Charlie Rangel
From Scrappleface. Featuring Scott Ott and Alfonzo Rachel.
Hilarious!
The looming entitlement crisis.
Doomy-doom-doom. Doomy-doomy-doom.
Funny cartoon
From Granite Grok. (H/T ECM)
Chris Wallace
Chris Wallace of Fox News explains the Obama White House. (H/T Hot Air)
Funny, because Wallace is the most even-handed cable news journalist I know. What an outburst!
If you are a skeptic of global warming, and you ask for the raw data, then you will be denied access to it!
Story from National Review. (H/T ECM, Brian)
Excerpt:
Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist… politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
[…]In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.
Free and open debate?
Story from Science News. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
According to the most popular formation theory, planets coalesce from a swirling disk of gas and dust that surrounds young stars. Since the disk rotates in the same direction as the star, the planets spawned by the disk should revolve in the same direction. But in an overcrowded planetary system, where a gravitational game of billiards is all but inevitable, orbits can get scrambled. A close encounter between planetary siblings can push one body outward while flinging the other inward, elongating and tilting the inner planet’s orbit.
In this scenario, the solar system may have been unusually lucky. Either it avoided catastrophic gravitational encounters between massive planets or it suffered such interactions so long ago that most of the planets had the chance to resettle into nearly circular orbits with little or no tilt, says Frédéric Pont of the University of Exeter in England.
“The presence of advanced life on Earth may be contingent on our planetary system having avoided the brunt of planet-planet scatter,” keeping Earth on a circular, Goldilocks-style orbit—neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it, he speculates.
The circularity of the orbit is crucial for maintaining liquid water at the surface. If the the planet’s orbit is too eccentric, then the temperature variations will either freeze the water, or evaporate it into the atmosphere. Either condition is fatal to complex life.
