Error Theory

Radio talk show host Mancow Muller is asking his listeners to help SHUT DOWN the crescent memorial to Flight 93. (Audio 27 seconds.)

Mancow describes how the giant crescent points to Mecca, and how the four terrorists are consistently placed in the symbolic Islamic heavens (the crescent and star parts of the design), while the 40 heroes are consistently depicted as symbolically damned (placed outside of the symbolic Islamic heavens). Good stuff (1 min, 21 sec).

"You have to see it to understand..." says the pro-war libertarian host, directing his listeners to CrescentOfBetrayal.com where they can find pictures like this (a familiar sight for our blogburst readers):


The Tower of Voices. 40 symbolic souls, literally dangling down below an Islamic shaped crescent, soaring in the sky overhead.

Using Islamic symbol shapes invites an Islamic interpretation, and in Islam, if you don't go to heaven, you go to hell (the fate of ALL unbelievers). Forty symbolic souls, never to rest in peace, gonging for eternity in their symbolic Islamic damnation.


Mancow on civil disobedience

Congressman Tancredo was scheduled to come on Tuesday's show, but got stuck in a hearing. Near the end of the show, Mancow says Tancredo will be rescheduled, then he lays it on the line. He thinks his show and his listeners have the power stop this atrocity from being built, but if the crescent memorial does get built, he is going to take a sledgehammer to it. They can send him to jail. At that point it won't matter. There are limits to what Americans should stand by for (1 min, 21 sec).

Last week's show was good too, with segments from Tom Burnett Sr. (45 sec) and Alec Rawls (2 min, 49 sec). (Alec also did an hour long interview with Tracy at No Compromise blog radio last week. To listen, scroll down to May 15th.)


Robert Spencer

An unexpected extra came in the middle of Tuesday's show when Robert Spencer was on to talk about Islam. Mancow asked what Spencer thought about this memorial controversy and Robert stepped up with another piece of the expose, pointing out that the 9/11 date is to be placed on the center line of the giant crescent, in exactly the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. (43 seconds.)

Exactly right. The date goes to the star on the Islamic flag. The date goes to the terrorists. Graphical proof here ("Terrorist memorializing feature #1".)

With the difficulty of getting just the Mecca orientation across, the discussion almost never reaches these other explosive details. How does Mr. Spencer find the time to be so knowledgeable about so many things? You da MAN Robert!


Pilgrimage to Somerset

When Mancow is able to reschedule the two Tom's, Tom Burnett says he is going to urge listeners who want to visit the memorial to plan for the weekend of August 2nd, when the Memorial Project is scheduled to have its next public meeting. Then they can help protest the crescent design, and anyone can sign up to speak during the public comment period.

Maybe we can even get Mancow to make the pilgrimage, and if Congressman Tancredo will call for a Congressional investigation, we just might be able to ram the food cart through the cockpit door. Just do it baby. Let's roll.


To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

The two most widely recognized symbols of Islam are the crescent and the sword. Kind of amusing that Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign logo can be seen to feature both a crescent and a curved Islamic scimitar:



The crescent shape in Obama’s logo has the round part on top, just like a traditional crescent shaped mihrab (the Mecca direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The animation shows the two most famous mihrabs in the world: the mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba, and the Prophet’s mihrab in Medina.

The lighter vertical column in the center-bottom of the logo, presumably meant to indicate reflected light, even conveys the full vertical shape of a traditional mihrab. The scimitar in the animation is from the flag of the Bosnian regiment of the Nazi SS.

If Obama himself had come up with this crescent logo, one might suspect Islamic intent, given his Islamic heritage. But the logo was not designed by Obama. It was designed by a Chicago based branding firm named Sender, which claims credit for coming up with: “a white sunrise against a blue sky, over a landscape implied by red and white stripes.”

Obama definitely deserves to be made fun of for having a fairly obvious crescent shape in his logo, given his efforts to convince the public that he is not Muslim. This is already an uphill climb, when both his grandmother and his cousin are telling documented lies about their religion, claiming to be Christian in one venue while professing themselves Muslim in another. Lying about being Christian: it’s an Obama family tradition!

Still, there is no indication that the crescent and scimitar shapes in Obama’s logo are intended to convey any Islamic meaning. A genuine coincidence apparently. At the opposite pole is the Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 memorial:



Contrast 1: Architect Paul Murdoch CALLS his crescent shaped memorial a crescent
The Crescent of Embrace name proves that the Flight 93 crescent was and is intended to be seen as a crescent. Only very reluctantly did the Memorial Project change the name, and the changes they made to the design are purely cosmetic. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign.

Contrast 2: The Islamic symbolism is overt
It is not plausible that an architect, designing a memorial to people murdered by Islamic terrorists, could be oblivious to the fact that his memorial design is laid out in the shape of a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag, readily identifiable as a crescent and star flag to airliners like Flight 93 passing overhead.

The Memorial Project simply assumes that the Islamic symbol shapes CAN’T be intentional, which is about like seeing an airliner fly into the World Trade Center and assuming it CAN’T be intentional. Do these people even remember the day they are supposed to be memorializing?

Contrast 3: The Flight 93 crescent contains still further Islamic symbolism
It turns out that the giant crescent points to Mecca. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is a well known structure in the Islamic world. It is a mihrab (as seen in the above animation), which gives the direction that Muslims are to face for prayer.

Everyone at the Memorial Project is fully aware that a person facing into the giant crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca. This according to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird. Again, they all just assume that this MUST be an innocent mistake (the equivalent of seeing as SECOND airliner fly into the Trade Center, and STILL assuming it can’t POSSIBLY be intentional).

Contrast 4: Proof of intent
Paul Murdoch PROVES that the Mecca orientation is intentional by repeating it in the crescents of trees that surround the minaret like Tower of Voices. Below is an animated run-through of the repeated Mecca-orientations (2 minutes).

You can restart the animation by refreshing the page:


Animated GIF: copy and paste. You can email it! (Animation restarts each time email is opened.) Click image for larger animation, if your connection is fast enough (1MB).

Crescent of Embrace site-plan, showing both the central crescent and the Tower of Voices, here.

Contrast 5: the designer's own thematic description is clearly terrorist memorializing
The designers of Obama's logo offer a clearly innocent thematic description of their creation. You can tell just by looking at it what it is MEANT to signify: a white sun coming up into a blue sky over red and white rows of fruited plain. Even the uncanny intimation of the vertical sides of a traditional mihrab is fully explained by the “sun” reflecting off the red and white “landscape.”

In contrast, Paul Murdoch's thematic account of his design is as nakedly pro-terrorist as his crescent and star layout. Murdoch says that the crescent comes from the terrorists breaking the circle. That is, they broke our liberty-loving circle and turned it into a giant Islamic-shaped Mecca-oriented crescent.

As Tom Burnett Sr. put it in his letter to American people, asking for help with our petition to keep the crescent design off of his murdered son's gravesite:

I don’t want to celebrate the terrorist’s circle-breaking crescent-creating feat.

And lest anyone thinks that the giant crescent is no longer present, the Park Service website makes clear that, while the redesign looks more like a circle, the circle is still broken:

The circle is broken in two places that mark the southeastern path of the plane to the crash site. The circle is broken at the entry to the memorial and at the crash site.

The breaks are in the exact same places as before and the unbroken part of the circle (the crescent) remains completely unchanged. It it still points to Mecca. It is still the world's largest mihrab by a factor of a hundred. The only difference is that now a chunk of the broken off part of the circle is included in the design, which is perfectly consistent with its original terrorist memorializing theme. The terrorists still break our liberty-loving circle and still turn it into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent.

So there you have it. Dueling crescents! Obama’s crescent logo exemplifies innocent coincidence (however guilty Obama may be of lying about his religion). In contrast, the Flight 93 crescent exemplifies proven intent. (More of architect Paul Murdoch’s endless proofs of intent here and here.)


To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Defenders of the crescent design keep accusing Tom Burnett Sr. of trying to get an improper “do over” after failing back in 2005 to sway the design-competition jury. But who is really seeking the do-over? The American people rose up in protest in 2005 when they saw that the Memorial Project wanted to plant a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag on the flight 93 crash site:



That uproar forced the Memorial Project to agree to redesign the memorial so that it would no longer include Islamic symbol shapes (whether they are intentional or not). But nothing significant was changed. Every particle of the original crescent design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign, which only disguised the original crescent with a few irrelevant trees, placed to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent.

The American people caught a hijacker trying to re-hijack Flight 93, and the Memorial Project told him to go back outside and try again, which is exactly what he did. Now they accuse Tom Burnett of wanting an improper do-over?

There were dozens of articles and television segments about the crescent controversy this week, mostly in Pennsylvania, with some national news coverage by Fox News television and AP. This post is an attempt to capture the general thrust of the new wave of position statements.

The Memorial Project is inverting every moral imperative at this point, and it all comes from their fervent desire to reverse the results of September 2005. Their embrace of the crescent was rejected by America and they are determined to undo that defeat, to the point of being willfully blind to massive evidence of al Qaeda sympathizing intent.


The new face of the Memorial Project: Edward Felt’s wife and brother take the lead

Sandra Felt, one of the Flight 93 family members who helped select the Crescent of Embrace design, admits that she never paid any attention to warnings about Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism in the crescent design:

Sandra Felt has known for nearly three years about complaints that the design of the proposed Flight 93 National Memorial allegedly contains Islamic symbols, but she never gave them any credence.

"I don't even think about it," said Felt, whose husband, Edward, died on ... United Airlines Flight 93.

And nobody blames her. It shouldn't be on the Flight 93 families to investigate evidence that any one of us can easily fact check. But Sandra and her brother in law Gordon Felt, now President of Families of Flight 93, are going further, pretending for some reason that the charges people have made against architect Paul Murdoch are actually being leveled against them.

How could that be, when three of the features that our petition lists as unacceptable--the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, the 44 glass blocks on the flight path, and the giant Islamic sundial--were not even discovered until after the crescent design was selected? Nobody blames the family members for approving design features they had no inkling were there, yet Gordon Felt says that warnings about the design are "quite hurtful, to think we would want to create a memorial to those who murdered our loved ones."

Nobody ever suggested any such thing, but Felt is getting as much mileage as he can out of this excuse NOT to look at the facts, telling Fox News television:

I was outraged, for anyone to infer that family members who have been such an integral part of this process have in any way been involved in memorializing the murderers of our loved ones. I find it extremely offensive.

This after expressing his anger at Tom Burnett last week for Tom's failure to submit to the Memorial Project's "democratic process." Tom lost the jury vote, so in Felt's view, he is apparently supposed to shut up now. Strange view of democracy.

Along with Patrick White (brother of Louis Nacke II), Gordon Felt sees Mr. Burnett as trying to get an improper "do over" by raising all these new concerns. Presented with evidence of an enemy plot, Felt acts as if this new information is cheating. Like Sandra, he is positively hostile even to the idea of taking this information seriously.

Not surprisingly, this slope is slippery, and Gordon Felt now seems to be deliberately misleading the public about the 44 inscribed translucent blocks that are to be placed along the flight path.


Memorial Project misinformation, covered up by the media's refusal to check the facts

One of the claims in our petition is that there are 44 inscribed translucent blocks, or "glass blocks," to be placed along the flight path. Asked about the 44 blocks by AP reporter Ramesh Santanam, Mr. Felt denied it:

Opponents also claim there is a plan to have 44 glass blocks, for the 40 victims and four hijackers, in the design.

"That's an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact," said Edward Felt's brother, Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93. "It's misleading and helps drive the conspiracy theory."

He said he is insulted people would believe he would participate in anything that honored his brother's killers.

Santanam presents these directly opposing factual claims, and that's it. No fact checking, when all he has to do is open up the design PDF's and count the translucent blocks. It takes literally two minutes.

Open up the Sacred Ground PDF and on the right side you see this:


At eye level, are 43 “glass” (or translucent marble) blocks, built into the two part Memorial Wall that follows the flight path just above the impact point. Forty are inscribed with the names of the 40 heroes. Three are inscribed with the 9/11 date. (The blocks can be counted in an elevation view at the bottom of the PDF.)

For the 44th glass block, go to the Entry Portal PDF, which shows a giant glass block, marking the spot where the flight path breaks the circle in architect Paul Murdoch’s description:


44th block sits at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway, which follows the flight path at the upper crescent tip. Murdoch even has the brass to tell us that it marks the terrorists' circle-breaking crescent creating feat. To be inscribed: "A field of honor forever."


They have been covering it up for two years now

The Memorial Project has known about this terrorist memorializing block-count since April 2006, when Project Manager Jeff Reinbold argued that the giant glass block at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway cannot be counted with the others because it is so much bigger (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, p. 146). As Tom Burnett wrote in his February 1st advertisement in the Somerset Daily American:

What? Because the capstone to the terrorist memorializing block count is magnificent, that is supposed to make it okay?

But regardless of the merits of the Memorial Project's rationale for not being concerned about the 44 translucent memorial blocks on the flight path, there can be no excuse for telling the public that this claim is false. No one ever said that all the blocks would be the same size. We have been explicit: the 44th block is the giant glass block that dedicates the entire site.

Maybe Gordie Felt has a different dodge in mind. Maybe he is caviling over the fact that the 44th block is made of slightly different material than the other 43, being designated "glass" while the others are labeled "translucent marble." That's like caviling about the size difference.

We can't go repeating "44 inscribed translucent blocks on the flight path" all the time, so we shorten it to "the 44 glass blocks" or "the 44 blocks." Is that Gordon Felt's excuse for evading the fact that there are 44 inscribed translucent blocks on the flight path? We use a necessary shorthand and his instinct for evasion says "aha!"?

Sorry Mr. Felt. That is NOT how you live up to your fiduciary responsibility to the American people. You have accepted a position of trust and you trying to hide the truth, not expose it.


The fourth petition complaint: that the giant crescent is STILL THERE

One of the intolerable features of the soon-to-be-built memorial was known to everyone involved in the jury process. That is the crescent and star configuration of the original Crescent of Embrace design. When outrage erupted in September 2005 over this the planting of a naked Islamic flag on the graves of our murdered heroes, the Memorial Project was adamant they did not want to change it. They had talked about the likeness to an Islamic crescent during jury deliberations and decided that they wanted to choose it anyway. When controversy erupted, they felt the critics were trying to override what they thought was THEIR decision to make.

That position collapsed when Congressman Tancredo insisted that, intentional or not, it was unacceptable to build the Flight 93 memorial in the shape of a symbol that the Flight 93 terrorists claimed as their own. Pretty obvious one would think, but the backers of the crescent design were bitterly angry about having their preference overruled, just as they are now. They didn't want to change the design, and they DIDN'T change the design.

In the original, the terrorists break our liberty-loving circle, turning it into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. The Park Service describes the so-called redesign in the exact same terms:

The circle is broken in two places that mark the southeastern path of the plane to the crash site. The circle is broken at the entry to the memorial and at the crash site.

It is still a broken circle, and it is still broken in the exact same places. The only change is that, instead of the broken off part being completely removed, a chunk of the broken off part of the circle now floats out across part of the mouth of the crescent:


Except for the re-coloring of the redesign image (right), the only change is the "broken off" arc of trees to the left of the crescent.

Both thematically and geometrically, nothing is changed. The unbroken part of the circle (the crescent) remains completely intact. In particular, it still points to Mecca, making it the world's largest mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built).

Sandy Felt seems pretty clear that the issue is still the giant crescent:

Sandy Felt, Edward Felt's widow, was on the second jury.

She said ... that the issue of the crescent shape came up during discussions because of a public comment card submitted.

Jurors were not willing to dismiss the design because of the name, "Crescent of Embrace," or the shape.

"There's no particular ownership of this shape," she said. "... We felt confident with the notion that the void in the embrace was representative of loss."

She and the other crescent defenders claim that it is Mr. Burnett who wants a "redo" on this point, but it is actually THEY who are looking for a "redo." On this very point--on just the crescent shape itself, without taking into account the numerous other Islamic and terrorist memorializing features--it is the DEFENDERS of the crescent who lost the popular vote in September 2005, not Tom Burnett.


Democracy

Do the nine people who voted for the crescent design (the vote was 9 to 6) really think that they have a greater claim to represent America's democratic voice than a United States Congressman, speaking for a national uproar? Do they really think that it is THEIR prerogative to plant a terrorist memorial mosque on the graves of our murdered heroes, no matter what the rest of the country thinks?

America stood up in September 2005 and said OVER OUR DEAD BODIES. The Memorial Project pretended to accede to this rejection, promising to remove the Islamic symbol shapes, but they DIDN'T remove the crescent. They only hid it.

Democracy is the will of the American people, not the will of nine family members, misguided by grief, who have fallen in love with a giant Islamic shaped crescent. It is bad enough that an inflated sense of prerogative makes these family members think it is okay to try to sneak their giant crescent onto the crash site even after it has been publicly rejected. Worse is their using their bitterness at being rebuffed as an excuse not to witness the numerous further Islamic and terrorist memorializing design features that have been discovered.

Every American feels tremendous sympathy for the grief of these families, but that does not absolve those who have stepped up to positions of public responsibility from the need to BE RESPONSIBLE. As much as the families may want peace and healing, our nation is in the middle of what promises to be a very long war with those who attacked us on 9/11. To be willfully blind to evidence of an al Qaeda sympathizing plot is DANGEROUS.

Since these family members are embracing every excuse to evade evidence of radical Islamic intent, they simply have to be overruled, and this time for good. No more do-overs for terrorist memorial mosques.


To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Check out the Fox News front page today, where "Crescent Outrage" alternates top billing with "Six-Legged Soldiers!" Finally, more than a handful of Americans will at least know that there is a controversy over the Flight 93 memorial.

They won't get much more than that from Fox's text report, which is pretty bare. There is no mention of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, no mention of the 44 inscribed translucent blocks on the flight path, no mention of the Islamic sundial, and no fact checking (the modern media disease). Still, this is big.

The text report DOES show the side-by-side comparison of the Crescent of Embrace and the Islamic crescent and star insignia. It also reports Tom Burnett's condemnation of the crescent design as an insult to his murdered son, and it mentions our petition.


UPDATE: Red Lasso has the Fox News video clip (thanks to Avid Editor):



This is powerful stuff. Not only do they show the clear likeness between the original design and an Islamic crescent and star flag, but the image they show of the redesign shows pretty clearly how the giant crescent remains intact in the redesign:



From the crescent and star likeness, they cut to Tom Burnett, asking what people would think if a memorial were laid out in the shape of a swastika. If viewers hadn't just seen the crescent and star likeness, that statement could be made to sound crazy, but Fox does right by Tom, giving viewers the information they need to see the reasonableness of the comparison. Many thanks to Fox for getting this right.

Fox has a lot more information at their disposal. They had a television crew at the Somerset County Courthouse yesterday where Colonel Harry Beam laid out a precise and devastating exposé of Islamic and terrorist memorializing design features, and they were sent extensive fact checking materials. None of this gets into their present reporting, but if they use it for an investigative feature, they can knock the crescent memorial out for good.


UPDATE II: Avid Editor found another completely different Fox News segment on Red Lasso. This one is even better, mentioning the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent!

Warming alarmists are trying to spin recent global cooling as just a cool phase of the Pacific oscillation, "masking" ongoing global warming. This explanation is KNOWN to be false.

The geologic record proves beyond any doubt that global temperature is driven by the solar wind (or sunspot activity), and that changes in CO2 are of immeasurably little consequence. Thus the present lull in solar activity means that global temperature is now falling. If solar cycle 24 fires up strong, global temperature could rise again, but given that solar activity has been at historical highs since 1940, a long term fall off IS coming, and when it does, it WILL cause long term cooling.


Figuring in ocean oscillations

The simple relationship between global temperature and solar activity is obscured somewhat by the difference between global temperature and surface temperature. Global temperature is the average temperature of the oceans, which are the planet's primary heat sink. In comparison, the heat storage capacities of the land masses and the atmosphere are trivial.

Ocean temperatures are not evenly distributed. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans both experience oscillations, where unusually warm or cold waters take turns at the ocean surface. This surface water is a primary determinant of the earth's surface temperature, so the ocean oscillations cause surface temperature to oscillate with respect to the actual global temperature.

Our current global cooling phase, caused by the lull in solar activity, happens to coincide with the onset of a cold "la nina" phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Thus as the earth cools, surface temperatures will cool even faster.

The warming alarmists are pretending that all the cooling is due to the ocean oscillations, which is only masking continued global warming:

Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.

In the press they are even bolder:

However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.

But present cooling is not just cold ocean oscillations masking overall warming. It is cold oscillations on top of a fall off in solar activity that is predicted by solar cycle 25 to become serious (if it isn't already).

The warming alarmists are actively covering up the real threat, even as it becomes manifest. Thirty years of la nina, compounded by thirty years of declining solar activity, at a time when Milankovitch cycles are approaching ice age conditions, is a time to be doing everything we can to forstall the possibility of runaway global cooling. Global warming never was a threat. Warming has negative feedback effects that stop it from becoming harmful. Global cooling does not. Positive cooling feedbacks regularly descend all the way into 100,000 year long ice ages, with the next one due any century now.


20th century solar activity and ocean oscillations

It is not that ocean oscillations can't mask global warming. This isn't what is happening now, but it actually did happen in the 1940's and 50's. The comparison is instructive.

Solar activity was at that time reaching "grand maximum" levels, just as a thirty year cold phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (or PDO) was starting. The intense solar activity warmed the oceans as a whole (and hence the earth), but having the colder Pacific water at the surface caused surface temperatures across the planet to fall, so it felt like the earth was cooling.

This phenomenon can be seen in the following three graphics: sunspot count, PDO, and the surface temperature record:


Cap'n Bob's sunspot count graphic. Solar activity reaches "grand maximum" levels in the early 1940's and stay there through the 50's and early 60's.



Steven Hare's Pacific Decadal Oscillation graphic. The PDO went into a cold surface water phase at the same time the sun was heating up.



Roy Spencer's graphic of the HadCRUT3 surface temperature record. The surface temperature cooled in the 40's and 50's as the cold PDO masked the warming being caused by high solar activity.


Continuing forward, the graphs show that the cold phase of the Pacific oscillation continued through the 60's, where the resulting cold surface temperatures were compounded by a weak solar cycle. By the early seventies, there was justified concern about the possible onset of the next ice age. Solar activity would be heading back down sooner or later, and it could have been sooner. What was unjustified was anti-capitalist environmentalists like Stephen Schneider blaming the cooling on human burning of fossil fuels, just so they could have an excuse for urging restrictions on fossil fuel burning and economic growth.

Shortly after Newsweek took global cooling fears mainstream in 1975, solar activity returned to "grand maximum" levels and the Pacific oscillation turned to its warming "el nino" phase. Throughout the 80's and 90's, these warming effects worked together to drive surface temperatures up. Solar activity and the Pacific oscillation both leveled out over the first five years of the 21st century, and in the last couple of years both have turned in the cooling direction.

In sum, if the surface temperature record is "corrected" for the influence of ocean oscillations (so that it tracks global temperature) the correlation to solar activity becomes much stronger.


Just how strong IS the correlation between solar activity and temperature, once the ocean oscillations and volcanic aerosol effects are corrected for?

The correlation is almost exact, all the way down to annual time scales. In the geologic record, the correlation in the geologic record is about 90% all the way down to decadal time scales. (Fred Singer and Henrik Svensmark both amass the evidence in their landmark books.) But the geologic record doesn't account for ocean oscillations and volcanic sulfates. For the modern period over which we have measures for these further determinants of surface temperature, the residual temperature anomaly tracks solar activity practically year by year. Here is Svensmark's graph of the temperature anomaly (trend removed), once ocean oscillations and volcanic aerosol effects are accounted for:



Svensmark graphic (via the reference frame).

Notice that Svensmark plots temperature against Galactic Cosmic Radiation (GCR), not solar activity. Higher levels of solar activity shield the earth from GCR, so GCR serves as a proxy for solar activity and vice versa. It is GCR that can be measured directly in the geologic record, and in Svensmark's theory, it is GCR that causes global cooling (by ionizing the atmosphere and seeding cloud formation).

Very impressive correlation. In contrast, there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that CO2 drives anything. The warming alarmists have a theory with NO EVIDENCE behind it, and they are willfully blind to the overwhelming evidence that temperature is driven by solar-magnetic-activity/GCR. Despite the fact that ALL THE EVIDENCE points to solar activity and GCR as the drivers of global temperature, the IPCC's General Circulation Models completely omit this competing theory.

According to cooling denier Richard Wood:

Natural variations over the next 10 years might be heading in the cold direction.

But, he adds:

If you run the model long enough, eventually global warming will win.

Yes. But not because the model is distinguishing between natural and anthropogenic warming. The model ASSUMES that CO2 drives temperature, and assumes that solar effects do not. As the IPCC climatologists admit (when pressed): these models do not produce forecasts. They are simulations that extrapolate assumptions, and the assumptions that are being extrapolated are those of environmental religionism, completely divorced from the evidence. They omit from their assumptions what there IS evidence for and assume what there is NO evidence for. Pure scientific fraud.


Environmentalist religion

CO2 has no role to play anywhere in this story. Theoretically higher levels of CO2 should have a very slight warming effect, but empirically, this effect is unmeasurable. We are NOT in a state like the 40's and 50's where a cooling PDO was masking the warming effects of high solar activity. We are in a very dangerous cooling phase where cold ocean oscillations are compounding the cooling effects of diminished solar activity. The only masking going on is from the dishonest warming alarmists, covering up the very real perils of global cooling with their hot air about CO2.

This gives them an excuse to proceed with their real agenda: placing restrictions on fossil fuel burning and economic growth. The warming alarmists are not actually concerned about global warming at all, and never were. They are environmental religionists who see economic activity as gobbling up the environment. The only thing they actually care about is securing restrictions on fossil fuel burning as a way to curtail economic activity and save the environment from human encroachment.

The alarmists don't care whether their claims about CO2 driven warming are true. In fact, they all KNOW that anthropogenic global warming is a hoax, but it gets them the policy prescription that they are driven to on religious grounds, and so they embrace it.


Error Theory

Distrust in truth is the fundamental human moral failing. In every arena, half the population imagines that it can somehow be right or in their interest to avoid or suppress the truth. The inevitable consequence of this truth avoidance is that the truth avoiders end up divorced from reality, which inevitably makes them wrong in their assumptions about what is right or in their interest.

In reality, warming is completely benign, while cooling is extraordinarily dangerous. It can easily wipe out, not just most of mankind, but most of the biosphere, as it has done like clockwork for the last 2 million years. When it comes to gobbling up flora and fauna, nothing compares to an ice age. If we want to save the planet, we ought to be pumping out greenhouse gases as fast as we can, and tailoring them to patch the infrared "holes" in our greenhouse blanket. Instead, thanks to the global warming alarmists, we are not going to do anything to warm up our greenhouse blanket, and will only be able to pray that this isn't the big one. Pretty damned stupid. Such are the wages of distrust in truth.

Jesus tried to tell us all: be a witness for truth. That is what he was doing--"I came into the world to be a witness for truth" (Jn 18:37)--and he asked us to follow him. The environmentalists think they are beyond Christianity. Fools. They don't begin to get it. If you don't trust in truth, if you just assume that curtailing fossil fuel burning is the right thing to do, regardless of what is really happening with global temperature, then you get divorced from reality and EVERYTHING you think you know will be WRONG.

These idiots will get us (or our children) killed.


Related posts

February 18, 2008
Global warming alarmists knew cooling was coming, were hoping to secure restrictions on economic activity first

March 21, 2008
Time to start adding a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases

February 14, 2007
My commentary on the draft IPCC report

Congressman Jim Ramstad (R-MN) gave a House speech this month, supporting Mr. Burnett's opposition to the crescent design. The speech is entered in the Congressional Record here, along with supporting statements from Tom Burnett Sr. (father of murdered Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.).

That makes two Congressmen now who have come out publicly against the crescent memorial. (Tom Tancredo took the lead last November, asking the Park Service to choose a completely new design.)


News coverage revs up confrontation at this Saturday’s public meeting

Ramstad's speech, and our ongoing petition drive, netted a full width banner headline on the front page of the Somerset Daily American, with the story continuing full width on an inside page as well. This high profile local news coverage should make for an interesting Memorial Project meeting at the Somerset County Courthouse this Saturday. Several critics will be speaking during the public comment period, and the first batch of petitions will be delivered in bulk (over 5000 signatures to date, 4700 online and 500 on paper).

The Daily American article includes lots of powerful language from Mr. Burnett and other critics of the crescent design, along with some remarkably disingenuous evasions from the usual defenders. Most egregious is Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, who tries to pretend that the criticisms of the design are all about Mr. Burnett trying to get an undemocratic "do over" after failing to stop the Crescent of Embrace design when he served on the design competition jury.

While on the jury, Mr. Burnett only complained about the giant Islamic shaped crescent and the minaret-like Tower of Voices. No one on the jury, including Mr. Burnett, knew anything about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent; or about the placement of the 9/11 date in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag; or about the 44 glass blocks on the flight path; or about the fact that the Tower of Voices turns out to be a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial.

Not that the jury is beyond reproach. It was bizarre for these family members and design professionals to plant a bare naked crescent and star flag on the graves of our murdered heroes, but given everything that the jurors did NOT know, this configuration at least COULD have been an accident. What came out after the design was selected is absolute proof of terrorist memorializing intent, with every Islamic and terrorist memorializing feature being repeated in the Tower of Voices portion of the memorial.

One example is the 38 Memorial Groves. (There were supposed to be 40.) By itself, it is merely suspicious that the arc of 38 groves can be seen as a set of 19 nested crescents: one for each 9/11 hijacker. But architect Paul Murdoch proves this terrorist memorializing intent by surrounding the Tower of Voices with a second set of 19 nested crescents. And on it goes. EVERYTHING gets repeated in the Tower of Voices, and the 93 foot tall Islamic sundial is itself a very precise structure that could NEVER occur by accident.

Patrick White wants to dodge all this by pretending that the controversy is about the initial jury decision, instead of the ensuing blindness to voluminous evidence of terrorist memorializing intent. No one exemplifies this willful blindness better than Patrick White himself.


Patrick White denies the Mecca orientation in public while admitting it in private

At the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting, a critic of the crescent design engaged Mr. White in private conversation, asking how he could be unconcerned about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. White's reply was to suggest that this orientation cannot be seen as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be "disrespectful to Islam." (The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ±.1°.)

But this isn't what White was telling the public. That same week, Patrick White told the press that all of the claims about Islamic symbolism had been thoroughly investigated and been found to be untrue and "preposterous." In private, White was acknowledging the almost exact Mecca orientation of the crescent and making excuses for it, while issuing sweeping denials in public.

He is still doing the same thing. He KNOWS that the giant crescent points almost exactly to Mecca, yet claims that such "assumptions," have been "repeatedly shown-to-be-false." In fact, not a single factual claim about what is in the design has ever been rebutted. If the crescent did not point to Mecca, it would be trivially easy to demonstrate. This is a simple geometric claim. But all the Memorial Project has ever offered is unsupported denials; denials that they acknowledge in private to be FALSE.


Patrick White’s dishonest attack on Tom Burnett

The jury process is irrelevant. No one is criticizing it. The jurors bear no responsibility for hidden Islamic and terrorist-memorializing features that they knew nothing about when they chose the crescent design. If it were not for two ugly bits of misinformation, put forward by Patrick White in his effort to make the jury process the issue, there would be no reason to mention the jury process at all. Both of White’s falsehoods are aimed at discrediting Tom Burnett Sr.

1. In the Daily American article (half way down) White claims that Mr. Burnett: “gave his consent to support what the majority picked.”

Mr. Burnett was incensed in 2005 when the Memorial Project announced that the jurors had united behind the majority choice. Without ever consulting with Mr. Burnett, the Memorial Project wrote in their jury report that: "By consensus the Stage Two jury forwards this section of the Flight 93 memorial to the partner [Paul Murdoch] with the full and unqualified support of each juror." Tom has been trying to correct the record ever since, and Patrick White OUGHT to know it.

2. White also claims that: “No one agreed then with Mr. Burnett’s preferred choice for a final design.”

"To the contrary" says Mr. Burnett, "the vote not unanimous; it was 9 to 6." Five people were with Mr. Burnett in rejecting the crescent design. This on a jury made up of 8 design professionals and 7 family members. It could even be that a majority of family members opposed the Crescent of Embrace. Tom requested the vote tally in a formal letter to the Memorial Project which was never answered. Now Patrick White throws the vote tally in Tom’s face, and completely misrepresents it.

3. Bonus badness. White claims that: “Jurors gave all of Mr. Burnett’s concerns a complete airing.”

In fact, the design professionals on the jury tried to shut Mr. Burnett up. Tom Sokolowski, director of Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum called Mr. Burnett “asinine” just for noticing that the crescent is a traditional symbol of Islam. This overt hostility to Mr. Burnett’s concerns is not what most of us would call “a complete airing.”

So no, the jury process is not the issue here, but if it were, it couldn't stand up to scrutiny either.


To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

The following press release was sent to Pennsylvania news outlets yesterday:

Angry over the Islamic symbolism contained in the Flight 93 Memorial Design, which appears to honor both the heroes and the terrorists, a group of concerned citizens asked Harry Beam (Lt. Col. U.S. Army Retired) to lead an organized effort to have the design changed.

Col. Beam said he examined several different factors before agreeing to lead the effort. First, he found that the people making the request are credible. Tom Burnett (father of a Flight 93 Hero) is demanding change to the memorial design. Additionally, Col. Beam states that he has talked to MD’s, PhD’s., Attorneys, School Teachers, Nurses, Pastors, Skilled and Unskilled Workers, Veterans and Retirees who are upset with the actions of the Flight 93 Planning Committee and the National Park Service. Second, Beam said he had to determine the validity of the assertions that there is Islamic symbology in the memorial design. He stated, “I will be the first to admit that several years ago, when I first heard about the Red Crescent, I assumed that it was a matter of co-incidence. After researching the design, I found there are many (8) additional co-incidents which cause one to question the design and the designer.” The fact that the Red Crescent points towards Mecca in the same manner a Mosque would if it were built on the site. The fact that there are 44 glass blocks included in the design (40 passengers and crew; 4 terrorists) are just two more of the eight examples of co-incidence.

The third factor was that the statements from Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) opining on the symbolism issue were not credible. Their opinions, presented to the U.S. National Park Service and the Memorial Project, were contradictory. One SME stated “because the earth is round, you can face any direction and be facing Mecca.” Most 5th graders know that is false. The statement also conflicted with another SME who said “the orientation to Mecca must be exact.” Many mosques do not have an exact Mecca orientation. One of the SME’s was a classmate of the designer, Paul Murdock.

When asked, how do you hope to accomplish your goal of changing an approved national Flight 93 memorial plan? Beam responded “I know that it will be an up-hill fight, but our Flight 93 Heroes deserve a better memorial than one that also pays tribute to the Islamic terrorists”. This will be a massive grassroots effort throughout the country to sway the opinions of the Department of Interior, the National Park Service, the Flight 93 Planning Committee and our lawmakers to change the current design. When people hear the facts concerning the current design, they are angered and ask “How was the fraudulent design approved?” Email and written petitions are being circulated not only locally but throughout the nation. Although we have just started, we have thousands who have signed petitions. We are certain that number will increase. Currently, letters and phone calls are beginning to be made to lawmakers. Congressman Tancredo has asked the National Park Service to change the design and remove the Islamic symbology; we hope to get other lawmakers to support his efforts. This fight transcends politics. It is not a Republican or Democrat issue – It is Americans demanding that our Flight 93 Heroes get a National Memorial that honors their memory – not the memory of Islamic terrorists. Anyone wishing to obtain a written petition or sign an electronic petition, can go to www.crescentofbetrayal.com. Persons interested in assisting in this effort can contact Col. Beam at hibeam@atlanticbb.net.

To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Just for this post, a new blogburst logo:



Tom Burnett's letter to the American people is bringing lots of signatures for our online petition. People can also join our blogbursts here


Damned to Hell

Time to emphasize the ugliest aspect of the terrorist memorial mosque that is now being built in Shanksville Pennsylvania. It does not just INCLUDE the terrorists in some kind of reductio ad absurdum of multiculturalist moral relativism. Actually, there is not a single speck of moral relativism in the entire design. Rather, the terrorists are explicitly championed, while the 40 infidels are again and again depicted as symbolically damned to Islamic Hell.

This is the evil genius of architect Paul Murdoch's use of the crescent and star layout. Everywhere the four hijackers are memorialized, they are symbolically placed inside the Islamic heavens (the crescent and star parts of the memorial). Everywhere the 40 infidels are memorialized, they are represented outside of the symbolic Islamic heavens, which in Islam signifies damnation.

In most instances, the immense scale of the design makes this theme difficult to grasp from ground level unless you know what to look for. The one exception is up at the Tower of Voices part of the memorial, where the symbolic damnation of the 40 heroes will be immediately visible to visitors.

The 93 foot tall Tower of Voices is formed in the shape of an extruded crescent, cut at an angle at the top so that its crescent arms reach up into the sky:



As seen from the base of the tower, the top of the tower will be a clear Islamic-shaped crescent, projected against the sky above. Hanging down below these symbolic heavens will be forty tubular steel chimes, one for each of the murdered passengers and crew. In Islam, if you don't go to Heaven, you go to Hell, thus those forty symbolic souls, strung below the symbolic Islamic heavens like fish on a line, are symbolically damned.

The imagery could not be clearer. Here is what hundreds of thousands of visitors will see when they look up the crescent tower:


40 tortured souls, gonging restlessly though heat, cold, wind, snow and rain (pictured).

What are patriots going to do when they see that Islamic crescent in the sky, soaring triumphantly over those forty symbolic infidel souls? Is the Park Service trying to start a rebellion? We are talking literally hundreds of people every day being confronted by this outrage.


Never to rest in peace

The crash site is a graveyard, from which the remains of our forty heroes can never be extracted. A cemetery is supposed to be a place for resting in peace, but these symbolic forty souls are to gong mournfully though the ages in their symbolic Islamic hell.

Over and over the defenders of the crescent design accuse us critics of seeing what we want to see in the design, as if we could see forty symbolic souls hanging down from an Islamic shaped crescent in the sky if the architect did not PUT these things there for us to see. Look at the architect's own drawings people. Do you not see the Islamic shaped crescent in the sky? Do you not see the forty wind chimes hanging below, specifically designated to represent the lives of the 40 passengers and crew? We are describing FACTS.

One of the most obvious facts is that it is the defenders of the crescent who are seeing what they want to see, or more precisely, who are choosing NOT to see what they DON'T want to see. It's like gate security, trying desperately NOT to see the bearded man in the suicide vest.

The irony is that Flight 93 is supposed to be the symbol of our woken vigilance. Those charged with the memorialization of Flight 93 are not just un-vigilant. They are relentlessly anti-vigilant, absolutely determined not to even consider the possibility of untoward intent.

We hosted an open design competition in time of war and literally invited the entire world to enter, yet the idiots who sent out this invitation cannot concieve that the enemy might have actually taken them up on it. They are outright hostile to anyone who points out the overwhelming evidence that this is in fact what happened.


Other places where the 40 heroes are depicted as symbolically damned

In the sequence of 44 glass blocks that are to be emplaced along the flight path (equalling the number of passengers, crew AND terrorists), all four "extra" blocks are placed in the Islamic heavens.

The three that are to be inscribed with the 9/11 date will be placed on a separate upper section of Memorial Wall that is centered on the bisector of the half mile wide central crescent: exactly the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. Thus the date goes to the Islamic star. The date goes to the terrorists.

The 44th block is at the upper crescent tip, commemorating the spot where, in architect Paul Murdoch's description, the terrorists broke our circle and turned it into a giant (Mecca oriented) crescent, to be inscribed: "A field of honor forever."

In contrast, the forty blocks inscribed with the names of the forty heroes are placed just above the crash site, down below the star on the Islamic flag. They are outside of the symbolic Islamic heavens, which makes them symbolically damned.

Murdoch continues this theme with the 38 Memorial Groves. There CAN'T be 40 because the Memorial Groves are part of the giant crescent, which makes them part of the symbolic Islamic heavens, and infidels can't be depicted in the Islamic heavens. The full analysis of the 38 groves shows Murdoch's evil genius at its fullest flower. Sickening, but well worth comprehending, if you can stomach it.


Blogburst blogroll