Error Theory

What could be as evil as sneaking a memorial to the 9/11 terrorists onto the Flight 93 crash site? How about sneaking a hidden message of Islamic indoctrination into the soundtrack of an adorable baby doll, repeated every 30 seconds to thousands of 2-5 year old girls without parental knowledge?

If you haven’t heard it before, check out this AP video from October:



If Mattel wants to sell a doll that Muslim parents can use to brainwash their own toddlers, they need to label the doll as Islamic. Instead, Mattel has been engaged in outright cover-up for three months now, claiming that they “did a lot of tests” and found that the doll “just coos and says ‘mama’.”

Liars. If they even listened to the sound track they are fully aware that the suspicious segment is completely unlike the rest of the recording. In contrast to the inarticulate coos and burbles of the otherwise quite compelling baby sounds, the offending part is very clearly a sentence, almost staccato in its articulation.

The AP video above only contains the offending sentence itself. Here is the full sound track (five inserted indoctrinations in 2 minutes):


How many thousands of two year old girls are right now having their hearts opened by this doll’s repeated love cries, only to have a jihadist jab in his poison needle a hundred times an hour? This is the Islam of al Qaeda: a self proclaimed religion of deceit, using deceit to snake its tendrils around the most vulnerable members of our society.


Release the uncompressed audio file

Mattel’s claim that the injected sentence contains no Islamic message is just as fraudulent as its claim that there is no sentence. Here is a slowed down version of the sound-track:



The exact intonation is either “Islam is the light,” or “Iglam is the light.” Since "iglam" is not a word, and since the full segment is clearly spoken as a sentence, the intended word has to be Islam.

Mattel says that the doll’s audio “may be imprecise or distorted” because “the original sound track is compressed.” So why don’t they release the uncompressed file?

No one is hearing things that are not there. Mattel suggests that people are being influenced by “the power of suggestion,” but we can test that hypothesis.

If people can hear whatever they want, then they should also be able to hear a superficially similar Christian message: “Aslan is the light.” Yet even in compressed form, the recording very clearly does NOT say Aslan. The vowels and consonants are distinct. Mattel is in effect denying that there is such a thing as language.

This too is very similar to the Memorial Project. Defenders of the giant Mecca-oriented crescent fantasize in the newspaper that anyone can see Mecca-oriented crescents wherever they want, if they just look for them. No. The only reason anyone can see a half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent in the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 is because architect Paul Murdoch put one there.


Mattel needs to conduct a real investigation and it needs to be transparent

Why should anyone ever buy a Mattel toy again when Mattel's response to clear evidence that their toys are being used in a plot against children is an obviously dishonest cover up? It would make a lot more sense, if they want to stay in business, to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation of how the clearly out-of-place and apparently subversive segment of the sound track got included. The forensic history is on their hard drives. Mattel should uncover the jihadist plotters in their employ, or in the employ of their sub-contractors, then refer them to the FBI and sue them for fraud.

There is even reason to think that the plot goes beyond just the sound track, and involves the entire the Cuddle and Coo doll project. According to the Muslim ex-Marine who blogs as 5-Pillar Column, Mattel's doll is also wearing a "hijab" (used by fundamentalist Muslim women to hide their hair).

Like the Islamic symbol shapes in the Flight 93 memorial, this is something that western society is not attuned to, so we don’t notice it, but Muslims immediately do. That doll has its hair covered:



5 Pillar speculates that it is the hijab that is causing "bigots" to take offense, but he seems to be the first one to have noticed that the doll can be seen as wearing a hijab.

Some versions of the doll show a wisp of hair, as Sharia law allows for girls, but all have the look of a proper hijab.


Pink version, shows wisp of hair. The hijab-like hair covering remains. (From MAMA’s Label That Doll home page.)

By itself, the possible hijab would be nothing, but together with the clearly articulated message of Islamic indoctrination, it suggests that the entire Cuddle and Coo team needs to be investigated. If Mattel is not forthcoming, the recourse is obvious.


Duped parents should sue Mattel into bankruptcy

Company officers evidently think that denial is the least damaging strategy for Mattel’s reputation and profitability. They need to be proved wrong. By covering up clear evidence that its product is being used as the vehicle for a jihadist plot against the children of its customers, Mattel has opened itself to tremendous liability. If they get sued into oblivion for the harm to children that their fraudulent denials are enabling, it will let other companies know that cover-up is not a good business decision.

Mattel did stop including the suspicious portion of the sound track in new production of their “Cuddle & Coo” doll, but instead of issuing a recall of the original dolls, the company is assuring the public that the warnings of Islamic intent have been investigated and been found to be without merit. That leaves untold thousands of these assault-toys preying on the minds of toddlers whose parents have been given false assurances, which continue to this day.

Here is Mattel's October 17th statement:

The power of suggestion has a lot to do with it. Our department did a lot of tests. It just coos and says ‘mama.’ We will not be pulling the doll.

On Christmas eve Mattel reposted a dismissive statement that earlier had been withdrawn from their website without explanation:

The Little Mommy Cuddle ‘n Coo dolls feature realistic baby sounds including cooing, giggling, and baby babble with no real sentence structure. The only scripted word the doll says is “mama.”

There is a sound that may resemble something close to the word “night, right, or light.” To avoid any potential misinterpretation, we have eliminated that segment of the sound file from future production.

Because the original sound track is compressed into a file that can be played through an inexpensive toy speaker, actual sounds may be imprecise or distorted.

We remain confident in the high quality standards of our Little Mommy Cuddle 'n Coo dolls.

By persisting in its dishonest denials, Mattel may have sealed its legal doom. Any lied-to parents out there want to get rich in the service of a most important cause?

The Memorial Project is also headed for legal trouble. The Mecca orientation of the giant Crescent of Embrace makes it a mihrab—the central feature around which every mosque is built—and it is unconstitutional to build a mosque as a national memorial.


Anti-vigilance

Like the memorial project, Mattel got duped by a stealth jihadist. In the middle of our ongoing hot and cold wars against Islamic supremacism, such things are going to happen. 9/11 exposed the nature of our terror war enemies: that they hide amongst us, pretending to be trustworthy friends while plotting acts of war. There is no shame in being the victim of Islamic deception.

What is inexcusable is to be willfully blind to Islamic plots once they are uncovered. Flight 93 is supposed to be the symbol of our woken vigilance, yet time and again we see this anti-spirit of Flight 93: a determined refusal to be vigilant, enabling even discovered plots to proceed.

All who have learned about the hidden Islamic messages in either the jihadist baby doll or the Flight 93 memorial, please learn about the other. Maybe together we can stop them both.


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Christmas party lunch at Chef Chu's today. The gals from the office srarted playing fortune cookie games. One game: add "between the sheets" at the end.

My fortune: "Unveil your ideas. Then act on them."




Got some holiday movie recommendations too. Over the Hedge. Slum Dog Millionaire.

My recommendation: go see Bolt, in 3D if you can. A really fun movie for adults and kids.

For four years now, I have periodically castigated what must be the scientifically stupidest excuse that the global warming alarmists use to dismiss the well documented natural warming effects of the solar wind.

Over and over again the alarmists claim that late 20th century warming can’t be caused by the solar-magnetic effects because there was no upward trend in solar activity between 1975 and 2000, when temperatures were rising. As Lockwood and Fröhlich put it last year:

Since about 1985,… the cosmic ray count [inversely related to solar activity] had been increasing, which should have led to a temperature fall if the theory is correct - instead, the Earth has been warming. … This should settle the debate.

Morons. It is the levels of solar activity and galactic cosmic radiation that matter, not whether they are going up or down. Solar activity jumped up to “grand maximum” levels in the 1940’s and stayed there (averaged across the 11 year solar cycles) until 2000. Solar activity doesn’t have to keep going up for warming to occur. Turn the gas burner under a pot of stew to high and the stew will heat. You don’t have to keep turning the flame up further and further to keep getting heating!

Surely this has to be motivated error. Nobody can honestly make such a profoundly stupid mistake, can they? It has to at least be willful blindness, doesn't it? Only now I discover that it is not just the anthropogenic warming religionists who are making this mistake. Everybody is, including the skeptics!


Even the real scientists are confusing level and trend

Check out the conclusion to this 2005 paper co-authored by Sami Solanki, a confirmed AGW skeptic, and Ilya Usoskin, who is no alarmist:

Note that the most recent warming trend, since around 1975, has not been considered in the above correlations. During these last 30 years, the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance, and cosmic ray flux, has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.

This is truly bizarre. As I wrote when I first came across this trope in early 2005:

Rasmus Benestad claims that, because there has not been a downward trend in GCR [Galactic Cosmic Radiation] over the period when warming has occurred (since the 60's) GCR cannot be the cause of the warming. But this attempt to dismiss the GCR-cloud theory is absurd on its face. Solar activity has been well above historical norms since the 40’s! It doesn’t matter what the trend is. The solar-wind is up. According to the theory, that blows away the clouds [by blowing away the cloud-seeding GCR] and creates warming. The wind doesn’t have to KEEP going up. It is the LEVEL that matters, not the trend. Holy cow. Benestad is looking at the wrong derivative (one instead of zero).

But John Cook cites ten scientific papers that make the same mistake (in support of making the mistake himself), and many of them are from reputable scientists, not Anthropogenic Global Warming religionists like Benestad.

If this is not motivated error, where is it coming from? As I commented on Cook's post, it would seem to be a product of the simple statistical analyses that these scientists are conducting. They found a correlation between changes in temperature and changes in solar activity, and that somehow distracted them from paying attention to the levels of solar activity (which HAS to be what matters). They have let what they are looking at (correlations) obscure in their minds what they are trying to get at: the physical process. They seem to be forgetting that, for purposes of climatology, the earth is a pot of water.

Turn the solar–magnetic flame up on a cold ocean and the planet might heat for centuries without reaching an equilibrium, but these folks would treat such an episode as evidence against solar-magnetic warming, since temperature is rising when solar activity is flat. And they still get correlation coefficients of 0.7 to 0.8. I wonder what the explanatory power of solar activity will turn out to be once our scientists stop treating evidence for solar-magnetic effects as evidence against.


Fitting to a model of the physical process

It would not be hard to estimate, for each level of global temperature, the level of solar activity that tends to create warming rather than cooling. Then estimate, for each increment of solar activity above this level, how much the rate of warming tends to increase. This could easily be combined with a physical model of the heat storage capacity of the oceans. Fitting such a model to the data would yield a picture over time of the heat store (ocean temperature) and the solar driven additions and subtractions from it.

Of course this physical process will yield statistical correlations between changes in solar activity and changes in global temperature, but the state of the heat sink always has to be kept in mind. If a given level of solar activity were stabilized long enough (while holding other climate determinates constant, such as the amount of GCR entering the solar system, the earth’s magnetic field strength, the phase of the earth’s orbit, and way down the list, human burning of fossil fuels), this stable level of solar activity should lead eventually to a stable global temperature, with higher steady levels of solar activity leading to higher equilibrium temperatures, but there is no reason to think that the planet is very often in such a steady state. Given the size of our heat sink, equilibrium should be rare, yet this is in effect what a focus on trend rather than level assumes: that climate is constantly in a state of long run equilibrium.

To develop a running estimate of the planet’s state of adjustment toward long run equilibrium would require a full climate model. As the earth warms, there may be negative feedback effects, like the increasing efficiency of the rain cycle in a wetter atmosphere, opening columns of dry air for the heat released by condensation to rise through. Whatever the mechanisms, equilibrium is reached when the radiation emitted by the planet is equal in energy to the radiation absorbed.

If Gavin Schmidt and the other eco-religionists who run NASA’s expensive GCM’s would stop excluding solar-magnetic effects, we might even get such modeling. In the meantime, just don’t take the correlation between solar activity and temperature to mean that solar activity must be going up for it to cause temperatures to go up.

Even crude modeling should raise the amount of temperature variation that is statistically "explained" by solar activity or GCR, if the physical model is on the right track. This provides a test of sorts for the GCR-cloud theory. Instead of analyzing simple correlations, fit to a physical model of the GCR-cloud process and see if explanatory power goes up. This should be a simple matter. We have all the data. It's just a matter of decomposing it more effectively.


Svensmark’s and Friis-Christensen's answer to Lockwood and Fröhlich

I got onto this issue again (and discovered that the AGW religionists are not the only ones who fail to distinguish trend from level), by visiting Cook's SkepticalScience post on Svensmark's and Friis-Christensen’s reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich.

Cook posts Svensmark’s graphic of the close correlation between GCR and de-trended temperature and draws what at first glance appears to be a logical conclusion:



Cook suggests that if changes in GCR fit so perfectly with changes in de-trended temperature, then something beside GCR must account for the TREND in temperature.

Wrong. The “something else” is the LEVEL of GCR. 60 years of relatively cloudless skies kept pumping heat into the oceans, both by direct absorption of sunlight, and from exposure to air warmed up by the relatively sunny landmasses. The skies didn't have to keep getting more and more cloudless for this warming process to continue. They just had to remain relatively cloudless. The work is being done by something besides changes in GCR, but it is still being done by GCR.

Why wasn’t warming uniform from 1940-2000 if the level of GCR was pretty much trend-less? The Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Take out the PDO and, as the Svensmark’s graph shows, the ups and downs of the 11 yr. solar cycle match the ups and downs in the temperature anomaly. (If you want, you can look at the Svensmark graphic as comparing de-trended temperature to de-trended GCR, given that the GCR trend is essentially zero).

Svensmark and Friis-Christensen show that they are not oblivious to the primacy of level over trend when they note that:

By Lockwood and Frohlich's own data, solar magnetic activity is still high compared with 100 years ago.

But even they still try to describe the path of global temperature as a function of the trend in solar activity:

The continuing rapid increase in carbon dioxide concentrations during the past 10-15 years has apparently been unable to overrule the flattening of the temperature trend as a result of the Sun settling at a high, but no longer increasing, level of magnetic activity.

Maybe what they mean here is that after 300 years of recovery from the Little Ice Age, and sixty years of a steady high level of solar activity, there is evidence that climate actually did reach long run equilibrium at the end of the 20th century, where the flat high level of solar activity came to correspond with a steady global temperature. Indeed, this could well be the situation, but it is unfortunate to see Svensmark and Friis-Christensen trying to couch this possibility in essentially the same language that Lockwood and Frohlich use, speaking as if it is the trend in solar activity that is driving global temperature.

The speculation that the climate reached a state of long run equilibrium with respect to the level of solar activity needs to be spelled out, and distinguished from the normal disequilibrium state of affairs where a flat level of solar activity will drive temperature change. Surely Svensmark and Friis-Christensen do not think that if solar activity had leveled out at a higher level, the fact that solar activity was level would have kept temperature from going up further, but their actual statement can be interpreted that way, which is a serious lapse when answering people like Lockwood and Frohlich who are misinterpreting the science in exactly that way.


The last redoubt of the AGW religionists is completely indefensible

It is an interesting state of affairs. The Anthropogenic Global Warming religionists have placed all their eggs in this non-existent basket. They are systematically using an errant focus on trend instead of level as their primary excuse for dismissing the solar warming alternative, despite overwhelming evidence for solar-magnetic effects. This is their last redoubt, and it is completely indefensible.

The only reason they even have a veneer of scientific legitimacy at this point is because real scientists have been making the same mistake. It’s like playing a game of chess and realizing that you’ve been overlooking an opportunity for mate.

We can’t afford such a lapse. We are in the fight of our lives here. The humanity-hating eco-religionists are trying to use the AGW hoax to unplug industrial capitalism, which they see as gobbling up the planet. They are not actually concerned about climate at all, but will use any excuse to try to shut down economic activity, as they have been attempting since the 1960’s.

These powerfully placed religious lunatics are on the verge of securing the draconian restrictions they so fervently desire, but scientifically they are already in check and mate. Their position is dead, and they have nowhere left to go.

We had better make that scientific result stick, before the AGW theocracy becomes a political fait accompli.

Set to everybody's favorite gunslinger music:


If you have a fast connection, there is a high quality viewing option at the lower right of the viewing screen here.

Part 1 focused on the blatant Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial, and on Tom Burnett's efforts to stop this desecration of his son's grave. Part 2 is about the terrorist memorializing features.

On first examination, the Islamic symbol shapes in the Flight 93 memorial are found to be slightly imprecise:

The giant crescent does not point quite exactly at Mecca.

The Sacred Ground Plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on a crescent and star flag does not sit exactly in the position of an Islamic star.

But additional features turn these imprecise Islamic shapes into precise Islamic symbol shapes:

Inside the Sacred Ground Plaza sits a separate section of Memorial Wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date, that IS placed in the exact position of an Islamic star.

Remove the symbolically "broken off" parts of the crescent of Embrace (now called a broken circle) and the remaining crescent structure--what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11--points EXACTLY at Mecca.

To find these additional features, just follow the terrorist brick road: the 44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks on the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew, AND TERRORISTS).

No need to have seen Part 1 before seeing Part 2. All of the parts of this video series will stand on their own, with only a small amount of overlap. There is a brief review of the Mecca orientation, because that is what leads to the discovery of the 44 blocks, but the blocks then lead to this whole further array of terrorist memorializing features.

If there is a group that you want to show this to--conservative campus group, church group, poker group, or just a little half-time patriotism--ask Alec Rawls about getting the video in full resolution, or in television viewing format.

The crisis faced by the US auto industry has both a superficial cause and a deep-seated long-term cause. The superficial cause is the recent spike of gasoline prices to over $4 a gallon. This was a purely artificial phenomenon, not based on energy production costs, or on looming exhaustion of supplies. The spike in prices was entirely a product of the Democratic Party's energy obstructionism.

Democrats are anti-nuclear, anti-coal, anti-oil-shale, anti-tar-sands, and their new anti-CO2 gig makes them anti-everything but the ludicrous “green” triumvirate of solar, wind and bio-fuels. Solar will be big once we figure out how to store it, but we are talking about today folks, where the anti-CO2 hysteria is all based on lies. The planet is cooling, not warming, and the CO2 externality is unambiguously positive, not negative. If anything we should be subsidizing its production, not restricting it. (Every time I see the now ubiquitous epithet “green” I immediately think “morons.”)

If America aggressively exploits its massive fossil resources, we can have gasoline at 1950s prices (in real terms), for much longer than we will need to rely on this primitive energy source. Instead, thanks to 40 years of Democrat energy obstructionism, we are vulnerable to energy prices much higher than $4 a gallon. We have just seen the merest taste of what a crimp in foreign oil supplies can do, with much of the money going directly to our original terror war enemies, the Saudis, who have spent more than a hundred billion dollars spreading their murder-cult version of Islam around the globe.

Continued energy vulnerability is a death knell for U.S. automakers, whose main success has been with big cars and trucks that get relatively low gas mileage. The spike in gas prices absolutely clobbered the gas guzzler sector of the market, which is the immediate cause of the U.S. industry’s current straits.

The artificiality of this year's energy crisis is no justification for a bail out of the industry that it ruined. The called-for remedy in such a situation, where temporary circumstances push businesses into bankruptcy, is re-organization. A reorganization strips the previous owners of their equity (the proper consequence for all business failure), and it provides the opportunity to strip away the union agreements that are the industry's long-term problem. It is the unions that make our auto industry uncompetitive. The unions have to be broken, destroyed, annihilated, or at least knocked back to something approaching a competitive wage, if our auto industry is to survive for any period of time.

In every other market it is illegal for sellers of a product to collude on price, or on any other demands, and rightly so. An efficient economy requires competition and this is as true in the labor market as anywhere else. Unions ought to be illegal, plain and simple, and they always should have been illegal. Now that they have destroyed another of our most important industries, it's time to jettison this antisocial institution (and when--not if--they try to maintain their position with their traditional eruptions of violence, it will be time to start treating union enforcers as the domestic terrorists they are).


Reagan broke the unions and deregulated oil

Come on Obama. We know you believe in Jeremiah Wright's call to strip white people of undeserved privilege. You didn’t sit in the pews every week for 20 years for nothing. There is not actually a whole lot of undeserved white privilege around, but there is some of it, and the auto unions are a glaring example (no less so because they also confer a modicum of undeserved black privilege). Make auto workers compete for their livings like everyone else and they will out-compete anybody, until our auto industry employs many more than it does today.

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," says Obama’s chief advisor Rahm Emanuel, and he’s right, as long as we are talking about using a crisis to fix the actual problems that created the crisis. The actual problems in the case of the auto industry are unionization and energy obstructionism, both of which are wholly owned by the Democrats. If Obama would cut loose those twin albatrosses he could set his presidency on the road to success early. I hope he does it, even though I dearly want to see him voted out in four years, because unlike the dirtbag Democrats, I always want what is best for America, regardless of which political party is helped or hindered by any particular American success.

Democrats strove mightily for five straight years to lose the Iraq war because they thought it would help their electoral prospects (just like they de-funded the Vietnam war after it was already won, just to cover up how wrong they were to oppose the war as un-winnable for so many years). Stinking heap of traitorous scum, and morally smug about it too. That’s not just a moral IQ of zero. That's a negative IQ. And it's more than half the country at this point. We are so screwed.

I’m not saying Democrats are moral trash in every way, only in their politics. We're talking about some of my favorite people in the world here, who just happen to be politically insane. For most Democrats, it’s not even their fault. They just believe what they read in the newspaper, without ever figuring out that the press is completely dominated by the most radical left wing a$$#oles that the 60’s produced. That’s where they went: to academia and the press, and lots of well meaning people are simply duped by the daily barrage of disinformation.

Obama shows every indication of being one of the worst placed dupes in history. The President Elect actually seems to believe that:

The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.

No , no, no , no and no. Still, if Obama has the wherewithal to figure it out, he can pull off a Reagan, whose firing of the air traffic controllers, in combination with the deregulation of the oil industry, broke the back of inflation on the spot. A decade of stagflation ended practically overnight. Obama has the same two ducks propped up in front of him, if only he has the wit to knock them down.


UPDATE: Heritage and Stiglitz both advocate for restructuring. UAW fighting tooth and nail for bailout, both to hang on to their uncompetitive remuneration, and their malignantly hostile work rules. At thes same time, these dirtbags are teaming up with the Democratic Party corrupt-o-cracy to strip American workers of secret ballots in votes on unionization. That will let unions use their thuggery and power over careers to coerce workers onto going/staying union, where their dues get diverted into Democrat campaign coffers. Will tax dollars be shoveled by the billions into propping up this confluence of moral trash?

All indications are that Obama has the instincts of Hugo Chavez and will take every opportunity to amass corrupt power. What else can we expect from a man whose entire pre-election resume consisted of "community organizing" for ACORN's project of systematic vote fraud? Still, we are yet to see what he will do once, as president, he actually has the power to sway the nation's course.

What accounts for those Indian policemen who could've shot the terrorists but kept their heads down instead?

India is a very corrupt country, similar to Mexico, where public servants like policeman regularly extract bribes from the citizenry, to the point where the police come to see themselves as working on a fee-for-service basis. When an Indian policeman is confronted with the opportunity to shoot a terrorist at some risk to himself, the question must automatically run through his head: what's in this for me? What extra payment am I going to get for risking my neck? What is the fee for this service?

The fee is zero. No bribe will be paid, and so the service goes undelivered.

Neo-neocon has some good thoughts on the need of police to be willing to incur civilian casualties in situations where terrorists are attacking civilians, but she gives Mumbai's corrupt policemen far too much credit to imagine that they kept their heads down out of this kind of consideration.

The standard of our own emergency response is amazingly high, as exemplified by the heroic New York City police and fire response to 9/11, rushing into harm's way in the face of overwhelming risk and in some cases almost certain death. Such extraordinary professionalism is a rare achievement. In contrast, the police response of allies like India will remain woefully inadequate until they are able to overcome their deeply entrenched cultures of corruption.