RedStateEclectic

Climategate: More Than Weather Data Was Fudged

Being of the accounting mindset, this email jumped out at me.

From: "Mick Kelly" <m.kelly@uea.ac.uk>
To: Nguyen Huu Ninh (cered@hn.vnn.vn)
Subject: NOAA funding
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 14:17:15 +0000

Ninh
NOAA want to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN.

How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.

Politically this money may have to go through Simon's institute but there overhead rate is high so maybe not!
Best wishes

Mick

Having kept books for projects across a myriad of industries, I recognize this. It appears that they did not properly segregate their  project funds, and they have already spent all the money allocated to the contract even though the work is not yet compete.  Mick is essentially telling Ninh that they need to whip up a set of faux books that show they still have a little money left over, so NOAA, not knowing that their money is long gone, will send them more.

I'd be willing to bet they need the second contract and the accompanying round of financing to complete the first project. Kind of a Ponzi scheme, where the funds intended for later contracts are actually being used to finish up earlier projects.

Amd of course,  they're not above laundering"their" money through another firm who, like any good racketeer would, will take a steep cut for that service.

Remember, if you or I did that, we could be guilty of a federal offense, and possibly even charged with a RICO violation. This is government money they're laundering.

Here's another gem:

From: "Tatiana M. Dedkova"

To: K.Briff

Subject: schijatov

Date: Thu, 7 Mar 96 09:41:07 +0500

Dear Keith

Also, it is important for us if you can transfer the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts which we gave you earlier and the sum for one occasion transfer (for example, during one day) will not be more than 10,000 USD. Only in this case we can avoid big taxes and use money for our work as much as possible.

Do you know what this is? Tax evasion. She is asking for the money to be transferred into a personal account, rather than a business account. Even better, she is asking for the money to be just ever so slightly under the amount of $10,000, because that's the magic number that triggers an automatic notification to the IRS.

And we're going to give these people billions and billions of dollars. Although if we do it $9,999 at a time, it could take a while.

Winnebago: Still Rumbling Along

Winnebago Industries was the original motorhome company. I know a little more about it only because my wife grew up in the Northern Iowa town where they were born, Forest City. Invented in the 1960s, they revolutionized how people 'saw the country' and an industry was born. Aside from making a lot of instant millionaires when it first went public on the NYSE, Winnebago has been sort of a company that has limped along for years.

It has stubbornly clung to high quality products in the face of stiff competition from newer motorhome companies and has had many management problems (due in part to its original owner and inventor John P. Hanson). Whenever the economy hit a recession or gas prices shot up, Winnebago was proclaimed dead and everyone waited for it to go belly up. It never has despite having many good reasons to in the past.

With the economy as it is now, one would expect Winnebago to be close to bankruptcy just about any day now. In fact, when the family visited Forest City this summer, I insisted that we go on the factory tour thinking this may be my last chance to see how a motorhome is built. It also helped quench the engineer in me and was a free tour satisfying the cheap bones in my body.

The tour was much as I expected, lots and lots of vacant factory grounds. Parking lots for chassis that were empty because there were no orders. The company had 'temporarily' laid off 2/3 of its workforce. They were down to only one out of 4 lines on the factory floor. They were no longer building motorhomes on speculation but only to order. They were building only 3 units per day. At retail around $125,000 that amounts to only about $100 million of revenue (these are very rough estimates on my part). The only bright part of the tour was the guide who said that the company had no debt and millions of dollars in the bank. "Good," I thought, "not that it's going to make a difference in this barren factory."

We were in Northern Iowa for Thanksgiving and one of my wife's relatives works for Winnebago. I expected to hear the worst and sure enough, she'd been cut back to part time. But she was upbeat as nearly all of the workers had been called back! Winnebago had now gone back up to 10 units per day and they expected more growth soon. And the relative was going back to full time.

A funny thing happened to Winnebago during this economic downturm, their conservative business model and failure to expand their physical plant and inventory had helped them avert complete disaster. Because although the market for motorhomes has shrunk so has their competition. Large overleveraged competitors like Fleetwood have gone bankrupt leaving the little company in small town Iowa as one of the few providers of motorhomes for the country. It's hard to see where the end of this tale will be but I suspect the town of 4,300 (6,000 workers at its peak) might just outlast Elkhart, Indiana.

Fun Fact: That is an actual Winnebago custom made for the movie Spaceballs by Mel Brooks.

Mainstream Steam

Who’d have thought two years ago that a mainstream publication would be talking about Ron Paul as going “mainstream”? 

News Flash: Mainstream Media Knew about Climategate but Refused to Act

In what could only be shocking to someone who has emerged from a 100 year slumber, the mainstream media (in this case the BBC) failed to act on one of the most intriguing stories regarding global warming in years. As our readers are surely aware, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Great Britain's East Anglia University had a lot of emails released on the internet a few days ago which showed that much of their research and conclusions are based on false or manipulated data.

What has just come of light is that the BBC has these suspicious emails leaked to them one month earlier and did not act. No follow up, nothing. So instead of acting on potentially the biggest scientific story of the year, they sat on it. From the UK Daily Mail:

The BBC has become tangled in the row over the alleged manipulation of scientific data on global warming.

One of its reporters has revealed he was sent some of the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia more than a month ago – but did nothing about them.

Despite the explosive nature of some of the messages – which revealed apparent attempts by the CRU’s head, Professor Phil Jones, to destroy global temperature data rather than give it to scientists with opposing views – Paul Hudson failed to report the story.

You can read his blog posts here. Very interesting how despite this sort of collection of emails he manifestly supports the global warming theory.

Questions remain: Did other news outlets receive it also? If so who? If not, why only the BBC? Who is the source?

My only thoughts are that it is possible other outlets received the emails but no one acting on them would be unusual. I suspect that it was precisely sent to the BBC because the hacker/leaker wanted to expose the BBC for a fraudulent news outlet that isn't interested in the truth but propagating a social meme.

I can't wait to see how this plays out. The fallout is only beginning to manifest itself.

In Light of Our Recent "Comments"

Oh, The People You Meet

While it wasn't on Mulberry St., I talked to somebody, a small business owner, over the weekend and I just can't stop thinking about what she said. 

You should see her. She's a little Chinese lady,always busy. For once, I was the only one in the store and so we chatted for a few minutes about the economy.  I found out she came to America with 1 baby. Right after she had her second baby, her husband died. They didn't have much money when he was alive, so after he died, she was really poor. Barely spoke any English. Started working in a dry cleaner.

When her kids started going to school, they brought home several applications for the free lunch program. She repeatedly threw them away. Then the school called, asking her if she understood that she would probably qualify. 

She told them to stop sending the forms because they were insulting. And she told her kids that they weren't allowed take handouts from anybody, that they weren't entitled to live off of other people.

She said her kids ate some very small sandwiches, but they ate their own sandwiches. Today one has graduated college, one is in college, (no government student loans either) and she owns the dry cleaner that hired her all those years ago.

Just having help available makes life too easy. I live in the state with the worst unemployment in the country, but nobody has come around offering to wash my car, paint my barn or rake my leaves. Why should they?

Climate Shifts

With Global Warming slowly leaving the nation's frontal lobes, I've noticed a shift in the comments sections of op-ed pieces. It used to be that every calamity was due to rising temperatures. Fear was the order of the day and fast action was needed. In other words, the usual political playbook was being employed in order to pass rotten legislation on behalf of special interests. Now, the environmentalists are changing along with the climate. More and more, their rants below the main articles are more in line with standard environmental issues: mostly Malthusian in nature with eco-destruction and pollution thrown in for good measure.

The movement really started to take off just about the time the Berlin Wall was coming down. It was communism's new digs - a place where government could grow. At the time, the doomsayers were predicting mass starvation, material shortages, and mountains of garbage. Ironically, it went hand in hand with the post-industrial meme as the nation started moving factories overseas and the service industry took hold. But are the environmentalists hitting a wall?

With the loss of a quarter of our factories and now a large economic downturn, people are not as receptive to saving other species when their own survival is at stake. Going green sometimes means paying more money and such a fiscal clash has no place in THIS environment. Also, all movements are subject to the artichoke effect. As you get closer to the heart of your goal, layers of interested people peel off due to their satisfaction level being reached and soon your movement lacks the necessary political prominence to continue. After all, only a handful of the obsessing gang-greens truly wish to go back to living in caves. As the decades go by the wayside along with the enviro-cons' dire predictions, their influence will slowly wane. It's hard to say what the next popular fixation will be. I do hope, however, that it is liberty.

Head in the Clouds

Just some passing thoughts, here, on the changes in technology…

Back when my husband and I were first married (this would have been early 80s—like circa ‘82), he “needed” a computer really badly (I don’t remember why—I think it was to “play” with—and practice programming on—in case he didn’t get into medical school and moved in the technology direction—which in retrospect, probably would have had a better future at the time than medicine), so he bough a used “personal computer” of some sort—all I remember was that the thing was big, and that the memory was a cassette tape—I don’t suppose there was much internal memory, either.  I think (maybe) he could do some sort of very basic “BASIC” programming on it, and that was about it.  When we needed to write papers in college, we pulled out my electric typewriter, or could head over to the college’s computer lab, and type whatever we needed to via a terminal on the mainframe, and then print it out on one of the network printers in another building (or down in the basement of the science building).

Our next computer came sometime during the medical school years—1983-87. It was a Commodore Amiga, and was the first “real” computer that I could use, too.  Although I don’t really remember what I used it for since Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, I don’t think.  I suppose it must have had a basic word processing function—and probably some decent time-killing games.

After we moved to Memphis in 1990, our computer purchases became more frequent.  Sometime in the early 90s (90-93), we upgraded to what was our first “Windows” machine (3.0, I believe), and then I puchased my first “laptop” (which I recently rediscovered when my son found it in a box in the basement—and I realized just how far technology has advanced since then—that laptop had docking drive that you could remove and replace—which would run either the big (5 1/4 inch?) floppy disks, or the smaller (3 1/2 inch) disks, which were just emerging on the scene.

I think we may have kept the same computer, but upgraded once between 93-95.  The computer we had was outfitted with a modem, so we could plug in and connect to the internet (in a manner of speaking).  I think we may have had an AOL or maybe Compuserve account at the time.

When we moved back to Nebraska in ‘95, the Internet stuff was starting to pick up steam.  Phone companies were offering “higher speed” internet service, and while it was still dial up, you could subscribe and be on for as much time as you wanted (and your phone was always busy).  That became more convenient in my early graduate school years (and we had upgraded computers—both the desktops and the laptops, at that point).   I should note that those who had laptops at the college could purchase special modems that they could plug into their laptops, which would give them access (while on campus) to the campus internet access.  Sometime during that timeframe, we had purchased some external disk drives—a Zip Drive—which was sort of a super-floppy drive.  That became sort of the format of choice for storing early digital photos—unfortunately, I think we’ve still got some of those photos on Zip Disks, but no way to make the Zip Drive work.

Sometime, and I’m not really sure when—probably between 1999 and 2001—our cable company came out with high speed “always on” internet—which we jumped at.  That opened new doors.  At the same time, Windows (which sort of defaulted to our operating system of choice), was upgrading, become a bigger user of hardware capacity, and this began a drift into the Ebke purchasing of computers more frequently to keep up with the new software.

All this has a point (which I’ll get to now):  CLOUDS.

For the last 20 years, we have spent money upgrading computer systems so that we could take advantage of the latest and greatest software.  And yet now, it seems, less and less of that software actually needs to be ON our computers.

Take, for example, the offerings of Google Apps.  With any Google account, you have access to Google Documents, Google Calendar, and some other goodies that I haven’t used much—for FREE.  If you have a small business, or a group with up to 50 people, and pay $10 for the domain name, you can create business e-mail address (so that everyone has the same extension—YOUR domain); then those people can “collaborate” on shared documents in real time online—with the Google word processor, presentation program, or spreadsheet—all of which are compatible with Microsoft products, and which, in many ways, are simpler for most people to use.

I noticed the other day that you can do bookkeeping (Quicken and the like) online—logging into your account, but not keeping anything actually physically on your computer.  Then of course there all of the “backup” systems which, for a subscription, allows you to back up your computer automatically, to a remote location—something which makes a certain amount of sense, I guess—I back up my files to an external hard drive, which would be safe if my computer were to crash—but not so safe if my house were to catch on fire…  Likewise, what about the online photo sharing and storage sites like Flickr, which allow you to store and organize your photos “somewhere else.”

All this is to say that I wonder where the future of computing is going?  If more and more people are doing more and more of their computing “in the clouds” rather than having everything stored with them, on their computer, then what’s the future of some of the software companies that are still using a highly proprietary model instead of open source?  And how do those “open source” folks make money—through advertising?  And what about computers themselves—are we going to keep getting bigger and bigger hard drives and RAM, with faster processors, or are we going to plateau on the need for that, and the big concern is going to be with how fast the internet connection can get? 

I’ll admit to being sort of a technological simpleton—I like technology, and I use technology, but much of it just passes me by and I don’t really get a good sense of where the “next step” is going to go—I wait till it gets there, and then jump on.  Anyone out there want to take any guesses as to the next destination, or merely enlighten me?

LLE

"Constant On"

As I sit here with numb fingers from pulling thousands of bulbs from constantly off strands of Christmas lights, I have decided that GE's catch phrase is a load of HOOEY. There oughta' be a law. (Sorry... that was my inner socialist speaking)

And WORSE, I'm out of Jim Beam! Well, rum will do in a pinch.

Obama Is Having A Job Summit

From CNN:

Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) CEO Eric Schmidt and Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) chief Bob Iger will be among about 130 people attending Thursday's meeting, according to a partial guestlist.

Other prominent CEOs slated to attend include Randall Stephenson of AT&T (T, Fortune 500), Brian Roberts of Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500), James McNerney of Boeing (BA, Fortune 500) and Frederick Smith of FedEx (FDX, Fortune 500).

Conspicuously missing? People who actually produce things.  Oh wait - maybe I didn't read far enough.

They'll be joined by such experts as Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, former Fed vice chairman Alan Blinder, United Steel Workers president Leo Gerard and San Antonio mayor Julian Castro.

So the unions who were about 50% responsible for the demise of our steel industry have a spot at the table?  Sigh.