ANOTHER CASE OF SUDDEN JIHAD SYNDROME

A Saudi man named Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani is the alleged killer of his Jewish professor. The New York Daily News reports that Al-Zahrani used a kitchen knife to stab his 77 year-old professor named Richard Antoun. Beyond the murder itself, the most stunning development may be the lengths authorities seem to be willing to go in order to play down the possibility this could be Jihad.

Antoun (pictured) was a professor of middle eastern studies and considered to be a peace activist.

Somehow, authorities have magically concluded that despite Al-Zahrani having written extensively about the middle east in general and Muslim scholars prior to the 11th century in particular, the murder was not religiously motivated. The DAILY NEWS reports:

Officials said the murder did not appear to be a hate crime and that Zahrani may have had an academic beef with Antoun - one of the advisers on his dissertation.

"There is no indication of religious or ethnic motivation," said Broome County District Attorney Gerald Mollen.

Let's see. A Muslim who has made middle eastern studies a primary focus of his attention, kills an elderly Jewish man and authorities have already determined it's not a hate crime.

Add another victim to the list of Sudden Jihad Syndrome's victims.



h/t to WND

EPA: HUMANS SHOULD STOP BREATHING

Based on what the EPA is saying, how else should we interpret this? If human beings exhale carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is now being considered a poisonous gas, human beings themselves are destroying the earth not because of anything they're doing but because of what they are - a carbon based life form that is viewed similarly to smokestacks that are polluting the air.

Here's the irony. Fewer humans equals less plant life, which is what the environmental movement claims to champion. The New York Times REPORTS:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday will complete its determination that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human health and the environment, paving the way for regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants, factories refineries and other major sources.

The agency finding also will allow Mr. Obama to tell delegates at the United Nations climate change conference that began today in Copenhagen that the United States is moving aggressively to address the problem.

Address the problem? Remember all of those "kooks" who have been saying the environmental movement is really an agenda that is about population control?

They don't seem so kooky these days, DO THEY?

Watts Up With That links to a study at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN that shows trees are flourishing as a result of all of this excess CO2.

Hmmmmm

So does this mean that the agenda of the EPA is actually one that involves extinguishing plant life?

h/t to WUWT

CLIMATEGATE AND CHILDISH SCIENTISTS

Steven F. Hayword's piece in the Weekly Standard is lengthy but extremely compelling. It not only provides insight into the creation of the "Hockey Stick" chart by Michael Mann, but it also gives us a sneak peak into the relationships between the CRU / man-made climate change proponents. The portrait painted of Michael Mann is not very kind. Hayword's analysis leaves one with the Impression that Mann was blinded by something other than science and that people within his circle expressed doubts about his "hockey stick".

Quoting from Hayword:

It has long been thought that over the last thousand years the earth experienced two significant natural climate cycles: the "medieval warm period" (MWP) centered around the year 1000 and the "little ice age" (LIA) from about 1500 to 1850 or so. The first report of the IPCC in 1992 displayed a stylized thousand-year temperature record showing that the MWP was warmer than current global temperatures, but this was mostly conjecture. Yet it was a huge problem for the climate campaigners: If the medieval warm period was as warm as today, as some scientists believe, it would mean that today's temperatures are arguably within the range of normal climate variability, and that we could not yet confirm greenhouse gas emissions as the sole cause of recent increases or rely on computer climate models for predictions of future climate apocalypse. There had long been rumors that leading figures in the climate community believed they needed to make the medieval warm period go away, but until the CRU leak there was no evidence besides hearsay that scientists might be cooking the books.

So what happened between 1992 and 1998? Mann's "hockey stick" chart in 1998 seemed to disregard both the MWP and the LIA. Based on Hayword's article, Mann dug in his heals over the matter and wouldn't even listen to those in his inner circle.

The CRU emails reveal internal doubts about this entire enterprise both before and after the hockey stick made its debut. In a 1996 email to a large number of scientists in the CRU circle, Tom Wigley, a top climatologist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, cautioned: "I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product." Mann and his colleagues made use of some of the CRU data, but some of the CRU scientists weren't comfortable with the way Mann represented it and also seemed to find Mann more than a bit insufferable.

Be sure to read the ENTIRE ARTICLE as it provides an "inside baseball" look into the culture within this group. It also puts the emails in a very logical and hard-to-argue-with context.

One of the best articles on this scandal I've seen.