Although Al Gore blatantly exploited the global warming theory to make himself millions of dollars in one of the biggest scams in recent history, the real inconvenient truth about the guff he was peddling was that the statistical evidence didn’t back up what he was saying.
That was a BIG problem for his credibility and for the credibility of the pseudo-scientists who had grabbed on to his coattails to try to make a name for themselves also.
There were only two possible things they could do.
(1) admit they had got it wrong,
or
(2) change the statistics.
Of course, door number (1) meant telling the truth, so they chose door number (2).
They changed the statistics.
Basically what the pseudo-scientists have now done is made the inconvenient “pause” in global warming disappear.
In a new paper published by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) they now estimate that global temperature during the period 1998 to 2012 increased twice as fast as all other estimates had calculated.
Of course, their new study stays well clear of six of the seven temperature sets used by climate scientists and instead uses the one regarded as problematic, the one shunned even by the UK’s own Met Office.
How they think they can get away with such crap is beyond me.
What they have done this time is just make the numbers up as they need them. Where instrument readings didn’t exist, for example for the Arctic, they stuck in a ‘guess’ of what they would have been, a ‘guess’ that would be sure to support the conclusion they wanted to reach.
Past temperatures like the HOT 1930s have been erased and other figures ‘massaged’ to emphasize recent warming.
The whole thing is another big fraud to manipulate the public who invariably believe whatever they are told by supposedly ‘learned’ sources and to give unscrupulous governments the ammunition they need to introduce more unnecessary legislation and taxes.
Facts, like the almost two decade long pause in global warming, are officially accepted by organizations like the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), but you would never know it if you read any of their reports because this type of information is buried so deep within it that hardly anyone sees it.
So if you ignore reality and make up your own numbers you can indeed prove anything with statistics.
I hope there aren’t too many things that Creflo Dollar and I have in common. But the one thing that I am sure of that we do have in common is that neither of us own a $65 million private jet. (We’d probably both like to but that’s a whole different story.)
Creflo, if you don’t know already, is one of those despicable TV preachers who spend 99.9 percent of their time trying to swindle money out of gullible and stupid people who think he is really a ‘man of God’.
This pastor’s latest attempt to enrich himself at the expense of his congregation was just as blatant piece of greed and fraud as I’ve come across.
He wanted $65 million.
Nothing wrong with that, if he was going to spend it building a hospital wing, feeding the poor, housing the homeless, or some other equally good works.
But Creflo wanted the $65 million to buy himself a private jet, and a pretty swanky one come to that.
I know what you’re thinking.
I thought the same.
But it turns out that Creflo didn’t want the jet for personal gain, although he would end up owning it and using it.
Oh, dear me no, not at all.
Creflo just wanted to use the private jet to transport food to the starving peoples of the world. Oh yes, and to save the lives of Christians being persecuted in the Middle east.
Personally, if these were indeed the reasons for wanting an airplane, I’d have set my sights on something a little more modest and of the cargo, rather than the luxury passenger, variety. You can pack a heck of a lot more boxes of food into an empty cargo fuselage than you can into one crammed with plush leather reclining seats, plama TV screens, beds, drinks cabinets and all the other luxury fittings you can find in a bespoke Gulfstream private jet.
It didn’t work of course. Thankfully.
It transpired that not even the type of gullible Americans who watch this kind of TV trash fell for Creflo’s obvious display of greed and self-agrandisement. After disappointing results and adverse publicity the web page soliciting donations for the private jet disappeared – and so did Creflo.
For a while, that is.
But he came back and when he did he had the usual religious scammer’s excuses all lined up. The reason for his disappearance was because he was “talking with God” – not the real one of course, but his own personal version, the one who only told him what he wanted to hear.
And his fake god told Creflo that his scam to get himself a private jet had failed because the ‘forces of evil’ had interfered with his plans and set out to discredit him.
one of Creflo Dollar’s modest little cribs
It’s a pity they hadn’t got to work on Creflo before now. Before he was able to scam his supporters out of enough money to buy him a million dollar home in Atlanta, another $2.5 million home in Manhattan, a Rolls-Royce motor car, and just enough money to buy one private jet back in 1999.
I wish we had heard the last from people like Creflo.
The World Wide Web, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, turned 25 years old this year, 2014.
There has never been anything like it before, certainly not as regards the impact it has made on society and the way we live our lives. Many of those changes are good, many are not so good and a few are downright annoying.
Here’s my take on some of them.
To concentrate on the good parts first, the one thing the www has done, for those who can use it effectively, is to give access to information that was previously only available to the elite few who managed to claw their way into the lofty heights of academia, or who worked in places where information was readily available. Now the same information is accessible at the touch of a button to anyone and everyone with a smart phone, tablet or computer.
Another benefit, in my view anyway, is that is has sent a massive wake-up call to telephone providers world wide, many of whom were fast asleep, content to rake in healthy profits from antiquated systems. No longer do we have to settle for slow and temperamental data transfer lines. Nowadays, particularly in the last few years, people are demanding systems that can cope with download streams in the gigabyte range. If you are old enough to remember the first modems you will know you wasted too much of your life trying to download at 12Kb/sec., sometimes less.
Freedom is also a welcome by-product of the World Wide Web.
The freedom to work in any country in the world, from virtually any country in the world is one big plus – it is for me anyhow. Another one I particularly like is the freedom to watch TV programs that I like, when I like, no longer tied to the schedules of some brainless bean-counter working for a broadcasting company. And the freedom to have your say on things as and when the mood takes you – they call that blogging don’t you know! – is also a great advantage to the ordinary person.
As is the freedom to disseminate information across the globe instantly, as Mr Snowden ably demonstrated, although I would hazard a guess that the powers that be would not agree with me on that one.
Indeed, this is the one aspect of the www that really bothers big brother.
China for example is one country where access is controlled by the state. Coincidentally this year also marks the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, you’ll find articles about that if you do a search, but probably not in China. They get away with it because they are not a democracy and do not pretend to be one.
In other countries, like the good old Land Of The (Not So) Free (Anymore)), the powers still like to con their people into believing that they are living in a democratic nation and that the people have the power to vote for this or that. But think for a moment, when was the last time you got to vote on whether to start a war, or whether to give $billions of your money to the greedy banksters to pay themselves huge bonuses and gamble away the rest?
It is because they need to keep the pretence of democracy going, that they do not yet have the confidence to start overtly censoring the internet. But they do all they can to snoop on what people are reading, or writing, or looking at.
This is where the freedom the www and associated technology provides can also be a negative, when it is used by governments to surveil us and record every piece of data they can. If they were doing this selectively and targeting terrorists and criminals no one would be too worried. But they are doing it to all of us, guilty and innocent alike.
They are also doing everything they can think of to impose taxes on internet commerce – of course they have to coz they’re stoney broke.
The www has revolutionized business practices and created all sorts of new commerce opportunities, Amazon perhaps being the best example of a company that has gone from nothing to a multi-billion dollar business in just a few years.
Communication and social interaction are also areas where the www has liberated the ordinary person – first with email and more recently with social media. In the near future expect to see social media expanding to become much more than individual platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. We are already seeing many new applications that are allowing people to communicate more widely, more easily and more often.
Another negative is that the World Wide Web has unwittingly facilitated the proliferation of pornography and violence, and is teaching a generation of morons all the wrong things. Things that will ensure they become a burden on society, not an asset.
And it has also opened a whole new environment in which criminals can operate. Millions of dollars are being stolen every day through scams, confidence tricks and outright theft.
You could say (and I frequently do) that people dumb enough to fall for these scams deserve all they get, or all they lose, is perhaps a better way of putting it. You know, the idiots who believe they really have won a lottery they didn’t buy a ticket for, or who think that Dr Umbungo Watanga from Nigeria is being truthful when he tells them that someone they never heard of has left them $25 million and all they need to do is send all their personal details and a few thousand dollars to unlock the fortune that awaits them. There really is one born every minute it seems!
All that said, and twenty-five years on, the www is still in its infancy. We have come a long way in the past 25 years, but we have really only scratched the surface as regards what the web has the potential to do to further improve our daily lives.
Where the vision to develop the www will come from in anyone’s guess. The only thing we know for sure is that the initiative won’t come from governments or their bureaucratic servants, simply because the people we elect to those positions do not have the required intelligence.
So its up to you. If you have any great ideas you want to share, send me an email.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web.
Today started off as just another quiet Sunday. I was going to write a short sermon, but decided against it since you’d already had one of those from me on Wednesday.
Then I got a life changing opportunity from the most unlikely of sources. On offer was a cool $5 million!
How good is that!!
I just had to tell you about it.
The opportunity came from my good friend General Abdul Aziz Jassem al-Shallal, one of the generals who have defected from the Syrian Army.
It turns out that the office of General Abdul Aziz Jassem al-Shallal monitors and controls the affairs of sensitive institutions in Syria that takes to do with foreign contract payments.
It also turns out that General Abdul Aziz Jassem al-Shallal thinks that I am a respected and honest person suitable for handling this project/transaction with sincerity, trust and confidentiality. Perhaps he had read some of my posts about the folly of getting involved in the Syrian conflict.
Luckily – for him – before he defected, the General was able to get his hands on all the paperwork necessary to retrieve unclaimed deposits and over invoiced sums to do with foreign contracts.
And luckily – for me – he can arrange it so that it appears that all this unclaimed money is owed to me. All I have to do is agree to give him 70 percent of the proceeds, and for my trouble I can keep 25 percent, with the remainder going on expenses.
That’s a cool 25 percent of $20 million for me!
WOW!!
Have I ever been this lucky?
Well, no I haven’t. Never. Not once. And sadly I’m not lucky this time either.
You see I know that the General Abdul Aziz Jassem al-Shallal who emailed me isn’t the real one, this one only exists in the mind of a Nigerian crook.
The real General Abdul Aziz Jassem al-Shallal, not the one who emailed me!
I also know that this is the latest variation of the infamous Nigerian 419 scam, designed to con greedy and gullible people out of money, not give them the opportunity to make money.
And I know that if I was foolish enough to reply to General Abdul Aziz Jassem al-Shallal all that would happen is that eventually the fictitious money transfer would run into problems that would either require me to pay some cash upfront to clear the way for the transfer (known as Advance Fee Fraud) or hand over bank account or other personal details that would allow these criminals to try to steal my money.
So will I be taking advantage of this great life-changing opportunity?
Sadly no.
The only reason I am mentioning this at all is to highlight the scam for those who maybe have not yet fallen victim to it, and as a warning to ignore all such “opportunities”. And there are a lot of them.
So why do scams like these keep happening?
Sadly the answer is, because a lot of the time they work, and they continue to work because people are so bloody stupid!
It has been estimated that there are a quarter of a million active scammers and that they cause $1.5 billion in losses each year, an average of $20,000 per victim. Some of the victims are just greedy idiots who think they are on to an illegal windfall, but others (also idiots) think they are contributing to things like charities and orphanages. On occasion some of these hapless victims have suffered more than financial losses, having been beaten, tortured, and even murdered.
There are two rules in life that you should apply to everything.
Rule # 1, believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see, and
Rule # 2, if it sounds too good to be true then it usually is.
No matter how great the temptation always try to remember these.
fasab 