There is an old joke that has two guys talking about beards. First one says, “I used to have a beard as ugly as yours. I shaved it off.” The other guy replies, “I used to have a face as ugly as yours: I grew a beard.”
Thing here is that Brad Pitt has a handsome face. Why does he cover it wiuth that scruffy beard?
The title above is what Posner gave but it is wrong: there really is no secret. Golf, like any other sport, has its girls, its groupies, its gold-diggers, its action seekers. Basketball, because of Wilt Chamberlain, has a reputation for being sexually wild. Why not golf? The message is that any kind of success can increase your sexual access. And, if you are married to someone in sports, don’t bank on fidelity.
Tiger Woods isn’t the only golfer with carousing issues. Retired players and current caddies tell Gerald Posner about the game inside the real PGA: The “Party Groupie Association.” Plus, Posner on exclusive details of Tiger’s new prenup.
The shock surrounding the Tiger Woods revelations this past week had a lot to do with his carefully generated squeaky-clean image. But almost as much the game and culture he came from—golf, with its elitist, country club provenance and paunchy, white, middle-aged enthusiasts. At the professional level, however, there’s a secret underworld not unlike many other major league sports: a Daily Beast investigation turned up groupies, carousing and wild sex as a central element for many players on the PGA Tour.
I spoke to eight retired golfers, current caddies, and ex-PGA workers. All spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the cases of the former players, some earn attendance fees for certain charity events or have good friends who are still playing, while each of the others whom I interviewed have continuing business relationships with the PGA or earn income from tournaments that they are not willing to risk by going public.
These sources recounted stories of “hounds” or “wild men” inside the small professional fraternity. One of the names that came up the most: John Daly. Some of the stories are well known, such as when he passed out drunk at Hooters or showed up at one tournament with scratches on his face from an angry wife (he’s on his fourth marriage). What isn’t publicly known is that in 2006, Daly’s autobiography originally included several torrid adult-only escapades. Sources say that business advisors thought the material far too racy, even for Daly, and talked the golfer out of it. Whole sections were cut from the first draft—including references to threesomes, and his then-wife Sherrie installing cameras on his tour bus to deter sex with groupies.
As with the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball, golfers like Daly log a lot of time on the road, away from families, ensconced in deluxe hotel suites. A top golfer might do up to 20 one-week tournaments a year.
Kate Rose – the model and wife of Justin Rose
More important, there’s no shortage of temptation. With players having to earn at least $500,000 annually to keep their professional status, it’s little wonder that some women attracted to athletes might find their way to a golf tournament instead of a basketball game. The players even have a name for these women: PGA, or Party Groupie Association.
If a player finds a girl interesting, it’s the caddy who might actually make the contact. “I’ve been told ‘Look around the ropes,’” says one caddie. “‘See who is easy on the eyes.’”
According to the ex-players and the caddies, the simplest ones, and usually the newest, are so-called “gallery girls,” the prettiest girls at the tournament who get prominent placement at the front line of the ropes that set off the spectators from the players. If a player finds a girl interesting, it’s the caddy who might actually make the contact.
“I’ve been told ’Look around the ropes,’” says one caddie. “’See who is easy on the eyes.’”
Caddies frequently pull the prettiest girls out of the autograph line, often offering a private chat with the pro. The caddy then often serves as the go-between. Players never give out their telephone number or contact information, instead leaning on the caddy as a trusted arranger. It partly explains why some caddies get paid so well—often, with a percentage of the winnings—to carry a bag and judge breaks on the green. For instance, Steve Williams, who is Tiger’s caddy, has been with him since 1999; Tiger even attended Williams’ 2005 wedding. Their financial arrangement is secret, but it’s obviously generous: Williams has been able to start his own charitable foundation to help junior golfers in his native New Zealand.
Golfer Adam Scott’s Girlfriend – ANA
But most of the girls who hang out looking to bed a golfer don’t wait on the fairways. Tournaments are a multi-day affair and walking around the course after a desired target isn’t the best way to land him.
“Some of the girls become tournament volunteers,” one retired player tells me. “That way they can run errands, or drive the players to the driving range or other places. It’s the best chance for a one-on-one.”
Others who are more versed in tournament life wrangle invitations to PGA dinners or special tournament social events. And the “real pros,” says one ex player, “know the hotels and resorts where every player is staying. It’s not that hard to determine.”
“You’d be surprised if you check the bios of all the pros,” one caddie tells me, “how many say they met their wife at this or that tournament.” That doesn’t mean that every wife who met her pro golfing husband at a tournament was a groupie, but it’s another sign of how much social and extracurricular life is part of the pro tour.
My sources said that clubhouses sometimes resembled frat houses, with golfers exchanging graphic stories of the previous night’s escapades. Players talk about “the 19th hole,” or dub a girl willing to have anal sex a “double bogey.” A “water hole” is anyone who performs only oral sex.
Almost everyone I spoke to said Tiger Woods had a reputation, since the mid-1990s, as a womanizer (calls to his agent were not returned). When he was off the circuit for some of 2008 because of injuries, the young and handsome duo, Spain’s Sergio Garcia and Colombia’s Camilo Villegas, had flocks of young girls following them. I heard ribald stories about top players, including Daly (his agent also didn’t return calls). Two of those interviewed claimed to “know” that one of golf’s superstars, and his wife, were swingers, a rumor that persistently makes the rounds on the Internet and is repeated even by other golfers on the tour.
One person to whom I spoke had personal experience with pro golfers bragging about a night of sex, and then using a prescription amphetamine—like Adderall or Ritalin—to get going the following day for the next round (such drugs are banned by the PGA since July 1, 2008, and while there is random testing for drug use among players some ridicule it for being easy to evade).
So Tiger Woods surely seems to have a lot of company in the golfer’s behaving badly department. The big difference: no one else on the tour has made $1 billion based on a reputation of perfection.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast’s Chief Investigative Reporter.
Scientists Behaving Badly
A corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists are exposed by a massive document leak.
by Steven F. Hayward
12/14/2009, Volume 015, Issue 13
// This is a very good article which explains the subject in terms the non-scientist can understand, shows where the controversies are, and generally sheds light on a murky subject. I include only a couple of paragraphs and encourage you to read the whol article, here.
Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.
In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”
As in the furor over Dan Rather’s fabricated documents about George W. Bush’s National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the “fake but accurate” defense–what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don’t you know, so move along, nothing to see here. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: “It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow,” Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. “The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. . . . I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them. . . . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.” Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, announced last week that he will temporarily step down pending an investigation.
…..
The behavior of the CRU circle has cast a long shadow over the entire climate science community, and many honest scientists will now undeservedly bear the stigma of Climategate unless a full airing of the issues is conducted. Other important climate research centers with close ties to the CRU–including NASA’s Goddard Institute and the Climate Change Science Program at NOAA–should not be exempt from a full-dress investigation. Such a reevaluation must begin with an understanding of the crucial role the CRU circle has played in the global warming drama.
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In 1998 three scientists from American universities–Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes–unveiled in Nature magazine what was regarded as a signal breakthrough in paleoclimatology–the now notorious “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction (picture a flat “handle” extending from the year 1000 to roughly 1900, and a sharply upsloping “blade” from 1900 to 2000). Their paper purported to prove that current global temperatures are the highest in the last thousand years by a large margin–far outside the range of natural variability. The medieval warm period and the little ice age both disappeared. The hockey stick chart was used prominently in the 2001 IPCC report as “smoking gun” proof of human-caused global warming. Mann and his coauthors concluded that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.”
Case closed? Hardly.
…..
Starting in 2003 two mild-mannered Canadians, retired engineer Stephen McIntyre and University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, began making noises about serious problems with the by-then iconic hockey stick graph. The dispute between McIntyre, McKitrick (M/M as they became known in the shorthand of the climate science world) and the hockey team was highly technical, involving advanced methods of data selection and statistical analysis that are almost impossible for a layperson to follow. But one key point was access to the original raw data and complete computer codes that Mann and CRU had used, rather than the adjusted data reported in their final studies.
To extend the sports equipment simile, Mann and the hockey team responded with the scientific equivalent of high-sticking. It was McIntyre’s requests for raw data and computer codes that prompted the numerous emails from Jones and other CRU people about “hiding” behind technicalities to refuse freedom of information requests or even destroying data, codes, and emails to stymie McIntyre. Prior to this time, most of the complaints about outsiders in the leaked emails dealt with such well known skeptics as the University of Virginia’s Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, and journal editors who didn’t toe the line. After 2003 the CRU crew became obsessed with McIntyre above all others. He appears in 105 of the emails by name (in some others, he’s referred to as “a certain Canadian”), usually with a tone of resentment and contempt.
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Perhaps the most damning email from the CRU circle is this July 2005 message from Phil Jones to climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama: “As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.” Jones’s attitude may not be exactly political, but it is certainly unscientific. The denial of political bent is also hard to square with the emails revealing that several of these scientists worked closely behind the scenes with alarmist advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, which really deserves to be shunned by serious scientists.
…..
Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so. But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it’s closing time for the climate horror show.
Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, coauthor of AEI’s Energy and Environment Outlook, and author of the forthcoming Almanac of Environmental Trends (Pacific Research Institute).
As Hillary and Gates fan out to explain what Obama really meant the other night, it’s becoming clear that the “Great Communicator’s” skills are breaking down.
It’s a strange paradox for a great wordsmith, but whenever Obama makes an important policy speech these days he leaves everyone totally confused.
His first health-care press conference back in July triggered a season of raucous political Rorschach and left his hopeful followers utterly baffled about what they were being asked to support.
Now White House envoys are being dispatched all over the globe to explain what the president really meant about the date when troops will or won’t be pulled out of Afghanistan. Hillary, you go to the Hill! Take Gates and Adm. Mullen with you. Holbrooke, off to Brussels! And you, Gen. Petraeus, you go on 360 and hit Anderson Cooper with jargony dog whistle caveats like “the pace of the drawdown is conditions-based.”
I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn’t really believe a word that he is saying.
Does Obama create confusion on purpose? Is this his “process” based on his confession that he’s a screen onto which people project things? Is it a strategy so that whatever bill trickles out of Congress or however many soldiers linger in Afghanistan, he can claim that the outcome is what he meant it all along? (Clinton and Gates assured nervous senators on the Hill Thursday that the August 2011 deadline was both firm and flexible, and that this position was, in Gates’ words, “not contradictory” in the least.)
Or is it that for all the administration’s vaunted mastery of multiplatform communication, Rahm and Gibbs and company are actually amateurs at crafting a clear political message and launching it on the dazed American public?
Or is it that there is so much subtext to every part of this message that the simple heads of the electorate are just not pointy enough to comprehend it?
I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn’t really believe a word that he is saying. He couldn’t convey that health-care reform would be somehow cost-free because he knows it won’t be. And he can’t adequately convey either the imperatives or the military strategy of the war in Afghanistan because he doesn’t really believe in it either. He feels colonized by mistakes of the past. He feels trapped by the hand that has been dealt him.
Obama all but held his nose as he delivered those words—“bring this war to a successful conclusion”—and never once mentioned the word “win.”
The only authentic moment at West Point was the history lesson he gave us at the start. As he spoke, you realized how long ago it was that we entered Afghanistan. How much blood has been shed since then. How futile it is to try to press the reset button and play this war game now as it would have been at the start, when we were hot on bin Laden’s trail in Tora Bora. For a moment, as Obama told us of the first attack on the Taliban and NATO’s invocation of Article 5, I felt I was being told some Nordic myth from ancient times: Four score years ago and ten, fiery planes set out for the prosperous, peace-loving climes of the United States of America! And then, there was war. There was much war, and it was covered in a great fog, and it lasted unto eternity.
Is it any wonder Obama would prefer to let us stay confused?
Tina Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times bestseller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC’s Topic A with Tina Brown. Also, she was a big backer of Obama in the Elections in 2008
Perhaps the scientists were just joking in some of the e-mails, as they now claim, and that they used “poorly chosen words.” If the East Anglia scientists were serious about everything in those e-mails, it’s a bombshell.
It’s an incredible assertion that is difficult to swallow, especially with the Alberta government spending billions on carbon sequestration.
The e-mails indicate an agenda-driven willingness among a group of like-minded scientists to influence what research gets published. In one 2003 e-mail, a scientist suggests boycotting the journal Climate Research, and manipulating its editors or getting them fired, for publishing articles contrary to the views of the Hadley CRU. In another message, the head of the Hadley climate unit, Philip Jones, wrote that he would try to exclude papers written by climate skeptics from a 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange(IPCC). He vowed in the e-mail to “keep them out somehow–even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
If he wasn’t kidding, Jones’s e-mail, and others like it, are distressing. On Tuesday, Jones announced his resignation while the school investigates the e-mails that indicate scientific and professional misconduct have been perpetrated by Jones and others.
Even those who accept the need to act on the theory of man-made global warming– including this paper–can’t deny that all science should be allowed to speak for itself. Nothing should be suppressed. As U.S. climatologist and global warming skeptic Roy Spencer notes: “Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting IPCC politics, not to find out how nature works. The ‘data spin’ is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science.”
Should overweight passengers pay extra to fly?
That’s the debate stemming from a photo of an extremely large passenger that was posted on the aviation Web site Flightglobal.com. The photograph shows an obese passenger spilling out of his seat and into the aisle. According to the blog, Unusual Attitude, which is hosted by the site, the photograph was taken by an American Airlines flight attendant to show her manager what was happening on the aircraft.
Although it was posted on the blog last month, ABCNews.com, the New York Post and New York Daily News have since picked up the photo and blog post.
More than 100 readers posted comments to the initial story, some expressing sympathy for the overweight passenger, others for the seatmate, still others for flight attendants.
One reader, Chris, who said he knew the flight attendant who snapped the photo, said the person in the middle seat was given a travel voucher and first-class upgrade on the next available flight.
Another reader, identified as “mad,” claimed to know the overweight man in the photo. “Yes, he is overweight — diabetes and obesity runs strong in his family,” the reader wrote. “However, he almost always pays extra to fly first class.”
Questions have also been raised about whether the photo is real. Fake or not, it is a heated topic, especially as airlines cut capacity. Earlier this year United began charging overweight passengers for an extra seat, joining Southwest Airlines and others will similar policies.
American Airlines told ABCNews.com that it could not verify the authenticity of the photograph. The airline “tries to be flexible for passengers of size” and handles each situation on a case-by-case basis, Tim Smith, an American spokesman, told ABCNews.com.
NASA hides Data
The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.
“I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” Mr. Horner said. “These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”
The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.
Mr. Horner, a noted global warming skeptic and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, wants a look at the data and the discussions that went into those changes. He said he’s given the agency until the end of the year to comply or else he’ll sue to compel the information’s release.
His fight mirrors one in Europe that has sprung up over the the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the UK after thousands of e-mails from the center were obtained and appear to show researchers shaving their data to make it conform to their expectation, and show efforts to try to drive global warming skeptics out of the conversation.
The center’s chief has stepped down pending an investigation into the e-mails.
The center has also had to acknowledge in response to a freedom of information request under British law that it tossed out much of the raw data that it used to draw up the temperature models that have underpinned much of the science behind global warming.
Mr. Horner suspects the same sort of data-shaving has happened at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), another leading global warming research center. (here)
Scientists become Politicians
So is James Hansen guilty of treason against the planet? That comical charge was leveled last summer by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman against lawmakers who voted against Cap’n Trade, the massive energy tax. Yet Reuters reports that Hansen, NASA’s foremost global warmist, hopes that the so-called Copenhagen climate-change conference ends in collapse:
Any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed, said James Hansen, that it would be better for future generations if we were to start again from scratch.
“I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it’s a disaster track,” Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told the Guardian newspaper.
“The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means.”
This seems to us to be a case of making a virtue of necessity. Copenhagen is widely expected to end in failure, so Hansen is putting the anticipated failure in the best possible light for his side. When politicians do this, it’s called “spin.” What’s it called when scientists do it?
We’ll answer that rhetorical question with another rhetorical question: These days, what’s the difference between politicians and scientists? In the wake of the East Anglia emails and their revelations of scientific misconduct, the reactions of global-warmist scientists, politicians and scientific journalists (with a few exceptions) show remarkable similarities.
Reuters reports that John Holdren, President Obama’s “science adviser,” told a House committee that “these kinds of controversies and even accusations of bias and improper manipulation are not all that uncommon in all branches of science” (which, if true, is even more damning) and that these shenanigans do nothing to undercut the “very strong scientific consensus” for global warmism.
The Hill reports that Sen. Barbara Boxer wants a “criminal probe”–not of the scientists whose misconduct was revealed in the emails but of the whistle-blower who revealed them. “You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,’ ” she said in a committee hearing.
Nature, which styles itself a scientific journal, publishes a rant of an editorial:
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall. . . .
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. . . .
A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists’ conspiracy theories.
Popular Science has an article titled “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.” And London’s Guardian features an op-ed by the left-leaning economist Jeffrey Sachs titled “Enough Posturing Politics. Time to Let the Experts Lead.” But what we’ve seen from these so-called experts–from the East Anglia emails to James Hansen’s effort to spin Copenhagen’s failure–is nothing but political posturing. Better, then, to be led by politicians, whom we can at least vote out of office.
A new Rasmussen poll finds that the American public is highly skeptical of global warmism:
Most Americans (52%) believe that there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming.
While many advocates of aggressive policy responses to global warming say a consensus exists, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 25% of adults think most scientists agree on the topic. Twenty-three percent (23%) are not sure.
But just in the last few days, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs seemed to reject any such disagreement in a response to a question about global warming, “I don’t think . . . [global warming] is quite, frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.”
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.
Rasmussen also reports that less than half of its survey subjects said they had been following the East Anglia revelations, suggesting “that Americans have had their doubts about the science of global warming for some time.”
H.R. Haldeman’s comment on the Pentagon Papers is relevant here: “To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing, which is: You can’t trust the government, you can’t believe what they say and you can’t rely on their judgment. And that the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong. And the president can be wrong.”
So can scientists.
From Best of the Web email.
In some ways I feel sorry for Tiger. Getting some sex can be very expensive!! Keeping up appearances can be even more expensive! Here is the latest.
TMZ.com reports that Rachel Uchitel, the first of Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses, has reportedly been in talks with the golfer, and had a half-hour chat with him before canceling the presser. According to TMZ, Uchitel and Woods had also been speaking just before Friday’s mysterious car accident. While TMZ says no monetary exchange has been made, the site does assert that Woods, as well as his representation, knew of her plan to deny the alleged sexual relationship. Meanwhile, The Daily Beast’s Gerald Posner has learned exclusively that the beleaguered golfer is negotiating an immediate $5 million payout to his wife—and revising her prenup to give her as much as $55 million more to stay with him two more years.
Elin Nordegren
Traditionally it’s a divorce that makes a financial dent for a wealthy athlete like Tiger Woods. But it appears that in Tiger’s case, it’s going to cost him to stay with his wife, Elin Nordegren, the mother of their two children.
In a statement Wednesday, Tiger said, “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.” Words are evidently not enough to mollify Elin: The Daily Beast has learned the details of what it’s costing Tiger to keep his marriage intact. A lawyer familiar with the hastily conducted negotiations of the past 72 hours said that as of Wednesday evening Elin has been offered a $5 million payment immediately if she agrees to stay—and her prenuptial agreement is being revised to give her up to an additional $55 million.
There’s a price to having a life turned upside down in the public eye. That’s what the couple is hammering out now.
When the couple married on Oct. 5, 2004, at the Sandy Lane resort in Barbados, Elin signed a prenuptial agreement reportedly worth $20 million after 10 years of marriage, not considered a large payout for someone who was already as successful as Tiger by then. (The tightlipped Woods camp, almost obsessive about releasing any personal information after Tiger’s blundering interviews with GQ in 1997, has never acknowledged the existence of the first prenup, although it’s been widely reported).
But in light of a string of women coming forward to say they had affairs with Tiger since his marriage, Elin has demanded that the prenup be rewritten, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker reported Wednesday. “The links legend’s spouse is reportedly being paid a hefty seven-figure amount—immediately transferred [sic] into an account she alone controls—to stick with her husband,” Zwecker wrote. “At this point, the couple needed to remain married for 10 years in order for Woods’ wife to collect a splitsville settlement of $20 million. I’m being told that time frame has been shortened—and the dollar amount increased ‘substantially.’”
The lawyer familiar with the couple’s negotiations told The Daily Beast that Tiger also has agreed to shorten the original prenup to seven years from the date of marriage, meaning it will vest in another two. And the revised agreement provides for a staggered schedule of payments spread out over five years that could be worth upward of $75 million. So for Elin to collect $80 million, she’ll need to stay with Tiger another seven years, be a dutiful wife in showing up with him at social events and in public as if they were still the perfect couple, and sign a nondisclosure form that will prevent her from ever telling her story. Even if she lasts only two more years, she’ll still walk away with nearly twice what she was entitled to under the original prenup.
Tiger’s advisers, who have successfully gotten the couple into counseling sessions, believe that keeping the marriage intact will help Tiger keep his corporate sponsors and bolster his dented image. Elin is herself considered a good asset. She’s never been a publicity hound or used her marriage to make money through self-help books, lecture series, or QVC makeup and jewelry lines. Rather, she’s just maintained a low profile and dedicated herself to being a spouse and mother. As opposed to some other celebrities, like Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie, Elin has never pushed her kids into the public eye. So, now, if she is persuaded to stay, she knows little will be the same. Her quiet life is finished. A Los Angeles-based paparazzo told me that a photo of Elin and the children would fetch $250,000. Some agencies are offering $100,000 just for tips that pay off with photos.
There’s a price to having a life turned upside down in the public eye. That’s what the couple is hammering out now. Since Tiger Inc. is in crisis, it’s likely she will accept a deal rather than allow her anger and sense of humiliation to prevail. The Woods camp is about to pull off the most expensive “stand by your man” stand ever. (Attempts for any comment from the Woods camp were not successful).
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast’s Chief Investigative Reporter.
That is life in the fast lane!!
For a comparison, one celebrity site is reporting that Tom Cruise is giving 75 million dollars to Katie Holmes to have baby number two!!
Posted 07:11 PM ET
Commerce: Amid creepy assurances that the firing of GM’s CEO Fritz Henderson was just business, evidence is piling high it wasn’t. It was politics, and another reason why government must get out of the private sector.
The surprise “resignation” of General Motors Chief Executive Henderson Tuesday, coming on the back of silky assurances three weeks ago that he had the support of the board, and just hours before he was to keynote a trade show in Los Angeles, had all the earmarks of one of those government operations World War II GI’s used to joke about for incompetence and absurdity: Close enough for government work. Catch-22. Snafu.
Not only did the GM board make a U-turn in its choice to lead the company on short notice, it didn’t even try to spin its ham-fisted move, blandly calling it a desire to find a new “change agent.”
Leaving the company headless, the board didn’t think of having anyone else lined up to take the reins. In the great rush for “change,” its chairman said without irony that GM would take a year to find a new CEO. Sounds like government work to us.
It points to an overbearing government presence in a distressed industry that’s only making matters worse. Government can be arbitrary, driven by politics and addicted to power. This move against Henderson is like one Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez would make — and will have similar results.
It also echoes the barbaric treatment of Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, who was denied a salary after a year’s work and is now quitting without a replacement, and the near-resignation of Robert Benmosche at AIG, all because both firms have been subject to government takeover and meddling.
Henderson, 51, had been handpicked for the job by the board just eight months ago after it arbitrarily fired then-CEO Rick Wagoner.
Henderson was a GM lifer who “didn’t fit in” with the GM board’s political appointees. Unlike them, he knew the car business.
He pared the product line, stabilized GM’s market share at 20% and turned a profit on some units. But he couldn’t transform the company with a political board looking over his shoulder, cutting his salary to $950,000 and second-guessing his every move. Surprise.
The White House knows this and tried to conceal its hand. “This decision was made by the board of directors alone. The administration was not involved in the decision,” a Treasury Department spokesman said. That’s rich, given that the government owns 60% of GM after sinking $52 billion in bailout cash into the company. You can bet it owns the board.
So after all of those irrational moves, the hunt is on for a first-rate new CEO. Good luck getting one.
Yesterday my friend and student, the ever beautiful and intelligent Tania Blatti came over to give Josephine a math diagnostic test, a very organized thing that took over an hour. Tania says that Josephine is very advanced in math for a second-grader, answering questions that third-graders usually cannot answer. Jo and I were very pleased.
Many bloggers and commentarists have named this article as the toughest and best analysis of the speech Obama gave at West Point.
Opinion
Searching in Vain for the Obama Magic
President Barack Obama’s Tuesday speech left a bad taste in many mouths.
Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.
One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received. Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.
One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.
An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.
Just in Time for the Campaign
For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.
The speech continued in that vein. It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the “world’s great religions.” He promised that responsibility for the country’s security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai — a government which he said was “corrupt.” The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars,” he added.
It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.
Obama’s Magic No Longer Works
But in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama’s magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.
It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives — their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.
Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere. That was where the political charmer Obama was able to successfully capture the imaginations of millions of voters. It is a place where campaigners — particularly those with a talent for oration — are fond of taking refuge. It is also where Obama set up his campaign headquarters, in an enormous tent called “Hope.”
In his speech on America’s new Afghanistan strategy, Obama tried to speak to both places. It was two speeches in one. That is why it felt so false. Both dreamers and realists were left feeling distraught.
The American president doesn’t need any opponents at the moment. He’s already got himself.
Others also commented.
LA Times
President Obama spoke 4,582 words in his primetime Afghanistan war speech at West Point last night.
He said “al Qaeda” 22 times.
He mentioned the “Taliban” 12 times.
And here’s how many times the Democratic chief executive used the word “victory” — 0.
That telling omission says more than anything about Obama’s 322d day in office when he gave his first major address as the United States’ commander-in-chief.
WASHINGTON—A barrage of instant criticism blasting President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy from across the political spectrum signaled the challenges ahead in selling the plan to a skeptical public and Congress.
Some of Mr. Obama’s most loyal supporters among liberal grass-roots groups denounced the 30,000-troop escalation—despite a newly revealed plan for a quick drawdown that White House officials had hoped would mollify the left.
Many Republicans, while supporting the troop increase, were quick to charge that the timetable for withdrawal would embolden U.S. adversaries. Arizona Sen. John McCain warned that Mr. Obama risked telling the enemy “that you’re coming and you’re leaving.”
Mr. Obama’s nationally televised address Tuesday kicked off a full-blown campaign by the White House to rally support for a troop escalation that could bring rising U.S. casualties just as lawmakers are running for re-election next year.
The plan appears designed to minimize political fallout—calling for a progress assessment a month after the November 2010 congressional elections and initiating the troop exit the following year as Mr. Obama begins ramping up his own re-election campaign.
But the difficulties ahead for Mr. Obama were evident as many in his own party, including some embroiled in tough campaigns for next year, were quick to express displeasure.
Paul Rahe says
To this one can add that President Obama has given his adversaries — both within his party and outside it — plenty of rope with which to hang him. It is most unlikely that the US military can accomplish the end that he seeks within the timetable that he lays out. If they fail to do so by 2011, mark my words: everyone will pile on.
It is, then, all the more important that President Obama adopt the recommendation that I made in my post on Tuesday. If he wishes to survive, he must seize upon the revelations of Climategate and reposition himself as a high-minded agnostic on the question of anthropogenic global warming, calling for a suspension of the policy debate and a thorough, objective re-examination of the evidence.
In this fashion, Barack Obama could rid himself of the cap-and-trade albatross; and, with any luck, the process of re-examination would take long enough for him to be able to join the ranks of America’s ex-Presidents.
Paul Mirengoff says:
Earlier today I wondered whether President Obama’s speech about Afghanistan would sound more like a description of a war plan or a structured settlement of a legal dispute. What I heard tonight tilted decidedly in the latter direction. To be precise, the speech sounded to me like a slick lawyer trying to sell a dubious settlement to a skeptical client or, in this case, set of clients.
Consistent with slick salesmanship – as well as the president’s character – the speech was quite self-referential. Providing a potted history of our military efforts in the war on terrorism, Obama took shots at his predecessor and attempted to cast himself as the hero throughout. Thus, he patted himself on the back for opposing the war in Iraq, on which he blamed the current difficulties in Afghanistan.
Obama also patted himself on the back for bringing the war in Iraq to a “responsible end.” But he failed to mention the surge in Iraq, which was instrumental in turning the tide to the point that it became possible to speak of a responsible end.
The omission was odd inasmuch as Obama was pitching a similar surge in Afghanistan. This meant that the Iraq surge was more relevant to tonight’s speech than any other element of the history Obama was purporting to recount. Yet he was too partisan, and too embarrassed by his own opposition to the surge, to mention this vital decision.
It was therefore rank hypocrisy for Obama latter to decry the partisanship that has plagued the war on terrorism.
Obama then patted himself on the back for undertaking the lengthy review that led to the decision he announced tonight. He claimed that this process would result in no delay, since no plan presented to him called for troops to be deployed before 2010 in any event. This is a non sequitur, and it remains to be seen whether we are successfully able to deploy troops as quickly, effectively, and in the same numbers as would have been the case if Obama had made his decisions significantly earlier.
As to Obama’s plan – the “settlement” – it entails deploying significantly fewer troops than the number General McChrystal asked for (about three-fourths of the total, as I understand it). Obama apparently hopes to make up the difference by calling on our allies to add troops. He said he has sought such assistance but had nothing positive to report by way of any response he might have received. In any case, I wonder whether a high percentage of troops supplied by our allies would be interchangeable with U.S. troops.
More importantly, Obama set July 2011 as the target date for beginning our withdrawal. Although he did add that conditions on the ground will be taken into account, it is difficult to understand how the U.S. will secure the support and commitment it needs from a critical mass of Afghans when they know, or have strong reason to believe, we will be starting to pull out only about a year after we have ramped up.
Indeed, Obama’s timetable threatens to undermine not just the first prong of his strategy (military) but also second and third prongs (civilian and Pakistan). With only a short-term commitment, we’re not likely to exert much influence on civilian behavior. Nor are the Pakistanis likely to be impressed by an America that’s more interested in a prompt exit, so it can save money and focus on domestic issues (points Obama emphasized near the end of his speech), than in defeating its enemies.
Obama attempted to sell his timetable through his usual dishonest rhetorical tricks. He compared his approach favorably to a decade-long commitment. But no one has proposed that he make, much less publicly declare, a commitment of that length. Obama was positing a “false choice.” The real choice is between announcing a “fight and run” strategy and making no statement about when we intend to start leaving. The former approach is a new wrinkle in warfare.
Obama claimed that the Afghans need to know they will have to take responsibility for their affairs before long. The Afghans presumably understand that, as a matter of American politics, we won’t fight a losing batter indefinitely (nor should we). But this doesn’t mean we need to set a date for the beginning of our withdrawal. And setting one may well make it too problematic to side strongly with the U.S. during the brief period in which we’ll be a rising force.
The president’s salesmanship, much of it quite defensive, made for an uninspiring speech. Obama attempted to compensate by closing with a rhetorical bang. But, ever the salesman, he felt compelled to offer something for everyone. First, he expressed his solidarity with the left by patting himself on the back for opposing “torture” and for closing Gitmo (one day).
Then, having gone on forever without receiving applause, Obama finally shifted the speech away from himself and onto his country. He spoke eloquently about how the U.S. has underwritten the security of the world for six decades, without seeking domination, territory, or resources in return.
It was too little, too late as far as I was concerned, but it finally brought Obama applause. Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for the president.
Jennifer Rubin – 12.02.2009 – 11:10 AM
A number of observers have remarked on the tone of the speech, which was typical of Obama — cold, removed, stern, and unfeeling. Peter Beinart thinks the surge is good policy but complains that the speech “left me cold”:
Militarily, we are plunging deeper into Afghanistan, but emotionally, we are getting out. There was virtually nothing in the speech about our moral obligation to the Afghan people, a people to whom America promised much and has delivered scandalously little.
It was, as Beinart puts it, “the opposite of rousing.”
On one hand, this is the temperament issue in full flower. What was attractive during the campaign, a steely and cool reserve, is, in a president, off-putting and sometimes downright weird. We keep waiting for the president to warm up, and it’s not going to happen, I think.
But part of the explanation was provided by Obama himself. He’s just not that into anything other than his Left-leaning domestic agenda. He told us:
But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended — because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own [emphasis added].
He couldn’t have been clearer — he can’t devote whatever it takes for as long as it takes because he has other things to do. We can hope he doesn’t mean it. We can hope the military works very fast to get the job done before the president tires. But we are kidding ourselves if we ignore the limitations and preferences of this president. He is president during a war. But he resists being a wartime president. We can only hope and pray that changes.
She is on the cover of a mag called Page Six which you may see here.
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, my latest book, is the story of a genius–a great man who, unlike many geniuses, was also a good man.
America has never produced a more significant artist than Louis Armstrong. I rank him alongside Aaron Copland and Robert Frost and Frank Lloyd Wright. But unlike those men, Satchmo was also a great entertainer whose music was and is loved by ordinary people all over the world. In 1964 he actually knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts with his recording of “Hello, Dolly!” Aaron Copland never did that!
When Armstrong started making records in 1923, jazz was still a collective art in which improvised solos took a back seat to group ensemble work. He changed that. The boldness and daring of his trumpet playing immediately caught the ears of his fellow jazz musicians–and so did his gravel-voiced singing. He was as influential a singer as he was an instrumentalist, the first and only musician of whom such a thing can be said.
Indeed, it seemed at times that nothing was beyond him. He really did perform with everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Johnny Cash. He really did end his shows (some of them, anyway) by playing 250 or more high Cs, capped with a high F. He wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies–without a collaborator. The ranks of his admirers included Tallulah Bankhead, Jackson Pollock, and Jean Renoir.
No less memorable, though, was the irresistible warmth of Armstrong’s personality. When you heard him for the first time, you felt as though you knew and liked him–not just as a musician, but also as a man. Nor was this impression deceptive. To be sure, Armstrong could be moody and profane off stage, but for the most part he was the living embodiment of Johnny Mercer’s admonition in “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive”: You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum/Keep gloom down to the minimum. As much as anything else, this was what made him a star, and the fact that he became a full-fledged star in turn played a crucial role in popularizing jazz.
Most people know me as the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, but I’m also a trained musician–the first one, in fact, ever to write a fully sourced Armstrong biography. I started out as a professional jazz musician, a bass player, before becoming a full-time writer. That experience has helped me to understand Armstrong’s music, and the world in which he lived and worked, from the inside out.
In addition, I’m the first Armstrong biographer to have had access to 650 reel-to-reel tapes that he made during the last quarter-century of his life, many of which contain astonishingly candid recordings of his private after-hours conversations. These tapes, which until recently were inaccessible to scholars, show that Armstrong’s personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his fans suspected.
He definitely knew how to hold a grudge, and though he was essentially apolitical, he was also a staunch believer in the hard gospel of self-help and individual responsibility. Not only do the Armstrong tapes shine a strong light on his character, but they also make it possible for us to know the full stories of such key events in his life as his 1931 run-in with the gangsters of Chicago.
The existence of these tapes is a big part of what made me want to write an Armstrong biography, and what I learned from them has helped to make Pops the most factually reliable account of Louis Armstrong’s life and work ever to be written.
borrowed from here
And of course, this…
You are a beautiful woman who is fortunately married to a special man. But do not lose sight of the obvious things. He is rich, famous and handsome. That means he can always get what he wants and he will always be chased by many women. Your job, Elin, is to be patient, encourage and help him to be discreet, and stop messing with his phone. I always have thought you were a classy woman: messing with his phone is NOT classy. It shows lack of respect for him and much lack of self-respect!!
Now you are going to have to face the noise of a small bit TV actress
And this party girl who one web site says “Rachel Uchitel has been linked to several professional athletes, and now you can add media mogul Ryan Seacrest and actor Steven Dorff to her list. On New Year’s Eve 2008, Uchitel, the woman at the center of the Tiger Woods scandal, was spotted having fun on the beach with Dorff and another friend in St Barth.” Girl gets around and has mileage so most likely Tiger would not take her seriously.
Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.
Getty Images
The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.
That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth’s atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let’s refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called “climate forcing.”
There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.
The IPCC’s Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn’t reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
But even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.
There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.
The notion that the earth’s climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth’s climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today’s. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the “Early Faint Sun Paradox.”
For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.
There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of “bait and switch” scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.
The notion that complex climate “catastrophes” are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.
Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.
Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.
Mr. Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This morning I started to collect all the articles flying around the internet about botched up and dithering is OBama. In the process I found this one, which had already done most of the work!!
Peter Wehner – 11.30.2009 – 11:17 AM
The overseas reviews for President Obama’s foreign policy are starting to pour in — and they’re not favorable. Bob Ainsworth, the British defense secretary, has blamed Obama for the decline in British public support for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph:
Mr. Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing the U.S. President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban. A “period of hiatus” in Washington — and a lack of clear direction — had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said. Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defense chiefs echoing the concerns.
The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. The Saudi “has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory,” according to Ajami. But “he is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.”
Indeed he has — and only Obama and his increasingly clueless administration seem unaware of this.
On almost every front, progress is nonexistent. In many instances, things are getting worse rather than better. The enormous goodwill that Obama’s election was met with hasn’t been leveraged into anything useful and tangible. Rather, our allies are now questioning America’s will, while our adversaries are becoming increasingly emboldened. The United States looks weak and uncertain. It’s “amateur hour at the White House,” according to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former official in the Carter administration. “Not only are things not getting fixed, they may be getting more broken,” according to Michael Hirsh at Newsweek. When even such strong Obama supporters as Gelb and Hirsh reach these conclusions, you know things must be unraveling.
It’s no mystery as to why. President Obama’s approach to international relations is simplistic and misguided. It is premised on the belief that American concessions to our adversaries will beget goodwill and concessions in return; that American self-abasement is justified; that the American decline is inevitable (and in some respects welcome); and that diplomacy and multilateralism are ends rather than means to an end.
Right now the overwhelming issue on the public’s mind is the economy, where Obama is also having serious problems. But national-security issues matter a great deal, and they remain the unique responsibility of the president. With every passing month, Barack Obama looks more and more like his Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter: irresolute, unsteady, and overmatched. The president and members of his own party will find out soon enough, though, that Obama the Impotent isn’t what they had in mind when they elected him. We are witnessing the unmasking, and perhaps the unmaking, of Barack Obama.
Jennifer Rubin adds – 11.30.2009 – 11:56 AM
Pete, your smart critique raises two key points, which supporters of the president might want to mull over as they consider whether a course correction is in order.
First, the roundup of international public opinion highlights what the Obama team often forgets: the whole world is watching wherever the president goes and whatever venue or crisis is occupying him at that moment. The Russians pay attention when he bows in Japan. The Iranians perk up when he meekly agrees to avoid free encounters with Chinese dissidents. The Syrians watch closely when the Obami try to finesse the reaction to the Goldstone report. And the North Koreans breathe a sigh of relief as they watch the farcical negotiations in Iran unravel. One senses that the Obami don’t quite grasp this, that they believe they are simply catering to this or that despot, trying as best as they can to ingratiate themselves and meet the “concerns” of whichever thugocracy occupies their attention that day. But in fact everyone watches everything, and the portrait of accommodation and concession is taken in by many audiences. That image of irresoluteness becomes fixed in our adversaries’ minds, even when they are not the immediate subject of the president’s focus on that visit or in that particular negotiation. Slowly, our adversaries begin to learn and to test us again and again, motivated by a sense that this president can be pushed and intimidated. The task of keeping foes at bay and allies in line becomes more difficult as a result.
Second, Pete observes: “Right now the overwhelming issue on the public’s mind is the economy, where Obama is also having serious problems. But national-security issues matter a great deal, and they remain the unique responsibility of the president.” And when national security does rise to the top of the list of voters’ concerns, it is generally because the public is becoming very, very alarmed. In the case of Obama, a real question is brewing: Is he making us less safe? Well, a year-long campaign of suck-uppery and burying our heads in the sand regarding the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions has made us less safe, many will conclude. Others will wonder whether the president missed a key opening after the June 12 elections and in fact helped to cement the rule of the Revolutionary Islamic regime. And then there is the inexplicable series of decisions on the war on terror — to investigate the CIA, cease enhanced interrogation techniques, close Guantanamo and offload detainees to places like Yemen, and try KSM in a civilian court where he can preach jihad and put the U.S. government on trial for years. The average voter may look at all that and recoil. What is he doing?
Foreign policy is rarely the top issue unless it is the top issue. In the case of Obama, it is plainly becoming a top issue. And considering his track record, that is a very bad thing for the president. His supporters might want to consider how to turn this around.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters nationwide say they’re at least somewhat angry about the current policies of the federal government. That figure includes 46% who are Very Angry.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 27% are not angry about the government’s policies, including 10% who are Not at All Angry.
Men are angrier than women, and voters over 40 are more angry than those who are younger. A majority of those over 40 are Very Angry. Only 25% of under-30 voters share that view.
The data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 71% who are angry at federal government policies today is up five percentage points since September.
Even more stunning, the 46% who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points from September.
Among the nation’s Political Class, just six percent (6%) are angry. However, among those with more Mainstream, or populist, views, 85% are angry. A majority of Americans today hold views that can be described as Mainstream or populist. Very few align with the Political Class (see more information on this divide).
Fifty-two percent (52%) of voters nationwide believe neither Republican nor Democratic political leaders have an understanding of what is needed today. That frustration is down eight points from 60% in September.
Sixty-five percent (65%) of Republicans and 59% of unaffiliated voters say that neither party has the answers. Those percentages are down significantly since September. Democrats remain fairly evenly divided as they were in September.
This unhappiness with government policies and leaders is reflected in numerous other Rasmussen Reports surveys. Americans, for example, now view being a member of Congress as the least respected job one can hold. President Obama’s job approval ratings also have suffered in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
The latest numbers show that only nine percent (9%) of voters trust the judgment of America’s political leaders more than the judgment of the American people. Seventy-four percent (74%) place more trust in the wisdom of the crowd.
Seventy-one percent (71%) believe the federal government has become a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests. Sixty-eight percent (68%) believe that government and big business work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.
Opposition to the health care plan proposed by the president and congressional Democrats remains high. Voters continue to oppose the government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler, and a growing number now believe their taxes will go up during the Obama years.
Williams fined record $82,500 for US Open tirade
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By HOWARD FENDRICH
Serena Williams was fined a record $82,500 for her U.S. Open tirade and could be suspended from that tournament if she has another “major offense” at any Grand Slam in the next two years.
Grand Slam administrator Bill Babcock’s ruling was released Monday, and he said Williams faces a “probationary period” at tennis’ four major championships in 2010 and 2011. If she has another “major offense” at a Grand Slam tournament in that time, the fine would increase to $175,000 and she would be barred from the following U.S. Open.
“But if she does not have another offense in the next two years, the suspension is lifted,” Babcock said in a telephone interview from London.
He said Williams is handing over $82,500 right now, already nearly double the previous highest fine for a Grand Slam offense – about $48,000 Jeff Tarango was docked in the 1990s.
Williams lashed out at a lineswoman after a foot-fault call at the end of her semifinal loss to eventual champion Kim Clijsters at the U.S. Open in September.
“I am thankful that we now have closure on the incident and we can all move forward,” Williams said in a statement released Monday by her publicist. “I am back in training in preparation for next season and I continue to be grateful for all of the support from my fans and the tennis community.”
She earned $350,000 by reaching the U.S. Open singles semifinals, part of her more than $6.5 million in prize money in 2009, a single-season record for women’s tennis. Her career prize money tops $28 million.
The American is an 11-time Grand Slam singles champion and ended the 2009 season at No. 1 in the WTA rankings.
Williams’ profanity-laced, finger-pointing outburst drew a $10,000 fine from the U.S. Tennis Association in September – the maximum onsite penalty a tennis player can face. But because it happened at a Grand Slam tournament, Babcock was charged with investigating whether further punishment was merited.
He concluded that Williams violated the “major offense” rule for “aggravated behavior.” The Grand Slam committee – with one representative from each of the sport’s four major championships – approved his decision Saturday.
The USTA said it would comment later Monday.
Babcock said a “major offense” under Grand Slam rules is “any conduct that is determined to be the ‘major offense’ of ‘aggravated behavior’ or ‘conduct detrimental to the game.’” There is no specific definition of what sort of actions constitute a “major offense.”
He said the highest possible fine that Williams could face – $175,000, if she violates her Grand Slam probation – was chosen because it is the difference in winnings between reaching the quarterfinals and semifinals at the U.S. Open. The $10,000 Williams already was docked by the USTA will be counted toward that total; that’s why she is paying half of $165,000 now.
