Global Warming - A Big Fat Scam?

The big news from over the weekend was that the email systems for the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climate Research Unit were hacked. The hacker released about 61MB worth of data on the Internet - hundreds of files that detail some startling things about the global warming movement.

The file itself has spent the weekend roaring across the Internet as folks all over the world check out the content of the hundreds of leaked files.

Interesting News Day

People have been IMing me the craziest stuff today. Talk about silly news. 

Colbert Nation is reporting that Stephen Colbert has won NASA's "Name Node 3" survey. The survey's function was to allow the public to vote on names for the new room on the international space station. The name "Colbert" beat out the second place name, one suggested by NASA, by over 40,000 votes. Colbert had been asking his viewers to submit his name (because NASA allowed write-ins), and the Colbert Nation responded and voted in droves with a whopping 230,539 votes (out of about 1.2 million). Hilarious.

NASA is not yet sure if they will actually name to room "Colbert". They reserved the right to use one of their suggested names.

Yahoo! News has a couple of interesting gems as well. First, a 15-year-old in Florida was suspended from riding the school bus for passing gas. This might be politcal correctness gone too far. The bus driver's write up noted that the "stench was so bad that it was difficult to breathe." Last time I checked, farting was a natural process, albeit a smelly one, but natural nonetheless.

You think that's bad? The last line of the article reads, "Whether he did it or not, he might have gotten off easy. A 13-year-old student at a Stuart school was arrested in November after authorities said he broke wind in class." Arrested for farting. What is the world coming to?

Perhaps both of these kids would've gotten off easier if they had the new, Japanese-developed,stink-free underwear. Yes, that's right, now you don't even need to change your undies; you can wear these for more than a week, the Japanese textile experts who developed the product say. I don't really see a market value for these, unless your son/daughter happens to be Calvin.

Lastly, in really awesome news, I read on The Knight Shift that Jackson, Mississippi has banned the use of red light cameras. This is awesome on a number of fronts. First, and most importantly, those cameras have been an invasion of privacy since their debut, so that will be no more in Jacksonville. I hadn't heard of this one before (but some quick Googling confirms it): People have accused cities of decreasing the length of the yellow light (sometimes below legal limits) in order to catch more people running red lights with the cameras, thus increasing revenue.  Never mind that an increased yellow light time decreases accidents while a shorter one increases accidents. The cities involved put the value of the dollar above that of human life. For these reasons, I truly hope that this starts a trend of banning red light camera enforcement.