It’s tough to be unhappy when America receives an award.  But for some reason the news that President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize left me miffed and a bit peeved.

Perhaps it’s now part of our culture that you get bonus points for making a good effort, kudos for just showing up, or a trophy at the end of the season not because you beat all the other teams but because someone, somewhere thought that kids need to be rewarded regardless of performance or they’ll feel like failures.

Our culture is so coddled and so sensitive to feelings that, in the end, we devalue success and achievement and prop up  the failures.

Everyone must be kept on a level playing field, you know.

There’s a bit of a misunderstanding going around on the Presidents new prize.

Sure, he was nominated for the award 12 days after taking the oath of office, but he didn’t win the award at that time.  And you can’t fault the man for being nominated alone, and you really can’t fault him for winning.  It’s not as though he threw his own name into the running.

What bothers me is that he was awarded an award for peace without really showing any accomplishment to justify the reward.

It’s as though we’ve received the grade card with straight A’s at the beginning of the year based on little Jimmy’s sincerity that he’s going to really try hard in school this year.

In my mind, you win these types of awards for achievement, not being able to talk a good game.

It all comes down to the fact that President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for talking the talk, and the unabated hope and change will leave us wondering if he can walk the walk.

Commentary Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize

Opinions are like elbows.  Everybody has one, most have two, and by reading the papers and watching the news, you’d think the media is run by double-jointed octopuses.

Take a look for yourself.  In tomorrows paper, take a yellow highlighter to the statements that are factual, not the entire sentence, just the factual statements.  You can give the author the benefit of the doubt and highlight the quotes from other sources if you wish.

Next, with a blue highlighter, highlight all the opinions.

When you’re done with the article, compare the number of yellow statements with the number of blue statements.  What do you notice?

If you’re like me, you notice that there are far more opinions in a single article than factual statements.

What happened to reporting the facts and letting the consumer form the opinion?

I believe that one of the drawbacks to living at warp speed is that we tend to leave the critical thinking to others for the sake of saving time.

Whatever, just give the facts to the guy on TV and let him tell me what the facts really mean.

Add some financial incentive and facts can be manipulated through opinion to achieve a desired outcome.

Opinions are OK, but they don’t constitute news.  To be honest, the opinion section in my local paper is only two pages by typeset only.  The opinions spill into the rest of the paper, most likely without conscious objection from the author.

I don’t mind opinion, but when reporting the news, please just stick to the facts, and let me determine what those facts really mean.

Think critically folks!  Ask for the facts and form your own opinion around them…  and turn off the TV!

The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.

Commentary media, media bias, opinion vs. fact, television

Interesting commentary in the Washington Times on Saturday. It seems a few “facts” are surfacing about the research conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global warming.

Contributor Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institute in Dallas) and made some interesting points about the IPCC’s “study of climate change”. I’ll print a few of those points here, but I encourage you to read the full article here.

In a 2001 report, the IPCC published an image commonly referred to as the “hockey stick.” This graph showed relatively stable temperatures from A.D. 1000 to 1900, with temperatures rising steeply from 1900 to 2000…

However, several studies cast doubt on the accuracy of the hockey stick, and in 2006 Congress requested an independent analysis of it. A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC’s peer review process. For example, the researchers who created the hockey stick used the wrong time scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded temperatures of the last century. Because the mean temperature was low, the recent temperature rise seemed unusual and dramatic. This error was not discovered in part because statisticians were never consulted. -Source

It also appears that there is a bit of conflict of interest in the scientific community. Mr. Burnett points out that many in a small group of climate specialists, nearly 43 different individuals, had coauthored papers with the head of research, the same guy who had “formulated” the so called hockey stick chart.

In the end, Mr. Wegman and his team could only conclude that:

“…the idea that the planet is experiencing unprecedented global warming “cannot be supported.”"

One thing was made very clear to me in college when conducting research and running tests: eliminate any personal bias from the research you are conducting, and make sure your tests can be reproduced, eliminate as many variables as possible, and only state scientific facts. This mantra seems to have been lost in “global warming research”.

A good example of a principle clearly violated is “Make sure forecasts are independent of politics.” Politics shapes the IPCC from beginning to end. Legislators, policymakers and/or diplomatic appointees select (or approve) the scientists — at least the lead scientists — who make up the IPCC. In addition, the summary and the final draft of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was written in collaboration with political appointees and subject to their approval.

Sadly, Mr. Green and Mr. Armstrong found no evidence the IPCC was even aware of the vast literature on scientific forecasting methods, much less applied the principles.

The truth on the IPCC is coming out, slowly but surely. It’s interesting to note that these new developments haven’t made it to the nightly news. Until it’s foreseen that the truth will instill outrage in viewers, it won’t get the ratings, and hence won’t be broadcast.

Corner Office Commentary

Every reader of this blog knows I’ve been skeptical about Al Gore and his man-made global warming agenda from day one. I still am, and I’m excited to see that conflicting opinions are now making it into the main stream media, slowly but surely.

As with every post on global warming, I must bring about a point of clarity. I am not disputing global warming all together, as I firmly believe that climate change goes in cycles, as evidenced by the number of ice ages our planet has been through, and these cycles have been scientifically proven and accepted world-wide. I am disputing the “consensus” that has been forced upon the general public that mankind is largely to blame for the increase in global temperatures.

I am encouraged by the change that this hysteria has brought upon our research and development of new green ways to conserve and reduce. The amount of smog and ozone that has blanketed major cities in the last few decades CAN be attributed to mankind, and it is not good for our overall health. So if this scientific farce brought on by a politically motivated former politician is stimulating these changes, so be it. But I think the scientific community owes the general public the unbiased facts about mankind’s involvement in global warming before our do-nothing politicians find a way to really screw up our economy based on bogus political conjecture.

Commentary, Environment, Politics climate, man made global warming, science