Monthly Archives: December 2014

The Opening of the Baseball Season

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The last regular seaon NFL games are pver and there will be a Super Bowl sometime in the future, but this is really the beginning of the baseball season. This fact is marked by the Winter Meetings that ended two weeks ago and caused some commotion with a numbe or teams making dramatic moves to add players. The two that stick out in my mind, at least, were the San Diego Padres and Chicago White Sox. The Cubs also added talent.
Without getting into names and stats, it is my obsevation that teams add winter meeting free agent and traded for talent and that this talent is very expensive and seldom helps all that much. .
The cost of free agent talent is pure cash and, usually multiyear deals. That means a team has a burden to carry for sometime, It will consider the new player, who is usually older and declining in skills, a major asset, but he will be a major liability soon. The players who are traded for are also expensive, but in a different way. To acquire Jock Donaldson from the A’s (OK, I’ll mention one player!!), the Blue Jays gave up a number of young players. I don’t know who they are, but I doubt if Billy Beane would take chopped liver. So the Jays have a great third base man, but have been diminished, probably, by a like amount of talent elsewhere.  
The Padres took Matt Kemp.  (OK second player) from the Dodgers in exchange for some players and the Dodgers are paying SD like $25million to pay Kemp’s salary. I look askanse at teams that give away an old star and pay his salary to get rid of him. They know more about Kemp than SD, so what’s up with that.
The whole point here is that there was a lot of action this month, and the season is now on. I don’t think however, that much has been changed as baseball is the ultimate team sport and it takes a whole team to win a pennant. For example, the last place added free agents Torii Hunter, a 39 year old outfielder and Erivn Santana, (OK, Players 3 and 4 and that’s it) a 33 year old starting pitcher. Now, if the Twins can outbid Detroit and Atlanta for these guys, they are going to help a little, maybe, But even with these additions, the Twins will be last in the AL Central again. It pains me to say that, by the way, I am a huge fan, but that’s the reality of it.

So we are off to the MLB Season, opening day is looming in just over 90 days. Stay tuned. 

Blog: Scientist confesses he made up polar bear population estimates

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This link will take you to one of the more illuminating articles of the year concerning the global warming issue. The message is that data is fabricated to allow access to the billions of dollars available for climate reasearch. This takes me back to the mid 1970’s when global cooling was the theme. (It now seems that was the correct theme as long term tree ring analysis shows a 2000 year cooling trend!!) I read that when the warming theory arose, it was because scientists were not able to make any money on cooling, so they wanted to try warming.
The competing theories were, for cooling, that particulates in the air blocked sunlight causing cooling, and, for warming, CO2 in the air trapped heat causing warming` From there, the battle was launched with the warmist faction prevailing. The image of drowning polar bears won over the polar bears are colder arguments. Of course, people would not buy the colder argument, although they did buy the argument that polar bears, that can swim fifty miles or more, were drowning. Ignorance is a large part of the warmist program. It is like Professor Gruber describing Democratic voters as ignorant, and these are the same people.
This ignorance allows warmists to deny the fact of no warming for 20 years by convincing themselves that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. Just think about that for a ininute. A thermal unit of heat trapped by co2 in the atmosphere, dives into the ocean and moves down (even though heat rises) several thousand feet to “hide.”  Of course, this violates several of the laws of thermodynamics but that would not bother a warmist believer, embracing their religion. The other facts ignored and lies embraced by them are well known.  
This article shows one warnist theorist admitting his lie. There will be more. Michael Mann??
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/05/scientist_confesses_he_made_up_polar_bear_population_estimates.html