Aunt Dee

Connie Dee Brown, of Albertville, Alabama, died on Saturday, July 28, 2012, in Birmingham after a brief illness, two months shy of her 97th birthday.

Connie was born on Sept. 19, 1915, in Hustleville, the daughter of Arnold Chambers and Ola Johnson Chambers. She was the eldest and longest-surviving of three sisters. She graduated from Albertville High School in 1935, and afterwards ran her own beauty shop in Albertville.

Connie married Roy Rodger Brown in 1957, and together they operated Roy’s Restaurant in Albertville for many years. Upon Roy’s retirement from the Bryant Line Furniture Company, Connie and Roy began many happy years as the most famed anglers in north Alabama, including spending every day one entire year fishing on their beloved Lake Guntersville. Roy Brown passed away on Oct. 9, 1997, after 40 years of happy marriage.

Connie was an active member of First United Methodist Church of Albertville and the Fairview United Methodist Church in Hustleville, leading Sunday School classes and church events too numerous to count. She was an avid Rook player, never missing weekly games with her close friends to the end of her life.

She was a steady and loving anchor of her family, providing care for her sisters and brothers-in-law in their own latter days.

 Connie was preceded in death by her husband, Roy; her sister, Ruby Jo Weir; brother-in-law, Joyce Weir; sister, Bernell Chambers Lowery and brother-in-law, Brelen A. Lowery; and her niece, Lynda Lowery Collier. She is survived by her niece, Lauren Elizabeth Lowery; great-nephew, William B. Collier III; great-niece, Killy Collier Mingus; and great-great-nephews, Collier and Matthew Mingus.

Aunt Dee’s family wishes to thank her many dear friends and neighbors for their aid and kindness during her long life, with particular thanks to Margie King for her devotion and care.

A graveside service at Memory Hill Cemetery in Albertville was held on Tuesday, July 31, at 11 a.m.

We Are All Afghans Now

From Jake Tapper at ABC, yesterday:

"What we fail to understand was that the Afghan people largely wanted to be left alone and they hate their government, in many cases, as much as they hate the insurgents. And when we went to them and said, 'Ah, we're coming here to help bring your government to you.' They said, 'Whoa we don't want out [sic] government!'"

All the Afghans wanted, says Chandrasekaran, was to be left alone, "and we didn't get that."

Imagine that.

Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

Twenty years ago, I put this quote at the front of my master's thesis in aerospace engineering:

"The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them."

It was taken from Bradbury's collection R Is For Rocket. Despite his many volumes of science fiction stories, Bradbury actually knew next to nothing about rockets or astronomy or science. That didn't matter. He knew everything about the human heart.

True then. True today. Thank you, Ray. Clear skies.

Fly-Over "Journalism" From The LA Times

I have a new column up at PJ Media about the LA Times' lame attempt to report on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman's recent failed appeal of his corruption convictions.  Here's a preview:

Much of [reporter David G.] Savage's article is downright funny (although not always in a ha-ha way) if you were previously familiar with either Siegelman or Alabama.  In attempting to explain the strange creatures from this mysterious hinterland to his La-La Land readership, Savage tosses up this doozy:

Siegelman was the rare Democrat who could win in Alabama. He had also won election as Alabama's secretary of state, attorney general and lieutenant governor. But his career ended when Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys charged him with corruption.

Well, I suppose that's one way to put it.  That is, if you either (a) don't actually know anything about the political history of Alabama, or (b) are anxious to put a pro-Siegleman spin on the whole affair. 

While all of Alabama's statewide offices did flip--and severely--to the GOP in the 2010 elections, prior to that watershed year "Dirty Don" was far from rare as a Democratic officeholder.  The state legislature had been majority Democrat for an astonishing 136 consecutive years prior to 2010.  The lieutenant governor's office, which Siegelman held from 1995-1999, has had exactly two Republican occupants (the last Democrat was Jim Folsom, Jr., who served until 2011) in the state's post-Reconstruction history.

...

Savage also gets plain points of fact wrong regarding Siegelman's prosecution, claiming of the first of two corruption trials for Siegelman, "To the surprise of many, a jury in Birmingham acquitted him on all the counts in 2005."

But that's not what happened.  Savage didn't even get the year of Siegelman's first trial right.

The 2004 (not 2005) case never went to a jury.  The charges were summarily thrown out by now-retired Carter appointee U.W. Clemon, an old political associate of Siegelman's, and in his day one of the most nakedly-partisan Federal Judges in the country. 

Here's the whole thing.

Before and After

As an antidote to the annual spate of Leftist nonsense on May Day, check out this telling photo essay from Der Spiegel of sites in East Germany from before and after its liberation from Socialism.  An example:

1991:

2011:

All the photos are by Stefan Koppelkamm.  Go check out the whole thing.

I saw a good bit of the old DDR not long after the Wall fell, and the "before" photos confirm my memories of the East side.  As I've noted in the past, it was the most godawful place I'd ever seen.

Remember those "before" shots the next time some Occupy yahoo starts going on about "equality."

UPDATE:  Steve Green has more than a few cogent thoughts on this topic.

Solid

Check out this uber-awesome video of a Space Shuttle launch, from the perspective of cameras mounted on the solid rocket boosters. Stick with it after the boosters separate from the orbiter stack, because the re-entry is nearly as cool as the launch:



The audio is real, recorded during flight and then mastered by George Lucas' Skywalker Sound. Amazing stuff. H/T: io9.

Emily Litella on Global Warmening

Emily in The Guardian: "Never mind!"

The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."

Emily in Der Spiegel: "Never mind!"

Vahrenholt: In my experience as an energy expert, I learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC. In one case, a Greenpeace activist's absurd claim that 80 percent of the world's energy supply could soon be coming from renewable sources was assumed without scrutiny. This prompted me to examine the IPCC report more carefully.

SPIEGEL: And what was your conclusion?

Vahrenholt: The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don't know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it's also good news.

It's a shame that neither politicians nor "journalists" understand that "climate models" are just software, and by the very nature of trying to simulate a massive, chaotic system with vast numbers of unknown variables, software that has to include massive simplifying assumptions.