Bad News, Good News

A quick Quick Hits:

Terror plot in Las Vegas?

• As police tried to piece together how a rare, deadly poison ended up in a motel for transients, the 57-year-old man who could hold the key lay unconscious in a hospital.

  Adding to the mystery, police said firearms and an “anarchist type textbook” were found in the same room where the ricin was discovered two days later.

• Earlier Friday, police Deputy Chief Kathy Suey said the friend or relative found two vials of ricin on Thursday after going to the motel to retrieve the hospitalized man’s belongings. Authorities on Friday confirmed that the vials contained ricin. It was unclear how long the vials were in the unoccupied motel room, and whether they might have been overlooked when ricin tests were conducted on Tuesday. Lombardo did not address such questions during the brief news conference.

Ricin is one of the more hideous poisons known to mankind. Derived from the castor bean, any dosage about half the size of a pin head is fatal. There is no antidote. The only people usually in contact with this stuff is cancer researchers and we highly doubt that cancer researchers are camping out in Vegas hotels with copies of the Anarchists Cookbook. Just remember, there are home grown nut jobs out there as well as the international terrorist.

Remember all the global warming hype? And the liberal trolls who berated us for not knowing anything about science? Looks like we were correct being skeptical and pointing out that the science is far from settled:

• Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

  No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

  A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

So one year worth of cooling wipes out the past 100 years of global "warming." Now we know the lefties and greens are going to shriek about "one year's worth of data doesn't prove warming doesn't exist." Neither does the selective reading of data that they do. And each year, the lack of hurricanes, the missing killer storms, the increasing snowfall, spreading polar sea ice and growing glacier thickness destroys any credibility they might have had, along with any chance to reduce our dependence on imported oil.