UPDATE: Josh catches the essence, see below.
It appears the mendacious Joe Romm has been given new marching orders by Center for American Progress Big Brother Blog: “Think Progress”. From what I make of it, it seems the management realized that CP just wasn’t holding much readership, as it looks like the same 30 commenters or so frequent the place. Sooo…the spin is on. Joe’s doing his best to make his forced merger under Think Progress look like a win.
“Prettier”? Heh. Me thinks this is Joe’s “lipstick on a pig” moment.
What is most strange though, is this:
Not only are comments disabled, they are gone, all of them, from the present to when the blog started in 2006. That may be a temporary condition, but we’ll see. When I moved from Moveable Type back in October 2007 to WordPress.com, everything remained in place, comments and all and is still there today.
You gotta love a guy like that that treats his user community like they don’t exist anymore.
Joe’s last post was about his vision of Memorial Day, 2030
That reminds me to remind everyone (and especially Joe) to be sure to fly your flag this coming Memorial Day, to honor those who gave so much, but have not been forgotten (nor disappeared).
I look forward to seeing more “high quality” climate articles on Think Progress, like this one:
ThinkProgress discussion of the tornado outbreak – click image for the full article
UPDATE: Josh captures the essence:
I guess there’s always the Wayback Machine, should we wish to relive these heady days
Airbrush the pictures. Stalinist. Burn the books. [snip] Delete the comments. Progressive.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Comments gone, huh? Just like the Stalinist era apparatchik who got airbrushed out of the picture with the Big S himself…
Hope his commenters like Cyber Siberia….
Comments are likely disabled during the move…however doesn’t the TP font look a bit too Cyrillic? Pravda nostalgia, anybody?
1… 2… 3…
AW-W-W-W-W-W!!
Thanx for playing, Joe, and Vanna has some lovely parting gifts for you on your way out. Mind the door.☺
Last available archive (front page) seems to be November 27, 2010:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101128031303/http://climateprogress.org/
.
To better identify the style of Mr. Romm, “Climate Regress”, “Climate Suppress” and “Climate Hubris” should all be considered in the rebranding of the site.
If you don’t like the story the past tells, just destroy the records.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
From The Sunday Times November 29, 2009
Climate change data dumped
by Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. …..
I don’t even own a flag. And I don’t think I need to fly one to show other people that I honor veterans (I’m one).
REPLY: Jeff, thank you, sincerely, for your service. My point is simply that many people forget, and get caught up in holiday planning and revelry. I’m just offering a reminder. – Anthony
Hmm, I wonder if all the comments are deleted, and the blog is moving, if all the bans Joe has issued to posters over the years will disappear as well? Maybe Joe’s PTB (Powers that Be) realized his readership was down because Joe had banned almost everyone from commenting.
“That reminds me to remind everyone (and especially Joe) to be sure to fly your flag this coming Memorial Day, to honor those who gave so much, but have not been forgotten (nor disappeared)”
Amen, Anthony. And take a moment to thank each vet that you know and meet, for their service to country and freedom.
With sincere humility, Thank You, US Military Veterans!
Most Americans honor our flag. But not all.
Jeff Alberts says:
May 27, 2011 at 7:14 pm
========
Your site got a hit from me.
It will be the last.
Its a free country.
Sheese.
Like lipstick on a pig’s rear end.
Jeff Albert thanks for your service!
Anthony, thanks for the reminder. Life rushes past, too fast some times. I will be going up and checking out my flag and making sure it is flying on Memorial Day.
It is a good day to go to the range.
Take every opportunity to fly your flag. Remember that there are millions of Americans who hate the US flag. They are driven bonkers when Americans fly their flag.
Viet Nam <—[old timey spelling] vet here, one of the lucky ones. I fly the flag 24/7/365, and here’s a little story that warms the cockles of my heart.☺
What a shame. Romm was a good recruiter for the skeptics. Perhaps his paymasters finally recognized this.
BTW, Douglas DC, CYBERIA works better — Romm to Cyberia?
Did Baghdad Romm just jump the shark?
Cyberia, dang, wish I thought of that!
It’s all about controlling the message. I expect Jessie Lee to be involved more, and as John Podesta is involved directly with Think Regress, well it is just natural.
http://pohdiaries.com/new-position-at-the-white-house-unfavorable-online-media-czar/
Thanks for that little story Smokey. LOL.
My single experience of engagement on that site was so negative and anti-scientific it is not a surprise that it is merging with other ‘lessers’. Why would anyone hang out there? Certainly not to learn anything.
Did someone say, ‘Death Spiral’?
http://climateprogress.org/2011/05/19/arctic-sea-ice-volume-death-spiral/
Traffic => Volume => Death Spiral
I get it now….
Good riddance to boring AGW-catechism sites
devoted to slandering all who disagree,
where non-believers’ comments never get posted
yet viscious warmist diatribes have no word limit.
Well, they are switching over to a new comment system. Sometimes wholesale database migrations are tricky. Check back on Tuesday when the new site is up.
And BTW, Climate Progress has always been part of CAP (Center for American Progress) this change appears to be making it a more integral part of the CAP blogging effort.
“Not only are comments disabled, they are gone, all of them, from the present to when the blog started in 2006. That may be a temporary condition, but we’ll see.”
I expect they’ll be back. There may be no technically suitable provision for read only access during the conversion and at some point a line must be drawn in the sand prior to conversion.
Joe will play it and wear it well, unfortunately he still has the pigs ear of the lame stream media, but that to will end!
Happy lonely trails Joe.
AP “Far Right”Claim
Anthony,
Jeepers. Joe Romm clocked out for the holiday just in time to miss the
Associated Press story by Dina Cappiello with some help from Associated
Press deputy polling director, Jennifer Agiesta:
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20110527/D9NFUAL80.html
While attributing “cap and trade” legislative plans over time to the political
left, right, and middle, the authors of the piece send the clear message under
the auspices of AP news that doubters of government climate change control
solutions are either on the far right of the U.S. political mainstream, or stooges
of the far right’s machinations.
One direct quote Ms. Cappiello uses that has nothing to do with opinion
polling takes us there:
The only innuendoes missing are that big oil, big coal, or big autos are financing
the FOI harassment of climate scientists and the resistance on the right.
If you fly the flag for the holiday, please take care to display it properly !
See:
http://www.usa-flag-site.org/etiquette.shtml
Joe Romm RIP.
The Norway Rat tool issues his apologia for the collapse of the odious and censoring CP blog. Why am I not surprised?
At least Joe Romm can now claim he’s not a bought and paid for stooge…
…oh, wait. Romm’s got a new gig…
…Bought. Paid for. Unlike WUWT – which is supported by entirely voluntary, personal donations and nothing else.
Let the free market sort the winners from the losers; Romm lost. Survival of the fittest, eh?
Don’t honour the flag, honour the humans.
A flag is but a piece of cloth.
Humans are made of living tissue – the same as you are made of yourself.
Progress through promotion of secret science. How enlightening.
Oh noes! Whatever will I do??
And the only correct spelling.
Most people don’t know this, but all Viet Namese words are one syllable, according some Viet Namese friends I had long ago. And no, I didn’t serve in Nam, not quite that old. 😉
Just to clarify, I’m not against flying the flag. I just don’t partake. And I feel that pasting cheap flags all over one’s car or the like cheapens what it stands for.
Admiral Romm – you exited climate space too close to the sceptics outpost – your failure will not be tolerated…
Fingers close… huhhhnnn…. kerplunk!
Any site that censors all dissent becomes an echo chamber. BOOORRRING!
They deleted all comments on that truly horrid 10/10 video of exploding children. But I saved the lot for posterity and put them here.
http://climate-catastrophe.blogspot.com/2010/10/yes-warmists-are-catastrophe.html
A nice little victory. This ain’t going down the memory hole.
So Climate Progress goes from a site with about a dozen regular posters and merges with a site that has about 2 dozen posters who usually veer off topic in 2-3 posts and start talking like jr. high school kids. I guess that’s an upgrade in Romms world.
gallopingcamel says: May 27, 2011 at 10:54 pm
“Any site that censors all dissent becomes an echo chamber. BOOORRRING!”
Any site that censors all dissent becomes an echo chamber. BOOORRRING!
Any censors echos dissent
echos
dissent
Real Climate seems to have fallen into a bit of a slough of despond as well. Only a few lead writings per month. Should we hold our breath for a terminal makeover with extreme prejudice there too?
I’m sure Joe Romm will be posting “progressive” propaganda again shortly. The site is just getting a few small changes, like erasing all references to AGW. This will allow Joe to focus on promoting ideas like bio-crisis, bio-debt and bio-justice. All those embarrassing rants about climate just distract from “progress” toward bio-debt being collected by the UN under a framework for global governance.
Wow. So not only are you either willfully ignorant or malicious in reporting about science, you’re petty too? I never would have guessed.
Putting all the bad eggs in one basket. That’s progress for you…
Climate pollution?
The cover of ‘Joe Romm’s Latest Book – Straight Up’ is wrong on so many levels.
Is that a hokey shtick in your pocket…?
I think that all debate forums run by anger and the suppression of dissent will eventually fail in the marketplace of ideas.
By the way, on September 11, 2001 I was in San Francisco. In the succeeding days, I flew the US flag from my hire car. It wasn’t knee-jerk patriotism. It was the right thing to do. Neither Joe Romm nor Glenn Beck will understand why.
Steven Rasey [27 May @7.12pm], that story from The Times is a fabrication. No raw data was ‘thrown away’-only copies-,and no scientists made any admissions of the sort the journalist Jonathan Leake concocted. He took a sentence from a website,published well before The Times article,and contrived to make it appear as an admission to questions from the media.
I agree. CP had become and echo chamber working hard to convert the converted. Brutal censorship of any contradictory evidence disguised and getting rid of mis-information – even when backed up with peer reviewed evidence. I stopped trying to post after many deletions. CP is crap, now deny that Joe Romm.
Last time I checked the ip addresses of CP and TP they were both running off the same group of servers anyway. The forum software on both sites looked similar too. So if both sites are getting a makeover, it sounds like a platform move.
It’ll be interesting to see how long Joe can stomach being under tighter editorial control. I suspect a hissy fit won’t be long in coming.
It would seem that the Center for American Progress preaches the sort of progress that the majority of the American public, scientists and laymen both, do not want.
I’ve always been a bit confused by the name drop of Romm here and there on skeptical blogs since I still have little idea who the heck he is. The blog he ran was always so shrill and frankly odd that I guess I’ve ignored it all these years. I think I was moderated out every time I posted there so I got bored with them.
Other skeptic bashers feature prominently in my latest info-graphic, at in paraphrased fashion:
Authority: http://oi56.tinypic.com/2nbtwcp.jpg
Good one, Nik.
Maybe Romm’s new site will have a new cable TV game show called ‘Spin the Romm’ hosted by Nick Stokes.
Or maybe Romm’s new site will have a new cable TV show called ‘CP Jeopardy’ hosted by Romm himself. The correct answer to every question will be ‘What did Joe Romm say?”
Anyone have other ideas on game shows for Romm’s new site?
John
This is how the knife falls when you are affiliated with a smarmy little woodchuck like John Podesta, CEO of the Center for American Progress.
George Soros and his ilk put a lot of money into these specialty political bloggers. Since Joe didn’t seem to make friends, he was set up to have someone control his money. Joe will come out swinging with justifications and excuses. He also will blame the Koch Bros.
So much for his claim of having such massive audience. Either he had low numbers and no one posted except a small handfull or he was incredibly tight on deleting posts.
Loss of CP offset by addition of Canadian version of Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/
Although, after I had a quick look at the new Canadian version, it doesn’t look too left leaning. I heard that Elizabeth May, leader/head of the Green Party and David Suzuki both had an inaugrual article, but I have’nt come across those yet, and I really don’t want to risk seeing them so early in the morning.
I would be reluctant to gloat over this event. I don’t doubt that the alarmists are regrouping for another major push.
Has Romm ever described how one goes about ‘polluting the climate’? If you can do that, then can’t you also ‘pollute the weather’?
Re: My comment yesterday, 6:53 pm.
What’s so scary about the common term for “National Socialist”? It’s a governing philosophy (albeit disastrous), not a bogeyman.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Mr. Romm must be freaking out that maybe the Earth’s “fever” is going to spike and the Arctic Ocean is going to boil over while his web site is being revamped…
But…the trees are bigger.
msnbc had open forums on their website with many discussion threads, including environment, until a couple years ago. Much debate centered around AGW and some very knowledgable posters were regulars. Folks routinely contradicted the “facts” of msnbc “green” articles. This became so embarrasing for them that they shut the message boards down. Like Romm, msnbc, without warning or explanation, simply removed the entire record from the website. For a while the UK version of the msnbc message boards were still running, and so many Americans migrated to their boards. It was funny seeing the brits there (mostly “progressive” or radical environmentalist folks) react to the invasion of rational Americans. The UK message boards were also disappeared about three months ago.
They can’t handle the truth.
The mainstream media yearn for the old days of the one way conversation.
Luckily for us, that genie is out of the bottle.
The love of my life, my Nam vet, has been known to stick one in his hat, right next to the poppy.
This is the part that struck me: “it is supposed to provide better controls”
I was never in the military, been a civilian contractor to various agencies, knew a lot of Vets and active. I fly my late Father-in Law’s Flag as a rule- this year is going to be
an exception due to the wet,nasty,weather….
He’d understand, miss sitting in his shop with a bit of good Kentucky sippin’
Whiskey, and hear the stories of Normandy, The Bulge, Remagen, Aachen
Oh cold, then,too. Thank you to all Vets on this Blog and elsewhere.
I notice the last day or 2 the weather has turned very cool for the Memorial day weekend. It is almost always very hot. Joe must be whut dun it. Saving electric by combining servers.
I tried reading Romm’s predictions for 2030 , but couldn’t finish the thing . However , I did get the impression that ol’ Joe is going to have a lot of egg on his face in nineteen years . I hope I’m still around to see it .
Hide the decline, refuse to comply with FOIA requests, refuse to debate, use IP address tricks to prevent ‘deniers’ from viewing AGW pages, delete information, on and on. Seems our friends have literally no clue what this tactic looks like to the general public:
“One of the main priorities for [AGW] promoters is to steer the general public away from hearing the skeptics’ side of the story. They’ve been amazingly successful so far, aided by legions of environmentalist bloggers. But these efforts require constant maintenance. When people notice contradictory elements and other details that don’t square up, tough questions start getting asked. Evasive answers or dead silence to those only speeds the erosion of credibility for the issue..” http://www.globalwarming.org/2011/05/26/global-warming-promoters-unsustainable-accusation-tactic/
The elimination of “Climate” from the blog name is telling: not enough interest, not enough convinced of the rabid fear-mongering, to maintain itself as a “climate” blog. Good sign.
Keith;
Good comment; I wonder what the ratio of “regulars” to “banned” was. Probably a small fraction.
Anthony, what would you say it is for WUWT? My WAG is about 20. Or maybe 200. 😉
Some interesting reading on Romm :
http://masterresource.org/category/romm-versus-bradley-enron/
Memorial Day is for honoring those who have died—not the living—especiallay for honoring those who have died in service to their country.
There is really no other way to honor them except to memorialize the graves of the individual veteran and to honor the country for which they all served. And this includes honoring the symbols of their country.
As for cheapening the flag, ignoring it is, perhaps, as demeaning as almost anything you can do.
This 2¢ from a veteran who just got back from helping place flags on veterans’ graves.
OK S.
P Walker says: “I tried reading Romm’s predictions for 2030 , but couldn’t finish the thing . However , I did get the impression that ol’ Joe is going to have a lot of egg on his face in nineteen years . I hope I’m still around to see it .”
Heck, I hope Joe Romm is around to see it. I have no doubt that he’ll be back at the helm of his pathetic little proctoganda machine next week, churning out absurdities that make the global warming hoax even more transparent than it already is. God bless Joe Romm!
Progress is change.
Climate Progress was against climate change.
Therefore Climate Progress was against climate progress.
I’m sure the logic conflict has been tickling away in the back of just about everybody’s brain for years now, whether they were aware of it or not. As it finished up, CP did a good job of fighting itself to its own failure.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: “Progress is change. Climate Progress was against climate change. Therefore Climate Progress was against climate progress.”
All progress is change, but not all change is progress. Your syllogism fails. Sorry.
Jeff Alberts says:
May 27, 2011 at 10:39 pm
=====
From your website:
“The focus points of this site are Weather and Climate related topics, both from a scientific and a political perspective. My hope is that users of sites such as Watts Up With That will utilize this resource to continue discussions of important topics by using the forums and the file repository functionality of this site.”
—
So, your “business plan” is to hassle Anthony, hoping it drives traffic to your site.
How’s that working out?
jorgekafkazar,
Progress is a subset of the set change. That which is against change must therefore be against progress. It does follow, as you have said, that change need not be progress, as progress is not the only subset of change and there are elements contained within change that are not part of subset progress.
If against climate change, then against climate progress. That still holds.
I was careful on my wording. Enjoy the weekend. ☺
There is, perhaps, a simple explanation for the change …
Joe got tired of getting slammed in the ratings … so, merge with Think Progress and hope for higher ratings (see Alexa) and maybe start beating out WUWT. And the way climate change (or whatever it’s being called this week) is getting hit lately, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Richard Black’s non-stop propaganda blog at the BBC has now limited comments to 400 characters… in case anyone cares.
In contrast, Black writes with such stupendous verbosity that it appears he is being paid by the word, by the BBC and/or Greenpeace and/or the UN crisis agencies.
AGW die-back.
Doesn’t sound very progressive. — John M Reynolds
Speaking of remembering Veterans, here’s a nice piece about WWII Vets in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704816604576333721638639298.html?mod=ITP_review_2
I hope it’s not behind the paywall.
My flag is out every day, as is my Gadsden Flag. I’m gonna go pay respects to my WWII dad tomorrow.
I’m proud to be a Vietnam War vet, and I’m eternally grateful to the fine young men and women who defend us and keep us free today. If you happen to encounter one, thank him or her in person.
When I first became skeptical about global warming I posted on Joe’s site and often only sections of my posts were allowed to appear. Finally, he banned me altogether.
He is a prime example of the arrogance, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance of the warmists.
When the global warming myth finally and completely collapses Joe Romm owes an apology to those who tried to put out the truth on his blog and were shut out.
Perhaps the saving grace will be: “We knew this all the time and were testing you all! No offense intended!”
I had an interesting email exchange with Joe regarding this – he said he’s not taking down the site, just revamping it. Having read the explanation on CP, I have to believe him (so far). However, what was much more interesting during these exchanges was Joe trying to claim that Hansen’s wildly off-beam ‘Scenario A/B/C’ predictions in the 80s actually proved Hansen was right all along! There was a lot of hand- waving about climate sensitivity from Joe, but I kept insisting (rightly) that Hansen’s predictions were wrong. Which they were. Badly wrong.
Joe also told me prophetically that the Arctic would be ice-free in 10-20 years time, probably even within 10. I told him I’ll hold him to that. We shall see…
BTW he also called me a ‘birther’, for some reason. I told him that as a British Citizen living in London, I couldn’t care less about where President Obama was born 🙂
Oh, further to my comment above: I have huge respect for all veterans – both from the US and the UK. We should never forget them.
We are witnessing the slow death of both Keynesian Economics and Hansenian Climatology at the same time. These quack theories were designed only for the purpose of expanding the power of the state at the expense of individual freedom. Good riddance.
Well, it looks like Climate Progress is back.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/05/31/231343/introduction-to-climate-progress/
The old comments aren’t there, but Joe says they will be, eventually.
The site is now an extension of Face Book – I posted a comment (asking about the old comments) and the comment header reported me by my age. When I told FB to only report my birth month and day but not birth year in my profile, then the CP comment stopped describing me as anything.
What a refreshing sense of perspective, as always. A technical glitch during a blog redesign is, of course, well worth shouting about. I look forward to further updates of this kind.
They probably aren’t glitches. Whatever FB interface software probably can’t handle past comments, and that should have been known beforehand. I’m not expecting the old comments to ever show up again.
Listing my age as a primary descriptor of was thanks to my FB profile not listing my employer or school, but allowing my full birthday in the profile, stupidity on my part. I probably should get that off of FB altogether as it’s an aid to people interested in stealing identity.
boy, do you guys hate each other!
Here we are, June 2nd, 2011.
Think Progress now has some neat little boxes on the right side of it’s masthead.
Some are for general topics. A couple are for individual contributors. If you
click on the one titled “Joe Romm: it takes you to:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/issue/
…and you can read all about it.
It may just be my security settings (I have to keep swatting away
on-the-fly requests to permit facebook cookies) but I don’t see
any place for comments following each article. ????
Is it just me, or is there some serious deterioration with Watts and his readers?
And, as far as I can tell, WUWT is as good as it gets now that Monckton is increasingly recognized as an embarrassing over-cooked prawn even among the denialists,.
Thank God for Pielke, Sr.
You are not right. I am
assured. I suggest it to discuss.