David N. Cox says he was merely exercising his right to petition the government, but a state Department of Transportation official has raised allegations that Cox committed a misdemeanor: practicing engineering without a license.

David N. Cox and his North Raleigh neighbors are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of Falls of Neuse Road.

After an engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, Cox and the North Raleigh Coalition of Homeowners’ Associations responded with a sophisticated analysis of their own.

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Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But [chief traffic engineer] Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.

We’re from the government, and we know better than you.

[It was] Laila Ibrahimi['s] husband, himself an officer in the ANA, who encouraged her to apply. ‘I always wanted to be strong and serve the country,’ she says. Now 31, she was married at 18 and has had three children, but she is pragmatic about their arrangements: ‘My husband’s first wife looks after them.’

Meanwhile, the French were:

• Getting cheap conflict hardwood from civil-war-ravaged Liberia.
• Bombing the crap out of Cote d’Ivoire.
• Slaughtering peaceful protesters, also in Cote d’Ivoire.

Therefore, I am participating in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. If you are offended by depictions of your prophet, I apologize, but I feel that the principle of freedom of religion is more important than not offending you. If you say that it’s only a few extremists who would want to kill people over this, then I say to you: clean your own house, then we’ll talk. If you’ll stand up in your mosque tomorrow and condemn violence against blasphemers, then we’ll talk.

The picture below is a miniature illustration on vellum from the book Jami’ al-Tawarikh (literally “Compendium of Chronicles” but often referred to as The Universal History or History of the World), by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 A.D. It depicts Mohammed supervising the rebuilding of the Kaaba.

In other words, it’s an image of Mohammed drawn by a devout Muslim. There are many such images.

Let’s hope he turn things around in Afghanistan as well.

Instead I will be turning on all that I can, in order to celebrate human ingenuity and technology.

If you really care about the earth, why don’t you spend a month naked in the woods, without fire, which, after all, produces carbon emissions!

It has put all its knowledge and patents of chemicals that are useful in killing malaria parasites in the public domain.

When will the madness end?

The irony is that most of North America and Europe is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.

If you don’t think giving hundreds of millions of dollars to an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy with absolute power over the majority of the world’s economies is an inevitable recipe for corruption and tyranny, consider this:

Lord Monckton, an official delegate from the UK to Copenhagen, was barred from the conference hall, thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious by the police today.

His crime? Pointing out that the “evidence” for global warming “climate change” is suspect at best and completely fraudulent at worst.

I’m sure there are some who regard this as just a good start.

For some perspective on the mild uptick in temperature at the end of the twentieth century, watch this video:

Update: James Randi, the world’s foremost debunker of pseudoscience of all kinds, weighs in:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that “global warming” is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.

Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong.

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It’s easy enough to believe that drought, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes are signs of a coming catastrophe from global warming, but these are normal variations of any climate that we — and other forms of life — have survived. Earth has undergone many serious changes in climate, from the Ice Ages to periods of heavily increased plant growth from their high levels of CO2, yet the biosphere has survived.