Steven Milloy asks, What Hurricane Season?, in an article at FoxNews.com. According to Milloy:

On May 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its "2006 Atlantic Hurricane Outlook," forecasting an "80 percent chance of an above-normal hurricane season, a 15 percent chance of a near-normal season, and only a 5 percent chance of a below-normal season." NOAA called for "a very active 2006 season, with 13-16 named storms, 8-10 hurricanes, and 4-6 major hurricanes."

The NOAA adjusted the forecast downward in August but still predicted only a five percent chance of a below normal hurricane season. Milloy correctly observes that the hurricane season, which ended yesterday, was clearly below normal. But he goes further with the following questions and statement:

How can so many smart folks be so wrong? What's the lesson to be learned from NOAA's big whiff? Could it possibly be that predicting weather and climatic events isn't so easy?

...

Despite the vast collective expertise of NOAA scientists, immense quantities of atmospheric and oceanic data, and unprecedented computing power, NOAA failed miserably in predicting weather events a mere six months into the future -- and reiterated those same ill-conceived predictions at mid-season.

While it is clear that the NOAA or the media created the expectation of a severe hurricane season, Milloy is wrong to decide based on this one season that the NOAA "failed miserably." He reminds me of an Air Force fighter pilot that once challenged one of my predictions. The pilot was to fire a Sidewinder missile at a remotely controlled target aircraft on a test range. Before the test I provided him with launch parameters (position and speed relative to the target) within which he would have an estimated 0.9 probablity of destroying the target. After the test, in which he fired the missile within the launch parameters but failed to destroy the target, he declared rather strongly that my estimated kill probability was wrong. I told him that it very likely was, but that he had no way of knowing that. I pointed out to him that I did estimate a one in ten chance that he wouldn't destroy the target. (I don't think he was convinced. Some fighter pilots can't accept the possibility of losing when given a 90 percent chance of winning.) If the pilot repeated the test firing with the same lauch paramters 100 times and got only 50 kills (for example), then he would have a strong case that my estimate was wrong.

The NOAA did predict a one in twenty chance that the 2006 hurricane season would be below normal. So there is no way that Milloy could know that their predictions are wrong unless he could repeat this season enough times to show that the 5 percent chance of a below normal season should have been much higher. But he obviously can't do that.

However, I do agree with Milloy that we shouldn't rely too heavily on mathematical models to predict something as complex as weather patterns or phenomena, especially not for more than a few days into the future. My experience with modeling systems much less complex than weather convinced me that models are useful for studying trends but aren't very good at predicting specific outcomes. It is insanity to spend billions of dollars and depress the economies of countries around the world based on weather models projected decades into the future. If the models are that reliable then the NOAA should be able to more accurately tell us if it's going to rain this weekend.

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The Associated Press reports that University of Florida football coach Urban Meyer passed up a chance earlier this year to speak to Congress about the Bowl Championsip Series. They say that Meyer declined the invitation because he was too busy with recruiting. Busy with recruiting or not I would have declined because Congress has no bussiness involving itself in how colleges determine their national champions.

Congress also had no business conducting hearings into drug use by professional baseball players. I believe that Congress could find more important issues to concern itself with than how professional and college sports are run. We have millions of illegal immigrants invading our country while some puffed up toads in Congress investigate sports activities. Some of these illegals are assaulting and murdering our citizens. Others are insidiously destroying our culture of freedom. Almost all are consuming our limited resources for assisting our needy citizens.

But the toads have their own priorities. Apparently they have found a way to buy some votes with the BCS issue.

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Do you remember the member of Congress who crashed his car late one night in DC and told the police that he was on his way to the Capitol to vote? The one who somehow escaped having a Breathalyzer test administered? The one who soon announced that he was not drunk but just on medication? The one who checked himself into rehab anyway? The one who is the son of Senator Edward Kennedy of Chappaquiddick fame? Well, an overwhelming majority of the citizens of Rhode Island returned him, Patrick Kennedy, to Congress last month.

Apparently they were unable or unwilling to find a better person to represent them. I know RI is a small state but surely they could have produced something better than a supercilious drunk.

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The New York Times reports that two days before his resignation Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a memorandum to the White House suggesting new options in Iraq. Among those options is this one:

Position substantial U.S. forces near the Iranian and Syrian borders to reduce infiltration and, importantly, reduce Iranian influence on the Iraqi Government.

I suggested the same thing in a post back in August. In that post I noted that Rumsfeld was concerned about the Iraqi border as early as February 2004. The question is, why is he just recently suggesting that something be done about the border? After all, he was in charge. Perhaps that's why he was fired. (I recommended that too back in September.)

It is possible though that Rumsfeld resigned of his own accord out of frustration with the White House interfering with the implemention of his policies in Iraq.

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Kofi Annan, the corrupt head of the ineffectual United Nations has shared his thoughts on Iraq with the BBC. CBSNews.com reports on that interview:

The current situation in Iraq is "much worse" than civil war, the outgoing United Nations secretary-general said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. broadcast Monday.

Now how did you determine that Kofi? Do you have a 'war badness meter'? Anyhow, if you think things are so bad in Iraq why don't you do something about it? Could it be that you know you can't? That you know your organization is as useless as teats on a boar 'coon? You can spend billions of dollars each year but all you can do is make dopey statements to anyone that will give you a venue.

During the interview with the BBC world service, Annan agreed when it was suggested that some Iraqis believe life is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein's regime.

"I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi's life," Annan said. "If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, 'Am I going to see my child again?'

Kofi, how can a dictator be brutal without hurting someone? Even you should be able to figure out that most Iraqis did not feel safe under Saddam. Perhaps most of the Sunnis did. But they represent a minority of Iraqis, and even young Sunni women had to be careful not to attract the attention of Saddam's sons. Ask the Shiites and Kurds how safe they felt under Saddam. They might tell you about the hundreds of thousands of their friends and relatives that he killed. The only way to feel safe under a brutal dictatorship is to be very careful not to offend the dictator or his minions.

On your way out Kofi, don't let the door knob hit you where the good lord split you.

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The bipartisan Iraq Study Group is releasing its report today so I thought it would be timely to issue my study group report. Technically, my study group is not a group because I'm the only member. Neither is it bipartisan; it represents only my viewpoint. Neither did it cost a million dollars; it only cost some of my time. Here is my executive summary: We need to kick some ass!

I've said before that we should not have occupied Iraq -- that we should have severely punished and removed the Saddam Hussein regime and then left the Iraqis to decide their own fate. We should not have settled in there as father figures for a people with conflicting cultures, none of which we understand. We should not have felt obligated to protect these people from themselves. But we did do these things and appear to be failing. So what should we do or not do now?

We most certainly should not ask Iran and Syria for help. We should tell them to stay out of the way or else. Expecting them to actually help at this point has to be the dumbest idea since the idea that we could mold Iraq into a country like our own. Any promise of support on their part would come at an unacceptable cost to us.

We most certainly should not be talking about a 'graceful exit.' Tim Russert, on the Don Imus show this morning, brought up the possibility that even a withdrawal at this point might result in a debacle similar to our departure from Vietnam, where we would be forced to leave most of our military equipment behind to prevent significant loss of military personnel. It could happen, of course, if we continue to insist on 'playing nice.' It won't happen though if we make a dramatic exit, and that is what I think we should do.

A dramatic exit will do two things. It will get us out of Iraq and it will send a message to the terrorists and neighboring countries, especially Iran and Syria. That message will be: If you think we are leaving Iraq because we are militarily weak or because we don't have the will to fight, then you could be dead wrong.

How do we make a dramatic exit? First we quietly prepare for the operation much the same way we prepared for the invasion. We build up our battle groups in the Persian Gulf; we position and strengthen our land based forces; and we position our heavy bombers, fighters and reconnaissance aircraft to support the operation. Then, when that is complete, we start talking openly about a complete withdrawal of our forces from Iraq. At the same time we start pulling our troops and equipment in Iraq into a few centralized locations that are easier to defend and arm them up for battle. If this encourages the insurgents, terrorists and neighboring countries to make concerted or independent plans to inflict major damage on us during the withdrawal, more the better. This is where the drama (shock and awe?) comes in.

In order to attack us they will have to form up and move into the open. This will give us what the military calls a target rich environment. As the targets appear we will attack them with the full force of all the airpower we have available. We will also attack them on the ground using the 'withdrawing' forces.

From the beginning of this process we watch the Iraq borders closely. If any country makes a move across the border we attack their forces viciously -- even Saudi Arabia, that has said it might enter Iraq to protect the Sunnis if we withdraw. After the withdrawal is complete we could keep some forces in Kuwait and the Gulf for awhile in case some additional blows need to be dealt to those that doubt our will and might.

If the potential attackers are smarter than I think they are and don't choose to take us on during the withdrawal process, then apparently they don't disrespect us after all.

(I've written several posts on the Iraq war. You can review them all here. The best way to view all posts on a given subject is to scroll to the Categories box in a sidebar on this page and then click on that subject (category). This will cause all the posts to be displayed on one page in inverse chronological order.)

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According to the Associated Press James Baker made the following statements during a discussion of the Iraq Study Group report:

... he said, the administration should involve the leaders of Iran in the search for peace in Iraq. Baker said that Iran had helped the United States "stabilize the situation in the aftermath of our invasion of Afghanistan."

"We haven't talked to Iran in 26 years and it hasn't gotten us a whole long way, in my opinion," he said, adding that the Iranians "do not want a chaotic Iraq" because if things collapse there they will be "besieged with refugees."

According to Baker, we haven't talked to Iran in 26 years, yet they helped us with Afghanistan about five years ago. So why does he think we need to talk to them now to get them to help us with Iraq? Perhaps Iran is more helpful when we don't talk to them.

But Baker said that not talking to Iran "hasn't gotten us a whole long way" right after saying that they helped "stabilize the situation in the aftermath of our invasion of Afghanistan." So he seems to believe that Iran's help with Afghanistan was no big deal, yet he wants us to talk to them about helping with Iraq.

If this is the kind of muddled thinking that went into the ISG report I don't have much hope that it will be very helpful to the President.

Keep in mind though, that the AP may have completely garbled Baker's statements. One advantage of video over print journalism is that when you see and hear the words coming out of the speaker's mouth you know what they actually said.

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Testifying on Capitol Hill, Iraq Study Group co-chair and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, referring to the group's report, said: "I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad and say, 'I like this but I don't like that.' This is a comprehensive strategy."

To continue his simile, I would agree that the report is not like a fruit salad, it's more like a fruit salad with a vegetable salad and a chicken salad thrown into the same bowl. There might even be some roast duck with mango salsa in there for the GEICO cave man.

Baker likes to crow about the fact that the report is bipartisan. One problem with bipartisan products is that while they may be acceptable to all the contributors they are truly satisfactory to none. What the President needs are the best recommendations, not just those based on a consensus.

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The Washington Post reports:

As pressure mounts for a change of course in Iraq, the Bush administration is groping for a viable new strategy for the president to unveil by Christmas, with deliberations now focused on three main options to redefine the U.S. military and political engagement, according to officials familiar with the debate.

Dictionary.com says that one definition of 'grope' is "to touch or handle (someone) for sexual pleasure." I'll assume that's not what the WaPo meant since this is not about the Clinton Administration. So they must have meant "to search blindly or uncertainly." While this might be true it is just their opinion and shouldn't be in a news article. I doubt that the "officials familiar with the debate" said they are groping in the dark. I suspect that if the article was about a Democrat they would have been simply searching for a viable new strategy or perhaps defining a viable new strategy.

The results of the Administration's groping according to the WaPo:

The major alternatives include a short-term surge of 15,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to secure Baghdad and accelerate the training of Iraqi forces. Another strategy would redirect the U.S. military away from the internal strife to focus mainly on hunting terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda. And the third would concentrate political attention on supporting the majority Shiites and abandon U.S. efforts to reach out to Sunni insurgents.

*At least I think this was a front page story. I got it from their web site but it states that the article is from page A01.

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I've previously given my executive summary of the actions we need to take  in Iraq. Now I'll summarize the Iraq Study Group's recommendation: We need to go forth and make nice with any and everyone to convince them that we all just need to get along.

I don't believe I have ever seen a more pedestrian product come from such a supposedly august body. They cavalierly propose simplistic approaches to extremely complex problems: Iran's and Syria's interference in the region; the Arab/Israeli problem. They base their recommendations on unsupported assumptions. The report comes across as a whole lot of wishful thinking and not much substance. Some excerpts from the report's executive summary and my comments follow.

The policies and actions of Iraq's neighbors greatly affect its stability and prosperity. No country in the region will benefit in the long term from a chaotic Iraq. Yet Iraq's neighbors are not doing enough to help Iraq achieve stability. Some are undercutting stability.

This is an example of the pervasive flawed logic in the report. It says that no country will benefit in the long term from a chaotic Iraq. But what about in the short term? What is their definition of long term? Iran may not be trying to help Iraq achieve stability now because they know that they will benefit more in the long term if the US fails and they then move in and save Iraq, or they at least save the Shiites.

Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage them constructively.

The ISG presses on with the unsound assumption that Iran and Syria have an "interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq." Even if they do want to avoid chaos in Iraq it doesn't mean that they want to help the US -- unless they get huge concessions.

The United States must adjust its role in Iraq to encourage the Iraqi people to take control of their own destiny.

I thought that was our role since shortly after the fall of the Saddam regime. In fact, I have been critical of that role because I think that we should have taken control of the country and maintained control until it was stable and then installed an Iraqi government.

By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq.

Not necessary for force protection? They must expect a lot of progress by 2008. The 140,000 troops there now aren't able to protect themselves.

It is the unanimous view of the Iraq Study Group that these recommendations offer a new way forward for the United States in Iraq and the region. They are comprehensive and need to be implemented in a coordinated fashion. They should not be separated or carried out in isolation.

Translation: We've done all the thinking that needs to be done. Mere mortals should not dare to mess with our work. Sorry guys, I'm ROFL. We can only hope that someone in the Administration does take it apart -- or they ignore it completely.

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