k.

Well Mark Steyn writing for the publication National Review ended up in the lawsuit because I guess Steyn was criticizing the hockey stick data and Michael Mann wanted to establish it as legitimate and push back against critics. So there was a lawsuit. So Michael Mann sued. And I may be getting some of the facts wrong here because there are a couple it looks like maybe whatever Mark Steyn did might have been separate but related to the National Review. So it looked like there might have been two legal actions one against the publication and one against the author.

But there's been some movement now. It's 13 years later. 13 years later and a judge has reduced the one million dollar defamation judgment which Mann had won. They reduced it from a million down to five thousand. Now there's an article by Greg Piper in Just the News so I'll recommend you to that. So look for Just the News and look for the article by Greg Piper and you'll get the correct version of this. I think I'm butchering a little bit.

But on top of that I think that separately the National Review had been in court for the same reason and got to it ended in a summary judgment in National Review's favor. So the National Review ended up getting a judgment in which they would be paid half a million dollars in legal fees. So I'm not positive but does this mean that Michael Mann the scientist the one who created the hockey stick thing and I believe was the one who kicked off the lawsuits does that mean that instead of winning a million he got five thousand and in the process also had to pay half a million to the other side which would suggest he came out way behind even though he won. So you sort of won a little bit but it looks like it became a financial nightmare basically.

So I guess I could use some fact-checking on that but 13 years a lot has changed. Or let me put it this way the whole our view of climate change is about ready to change. So look for big changes in that domain.

There's a study Sam Jones is writing in the Washington Post that science has shown there's a link between swearing and pain tolerance and that people who swear when they're in pain like you hit your thumb with a hammer or something that the swearing decreases the pain. Now this is another one of those situations where you could have just asked me. You didn't really have to study it. Just ask me. Yeah swearing definitely helps with pain. Don't know why.

There's a story about a Florida man who swallowed a 760,000 dollar diamond from Tiffany's. So he went to Tiffany's and must have grabbed a diamond and swallowed it. And so when the police got there he asked if he'd be charged for what's in his stomach. And I don't know the legal ins and outs of this but I think it depends if it was a duty free store. Anybody? No duty free. All right I'll just leave that with you.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Israel is trying to neutralize what security officials see as a Turkish-backed Islamist