We need more Muslims like this one, who writes an open letter to the Boy Wonder.
Hopefully you will realize that we can only defeat an enemy we can name, describe, and understand. As Thomas Friedman and others have recently reminded us, the only answer to jihadists, Salafists, and Islamists is a narrative from within America, and most important from within Islam, that counters the global supremacism of political Islam. Until you say exactly that, we will continue to flail in this conflict.
So she looks at her computer screen and says, “um, I’m afraid there’s a problem, this passenger’s name is on a watch list.” Oh, great. Looks like my dad is playing Mr. Buzzkill again, just because I took that semester off from Oxford to go backpacking in Yemen. So I showed her my official State Department visa.
So I’m like, “honey, do I look like I’m a US military veteran?”
“No.”
“Do I look like I’m some sort of right wing anti-tax teabagger?”
“No.”
“Do I look like anybody else on the DHS terrorism danger list?”
“No, but…”
“Then I suggest that unless you want a nasty anti-discrimination lawsuit on your hands, you’d best give me an aisle seat. With extended legroom.”
OK, so I’m a little late for this year. I was out of town. This will make up for it, though. I promise.
Stop the presses! The NLM has apologized to Israel!
Wait…
The only thing worse than no apology is a convenient apology. Funny, I didn’t think I could like Jimmy Carter less, I guess I was wrong.
Go ahead and roll the presses, I guess.
I don’t know how long this series will stay up. I’ve only watched Part 1 and it’s so hilarious and dead-on that I’m posting it now.
NB: It contains some f-bombs. It will also teach you a surprising amount about film making.
Update:
Ed Driscoll has more, and links to the whole thing. I’ve now seen it all, and it’s great save for the last minute out of seventy. The good news is that the thing has gone completely viral.
This column in the Telegraph is a good rundown of the bare-knuckle politics involved in HopeNChangen.
This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes, presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of course. It’s from the – er – UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is – er – running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a “leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell under the Tories.
But there’s also this:
This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.
Algore is indeed corrupt and risible (which is probably why he has fans at the U.N.) but not all climate science is pseudoscience. Unfortunately good science is getting harder and harder to do what with it being politicized by everybody. AGW is a plausible hypothesis. But it’s not yet a theory because it’s not making any useful predictions yet, and it’s hard to imagine a more complex, harder to model system than climate.
Science is our only hope to know what’s real. Once it has been allowed to really find out, then we can talk about potential remedies. We’re just not there yet, and the naked power grab of the Left is not going to help in any case, because the Left never solves problems, it just creates them. (The Right sometimes solves problems, but usually creates them, too.)
I wish there were a way to get all politicians to just leave their hands off the scientists for a few years. I fear that may now be impossible.
What a mess.
Dear Leader’s Teleprompter said this week,
“We just had a very productive session about the final stages of health care reform in the Senate. And from the discussions we had, it’s clear that we are on the precipice of an achievement that’s eluded Congresses and presidents for generations, an achievement that will touch the lives of nearly every American.”
But it’s the right word.
Skepticism is always a virtue. It’s really just another name for scientific thinking and does not mean cynical. One of the leading lights of the modern skeptical movement, the Amazing Randi, turns out to be as skeptical as I about AGW, and for many of the same reasons.
An unfortunate fact is that scientists are just as human as the rest of us, in that they are strongly influenced by the need to be accepted, to kowtow to peer opinion, and to “belong” in the scientific community. Why do I find this “unfortunate”? Because the media and the hoi polloi increasingly depend upon and accept ideas or principles that are proclaimed loudly enough by academics who are often more driven by “politically correct” survival principles than by those given them by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Bohr. (Granted, it’s reassuring that they’re listening to academics at all — but how to tell the competent from the incompetent?) Religious and other emotional convictions drive scientists, despite what they may think their motivations are.
Scientists are indeed fallible. Science, on the other hand, is self-correcting.
I attended a fascinating presentation last night about the effect of climate on the history of civilization. It pointed out how fortunate we are to be living in a fairly stable time because, by the normal cycle, we should be heading into another deadly ice age about now.
Does human activity alter the earth’s temperature? It’s a plausible hypothesis. It’s a long way from being as settled a theory as gravity, evolution, or a round earth, though. And yes, if enough ice melts the sea levels will go up a few meters – just as they have in the past.
As the chart I referenced points out, and Randi seems to agree, the best response would be to adapt. Adapting could well be expensive. So, instead of using climate change (it has always changed, and always will) as an excuse to dismantle the best and only way to create wealth, it makes sense to me to protect freedom and create all the wealth we can muster. One way or another the seven lean years will come. We should be ready, and not in voluntary servitude.
John Derbyshire has an apropos followup.
Once you’ve subtracted all that science-neutral matter, there isn’t much left to talk about, unless you want to spend a year or so, at no likely advantage to yourself (unless someone’s paying your bills), immersing yourself in a very contentious field of scientific enquiry that rests on data that can be gathered only with great difficulty, and on theories about the dynamics of a fantastically complicated planet-sized system of interacting phenomena.
The results out of that field are not sufficiently dispositive to justify colossal international programs of action, designed and executed by (and, career-wise, for) plump, unaccountable globalist bureaucrats. Without dispositive evidence, such programs should be resisted on principle by everyone who cares about individual liberty and national sovereignty.
Once again, San Francisco beats Oakland in a competition of perception.
It’s time to face facts: San Francisco is spectacularly mismanaged and arguably the worst-run big city in America. This year’s city budget is an astonishing $6.6 billion — more than twice the budget for the entire state of Idaho — for roughly 800,000 residents. Yet despite that stratospheric amount, San Francisco can’t point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle — and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short.
Even for this conservative-leaning libertarian who thinks liberals suffer from collective brain damage some of this is jaw dropping. Read the whole thing or you’ll miss gems like this:
In 2007, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) held a seminar for the nonprofits vying for a piece of $78 million in funding. Grant seekers were told that in the next funding cycle, they would be required — for the first time — to provide quantifiable proof their programs were accomplishing something.
The room exploded with outrage. This wasn’t fair. “What if we can bring in a family we’ve helped?” one nonprofit asked. Another offered: “We can tell you stories about the good work we do!” Not every organization is capable of demonstrating results, a nonprofit CEO complained. He suggested the city’s funding process should actually penalize nonprofits able to measure results, so as to put everyone on an even footing. Heads nodded: This was a popular idea.
If you can’t do that, at least read the sidebar.
San Francisco installed crime cameras in dangerous areas, which are proven to reduce crime if someone is watching them. The city, however, forbids anyone from watching them until after a crime is committed, out of privacy concerns.
Oakland is sure to try to catch up soon.
So Algore was wrong about the temperature of the earth’s core, and about the vanishing arctic ice cap. Turns out he’s also wrong about mosquitos.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but hold in awe a man who can be wrong about so many disparate things.
A good read at PrudentBear.com on the risks of mathematical modeling (in spite of the anachronistic use of the term “computer tapes”).
It’s not as if Wall Street had no warning; mathematical models based on modern financial theory had caused huge losses as far back as 1987, and had caused the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998. Yet the world’s best remunerated people went on using the mathematical models that had caused moderate sized disasters before, only to watch them cause a truly impressive disaster in 2008. It must have been some kind of compulsion.
Turning now to my other example, that of global warming: the possibility that excess carbon dioxide, through a “greenhouse effect” might cause a global rise in temperature is based on well-established chemistry and physics. Deniers of the possibility of global warming are thus being as irrational as the extreme eco-alarmists; global warming is indeed possible because of physical and chemical processes that are perfectly well understood, indeed fairly elementary.
The difficulty arises in estimating whether it is actually happening. The rise in temperatures so far observed is well within the level of “noise” in global temperatures over a period of a century or so, let alone the more extreme fluctuations that have taken place when the observation period is extended to millennia. It is thus necessary to match the very limited temperature data we have, stretching back no more than a century on a worldwide basis, with secondary observations of such things as tree rings and ice cores, synthesizing the result with a computer model of what is believed to be the carbon forcing process in order to predict the range of possible future warming effects.
And now for some (badly narrated) data.
Investing in oil exploration, it was observed at the time, makes it possible to drill oil more efficiently, and produce greenhouse emissions in even greater amounts, and stands in contradiction to the firm’s stated public mission. No one mentioned Dr Pachauri’s founding role in the company – or that he was currently chairman of the IPCC.
What do you expect? The UN is a systemically-corrupt, anti-freedom political entity. Absolutely everything it says and does must be viewed in that light.
If true, this could be very good news.
“Therefore, we warn the Guards who have betrayed the martyrs (from the war between Iran and Iraq) and who decided to attack the lives, the property and the honor of the citizens. We seriously warn them that if they do not leave their chosen path, they will be confronted with our tough response. The military is a haven for the nation. And we will defend the peace-loving Iranian nation against any aggression.”
VDH proffers a hypothesis about Messiah Fatigue.
I have an heirloom china pitcher on my mantle that has dozens of glued cracks—so much so that it is now purely ornamental and will not hold water. When I was a boy I’d ask my mother when, and under what circumstances, did the china crack apart.
She would provide stories about each fissure and mend, many of the break narratives handed down to her from her own grandparents in the house. There wasn’t one single accident, but instead dozens that rendered a once useful pitcher into an non-functional art object.
He then lists some of the chips and cracks. The list is entertaining for its sheer length.
No, not Him. The other Dear Leader.
While climate delegates are quarreling in Copenhagen, and President Barack Obama is collecting his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, an important story is unfolding in relative obscurity, in North Korea. Furious over a confiscatory currency “reform,” citizens of the world’s most repressive state have begun publicly criticizing their government.
It is hard to overstate just how bold a move that is.
Not to worry. Dear Leaders are always ready to take in bad news.
The unionized jackboot dunce parade is at it again.
So the decision to publish it on the Internet is probably a questionable one. On top of that, however, is where the real idiocy shines. They chose to publish a redacted version of the document, hiding all the super-important stuff from the public. But they apparently don’t understand how redaction works in the electronic document world. See, rather than actually removing the offending text from the document they just drew a black box on top of it. Turns out that PDF documents don’t really care about the black box like that and the actual content of the document is still in the file.
Yup, their crack legal staff managed to screw this one up pretty badly. Want to know which twelve passports will instantly get you shunted over for secondary screening, simply by showing them to the ID-checking agent? Check out Section 2A-2 (C) (1) (b) (iv). Want to know the procedure for CIA-escorted passengers to be processed through the checkpoint? That’s in the document, too. Details on the calibration process of the metal detectors is in there. So is the procedure for screening foreign dignitaries.
Finding really bad art on public buildings isn’t too hard. Like the City Hall in Compton:
I’m not sure that “birthing” is really the verb they’re after, but whatever. Now, compare and contrast two photos. One is on the City Hall (just to the left – Har! – of the “birthing mall” picture) near the courthouse in Compton, and the other isn’t. Can you tell which is which?
Don’t be hasty.
Thulsa Doom never had so much power over his thralls as we do.
I’m not sure how I feel about this.
Michael Yon emails with this cautiously optimistic note:
President Obama’s decision to send more troops is popular among the troops here. And for the first time I see a real fighting chance emerging. Though sharply increased fighting should be expected, there are cracks in the Taliban. They are not invincible and we can beat them, and finally I believe we probably actually will. (Touch wood, and pass the ammo…)
If you followed Yon’s reporting in Iraq you knew about the civil war months before the MSM or the government talked about it, and you also knew we had won months before anybody else. He has been warning for a long time that Afghanistan was being lost, so this is very big news indeed.
He’s got a short dispatch up. And, if you’re on Twitter, you should follow him there at twitter.com/Michael_Yon. He posts lots of interesting mini dispatches there. Last night, for example, he tweeted about several attacks we’ve made on Taliban IED emplacement teams where the Tali left bodies and equipment behind; something they don’t usually do. “So I asked COL Tunnell for his assessment about why Taliban abandoned what they normally take. COL Tunnell thinks their network is damaged.”
I completely trust science, the process. It is the only method we have for figuring out how nature actually works. The AGW debate, it’s worth remembering isn’t all science.
Here’s a handy flow chart.
Or maybe religion should be on the chart.
Andy McCarthy warns, “prepare to be infuriated.”
It’s been brought to my attention by several reliable sources that the Defense Department has brought Louay Safi to Fort Hood as an instructor, and that he has been lecturing on Islam to our troops in Fort Hood who are about to deploy to Afghanistan. Safi is a top official of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and served as research director at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).
Worse, last evening, Safi was apparently permitted to present a check (evidently on behalf of ISNA) to the families of the victims of last month’s Fort Hood massacre. A military source told the blogger Barbarossa at the Jawa Report: “This is nothing short of blood money. This is criminal and the Ft. Hood base commander should be fired right now.”
Update:
Christopher Hitchens on why Hasan should have been stopped before he committed jihad.
What about the emphasis on Hasan’s supposedly knife-edge mental state? Well, even supposing it to have been precarious, it can hardly have been improved by immersion in the rantings of Anwar al-Awlaki. I do not say that all practitioners of woman-hating, anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic suicide immolations are themselves insane, but I do say that the teaching itself is demented. In the same way, I do not say that all Muslims are terrorists, but I have noticed that an alarmingly high proportion of terrorists are Muslim. A paranoid or depressive person—of whom we have many millions in our midst—does not have to end up screaming religious slogans while butchering his fellow creatures. But a paranoid or depressive person who is in regular touch with a jihadist “spiritual leader” is presented with a ready-made script that offers him paradise in exchange for homicide.
But instead of being from California they are from Texas and Georgia.
Carter says the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution mandates equal penalties for similar offenses, and that the failure of the IRS to assess any penalties against Geithner demands similar penalties for all taxpayers with substantially equivalent cases. “This bill seeks to codify what is now established by the law of precedent,” says Carter. “The Geithner case has established a legal precedent for the determination of penalties by the IRS, and that precedent can be cited in all federal tax courts. The penalty is now set at zero.” “Taxpayers who willfully attempt to evade paying their fair taxes should pay a penalty, or our tax code becomes unenforceable,” says Carter. “This bill is not to reward tax evaders, but to defend the Rule of Law itself. If we as a nation choose not to enforce the law against the politically privileged, then we cannot enforce the law against others without undermining respect for the law itself.”
Today’s potpourri features a deceptively simple application of CG, and a darkly violent application of high-speed cameras.
Remember: If it looks easy, it was difficult. And vice versa.
I think Derek Lowe has it about right.
A third issue I want to comment on are the problems with the data and its analysis. I have deep sympathy for the fellow who tried to reconcile the various poorly documented and conflicting data sets and buggy, unannotated code that the CRU has apparently depended on. And I can easily see how this happens. I’ve been on long-running projects, especially some years ago, where people start to lose track of which numbers came from where (and when), where the underlying raw data are stored, and the history of various assumptions and corrections that were made along the way. That much is normal human behavior. But this goes beyond that.
Those of us who work in the drug industry know that we have to keep track of such things, because we’re making decisions that could eventually run into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money. And eventually we’re going to be reviewed by regulatory agencies that are not staffed with our friends, and who are perfectly capable of telling us that they don’t like our numbers and want us to go spend another couple of years (and another fifty or hundred million dollars) generating better ones for them. The regulatory-level lab and manufacturing protocols (GLP and GMP) generate a blizzard of paperwork for just these reasons.
But the stakes for climate research are even higher. The economic decisions involved make drug research programs look like roundoff errors. The data involved have to be very damned good and convincing, given the potential impact on the world economy, through both the possible effects of global warming itself and the effects of trying to ameliorate it.
I don’t think the emails are much of a big deal, except as they indicate any lawbreaking. Even wanting to stay out of “tainted” journals makes sense if you assume the analogy of evolutionary scientists wanting to avoid journals that have been coopted by Intelligent Design cranks or other creationists. But to assume that you have to assume that climate science is as settled as evolution.
Evolution is the only theory for speciation and there are no competing theories. There is a lot of evidence for AGW but much of the data is lost, and there are competing hypotheses. The climate is a complex system, and the computer models of it are clunky (as revealed by the CRU data dump) and rely on iffy data sets. The data sets in support of evolution are many (fossils take second place to DNA evidence) and nothing in modern biology makes any sense except in light of evolution. The same cannot yet be said for any climate hypothesis. (I see nothing that’s risen yet to the standard of a theory because there aren’t any good and tested predictions.)
So to the deliberately offensive who want to call skeptics “deniers”, using a deliberately political term, I say knock it off and show proper respect. While it’s true that some of the anti-AGW noise out there is ideologically-driven any honest person would have to admit that the same is just as true, if not more so, on the pro AGW side.
Scientists are humans, not saints. They’re supposed to show disciplined thought, so they get held to a higher standard, but they are not immune to making mistakes.
Update:
A commenter on another post sent this abstract.
Policymakers need to know whether prediction is possible and if so whether any proposed forecasting method will provide forecasts that are substantively more accurate than those from the relevant benchmark method. Inspection of global temperature data suggests that it is subject to irregular variations on all relevant time scales and that variations during the late 1900s were not unusual. In such a situation, a “no change” extrapolation is an appropriate benchmark forecasting method. We used the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s annual average thermometer data from 1850 through 2007 to examine the performance of the benchmark method. The accuracy of forecasts from the benchmark is such that even perfect forecasts would be unlikely to help policymakers. For example, mean absolute errors for 20- and 50-year horizons were 0.18°C and 0.24°C. We nevertheless demonstrate the use of benchmarking with the example of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1992 linear projection of long-term warming at a rate of 0.03°C-per-year. The small sample of errors from ex ante projections at 0.03°C-per-year for 1992 through 2008 was practically indistinguishable from the benchmark errors. Validation for long-term forecasting, however, requires a much longer horizon. Again using the IPCC warming rate for our demonstration, we projected the rate successively over a period analogous to that envisaged in their scenario of exponential CO2 growth—the years 1851 to 1975. The errors from the projections were more than seven times greater than the errors from the benchmark method. Relative errors were larger for longer forecast horizons. Our validation exercise illustrates the importance of determining whether it is possible to obtain forecasts that are more useful than those from a simple benchmark before making expensive policy decisions.
And the indispensable Derb has a great column on why, even with all of this, we should trust science.
Well, of course we all do trust science. We trust Bernoulli’s Principle every time we get on a plane; we trust celestial mechanics when we take the kids outside to watch a scheduled lunar eclipse; we trust subatomic physics when we relax with an iPod; we trust the laws of chemistry every time we strike a match; we trust the theories of Special and General Relativity when we consult a GPS gadget; we trust natural selection when we fret about drug-resistant disease strains or pesticide-resistant crop infestations; we trust molecular biology every time we pop a pill. Our trust in science is well-nigh unbounded. We hardly draw a breath without trusting science.
Derb’s not up on his aeronautics and doesn’t know that Bernoulli accounts for only a small portion of lift, but his point is valid. Yuval Levin concurs.
…it shows, as Derb notes, that science is a human endeavor, and therefore highly prone to corruptions of all sorts. I do think it’s fair to say, though, that science is less prone to them (or better equipped to correct for them) than most great human endeavors.
As we say around the shop, trust the process.
