Cargo Cult Climate Science | The Resilient Earth

Richard once wrote a piece called Cargo Cult Science. It focuses on people who get lost in the trappings of science and miss the point of the scientific enterprise. In explaining what he means by "cargo cult science", he writes:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Doug Hoffman connects cargo cult science with climate science in his piece: Cargo Cult Climate Science at The Resilient Earth.

In this age where climate scientists are embroiled in public scandal, it is instructive to compare the actions of the CRU crew and others so recently in the news with Feynman's ethical standards. For those not following the Climategate scandal, a number of prominent climate change alarmists were caught out withholding and ultimately destroying climate data rather than letting critics review the data themselves. Here is what Feynman said about such shenanigans:

[T]here is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
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Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

Feynman summarized it this way: “the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” Yet, the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit breached Britain's Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

Again, when I was learning science, I learned that your write-up had to include your data, your procedures, and an interested reader would need to know in order to replicate your experiment. If a reader had to be psychic in order to reconstruct the experiment, I got marked down on my write-up.

The CRU and ICPP researchers must not have gone to Cal State Univ. Los Angeles.

Markets Make People Fairer

Evolutionary psychology has worked to show that a lot of our sense of morality is in our genetic makeup – hardwired in, as it were. Well, according to this piece at Reason Magazine, markets seem to help. Science Shows That Markets Make People Fairer

Are people innately fair-minded or is it learned behavior? A fascinating new study, "Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment," that is a big step toward resolving this question is being published today in the journal Science [subscription required]. The researchers find strong evidence that market institutions cause people to treat each other, especially, strangers more fairly. The research is based on the results of behaviorial experiments in 15 different societies which have varying amounts of integration into markets.

In a way, it makes sense. Societies that implement rules that make social interactions, including trade, fairer, would tend to be more successful than those that don't. The more successful societies spread farther and have more influence.

The path to single payer (Wizbang)

Kim Priestap shows how ObamaCare could very plausibly lead to a single-payer system: The path to single payer

The bill the House that is supposed to come up for a vote this weekend will impose regulations on all health insurance companies that will make it impossible for them to stay in business. They will be required to provide insurance to people with preexisting conditions. The only way any insurance company can stay afloat when it is required to accept the sickest people is if everyone, the young and healthy specifically, buy insurance as well. Healthier people don't require as much health care, so their premiums will go to pay the claims for sicker people.

But here's the problem. The fine for not buying health insurance is less than the cost of insurance itself. Since there's no incentive for the healthiest among us to buy insurance since they will have to be accepted when they do get they get sick, many people will choose to pay the fine, which will go to the government and not the insurance companies.

Naturally, it won't be too long before the insurance companies find themselves paying out more in claims than they receive in premiums. No company can stay in business under those circumstances. If the insurance companies try to increase their rates in order to stop the bleeding, the government will have the authority to call the rate increases excessive and will deny them. The fates of the insurance companies will be sealed.

Crime and punishment

Bernie Madoff has been beaten up in prison, to the deep satisfaction, if not glee, of many people.

A fellow inmate at Butner federal prison brutually fulfilled the fantasy of millions by savagely beating the piss out of ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, reports WSJ. (source)

From Facebook (Identities redacted to protect the innocent):

J

The *ss-whipping took place in December. The prisoner officials are just now making it public. Ah, it couldn't have happened to a better guy.

me

I agree he deserved to be punished, but I'm not happy at the glee people are finding in news of what is, after all, vigilante action, especially from people who would normally object fiercely to such.

J

Normally I am anti-vigilante. In this case, he needs more than just incarceration. The pain and suffering he has personally caused he deserves to be beaten daily.

S

He wiped out an eight MILLION dollar fund's worth raised over the past forty years by two generations of rabbis at my uncle's temple in NYC... whatever he gets, he richly deserves.

K

Its human nature to want to see retribution on those who hurt others. This guy didn't just steal from celebrities and the ultra-rich. He wiped out the savings of people set to retire. Elderly folks who will be forced to work beyond their years, now hoping they don't end up destitute. We can say we object to vigilante justice, but the good person ... See Morein all of us want to see justice at the end. Incarceration is punishment, but in his case, a far cry from the level he deserves. He'll get 3 square meals a day and a warm bed. Some of these poor people are still trying to figure out how they will make it past the next few years.

The glee is justified. The beatings he gets should be the tip of the iceberg. If there is God/Karma/Cylon-god, whatever,..then the rest of his time of earth should be a living hell.

me

This is a fascinating thread for a couple of reasons. Absolutely fascinating.

First of all, the notion that it's OK to wish this person to be beaten -- to continue to be beaten -- over money. So many times, we sneer at people who get more upset over monetary crimes than we do over murder or other crimes of violence.

And one of the notions I'm constantly encountering in the health care debate is that the health care industry should not be paying so much attention to money. Don't ask how we're going to pay for care, just make it happen. Doctors shouldn't be so worried about money anyway.


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Second, and rather gratifying, after the argument I had over on Live Journal regarding waterboarding the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it's so nice to see such full-throated support of something that is not even debatable -- beatings *are* torture.

But it seems odd to me that so many people in society are squeamish about pouring water on the face of someone who plotted to kill thousands of innocent people, and personally cut the head off of Daniel Pearl, but they're perfectly fine with torturing someone whose only crime is cheating greedy people.

Sous-Vide 101: Prime Steak Primer

You may have seen it on Iron Chef -- vacuum seal meat in plastic bags and then cook it in an immersion cooker with the water temperature precisely controlled. Serious Eats has a primer on the use of the immersion cooker for steak. Sous-Vide 101: Prime Steak Primer | Serious Eats

Finally, anyone with a bit of cash (or a generous friend or two) can produce perfectly cooked proteins without fail—chicken with a juiciness the Colonel's wife only dreamed of, and the kind of double-thick pork chops that would've made me break out a celebratory PBR mid-service, had I been able to produce it when I was a line cook.

Unfortunately, there aren't too many practical resources for home cooks now that they've actually got the damn machines. Hopefully, this new recipe series will shed some light on sous-vide cookery basics.

Alice in Wonderland

Neat stuff online...

What could be more beautiful than the original manuscript? This is the original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, the pen-name of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician. It is called "Alice's Adventures Underground" and it is a treasure of the British Library. The book is in their online gallery and you can look at each hand-written, hand-drawn page (all 91 pages). Here is the link:

British Library Online Gallery-Virtual Book

How to make a snake

How to make a snake

First, you start with a lizard.

Really, I'm not joking. Snakes didn't just appear out of nowhere, nor was there simply some massive cosmic zot of a mutation in some primordial legged ancestor that turned their progeny into slithery limbless serpents. One of the tougher lessons to get across to people is that evolution is not about abrupt transmutations of one form into another, but the gradual accumulation of many changes at the genetic level which are typically buffered and have minimal effects on the phenotype, only rarely expanding into a lineage with a marked difference in morphology.

So if you want to know where snakes came from, the right place to start is to look at their nearest cousins, the lizards, and ask what snakes and lizards have in common, that is at the same time different from more distant relatives, like mice, turtles, and people…and then you'll have an idea of the shared genetic substrate that can make a snake out of a lizard-like early squamate.

Furthermore, one obvious place to look is at the pattern of the Hox genes. Hox genes are primary regulators of the body plan along the length of the animal; they are expressed in overlapping zones that specify morphological regions of the body, such as cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral/pelvic, and caudal mesodermal tissues, where, for instance, a thoracic vertebra would have one kind of shape with associated ribs, while lumbar vertebra would have a different shape and no ribs. These identities are set up by which Hox genes are active in the tissue forming the bone. And that's what makes the Hox genes interesting in this case: where the lizard body plan has a little ribless interruption to form pelvis and hindlimbs, the snake has vertebra and ribs that just keep going and going. There must have been some change in the Hox genes (or their downstream targets) to turn a lizard into a snake.

There are four overlapping sets of Hox genes in tetrapods, named a, b, c, and d. Each set has up to 13 individual genes, where 1 is switched on at the front of the animal and 13 is active way back in the tail. This particular study looked at just the caudal members, 10-13, since those are the genes whose expression patterns straddle the pelvis and so are likely candidates for changes in the evolution of snakes.

Here's a summary diagram of the morphology and patterns of Hox gene expression in the lizard (left) and snake (right). Let's see what we can determine about the differences.

follow the link for diagrams and the remaining text.

What, Me Worry?

What, Me Worry?

While it's been noted that the one thing President Obama needs to make his arguments, it's a bad guy. He desperately needs a villain that he can rail against, so he can properly cast himself as the "good guy' fighting against the bad guys. It's pretty much lifted whole cloth from the conservative side, but at least with them you can be halfway certain that the bad guys are actual bad guys -- the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein, Iran, and whatnot.

This dovetails quite nicely with the liberals' own preferred tactic of finding and protecting "victims." If there's anything that comes across as more noble and self-sacrificing and good than fighting the bad guys, it's defending the helpless. Any scholar or fan of the heroic myths (Joseph Campbell, comic books, classical mythology, etc.) can tell you this. It's hard-wired into the American psyche.

However, these worthies currently using these archetypes should know better -- if you're going to make it work, you better do your homework first. People are a lot more savvy now, and they will distinguish between actual representations of these archetypes, and weak-ass attempts to fake them.

Case in point: President Obama's latest poster girl for health care reform, Natoma Canfield. She's a woman who came down with leukemia when she didn't have health insurance, and now she's sick as hell.

Obama's name-dropping her all over the place, talking about how much better off she'd be if we'd had ObamaCare in place before she got ill. And she's remarkably photogenic for the role -- he'd wanted her to introduce him at his carefully-screened speech, but she was bedridden with her illness.

But a few people started looking at her circumstances (after she and Obama had invited us all to imagine ourselves in her shoes, it was only natural that a few might actually check what size shoe she wears), and the details painted quite a different picture

It turns out that she wouldn't necessarily have been better off under ObamaCare. She's already being treated at one of the nation's top cancer clinics, who did NOT turn her away when it was discovered she had no insurance. They are not planning on putting a lien on her house if she can't pay the very high costs the clinic is incurring in treating her.

Under the current fatally flawed, cruel, heartless, unforgiving, greedy system, Ms. Canfield is getting some of the best care available for her condition, and while the hospital would like to recoup at least some of the money they're spending on her, they're going to do all they can to do so in as kind a way as possible: helping her get state aid, qualifying her for charity care, or other avenues of payment -- but have already ruled out taking her home.

The oncologists are not running a credit check on her before her chemotherapy. The nurses are not treating her pain medications as COD. There is no running meter on her hospital bed. And no one at the hospital is chastising her for remaining essentially unemployed for 12 years.

Under ObamaCare, though, as Jim Hoft noted, her prior bout with cancer might not have been detected as quickly as it was -- the screenings that caught it would have been deferred until she was older, as she wasn't in a statistically significant risk group.

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What these people want -- and what Obama is trying to secure for them -- is freedom from responsibility. Freedom from worrying.Freedom from anxiety.

Well, guess what? There's no guarantee of that in life. Life comes with exactly one guarantee -- that it will end. We all -- rich, poor, white, black, man, woman, powerful, powerless -- all get one permanent, lasting death. That's it. That's all we're promised. Everything else is catch as catch can.

Unless, of course, you're a liberal. Then you have a constitutional right to be treated :"fairly" by life under every exigence. And if something "unfair" happens, then the government is obligated to come in and make it all better.

Bjorn Lomborg on climate change

Bjorn Lomborg has a piece titled: Fixing climate change shouldn't cost the Earth

FOR the better part of a decade, I have upset many climate activists by pointing out that there are far better ways to stop global warming than trying to persuade governments to force or bribe citizens into slashing their reliance on fuels that emit carbon dioxide.

What especially bugs my critics is the idea that cutting carbon would cost far more than the problem it is meant to solve.

"How can that be true?" they ask. "We are talking about the end of the world. What could be worse or more costly than that?"

They have a point. If we actually face, as Al Gore recently put it, "an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale preventative measures to protect human civilisation as we know it", then no price would be too high to stop global warming. But are the stakes really that high?

The answer is no. Even the worst-case scenarios proposed by mainstream climate scientists, scenarios that go far beyond what the consensus climate models predict, are not as bad as Gore would have us believe. For example, a sea-level rise of 5m - more than eight times what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects, and more than twice what is probably physically possible - would not deluge all or even most of mankind.
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Why are we willing to calculate costs and benefits when it comes to traffic safety and terrorism, but not when devising policies to deal with global warming? Perhaps it is because we experience the downside of excessive traffic regulation or security measures every day, while the downside of bad climate policy is more of an abstraction. It shouldn't be, for the risks posed by bad climate policy deserve as much attention as the risks of worse-than-expected climate impacts - maybe more.

Remember how biofuel requirements were supposed to help reduce carbon emissions? In fact, the artificially inflated demand for ethanol and for the corn to manufacture it wound up driving up food prices (which pushed about 30 million poor people into the ranks of the malnourished). It ate up more arable land, which led to the destruction of rainforests and created a situation that will result in more CO2 emissions over the next 100 years.

The biofuel lesson is salutary. If we panic and make the wrong choices in response to global warming, we risk leaving the world's most vulnerable people even worse off. If we are to have a constructive dialogue about the smartest policy responses to global warming, we need to replace our fixation on far-fetched Armageddon scenarios with realism about the true costs of this challenge.

It seems Bjorn Lomborg is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “The China Syndrome Counterpunch”

Could China shrug? Dafydd ap Hugh doesn't think it's that much of a threat. He writes in his post: “The China Syndrome Counterpunch”.

...fearmongers suggest China could threaten to dump all their T-bills at bargain-basement prices, driving down the value of the bonds we need to sell to finance our out-of-control spending. The sudden drop in bond values would force us to jack the interest rate through the sky, just to get people to buy them. This in turn is supposed to drive our prime rate into the stratosphere as well, bankrupting the country.

To avoid this scenario -- dubbed the "China Syndrome" by some economists -- we will (so goes the argument) give the Commies anything they demand in the way of foreign and domestic policy and military stand-downs... to appease them, placate them, and keep them from carrying through their extortion.

(Skipping over his cite of Beldar's explanation of why it's not that much of a threat.)

...I have another angle on the whole thing. I say it would be absolutely wonderful for us if the Chinese really did enact their eponymous syndrome!

So why am I right and all those professional economists wrong? Because they think like acolytes of the Dismal Science -- that is, dismally -- whereas I think like a novelist.

Here is my scenario:

1. Red China threatens us with a China Syndrome unless we sever relations with Taiwan (for example).

2. We tell them to go stuff an eggroll.

3. They decide to call our "bluff," and they really do dump all their T-bills at, say, half their current value.

4. The Federal Reserve jumps into action, working through proxies to buy every dang Treasury Note China sells, as many as we can get our mitts on.

5. Now that we have bought back hundreds of billions of dollars of our "debt" for fifty cents on the dollar, we wait for the dust to settle and the market to recover -- then we sell them again for the normal price.

6. We send a letter to Beijing, thanking them for their generous donation to the Save Liberty and U.S. Sovereign Health (SLUSSH) fund. With heartfelt thanks, we settle back to enjoy our windfall profit on our own debt instruments.

The moral is simple: Whenever any entity -- whether individual person, giant corporation, or sovereign nation -- buys or sells bonds, equities, derivatives, collectibles, futures, or indeed any other investment instrument on the basis of politics, party, policy, or pique -- that is, whenever one makes investment decisions for any reason other than pure economics -- that entity is going to lose its shirt... along with its coat, tie, pants, and undies.

This Lizardian Rule of Thumb applies to universities that divest their stock in Israeli companies to protest Israel's dealings with the Palestinians; it applies to lefties who dump their mutual funds if they contain Starbucks or Nike stock; and it applies to conservative Christians who will only invest in companies that are run by ministers: You're going to lose a huge wad of your return by letting extraneous circumstances dictate your financial decisions.

Of course, doesn't this depend on an administration savvy enough to recognize this opportunity?

The Boxer Blimp

What Darwin's Doubters Get Wrong

Michael Ruse remarks on a new book, What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry A. Fodor. His piece, in the Chronical of Higher Education, is titled: What Darwin's Doubters Get Wrong.

...in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin. To understand their critique, we must first put the clock back a year...

Evolutionary biology is on a roll, and that was a cause for celebration—and frenetic presentations that jammed in as much new science as possible. Moreover, to a person, the scientists saw that the first point led smoothly into the second. Everyone appreciates the tools of Darwinism, above all the mechanism of natural selection. But great science doesn't stand still. It picks up and carries ideas and findings way beyond the wildest hopes of its founders. Evolutionary biology today is deeply Darwinian, but it has outpaced the Origin in ways that its author could never have imagined. To use a hackneyed phrase, Darwin gave biology a paradigm, and biologists have been expanding it ever since.

... The most exciting discovery in recent evolutionary biology is that humans and fruit flies, Drosophila, are remarkably similar at the molecular level, like DNA. Organisms really are built on the Lego principle, with the same building blocks: Go one way and get a human, another way and get a fly. Meanwhile evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists like Marc Hauser, at Harvard University, are studying moral behavior with such precision that they are able to pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in ration-al thinking, emotional reactions, and motivations. And, as always, the context is Darwinian. Why did natural selection push things this way rather than some other way?

Exciting times, which makes it all the more remarkable to hear voices from within the mainstream of philosophy questioning the veracity of evolutionary theory. I'll mention three. First there is Alvin Plantinga....

Plantinga is an open enthusiast of intelligent design, the belief that at some points in life's history an intelligent being intervened to move the process along. I am not quite sure whether this makes him a full-blooded creationist, although he has in the past said he does not think it an impossible position. Some supporters of intelligent design, like Phillip E. Johnson, an emeritus professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial (Regnery, 1991), seem to reject all forms of evolution. Others, like Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, 1996), seem to accept a lot of common descent and might even be called theistic evolutionists, meaning that they think God guides the course of continuous development. Wherever Plantinga stands on this spectrum, he stands with the intelligent-design theorists in strongly emphasizing what they see as the falsity of Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Why does Plantinga feel this way? In his view, Darwinism implies that there is and can be no direction in life's history. All change is a function of randomly appearing new variations (mutations) that are then sifted by the opportunistic mechanism of natural selection. Although new variations are not uncaused, they do not appear according to need. ... Stephen Jay Gould used to pun that the arrival of the human species was entirely an accident brought on by our lucky stars—a comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and allowing for the rise of mammals. It is precisely that kind of thinking to which Plantinga is opposed.
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New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel ... states firmly that he does not believe in a deity, he has now come out against Darwinism. If Nagel is not a supporter of intelligent design, one wonders why he says what he does. He has endorsed a book by Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2009), naming it one of the top books of 2009 in the Times Literary Supplement.

Doubting the Darwinian claim that the sources of variation are undirected, Nagel quotes Behe as an authority. "Are the sources of genetic variation uniformly random or not? That is the central issue, and the point of entry for defenders of ID," Nagel writes. He goes on to tell us that Behe's recent book, The Edge of Evolution, examines the "currently available evidence about the normal frequency and biochemical character of random mutations in the genetic material of several organisms."...
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Jerry Fodor, no less distinguished than Nagel and Plantinga, is well known for his claim that the mind is composed of separately functioning modules. And he, too, has taken to criticizing Darwinian theory, first in an article in the London Review of Books and now in What Darwin Got Wrong. Fodor finds something deeply flawed in contemporary evolutionary thinking: "An appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists are coming to think that the theory of natural selection can no longer be taken for granted. This is, so far, mostly straws in the wind; but it's not out of the question that a scientific revolution—no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory—is in the offing."

To Fodor the notion of natural selection is flawed. He has long been on record arguing that metaphors in science are misleading, and that they must be eliminated as science matures. In the case of Darwinism, we have an analogy or metaphor at work, between the artificial selection that breeders use when they improve livestock—shaggier sheep, beefier cows—and the process of differential reproduction that Darwinians think leads to evolutionary change (in the direction of adaptive advantage). Fodor believes that differential reproduction illicitly brings mind into the natural process:

The present worry is that the explication of natural selection by appeal to selective breeding is seriously misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. Because breeders have minds, there's a fact of the matter about what traits they breed for; if you want to know, just ask them. Natural selection, by contrast, is mindless; it acts without malice aforethought. That strains the analogy between natural selection and breeding, perhaps to the breaking point. What, then, is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection? The question is wide open as of this writing.

What does one say about these critics? One could certainly pick apart individual things, for instance Fodor's claims about selective breeding versus natural selection. The very last thing that Darwin and his followers are trying to do is put mind into nature. In both artifice and nature, some organisms are going to reproduce and others are not, and the reasons for that are (on average) going to be connected to the different features of the winners and losers. To say that a speckled moth is less likely to be eaten by a robin than a dark moth, because the robin can less easily see the speckled moth against the lichen-covered tree, is to say nothing about God or any other conscious being.

One could also pick up on the fact that neither Plantinga nor Nagel seems to have the slightest awareness of the scientific criticisms that have been launched against intelligent design. Every example that supporters of intelligent design produce to suggest that natural causes are not adequate—the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade—has been shown to be the exquisite end result of evolution.
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But rather than work over the details, I want to draw attention to the way this crop of critics ignores evolutionary biology—aside from the kind of cherry-picking in which Fodor engages. Nagel may sneer about the failure to find "accessible literature" that answers his worries. In what part of the library was he doing his literature search? Where, for example, is any discussion of the Grants' work on the Galápagos finches? What about a detailed look at the new scholarship that is challenging earlier thinking about the evolution of bipedalism? What about the discoveries of molecular biology and of the similarities (homologies) between humans and fruit flies? And why no mention of Marc Hauser and his work uncovering the secrets of moral thinking? There is a deafening silence on those and other issues. Fodor, Nagel, and Plantinga don't need to turn themselves into biochemists, but some awareness of the issues and advances would not be entirely misplaced.

This total lack of interest in the science is surely suggestive. The critics are being driven by other, for them deeper, concerns. And as an evolutionist, I turn to the past for clues. What fueled the initial opposition to Darwin was a concern with our species, with Homo sapiens. For 150 years, since the Origin, critics have feared that we humans might become part of the evolutionary picture—not just our bodies, but our minds, our very souls. What makes us distinctively and uniquely human?
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Plantinga is open in his fear that Darwinism makes impossible the guaranteed existence of our species. More, for years he has argued that Darwinism is bound up with the metaphysical belief that everything is natural (as opposed to supernatural), and that this leads to a collapse of rational belief and knowledge. The chance elements in Darwinism are simply not compatible with Plantinga's Christian faith.

As nonbelievers, Nagel and Fodor are a bit different, but not that different. For years Nagel has argued against a reductive view of the human mind, believing it to be more than just molecules in motion—the obvious end result of Darwinism. At some level, Nagel believes, the mind is above the material. It is perhaps a stretch, but probably not too much of a stretch, to say that the kind of sympathetic attitude that Nagel takes toward intelligent design points not so much to a concealed theism (akin to Plantinga's open theism) as to a kind of vitalism, in which there are nonnatural, nonphysical forces that direct things in the material world.

And then there is Fodor. The final section of his new book is very revealing. As a dreadful warning to those who do not accept his main conclusions, Fodor prints passage after passage of claims by Darwinians that one can understand human nature and thinking as the product of natural selection: This is where we will all end up if we don't stop the rot right now. My suspicion is that Fodor doesn't really give a damn about fruit flies or finches or anything else out there. But when it comes to Homo sapiens, he wants no part of a naturalistic explanation that reduces design to the workings of blind law. There may not be a God, but we sure are made in his image.

I often joke, as one who spends a lot of time fighting creationists, that when one of them says something silly, that means more work for me: bread on the table. When one of them says something really silly, there is strawberry jam, too. In 2005, after a trial in Dover, Pa., a federal judge ruled that intelligent design should not be taught in schools. Pat Robertson's response—"God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them"—kept me and my family well fed for weeks.

The Greatest Story Ever Told -- 06 -- Goodbye antimatter, hello protons, neu...

The Greatest Story Ever Told -- 06 -- Goodbye antimatter, hello protons, neutrons, and electrons!

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. -Dave Barry

Welcome back to our series on The Greatest Story Every Told, where we start from before the big bang and come forward in time to get the Universe we have today. (If you're just joining us, go back for parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.) Last time, we talked about how we made more matter than antimatter (and we clarified some questions). So what does our Universe look like at this point?

Well, the Universe is still full of hot radiation, flying around and slamming into everything, including nearly equal amounts of both matter and antimatter. Nearly equal, but not quite. For every ten billion antiquarks, there are something like ten billion and six quarks, and for every ten billion positrons, there are ten billion and six electrons. And while all of this is going on, the Universe is expanding and cooling as it continues to age. Everything moves away from everything else, just like dots on the surface of a balloon.

(For those of you wondering just how far back in time I'm talking about, the Universe is about one femtosecond, or 10^-15 seconds, old at this point.)

Well, what happens as the Universe expands and cools? Things smack into each other far less often, for one, because there's more space between them in general. And when they do smack into each other, because things are cooling in addition to expanding, they hit each other with less energy. Even though matter and antimatter are constantly running into one another and annihilating, what's not happening anymore as the Universe ages is that you're not making more matter and antimatter to replace what you're destroying; it's all becoming radiation. In other words, this happens.

And its counterpart, shown below, is no longer happening once the Universe gets cool enough.

So instead of a fiery inferno, where everything is continuously blasted apart mere instants after it's created,

things are instead coming together a little more calmly. This means when two up quarks and one down quark get together, they can finally, when the Universe is about 10 microseconds old, form a stable proton. And when two down quarks and one up quark get together, they can form a stable neutron.

Go read the rest of it.

Race? American!

We're an American Man

In Letter III of his Letters From an America Farmer (1782), J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur famously asked: "What then is the American, this new man?" He answered: "He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He has become an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims." (More on De Crevecoeur here.)

The Census Bureau will have none of it. Mark Krikorian observes: "Fully one-quarter of the space on this year's form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government's business (despite the New York Times' assurances to the contrary on today's editorial page)." The editorial to which Krikorian refers is here.

Mark Krikorian harks back in spirit to De Crevecouer. Krikorian has set up a Facebook page inviting Americans to follow his example:

In 2010, the new CENSUS will be taken.
Last time, instead of listing my race, I listed me as "HUMAN."
This next year, I will be listing myself as "AMERICAN"... please Join ME!!
If you believe, as do I, that when America QUITS asking people what their COLOR, RACE, Ethnicity is, then we will all become a stronger Group: Americans.

Krikorian therefore suggests:

[W]e should answer Question 9 by checking the last option -- "Some other race" -- and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

So remember: Question 9 -- "Some other race" -- "American." Pass it on.

As he says, pass it on.

Help curb voter fraud in California

Help curb voter fraud in California

One of the things the last few elections has revealed is escalating voter fraud in America, fraud of the type that aligns us more closely with a banana republic than with a traditional Western nation.  Thus, we know that groups such as ACORN have registered thousands of non-existent people.  And because America has traditionally had an honor system at the ballot box ("If you say you're Minnie Mouse, than I guess you're Minnie Mouse.  Please, go vote."), little has been done to stem the impact at the ballot of those fraudulently registered voters.

There is now a ballot initiative circulating in California that officially concedes that the honor system no longer works.  It will require all California voters to show photo ID at the polling place, and it mandates steps to protect against voter fraud in absentee ballots too.  Lastly, as a little extra benefit, it allows an extra 15 days for votes sent in by overseas troops.  In other words, the whole ballot is meant to slow down fraud and allow every vote to be counted.

I only heard about this ballot initiative today, but I can assure you that the Democrats will hate it.  They'll waffle on about the fact that poor people just can't manage to obtain government ID, making this an impossible hurdle between themselves and democratic participation.  That this argument is demeaning is obvious.  It also makes no sense when one considers that these same people are able to handle the system with some level of skill when it comes to collecting government benefits.  (And I speak with solid second hand knowledge about this, since someone close to me lives at that level, as do her friends.  Whacked out on perpetual 60s head trips they may be, but they know how to get their welfare checks and food stamps.)

If you are a California voter who is interested in making this initiative a reality on California's ballot, go here, print-up the petition you'll see, sign it, and mail it to

Vote SAFE
925 University Avenue
Sacramento, CA  95825

A couple more things:  First, time is of the essence, since all petitions must be received 131 days before the election.  Second, each petition is written so that two people from the same county can sign it.  Of those two, though, one must not only sign it, but also fill out the "circulator" declaration.

A gene for Alzheimer's makes you smarter

Jerry Pournelle has posted some discussions on the notion of "overclocking the brain" – physiological changes that increase intelligence at the cost of a higher chance of dementia. Now, here's a piece from New Scientist showing that a gene that increases the chance of developing Alzheimer's makes its carriers smarter. A gene for Alzheimer's makes you smarter.

The "allele" in question is epsilon 4, a version of the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE). Having one copy increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's at least fourfold compared with people who have other forms of the gene. A person with two copies has up to 20 times the risk.
....
Her team asked 20 to 35-year-olds to remember which pictures of animals or landscapes they had seen before, while having their brains scanned with functional MRI. It was an easy task and all performed equally well. But a brain region critical to memory lit up more strongly in epsilon 4 carriers than in the others, raising the intriguing possibility that carriers' brains get overworked in early life, only to be worn out by the time they hit old age. MacKay wouldn't go that far, but she says: "It's possible that your brain is having to work harder when it's younger and this may have consequences for later life."

---

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Market Doesn't Ration Health Care

One of the fears about a single-payer option for health care is that it will lead to rationing. A very frequently heard response is, "The Market Already Rations Health Care". Sheldon Richman at The Freeman begs to differ. The Market Doesn't Ration Health Care:

When a person buys five apples in a grocery store rather than ten because he wishes to use the rest of his money for other purposes, it seems entirely wrong to say the market (or even the grocer) has rationed the apples. The customer simply makes his choice on the basis of his preferences and the money available (which is the result of previous transactions).

It is true that as a result of market exchanges, goods and resources change hands and (except for land) locations. But in no sense is this rationing or allocation. The resulting arrangement of resources is simply a product of many transactions. Of course, people’s choices of what and what not to buy and sell at which prices create an arrangement of goods and resources that tends to be intelligible in terms of consumers’ subjective priorities. But that does not warrant calling the process rationing or allocation.

Those words (especially ration, which shares its root with rational) suggest conscious decision-making, as part of a plan, by an agent. In a free market there is no consciousness overseeing this “distribution”—another inappropriate word when it comes to describing the market process.

I am not saying anything that a good economist or other thoughtful person doesn’t already know. I am merely pointing out that we can be more effective in the health care debate if we are more precise in our language. We do not face a choice between methods of rationing medical services. We face a choice between rationing according to a bureaucratic plan and freedom to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges.

Vitamin N

Dennis Prager has had on his show the author of a book on raising children. He considers "no" to be the best thing for parents to say to their children, to the point where he calls it "Vitamin N".

Maybe it's time for the Republicans to take pride in being the "Party of No". Here's a comment from Robert Ringer's Voice of Sanity blog: Saying Yes to the Party of No

Alice in Health Care Land

This is a four part (to date) series by Thomas Sowell.

In part one, he observes that a lot of the discussion of health care is like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

Alice in Health Care:

One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians' answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government. Back when the "single payer" was the patient, people were more selective in what they spent their own money on. You went to a doctor when you had a broken leg but not necessarily every time you had the sniffles or a skin rash. But, when someone else is paying, that is when medical care gets over-used -- and bureaucratic rationing is then imposed, to replace self-rationing.
....
Confusion between costs and prices add to the Alice in Wonderland sense of unreality.

What is called lowering the costs is simply refusing to pay all the costs, by having the government set lower prices, whether for doctors' fees, hospital reimbursements or other charges. Surely no one believes that there will be no repercussions from refusing to pay for what we want. Some doctors are already refusing to accept Medicare or Medicaid patients because the government's reimbursement levels are so low.

Similarly, if it costs a billion dollars to create one new pharmaceutical drug, then either we are going to pay the billion dollars or we are not going to keep on getting new pharmaceutical drugs produced. There is no free lunch.

Virtually everything that is proposed by those who are talking about bringing down the costs of medical care will in fact raise those costs. Mandates on insurance companies? Why are insurance companies not already doing those things that new mandates would require? Because those things raise costs by an amount that people are unwilling to pay to get those benefits.

If not, it would be a slam dunk for the insurance companies to add those benefits to the policies and raise the premiums to cover them. What politicians want to do is look good by imposing mandates, and then let the insurance companies look bad by raising the premiums to cover the additional costs.

It is a great political game, but it does nothing to lower medical costs.

Politicians who want a government monopoly on health insurance can easily get it, just by making it impossible for private insurance companies to charge enough to cover the costs mandated by politicians. The "public option" will then be the only option -- which is to say, we will no longer have any real option.

Alice in Health Care: Part II:

By all means look at other countries, but not just to see what to imitate. See how it actually turns out. Yet there seems to be an amazing lack of interest in examining what government-controlled medical care produces.

While our so-called health care "summit" last week was going on, British newspapers were carrying exposes of terrible, and often deadly, conditions in British hospitals under that country's National Health Service. But this has not become part of our debate on what to expect from government-controlled medical care.

Such scandals are an old story under the National Health Service in Britain, one repeatedly producing fresh scandals that their newspapers carry, but ours ignore.

In addition to a whole series of National Health Service scandals in Britain over the years, the government-run medical system in Britain has far less high-tech medical equipment than there is in the United States. Neither in Britain, Canada, nor in other countries with government-run medical care systems can people get to see doctors, especially surgeons, in as short a time as in the United States.
....
If those who make international comparisons were serious, instead of clever, they would compare the things that medical science can have a great effect on-- cancer survival rates, for example. Americans have some of the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and for some particular cancers, the highest.

When you can get to see a doctor faster, and get treatments underway without waiting for months, while the cancer grows and spreads, you have a better chance of surviving. That, too, is not rocket science. But it is also something that you are not likely to see featured in most of the media, where people are promoting their own pet notions and agendas, instead of giving you the facts on which you can make up your own mind.

Alice in Health Care: Part III:

With all the controversies, charges, counter-charges and buzzwords swirling around the issue of medical care in the United States, there is a lot to be said for going back to square one and asking just what is the fundamental problem.

The quality of the medical care itself is not the problem. Few-- if any-- countries can match American medical training, medical technology or the development of life-saving pharmaceutical drugs in the United States. Most countries with government-controlled medical care cannot come close to matching how fast an American can get medical treatment, particularly from specialists.

Political hype is no reason to throw all that away. In fact, policies based on political hype over the years are what have gotten us into what is most wrong with medical care today-- namely, the way it is paid for.

Alice in Medical Care: Part IV:

Some years ago, one of my favorite doctors retired. On my last visit to his office, he took some time to explain to me why he was retiring early and in good health.

Being a doctor was becoming more of a hassle as the years went by, he said, and also less fulfilling. It was becoming more of a hassle because of the increasing paperwork, and it was less fulfilling because of the way patients came to him.
....
The loss of one doctor-- even a very good doctor-- may not seem very important in the grand scheme of heady medical care "reform" and glittering phrases about "universal health care." But making the medical profession more of a hassle for doctors risks losing more doctors, while increasing the demand for treatment.

A study published in the November 2009 issue of the Journal of Law & Economics showed that a rise in the cost of medical liability insurance led to more reductions of hours of medical service supplied by older doctors than among younger doctors.

Younger doctors, more recently out of medical school and often with huge debts to pay off for the cost of that expensive training, may have no choice but to continue working as hard as possible to try to recoup that huge investment of money and time.
....
Although younger doctors may be trapped in a profession that some of them might not have entered if they had known in advance what all its pluses and minuses would turn out to be, there are two other important groups who are in a position to decide whether or not it is worth it.

Those who are old enough to have paid off their medical school debts long ago, and successful enough that they can afford to retire early, or to take jobs as medical consultants, can opt out of the whole elaborate third-party payment system and its problems. What the rising costs of medical liability insurance has already done for some, other hassles that bureaucracies and politicians create can have the same effect for others.

There is another group that doesn't have to put up with these hassles. These are young people who have reached the stage in their lives when they are choosing which profession to enter, and weighing the pluses and minuses before making their decisions.

Obama's Birth Certificate

Jay Tea comments at length at his blog.

At the Tea Party Convention this weekend, professional gadfly Andrew Breitbart got into it with some folks from World Net Daily about the "birther" issue. For those who've been living under a rock for the past two years, that's the term for those people who -- to put it charitably -- have unresolved doubts as to whether or not President Obama was actually born in Hawaii and is therefore Constitutionally eligible to serve as president.

Breitbart's main argument seems to be that it is a "loser" argument. And he's right.
....
But let's look at the "birthers" from a slightly more strategic level.

First up, what are they achieving now? Well, for one, they're giving Obama's supporters a ton of cover. While they're chasing this mythical "proof," they're NOT looking at what he's doing right now. By obsessing in what may or may not have happened on August of 1961 in Hawaii, or Kenya, or Indonesia, or Iceland, they're not paying attention to what's going on in DC today.

For another, they -- let's face it -- come across as silly. And that lets Obama's backers tar all of his detractors with a very broad brush, and distract from things that really matter.

For one more, I have to ask: what is their long-term goal? Let's play this out. Suppose they get proof that the Hawaiian Certificate of Live Birth is faked, and they get proof Obama was born in Kenya. Then what?

Well, it's way, way too late to overturn the election. Obama was certified as the winner, and his administration has been running things for for over a year. McCain and Palin admitted defeat and have moved on.

Congratulations, birthers. You've just given us President Joe Biden. Smooth move, assholes.

It's a losing issue, and it only gives ammunition to Obama's supporters.

Gays in the Militaries

Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal: Gays in the Militaries

Also worth pondering is the experience of countries in which gays and lesbians serve openly. Britain and Canada are often cited as cases in point, though the deteriorating overall capabilities of their armed forces do not inspire confidence. A better comparison is the Israeli military, which hasn't yet been deemed incompetent or pusillanimous even by those who otherwise routinely defame it.

Israel is not the U.S. It has a conscription-based army that can't idly turn people away. It has its own set of cultural assumptions. The most religiously Orthodox Israelis are the least likely to serve. But it remains an instructive case, especially to those who have sincere and reasonable doubts about the effects of lifting the policy and aren't persuaded by the cheap accusations of "bigotry" that pass for reasoned argument on the subject. As Capt. Raz says, "by not treating it as an 'issue,' it doesn't become one. That's the bottom line."

Bottom line, though: I think the decision should be made by the military, not the social workers or activists.

Five reasons why evolution is important

Steve Newton, writing at the NCSE, lists Five reasons why evolution is important

Writing at the Huffington Post (February 12, 2010), NCSE's Steven Newton offered, in honor of Charles Darwin's 201st birthday, a list of five ways in which evolution is important to medical practice: improving the understanding of H1N1 and emerging diseases, HIV, vaccines, antibiotic resistance, and drug development. "There are a host of other applications of evolution — agriculture, forensics, bioengineering," he concluded. "But the importance of evolution extends beyond its practical side; evolution explains the diversity of life on this planet, shows us our connection to other living things, and reveals profound insights into the processes of nature. Today, on Darwin's 201st birthday, take a moment to reflect on the importance of evolution."

The Guardian begs to differ

The Wall Street Journal had a piece titled How Milton Friedman Saved Chile. Naomi Klein at the Guardian has a response, Milton Friedman did not save Chile.

Klein writes:

According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous "Chicago Boys" are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with "some of the world's strictest building codes."

There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile's modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody US-backed coup. That means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected socialist president. (In truth many Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the first law was adopted in the 1930s).

It's a pity she didn't read a bit further:

Chile also has some of the world's strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.

If you can't afford to adhere to the codes, and you need a place to live, you will live in a place that doesn't adhere to the codes. Chile's economy had turned around, and the country became prosperous enough to implement its codes.

As for the damage Friedman's followers allegedly did to Chile, she fails to mention the 1000% inflation rate before they started meddling, and how the economy turned around afterward. I'm sure she has a response. Why not put it in the article?

How Milton Friedman Saved Chile

From the Wall Street Journal: How Milton Friedman Saved Chile.

Saturday's earthquake in Chile measured 8.8. That's nearly 500 times more powerful than Haiti's, or about one million Hiroshimas. Yet Chile's reported death toll—711 as of this writing—was a tiny fraction of the 230,000 believed to have perished in Haiti.
It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick—and Haitians in houses of straw—when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down. In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina's.
What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman's academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile's "Chicago Boys" had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on.
....
Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

Chile also has some of the world's strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.

In "The Shock Doctrine," Ms. Klein titles one of her sub-chapters "The Myth of the Chilean Miracle." In her reading, the only thing Friedman and the Chicago Boys accomplished was to "hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence." Actual Chileans of all classes—living in the aftermath of an actual shock—may take a different view of Friedman, who helped give them the wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew.

Why scientists must be the new climate sceptics

From New Scientist

I believe we're seeing the blowback of the decade-long battle with the sceptics. Climate scientists have been on a war footing for so long that they are no longer as open to criticism as they should be. Take the reactions of the UEA and IPCC to the damaging stories about them: both organisations initially insisted they had no case to answer and backed down only after further media coverage.

Newspapers should not have to force researchers to be transparent, self-critical and self-correcting: these attributes are essential to science. When they are missing, people lose trust.

....

Science needs to fight back, but not just by attacking its critics. Scientists need to reclaim the badge of "scepticism". They need to show that although the essentials of global warming are settled, the field itself is alive with debate and revision, as all science should be. They need to tell the public that there are things in the science that are open for debate, even if those things do not detract from the case for action.

Without a more open attitude, there is a real risk that the public's doubts about climate science will deepen. And it can take years for a field to recover its standing once people feels that they have been mislead. It has happened in Britain with genetically modified crops and nuclear power. In this case, we cannot afford any more years of mistrust.

Debunking Some Emerging ACORN Liberal Myths

Debunking Some Emerging ACORN Liberal Myths

by Patterico on

This post debunks several liberal myths about ACORN that have emerged in recent weeks — many from Eric Boehlert of Media Matters and Brad Friedman.

POSING AS A PIMP AT ACORN

Liberal Myth: James O'Keefe did not pretend to be a pimp inside ACORN. Instead, he merely presented himself as Hannah Giles's boyfriend, trying to help her escape from an abusive pimp.

Examples of the spreading of the myth:

Eric Boehlert:

O'Keefe pretended to be an aspiring pol, not pimp, in first ACORN vid.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

The video implies that the advice about the 13-year-olds was given with the intent of helping a pimp control them. This doesn't fit the circumstances. In fact, it appears that what happened was that employees were responding to requests on how to get young girls out of sex work, not keep them in.

Brad Friedman:

After not hearing from New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt for nearly a week — during which I'd sent him more and more indisputable evidence that Andrew Breitbart employee James O'Keefe never played his infamous "pimp" character in the offices of ACORN — he responded with a couple of blistering charges.

Brad Friedman again:

Though he can, perhaps, be forgiven there, given that Harshbarger's report had not yet come out confirming that O'Keefe neither dressed as a pimp, nor represented himself as such. Rather, O'Keefe told ACORN workers that he was a college student considering a run for Congress someday, and was hoping to help the prostitute actually escape from an abusive pimp.

(Bold is mine.)

Digby:

[O'Keefe] had dressed like a nice, young, preppie fellow, just trying to help this unfortunate young white girl caught in a bad situation in order to gain the ACORN workers' trust and compassion. He used his stereotypical innocent, youthful, studiously upstanding looks to create a false impression with the ACORN workers and then turned around and filmed some bogus footage of him dressed in a ridiculous pimp costume to give a false impression to the mostly white audience. It was a very clever way to use racial stereotypes on both groups to get what he wanted.

Dave Johnson at the Huffington Post:

In fact, O'Keefe was NOT "dressed as a pimp." He represented himself as a candidate for Congress who was trying to help women who were being exploited. He then doctored the resulting videotapes to make it appear that ACORN acted improperly.

Fact: James O'Keefe posed as a pimp. He repeatedly told ACORN employees that he was setting up a house where Giles and underage girls would turn tricks, and give the proceeds to O'Keefe, who planned to use them for a future Congressional campaign.

Let's take the Baltimore transcript — which is the first ACORN video, and therefore the one where Boehlert denies that O'Keefe pretended to be a pimp. Among other things, we see this:

Tonja: so the type of business okay … the type of business of service you provide let me make sure there is a code for it okay O'Keefe: A code for prostitution? Tonja: Well, yeah I have to have a name and a code number.

and this:

Tonja: they under sixteen so you don't worry about that, but on the other part of the form you can use them as a dependents because they live in your house they are under 16 and they are living in your house. Well you live in a boat but because you are taking care of them so you can use them as a dependent O'Keefe: What if they are going to be making money because they are performing tricks too Tonja: but if they making money and they are underage then you shouldn't be letting anybody know anyway.

and

O'Keefe: we want to use a lot of the money that we are getting Shira: you don't want to use all of it O'Keefe: No I am saying we want to use a lot of the cash for my campaign.

Similarly, at ACORN D.C., O'Keefe and Giles talk about setting up a house for Giles and several El Salvadorean girls who will be working for him. Giles says she will take the money and give it to O'Keefe, who says he is running for a local election. The ACORN worker tells O'Keefe to distance himself from the house of women of the night that Giles will be running because he is in political stuff and the revelation will be bad for him if people learn about the house of prostitution. Here are some quotes from the transcript which (like all ACORN transcripts) is supported by unedited audio:

James: So, I can be the one who ah, I have documentation right? So, I can, I can be the one basically put up the house for it and she can perform tricks in the house.

Acorn 3: Yep.

James: Okay, and well all those girls too? All those, there's like 10 girls? There's ten El Salvadoreans. . . .

Acorn 4: If you buy the home, you have no knowledge of what's goin' on in that home. He's just [garble] the landlord.

Acorn 3: You have no knowledge of what's goin' on, you just the landlord.

Acorn 4: You have no knowledge of what's goin' on, I'm just keeping it real – your just the landlord.

James: I'm just the landlord.

Acorn 4: You're just the landlord.

James: But, but, but…

Acorn 3: We know she's your girl friend, but we're talking about your career. How far you trying to go?

James: I'm using the money that she's getting, you know what I mean?

Acorn 3: Okay. But you don't know where its coming from.

Hannah: It's cash.

James: I, I, I personally know where its coming from.

Acorn 3: Right, but when the police ask you – you don't know where its coming from – that's what we're trying to tell you.

James: All right.

Acorn 3: We're looking out for you. . . .

Hannah: And I want him to be successful and why I'm working so hard and bringing these girls in so when he does run for office he has unlimited funds.

San Bernardino:

O'Keefe: . . . we wanna set up sort of like a business to do this type of thing and –

Theresa (ACORN): A prostitution business?

O'Keefe: That's right. . . .

Hannah (Eden): um I'm kinda familiar with that in Miami, but I also the guy that I'm supposed to be working for here just got a shipment or 12 El Salvadorean girls.

Theresa (Acorn): Oh, really?

Hannah (Eden): They're between the ages of twelve years old and 15, and if I can, which I think I because I do have some sort of relationship with them.

Theresa (Acorn): Mmm hmm.

Hannah (Eden): in the brief time I've come in contact. Would like to take them away from him . . . and use them for me, for myself and also to keep so they don't have to be subjected to a man . . . who is abusive . . . .

James: So basically we want . . . a house to put them in and we have been trying to go through the other authorities but they have been unhelpful with us because of, you know . . . they just you know they don't wanna deal with these sex sex girls coming in performing sex they think we don't wanna have anything to do with that. . . .

O'Keefe: But, one of the things I was one of the things we also wanna do um one of my goals you asked you asked do you know how you wanna do this, I think one of the goals is not only can Eden protect some of these 13, 14, 15 year-old girls.

Theresa (ACORN) Yeah.

O'Keefe: coming over from El Salvador. In addition to protecting them and getting their feet on the ground so that they can you know perform the tricks and you know learn the how LA prostitution scene is I was also wanting to um use some of the this is very lucrative and potentially we can use a lot of the money we're getting from the underaged girls from El Salvador and use some of the money for campaign one day . . . .

O'Keefe: We're bringing these girls from overseas.

Hannah (Eden) Well, they're here.

O'Keefe: But, we are gonna take a part of the profit and I intend to use the profit.

Theresa (ACORN): Right.

O'Keefe: From the tricks the girls perform.

Theresa (ACORN): Right.

O'Keefe: To fund my political campaign.

Theresa (ACORN): Right.

The videos go on and on like that.

Friedman, Boehlert, and others have glommed on to the fact that O'Keefe did not wear his pimp outfit inside ACORN. Pointing to various ambiguous statements or failures to correct others, they have argued that Breitbart and O'Keefe deliberately tried to suggest otherwise. Friedman and Boehlert have yet to explain how O'Keefe supposedly sought to advance this misdirection by showing himself walking into ACORN in a shirt and slacks — in the first few seconds of the very first video released to the public.

I have challenged Boehlert to say clearly whether O'Keefe ever posed as a pimp at ACORN. The offer stands at $200 simply to take a clear and unequivocal position, one way or another. It would take only 10 words and he could collect $200. Yet he won't do it. Could it be that, if he admits O'Keefe posed as a pimp, he would no longer be able to insinuate that he didn't by focusing on O'Keefe's manner of dress?

"INDEPENDENT" REPORT EXONERATES ACORN AND ESTABLISHES MISLEADING OVERDUBBING

Liberal Myth: An "independent report" by a former Attorney General from Massachusetts establishes that the videos have been doctored in a misleading fashion. O'Keefe overdubbed voices to make it appear that ACORN employees were responding to one question, when in fact they were responding to a very different question.

Examples of the spreading of the myth:

Brad Friedman:

You may also not have known that while both independent reports, the other one by the Co micsngressional Research Service [PDF], found no criminal wrong doing by ACORN, they did find that O'Keefe likely the broke the law in at least two states by secretly recording the videos which had voice-overs deceptively edited into them later, "in some cases substantially," according to Harshbarger's report, so that it was "difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding."

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

Boehlert and Brad Friedman have written exhaustively on how misleading the videos were, how they were heavily edited to make it look like employees were answering questions they weren't actually asked (it seems that a lot of the "tax evasion" stuff was created in editing—employees seem to be talking about strategies to escape an abusive pimp).

Dave Johnson at the Huffington Post:

The investigation offered conclusive evidence that the videos were doctored and that voiceovers were used to make it appear people were saying things they did not say.

Eric Boehlert:

Harshbarger also shed light on the controversial videos, noting that portions had been "substantially" edited, including some voice overdubbing. And because O'Keefe and Breitbart refuse to let any outside observers — including journalists — view the full collection of unedited tapes, it's impossible to tell just how significantly the tapes were manipulated prior to their release.

Fact: The report is by a paid ACORN consultant who did not allege misleading voiceovers, who did not interview the ACORN employees in the videos, who admits that his evidence is secondhand, and who never acknowledges the existence of unedited audio.

Harshbarger did not say the videos were doctored to make ACORN look bad. His report said there were edits and narrative voiceovers — just like in any documentary. It did not say those edits and narrative voiceovers were misleading. Here is the quote from paid ACORN consultant Harshbarger:

The unedited videos have never been made public. The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles's comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

Several questions leap to mind. Isn't a "substitute voiceover" a standard documentary tactic? The narrator narrates while subjects are shown speaking.Read Harshbarger's quote again. Even though he is a shill, he is not claiming that O'Keefe substituted voiceovers in a deceptive manner to make it appear that people are saying things they didn't say. That is just made up by the liberal bloggers.

In addition, in every case where I have seen a voiceover by O'Keefe, the unedited audio backs up what he claims is being said.

It is not "impossible" to tell what questions ACORN workers are responding to, as Boehlert claims. (Or "difficult" as shill Harshbarger claims.) The full unedited audio is available at biggovernment.com/acorn. You can listen to the unedited audio, compare it to the videos, and hear for yourself that O'Keefe did not overdub voices in a deceptive or misleading way.

For some odd reason, Harshbarger declines to mention the fact that unedited audio is available as to each ACORN visit as to which there is a transcript. Listening to the unedited audio would make it VERY EASY to determine whether there was any misleading editing or overdubbing.

You know: if you actually cared. As opposed to being out to make cheap political points.

Indeed, they used two separate microphones, as this video reveals:

(Watch beginning at around 4:40). How did they match up two separate strands of audio, if they were doing clever edits?Friedman has flatly lied about this. In a letter to Clark Hoyt, he says: "While we can't know if the text transcripts O'Keefe released were accurate, since he refuses to release the audio tape . . ." Friedman knows the full audio is available, as I told him this on a radio show and we discussed it at length — before he wrote Hoyt.

Eric Boehlert has linked Friedman's post but did not lift a finger to correct Friedman. Remember: Boehlert has repeatedly claimed that O'Keefe "lied" or committed a "hoax" because he did not correct Steve Doocy's claim about his manner of dress at ACORN. By Boehlert's logic, Boehlert has himself engaged in a hoax, by endorsing Friedman's post but failing to correct Friedman's falsehood.

What's more, Harshbarger was hardly conducting an independent investigation. He was a consultant paid by ACORN — as independent as a researcher paid by a tobacco company who finds no link between cigarettes and lung cancer.

According to the New York Times, Harshbarger "comes from the liberal, Democratic side of the political divide."

And he didn't interview any of the ACORN employees that appeared in the tapes.

We did not interview the employees captured on video, since we were satisfied there was no question that the visits occurred and the comments were made. . . . Hence, all our knowledge about the videos is largely circumstantial and secondhand.

Oh, well, then. You're paid by ACORN and you didn't interview the primary people. You want to raise questions about possibly deceptive editing — yet justify your failure to interview the principals by saying you are "satisfied there was no question that the visits occurred and the comments were made."

Yup, no credibility issue there!

ACORN ADVICE ABOUT AVOIDING PAYING TAXES

Liberal Myth: ACORN employees never advised O'Keefe and Giles to avoid paying taxes. They simply tried to help the two pay their taxes.

Examples of the spreading of the myth:

Brad Friedman:

None of the workers they spoke with who had tried to help them had advised "evading taxes" as the wingnut crew would have you believe .. .

Friedman, in a letter to Clark Hoyt:

Your contentions are clearly (and understandably) biased by the videos which offer a very different picture from what actually happened in those offices, according to the transcripts. I'll not continue this already long email by detailing specifics of how, except to say that, contrary to what I read as your impressions, in every office the workers advised the pair that they must legally pay their taxes (not hide the income as you suggest), no matter where it comes from.

Friedman:

In fact, in every ACORN office seen in the Breitbart/O'Keefe vidoes [sic] — as understood only by reviewing the text transcripts, since the videos are so purposely misleading on this point — ACORN employees advised that Giles must pay taxes, even if the income was gained through illegal prostitution. No ACORN employee ever advised the pair to "avoid paying taxes" as so many who fell for the hoax have described.

Boehlert:

*Correction: I originally wrote that ACORN workers provided advice on how a prostitute could avoid paying her taxes. That's incorrect, and I regret the error.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

Boehlert and Brad Friedman have written exhaustively on how misleading the videos were, how they were heavily edited to make it look like employees were answering questions they weren't actually asked (it seems that a lot of the "tax evasion" stuff was created in editing—employees seem to be talking about strategies to escape an abusive pimp).

Fact: ACORN employees advised Giles and O'Keefe on strategies to evade taxes.

Let's go to the Baltimore transcript again:

Tonja: No you have to pay taxes on the money you make

O'Keefe: Is there any way around that though

Tonja: Yeah don't file them and you continue doing cash

Or San Bernardino:

James: What about the money situation like the eh if I wanna use some of this money for my political campaign. How can, how can I start thinking about this long term so that I don't get caught with the Feds or something like that?

Theresa (ACORN): Okay. I think- in my business it it was mostly cash.

James: Okay.

Theresa (ACORN): All right. It's a cash business.

Hannah (Eden): That's what we're doing.

Theresa (ACORN): So you only claim enough to you you can't . . .

Theresa (ACORN): do you? Yea yea well and and we at that time I made 15 grand and they made ten and thats a lot of money for a week, well for six days,

Hannah (Eden): no kidding

Theresa (ACORN): and that was paid up front in cash

James: did you declare it all?

Theresa (ACORN): I didn't declare a dime no—It's cash

THE PHILADELPHIA VISIT

Liberal Myth: Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe did not represent Giles as a prostitute in Philadelphia.

Examples of the spreading of the myth:

Brad Friedman:

In the video (seen at right), Russell explains what happened when O'Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles — seen dressed similarly to a prostitute in the edited videos from other cities where O'Keefe carried out his campaign — came in for an interview in her office. "They never said that she [Giles] was a prostitute, and he was not dressed in any usually flashy manner," Russell explains.

Fact: A video shows that Giles was identified as a prostitute.Indeed, the released video shows that ACORN worker Katherine Conway Rcssell went on TV and lied about a) whether prostitution had been mentioned; b) whether Giles and O'Keefe were kicked out; and c) whether she gave any help to Giles and O'Keefe.

Friedman is aware of this. I told him about it on a radio show hosted by Larry O'Connor. He has failed to correct the falsehood.

These are just some of the myths, and just some of the evidence. I spend the time compiling it because I am sick of seeing history rewritten.

Insurance and Mortality

Insurance and Mortality

by Jonathan Wilde

Last week, Megan McArdle wrote in The Atlantic that after you control for this and that, it's not clear that having insurance makes one less likely to die. Leftists were shocked and outraged. Matt Yglesias was all a-twitter:

Do rightwingers really believe that US health insurance has no mortality-curbing impact?

Megan McArdle replied that, okay, maybe there is a relationship between having insurance and being less likely to die that we don't see in the research, but if there is, it's gotta be small.

I'm surprised at the shock and awe from leftwingers, though maybe I shouldn't be. It's part of their gospel that people are dropping dead left and right because of lack of insurance.

As someone in the medical field, though not an epidemiologist or familiar with the research, my personal reaction was a lack of surprise at McArdle's conclusion. Why?

• Any emergency will be treated at US hospitals. If you don't have insurance but are in a car wreck and bleeding, you will get treated-- you'll receive fluids, blood, angiograms, and if needed, surgery.
• Aside from that, medical science is still at a primitive level on an absolute scale, even if it has made significant progress on a relative scale. Most things that are going to kill you will still kill you even with the best medicine has to offer. Insurance won't save your life if you get a metastatic cancer (with rare exceptions).
• The place where insurance would make a difference is with things that would kill you if not treated but would save your life if treated. These types of illnesses, in my anecdotal experience, are rare in the larger scheme of things.
• On the other side of the ledger is when medical care kills people who would otherwise live to an old age.

Creationism really is a science stopper

Creationism really is a science stopper

by Richard B. Hoppe

We often argue that saying that "God did it" is a science stopper. That claim is typically countered by pointing to numerous examples of scientists who were (Newton) or are (Kenneth Miller) Christians (though as we know, Newton was a peculiar sort of Christian, even for his time).

The Disco 'Tute, of course, doesn't think that positing an Intelligent Designer is a science-stopper. Their 'solution,' embodied in the Wedge strategy, is to redefine science to include God an unnamed intelligent designer with inscrutable goals and skills as an "explanation."

One variety of Christian "science," however, is clearly willing to stop science in its tracks, and Todd C. Wood, faculty member at Bryan College, has provided a stark illustration of that. While Wood has shocked his creationist peers on occasion, for example for saying that

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well. (All bolding original)

However, Wood has clear boundaries. Writing on his blog more recently Wood says

That's why I don't care about the origin of life (and why I'll probably never finish reading Meyer's book). I already know where life came from. I open the book of Genesis, and the Bible tells me exactly where life came from. Speculating on how it might have happened in a naturalistic scenario seems like a waste of time to me. Just like it would seem like a waste of time to an atheist to study the logistics of Noah's Ark.

Can't get any clearer than that.