Is Obama a Centrist?

Or is he just playing one on TV?

CAN YOU HEAR the grumbling over in what Howard Dean used to call "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?" The tolerance-and-diversity crowd is upset with Barack Obama; it seems the president-elect has been bringing people into his circle who don't agree with them on every single issue.
....
As if all that weren't enough to give a fervent liberal agita, Obama has asked the Rev. Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. From many on the left, where Warren's staunch opposition to same-sex marriage is reason enough to loathe him, responses have ranged from dismay to fury. Barney Frank labeled the pastor's views "very offensive" and pronounced himself "very disappointed" that Obama would invite him. The blog Liberal Rapture was more pungent: "Obama throws another middle finger to liberals." ...

Still, Obama is hardly in danger of turning into anything resembling a right-winger. With his trillion-dollar "stimulus" proposal, he is inviting comparisons to FDR. And with committed liberals like Tom Daschle as Health and Human Services secretary, Carol Browner as energy czar, and Eric Holder as attorney general, the Obama administration is never going to be accused of harboring Republican tendencies.

During the campaign, I saw Obama compared with the dog chasing a car -- "What'll he do if he ever catches one?" Well, he caught one, and now he's having to figure out what to do with it.
What some are calling psychopathy, I think is better described as malignant narcissism. The Clintons, for example, are on the side of the Clintons -- period. So is Obama. But even a his age, I'm willing to wait and see if his is the narcissism of youth and whether he might be willing or able to grow out of it. (Being on the Left means never having to grow up.)
Maybe he'll be forced to grow into the office, and into being a mature human being. We can let him, and give him credit if he does so. Or we can treat him the way the strident Left treated GWB for eight years.

Beldar on Rathergate

I played a small but enthusiastic part as one of bloggers who were scrutinizing Dan Rather, "60 Minutes," and CBS News during the 2004 Ra^thergate controversy.
....

The problem, though — as I noted at length when Rather first filed his case, here and here — is that Quinn's hands are effectively tied by the fact that his client was spectacularly gutless in its dealings with the psychotic prima donna who for so long occupied its anchor chair. Quinn's defense for CBS News won't be that Rather and Mapes and their entire team were incompetent, biased frauds who committed the worst kind of journalistic malpractice to change the outcome of a presidential election and then, when caught, tried to cover it up. CBS had ample, compelling, even glorious "good cause" to fire Rather no matter what time term remained on his contract or what other terms it contained to guarantee his preeminence at the network.

But CBS didn't do that. Instead, it convened the Thornburgh-Boccardi Panel, whose ultimate report was far from a bare-knuckled or clear-eyed assessment of the culpability of Rather and CBS News' top brass. CBS News eased Rather out, rather than immediately throwing his sorry butt on the street.

And now, instead of defending itself against Rather by using the awesome mechanisms of the law to prove, once and for all, the essential truths of Ra^thergate — including the indisputable fact that the Killian memos were pathetically obvious forgeries — CBS News' defense is not that Rather is a crazed scoundrel and a national disgrace, but that CBS fully performed its contractual obligations to Rather.
....

Rick Warren on evolution...

From Little Green Footballs:

Oddly enough, the FAQ page at the Saddleback Church that contained their policy statements on dinosaurs, evolution, and homosexuality (among other subjects) has suddenly been wiped clean: Saddleback Church: Small Group Information.

But Google's cache has a copy as it appeared on December 16, 2008.

So now the folks at DebunkCreation can be annoyed with Obama, too.

An Nihil Nation

Dafydd at Big Lizards thinks he knows how Obama the Disappointment managed to find all those voters.

We've all been wondering -- oh, all right... I've been wondering -- whence came all those gazillions of Democratic voters who propelled the over-the-top Barack H. Obama over the top. Well, it appears that a new survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics may have found part of the answer:

Teenagers lie. They cheat and steal, too. And they are doing it more often and more easily than ever.

That is the conclusion of the latest "Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth", released this week by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a partnership of educational and youth organizations. The institute conducted a random survey of 29,760 high school students earlier this year (as they have every two years since 1992) and found that the next generation of leaders have a somewhat casual relationship with the truth.

What this survey, which shows a growing trend of falsity, cheating, and amorality, tells us is that we are not only raising yet another generation of kids without a functioning moral compass, but more threateningly, a generation of kids who haven't the slightest idea that there is a real world out there where lying, cheating, and stealing not only won't get you anywhere, it can destroy your life.

....

Of course such truth-challenged, reality-denying kids would be much more likely to grow into Democrat-voting young adults; the Democratic Party is the party of fantasy, denial, and situational ethics. Naturally, not every Democrat is dishonest... but the contemporary Democratic Party rewards brazen dishonesty in a way that I don't believe any previous political party in the United States has done.

Heck, look who just got elected president... and how he did it.

I firmly believe this is the result of leftist government schools (followed, after a while, by secular private and even religious schools) ceasing to teach ethics, civics, or even basic right and wrong, for fear of trampling on some kid's "right" to choose his own "values." (For that matter, even the substitution of "values," a content-neutral term, for "virtues," which implies a fixed moral code, is a terrible symptom of the disease of nihilism.)

....

By being afraid to tell kids that there is a real right and a real wrong -- that some moral codes are absolute, not subject to the whim of the actor -- we may be sowing the seeds of our species' own destruction.

One of the things conservatives believe is that civilization is fragile.  It is a human institution buttressed about by artificial structures which are designed to maintain it.  Without those structures, it will all too easily veer into the abyss.  These structures are not natural components of the human psyche -- people don't automatically invent them when needed or adhere to them just because they might be a good idea.  They have to be passed from generation to generation and enforced by a number of different mechanisms.  If they are allowed to lapse, their recreation and reimplementation is in no way guaranteed in the next generation.  Or, for that matter, before the civilization collapses.

The housing bubble

Daffyd at Big Lizards spots an NY Times article on the housing bubble.

The New York Times waits until after the election to drop yet another bombshell, one which may very well go unnoticed by the rest of the elite media (falling into the memory hole alongside the brief and cryptic reporting on Barack H. Obama's illegal fundraising). Under the headline "Tax Break May Have Helped Cause Housing Bubble"....

Wow, what a great gift President Bill Clinton gave the American people! Except, half a mo... Didn't that staggering "housing bubble" have something to do with the subsequent financial collapse? Well, as a matter of fact, the Times itself now, after November 4th, is willing to admit as such ....

Of course, this being the TImes, they quite predictably get a number of points wrong. There was no "failure by regulators to intervene;" in fact, the "relaxation of lending standards" was precisely in response to Clinton regulators interpreting the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act to require banks to make subprime housing loans to poor people who couldn't possibly afford the mortgage payments.

But they do get the basic point: When government intervenes in the market, the unintended bad consequences often overwhelm whatever good was intended. This is why economist Milton Friedman coined the phrase "the invisible foot" of government as the antiparticle to the "invisible hand" of the market.

....

The Times now thinks this government intrusion was a bad idea after all:

Referring to the special treatment for capital gains on homes, Charles O. Rossotti, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner from 1997 to 2002, said: "Why insist in effect that they put it in housing to get that benefit? Why not let them invest in other things that might be more productive, like stocks and bonds?"

Amusingly, then-Sen. Blob Dole, running against Clinton in 1996, gave a speech that appears to have precipitated Clinton's housing tax-break proposal; but Dole had actually called for an across-the-board cut in the capital-gains tax, without singling out any particular instrument over the others. (Grover Norquist agreed with Dole.) Had Clinton followed Dole's advice, we might very well not be in the current financial crisis.

But, well, here we are. At least, however, we have the enormous satisfaction of seeing the New York Times admit that a Bill Clinton domestic monetary policy was naive and foolish, and give a pretty good explanation -- after the One is safely elected -- why in future we should run our economic and monetary policy on the basis of Capitalism, not liberal fascism. (One wonders whether this new-found fiscal conservatism will ever translate into opposition to specific Obamic policy.)

Better late than never, I suppose; but even better in time than late.

Daffyd is right.  This will disappear into the memory hole.

Outcomes of climate predictions

From John Ray's blog:

Top 10 dud climate predictions

 

By Andrew Bolt, writing from Australia

 

Global warming preachers have had a shocking 2008. So many of their predictions this year went splat. Here's their problem: they've been scaring us for so long that it's now possible to check if things are turning out as hot as they warned. And good news! I bring you Christmas cheer - the top 10 warming predictions to hit the wall this year. Read, so you can end 2008 with optimism, knowing this Christmas won't be the last for you, the planet or even the polar bears.

Here are the predictions...

1. OUR CITIES WILL DIE OF THIRST

2. OUR REEF WILL DIE

3. GOODBYE, NORTH POLE

4. BEWARE HUGE WINDS

5. GIANT HAILSTONES WILL SMASH THROUGH YOUR ROOF

6. NO MORE SKIING

7. PERTH WILL BAKE DRY

8. ISLANDS WILL DROWN

9. BRITAIN WILL SWELTER

10. WE'LL BE HOTTER

Follow this link to read about them. 

Source

Rather, Thornburgh, and the CBS bus

Scott Johnson at Powerline looks at a piece by Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University.  He argues for Rather's defense:

....

Rather did little reporting for the segment, but led the defense. Within three weeks the network caved and said it shouldn't have relied on the documents. That concession was viewed as acknowledging fundamental problems with the segment's veracity. So were the conclusions of the review panel headed by Thornburgh and Boccardi.

But their 223-page report did no such thing.

Though sharply critical of the network's strident dismissal of critics, the panel never concluded the broadcast was wrong -- that Bush's military record wasn't marked by favoritism and dereliction. Nor did it ever say the disputed documents were bogus. Instead, the panel concluded the documents couldn't be proven genuine, and for a simple reason: They were photocopies. And experts are reluctant to vouch for the authenticity of any document when they can't inspect its paper and ink.

Wasserman cites the Thornburgh-Boccardi report in support of his argument here, but It is hard to believe that Wasserman has read it. If he has read it, this professor of journalism ethics needs to be reminded that it's not ethical to withhold from your readers relevant evidence directly contradicting your thesis.

Such as:

(1) The source of the documents: The documents on which Rather's story relied were asserted to have came from Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, then Lieutenant Bush's commanding officer. The documents purport to derive from his "personal file." Killian died in 1984; his family denies that the documents emanated from him or them. The lack of any evidence to substantiate the provenance of the documents in Lieutenant Colonel Killian's "personal file" by itself highlights the absurdity of the argument for their authenticity.

....

(2) The font/typestyle of the documents: The Thornburgh-Boccardi report provides the analysis of forensic document examiner and typewriter expert Peter Tytell, both in the text and at greater length in the report's Appendix 4. Tytell is a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Documents Examiners and a highly qualified expert on the issues raised by the typographic characteristics of the documents. Tytell examined the official Bush Guard documents as well as the CBS documents procured from Burkett and concluded that the Burkett documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle.

According to Tytell, Times New Roman was designed in 1931 for the Times of London and was only available on typesetting and other non-tabletop machines until the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980s. Tytell concluded that the Times New Roman typestyle was not available on a typewriter in the early 1970s and that the Burkett documents must have been produced on a computer. The Thornburgh-Boccardi report states: "The [Thornburgh-Boccardi] Panel met with Tytell and found his analysis sound in terms of why he believed that the documents are not authentic." If the documents are not authentic, they are frauds.

....

(3) The content of the documents: Rather's defenders such as Wasserman ultimately rely on the contents of the documents to authenticate them. However, if the documents did not come from the personal file of Lieutenant Colonel Killian, if the documents were not typed on a typewriter, they cannot be authentic regardless of their content. Even if the documents "meshed" perfectly with the official Bush Guard records, they would still be frauds.

And they don't mesh.  All in all...

Thus the bad faith of the CBS TANG story pales next to that of Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley. Regardless of Dan Rather's level of culpabity for the story as originally broadcast, the story itself is a classic of institutional and professional disgrace. It is odd at the least that a professor of journalism ethics is insensitive to it. For a more clear-eyed view of Rather's lawsuit, by the way, see Bill Dyer's "Rather v. CBS: Experts, 'boardroom truth' versus 'courtroom truth,' and settlement values."

 

Dan Rather and Mary Mapes are still peddling the same fraud that CBS was peddling on September 8, 2004 in the story on President Bush's TANG service. Edward Wasserman has now come to their assistance in peddling the fraud. Whatever the state of their knowledge then, Rather and Mapes must know now that they are peddling a fraud. Although Wasserman portrays Rather as a victim, he is in fact a perpetrator who has yet to acknowledge his offense.

RIP Forrest J Ackerman

Obituary at Reason Magazine:

Going to pot?

Reason Magazine tends to follow police misconduct, including excesses that stem from prosecution of the War On Drugs.  Here's a piece by Radley Balko:

Like Mark Draughn, I've been somewhat skeptical of Barry Cooper, the former drug cop turned pitchman for how-to-beat-the-cops videos. He comes off as more of a huckster than a principled whistle-blower, which I think does the good ideas he stands for (police reform) more harm than good.

But damn. I have to hand it to him. This might be one of the ballsiest moves I've ever seen.

KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.

The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster's attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster's secret mobile office nearby.

To clarify just a bit, according to Cooper, there was nothing illegal going on the bait house, just two evergreen trees and some grow lamps. There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it's difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn't lie to get a warrant.

....

The story's worth watching, not only to see if the cops themselves are held accountable for this, but whether the local district attorney tries to come up with a crime with which to charge Cooper and his assistants.  I can't imagine such a charge would get very far, but I wouldn't be surprised to see someone try.

If this happened as portrayed, the police can't get a pass on it.  Police officers have a great deal of power.  If they're perceived as abusing it, public distrust will make their jobs infinitely harder.

Loser pays

Some notes from Sasha Volokh:

The Manhattan Institute has released Greater Justice, Lower Cost: How a "Loser Pays" Rule Would Improve the American Legal System, by my friend Marie Gryphon. From the executive summary:

Effects of Loser Pays

This paper infers from its examination of the scholarly literature how loser pays would affect the American legal system:

• Almost every economist who has studied loser pays predicts that it would, if adopted, reduce the number of low-merit lawsuits.
• A loser-pays rule would encourage business owners and other potential defendants to try harder to comply with the law. Doing so should produce fewer injuries.
• Loser pays would deter ordinary low-merit suits, but it would not discourage low-merit class actions to the same extent because the risk of enormous losses, rather than the costs of legal defense, is the primary source of pressure on defendants to settle. . . .

Litigation Insurance

This paper provides an overview of how litigation insurance would ensure access to justice for poor and middle-class plaintiffs under an American loser-pays system:

• In loser-pays jurisdictions, insurance covering the legal costs of the plaintiff can be purchased at the same time that a lawsuit is filed for a reasonable premium advanced by a plaintiffs' attorney as part of the ordinary costs of litigation.
• After recently scaling down its legal aid services, which were funding civil litigation for poor plaintiffs, England witnessed massive growth in its litigation insurance market; the same thing is likely to happen in the United States if it adopts a loser-pays rule.

To be successful in the United States, a loser-pays reform must be designed to reduce the number of nuisance lawsuits, control overall litigation costs, promote settlement, and ensure access to justice for plaintiffs with strong legal claims. To achieve these disparate goals within the existing American legal system, this new Manhattan Institute proposal incorporates a modified offer-of-judgment rule, which ties the amount of any fee award to the size of the parties' settlement offers, and advocates the removal of legal barriers to the establishment of a robust litigation insurance industry in new loser-pays jurisdictions.

IQ and success

The conventional wisdom holds that IQ doesn't matter for success in life.  For success in particular occupations, it may matter a lot -- to a point.

I haven't managed to finish Malcolm Gladwell's new #1 bestseller, Outliers, yet, because it's so full of snarkworthy goodness. Here's a taste from p. 80:

"What Hudson is saying is that IQ is a lot like height in basketball. Does someone who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball? Not really. You need to be at least six foot or six one to play on that level, and all things being equal, it's probably better to be six two than six one, and better to be six three than six two. But past a certain point, height stops mattering so much. A player who is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter. (Michael Jordan, the greatest player ever, was six six after all.) A basketball player only has to be tall enough — and the same is true of intelligence."

 

Another anniversary

From The Corner at NRO:

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Saddam Hussein's capture by U.S. forces, when he was pulled dirty, afraid, and alone from a hole in Tikrit, Iraq. Five years from that day, Iraqis continue to face a somewhat uncertain future fraught with challenges and perils. Critics of the war complain that there is no certainty that democracy can take root in Iraq, and lament the possibility that this "experiment" will fail.

....

When U.S. soldiers pulled Saddam Hussein from that hole in Tikrit, the spell that had held Iraqis captive for decades was broken. Suddenly, there was a glimmer of hope for a population who had never had the right to dream of a better life. That hope is what differentiates every day before December 13, 2003, from every day since. It is the hope that things will get better, that the individual life can mean something. That the next generation can live a better life than the current one, and that through effort and will the people can make tomorrow better than today. This hope is fundamental to meaningful human existence, but is often taken for granted by Americans who have never endured a life where its expression is denied by a cruel dictator. Some suggest that Saddam's dictatorship, though cruel and oppressive, was the only way to effectively control the tribes, maintain order, and govern the country. Day by day the Iraqi people are proving them wrong; this is the legacy of December 13. 

Legalese

I've occasionally described "Legalese" as "a language used by lawyers, which bears a deceptive similarity to English".  And I point out that people often err in assuming that a particular word in Legalese bears anything like the meaning in Legalese that it bears in English.

 

Now, I read a Constitutional Law Professor saying much the same thing. (I'm assuming he wrote the following in English, in which case it means what it says -- as opposed to Legalese, in which case it might not.)

...actually the panel reasoned that Hatfill failed to prove that the columns were published with what libel law calls "actual malice": "that The Times had knowledge that the columns were false or published them with reckless disregard of whether they were false." "Actual malice" is thus a legal term of art that has little to do with what English speakers actually call malice (in the sense of ill will).

So this is partly the fault of the lawyers. You'd hope that "malice" in law would mean what "malice" means in English, but if it doesn't, at least you'd hope that "actual malice" would actually mean that. No such luck.

The Democrats' torture narrative

At National Review online:

According to the Levin report, the Bush administration reacted to 9/11 by "redefining" the law to permit aggressive interrogation tactics. Thus, the fable goes, in early 2002 the president determined that neither al-Qaeda nor Taliban fighters were entitled to prisoner-of-war treatment, in effect blocking application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and the "well established military doctrine" of "legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions." The administration then covertly set about having its Justice Department alter the legal definition of torture, the story goes, while its interrogators were schooled in illegal tactics by experts at the Defense Department. These techniques were employed by the CIA on important captives and became elements of a new warfare culture that spread to military interrogators at Gitmo and led, eventually, to the Abu Ghraib scandal. 

That narrative is flawed in its fundamental assumptions and fictional in its sweeping conclusions. The Bush administration did not "redefine" detainee treatment law; it undertook to determine what the law says and whom it covers. The intent of the Geneva Conventions, the principal law on the subject, is to civilize warfare by affording benefits, including an absolute bar against abusive treatment, to eligible prisoners of war — i.e., to captured soldiers who adhere to the laws of armed conflict, meaning, among other things, that they forgo intentionally endangering civilians. By definition, al-Qaeda is not qualified for Geneva protections because it is a terrorist organization: It is not one of the sovereign nations that signed the 1949 pacts, and it specifically targets civilians. Though the Taliban was the de facto government of Afghanistan, its fighters also target civilians and hide among them, and consequently they do not qualify for Geneva protections.

....

Prisoner abuse should not be taken lightly. There have been nearly two dozen detainee deaths reported, five of which are believed to have occurred during interrogations. But these episodes are endemic to warfare, not peculiar to the Bush era or a result of the president's policies. Abuse is not to be tolerated — and it isn't: dozens of U.S. military personnel have been disciplined and a number tried in courts-martial. There is a world of difference between relatively rare wrongdoing at the hands of a miniscule number of soldiers and a government program of torture. 

The torture narrative is at odds with the facts. The U.S. does not have a policy of torturing captives, nor does it fail to abide by its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. When abuse has occurred, steps have been taken to punish the wrongdoers and rectify military practices. Those efforts will continue. A sober study would have made that clear. Congressional Democrats have instead found it expedient to smear the administration, the military, and the intelligence community for political purposes.

Asking questions about 9/11

Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.
Counterknowledge.com has some questions for the 9/11 truthers to answer:

One of the standard claims of 9/11 "truthers" is that they are merely sceptical individuals with a healthy and understandable desire not to swallow US government propaganda at face value. The mantra "just asking questions" allows them to pose as wary and intelligent souls too accustomed to the concept of duplicity in high places to accept the "official story" of Al Qaeda's role in planning and perpetrating the largest mass casualty terrorist attack in modern history. It also allows them to adopt an indignant tone when dealing with their critics, and to conflate attempts by debunkers to undermine their claims with both unquestioning acceptance of an "official cover-up" (irrespective of whether the debunker happens to be a supporter of the current US administration or not) and a systematic effort to deprive them of freedom of speech. It goes without saying that in the process the "truthers" set up two straw-men for them to knock down, but then they're not very good at dealing with tougher critics.
....
...conspiracy theorists know that mud sticks: if you can make an accusation against an individual or group through innuendo and sly hints the latter has the hard task of proving the calumnies against them to be false.
...the claim that one is "just asking questions" is liberating, as it frees the truther of the obligation of actually constructing a coherent alternative theory - based on the evidence at hand - which is more convincing than the "official theory".

it makes the task of a truther an easy one: all he or she (there seem to be few female truthers around, which hopefully means that they won't reproduce) has to do is google to get the appropriate "story" from Prison Planet, 9/11 Blogger, What Really Happened or a similar website. Hey presto, they get what they want: "The FBI said there were no phone calls from AA77!"; "4,000 Jews didn't turn up to work at the WTC on 9/11!"; "Silverstein ordered the demolition of WTC7!" And so on and so forth. 

Any genuine sceptic dealing with truthers - whether online or in the flesh - then has to (1) work out what the hell his or her interlocutor is talking about, and (2) ask themselves how exactly they made this claim, and if it has any substance. Anyone lacking either patience or detailed knowledge of the events of 11th September 2001 may be tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Debunkers are left with the time-consuming task of researching the historical background, and trying to assemble the relevant technical and scientific information, before they can actually verify the facts for themselves.  In short, the truther can throw out a red herring or an outright distortion in a matter of minutes, leaving it up to other net users to take the time and trouble to verify their origin and accuracy.

(In debates over Evolution, this tactic is known as the "Gish Gallop" after Duane Gish's tactic of throwing out a multitude of red herrings for the evolutionist to refute.  Each one sounds impressive, and a claim that takes five seconds to make takes at least fifteen minutes to properly refute.)

Fortunately, yeoman work has been done by scores of individuals to actually put the record straight. Pat and James from Screw Loose Change, Mark Roberts, 9/11 Myths, Debunking 9/11 and 9/11 Guide in particular provide a valuable resource. The James Randi forum is particularly useful in that it provides commentators with specialist knowledge - military veterans, pilots, flight engineers, physicists, architects, forensic experts etc - with a platform to expose the anti-scientific claptrap and historical illiteracy of the truthers. This is the main reason why the JREF and its commentators arouse such hatred from the 9/11 conspiracy ghouls.

It's time to turn the tables on the truthers. Rather than accept a situation in which the nutjobs and kooks who subscribe to 9/11 conspiracies can make their accusations willy-nilly, it is high time that their critics decided that they can "just ask questions" too. This particular debunker has decided that maybe, just for once, the onus for actually demonstrating the validity of their theories on the basis of systematic and critical analysis of the evidence belongs to the truthers, not to those who wish to expose their fallacies. As someone whose academic bias is based on history, I would like to pose the following challenge to the conspiracy-mongers:

Let's take your thesis (that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush administration, and covered up by a coalition of US government agencies, allied powers, big business and the media) as read. The following questions point to logical and factual gaps within that thesis. It is now up to you to answer these questions and explain why your theories are still valid. For your answers to be credible, they need to be detailed and based on verifiable evidence. No suppositions, no speculation, no unsupported assertions, just the facts. Stop "asking questions", and provide answers. These fifteen initial questions will do for starters.

Go read the questions.

Shoes fly, don't bother me

The news is full of accounts of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at the President during a press conference. From The Anchoress, I note:

In reading some of the forums, this commenter at Ann Althouse made a spot-on analysis that actually can be broadened.

Harsh Pencil wrote:

The reporter knows deep down that he can throw his shoe at Bush only because of Bush and it shames him. He can't forgive Bush for that.

Yes. Spot-on. And when I read that, I realized Harsh Pencil had articulated the sense I have had, since 2001, that Bush Derangement Syndrome was rooted in shame and fear. I remember reading a Maureen Dowd column written shortly after 9/11 in which she blathered on about no longer being able to occupy her time discussing which nylons she bought (or something like that - I told you, it was blather). While I cannot remember the column clearly, I remember the odd (for then) tone of resentment Dowd expressed in it toward Bush, and at the time I thought:

she is resentful that it is Bush who she must look to for safety, that it is the parental, cowboyish Bush who is protecting her, and not the adolescent Gore.

I'm pretty sure Bush Derangement Syndrome is nothing more than adolescent angst because "their side" did not get to lead and reassure and hold-steady in a time of danger and uncertainty. It's a larger demonstration of Bill Clinton's regret that 9/11 did not happen on his watch, so he could have a chance to be a "great" and wartime president.

Accepting responsibility

David Friedman comments:

am reminded of my reaction at the time of the Waco tragedy when Janet Reno, then Attorney General, made a similar statement on her own behalf. If you accept personal responsibility for actions that led to a substantial number of people, including children, being burned to death while under attack by people whose actions you consider yourself responsible for, the very least you can do is to resign. Subsequent suicide may be appropriate but is not mandatory.

But of course what she actually meant, and what he actually meant, was something closer to "all right already, stop bugging me."

Family matters

Brenda Almond at the London Daily Mail believes family matters -- a lot.

From almost the first moment of recorded history, one set of relationships has been at the heart of the human experience and the basis of civilisation itself: a mother and father who depend on each other; the children who rely on them both; a supportive network of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

And society isn't helping.

This week a report from Unicef, the UN's child welfare agency, warned that working mothers take a massive risk when they put their offspring into low quality childcare. 

Experts at the world body said such toddlers could suffer psychological harm and fare poorly later at school. Aggressive behaviour learned by children at some nurseries might contribute later to classroom disruption.

....

Until very recently, in fact, the importance of the family was taken for granted, not only as the basis of society, but as the foundation of our human identity. 

Today? In western societies  -  and especially in the English-speaking world  -  we think we know better. Forget the wisdom of the ages. Forget our deep-rooted instincts.

Forget precepts that have governed every society in every era of history.

The importance of the 'traditional' family is being challenged as never before.

The idea has taken root that human families can be constructed in any way people want. The message is that biology counts for nothing. 

Biological mothers don't matter to their children. Biological fathers don't matter either.

All that matters is what adults want  -  and children must adapt to it, whether they like it or not. 

The sheer speed of what is happening is quite astonishing. In less than 50 years, the old values have been stood on their head.

Today, legislators don't hesitate to plunge into 'reforms' that tear up the rights, duties and obligations that have underpinned the family for millennia.

They rush into new ' postmodernist' concepts of family, partnering and parenthood. Indeed, they are even attempting to banish the word 'marriage' from the statute books.

Everywhere in the West, the liberal consensus is on the march. In Britain, for example, a Labour Government has discouraged the use of the 'm' word in official documents, while in the U.S., the American Law Institute recommends that marriage should be ' deprivileged' and not be given a status above any other relationship. 

But we're no longer hunter-gatherers. Do we still need a life-support system suited for cave men?

Yet on any rational analysis, this reckless embrace of a brave new world is simply perverse, since there is no doubt whatever that the traditional family, underpinned by marriage, is the best way of bringing up secure, happy children and maintaining social stability. 

You don't have to be a religious believer or a Victorian moralist to take this view. The evidence speaks for itself (despite the strenuous efforts of the liberal establishment to ignore it). 

Fact: one in two unmarried couples splits up before their first child is five years old. The figure for married couples is just one in 12. 

Fact: children from broken homes are 75 per cent more likely than their classmates to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to be involved with drugs and 50 per cent more likely to have alcohol problems.

They are also more likely to run away from home, find themselves in the care system and end up in jail. 

At the very least, those bleak statistics should give us pause. The truth is that some of the most intractable problems facing Britain today  -  from our tragically high rate of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases to petty crime, gang membership and welfare dependency  -  have their roots in family breakdown.

....

And yet the family in its traditional form is crucial to us all  -  not simply because it underpins social stability or because it connects us to the past and the future, but because it's also a bulwark of freedom itself. 

Why? Because the invisible bonds it creates between its members generate loyalties and affections capable of resisting any tyranny. 

That's what, in the end, makes the family not just a conserving institution, but also the engine of liberty and progress.

Yes, the family can sometimes fail. When it does, the consequences can be appalling. But at its best, it provides an anchor for individuals who would otherwise have no inspiration or support in an uncertain world. 

For these reasons we should think long and hard about where we are being taken by some of the fashionable dogmas of our day: the belief that divorce or separation doesn't hurt; that what adults do can't seriously harm their children; that cohabiting is at least as good as marrying; that genetic relationships don't matter; and that 'family' can mean whatever we want it to mean.

All of these dogmas are false. All are deeply damaging. Every day we can see the consequences in broken families and broken lives. 

In allowing matters to come to this, the liberal establishment has made arguably the most profound mistake of the past half-century. Dare we allow it to continue?

Probably apocryphal, but...

From Cheat-Seeking Missiles:

According to a Marine Pilot:

In addition to communicating with the local Air Traffic Control facility, all aircraft in the Persian Gulf AOR are required to give the Iranian Air Defense Radar (military) a ten minute 'heads up' if they will be transiting Iranian airspace.

This is a common procedure for commercial aircraft and involves giving them your call sign, transponder code, type aircraft, and points of origin and destination.

I just flew with a guy who overheard this conversation on the VHF Guard (emergency) frequency 121.5 MHz while flying from Europe to Dubai. It's too good not to pass along. The conversation went something like this…

Iranian Air Defense Radar: 'Unknown aircraft at (location unknown), you are in Iranian airspace. Identify yourself.'

Aircraft: 'This is a United States aircraft. I am in Iraqi airspace.'

Air Defense Radar: ' You are in Iranian airspace. If you do not depart our airspace we will launch interceptor aircraft!'

Aircraft: 'This is a United States Marine Corps FA-18 fighter. Send 'em up, I'll wait!'

Air Defense Radar: (no response … total silence)

Islamic Creationism

Little Green Footballs reports on anti-evolutionism in the Islamic world.

 

Mark Steyn and terrified Muslims

Mark Steyn looks at the expected backlash against Muslims.

This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".

Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam."

....

We are told that the "vast majority" of the 1.6 billion to 1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra's estimate) are "moderate." Maybe so, but they're also quiet. And, as the AIDS activists used to say, "Silence=Acceptance." It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush's foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam – "Allahu Akbar."

I wrote in my book, "America Alone," that "reforming" Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Quran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there'll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there'll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Mumbai in the name of Allah, and that's just business as usual. And, if it is somehow "understandable" that for the first time in history it's no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, "worry about image." Not enough.

Judge Jones interview

Reported at Little Green Footballs.

One interesting bit...

Gitschier: Regarding the Memorandum Opinion itself, I found parts of it astonishing. You used words like "mendacity," "sham," "breath-taking inanity of the board's decision."

....

[Jones:]  In the realm of the lay witnesses, if you will, some of the school board witnesses were dreadful witnesses and hence the description "breathtaking inanity" and "mendacity." In my view, they clearly lied under oath. They made a very poor account of themselves. They could not explain why they did what they did. They really didn't even know what intelligent design was. It was quite clear to me that they viewed intelligent design as a method to get creationism into the public school classroom. They were unfortunate and troublesome witnesses. Simply remarkable, in that sense.

Islam needs to grow up

So says J.G.Thayer at Commentary:

Once again, a horrific atrocity has been committed by a group of committed, determined Muslims willing and eager to die in the name of their faith. And, as usual, the Islamic groups have pulled out their standard boilerplate responses:

Disclaimer #1: "These people do not represent True Islam."

Disclaimer #2: "You must not blame all Muslims for the deeds of these misguided few (who we embraced as brothers right up until they started killing)."

Disclaimer #3: "What they did was terrible, but they were provoked by the oppression and attacks on Muslims around the world, mostly by Israel and the West."

Disclaimer #4: "We fear a terrible backlash from non-Muslims, and demand that you protect us from those who would threaten us or say mean things or do things to insult us."

....

Other religions have had their aggressive, expansionist, conquering phase, but they grew out of it. Islam is still in its aggressive, conquering phase. It's been often noted that "Islam has bloody borders." One can only hope that it, too, will grow and mature past it.

And soon — or that backlash that they whine about just might happen some day.

Who caused the mortgage collapse?

From Samizdata:

What caused the economic crises?

"Greedy bankers" says some people.

There is certainly a lot of greed about. For example, the people who trampled a part time Security Guard to death at a Walmart on Long Island (as he shielded a fallen pregnant women from them) were certainly greedy. Even after it was announced they had killed a man they still did not want to give up shopping for bargains in the sale and were very angry at being removed from the store. But I doubt there were any bankers in the Walmart sale crowd - although I am open to being proved wrong.

Day without a gay firing

Clayton Cramer looks at one implication of the "Day Without a Gay" movement:

I often find Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality a bit too strident for my tastes, but there's considerable wit and truth to his most recent comment concerning the mass protest of homosexuals "calling in gay" to protest the voters of California voting for Proposition 8:

Now they're staying home from work and "calling in gay" to protest Prop 8. But wasn't it just a short time ago when the homosexual lobby was moaning that all across America people could be fired "just because they're gay"? Now they're taunting their employers using their gayness. Gee, it looks like their jobs are pretty safe!

Sowell on Mumbai

Worth reading:

Will the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai cause any second thoughts by those who are so anxious to start weakening the American security systems currently in place, including government interceptions of international phone calls and the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo?

Maybe. But never underestimate partisan blindness in Washington or in the mainstream media where, if the Bush administration did it, then it must be wrong.

It took a handful of men to crash each airplane involved in 9/11.  The power technology can grant to small numbers of people to injure multitudes is huge, and will only grow as technology improves.

There are growing numbers of things that can destroy us. The Roman Empire lasted a lot longer than the United States has lasted, and yet it too was destroyed.

Millions of lives were blighted for centuries thereafter, because the barbarians who destroyed Rome were incapable of replacing it with anything at all comparable. Neither are those who threaten to destroy the United States today.

The destruction of the United States will not require enough nuclear bombs to annihilate cities and towns across America. After all, the nuclear destruction of just two cities was enough to force Japan to surrender-- and the Japanese had far more willingness to fight and die than most Americans have today.

How many Americans are willing to see New York, Chicago and Los Angeles all disappear in nuclear mushroom clouds, rather than surrender to whatever outrageous demands the terrorists make?

Heinlein wrote that there are only two ways to avoid being blown up by a nuclear bomb:  Not be there when it goes off, or arrange the world in such a way that no one will set one off where you are.  I think it's worth noting that some of these arrangements are more satisfactory than others.  One arrangement that is not satisfactory is appeasing the terrorists.

The people who flew those planes into the World Trade Center buildings could not have been bought off by any concessions, not even the hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in bailout money today.

They want our soul-- and if they are willing to die and we are not, they will get it.

Why Bombay?

This piece in the New York Times by Suketu Mehta ponders the question.  Among points offered is:

 

What They Hate About Mumbai

My bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There's something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. "Mumbai is a golden songbird," he said. It flies quick and sly, and you'll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you". The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.

When the Twin Towers were bombed, I, too, pondered why that target was chosen. 

Some of the motive, I suppose, was envy. The Twin Towers were tall buildings, and much bigger and much more impressive than anything the terrorists' home culture could build.  But then, the oil-rich countries can pay to have impressive things built for them.  Maybe that's enough, or maybe that merely rubs in the fact that they can't do for themselves what they hire foreigners to do for them.

 

I think another, more important reason for the target is what goes on there.  The World Trade Center is about trade.  It's about making money and conducting business.  And it's based in an insight expressed by Adam Smith around the same time the United States were founded.

 

In order for a voluntary trade to take place, each participant in the trade must believe he's getting the better deal. If either side of the trade decides it's not worth it to carry out the trade, it doesn't happen. Trade happens, business is conducted, and fortunes are made, because people freely choose to trade.  The golden songbird sings because people are free to choose.

 

This is anathema to many.  In particular, there are people who believe there is an ideal way that things should be run, and it's all set out in the words of a prophet.  Perhaps this prophet is Karl Marx, or Mao Zedong.  Maybe the prophet is Muhammed.  But in any case, the existence of free markets must be an outrage to those who would see the will of their Prophet done, not free will.  That infidels might be allowed to make their own decisions is an outrage; that this outrage yields happiness and prosperity adds insult to injury.

 

Mehta winds down with:

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God's name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder.

Keep your freedom and choose what you will.  Living well is the best revenge.

Was it something she said?

Tammy Bruce was asked to write letters to the Presidential candidates, and The Advocate would publish the one addressed to whichever candidate won.  Her letter to Obama was published, and the readers didn't like it.

So I wasn't surprised at all to find on the Advocate's website comments on my article that were vicious, misogynistic and even somewhat threatening. Even just one letter of dissent is apparently too much for a community which demands acceptance from everyone else. I also know because moderate or conservative POVs are not usually offered by the gay press, moderate and conservatives gays simple don't read magazine's like The Advocate, leaving a ghetto readership of leftists and liberals, hence, the malevolence in the response to my article.

Keep in mind, the hate coming from the anti-hate, liberal, tolerant Gay Gestapo as I term it is also meant to send a message to anyone else who might dare to not conform, so I'm asking that you submit a comment to help send a message to young people who read this that many people, gay and straight, do think differently and it's okay. Starting with my first book "The New Thought Police" (7 years ago now!) I'm determined that we make sure that no gestapo makes it too dangerous or threatening to speak out. This is especially important for minorities and all of us who think freedom of expression, being different and the importance of individualism aren't just slogans for the latest protest or banner.

The editors of The Advocate should be praised for being willing to include a conservative POV in this article. Let's make sure they're not frightened away from doing so again by a bunch of Thought Police thugs.

Selling freedom

Theophanes at Distributed Republic suggests people arguing for free markets learn to tweak their terms.  The basic recommendations:

1. Say "freed market" not "free market."

2. Avoid "capitalism" and "socialism."

3. Please, please, please, don't call it "anarcho-capitalism" or yourself an "anarcho-capitalist."

4. Support "de-monopolization" instead of "privatization."

If you hew to these rules I think you'll find it easier to tip-toe around people's prejudices and ingrained responses and slip dangerous ideas into their heads. Good luck!

Crash

An air force jet has crashed, and four people died as a result -- incinerated in their home.

This hour, Dennis Prager has been discussing the issue, and raises the point that in his religious tradition, there is a penalty demanded even in the case of an inadvertent killing.

Deliberate murder is to be punished, of course. But killing an innocent person is so serious that it calls for punishment even if it's done inadvertently.

This strikes me as a case where two different ethical imperatives collide.

On one side, if someone causes a death entirely unintentionally, it seems unfair to punish him for what amounts to a roll of the dice.  In the case of the jet crash, the dice could have rolled slightly differently, and no one would have died.  The pilot (or the mechanic, or the inspector, or whoever is found to be at fault) would be off the hook.  Fairness seems to demand that this person not be punished for something so beyond his control.

On the other side, since killing a person is such a serious event, we require extra care to avoid it.  Our liability laws reflect this -- a person can be charged with negligent homicide if he fails to take reasonable care to avoid an accidental death.  It makes sense to punish an accidental homicide in that it sends a message to society about the seriousness of even an accidental death.  This measure of protection for society as a whole can make sense, even at the expense of some amount of fairness toward some individuals.

Left, Right, and Wrong

John Ray offers this on Leftism and morality:

I have been writing -- sporadically -- on topics in moral philosophy for many years now (See here) so I think it is time for me to ask if I have learnt anything over the years. I think I have. In particular, I think I have now arrived at a complete answer to what Leftists say about the matter.

To begin with:

The nub of the Leftist argument is that "right" and "wrong" language is incoherent. Saying "X is pink" and "X is right" seem on the surface to be the same sort of statement but we can immediately see that they are not. Pinkness is an objective property that we can point to whereas rightness exists only in the mind of the speaker. "Who says?" is a complete refutation of any claim that something is right. Religious people can say that "God says" but since religious people do differ considerably on moral questions (e.g. abortion) it is immediately obvious that it is only an opinion about what God says that we are dealing with. And how can an opinion have any objective reality? So the Leftist concludes that there is no such thing as right and wrong, just different opinions and value judgements. You cannot find rightness under a rock and you cannot find it anywhere so it does not exist as such.

And indeed, Heinlein has had characters take the position that if you find a semantic referent for a word -- if you can't point to an example of what the word represents -- it has no meaning.  Thus, since you can't point to "justice", "morality", or "right" or "wrong", these words have no meaning.

I did three courses in philosophy in my years as a university student and was always exposed to the above analysis. And up until fairly recently I accepted it as describing at least one sort of moral statement. I was always aware, of course, that nobody ever talks as if they believed it. Leftists are in fact very quick on the draw with moral language. They can say that there is no such thing as right and wrong and then immediately and with a straight face go on to say that "racism" or "intolerance' is wrong. And George Bush is of course EVIL!

So what the heck is going on? I think the first key is, as I have previously argued, that moral language is not used in one way but rather in several ways. And I have SHOWN that usage of moral language differs from person to person by way of psychological research. Philosophers are like physicists: They are always looking for a "unified field" theory of what they study but what if such a unified field does not exist?

After some discussion, he looks at different types of moral formulations:

I have previously set out what I think are the main uses of moral language but I will repeat them here as a preliminary to an important update. It seems to me that statements such as "X is right" (or "X is good" or "You ought to do X") can be unpacked in only four or perhaps five basic ways:

 

1. I like it when people do X

2. Doing X generally leads to widely desired results

3. It is the will of God that you do X

4. X has an inescapable, universal "moral" quality.

5. X is the prevailing rule around here (though if the person was asked why that rule exists he would almost certainly reply by referring to some version of one of the preceding three statements).

Ray spends some time discussing evolutionary morality -- morality and ethics that are "hard-wired" in to human beings.  We do seem to have certain instincts that lead us to consider some behaviors "wrong".  One point he seems to miss is that social codes have also been subject to a form of evolutionary selection.  Communities with moral codes that "work" tend to succeed and prosper; communities with moral codes that don't "work" tend to fail and disappear.  This is one reason why conservatives have the high regard they do for traditional codes -- they've stood the test of time and haven't been eliminated by this selection mechanism.

 

In the end,  Ray concludes:

So we come back in the end to the good Burkean principle that theories are to be distrusted and and continually tested against whether or not they lead to generally desired outcomes. Philosophers judge an argument on its consistency, elegance and comprehensivesness. Conservatives judge it on its practical outcomes. And Leftists judge it on whether they can use it to make themselves look good.

 

A famous objection to any claim that moral statements are at base empirical and hence rationally arguable is the objection by David Hume. David Hume contends that there is an unbridgeable gap between "is" and "ought" statements -- so that you cannot justify "ought" statements by "is" statements. Yet that is precisely what people normally do. An "ought" statement always commends some course of action and when people ask WHY that course of action is commended the reply is often in terms of "is" (empirical) statements (e.g. the commendation of X can be explained as: "X leads to generally desired consequences" or "X leads to consequences that you would like" or "I like X" or "X is the prevailing rule in this culture"). So in my view the fact that an "ought" statement can be explained in that way shows that it is an empirical statement to begin with. Statements in general have all sorts of influences on people (for example, if someone said to me: "Your son has just died", it is clearly an empirical statement but it would also have an enormous influence on me if true. It would cause me to take many actions that I would not otherwise take) and an "ought" statement is an empirical statement with what is expected to be one particular sort of influence -- it is meant to cause you to behave in the way described (Something that R.M. Hare also saw). So an "ought" or "is right" statement is simply a shorthand (compressed) "is" statement that can be expanded in some way if desired. It might be noted however that there seems to be a gradient in "good", "right" and "ought" statements, with "ought" statements being most intended to incite action and "good" statements least so.

 

Gun control in Mumbai

Didn't work.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of "gun control". India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

The guns used in last week's Bombay massacre were all "prohibited weapons" under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

Hat tip: Clayton Cramer

Possums and climate

Andrew Bolt has a comment about a possible extinction event being linked to global warming.

You are being misled by alarmists:

SCIENTISTS say a white possum native to Queensland's Daintree forest has become the first mammal to become extinct due to man-made global warming.

The white lemuroid possum, a rare creature found only above 1000m in the mountain forests of far north Queensland, has not been seen for three years.

Experts fear climate change is to blame for the disappearance of the highly vulnerable species thanks to a temperature rise of up to 0.8C....

Scientists believe some frog, bug and insects species have also been killed off by climate change. But this would be the first known loss of a mammal and the most significant since the extinction of the Dodo and the Tasmanian Tiger.

"It is not looking good," researcher Steve Williams said.

"If they have died out it would be first example of something that has gone extinct purely because of global warming."

Rising temperatures - which these researchers blame on man - are said to have caused this extinction. So let's check the mean maximum temperatures at the nearest big weather station, Cairns, and see if things have grown possum-deadly hotter over the past 30 years:

Good heavens! You mean in the 30 years to 2000, the temperatures were actually bang-on the long-term average?

Try again. Let's see if this year was hotter than average:

No, it wasn't. In fact, it's cooler in Cairns this year than it was a decade ago:

Port Douglas is even closer to this white possum territory, but its statistics don't allow similar comparisons. But there is this graph, showing that temperatures next to the Daintree were actually above average in the 30 years to 1980, when the white possum still could thrive:

Meanwhile, of course, the world's temperatures have actually fallen over the decade.

Do the researchers have a more plausible, albeit less media-friendly alarmist, explanation for the white possums' demise? Can they explain why they cried wolf on the temperatures?

How science works

A comment by James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

How Science Actually Works

Here's a fascinating little story from the science section of the New York Times:

Scars on the surface of the Moon record a hail of impacts during what is called the Late Heavy Bombardment. The Earth would have received an even more intense bombardment, and the common thinking until recently was that life could not have emerged on Earth until the bombardment eased about 3.85 billion years ago.

Norman H. Sleep, a professor of geophysics at Stanford, recalled that in 1986 he submitted a paper that calculated the probability of life surviving one of the giant, early impacts. It was summarily rejected because a reviewer said that obviously nothing could have lived then.

That is no longer thought to be true.

"We thought we knew something we didn't," said T. Mark Harrison, a professor of geochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. In hindsight the evidence was just not there. And new evidence has suggested a new view of the early Earth.

This, of course, is how science actually works. All scientific knowledge is tentative, subject to constant challenge by new hypotheses and new evidence.

Keep this in mind every time a global warmist claims that the "scientific consensus" about "climate change" is unchallengeable.

And not just "climate change", but all those who seize upon one item and declare evolution impossible should take this to heart.  Evolution has survived 150+ years of people trying to disprove it.  Anyone who succeeds in disproving it will become famous.  That's how science works.

Win Ben Stein's Mind

From Little Green Footballs:

Roger Ebert's comprehensive skewering of Ben Stein's anti-evolution film Expelled (a right-wing Michael Moore-ish piece of deceptive propaganda) is a must-read: Win Ben Stein's mind.

How to break a terrorist

I heard the author of this book interviewed on the Laura Ingraham show.  I don't have nearly as much of a problem with his approach to the discussion as I do with some other folks (in particular, those who claim torture doesn't work, and anyone who says torture has ever worked is lying).  However, Blackfive also has some comments:

His attitude was so self-congratulatory I was put off and his contentions that he and his team followed an enlightened and higher moral path and the rest of the task force members were brutes was abundantly obvious. The title of the book seems to perfectly match this attitude. "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq." I am the one with the brains, they are the brutes.

Obama's Shrinking Coattails

Coattails seem to be going out of fashion. 

Mary Katherine Ham notes another reason why Democrats may not be able to count of Obama drawing voters to the polls in the future:

...the Obama turnout effort among blacks may not be replicable. You can only vote to elect the first black president once.

Mumbai is now officially part of the West

At least, discussions make a good springboard for Hugh Hewitt to plug his book.

 

They hate Jews

Dennis Prager looks at the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai:

As Newsweek reported during the siege, Given that Orthodox Jews were being held at gunpoint by mujahideen (sic), it seemed unlikely there would be survivors. Newsweek, like just about everyone else, simply assumes Islamists will murder Jews whenever and wherever possible.

They are right.

Why is this important?

For years I have warned that great evils often begin with the murder of Jews, and therefore non-Jews who dismiss Jew-hatred (aka anti-Semitism, aka anti-Zionism), will learn too late that Jew- and Israel-haters only begin with Jews but never end with them. When Israeli Jews were almost the only targets of Muslim terrorists, the world dismissed it as a Jewish or Israeli problem. Then it became an American and European and Filipino and Thai and Indonesian and Hindu problem.

Jews are the canary in the coal mine. They draw the first hatreds of the evildoers of the world, but if we ran out of Jews, there'd still be plenty of hatred left for everyone else.

What side are the media on?

From Prarie Pundit:

When it comes to terrorists and their grievances, nearly all the Western media have provided them with a rich diet on which to feed.

In the spring of 2005, Newsweek ran with a thinly sourced item about the Quran being flushed down a Guantanamo toilet. Result: At least 15 people were killed in Afghan riots.

Newsweek later retracted the story, which was the right thing to do but also, in its way, exceptional. Compare that to the refusal of French reporter Charles Enderlin and his station, France 2, to retract or even express doubt about his September 2000 report on Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli soldiers during an exchange of gunfire in the Gaza Strip -- an exchange Mr. Enderlin did not witness.

....

The media is quick to follow the enemy script whether it is the bombing of wedding parties are blaming the US for not stopping the enemy attacks on noncombatants. How many stories have you seen about enemy war crimes? The attacks on Mumbai are clearly war crimes. Targeting noncombatants deliberately is a war crime. So where are those stories?

They don't fit the "AmeriKKKa" narrative beloved by the left.

Marriage and history

Historians in the Sac Bee have their say:

"Traditional marriage has varied immensely from society to society and time period," said Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is the author of "Marriage, A History."

Coontz said one form of marriage has been supported by more societies prior to the 18th century than any other.

And it's not one man, one woman.

"It's one man, many women," said Coontz, citing examples from the Old Testament.

From polygamy to interracial marriage, the notion of what marriage means – and who can get married – has gone through many permutations, say scholars who have studied the institution.

....

What about same-sex marriage?

Coontz said same-sex marriage has been accepted in some cultures. "But those have always been a small minority," said Coontz.

Maybe there's a reason for the minority status.

And an op-ed in the NYTimes looks at why people voted for Prop 8...

(1) Blacks are much more likely than whites to attend church, according to a Gallup report, and black women are much more likely to attend church than black men....
(2) This high rate of church attendance by blacks informs a very conservative moral view....
(3) Marriage can be a sore subject for black women in general....

...and how to talk them out of it.
(Hat tip: How Appealing)

The Arab Street Rises Up

Or not.

Thomas Friedman has some comments on what causes the Arab street to rise up in protest.
if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai? India says its interrogation of the surviving terrorist indicates that all 10 men come from the Pakistani port of Karachi, and at least one, if not all 10, were Pakistani nationals.

We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.

Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village — all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country — declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.

The structure of Society

Clayton Cramer has been reading.

Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. xv + 263

This is an astonishingly depressing book. You really do need to read it--but there are a few caveats that I will get to at the end of the review.

Dalrymple observes how little of the blame the underclass spreads to their own actions -- everything bad in their lives happens to them, the result of bad luck, societal conspiracy, or their victims.  They never do anything wrong, or fail to do anything right.
But I also noticed this:

Dalyrymple, who is pretty clearly not a Christian, points out that the collapse of traditional sexual morality did not free the underclass from all the horrible limitations of narrow-minded rigidity. Instead, it destroyed a system of family ties and duties that provided the most stable situation for the poor to rise up and out. The underclass has all the sexual jealousy that was present in the past (and then some), but without any of the rules or social conventions that punished men for philandering and discouraged them (not always very effectively) from abusing their wives and children. The absence of those rules has only aggravated the sexual jealousy problem that seems to be natural to the species.

I've been thinking that marriage, as an institution, is a lot more than a goodie bag the churches and the government give to people.  It's a nucleus around which society crystallizes.  Playing with the structure won't endanger any particular marriage.  If the rules are relaxed to allow same-sex marriage, we won't see couples running to divorce court en masse. Instead, we'll see what Dalrymple observes in the inner cities -- people just not bothering.
Marriage has a number of goodies attached, but these goodies are bribes, designed to induce compliance with a wide array of rules, both written and unwritten.  Destroy the incentive structure around marriage, and the institution goes away.  When the institution goes away, the short-range forces that pull a mob together into society disappear, and society crumbles from the bottom up.

Hi, all!

Did you miss me?
I've been working at the Loscon science fiction convention all weekend.  I was running the hospitality suite for about 1000 people. It was an incredible amount of work, and I put in 10-hour shifts Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
But it seems to have been a success.
I'm on vacation today and tomorrow, to recover.
And back to blogging.....

Which side?

One has to wonder what side the press is on these days.
In this post, we see how news reporters did their level best to get people captured by the terrorists who had taken over the Taj Hotel in Mumbai.

While watching the Mumbai terror attacks on Fox last week, I heard a Fox anchor, safely ensconced in NYC, interview a frightened Indian man who was hiding in the Taj hotel. He was like a golf announcer, all whispers, and she was the soccer announcer, loudly leading the terrorists to their GOOOAAAL. It went something like this:

He (whispering into his cell phone): It's very frightening, but I think I'm safe.

She: Are you safe? How? Where are you?

He: I'm in my room.

She: How terrible. Are you sure your safe? Where are you?

No kidding. She actually asked twice where he was, as if it never occurred to her that the terrorists might be monitoring the media to find more hostages people to torture and kill. And, it turns out the terrorists were doing just that, and Fox was hardly alone...

The great war correspondents of WWII understood war and enemies and good guys. They were, by and large, discrete when it was important to be discrete, and honest journalists the rest of the time. With Vietnam, we got a new kind of war correspondent, becoming more anti-war as the war moved along, until they became a powerful force for our abandonment of the war. Their reporting may also have helped the North Vietnamese understand our troop movements and strategies.

Now we have a new generation of war correspondents, many of whom never leave their air conditioned suites, few of whom accept that we really are at war. They're reporting incidents not battles, and they proved last week that they're not to be trusted with sensitive information.

As commentary, I pass this along:

Which side is the War Office on? This was the question once asked by a man walking down Whitehall, and the answer he got was: "Ours, I hope."

Things have deteriorated since.

Napoleon is alleged to have said, "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity."  Nice words, but the hard part is deciding at what point mere stupidity is inadequate to the task.