Thoughts on freedom, virtue and religion from Bill Whittle.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
It Is Not Unconstitutional
This article embodies two maladies of the mainstream media that Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out on another occasion also afflicts the Left: (1) they don’t really understand conservative arguments; and (2) they don’t really understand the Constitution.
It’s nothing new. Actually, I’d go further and say they don’t understand arguments, period. They’ve grown up in a propagandistic cocoon in which they’ve never had to actually make arguments, or rationally defend or question their own beliefs, because it is simply given by all around them that they are correct.
An Open Letter To Dr. Phil Jones
We are dealing with liars:
Your explanation of your statement is this:
At the end of the IPCC process, chapters, formal comments and responses are all published and that is the appropriate place for this information. It is important that scientists should be allowed free and frank discussion during the writing process. I might also point out that I decided not to take part in AR5 because of the time commitment it requires.
That sounds perfectly logical … if we were dealing with honest men. But if the Climategate emails have shown anything, they have shown that we are not dealing with honest men. Far too many of the leading AGW supporting climate scientists have been shown by their own words to be serial liars like yourself.
But in any case, only scientists with something to hide need privacy to have a “free and frank discussion” about science. Honest scientists have no reason to hide their views. Honest scientists discuss these scientific issues on the web in the full light of day. Why on earth would someone need privacy to discuss the intricacies of the climate models? Do you really have to go into a closet with your best friend to speak your true mind about atmospheric physics? Is it true that you guys actually need some kind of ‘private space’ to expose your secret inner ideas about the factors affecting the formation of clouds? From my perspective, these kinds of private discussions are not only not what is needed. This two-faced nature of you guys’ statements on the science are a large part of the problem itself.
This is quite visible in the Climategate emails. In your communications, you and many of the scientists are putting out your true views of other scientists and their work. You are expressing all kinds of honest doubts. You are discussing uncertainties in your and other scientists understandings. You are all letting your friends know which papers you think are good and which you think are junk, and that’s valuable information in the climate science discussions.
But you never say any of this in public. Not one word. For example, in public it’s all about how great Michael Mann’s science is, not a word of criticism, while in private some of you guys justifiably tear both him and his work to shreds.
I find this double-speak deceptive and underhanded. It has nothing to do with “free and frank discussion” as you claim. I think that if AGW supporting scientists actually broke down and told the truth to the public, you would fare much better. I think that if you disavowed your beloved Saint Stephen (Schneider) and his advice, and you expressed all of your doubts and revealed all of your uncertainties about the climate and told the plain unvarnished truth about your opinion of other scientists’ work, we’d be infinitely better off. Nobody likes two-faced people. You would be miles ahead if you said the same things in public you say in private, and so would the field of climate science.
But it wouldn’t serve “the cause.” When will people realize that the climate “scientists” have not been engaging in science? And they’re not just liars. I don’t know what the FOIA laws are in England, but I think that if Jones had done here what he did in East Anglia, he could be subject to criminal prosecution. And would be, at least under an administration that was more interested in enforcing the law than in maintaining politically correct pieties. I hope we’ll get an administration like that some day.
The Stink Of Intellectual Corruption
“…is overpowering“:
The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.
‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: ‘I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.
‘They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the centre of the affair, said the group findings did stand up to scrutiny.
Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones – who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – said: ‘Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden.
‘I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.’
I wonder who at DOE that was, and if it was during the Bush administration?
Thanksgiving Thoughts On Marxist America
We have lost the balance:
Here’s what Marx said:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
Think about what this means. All of the money and power would be focused in the state, but then the state would not do anything with that concentration of power. The state was innocent. There would be no cronyism, no corruption, no bureaucracy, and no concentration of stupidity so as to make mistakes much bigger.
This is precisely — without the proletarian aspects — the Obama worldview. Good citizens with high levels of education will be the philosopher kings, telling everyone what to eat, drive, and do for their own good. Naturally, these people would have no interests of their own. Naturally, their learning from books and theories rather than from real life would not lead them into really big mistakes.
And naturally this system will make the economy grow (“increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible”) rather than collapse because the people running the state know nothing about creating jobs or meeting a payroll or actually producing anything.
Then, there is Marx’s view of what later became known as the withering away of the state:
“When…all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. … If the proletariat…makes itself the ruling class…then it will…thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”
What we have here today is not the triumph of the proletariat but the triumph of the managerial-bureaucratic-intellectual-cultural elite. The best describer of this is not Marx but James Burnham, a former Marxist whose writings in the 1940s were the basis for George Orwell in writing 1984. Then there is Karl Popper, who pointed out that the greatest threat to freedom (the “open society”) were those who thought they knew everything.
And those who seek political power, with few if any exceptions, are people set on accumulating power, glory, and wealth. All the more reason to limit what they can do.
Nevertheless, this grasping elite views itself as disinterested. It does not act from selfish motives but because it knows better than anyone else how to promote the public good. And even with the best will and highest morality that mortals are capable of achieving, political leaders and bureaucrats are still limited by their own worldview, life experience, and specific role (where you stand is where you sit, as one popular Washington, D.C., maxim has it).
There’s nothing here that would surprise America’s founders, who knew that freedom always depended on restraining such people.
Let’s hope we’re not too far gone.
Happy Tenth Bloggiversary
…to Megan McArdle. Mine was sometime in October (I’m not sure exactly what the date was, because my first post was lost to the vagaries of multiple exports/imports to multiple blogging platforms, and I don’t think I noted it. Not going to go back and search the month to verify.
The Problem with the Climate Data
I note that over at RealClimate they are desperately trying to spin this as two-year-old turkey. However, it’s not just my case that has new information. Regarding a host of other issues, the recent emails contain much previously unrevealed evidence of the perfidy, subversion, misdirection, and malfeasance practiced by the Climategate un-indicted co-conspirators. Among many other things, they provide clear evidence of the destruction of incriminating emails. This was not just “boys will be boys”. This was the leading lights of the AGW supporting scientists, working together to deny access to publicly funded climate data, and twisting, bending and breaking the scientific norms, FOI regulations, and possibly the law in the process. And that’s just what they did in my case, that doesn’t even begin to touch their other misdeeds that they discuss in detail.
The discouraging part is that, to this day, not a person among them has admitted that they did anything incorrect in the slightest. Not one has acknowledged that they went a ways, not just a little ways, but a long ways over the line of ethics, morality, and honesty. No one has said they did a single thing wrong, no one has admitted they evaded an honest FOI request. Silence.
And silence, unfortunately, has also been the overwhelming response of the climate science community to their misdeeds. The miscreants say nothing, their supporters say nothing, they keep awarding each other honors and prizes, and they hope it will go away.
And as he notes, it’s not going to go away. It’s only going to get worse as more and more comes to light over time. Whoever is leaking this know what they’re doing, and knows the whole story.
[Update later afternoon]
Inappropriate conduct by the National Research Council? I wish I were capable of being shocked.
“All Models Are Wrong”
More on the latest email release.
The Ironic Presidency
The difference between 2008 and 2011:
The one constant here is Obama’s false pitch in 2008 that everything that came before his hope-and-change elixir was simply awful and everything after would be wonderful, from a cooling planet to falling seas — all delivered in teleprompted mellifluousness with a new post-racial cool. In 2008, for a conservative critic to suggest that the former Chicago community organizer was a glib rookie senator — without any experience in national politics, clueless about the private sector, with no prior record of industry or inspired legislation, and with a mostly unknown and poorly researched past — was to earn the charge of racism; in 2011, for a liberal to do the same, I guess, will be seen as sober and judicious bipartisan reflection.
And they’ll still call us racists.
Climaquiddick Redux
They’ve found more incriminating emails. Validating that the “exoneration” of Mann was a whitewash.
[Update a while later]
A lot more over at Yid With Lid.
[Update a few minutes later]
Ace has more, too.
These people aren’t doing science. They should be drummed out of their so-called profession.
[Late afternoon update]
The emails seem to be real. At least Mann isn’t denying them. Though certainly he’ll continue to spin.
[Bumped]