Will a Nobel for Literature be next? And an Emmy for the reading?
I mean, this is must-see teevee.
Plus, it’s a gift that keeps on giving, in its inspiration of other timeless poetry.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
No Honor Among Thieves
Good news from Kyopenhagen — things are falling apart:
Government ministers can’t agree on the best way to take money from their own citizens, give it to an opaque, above-the-law organization, and yet still control it; because, of course, with all that money comes power. Negotiators are skittish about how they can ensure that the money pledged will actually be paid into the pot, and if it does, who gets to dole out the funds. Everybody wants a piece of it, but nobody trusts anybody.
Well, they shouldn’t.
Unfortunately, as he notes, this is only a temporary setback. The leftists will regroup, and make other attempts in the future.
The Unraveling Continues
We now have substantial evidence, from several independent sources, that the data used as the basis for the IPCC report has been adjusted in undocumented ways, and those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.
The manufactured consensus continues to fall apart.
[Update early afternoon]
Just like that, the warming is gone:
Given all this manipulation and cherry-picking, you should ignore the press releases that will undoubtedly be coming from NOAA (when they return from snowy, cold Copenhagen), NASA, and Hadley about how this has been among the warmest years, and how the last decade was the warmest on record.
I guess that Heidi Cullen will be calling for the former head of meteorology of her employer to be “decertified.”
The Only Thing That Saves Us From These Tranzis
…is their sheer incompetence:
One has to admire the heartless indifference of the climate-change jet-set in the VIP enclosure to a lifelong toady like Borenstein. The rest of us, though, might draw the conclusion that, even if you think it a good idea to transfer trillions of dollars from the functioning part of the world to a transnational bureaucracy in an attempt to recalibrate the very heavens, these chaps might not be the ones you’d want running it.
But somehow, that thought never seems to occur to them.
“That’s What Socialized Medicine Does”
“…it turns each of us into a little fascist.” Of course, a lot of people, far too many, don’t mind that. They don’t mind it at all.
Zubrin’s Path
An amusing political cartoon, but pretty much inside baseball for space enthusiasts.
Science, Epistomology…
…and science reporting. An interesting post by Derb:
…science has more epistemic depth than most of us can cope with. That water quenches thirst and puts out fires, I can confirm by experience. That it is composed of hydrogen molecules bonded to oxygen molecules by electromagnetic forces, I take on trust. “What the deuce is it to me?” I take it on trust because water’s real useful (see above). I’d likely be skeptical about the hydrogen/oxygen business if it were detached from the thirst-quenching and fire-extinguishing. It sounds improbable on the face of it, and one can easily think up folkish objections, of the kind that creationists make against evolution. (Hydrogen’s highly flammable. If there’s hydrogen in water, why isn’t water flammable? Etc., etc.)
When unmoored from utility, abstract ideas have to appeal to the human mind on their merits; and the human mind is so structured that the only abstract ideas it regards as having merit are those that concord with the “naïve duality” that is our default metaphysic — “medium-sized dry goods” being acted on by human wills, or by invisible spirits possessed of human-like wills. That’s as much epistemic depth as most of us can handle. Abstract ideas at odds with that schema just irritate us. And of course, an abstract idea widely held among people we dislike for personal, social, or tribal reasons, is doubly unappealing.
When the science has as powerful real-world implications as climate “science” (sorry, it’s hard to say it without scare quotes at this point) does, it must be trusted much more than it currently deserves to be, based on the behavior of its ostensible practioners.
Thoughts On Judicial Supremacy
Ramesh discusses something that doesn’t get enough discussion:
The argument that has not been made (or at least not made often) is that the whole legislation — not just the individual mandate — exceeds the constitutional powers of the federal government. This classic conservative position has gone unvoiced. I suspect that it has done so because, again, of the influence of judicial supremacy. We have been trained to think that saying that an overhaul of American health care exceeds the legitimate powers of Congress is equivalent to calling for the judicial invalidation of health-care legislation (along with much of modern government, by implication). Since that would be absurd to call for, we don’t say it.
At the risk of being thought quixotic, let me suggest that we need to revive a dormant tradition of legislative reasoning and argument about the Constitution. In this kind of constitutional reasoning considerations that it would be improper for judges to invoke have their place.
What a concept. This is annoying, too:
…too many commentators have dwelt on the question of how the courts are likely to treat the legislation — or, at best, what they should do consistent with their precedents — rather than on the distinct question of whether the Constitution, properly interpreted, grants Congress the power to enact this legislation.
It’s partly because many of the commentariat don’t even understand the Constitution, nor care about it much, at least when it comes to the government running the economy. But it’s also a symptom of the simple-mindedness of the media. It’s like a political campaign where they report on the horse race — who’s ahead or behind — rather than what the candidates actually say about the issues, with an analysis of it. Yes, it’s not unimportant to speculate about how a court will rule, but it’s not as important as analyzing the actual legal and constitutional issues, but they’re either incapable of that, or uninterested.
The Precautionary Principle
…and global warming. I have some thoughts on regret over at PJM.
[Update a few minutes later]
Brian Micklethwait agrees with me on where the burden of proof now lies.
Hiding The Decline
…is even worse than it first appeared. It would appear that tree rings are worse than useless as a proxy for temperature.
[Late afternoon update]
The data has been tortured, and it has confessed:
Continent after continent, researchers are seeing no warming in the unprocessed data (see one thorough analysis here).
For years, I have been a true skeptic on the subject. That is, I wasn’t convinced that the planet was warming, but I was willing to concede the possibility, even probability, and be convinced, though I never thought that it justified the costly and draconian, even totalitarian measures being proposed to deal with it.
I’ve reached a tipping point. Now consider me a “denier.” The burden of proof has shifted, completely. The climate scientific community has clearly been engaged in a toxic combination of groupthink, overadoration of their theories and confirmation bias, and outright fraud, not to mention hiding a lot more than the decline. Whoever finally blew the whistle on them last month is, in my opinion, an unknown hero to humanity.
I’ll have more thoughts on this, and the implications for national and global policies, at PJM in the morning.