As long as we continue to pretend, or imagine, that the purpose of human spaceflight is to “explore,” we’ll continue to get the policy wrong.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The IPCC
…and its inconvenient truth:
Based upon early drafts of the AR5, the IPCC seemed prepared to dismiss the pause in warming as irrelevant ‘noise’ associated with natural variability. Under pressure, the IPCC now acknowledges the pause and admits that climate models failed to predict it. The IPCC has failed to convincingly explain the pause in terms of external radiative forcing from greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar or volcanic forcing; this leaves natural internal variability as the predominant candidate to explain the pause. If the IPCC attributes to the pause to natural internal variability, then this begs the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural internal variability. Not to mention raising questions about the confidence that we should place in the IPCC’s projections of future climate change.
Nevertheless, the IPCC appears to be set to conclude that warming in the near future will resume in accord with climate model predictions.
Why is my own reasoning about the implications of the pause, in terms of attribution of the late 20th century warming and implications for future warming, so different from the conclusions drawn by the IPCC? The disagreement arises from different assessments of the value and importance of particular classes of evidence as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence – my reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of observational evidence and understanding of natural internal variability of the climate system, whereas the IPCC’s reasoning is weighted heavily in favor of climate model simulations and external forcing of climate change.
The models are utterly useless, as a basis for public policy. In fact, to the degree that people don’t understand this, they’re worse than useless.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: no ice-free Arctic this year. Mazlowski is falsified.
The Safety Culture
Some cogent thoughts from Mollie Hemingway:
Many parents just can’t accept the reality that we’re not in as much control of our children as we wish. Last week my nephew went to an outdoor camp in Colorado with the rest of his 5th-grade class. They were supposed to stay just one night. Floods hit the region, the roads washed out and filled with boulders. There was nothing anyone could do. After being stranded for three days, the parents heard about plans to airlift the kids out via Chinook helicopter. That plan was halted when some parents complained it was too dangerous. Who knew that helicopter parents would be threatened by actual helicopters?
Never mind that riding on a Chinook would be the adventure of a lifetime for a 10-year-old. Perhaps because there were no other reasonable options, the airlift commenced the next day. Every child survived and my nephew reported that “No one ever had so much fun in a natural disaster.”
Look, I’m a mother. I care deeply about my children’s safety. But safety is just one important thing to teach our children. And it’s not even anywhere near the most important thing. Keeping your kids from dying or getting hurt is of secondary importance to teaching them how to live. Safety isn’t even a virtue. If you’re teaching your kids more about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others, responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.
That’s the kind of culture that breeds the hypersafe culture of spaceflight that my book is all about.
And then there’s this:
My neighborhood is in Northern Virginia, an area that has been rewarded for playing it safe and going after government cash. Many of my neighbors are government employees, lawyers and lobbyists. Many of them have found success regulating other people’s businesses out of existence, destructive acts all too frequently predicated on fears that somebody somewhere might get hurt. It’s not surprising, in that context, that my neighbors would call for regulation of the lemonade stand or lawn mowing business run by the kids next door.
The fact is that America is now run by people who profit from keeping everyone else from taking risks. It’s lucrative work if you can get it. Six of the ten richest counties in the country are next to Washington, D.C., for good reason. [“It’s where the money is.” — Willie Sutton] But this isn’t a recipe for prospering culturally or politically.
Yup.
Keith Cowing’s Hoplophobia
On full display.
And to answer his anticipated question, I read NASA Watch because I find it informative, despite things like this.
Men And Women Are Different
Some apparently politically incorrect thoughts from Sarah Hoyt.
The Media’s Guide To Firearms
A Denunciation Of President Obama
In remarks on the Senate Floor on March 16, 2006, Sen. Obama said the need to raise the Debt Limit was “a sign of leadership failure.”
Sen Obama said the need to raise the Debt Limit was another reflection of the “Government’s reckless fiscal policies.”
The[n], Sen Obama also denounced the rising National Debt as “a hidden domestic enemy” robbing cities & states of “critical investments.”
Denouncing the ever-increasing National Debt, then-Sen. Obama told the Senate he would oppose an increase in the Debt Limit.
Pwned.
It goes without saying, of course, that Mark Knoller is a racist.
The Economic Recovery
What economic recovery?
…why is the current recovery so weak? It is not because of the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis. U.S. Financial markets began to recover in late 2008, more than four and a half years ago. Moreover, research by Michael Bordo of Rutgers University and Joseph Haubrich of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland show that US recoveries following financial crises are typically faster, not slower, than average.
Recent research by us and other scholars analyzes the chronically slow economic recovery from a very different perspective. Specifically, our view is that poorly designed and implemented government policies have impeded capital and technological investments and hiring, and that bad government policies – not underlying problems with the U.S. market economy – are the primary reason why the economy has not recovered.
And the low-info voters voted for four more years of it last fall.
IRS Officials
They thought Obama wanted them to crack down on the Tea Party:
In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives.
But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters.
“As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently,” the staff report concludes. “Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.”
Well, why wouldn’t they have thought so? After all, recall that four years ago, the president “joked” about auditing his enemies.
It’s worth re-reading what I wrote at the time the “phony” scandal was breaking:
After the Supreme Court ruled against the administration in Citizens United (the case that some defending the IRS are claiming was the cause of the new scrutiny, despite the fact that it started before the caseloads began to increase), President Civility lectured them, a captive audience at the State of the Union speech, lying about the ruling to their faces (well, all right, to be fair, he may not have been lying — President Constitutional Scholar may have just been ignorant on the nature of the ruling). This undoubtedly made many in his government think that it gave them license to fight the ruling in the trenches against the sudden growth in enemies of the state it had spurred, since their president had said it was wrong.
Let me (as the president would say) be clear. I will be in no way shocked if emails are discovered showing that the White House actively ordered IRS officials to go after Tea Party groups, while green lighting his political allies. My only point is that, sadly, it wouldn’t have been necessary for them to do so.
When the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170, it wasn’t done at the direct order of King Henry II. It didn’t have to be. All it required was for the monarch to muse, aloud, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
But sadly, while we have badly needed a better president for over four years, the real problem isn’t the men and women running the system, and it wasn’t a failure of the system — it is the system itself.
And that’s the most worrisome thing. It may require a major reform of the civil service to fix it.
The Shooter’s Politics
While it has no bearing on this guy going nuts and killing 12 people, it’s rather ironic that he’s a liberal Obama supporter considering the left always jumps at the chance to paint a killer as a Christian or conservative.
And of course, if he was a Christian or a conservative, it would obviously be the motive.
[Update a few minutes later]
“If we’d had ammunition, we could have cleared that building.”
But it was an unarmed victim “gun-free” zone.
Oh, and here’s a bonus from that idiot Piers Morgan. The type of gun used is obviously very important, until it isn’t.
[Update a while later]
The media remains obsessed with AR-15s, even though the shooter didn’t use one, and didn’t even attempt to get one. Instead, he used a Joe Biden special.
[Late-morning update]
If Obama had a fan, he’d look like Aaron Alexis:
Now we learn that Alexis was a Prius-driving, African-American liberal who liked Obama. Facts aren’t much fun, eh, libs?
So now the MSM narrative will magically transform this mass murder from “yet another damning indictment of gun-toting, right-wing racist America” to “the completely isolated actions of a misunderstood victim of society.” Just watch. It happens every time. And every time, they think we won’t notice.
Meanwhile, their ratings and their circulation numbers continue to plummet, and they blame everybody but themselves.
What tools they are.