Category Archives: Social Commentary

Rudy

Noah Rothman, on the idiotic outrage over Giuliani’s comments:

The press did not recoil in horror when former Vice President Al Gore screamed that George W. Bush “betrayed” the country. Nor did they feign outrage when Obama accused the 43rd President of the United States of being “unpatriotic” because he increased the debt at a pace that the 44th President of the United States would rapidly eclipse. And why would they? It’s not their place to defend the president’s reputation – he is, after all, merely a temporary civilian custodian of one branch of our republican government. Americans have a rather grand tradition of besmirching the character of our presidents, and it is a healthy and cherished one. By “civility,” the press really means deference and observance of subjectively assessed standards of decorum. That’s not merely bias, its servility.

Yes.

[Afternoon update]

Obama not only doesn’t love America, he doesn’t even like it.

Climate Skeptics

How and when did you become one?

A lot of interesting responses.

As some note there, to me the biggest deal with the release of the CRU data five years ago wasn’t (just) the duplicity and unscientific behavior revealed in the emails, but the utter crap that was the source code of the computer models. It was clear that it was not done by anyone familiar with computer science, numerical methods, or modeling, and the notion that we should have any confidence whatsoever in their output was societally insane. In terms of Matthews’ paper, I’d put myself somewhere between “lukewarmer” and “moderate skeptic.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Starting to read through the comments. Here’s just one horror story:

Most of the claims being made by climate change advocates appear to run contrary to basic meteorology. As I’ve been attacked personally and professionally for offering contrary views, I decided to leave the field. I will defend my Atmospheric Science PhD thesis and walk away. It’s become clear to me that it is not possible to undertake independent research in any area that touches upon climate change if you have to make your living as a professional scientist on government grant money or have to rely on getting tenure at a university. The massive group think that I have encountered on this topic has cost me my career, many colleagues and has damaged my reputation among the few people I know in the field. I’m leaving to work in the financial industry. It’s a sad day when you feel that you have to leave a field that you are passionately interested in because you fear that you won’t be able to find a job once your views become widely known. Until free thought is allowed in the climate sciences, I will consider myself a skeptic of catastrophic human induced global warming.

Yup. Totally, totally politicized. It’s not a science any more. Unless you think that Lysenko was a scientist.

Jon Stewart

Kyle Smith isn’t as impressed with him as we’re supposed to be:

Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.

It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.
Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.

Yes, as Jim Treacher put it, the “clown nose off, clown nose on” schtick got pretty tiresome. The tears of all those bewailing his departure are delicious.