A long and interesting essay with which I think I disagree, but haven’t had the time to dig into enough to be sure.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Space Show
I’ll be on this afternoon from 2-3:30 PM PDT, to discuss the book in the context of current events with Russia, commercial crew and congress.
Left-Lane Squatters
Washington state is cracking down on them.
I wish more states would do this. As I wrote in comments there, for decades, I’ve been saying that when I am king, all those stupid signs that say “Slower Drivers Keep Right” will be replaced with “Left Lane For Passing Only.” Because no one thinks that they are a “slower driver.” I’d also put in sensors so that you get an automatic ticket if you’re passed on the right five consecutive times without passing anyone.
The Climate Cult
Thoughts from Steve Hayward on the latest propaganda failure:
The temperature plateau and the persistent limitations and errors of the computer models strongly suggest the kind of “anomalies” that Thomas Kuhn famously explained should constitute a crisis for dominant scientific theories. What’s more, several papers recently published in the peer-reviewed literature conclude climate sensitivity is much lower than previously thought, making the problem of climate change much less likely to be catastrophic and more likely to be easily managed. But with the notable exceptions of the Economist and straight-shooting New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin, these heterodox findings, which have steadily eroded the catastrophic climate change narrative, have received almost no media attention.
Despite all this, there has been not even the hint of a second thought from the climateers, nor any reflection that their opinions or strategies could bear some modification. The environmental community is so deeply invested in looming catastrophe that it’s difficult to envision a scientific result that would alter their cult-like bearing. Rather than reflect, they deflect, blaming the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industry, and Republican “climate deniers” for their lack of political progress. Yet organized opposition to climate change fanaticism is tiny compared with the swollen staffs and huge marketing budgets of the major environmental organizations, not to mention the government agencies around the world that have thrown in with them on the issue. The main energy trade associations seldom speak up about climate science controversies. The major conservative think tanks have no climate change programs to speak of. The Cato Institute devotes just two people to the issue. The main opposition to climate fanaticism is confined to the Heartland Institute, the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a scattering of relentless bloggers who have acquired surprisingly large readerships. That’s it. These are boutique operations next to the environmental establishment: The total budgets for all of these efforts would probably not add up to a month’s spending by just the Sierra Club. And yet we are to believe that this comparatively small effort has kept the climate change agenda at bay. It certainly keeps climateers in an uproar.
Well, someone has to do it.
Safe Is Not An Option
Ed Driscoll interviewed me the other day. The podcast and a transcript are up now.
Skepticism
Just what is it, anyway?
I consider myself a skeptic, in general. I don’t really “believe” in anything, including deities, except the scientific method. Of course, that means that I also don’t actively disbelieve in deities. I simply have no opinion about them.
When it comes to science, I accept as a working theory that which best seems to scientifically explain the available data, which is why I think that evolution is the best explanation for the fossil record and the structure and relationship of DNA in life on earth. But I don’t “believe” in it. I don’t even “believe” in gravity. I simply view it as a useful invention of Isaac Newton, improved upon by Einstein, to explain a lot of empirical phenomena, like things falling when dropped, or bodies in space orbiting other bodies. And what makes it useful is that it is very predictive.
Which brings us to climate “science,” which seems to be anything but. Which isn’t surprising, because the models remain primitive, both in terms of the computer power needed to properly model such a thing, and our understanding of the interactions. So when asked if I “believe” that the earth is warming, or if that warming is being caused by humans, I don’t really know what to say, since I don’t “believe” anything. I certainly can’t “deny” it, since I have no idea, but (as I’ve often said), if the planet is warming, it would hardly be surprising, considering that we’re less than half a millennium from the Little Ice Age.
To repeat: Here is what I do deny:
I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.
I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”
As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such understanding suffer from hubris. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.
Nothing has changed in the interim to cause me to change my opinions in that regard.
The Bergdahl Backlash
Why Team Obama was blindsided:
This is a fundamental culture clash. Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)
President Obama did this to himself (and to Bergdahl). This beautifully educated man, who never tires of letting us know how much smarter he is than the rest of us, never stopped to consider that our troops and their families might have been offended by their commander-in-chief staging a love-fest at the White House to celebrate trading five top terrorists for one deserter and featuring not the families of those soldiers (at least six of them) who died in the efforts to find and free Bergdahl, but, instead, giving a starring role on the international stage to Pa Taliban, parent of a deserter and a creature of dubious sympathies (that beard on pops ain’t a tribute to ZZ Top). How do you say “outrageous insult to our vets” in Pashto?
Nor, during the recent VA scandal, had the president troubled himself to host the families of survivors of those vets who died awaiting care. No, the warmest attention our president has ever paid to a “military family” was to Mr. and Mrs. Bergdahl.
He’s from a different country than many of us.
The Polar Bear-Faced Lie
Mark Steyn says that the real endangered species is climate scientists willing to defend Michael Mann.
Dietary Animal Fat
It’s long past time to end the war on it:
The public MUST NOT let TBFS slip slowly into oblivion. Nina’s first story should create an outraged public that demands the following:
- Government-sponsored nutrition must be totally terminated.
- Freedom of information in valid nutritional sciences must be made widely available.
- All citizens must have the right to design their own nutrition plans.
- A primary prevention program based on eliminating the causes of diseases must be implemented.
It won’t happen unless we make it happen. It has to become a political issue. Attacking Michelle’s school-lunch tyranny would be a good start.
[Update a few minutes later]
And yet the USDA is still spending millions to propagandize us about low fat:
The USDA also proposed a study on changing how food is described on menus, labeling low-sodium and low-fat versions as “regular,” and “framing regular versions of certain snack products as high-fat or high-sodium.”
I’d like to see someone on the Hill make an issue of this.
Mann Suit Update
We got what looks to be very good news today. While the appeals court didn’t actually rule on our case, they did issue an opinion in BuckleyBurke, which is closely related, as it has to do with the right to an interlocutory appeal under collateral-order doctrine in an anti-SLAPP case. Their arguments largely mirror the ones we make in our brief, and they seem to be quite aggressive in their defense of the First Amendment, so it seems likely that there’s a very good chance that they’ll actually address our merits, and perhaps ultimately end up dismissing.
[Daturday afternoon update]
Sorry, had the name of the case wrong. Here‘s Les Machado’s take:
Takeaway: the headline here is the Court’s conclusion that the denial of a special motion to quash is immediately appealable. While the Court was careful to not extend its ruling to the denial of a special motion to dismiss, parties who are currently appealing from the denial of special motions to dismiss have to be buoyed by the decision.
That would be (among others) me.