Is it ethical?
I haven’t read the paper yet, but I’ll be interested in comments from people who do.
But, 97%!!!
A majority of scientists are skeptical about the global-warming crisis:
One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’
Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists. We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe.
As Freeman Dyson has noted, skepticism is exactly the attitude that a true scientist takes.
[Late evening update]
From a comment:
I have added James Taylor to my list of people that I can’t trust a word they say. That article is a travesty, as are the ones he links to about meteorologist. How dare he say “only 36% of scientists” when the study studied geoscientists who work at Alberta petroleum? Pathetic. Or claim in the other links that “only a minority 30% is very worried about global warming”, ignoring that the study said an additional 42% are _somewhat_ worried. I’m not a big believer in AGW, but the man is obviously in the business of fooling people. You shouldn’t link him either.
Noted for future reference. But the point remains that a) the 97% number is bogus and b) the models are broken.
The Eloi
Are we raising a generation of them?
Hyperloop–Tech Trick?
…or political manifesto?
Musk has a long history of political entanglement — usually with people trying to scuttle his various big-think projects. SpaceX has been a target of regulatory concerns from the get-go, most recently from Texas legislators who opposed letting Musk build an airport for spaceships at a site near Brownsville. Tesla has also clashed with lawmakers in New York and other states who have tried to stop the company from selling electric vehicles directly to consumers. These are the kinds of obstacles no tech CEO wants to face — and yet, because of the scope and scale of Musk’s ambitions, he has to climb over them.
For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It’s slowed him down. It’s required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It’s required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the private sector.
Yup. NASA is an excellent example of that problem.
The Smartest Woman In The World
Really? Medgar Evans?
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of the smartest woman in the world, Victor Davis Hanson thinks that Benghazi is the mother of all scandals.
[Mid-morning update]
Huma Abedin as the modern-day Alger Hiss?
It is increasingly common for the Left (and its reliable water boys in the loyal opposition like McCain) to demonize its opponents. In Hiss’s day, it wasn’t so common, but his case was the first big instance of it. It is now generally accepted among leftists that those who dare to stand against any aspect of the politically correct agenda are not only wrong. They are evil, morally bankrupt, and stupid to boot – except for the diabolical ingenuity they employed to frame their pure-as-the-driven-snow victims.
This is a pernicious tendency that conservatives should identify and reject whenever and wherever it appears, for the simple fact that even if all her accusers are terrible people who kick their Shih Tzus and don’t recycle, that would not in itself tell us anything about Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. She could still be a Muslim Brotherhood operative even if her accusers were Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. And to hear the Left tell it, that’s exactly who they are: Alger Hiss and Huma Abedin are innocent, and if you don’t believe that, or even think the questions worthy of investigation, be ready to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness by an increasingly authoritarian and thuggish Left.
All the more reason to push back.
About That Spanish Skyscraper
It actually does have elevators. I don’t think I blogged about it at the time, partly because it seemed so hard to believe that a building could get all the way from planning to completion with no one pointing out the problem.
Harry Reid
Just how devious is he?
I’d go with the “arrogant and honest” theory myself. That would seem to be what’s happening here.
Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs
…are becoming oligarchs:
Like the moguls of the early 20th century, who bought and sold senators like so many cabbages, the new elite constitute a basic threat to democracy. They dominate their industries with market shares that would make the old moguls blush. Google, for example, controls some 80 percent of search, while Google and Apple provide the operating system software for almost 90 percent of smartphones. Similarly, more than half of Americans, and 60 percent of Europeans, use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social media site. In contrast, the world’s top 10 oil companies account for barely 40 percent of the world’s oil production.
Like the Gilded Age moguls, the tech oligarchs also personally dominate their companies. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, for example, control roughly two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Brin and Page each is worth more $20 billion. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, owns just under 23 percent of his company; worth $41 billion, Forbes ranked him the country’s third-richest person. Bill Gates, the richest, is worth a cool $66 billion and still controls 7 percent of his firm. Newcomer Mark Zuckerberg’s 29.3 percent stake in Facebook was worth $16 billion as of July 25, according to Bloomberg.
This combination of market and ownership concentration needs to be curbed.
…Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.
This seems related to this.
Libertarians And Conservatives
Can they find common ground through the Constitution?
Preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights, provides ample grounds for unity between libertarians and most conservatives. Many of our civil liberties — dear to libertarians and conservatives both — are under assault by progressive forces.
There is much to collaborate on: preserving freedom of speech, and of the press, and of the free exercise of religion; honoring the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances; not infringing the right to keep and bear arms; rehabilitation the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonably searches and seizures; the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Even, casting the net a bit wider, the classical gold standard and the repeal of the Estate tax!
They’d better.
IQ
Why can’t we have an intelligent conversation about it?
Because it’s politically incorrect. All part of the Left’s war on science.