"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
When most science is funded through taxes, then the peer review process takes over. Science administration is a bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy is as subject to the Iron Law of Bureaucracy as any other. The process weeds out silly grant applications and those based on truly unsound science, but it also weeds out bold challenges to the consensus, and the number of “peers” who adhere to the consensus grows. The result is concentration of resources on the popular hypotheses: often a good thing, but no formula for breakthroughs. How to fund contrarian ideas is the real challenge to government funding of science. We don’t really want to be handing grants off to the Flat Earth Society, but you know, I’d rather give them a million or so each century than beggar the country in order to enrich Al Gore.
Of course, any reasonable person would rather fund harmless kooks than fund deliberate liars (like Algore) who are out to enrich themselves by doing harm to enormous numbers of people.
Let’s let this post begin with some Begala (rhymes with “Big Caca”):
I was in the middle of a Neil Armstrong Moment when I was on CNN Tuesday morning. Rather than let McCain and Palin get away with their lie, anchor John Roberts played a videotape of Sarah Palin in a 2006 gubernatorial debate in which she endorsed the bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina Island saying, “I’m not going to stand in the way of progress that our congressional delegation and the position of strength that they have right now.” Perhaps her supporters, noting Palin’s support for banning books, teaching creationism and doubting global warming will argue that for her, calling the bridge “progress” was her way of saying she was against it.)
Full stop. Would that be the “anchor John Roberts” who recently “slipped and said ‘we’ when asking [Begala] how Democrats should respond to Republican attacks”? Well, obvious bias aside, what’s the substance of Begala’s attack? As to the Bridge to Nowhere, see my previous post today, Mr. Begala (he won’t, of course. Its substance–Jim DeMint’s article–is in the Evil Wall Street Journal, the reading of which no doubt gives Begala a rash).
The banning books lie? Read this and weep, Mr. Begala. (note: the link is to a pdf) The first paragraph of the linked document suffices to demonstrate that Begala is a liar or a fool:
We at the City of Wasilla have received many emails and requests for information about “banned or censured” books at the Wasilla Library while former Mayor Palin was in office. We have no records of any books being “banned or censured” ever.
The emphasis is in the original.
And what of Biggaliah’s assertion that Palin supports “teaching creationism”? First, by simply and baldly stating a very genral assertion of contrafactual “trutherism” Begala is simply attempting to bias his readers’ perceptions of Palin as a whole. Second, by doing so, he’s attempting to impeach any arguments refuting his earlier assertion with this disingenuous, subtle ad hominem attack. But for anyone willing to do 30 seconds (or less) of fact checking, OK, maybe 45 seconds for a slow reader following up on footnotes giving actual sources, the “Palin wants radical fundie nutjobs teaching superstition in schools” meme falls flat.
Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska’s schools. She has said that students should be allowed to “debate both sides” of the evolution question, but she also said creationism “doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”
As to doubting global warming *sigh*. From Begala’s other bloviations, one gathers he means anthropogenic global warming as opposed to heliogenic global warming. *heh* That being the fair assumption based on Begala’s consistent stance, one can only respond to his assertion that Palin is a “global warming denier” (or at least dounter) with a big fat, “So? So she’s rational and you’re not. That’s a crime?”
The less than 30 seconds it took me to read the “analysis” at Factcheck.org and click through to a primary source (“Palin has not pushed creation science as governor,” Alaska Daily News–Dan Joling, with references aplenty) would have served Begala well, had he any desire for truth–or even to NOT appear to be an idiot.
Reason could be seriously life-threatening. No, seriously. After all, some folks want to charge reasonable people with the “crime” of “global warming denial” don’t they? How far away can we really be from a new Inquisition by The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming? Auto da fé, anyone? (Even if the Boston Glob has so far avoided viewing such as reasonable, The Goracle seems to be in line with the UNthinking on punishing opponents of his global warming scam.)
“Don’t you realize how badly you can damage a perfectly good preconception or assumption if you insist on thinking about it… “
Please! Whatever you do, do NOT let politicians *spit*, Mass Media Podpeople, Academia Nut Fruitcakes, members of The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming or any other of that grab bag of babbling ninnes catch you thinking! Why! They’ll make Harrison Bergeron look like a lucky, lucky young man indeed when they’ve finished with you!
*sigh*
THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂
If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.
One of the problems that the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming (and its newly christened scientifictional dogma of anthropogenic global changism) keeps on running into time and again is that its predictions always fail. Always. What the “chuch” seems to have forgotten is some basic principles of experimental demonstration of theories, specifically,
‘The best scale for an experiment is ten millimeters to the centimeter!’
*heh*
Instead, the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming tends to rely on pretty pictures and graphs generated by whoo-whoo computer models that defy common protocols of scientific practice, common sense and simple honesty.
No wonder its predictions, like other wackos who have been foretelling doom since the founding of the human race, have been crackers from the start.
(Now sitting in my office “enjoying” the first truly seasonal temperatures of the year–s’all right. I’m quite comfy with simply an old AS400 cooling fan turned on me. 🙂 It’s 86 degrees Fahrenheit outside, right now–that’s 30 degrees Celsius for you Europeans out there–just a wee tad milder than the third week in July usually is in these parts. Simply reflects a major global cooling trend that’s been happening for the past eighteen months. “Global warming” my hinky &^%$ @$$.)
The Maunder minimum is the name given to a period of extreme solar inactivity that occurred between 1645 and 1710. Of particular interest is that this period of inactivity corresponds closely to one of the coldest periods of the so-called “Little Ice Age” in Europe, a time of long, cold winters that caused severe hardships in the pre-industrial revolution world. This has led scientists to extensively study the possible influences of solar activity on terrestrial climate, as well as examine other stars for evidence of activity cycle behavior similar to the Sun’s.
If, as the paper noted at the second link suggests, we are entering another period of relatively major solar inactivity, all the resources being wasted on The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming’s assault upon civilization (assault upon reason, even) will be hard cheese indeed to our progeny.
After all, the nut of
Examinations of the solar activity cycle and the unusually cold weather of the Maunder minimum period have spurred significant controversy among astronomers, atmospheric scientists, and climatologists. The period from about 1300-1715 is known as the “Little Ice Age” in Europe, a period characterized by unusually long and cold winters. This period coincides closely with the time during which the Sun is known to have had time of inactivity, with some of the worst weather occurring squarely during the Maunder minimum.
…is that it led to widespread famine, disease and widespread depopulation. Oh, wait. Those are all goals embraced by the looniest of The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming and their co-religionists in the “Bow Down and Worship Gaia” crowd of even loonier eco-freaks who view mankind as a disease.
[N.B., now that the dire predictions of global warmists are proving to be less than accurate, the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming now uses “climate change” in place of their long-trumpeted “global warming” but it’s all just sleight of hand.]
Freeman Dyson is smarter than you or I. Heck, he’s probably smarter than you and I put together. So, when he speaks on the subject of global warming/climate change, even in something so brief as a review of a couple of books, he’s worth listening to, at the very least. For example, writing about A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, by William Nordhaus:
For the benefit of those who are mathematically illiterate or uninterested in numerical details, Nordhaus has put a nonmathematical chapter at the beginning with the title “Summary for the Concerned Citizen.” This first chapter contains an admirably clear summary of his results and their practical consequences, digested so as to be read by busy politicians and ordinary people who may vote the politicians into office. He believes that the most important concern of any policy that aims to address climate change should be how to set the most efficient “carbon price,” which he defines as “the market price or penalty that would be paid by those who use fossil fuels and thereby generate CO2 emissions.” He writes:
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.
If this chapter were widely read, the public understanding of global warming and possible responses to it would be greatly improved.
Indeed. Of course, the several assumptions (apparent assumptions; I have not yet got my hands on a copy) of the Nordhaus comment above are large assumptions indeed, but the public’s understanding of the costs of dealing with carbon dioxide–whether such a thing needs to be done or not–would indeed be a great step forward in opening the dialog on “climate change” to other than True Believers in AGW (more rationally known as Reality-Based Fantasists, IMO).
But it is the assumption Dyson makes that is truly frightening. He’s a really, really smart man, but it looks like he misses the critical factor in his approach to the material above. To repeat:
For the benefit of those who are mathematically illiterate or uninterested in numerical details, Nordhaus has put a nonmathematical chapter at the beginning with the title “Summary for the Concerned Citizen.” This first chapter contains an admirably clear summary of his results and their practical consequences, digested so as to be read by busy politicians and ordinary people who may vote the politicians into office.
The “busy politicians” and the “ordinary people who vote them into office” are both likely to be not only mathematically illiterate but functionally illiterate as well. Heck, neither of those facts matter, because neither class would read it anyway, even if they could read or understand the book–or even Dyson’s review of it. And there lies the crux of the problem: politicians only listen to their flappers (review your Swift for the reference) and “ordinary people” are brain-sludged (not brainwashed) by the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind and self-lobotomized to the point that they’d never even pick the book up.
Or any other book that might challenge them beyond the level of People Magazine or Sports Illustrated.
The second book reviewed in the Dyson article is, Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto, Ernesto Zedillo, ed. Although it, too, suffers from the same “It’s not People Magazine or Sports Illustrated” lack of appeal to ordinary citizens, it nevertheless sounds rather interesting to me. *heh* (Yeh, you’ve picked up on the fact that I don’t read People Magazine or Sports Illustrated, right?) For example, as Dyson notes,
Zedillo in his introduction summarizes the arguments of each contributor in turn. He maintains the neutrality appropriate to a conference chairman, and gives equal space to Lindzen and to Rahmstorf. He betrays his own opinion only in a single sentence with a short parenthesis: “Climate change may not be the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has ever faced.”
Later in the article, Dyson gets to the meat of the review,
All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.
Should we be environmentally responsible? Yes, of course we should, for any number of reasons. But the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming, in attempting, with great success, to shut down all dialog, all debate on its dogma is performing a serious disservice to everyone. Heck, the pagan religion they practice is not even well-qualified as religions go: “redemtion” in the Church of AGW means essentially killing off most of mankind. In that, AGWers are hardly better than Islamics.
THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂
If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.
It’s simple, really. If it is really the problem believers in Anthropogenic Global Warming insist it is, and IF they are sincere in their alarm, then they can easily reduce CO2 greenhouse emissions by one simple step: stop exhaling.
That ought to cut off a lot of hot air.
This solution to a vexing world problem has been brought to you by the world class research group (me, myself and I) of third world county central.
Donations to support our think tank gratefully accepted.
Back in the day when there were liberals on The Left, liberty was a concept that was much-valued by those who called themselves liberals. When I was but a lad, as the expression used to go, I exposed myself to John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, which dealt not so much with liberty of conscience or of will but liberty as exercised by individuals within the civil realm, in the social order. Of course liberty of conscience and social liberty are closely related, but Mill made clear that freedom to express oneself in the marketplace of ideas was a different thing to liberty of conscience.
Those who call themselves liberals nowadays seem to have forgotten any kind of liberty in their pursuit of extirpating all discourse that challenges their dogma in the areas of
homosexual behavior/priviledges
pseudo-scientific dogma in everything from Darwinism to anthropogenic global warming
economic suppositions
statist control of private matters
property rights
education
religion
and just about all other areas that touch our lives.
Of several things that Mill said in his famous essay that influenced much of my behavior during my formative years, two stand out: his comment that truth need not fear debate and that we must always be wary of the tyranny of prevailing opinion stifling debate.
A simple example to demonstrate that the typical soi-disant “liberal” of today is no such critter is Algore’s response to those who would challenge his AGW position with… facts.
“There’s no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. . . . There is no more scientific debate among serious people who’ve looked at the evidence.”
Funny thing, that “no more debate” meme he seems intent, along with other AGW dogmatists, on making fact: real scientists (as opposed to AGW dogmatists) are debating it, examining the facts and the hypotheses. You can find links to quite a few real scientists (AGW dogmatists simply dismiss real scientists as “deniers”) who have some inconvenient facts to discuss with Mr. Gore here, although anyone who can type “google” can find many, many more references (including this one–pdf, and do note the creds the interviewee has that Algore lacks).
Cutting off (or shouting down) debate on an issue to avoid having to deal with facts is the mark of a weak argument, which says a lot about most fake liberals’ arguments.
I do encourage you to track down (there, that wasn’t so hard, was it?) and read a copy of Mill’s essay, On Liberty. I have my copy, first read as a wee lad *heh*, within reach of my right hand, as I have had for many years. You might find it useful to purchase a hardcopy for marking and note-taking (it’s interesting to me to go back and read my “arguments” with Mill and see how they have changed over the years).
BTW, Mill’s arguments concerning liberty bear very closely on an upcoming post on authority, one I keep deferring but need to write soon.
13 Things Off the Top of My Head… some from the dregs of my soul. *sigh*
1. My hat. Only on my head when I’m outdoors.
2. Why is it that when I clean things up–my desk for example–within 15 minutes, whatever I’ve cleaned is messier than it was before cleaning? Is it some universal law of the universe… or just my lil pocket of it?
3. I may as well write this day off as eaten by locusts. From the gitgo, “Whatever can go wrong [has gone] wrong.” Looking for silver linings. Any help here? 😉 Comments from Murphy not allowed.
4. The thing about growing older is that I don’t feel as old as I am. Until I wake up. Still tired, as usual.
5. Ever notice that some things proliferate beyond all reason? Ragweed, politicians *spit*, bureaucraps. All part of the Curse of Adam, I suppose…
A short string (could easily have become a T-13 of its own, but I’m in full ADHD mode today and short on coffee. Blame Murphy) of related items:
6. IF (and despite the Chicken Littles the jury is out, hung only by the paltry few scientists who owe more to politics than to science) AGW were a fact, we’d have more to be thankful for than to bemoan. After all, the earth is overdue for an ice age…
7. So, despite the fact that it appears that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a crock (it appears global climate change is largely due to solar influence, mediated or exacerbated by orbital mechanics and a few other factors beyond man’s ability to influence), and we nevertheless seem to be in a very minor uptick in global temperatures, who’s unhappy with slightly warmer winters besides ski resort operators? Who’s sorry to see slightly longer growing seasons and slightly larger growing areas? Oh, right. Socialist tinkerers and nannystaters who want to use “global warming” to restrict capitalism and your freedoms…
8. Another benefit: maybe–just maybe–the sheeple who’ve been gulled by the lies of AGW Chicken Littles will wake up and smell the coffee when the doom and gloom doomsday scenarios do not come to pass. Maybe. But I don’t hold out much hope. After all, if they weren’t self-lobotomized dummies, they wouldn’t be sheeple to begin with, now would they?
9. On a cheerier note (and leaving AGW behind for now), the cold snap that’s been around for a few days here in America’s Third World County™ seems to be on its way out, and warmer weather is in the offing for this weekend. Nice. Gotta love that global warming… (Oops. Slipped there.)
10. What is it with trifocals? Some days, I feel like one of those bobbleheads.
11. If Mass Media Podpeople and politicians *spit* could all be dosed with an effective truth serum… they’d be out of work the next day. Heck, they’d likely all (or as darned close as to make almost no difference whatsoever) find engraved invitations to necktie parties hosted by Dr. Tarr and Mr. Fether in their hands.
12. Well, with Fred Thompson out of it, there’s no longer anyone worth voting for in the presidential election. The offerings all come down to, “How fast do you want to drive the country off a cliff?” *sigh* (“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward to perdition.” Preach it, brother… *profound sigh*)
13. I truly believe that, since States control what actually goes on their ballots in elections–or should–we as a country need grassroots movements in every state of the (dis)Union to get state constitutional amendments enacted to place “None of the Above” as an option for every elective office, such amendments to provide that if “None of the Above” recieves a plurality of the vote then ALL listed candidates should be disqualified from running for that office and a new election with a completely new slate of candidates offered to the electorate. Ditto for the federal Constitution, just to cover the bases. For presidential races, keep the electoral college, but allow it the same option.
