Safer?

Obama's increasingly inane blither notwithstanding, when it comes to making Americans safer, the Bush Administration has done the job (see historical sequence here). The refusal of the Democrat left to admit that is typical of leftist politics generally, and it always has been. In Marx's day, it was known as "revolutionary defeatism," part of a larger strategy to bring about the collapse of capitalism. Now it's just defeatism, stale and tired, a cynical political stance with no purpose beyond grubbing and pandering for political office.

Somebody should tell Harry and Nanci that defeatism has never been a good political strategy. In Europe the socialist Second International had high hopes for its agenda across the continent. But when war came in 1914, Europeans put patriotism ahead of ideology, and rushed to enlist in large numbers in the armies of their own countries. Socialist dreams of an international mass movement collapsed on the spot.

Byron

NPR humor

For some reason I listened briefly to NPR this morning, and, as usual, they did not disappoint. NPR, don't forget, is a national treasure, so fine in its sensibilities and profound in its message that it must be carefully shielded from the crassness of ordinary marketplace competition. Every time I turn it on, I feel a surge of taxpayer pride.

Anyway, following a news/editorial on the joint US-Iraqi effort to clear Baghdad's Sadr City of Mahdi Army "militants" (which was described as having "killed at least 1,000 people, including untold numbers of civilians" -- NPR at its unbiased best!), came a report of some organization's Greeness comparison of 14 countries. And wouldn't you just know it, the US finished "dead last." Oh, dear, can't we do anything right?

And who were the Greeness winners? The winners were India and another country I can't recall, who both won, it was said, because people there "live in small houses without heat or air-conditioning"! It's so great to start the day with a hearty laugh. Thank you, NPR!

I'll bet further investigation would find that some people in India are so committed to green living that they exist outdoors on bio-degradable mats, while other sub-continent eco-saints construct their homes by recycling discarded cardboard, which also preserves precious space in landfills. There are just so many lessons we Americans could learn, if only we'd stop our capitalist grubbing long enough to pay attention.

But I really do think with a little additional research NPR might have uncovered Greeness models even more deserving than India and the other place. For example, I seem to remember reading about a tribe that lives in caves along a shoreline and subsists on raw shellfish. It gives the rest of us something to shoot for, that's for sure.

Byron

Global Warming Amusement

In a sudden spate of articles, climate scientists are now predicting a period of global cooling. For example, from the UK Daily Telegraph:

Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said. Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a 'lull' for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.

This would mean that the 0.3C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the IPCC may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

Terry Dunleavy, secretary of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, and executive vice-chairman of the International Climate Science Coalition, among others, points out the obvious irony here:

The Global Warming ballyhoo has been based in faith in "climate models," that no one with any experience with such things would take very seriously. The idea that such poorly-specified models could predict tenths-of-a-degree changes in temperature 50 and 100 years out is simply ludicrous.

But the question for the true believers who take the models as revealing gospel truth, the question is simply this:

How can it possibly be that these marvelous models, by which we are supposed to uproot whole economies, have so completely failed to predict this cooling trend?

The answer is not hard to find, once you realize that we are dealing here with backasswards science of the worst kind. These are the steps in the process of backasswards science in this particular case:

It begins with (1) a set of variously-motivated predictions about a looming global warming crisis. (2) Climate models are then devised to predict the predictions. (3) When contrary data appear, they are dismissed as short-term noise: In this case, observed cooling is dismissed as a short-term trend, a "lull" that merely obscures temporarily the underlying warming described by the models. In other words, the models are built to fit the predictions, then the data are made to fit the models!

It's the scientific equivalent of Girls Gone Wild: Science Gone Backwards!

Get out the popcorn, we're being treated to a public tutorial on how to create a scientific boondoggle.

What fun!

Byron

Exploding the myths

In the overwhelming majority of cases, whatever the race of the convicted, prison remains what it has always been: a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending.

An excellent article by the always-reliable Heather MacDonald. It has long been known that reports of victims show that racial variations in arrests are not a product of discrimination by law enforcement, and that variations in sentencing, regardless of race, are almost entirely explained by two factors, seriousness of the offense and prior record. Black rates of arrest and incarceration are high, because black rates of serious offending are high, not because are blacks being systematically discriminated against by the criminal justice system. Almost everything you hear from the popular media and from politicians on this subject is wrong.

Byron