Video: Hurricane Camille

Interview with Camille Paglia, a brilliant woman of the Left, a person of great intellectual integrity -- and absolutely fearless.

She's my favorite atheist lesbian lefty, always worth listening to.  You wanna get in the pit with her, you better be ready.

The full video interview (15 minutes), which is mostly about art and art history, is here.

Highly recommended. This time she's voting for Stein (Green Party), not Obama, and she explains why not in no uncertain terms.  (The interviewer is Glenn Reynolds, aka "Instapundit," who simply lets her talk.)

Her comment about white liberals ought be carved on a monument somewhere: They have zero connection with the working classes they claim to represent, in fact they despise those people as contemptibly backward and stupid, with their bad grammar, bad teeth, Bibles, and hunting rifles. Their only function is to be used as shock troops against The Rich, who are hated by liberal intellectuals out of envy and deep resentment of their success, wealth, and recognition -- all of which, liberal intellectuals absolutely believe, would in a just and intelligently run society, come to themselves instead. It's the endless gnawing of that status envy which explains why the liberal intellectual is permanently angry and demanding of "necessary social change."  I'll admit my won bias here: Liberal intellectuals make me want to puke.

Byron  

Gender Bender

The AAUW spin sisters strike again

Agenda-driven politicized junk social science at its worst.

"Thus, while discrimination cannot be measured directly, it is reasonable to assume that this pay gap is the product of discrimination."

Oh, baloney.  And to start that sentence with "Thus" is simply hilarious -- as is the preceding confident assertion that "all the [other] factors known to affect earnings" have been accounted for.  The problem, of course, are all the things you didn't know that you didn't know, or suspected but had no way to measure. Assertions about having accounted for "all the other factors" is pure bilge.  (See explanations of global temperature change that do not include, for example, the activity of the Sun (!) as a causal factor. The mind reels.)

We're deep in follies of regression analysis here:  Attributing the residual, unexplained variance to your preferred cause, which you admit you can't measure.  It's hanging your pet name on an unknown. OK, instead of calling it "sex discrimination," I'm going to call it "Timmy."

But what you certainly do have is plenty of measurement error (random, systematic, and everything in between) in many or most of your measures, some or many of which will be self-reports of some kind. Fortunately, people have perfect memories and never fudge the truth -- and I am Marie of Romania.

Problem is, measurement error lowers correlations, and that creates unexplained variance.  Until somebody demonstrates otherwise, I'll assume "Timmy" is just another name for measurement error.

Byron

Stealth Climate Report

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it

The climate hoaxers tried to sneak this one out.  Isn't it time to put this nonsense out of its misery?  Notice that "natural variability" in this case includes things like changes in ocean temperatures and variations on the output of the Sun (!); in other words, obviously critical causal variables are dumped into the error term as if they were random noise. Good grief, the output of the Sun may well be the most powerful climate determinant of all!

To call these pitifully weak computer models "deeply flawed" is laughable understatement; to advocate economic and environmental policies from them is just reckless, the height of folly and hubris.

This is science at its politicized, self-serving worst.  No surprise, the defense, limp as it is -- Jones wants to object about too-short time lines? That's just hilarious! -- comes from disgraced East Anglia, an outfit that no doubt, given the chance, would have burned this report before anybody saw it.  The NYT, et al., will endeavor to do the equivalent.

Byron

Fruits of absurdity

Who devised this plan, Bull Connor?

Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals

But, really, stuff like this is just the eventual result of enshrining race differences with affirmative action and myriad other liberal race-based programs.  If the child of a pair of black medical doctors or lawyers can be favored in college admissions over the child of a single-parent white housemaid  (and that's the way it works, folks), then every kind and manner of absurdity is not only possible, but likely.

Here's a radical idea: Color-blind application of uniform standards, across the board, with special tutorial help for all those who need it, regardless of their racial-ethnic or economic status.

Nah, forget it -- that would be considered raaacism under today's liberal newspeak.

Byron

Hillary goes into hiding

WaPo wonders: Say, where’s Hillary these days?

This whole article is well worth reading. Big trouble this way lies, and Issa will show no mercy, nor should he. This is a first-class bunglement of serial lying, gross malfeasance and, in Obama's case, inexcusable nonfeasance. As a result people were murdered, including a US ambassador who was a rising star in our foreign service.

The amateur-hour clumsy attempt at a cover-up has completely imploded (must-see video here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uFf0dUH3OtU ), which means somebody is going under the bus or will be kicked into the ditch, pick your metaphor.

Obama will skate, of course, and Susan Rice, who got shoved out front, does not swing enough weight to fill that sacrificial role. Which leaves the buck stopping at Hillary. Can she be persuaded to take the fall on behalf of Obama, going quietly, ending her public career in disgrace? I have my doubts about that.

This could get ugly.

Byron

Obamanomics, French Style

Rich Businessmen Pulling Out of France as Tax Hit Looms

Like Obama, the French socialists computed the prospective gains from taxing the rich on the assumption that people of means would just sit there and let themselves be fleeced. Let's call that "ObamaMath."

What these Wizards of Other People's Money keep forgetting is that the rich got that way by being proactive and smart, not by being passive and stupid. The nation's economic vitality -- the successful entrepreneurs and risk-takers, the people politicians like Obama demonize to get themselves elected -- go elsewhere, leaving the rest to fight over a smaller and smaller pie. This is called Economic Planning.

(It doesn't even produce the booby prize of more equality, because those who control the reins of Government now become an entrenched wealthy and privileged ruling class. We are then treated to the spectacle of extravagantly wealthy public officials like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Diane Feinstein, et al., giving speeches that excoriate and vilify the private-sector Rich. This is called Populism. 

Byron

Latest anti-gun idiocy

Gun Microstamping: Democrat Ignorance Threatens Manufacturing Jobs

Microstamped firing pins that leave an identifier on the spent casing.

It simply gets no dumber than this. Criminals steal their guns, or buy stolen guns on the street, so the microstamping would identify the wrong person.  Microstamping is useless with revolvers and other guns that don't eject the spent cartridge -- and a few swipes with a file removes the stamping, anyway.

The only real-world effect of microstamping would be to make guns more expensive, so fewer law-abiding people could afford the means to defend themselves and their families.  That is seen as desirable public policy by Progressive legislators and others who live in gated communities patrolled by armed security guards.

The Swiss get it right

Who Needs College? The Swiss Opt for Vocational School

Sadly, our education establishment would fight this tooth and nail.  At every level of education, whenever there is a choice between the good of students vs. the interests of the educators, the students lose.  The self-serving, pretentious rhetoric by which this conflict is obscured and concealed is a language game that should have been laughed off the stage a long time ago.

In this case, the conflict is over the academy's desire to maintain a system that's gotten fat off an unconscionable explosion of student debt, primarily spent on expanding and over-rewarding administrative staff, while pumping out B.A.'s that are worthless in the job market.

Byron