With apologies to CCR—
Long as I remember, the rain been comin’ down,
Clouds of mystery pourin’ confusion on the ground.
Politicians through the ages tryin’ to raise their funds;
And I wonder, still I wonder: Who’ll tax the rain?
Homo sapiens generally likes being at the top of the food chain. In some natural settings we are not—think about going one-on-one with a crocodile or a grizzly—but in the civilized world we rule.
Not every creature is designed to be at or even near the top of a food chain. Some critters are prey animals. Deer are an example, and when deer move into an environment with no predators, their population will explode until they overgraze the area, destroy its ecology, and then die of starvation. A healthy deer population requires predation.
Of course, the idea that culling a deer herd is a good thing offends that special group of humaniacs called bambiists. A group of them is now protesting a National Park Service hunt in Rock Creek Park in DC. (WaPo story here.) They think that the deer can be put on birth control.
No, what works is predation. The practical choices are hunters, wolves, or mountain lions. Considering that the hunters can be expected to limit their predation to the deer, they strike me as the best choice for an urban environment such as DC.
BTW, a deer ate that crocus I photographed yesterday.
Yet another bit a climate change fear mongering is being exposed as bogus at best. Powerline has the story. (H/T, Instapundit) Apparently, folks working in that region of pseudoscience believe that it is OK to “adjust” data that does not fit their preconceived “conclusions.”
Overheated rhetoric shouldn’t be a part of Science. It’s better to keep your stick on the ice.
Stacy McCain has a post up about the danger of cheating by scientists who report manufactured data. He notes that there has been a ten-fold increase in withdrawn papers since 1975.
I was on the editorial review board of a journal during the ’70s, and while our peer reviewers occasionally spotted errors, I don’t remember ever seeing fabricated data. Now, we have whole branches of so-called science that rely on data massaged to fit preselected conclusions.
Sigh.
I am telecommuting today because Goddard Space Flight Center is closed to everyone except emergency personnel.
The Congressional hearing on global warming has been canceled. The House Science, Space and Technology Committee has postponed the hearing on “Policy Relevant Climate Issues in Context.”
Say, is Al Gore in town?
Glenn Reynolds has a review of Al Gore’s new book The Future at WSJ. He finds the book useful, if flawed, in presenting both sides of Al Gore–technophobe and technophile.
The government sterilized Carrie Buck, not a corporation, and in the name of “progress,” not profit. Pondering this might have encouraged Mr. Gore to broaden his focus where abuses of power are concerned. His narrow focus—on capitalism and private depredations—doesn’t rob Mr. Gore’s book of usefulness, but it does say something about the worldview that produced it.
Read the whole thing.
There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
—Timothy Leary
Why? Would carefully thinking about what I was doing prevent me from recycling? Would thinking about the “green” agenda make me skeptical of it? What would happen if I engaged in careful, well-planned conservation of the environment?
Statistics are like a sewer pipe. The output is dependent on the input. Or as Nate Silver has recently discovered (H/T, TOM),
Nov. 2: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased
Well, duh.
Polls are susceptible to all sorts of bias caused by poor design. Sometimes the error is an honest mistake. Liberty magazine predicted that FDR would lose in 1936 based on the results of a telephone poll. Their sample was skewed because a significant percentage of voters couldn’t afford a phone. Other polls aren’t really honest but are designed to show momentum for a candidate.
The polls this year simply don’t appear to reflect the real world sentiments one hears around the office coffee pot or in the checkout line at WalMart.
I suspect that Mr. Silver’s model is a bit buggy. We will see how well it does on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I expect that I’ll be able to say:
You smell that? That charred smell? That’s Nate Silver, son. I love the smell burnt out Nate Silver in the morning. It’s the smell … of victory.
The Other McCain has a story up about a Virginia town that can’t expand it’s airport because some of the earth moving will involve digging up a bit of coal. You see, the town plans to sell the coal to help offset the cost of the airport improvements, and that makes the project a coal mine in the eyes of the Feds. The project is bogged down in the permitting process and the President’s War on Coal.
Would it speed things along if they just burn the coal on site as scrap? Or does that have even worse EPA air pollution problems?
Is it November yet?
The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth. 198 co-authors (all with Ph.Ds) (H/T, Debbie Witt)
(H/T, Smitty)
OK, when I took Chemistry there were fewer elements (earth, air, fire, and water), but I hear that several more have been discovered. One of these new-fangled elements is called carbon, and it’s supposed to be found in all organic compounds, including sugars. Indeed, when I checked in Wikipedia, it claimed that sugars are made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
So how do you make carbon free sugar?
Stacy McCain has a thought provoking piece up entitled The Problem With Sexual “Rights”. He discusses how behaviors that were not too long ago universally viewed as perversions are now seen as protected “rights.” It’s provoked me to have several thoughts on the subject, and I’ll share one of them after you’ve read his essay. Go read it. Now. I’ll wait …
To begin, let me say that I have religious-based objections to the sorts of behaviors that Mr. McCain writes about, but, putting those objections aside, I have thoroughly secular objections as well. I’ll stick to one of them for this post.
There are four basic functions of biological organisms. These are replication (they have offspring), heritability (they pass on genetic material to their offspring), catalysis (they have a common set of chemical processes), and energy use or metabolism (they all burn carbon through similar processes).
It seems to me that, of all the perverse behaviors which sexual oddballs claim to be allowed by their “rights,” not one leads to replication of the species. Members of a species that don’t engage in reproductive activity remove themselves from the gene pool. If a sufficient percentage of the members of a species refuse to reproduce, the species will die out. To argue that one was “born that way” is to argue that one is genetically defective. If that’s the case, such a person should be treated with the same dignity and respect that we have for others who have a genetic disorder. OTOH, if the person is simple engaging in non-benefical behaviors for reasons of self-gratification, I don’t understand why such behavior should be socially acceptable. Perhaps a few of these behaviors shouldn’t be illegal, but not every thing that is legal is honorable.
The case of the convict in Massachusetts who wants a “sex-change” operation brings up the point that all the cosmetic surgery in the world will not eliminate the Y-chromosome in his genome. He won’t have ovaries. He won’t be a woman. Ever. He’ll be living a falsehood, a lie.
Popeye got it right. “I yam what I yam, and tha’s all what I yam.”
One of these days, the real world will tire of the liberal push for wrongheaded rights, and folks may start remembering some other words of Popeye’s. “That’s all I can stands, cuz I can’t stands n’more!”
Michael Mann is touchy about criticism of his controversial work on “climate change,” especially commentary on his famous “hockey stick” warming curve. He has his lawyer sending nastygrams out threatening legal action if his critics don’t recant their heresy. A few days ago, the National Review responded with a “Get Lost” post and a strongly worded letter from their lawyer noting that the data Prof. Mann has been covering up lo these many years would be subject to discovery if he sued.
It seems that the Competetive Enterprise Institute has also received a letter from Prof. Mann’s lawyer, and the CEI’s response is essentially the same as NR’s.
And regardless of how one views Mann’s work, his threatened lawsuit is directly contrary to First Amendment law regarding public debate over controversial issues. Michael Mann may believe we face a global warming threat, but his actions represent an unfounded attempt to freeze discussion of his views.
In short, we’re not retracting the piece, and we’re not apologizing for it.
Bravi. And as Prof. Reynolds notes, discovery should be interesting. If Prof. Mann is foolish enough to sue.
Mark Steyn did one of his beautifully pointed posts over at The Corner concerning “the ringmaster of the tree-ring circus” of Climategate, Michael Mann of Penn State. Prof. Mann was offended and had his lawyers send a nastygram to National Review threatening legal action. Rich Lowry’s response was Get Lost, and he reminded Prof. Mann that any lawsuit would open all the work that he has fought to keep hidden from public view to discovery and use by the magazine in its defense.
Stacy McCain comments on Mr. Lowry’s spirited response and Prof. Mann’s predicament:
Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel (or pixels by the terrabyte, as the case may be). Above and beyond handing Lowry the journalistic license to go rooting around in Mann’s life and career, a legal fight with Mann would provide National Review with a lucrative fundraising opportunity and a publicity bonanza. How many Drudge links, talk-radio segments and Fox News interviews would be inspired by such a lawsuit?
Nice touch mentioning pixels by the terabyte. I wonder where that came from.
In any case, the left is losing control of the The Narrative. Expect even more panic.
Mother Jones has posted an article which suggests that the dirt found on organic produce is “chemical free.”
Uh, huh. And the left tries to paint conservatives as ignorant of Science.
The last time I checked, dirt was made of chemicals. In fact, and I’m sure that the writers at Mother Jones will be shocked to learn this, organic produce is made of chemicals.
I could go on ranting, but Deborah Blum has beat me to it with a good post at Wired. Go check it out.
If you check with some of the conspiracy sites out on the Internet, you’ll find some that maintain that the Apollo lunar landings were hoaxes staged in a studio. Indeed, the soundstage required was quite impressive. BTW, do you know why the Apollo 11 pictures were black-and-white and the later “missions” were in color? Not all of the soundstage was complete for the first “landing,” and there was a dust control problem. The pictures had to be kept monochrome so that the red dust wouldn’t be obvious. You see, to keep the studio hidden from the public—it was built on Mars.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel called Fallen Angels. One of the premises of the plot is that the Earth in the near future is at the beginning of a new Ice Age that is made worse by laws and regulations passed by environmental Luddites.
Meanwhile, the “settled” science of global warming has received another unsettling blow. The Register reports that a study of tree rings shows that the world’s climate has been cooling since Roman times.
“We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,” says Professor-Doktor Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, one of the scientists leading the study. “Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy.”
Yep. A thousand years ago, colonists grew wheat in Greenland. Their descendants are just now able to grow a few vegetables because of what they view as the recent improvement in their climate.
Have you noticed that whatever the current perceived scourge of society might be (drugs and liquor a century ago, global warming now), the Progressive Technocrats have just the solution you need–if you’ll only let them run your life for you?
This is from Prof. Iowahawk:
DNC Scientists Disprove Existence of Roberts’ Taxon
“Pelosi’s Paradox states that in order to find out what is in a health care bill, it would have to be passed,” explained physicist Steven Hawking. “But in order to be a law it would have to be constitutional, which means someone would have to know what was in it, which would mean it couldn’t have been a bill in the first place. Think of Schroedinger’s Cat, except with a lobotomy.”
…
“If Roberts’ Taxon were really to exist, and was woven throughout the Health-Government-Time continuum, the merest realization of it would create a giant black hole in Gallup Space and cause free healthcare reality to collapse upon itself,” said Plouffe.
More at the link.
UPDATE—I believe this entire area of research has been ruined because of contamination of the system with super-massive bozo-ons.
The President suggests that we can turn the economy around by buying thingamajigs.
Here we have another example of his desire to pick winners and losers. Solyndra. Chevy Volts. Thingamajigs. All selected without regard to technological constraints or economic viability.
Why thingamajigs? Why not whatits or doolollies or thingamabobs? Given the connection between campaign contributions and green energy loan guarantees, I wonder …
UPDATE–@iowahawkblog tweeteth:
#Thingamajig The word Obama was looking for was ‘thermostat.’ He was in a thermostat factory, surround by boxes emblazoned “thermostat.”
Jazz Shaw has a poll going over at Hot Air about beliefs on the origin of humans. If you want to know how I voted, click on the Science & the Bible link to find my postings on God, Science, creation, etc.
For those of you who might care to know in a hurry, here’s a summary. I believe in the God described in the Bible. I believe that I should pay attention to everything He says, both the explicit things in the Bible and implicit things in the evidence in nature. Because I take both seriously, I believe that God created the Universe and Man in it and that He used cosmological and biological evolution to do it. A God who can say, “Let there be,” and get His desired result without further tinkering seems to me to be much more powerful and wonderful than a cosmic tinkerer.
We’ve placed a big emphasis on clean energy. It’s the right thing to do for our environment, it’s the right thing to do for our national security, but it’s also the right thing to do for our economy. … When it’s completed in a few months, Solyndra expects to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across America and around the world.
It’s happening right now. The future is here. It’s here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.
—Barack Obama, 26 May, 2010
(H/T, Byron York)
If I were running the President’s reelection campaign, I would avoid comparisons between his public equity financing record and Mitt Romney’s private equity record.
Too many of the wrong kind of fights get stirred up between “science” and “religion.” You can click on the Science & the Bible link above to get a better idea of how I see these two areas of human knowledge supporting one another. My stuff is written from the point of view of a religious believer.
One of the arguments advanced by the other side of late is that they are smarter than we believers and that as education improves religion will wither away. Neil Ormerod has an excellent essay challenging that argument. Read the whole thing.
