"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Saturday, December 20, 2008

QUOTE OF THE DAY/IT'S A MISERABLE LIFE: THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS SCOOPS HOT AIR BY 3 DAYS

WHAT'S AT HOT AIR TODAY: A QUOTE FROM THE NYTIMES ...
Had George Bailey never been born, the people in his town might very well be better off today.
... WAS HERE AT THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS THREE FREAKIN DAYS AGO.

REGULAR READERS KNOW THAT WE SCOOP THE BIGGIES ALL THE TIME.

SPREAD THE WORD. BLOGROLL US. BOOKMARK US.

GRAPHIC DEPICTS ROOT CAUSE OF FINANCIAL CRISIS: LIBERAL HOUSING POLICIES; IOW: BUSH DIDN'T JUST EMBRACE FANNIE MAE; HE GAVE HER A FRENCH KISS.

  • BUSH'S "COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM" REALLY MEQSN PRO-LIFE HAWK WHO IS A LIBERAL WHEN IT COMES TO GOVERNMENT SPENDING.
  • LIKE THE GOOD LIBERAL HE IS, BUSH INCREASED DOMESTIC SPENDING TO HEIGHTS NOT SEEN SINCE THE GREAT SOCIETY.
  • THAT'S WHY WE'RE IN THE MESS WE'RE IN: BECAUSE BUSH DID NOT GOVERN AS A CONSERVATIVE.
  • THE FANNIE MAE CRISIS WAS DUE IN PART TO BUSH'S LIBERAL EFFORTS TO INCREASE HOME OWNERSHIP AMONG POOR MINORITIES WITHOUT DECENT CREDIT.
  • BUSH DIDN'T JUST EMBRACE FANNIE MAE; HE GAVE HER A FRENCH KISS.
NYTIMES:
“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”

... Darrin West could not believe it. The president of the United States was standing in his living room.

It was June 17, 2002, a day Mr. West recalls as “the highlight of my life.” Mr. Bush, in Atlanta to unveil a plan to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million, was touring Park Place South, a development of starter homes in a neighborhood once marked by blight and crime.

Mr. West had patrolled there as a police officer, and now he was the proud owner of a $130,000 town house, bought with an adjustable-rate mortgage and a $20,000 government loan as his down payment — just the sort of creative public-private financing Mr. Bush was promoting.

“Part of economic security,” Mr. Bush declared that day, “is owning your own home.”

... So Mr. Bush had to, in his words, “use the mighty muscle of the federal government” to meet his goal. He proposed affordable housing tax incentives. He insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending.

Concerned that down payments were a barrier, Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to spend up to $200 million a year to help first-time buyers with down payments and closing costs.

And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for federally insured mortgages with no money down. Republican Congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as Mr. West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view.

The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations. “Corporate America,” he said, “has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place.”


THIS GRAPHIC DEPICTS THE ROOT CAUSE OF FINANCIAL CRISIS:
POLICIES STARTED BY LIBERAL CLINTON
AND EXPANDED BY LIBERAL BUSH

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S EFFORT TO INCREASE HOME OWNERSHIP FROM 65% TO 70% - WITHOUT ADEQUATE OVERSIGHT - IS WHAT CREATED THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS.
  • FEDERAL SPENDING WILL ALMOST ALWAYS BE WASTEFUL AND CORRUPT BECAUSE THE BUREAUCRACY AIN'T SPENDING THEIR OWN MONEY;
  • THEY ARE SPENDING OURS!
  • THAT'S WHY FOLKS WHO BENEFIT FROM LARGE FEDERAL SPENDING PROGRAMS CAN BUY A SENATOR AND THE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HE OVERSEES FOR $100,000 OVER TEN YEARS.
  • THE ONLY SOLUTION IS HAVING THE SMALLEST POSSIBLE GOVERNMENT.

NY GOVERNOR SHOULD APPOINT MARIO OR FERRARO TO FINISH HILLARY'S SENATE TERM

FERRARO CAME OUT AGAINST "PRINCESS" CAROLINE.
  • GOOD.
  • BUT GERALDINE WOULD BE EVEN BETTER.
  • SHE COULD ACCEPT AND PROMISE NOT TO SEEK REELECTION, LEAVING THE SEAT OPEN TO A FAIR PRIMARY CONTEST BETWEEN CAROLINE AND ANDREW CUOMO - SHOULD HE DECIDE TO RUN FOR THE SENATE AND NOT THE GOVERNORSHIP.


MORE HERE.

THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS SCOOPS INSTAPUNDIT BY 3 DAYS: CREDIT SUISSE BONUSES

What Instapundit Glenn Reynolds posted today:

SHEER GENIUS: at Credit Suisse.

Posted at 5:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds
We posted on three days ago.

REGULAR READERS KNOW WE DO THIS ALL THE TIME.
SPREAD THE WORD. BLOGROLL US. BOOKMARK US.

UN OFFICIAL DESERVEDLY THROWN OUT OF ISRAEL

Richard Falk, one of the United Nations' most evil members, has been shown the door from Israel this week:
No one can say they didn't see it coming: Israel this week expelled a United Nations investigator who compared Israeli policies to the Nazi Holocaust.

Israeli officials barred Richard Falk from entering Israel to investigate its policies towards the Palestinians because, as one Israeli official said, of Falk's "extreme, methodic criticism of Israel."

[...]

In May, Falk had a chance to explain what he meant in an extended interview on the BBC.

While Falk said he regretted using the analogies, under persistent pressure from the host, he stood by his statements.
Interesting how it sounds like the BBC host wanted him to stand by his blasphemy. Not surprising coming from the Beeb. But also disappointing is how people like these are never asked for their opinions on Islam itself, though as I'm aware, the UN banned the discussion of it a short time ago.

UK BUREAUCRACY STANDS IN THE WAY OF A MOROCCAN IMMIGRANT WHO WANTS TO RETURN HOME

So far, Rashid Ali has cost the UK taxpayers £250,000.

Pure idiocy.

From this article in the Mail Online:
Like thousands of others arriving here [to the UK], Rashid Ali dreamt Britain would be a land of opportunity. But when he failed to gain asylum, he just wanted to go home to Morocco.

With no money, job or passport, the illegal immigrant resolved to flee Britain by stowing away on cargo ships.

Yet after six failed attempts he is still here – because the UK authorities have forced him to stay. He was supposed to have been deported in 2005 after he was caught stowing away for the fifth time and was jailed for stealing a coat and some food.

But instead the 30-year-old was then held at an immigration detention centre for three years – at a cost to the taxpayer of £250,000.

Now he could be jailed again after being caught hiding on another boat two days after being released. Yesterday a judge said it beggared belief that the Home Office had failed to repatriate him....
The following words from Bristol Crown Court, Judge Michael Hubbard the Royal Crown Court sum up his frustration with government bureaucracy:
'It beggars belief that during that time in detention it wasn't sorted out for him to return home. Can we not use this court to kick some backsides and have something done?'

Must not joke about Obama

We read:

"Alaska officials are investigating racist jokes about President-elect Barack Obama that have been circulating on state government e-mail accounts.

One of the five e-mails obtained by The Associated Press asks about the outcome of the Democrat's victory after all the time and money invested and concludes: "Another black family living in government housing!"

Source

Or are we not supposed to mention that there are a lot of blacks in government housing? I guess that's it. Reality must not be mentioned.

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Give us the money

An insightful email from a British reader below:

After forty years of listening to greenie scare stories, (even believing some of them at one time) I think I am starting to see a pattern emerging. It seems to start as:

Plan A: The Scam

We have identified an ecological disaster and HUMANS ARE TO BLAME. But if you pay us lots of money and do exactly what we say, we may be able to fix it in time.

For some inexplicable reason, this does not convince everyone, so we need:

Plan B: The Precautionary Principle

Well, even if we're wrong, you still ought to pay us lots of money and do exactly what we say.

For some inexplicable reason, this also does not convince everyone, so we need:

Plan C: The Tipping Point

OK. So nothing is happening and there isn't any evidence, but there will be soon if you don't PAY US THE MONEY!

This method seems to be a limp-wristed version of that used by Ronnie and Reggie in the East End of London many years ago, and was known then as extortion, or, "demanding money with menaces." (but now it is called "environmentalism." I suppose at least we have a longer word.) Although the Kray's methods seem to have been:

a. less verbose

b. arguably more cost-effective, and

c. they had the balls to do their own dirty work.

The greenie extortionists, having failed at plan C, exhort the legal authorities to silence the dissenters. And if that doesn't work they incite young, idealistic and naive people into acquiring a criminal record on their behalf. Maybe we should just say "BOO" to the greenies for a change. Being polite only lets them get away with it.


Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

When will psychologists ever learn?

Artifactual relationships, absent sampling and invalid measuring instruments still abound in research into the psychology of politics

Rather to my surprise I recently read in the popular press a rather good article which points out that "phobias" and prejudice are very different. It was written by a young psychology professor named Nicholas Haslam at the University of Melbourne. I have myself for some time been protesting the misapplication of the word "phobia" to just about anything that Leftists disagree with: Homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, etc. As the article will cease to be available on the newspaper site after a while, I have reposted it on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH today.

To keep his article within the bounds of political correctness, however, Haslam also had to say that "Prejudice flourishes among people who are cold, callous, inflexible, closed-minded and conventional". So you are still a pretty bad egg if you distrust Muslims or regard homosexuality as wrong or unhealthy.

What he said there is a conventional belief among psychologists but the evidence for its truth is very weak. In the 60 years that psychologists have been subjecting such theories to experimental test, just about the only proof for such theories that they have found has been derived from handing out to their students a bunch of questionnaires and seeing if the students who didn't like (say) blacks also expressed views that psychologists regard as close-minded etc. And from what their students say, psychologists generalize to all mankind.

From almost any point of view that is a ludicrous procedure. Not only do they base their research on a non-sample -- meaning that no generalizations can be drawn from it anyhow -- but college students are even a group of people who are KNOWN to be unrepresentative of the general population in all sorts of ways. And even if students were representative, relying on what they say would be most incautious. Students are very good at giving their professors the answers that they think their professors want. So many of the answers given will not be what the students really think.

So for all of those reasons, I was only slightly surprised when, in one of the earliest pieces of research I ever did, I found a correlation of .808 (a very high correlation) between two variables among students but when I repeated the survey on a more representative population, the correlation dropped to around .10, which is negligible. For the rest of my research career. I did almost all my research on proper samples of the general population and almost always ended up getting very different results from my student-using colleagues.

So I was curious to see if Haslam was just mouthing conventional and unsubstantiated platitudes or if he really had some basis for his generalizations. He replied that he was relying on a big review article on the subject by Sibley and Duckitt in Personality and Social Psychology Review titled "Personality and Prejudice: A Meta-Analysis and Theoretical Review". In a very restrained academic way it ploughs the old furrow that racially prejudiced people are sick in the head and anti-racists are just wonderful lovely people. Negative racial views are very common (if rarely acknowledged publicly these days) so there must be a lot of sick people around.

I have debated in the journal literature with Duckitt before so expected him to be less naive and assumption-prone than are most writers in the field -- and so it was. He shows a rare and commendable awareness that alleged correlations between attitudes and personality can arise because the alleged measures of personality are in fact measures of attitudes, for instance. He does not take that awareness as far as he might, however. He seems, for instance, to take correlations between racism and social dominance quite seriously despite the fact that the social dominance questionnaire contains such items as "Inferior groups should stay in their place", "Superior groups should dominate inferior groups" and "Some groups of people are just more worthy than others". Races are of course groups so is it any surprise that such statements correlate with other expressions of racism? All Duckitt has shown is that some expressions of racism correlate with one-another. He has shown nothing about personality at all.

So the finding of a relationship between social dominance and racism is what is called in science a "methodological artifact" -- generally a source of shame among serious scientists, but something that has long been common in this research field. Duckitt himself points out some other examples of it. Psychological research is in general still a profoundly amateur enterprise.

I might mention that the folly that I have just pointed out is not really the fault of Duckitt. His article is simply a summary of what other researchers have found and none of them seemed to see any problem with their measure of social dominance either. So it is psychologists as a whole that my criticism principally applies to. I never cease to be staggered by how blind psychology academics can be. They must never look at the questions they ask people.

Duckitt DOES show an awareness of the sampling problem I have mentioned but does not seem to take it seriously. He claims he has some real samples in his data but he does not identify them and combines them with the student data. There is no repetition of all his analyses on student and non-student data. So the generalizability of his findings is simply unknown.

But the problems with the Sibley & Duckitt article do not end there. Duckitt says very little about the measures of racism that he uses. He concedes that they were only poorly comparable and that some were more narrowly focused than others but he seems to take no account of that in his major analyses. Yet this is a vital point. In my research, I repeatedly found some shared variance betweeen attitudes to different racial groups but not much (about 20% on average). In other words, there were many people who didn't like (say) blacks but who did respect (say) Jews. So in most of the general population, there is essentially no such thing as racism. If there were, knowing a person's attitude to one minority would tell you all you need to know about that person's view of all minorities. But it is not so. Undoubtedly, there are some individuals who dislike all outgroups but that is not generally so. So the concept of racism is close to being an irrelevant concept. The concept it embodies is misleading. Many white people may be wary of blacks but have no firm views on race in general. So Duckitt makes a basic assumption that has very little correspondence with reality. There is ample room for attitudes to different races to have different correlates but Duckitt treats them as all the same. He has thoroughly scrambled Humpty Dumpty.

What I have just challenged is what psychologists call the "validity" of the racism measures. Do they index what they purport to measure? And the pervasive Leftist orientation among psychologists seems to make them very poor at composing valid questionnaires to measure racism, conservatism. authoritarianism etc. If you want to find out what people really believe you have to present them with statements that express that and not statements that are utterly loony. But psychologists tend to think that anything to do with conservastism etc is loony so it is common for them to compose questionnaires that contain way-out statements rather than normal expressions of conservatism etc.

And that shows on the rare occasions when the validity of such a questionnaire becomes testable. Do answers to a psychology questionnaire about conservatism predict a conservative vote in national elections for instance? From the McClosky and Adorno questionnaires to the Altemeyer questionnaire, they dont, or do so very weakly. So some of the measures of conservatism most frequently used by psychologists are demonstrably not valid.

And that IS the fault of the person who devised the questionnaire. I am more a libertarian than a conservative but I do have some conservative sympathies and the questionaire measures of conservatism that I compose correlate with general population vote up to the level of .50, which is not high in any absolute sense but which is very high by the standard of what is normally found in psychological research. It is certainly much higher than what is found in general population samples with the McClosky, Adorno and Altemeyer measures that other psychologists use. And the difference is that my conservatism questionnaires contain examples of what conservatives really say rather than what psychologists think they say. And it is amazing how profoundly wrong the conventional psychological conception of conservatism can be. See here. When psychologists research conservatism, they usually research a caricature of it.

And what is true of conservatism measures used by psychologists is also true of measures of prejudice. And so validation of such measures against real-life behaviour is rarely attempted. Does a "racist" person according to psychologists actually tend to vote for political candidates who are critical of affirmative action or uncontrolled Hispanic immigration, for instance? Psychologists normally seem game to test that only among their students.

So you see why I gave up psychological research around 1990. I felt that I was in a dialogue with mere game-players rather than serious scientists. What they say reflects their prejudices, not the results of any serious research.

The games psychologists play can be dangerous however. The sort of utterance that I quoted from Haslam above has the tendency to dehumanize those it describes and that view of "racists" and others has certainly passed from psychologists into the popular culture. Note here where a NY film critic quite literally questions the humanity of "racists". When one notes how many people -- even critics of illegal immigration -- are routinely denounced by Leftists as "racists", we see that such dehumanization could hit a lot of people. How ironic that the Leftist psychologists who would denounce the dehumanization practiced by the likes of Hitler go on to do a pretty neat job of dehumanization themselves. And just as Hitler based his dehumanizations on fake science, so do modern-day academic psychologists.

Substantiation for the various points I have made above about research findings can be found here.

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Friday, December 19, 2008

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) demands censorship of conservatives

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-Gesundheit) wants to salvage and strengthen The Fairness Doctrine. And besides suppressing talk radio, she would also like to censor cable, satellite programming and broadcast television. Because there's nothing more important for Congress to work on, apparently. No high priority economic mess, for instance.

“I’ll work on bringing it back. I still believe in it,” Eshoo told the Daily Post in Palo Alto.

The Fairness Doctrine required TV and radio stations to balance opposing points of view. It meant that those who disagreed with the political slant of a commentator were entitled to free air time to give contrasting points of view, usually in the same time slot as the original broadcast...

Eshoo said she would recommend the doctrine be applied not only to radio and TV broadcasts, but also to cable and satellite services.

“It should and will affect everyone,” she said [calling] the present system “unfair,” and said "there should be equal time for the spoken word."

Broadcasting & Cable points to other ominous signs.

The [Fairness] doctrine, which only applied to broadcasting, was scrapped by the FCC as unconstitutional in 1987... The doctrine's demise is credited -- or blamed, depending on who is citing it -- for the rise in conservative talk radio. Hosts including Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have expressed concerns that the new Democratic regime in Congress will try to reinstate the doctrine as a way to silence their critics.

Contributing to that concern were recent comments by Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York to Fox News last month.

The office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, yet another California Democrat, has raised the specter of its return. More recently, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said in an interview on talk station KKOB-AM Albuquerque that he hoped there would be a push for the doctrine, saying that “all stations should have to represent a balanced perspective…instead of always hammering away at one side of the political [spectrum].”

Sounds like a solid idea to me.

That First Amendment thingie is such a nuisance. And if we can just silence our critics and utterly control media content, we'll achieve a Democrat Utopia, dontcha know?

As of this moment there are 61 radio stations in New York City. Stations broadcast everything from Air America to Reggae Hip Hop and everything in between.

The reason liberal ideas don't resonate with the general public is that they are forced to compete on the merits of the ideas alone.

And liberals don't like competition.

They would prefer that big government decide what you can listen to, how much fuel your car can consume, what workers' organizations you must join, how much carbon dioxide you can expel, what your retirement stipend must be, which benefits you should consume for your health-care needs... and so on, ad infinitum. They want government to control every aspect of your life.

Furthermore, competition exposes their ideas as intellectually bankrupt, morally reprehensible and ultimately at odds with the vision the Framers held for this country.

You may recognize the fairless doctrine from previous corrupt and failed socialist governments.

I say to Anna Eshoo: read your Constitution, if a liberal hack like you owns a Constitution, that is.

We will resist the Fairless Doctrine and fight your vision of a totalitarian regime that regulates and approves content. In fact, why not put (D-Venezuela) after your name, you pathetic goon?

Note to readers: was that too harsh? I'm in a bad mood tonight.

Drill: World Bank Says Russia may need help if oil falls more

We need to get it drilled into our heads,
the drill is,
we need to drill more, and drill now,
and if we do,
then we will drill tyrants like Putin, Ahmadinejad, and King Abdullah into the ground.

From the Associated Press:
MOSCOW (AP) - Russia would come under crippling financial pressure and may need to raise money externally if oil languishes at an average of $30 a barrel over the next two years, the World Bank predicted Friday.

The bleak scenario would mark a rapid unraveling of Russia's oil-fueled economic gains over the past eight years, during which time the government has paid down most of its foreign debt and built up a vast stockpile of international reserves.

"If oil prices in 2009 and 2010 average $30 a barrel, that would be a nightmare scenario for a global economy," Zeljko Bogetic, the World Bank's chief economist in Russia told investors on Friday. "The pressures on the current account and public finances in Russia would quickly rise to a point where the financing constraint would become so sharp that it's possible even to envisage Russia's return from a creditor to international organisations to (that of) a borrower."

At $50 a barrel, Russia could drain much of its reserve funds and run budgetary deficits, but would not face a "meltdown" scenario, said Bogetic.

Oil prices took a sharp turn downward this week, with the February light sweet crude contract trading just over $42 a barrel—more than $100 lower than its July peak—despite a large output cut pledged this week by oil producers' cartel OPEC.

Some major oil-importing countries have criticized OPEC's move to push up prices during a global slowdown.

The World Bank currently forecasts an average oil price of $75 a barrel over the next two years, said Bogetic.

Among emerging markets, Russia has been one of the hardest hit by the global financial crisis and plunging oil prices, the mainstay of the Russian economy. These factors have put the national currency under intense strain and triggered massive stock market losses and capital outflows from the country.

Russia, which grew at over 8 percent last year, is facing a severe slowdown in growth, and possibly even recession next year, analysts say. Torrid figures released earlier this week showed that industrial output had plunged 10.8 percent in November from the previous month, signaling a dramatic slowdown in the final quarter.

Will the Jews survive?

My Answer: Maybe not.

But I am not going to spell out my reasoning here. Some of the things I say on the matter will in many people's view stray into political incorrectness. But if after that warning you want to read on, you will find the article on DISSECTING LEFTISM.

Posted by John Ray.

Top 10 dud climate predictions

By Andrew Bolt, writing from Australia

Global warming preachers have had a shocking 2008. So many of their predictions this year went splat. Here's their problem: they've been scaring us for so long that it's now possible to check if things are turning out as hot as they warned. And good news! I bring you Christmas cheer - the top 10 warming predictions to hit the wall this year. Read, so you can end 2008 with optimism, knowing this Christmas won't be the last for you, the planet or even the polar bears.

1. OUR CITIES WILL DIE OF THIRST

Tim Flannery, an expert in bones, has made a fortune from books and lectures warning that we face global warming doom. He scared us so well that we last year made him Australian of the Year. In March, Flannery said: "The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009." In fact, Adelaide's reservoirs are now 75 per cent full, just weeks from 2009.

In June last year, Flannery warned Brisbane's "water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months". In fact, 18 months later, its dams are 46 per cent full after Brisbane's wettest spring in 27 years.

In 2005, Flannery predicted Sydney's dams could be dry in just two years. In fact, three years later its dams are 63 per cent full, not least because June last year was its wettest since 1951.

In 2004, Flannery said global warming would cause such droughts that "there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis". In fact, Perth now has the lowest water restrictions of any state capital, thanks to its desalination plant and dams that are 40 per cent full after the city's wettest November in 17 years.

Lesson: This truly is a land "of drought and flooding rains". Distrust a professional panic merchant who predicts the first but ignores the second.

2. OUR REEF WILL DIE

PROFESSOR Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of Queensland University, is Australia's most quoted reef expert. He's advised business, green and government groups, and won our rich Eureka Prize for scares about our reef. He's chaired a $20 million global warming study of the World Bank. In 1999, Hoegh-Guldberg warned that the Great Barrier Reef was under pressure from global warming, and much of it had turned white. In fact, he later admitted the reef had made a "surprising" recovery.

In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant "between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland's great Barrier Reef could die within a month". In fact, he later admitted this bleaching had "a minimal impact".

In 2007, he warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were again bleaching the reef. In fact, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network last week said there had been no big damage to the reef caused by climate change in the four years since its last report, and veteran diver Ben Cropp said this week that in 50 years he'd seen none at all.

Lesson: Reefs adapt, like so much of nature. Learn again that scares make big headlines and bigger careers.

3. GOODBYE, NORTH POLE

In April this year, the papers were full of warnings the Arctic ice could all melt. "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time," claimed Dr David Barber, of Manitoba University, ignoring the many earlier times the Pole has been ice free. "It's hard to see how the system may bounce back (this year)," fretted Dr Ignatius Rigor, of Washington University's polar science centre. Tim Flannery also warned "this may be the Arctic's first ice-free year", and the ABC and Age got reporter Marian Wilkinson to go stare at the ice and wail: "Here you can see climate change happening before your eyes."

In fact, the Arctic's ice cover this year was almost 10 per cent above last year's great low, and has refrozen rapidly since. Meanwhile, sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing. Been told either cool fact? Yet Barber is again in the news this month, predicting an ice-free Arctic now in six years. Did anyone ask him how he got his last prediction wrong?

Lesson: The media prefers hot scares to cool truths. And it rarely holds its pet scaremongers to account.

4. BEWARE HUGE WINDS

Al Gore sold his scary global warming film, An Inconvenient Truth, shown in almost every school in the country, with a poster of a terrible hurricane. Former US president Bill Clinton later gloated: "It is now generally recognised that while Al Gore and I were ridiculed, we were right about global warming. . . It's going to lead to more hurricanes." In fact, there is still no proof of a link between any warming and hurricanes. Australia is actually getting fewer cyclones, and last month researchers at Florida State University concluded that the 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years.

Lesson: Beware of politicians riding the warming bandwagon.

5. GIANT HAILSTONES WILL SMASH THROUGH YOUR ROOF

Ross Garnaut, a professor of economics, is the guru behind the Rudd Government's global warming policies. He this year defended the ugly curved steel roof he'd planned at the rear of his city property, telling angry locals he was protecting himself from climate change: "Severe and more frequent hailstones will be a feature of this change," he said. In fact, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits "decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne. . ."

Lesson: Beware also of government advisers on that warming wagon.

6. NO MORE SKIING

A bad ski season three years ago - right after a great one - had The Age and other alarmists blaming global warming. The CSIRO, once our top science body, fanned the fear by claiming resorts such as Mt Hotham and Mt Buller could lose a quarter of their snow by 2020. In fact, this year was another boom one for skiing, with Mt Hotham and Mt Buller covered in snow five weeks before the season started.

What's more, a study this year in the Hydrological Sciences Journal checked six climate models, including one used by the CSIRO. It found they couldn't even predict the regional climate we'd had already: "Local model projections cannot be credible . . ." It also confirmed the finding of a study last year in the International Journal of Climatology that the 22 most cited global warming models could not "accurately explain the (global) climate from the recent past". As for predicting the future. . .

Lesson: The CSIRO's scary predictions are near worthless.

7. PERTH WILL BAKE DRY

The CSIRO last year claimed Perth was "particularly vulnerable" and had a 90 per cent chance of getting less rain and higher temperatures. "There are not many other parts of the world where the IPCC has made a prediction that a drop in rainfall is highly likely," it said. In fact, Perth has just had its coldest and wettest November since 1991.

Lesson: As I said, don't trust the CSIRO's model or its warnings.

8. ISLANDS WILL DROWN

The seas will rise up to 100m by 2100, claims ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams. Six metres, suggests Al Gore. So let's take in "climate refugees" from low-lying Tuvalu, says federal Labor. And ban coastal development, says the Brumby Government. In fact, while the seas have slowly risen since the last ice age, before man got gassy, they've stopped rising for the last two, according to data from the Jason-1 satellite. "There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rises," the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute declared last month.

Lesson: Trust the data, not the politicians.

9. BRITAIN WILL SWELTER

The British Met Office is home to the Hadley Centre, one of the top centres of the man-made global warming faith. In April it predicted: "The coming summer is expected to be a 'typical British summer'. . ." In fact, in August it admitted: "(This) summer . . . has been one of the wettest on record across the UK." In September it predicted: "The coming winter (is) likely to be milder than average." In fact, winter has been so cold that London had its first October snow in 74 years -- and on the day Parliament voted to fight "global warming".

Lesson: If the Met can't predict the weather three months out, what can it know of the climate 100 years hence?

10. WE'LL BE HOTTER

Speaking of the Met, it has so far predicted 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2007 would be the world's hottest or second-hottest year on record, but nine of the past 10 years it predicted temperatures too high. In fact, the Met this month conceded 2008 would be the coldest year this century. That makes 1998 still the hottest year on record since the Medieval Warm Period some 1000 years ago. Indeed, temperatures have slowly fallen since around 2002. As Roger Pielke Sr, Professor Emeritus of Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric Science, declared this month: "Global warming has stopped for the last few years."

Lesson: Something is wrong with warming models that predict warming in a cooling world, especially when we're each year pumping out even more greenhouse gases. Be sceptical.

Those, then, are the top 10 dud predictions of that hooting, screaming and screeching tribe of warming alarmists. Look and laugh. And dare to believe the world is bright and reason may yet triumph.

Source

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

THE MALARIA SCARE DEBUNKED

Malaria today is most common in tropical countries so Greenie "scientists" assume that it is a warm-climate phenomenon and predict that global warming will spread it into Europe and the United States. Below are some excerpts from an academic journal specializing in malaria studies which show that malaria is NOT limited by climate and that epidemics of it have been known as far North as Finland. So it is not climate that limits malaria but public health measures. Climate is irrelevant. Note that what is true of malaria should also be true of other mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue fever and Ross river virus



Global warming and malaria: knowing the horse before hitching the cart

By Paul Reiter

Abstract

Speculations on the potential impact of climate change on human health frequently focus on malaria. Predictions are common that in the coming decades, tens - even hundreds - of millions more cases will occur in regions where the disease is already present, and that transmission will extend to higher latitudes and altitudes. Such predictions, sometimes supported by simple models, are persuasive because they are intuitive, but they sidestep factors that are key to the transmission and epidemiology of the disease: the ecology and behaviour of both humans and vectors, and the immunity of the human population. A holistic view of the natural history of the disease, in the context of these factors and in the precise setting where it is transmitted, is the only valid starting point for assessing the likely significance of future changes in climate.

Common misconceptions

There is a widespread misconception that mosquito-borne diseases require tropical temperatures, or at least the temperatures of the warmer temperate regions. A glance at a map of global isotherms reveals that summer temperatures in many temperate regions are at least as high as in the warmest seasons of many regions in the tropics. The crucial difference is that the tropics do not have cold winters. Moreover, if tropical mosquito-borne pathogens are introduced to temperate regions in the right season, they can be transmitted, if suitable vectors are present

In Lapland, in the past, anopheline species survived the winter in houses and stables, feeding occasionally, and transmitting malaria when outdoor temperatures were below -40°C. These examples underline the limited value of meteorological variables as a guide to the behaviour and geographic range of vector species, and of the pathogens they transmit. Few people are aware that it is less than forty years since the final eradication of malaria in Europe and the United States. Indeed, the disease was common in the period from the 16th to 18th centuries that climatologists term the Little Ice Age and data from burial records around the Thames estuary reveal that mortality in "marsh parishes" of England was comparable to that in areas of transmission in sub-Saharan Africa today

Until the mid-19th century, the northern limit of transmission was roughly defined by the present 15°C July isotherm. Denmark and parts of Sweden suffered devastating epidemics until the 1860s. Incidence diminished thereafter and the disease had essentially disappeared around the turn of the 20th Century. The same was true in Finland, except for a brief recrudescence in 1941, during the Russo-Finnish war.

Conclusion

Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by climate in most temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, "new" malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum altitudinal limits for transmission. Future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the disease, but obsessive emphasis on "global warming" as a dominant parameter is indefensible; the principal determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics. There is a critical need for cheap, effective control campaigns, as were implemented during the DDT era. A creative and organized search for new strategies, perhaps based on new technologies, is urgently required, irrespective of future climate change.

Malaria Journal 2008, 7(Suppl 1)

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Thursday, December 18, 2008

PIGS FLY: NYTIMES BLAMES CLINTON POLICY FOR MUCH OF THE REAL ESTATE BUBBLE

NYTIMES: Clinton Tax Break May Have Helped Cause Housing Bubble
“Tonight, I propose a new tax cut for homeownership that says to every middle-income working family in this country, if you sell your home, you will not have to pay a capital gains tax on it ever — not ever.”

— President Bill Clinton, at the 1996 Democratic National Convention
By itself, the change in the tax law did not cause the housing bubble, economists say. Several other factors — a relaxation of lending standards, a failure by regulators to intervene, a sharp decline in interest rates and a collective belief that house prices could never fall — probably played larger roles.

But many economists say that the law had a noticeable impact, allowing home sales to become tax-free windfalls. A recent study of the provision by an economist at the Federal Reserve suggests that the number of homes sold was almost 17 percent higher over the last decade than it would have been without the law.

... Charles O. Rossotti, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner from 1997 to 2002, said: “Why insist in effect that they put it in housing to get that benefit? Why not let them invest in other things that might be more productive, like stocks and bonds?”

The provision — part of a sprawling bill called the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 — exempted most home sales from capital-gains taxes. The first $500,000 in gains from any home sale was exempt from taxes for a married couple, as long as they had lived in the home for at least two of the previous five years. (For singles, the first $250,000 was exempt.)

... By favoring real estate, the tax code pushed many Americans to begin thinking of their houses more as an investment than as a place to live. It helped change the national conversation about housing. Not only did real estate look like a can’t-miss investment for much of the last decade, it was also a tax-free one.

Together with the other housing subsidies that had already been in the tax code — the mortgage-interest deduction chief among them — the law gave people a motive to buy more and more real estate. Lax lending standards and low interest rates then gave people the means to do so.

  • THIS LAW (COURTESY OF CLINTON), THE EARLIER CRA (COURTESY OF CARTER), THE GSE'S - FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC )PPROTECTED BY DOD AND FRANK AND OTHER DEMS) - WERE CHIEFLY TO BLAME FOR CREATING THE POISON THAT TURNED A HOUSING BUBBLE INTO A FINANCIAL MELTDOWN.
  • GREENSPAN HELPED SET IT ALL IN MOTION WITH HIS 17 RATE INCREASES FROM 2004-2007, WHICH PULLED THE RUG OUT FROM UNDER ALL THE BORROWERS.
  • THE OIL BUBBLE - (ITSELF FUELED BY SPECULATION THAT WE WERE IN "THE AGE OF PEAK OIL", AND AN ILL-CONCEIVED HEDGE STRATEGY WHICH GAMBLED THAT COMMODITIES WERE A SAFE HAVEN IF STOCKS WENT DOWN) - WAS THE COUP DE GRACE.

HAD ANY ONE OF THESE THREE THINGS NOT HAPPENED, WE'D BE DOING OKAY.

WALL STREET GREED AND DEREGULATION HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT AT ALL.

AN EQUITABLE WAY FOR WALL STREET TO GIVE OUT BONUSES:

SINCE THEY HAD A BIG ROLE IN THEIR OWN MELTDOWN, AND BECAUSE WE TAXPAYERS ARE GONNA BE BAILING THEM OUT, WE NEED AN EQUITABLE WAY FOR WALL STREET EXEC'S TO GET BONUSES WHICH AREN'T AT OUR EXPENSE.

HERE IT IS -

VIA Power Line:

Credit Suisse has a fine idea:

Credit Suisse announced today that bonuses for its top executives would be made in illiquid, mortgage-backed securities. Seeing as these guys are responsible for getting this stuff on the companies books, it makes sense to shove it back to them. And if the market gets liquid again, and the stuff goes up, that's going to be a huge windfall for execs.

I'd like to see this idea spread. Maybe Congressmen could be paid in Freddie Mac paper and union officials in GM stock. The possibilities are endless!

Justice: As you make your bed, so you lye down. According to your Conditions you have your Bargain. [1721 J. Kelly Scottish Proverbs 16]

NYTIMES IN A GRAMSCIAN ATTACK ON "IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE"

THE NYTIMES HAS ONCE AGAIN GONE OUT IF ITS WAY TO TRAMPLE ON AMERICAN AND JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES - AND AN AMERICAN CLASSIC MOVIE:

FRONT PAGE:

Movies »

It's a Miserable Life
It's a Miserable Life

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying story.

EXCERPT:

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. ... the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” Now that’s scary. ... Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. ... Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.
THE NYTIMES IS ACTUALLY ENDORSING POTTERSVILLE. SICK.

HERE'S ANOTHER THING - SOMETHING WHICH EXPOSES THE COLUMNISTS UTTER IGNORANCE AND POOR RESEARCH:
I checked my theory [THAT GEORGE COMMITTED A CRIME] with Frank J. Clark, the district attorney for Erie County upstate, where, as far as I can tell, the fictional Bedford Falls is set...
WRONG. HERE'S PROOF:
  • AND ALL THREE OF THESE TOWNS ARE IN WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NOT ERIE.
THIS ERROR IS MORE COMMON THAN THE NYTIMES' BRAZENLY ANTI-JUDEO-CHRISTIAN ATTACK WHICH UNDERLIES THIS COLUMN.

A COLUMN MEANT TO BERATE A MOVIE WHICH IS NOT ONLY ONE OF THE GREATEST MOVIES EVER MADE - BUT A CHRISTMAS CLASSIC, AND THEY DO THIS THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS.

THE NYTIMES HAS NO SHAME.

2 PONZI SCHEMES: MADOFF'S FUND AND SOCIAL SECURITY: THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS SCOOPS THE WALL STREET JOURNAL BY A DAY!

WSJ - 12/17/08:
Holman W. Jenkins Jr.: Put Madoff In Charge of Social Security

Where was the SEC? Such is the plaint lofted in the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal.
RELIAPUNDIT, THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS - 12/16/08:
Must not mention that a crook is a big Democrat donor

We read:
"Very few media stories of the fraud perpetrated by former Nasdaq chairman Madoff mentions the heavy financial support that Madoff has donated to the Democrat Party. Campaign contributions by Madoff show many thousands of dollars going to Democrat candidates and causes. Including $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign, thousands to Charles Rangel (D, NY), Charles Schumer (D, NY), and $6,000 to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Madoff also gave generously to Senator Frank Lautenberg (D, NJ) who runs a charitable foundation that invested with Madoff.

Source
The Madoff fraud is said to be the biggest scam ever, with billions lost. Banks worldwide were caught. He stole from charities, 401(k)s, pension plans, retired people and some really vulnerable souls. Some charities lost their entire investments. More on the losers here.

Comments on this post

You have to admit this is a pretty smart guy. Perhaps there is a place in the government for him.. wouldn't doubt it
.
ha!

we should make him the chief of social security --- which is after all a PONZI SCHEME.

REGULAR READERS KNOW WE SCOOP THE BIGGIES ALL THE TIME. SPREAD THE WORD. BLOGROLL US. BOOKMARK US.

Global cooling hits the Australian State of Victoria

Where have Victoria's days of summer gone? Cool and cloudy days have forced beach lovers indoors, and bikini and ice cream sales have slumped. One ray of sunshine is a bright outlook for Christmas - long range forecaster John Moore says Christmas Eve will be fine and 26 [Celsius], and Christmas Day fine and 25. But he says showers will return on Boxing Day. Melbourne has seen an average of just seven hours' sunshine a day this month, well down on the December average of 8.3 hours.

The silver lining is that parts of Victoria had more than their December average of rain in just one day - last Friday - and Melbourne's December fall is already well above average.

While no one needs an expert to work it out, Dr Harvey Stern, at the Bureau of Meteorology, confirmed it was unusual to have so few hot days in December. "There's no sign of really hot weather in the next week," he said. "Mostly we are looking at temperatures in the 20s."

Summer swimwear retailers have been particularly hit by the cold weather, many brands reporting a drop in bikini and board short sales. Rip Curl marketing manager Nick Russell is really looking forward to a break in the weather. The surf brand's bikini sales are well down on previous years, especially in coastal holiday spots. "We would be significantly better off if it had have been 35C and beautiful for the past fortnight or so," he said. Mark Mariotti, who owns St Kilda ice cream store Seven Apples, said his business was losing thousands of dollars a week. "My business is all about summer and sales and it's not happening . . . we want some sun," he said.

Dr Stern said Melbourne's rainfall of 67mm this month was 10mm above average. Melbourne Water's supply manager John Woodland said an average of 65mm of rain fell over Melbourne's major catchments, boosting the city's water storages by 11 billion litres. The rain topped up catchments by 0.6 per cent, taking the nine reservoirs to 34.6 per cent of capacity, compared with 39.1 per cent at the same time last year. Smaller gains are expected for the rest of the week as more water flows from streams across the 160,000ha catchment area. Mr Woodland said despite the downpours the city's storages still faced an 80 billion litre shortfall.

Dr Harry Hemley, vice-president of the Australian Medical Association Victoria, said GPs had been flooded with patients complaining of common colds during the cold snap. "There has been an influx since we've had the cold spell of weather and people have been indoors coughing over each other," Dr Hemley said. "Prior to this little cold spell we had more hay fever coming in and that seems to have declined and now we've got more upper respiratory infections."

Source

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

THIS FRIDAY ON "THE GATHERING STORM"

Listen to The Gathering Storm Radio Show, which WC and I cohost. The show broadcasts live every Friday beginning at noon, Pacific Time.

The call-in number is (646) 915-9870.

Callers welcome!

Our guest is Alec Rawls of Error Theory. We will be discussing the Flight 93 Memorial. Videos about the memorial:

"It Points to Mecca"



"44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks on the flight path"


Listen to the December 19, 2008 edition of The Gathering Storm Radio Show, live or later by CLICKING HERE.

UPCOMING SHOWS:
December 26: Cassandra USA
January 2: Tom Trento
January 9: Yoni Tidi

OBESITY UPDATE

The O word: The word 'obese' is banned in British government letters

We read:
"Ministers banned the word 'obese' on letters to the parents of fat children - because focus groups did not like it, England's chief medical officer said today. Professor Liam Donaldson revealed that the term was replaced on letters to parents by 'very overweight' over fears it would upset and stigmatise fat children. Writing on the BBC News website he said obesity had become a taboo word or an 'O word'.

The Department of Health announced in August that for the first time parents would be routinely informed if their child was clinically overweight. Children are weighed on entering primary school (at age four or five) and in their final year (aged 10 or 11) as part of the National Child Measurement Programme.

Letters are then sent out to make parents aware of potential problems with their child's weight so they go and see their doctor about it if needed. But Professor Donaldson said that in the planning stage, a 'stumbling block' was the wording of the feedback letter. 'The majority of these parents felt that using the term "very overweight" in combination with the associated health risks was a better approach. Suddenly, we had stepped on eggshells.' He added: 'Obesity has become the new cancer. A word that is taboo, that intimidates, strikes fear, that promoted softer euphemisms. In effect it has become an "O" word.

At the time, the National Obesity Forum described the Government's decision not to use the word obese as 'prissy and namby pamby'.

Source

The word is deliberately used by fat-warriors in a derogatory way. Strictly, it refers only to grossly overweight people but has come to be used to refer to any degree of being overweight. So we now have the amusing situation where people will hear all these furious condemnations of obesity in the media but then will all be told that it does not apply to their kid -- a very confused and confusing message. One arm of officialdom is being defeated by another arm of officialdom!






Obesity is determined 'by the time a child is five'

So the tots are now in line for harassment. The results are ENTIRELY in line with genetically-determined overeating. That the kids were the same as earlier at birth means nothing. They had not by the time of birth had any influence on their nutritional intake

Child obesity is determined before the age of five, ministers were told yesterday. Scientists found that the majority of weight gain in children happens before they have started school, raising doubts over Government policies which target fatter children only when they start primary education. They urged ministers to launch more pre-school obesity initiatives. A quarter of children aged four and five in England are overweight, and around 10 per cent are classified as obese - so fat that their health is in danger.

Experts blame diets rich in fat, salt, sugar and processed foods, and say that bad dietary examples set by their parents could also be to blame. The findings, published in the journal Paediatrics, came from the EarlyBird study of 233 children from birth to puberty which were presented to ministers today. At birth, children in the study were the same weight as children born 25 years ago, the study found.

But by puberty they had gained more fat compared to children of the same age in the 1980s. Most of the excess weight gain was put on before the age of five, they found. Although the weight of a five-year-old bore no relation to his or her weight at birth, it closely predicted the weight the child would be at nine, indicating that the child's path to obesity began before school age but was not connected with birth weight. They found that before a girl gets to school, she will have gained 90 per cent of the excess weight she will have at puberty. Boys will have piled on an extra 70 per cent.

Lead researcher Professor Terry Wilkin, of Plymouth's Peninsula Medical School, said: 'When they reach five, the die seems to be cast, at least until the age of puberty.' He said he believed a poor diet probably had more effect than lack of physical exercise. 'It is entirely possible that the calorie density of food and portion sizes could be higher,' he said.

Professor Wilkin criticised Government policy which focuses on school age children, with initiatives to make school meals healthier and get children to play fewer computer games. Professor Liam Donaldson, England's chief medical officer, said soaring rates of obesity amounted to an 'impending crisis'. He told the BBC: 'It is never too late. Obesity is one of the few serious medical problems that can be reversed very, very quickly.'

The Department of Health said: 'We have made obesity prevention, nutrition and physical activity a priority in the updated Child Health Promotion Programme. 'In addition, the Healthy Start scheme provides vouchers to put towards the cost of milk, fresh fruit and vegetables or infant formula to around half a million pregnant women and children under four in low income and disadvantaged families.'

Source

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Is Atheism Morally Bankrupt?

Ben Shapiro says that atheism is morally bankrupt in the article below. I add some comments at the foot of the article

If you walk around Washington, D.C., on a regular basis, youre likely to see some rather peculiar posters. But you wont see any more peculiar than the ads put out by the American Humanist Association. Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake, say the signs, in Christmas-colored red and green. Sounds great, doesnt it? Just be good for goodness sake. You dont need some Big Man in the Sky telling you what to do. You can be a wonderful person simply by doing the right thing. Theres only one problem: without God, there can be no moral choice. Without God, there is no capacity for free will.

Thats because a Godless world is a soulless world. Virtually all faiths hold that God endows human beings with the unique ability to choose their actions -- the ability to transcend biology and environment in order to do good. Transcending biology and our environment requires a higher power -- a spark of the supernatural. As philosopher Rene Descartes, put it, Although I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined [my soul] is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body and can exist without it.

Gilbert Pyle, the atheistic philosopher, derogatorily labeled the idea of soul/body dualism, the ghost in the machine. Nonetheless, our entire legal and moral system is based on the ghost in the machine -- the presupposition that we can choose to do otherwise. We can only condemn or praise individuals if they are responsible for their actions. We dont jail squirrels for garden theft or dogs for assaulting cats -- they arent responsible for their actions. But we routinely lock up kleptomaniacs and violent felons.

It's not only our criminal justice system that presupposes a Creator. Its our entire notion of freedom and equality. We hold these truths to be self-evident, wrote Thomas Jefferson, supposed atheist, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Human equality must spring from a Creator, because the presence of a soul is all that makes man human and equal. Biology suggests inherent inequality -- who would call Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stephen Hawking equal in any way? Biology suggests the sort of Hegelian social Darwinism embraced by totalitarian dictators, not the principles of equality articulated by the Founding Fathers.

Without a soul, freedom too is impossible -- we are all slaves to our biology. According to atheists, human beings are intensely complex machines. Our actions are determined by our genetics and our environment. According to atheists, if we could somehow determine all the constituent material parts of the universe, we would be able to predict all human action, down to the exact moment at which Vice President-elect Joe Biden will pick his nose. Freedom is generically defined as the power to determine action without restraint (Random House). But if action without restraint is impossible, how can we fight for freedom?

If there is no God, there is no freedom to choose. If there is no freedom to choose, there is no good or evil. There is merely action and inaction. There is no way to be good for goodness sake -- that would require an act of voluntary will far beyond human capacity. Atheists simply gloss over this point. The American Humanist Association states on its website, whybelieveinagod.org, We can have ethics and values based on our built-in drives toward a moral life. Without a soul, this is wishful thinking of the highest order. Since when does biology dictate a moral drive? If it did, wouldnt man always get more rather than less moral -- wouldnt history be a long upward climb? What about the murderers, rapists, child molesters and genocidal dictators? Are they all ignoring that built-in drive toward a moral life?

Atheism may work for individuals. There are moral atheists and there are immoral religious people. But as a system of thought, atheism cannot be the basis for any functional state. If we wish to protect freedom and equality, we must understand the value of recognizing God. We must recognize the flame of divinity -- free will -- He implanted within each of us.

Source

Shapiro's argument is a common one but ignores the fact that free will is a difficult concept for Christians too. Why does God allow freewill if he knows that it will in some cases lead to perdition? More importantly, however, irreligious people are usually quite moral. Very few Australians are religious but standards of behaviour are little different from the USA -- a much more religious country.

So how come Australia is a civil, prosperous and pleasant place to live? It is because Australians DO have a widely agreed-on moral code -- but it is not a Christian one. It originates from the values of the English working class of yesteryear and can perhaps be conveniently summed up (in its original Australian slang) as the following five "Commandments":

* Thou shalt not dob in thy mates
* Thou shalt not bung on an act.
* Thou shalt not be a tall poppy
* Thou shalt give everyone a fair go
* Thou shalt be fair dinkum

Translating these into standard English yields APPROXIMATELY the following:

* You must not incriminate your friends to the boss, the police or anyone else. Loyalty to your associates is all-important.

* You must not be ostentatious or pretend to be what you are not.

* You must treat others as your equals. If you are seen as being better than others in anything but sport you will be made to suffer for it.

* You must be fair and permissive in your treatment of others.

* You must not be insincere or dishonest.

From Hammurabi onwards, most moral codes have had much in common and the Australian and Christian moral codes do also have things in common but the Australian moral code is not preached in churches. It is simply traditional and widely heartfelt. I have looked recently at why moral codes tend to be similar from society to society. In brief, there are some inborn moral instincts. Such instincts are necessary for social life to exist.

So: Apologies to American churchgoers but people CAN be moral and decent without someone either putting the fear of God into them or inspiring them with the love of Christ.

Final note about religion in Australia: When asked at census time most Australians do put down some religion for themselves. Note, however, that in the last census we had over 5% of the population describe themselves as Methodists -- a denomination that has not existed in Australia for many years. The Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists combined to form the "Uniting" church a quarter of a century ago. In other words, for the vast majority of Australians, Christianity is a token thing.

So, as with the Australian population at large, lots of Australian conservatives are NOT religious. I am one of them.

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

2008 COOLEST YEAR OF THE CENTURY

TIME - VIA DOUG:
  • THE ATMOSPHERE HAS MORE MAN-MADE CO2 IN IT THAN EVER,
  • BUT 2008 WAS THE COLDEST YEAR OF THE NEW CENTURY.
THEREFORE: CO2 BASED AGW THEORIES ARE TOTAL BS.

THEREFORE, THERE IS NO GOOD REASON TO TAX, TRADE OR LIMIT CARBON OR CO2; IT'S ALL A FRIGGIN SCAM - THE BIGGEST SINCE KARL MARX TOLD PEOPLE COMMUNISM WAS GOOD.

Big-boy's toy with Greenie spin

Greenpeace are big on this too. They like playing around in boats



The record-breaking, biodiesel-powered Earthrace vessel is visiting Queensland promoting the use of environmentally sound fuels. The unique craft - like something out of Mad Max on water - this year set a new record for a powerboat to circle the globe. Using renewable biodiesel fuel for a net zero carbon footprint, the 24,000 nautical mile voyage took 60 days, 23 hours and 49 minutes, smashing the record by over two weeks. Earthrace skipper Pete Bethune said the vessel's tour aimed to connect with people and encourage debate on environmental issues. [What crap! He is doing it because he enjoys it]

Source

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Curlypet has a new book out

A very popular writer in Leftist circles is the curly-headed Malcolm Gladwell. His shallow erudition and superficialty seem to suit Leftists well. Oversimplification is a Leftist stock-in-trade after all. Sadwell has made something of a name for himself by downplaying, in traditional Leftist style, the importance of genetics to human ability and achievement. And his new book, "Outliers" just out continues that tradition. In an era when hardly a day goes by without new evidence of some genetic influence on people being recorded in the academic journals of medical genetics and behaviour genetics, Sadwell has to be fast and loose to maintain his position. And fast and loose he is.

I have pointed out the many holes in one of his effusions here. David Brooks has a useful review of his latest book here and there are a few scathing comments on it here.

Gladwell's basic point in his new book appears to be that you need a combination of opportunity, ability and hard work to achieve success in any field. How is that original? I imagine that they were saying the same in ancient Sumeria -- and I certainly would not argue with it as a rough generalization. Gladwell's only contribution seems to be in stressing how hard successful people have worked for their success -- and that is sometimes true. But it isn't always true. Let me speak of the field that I know best: Writing academic journal articles. I have a talent for that. In my heyday, I was getting papers published at roughly the rate of one a fortnight. The academic average is about one a year. So did I work hard at it? Not by comparison with my colleagues. They would often labour for a year over a paper and then have it rejected as not good enough for publication! By contrast, some of my papers were written in one day and were immediately accepted for publication. And very few of my papers took more than a few days to write. So Sadwell is overgeneralizing. If you are a classical violinist or pianist, sure it takes hours of practice daily but in other fields you just have a talent for something or not.

And in good Leftist style Sadwell stresses that a fortunate environment is important for success -- i.e. we have to thank "society" for our achievements. Bill Gates grew up into a privileged family and part of his success stems from that. But what about the millions who grew up in privileged families and ended up good for snorting cocaine only? Environment has some minimal role but it is clearly the least important factor. And the same applies to hard work. What about the millions of kids who dutifully do their piano or violin or ballet practice and end up acclaimed only by their mothers? You can't get away from the fact that exceptional achievement comes from exceptional ability and all Sadwell's fancy footwork cannot hide that. So Sadwell achieves the rather remarkable feat of being at once platitudinous and wrong.

In closing, below is part of an introduction to Sadwell from one of the great British skeptics at The Register:
Have you ever had the nagging sense that there's something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell - the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn't quite put your finger on it? We're here to help, dear reader. Gladwell gave two vanity "performances" in the West End - prompting fevered adulation from the posh papers - the most amazing being this Guardian editorial, titled In Praise of Malcolm Gladwell.

It appears that we have a paradox here. A substantial subclass of white collar "knowledge workers" hails this successful nonfiction author as fantastically intelligent and full of insight - and yet he causes an outbreak of infantalisation. He's better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion - and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card. That's pretty odd. So what's really going on here? Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What's he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he's saying that hold so much appeal? Let's start with the first two first.

Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it's reassuringly predictable. The most famous book Tipping Point, takes an epidemiological view of social trends and throws in a bit of network theory. You won't draw anything more profound from this than "we're all connected" - gee! - and you certainly won't get the drawbacks of epidemiology - much of which is now indistinguishable from junk science. A good book to write would be about how how epidemiology became so debased so quickly: it's now merely a computer modeling factory for producing health scares, or in the case of British foot-and-mouth disease, catastrophic policy responses that cost billions of pounds. John Brignell's The Epidemiologists does just that. (For good measure, Milgram's Six Degrees theory, has subsequently been debunked since Tipping Point appeared. Gladwell could have done that himself using a bit of investigative research of his own - but he probably wouldn't have liked the conclusion.)

The next book, Blink published in 2004, asks (in his own words) - "What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?" But he ends up pursuing the idea that rationality is overrated - and with only speculative cognitive science to go with, it isn't suprising that this book, too, doesn't get to any conclusion. And the message of the new one? Genius takes hard work. Again, it's something bleedingly obvious, but which leaves deeper questions unanswered. Take two geniuses: George Best and Tesla. What did they offer? Why do we admire them so much? There's obviously much more to each of them than perspiration - but we don't find out, and the book is as flattening and reductive as the others.

Perhaps it's Gladwell's stunning oratory that draws the crowds? Perhaps he's such a magnetic performer, that you go for the ride, not the destination? But when we see a example of the Master at Work - the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. Here's an excerpt of the master strolling the stage at Ted - a presentation called Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce. Gladwell blathers at great length about an obscure market researcher called Howard Moskowitz. Who? On his own website, Howie calls himself "a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics". Yet Gladwell describes Moskowitz' market testing of varieties of soup as if he was an unsung genius of the 20th century. All this takes up 15 minutes, but it's so repetitious and predictable, it seems to take about three times as long. (So much for the dazzling oratory Guardian leader writers admire.)

More here


Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Is racism the ultimate evil?

From the way Leftists talk, one would certainly get the impression that racism is the ultimate evil. In the 2008 Presidential campaign, an amazing number of utterances by Obama foes were twisted out of all recognition in an attempt to portray them as racist.

I would argue that things like dishonesty, lack of reality contact and emotionalism are far more detrimental to overall human welfare but, judging by their own most usual method of argument, Leftists are quite comfortable with such phenomena.

Leftists normally justify their paranoia about racism by referring to Hitler. They say that Hitler's treatment of the Jews shows just how evil racism is. But Jews are not a race! It is only your religious heritage that makes you a Jew. Judging by the number of blue-eyed Jews around, Jews are in fact quite mixed racially.

So Hitler's deeds cannot be put down to racism. They could however be seen as an example of religious bigotry and are thus yet another example of how destructive religious bigotry can be. And who are the main religious bigots today? Muslims and Leftists. The furious hatred that Leftists pour out on Christianity is quite virulent religious bigotry. So, as in other ways, it is Leftists, not racists who are Hitler's real heirs.

Even the well-known claim by Hitler that Germans are a Herrenvolk can only be portrayed as racist by mistranslation. It is commonly translated as "master race" but that is not what it means at all. The German word for race is Rasse and if Hitler had meant "Master race", he would have said Herrenrasse. But he didn't. Volk means "people" and is related to the English word "folk". So Hitler was quite clearly referring to a "Master people", not a master race.

And note that in the old Communist East Germany, they used Volk a lot. East German products used all to bear the brand "VEB", which stands for Volkseigenebetrieb, or "people's own enterprise". So were the Communist East Germans racist? Were they portraying their products as coming from the East German race? I think the answer is obvious to anybody but a Leftist intellectual.

Ultimately, the Jews were simply convenient to Hitler -- a group on whom all problems could traditionally be blamed: A scapegoat. His treatment of them was politically useful, not an outcome of racism. He treated many groups harshly, including clearly religious groups. One instance of that was Jehovah's Witnesses, then known in Germany as Ernste Bibelforscher. Because they refused to be conscripted into Germany's armed forces, they too went to the concentration camps.

I have said more about these matters on DISSECTING LEFTISM recently.

Update:

Trying to be accurate has its perils. I gather that some have seen what I said above as a defence of Hitler. Nothing I said above does that. I said that Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat, which is far and away the most common summary of his actions. By noting that his savagery extended to all sorts of groups, I think I have in fact shown that he was worse than a racist. The entire nation of Britain was racist in the 19th century. They thought that to be born British was to be born superior. Yet they did nothing remotely resembling what Hitler did. They in fact made a Jew their Prime Minister.


Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

GEERT WILDERS IN JERUSALEM

Geert Wilders, the brave Dutch politician who's an outspoken critic of Islam, was in Jerusalem just 2 days ago, and gave a whole speech presented at Andrew Bostom's site.