Crash Landing

The Bottom Is In

2008-09-06T16:31:00.002-04:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122072588739407007.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news

Complain all like about government intervention. Keep complaining for the next decade, or whenever the next crisis happens. In the meantime, I think I'm going to make some dough on distressed housing.

"Come, Quickly, They're throwing money away."

Why Is Jennifer Aniston...

2008-09-05T19:54:00.002-04:00

In bathroom there is one of those little metal magazine racks on the floor. Inside it, there is a copy of Good Housekeeping, folded over saw that only half of the cover is visible. Next to a picture of the aforementioned actress I can see the headline fragment, "Why Is Jennifer Aniston..."

I have not yet looked to see what the rest of the headline is, but in my mind, it reads, "...on the Cover of This Magazine, When She Hasn't Done a Lick of Housekeeping in Her Adult Life?"

Silas Goes to His Protection Agency

2008-09-04T19:31:00.004-04:00

I forget, what happens now? Is there a shootout and the side with more readers wins?

I am happy to report that the legal proceedings have moved Silas' Barbie post from the top of his blog, where it had been sitting since August 27.*

* Yes Silas, this last comment was completely unfair and represents humor at your expense. Although it is true, it implies things about your post that are not true. Some would call it shameful what I have done.

Research Papers

2008-09-04T19:14:00.002-04:00

I wondering why I'd want to assign my students (as is standard practice) one or more scholarly type research papers, when none or almost none of them will be going into academia. Sure, it's great to give them writing assignments, and I plan on plenty of those, but why should they be learning how t0o do bibliographical references and proper footnoting, since, once they leave college, they will probably never create a bibliography or a footnote again.

Is there some point to this exercise I'm missing? Any thoughts?

The Silas Problem

2008-09-03T22:06:00.002-04:00

Regular readers know that a certain poster often departs from what many would consider to be the conventions of civility. (I am making no judgments in this post.) Recently Gene succumbed to the pleasures of his power as Administrator and began deleting comments from the person in question. This raises the question of what the final solution should be to our Silas Problem. I offer some possibilities, with commentary, below.

(1) Ban him. The problem here is that he can come back in alternate guises. Once we "out" him, is that new persona immediately banned too? Or does the new and improved Silas have to earn a fresh banning at that point? Also, we then run into problems of consistency. We have to start banning others if they cross "the line," meaning we have to define the line. There is also the efforts of enforcement. I for one don't feel like judging whom to ban, and going to the trouble of deleting posts. If we have a "hey we never ban" policy, then we can't be held liable for the ridiculous and offensive things you may see here. But if we ban one person, then the next time Robert W. puts up anti-Islamic screeds, we are implicitly giving him a nod and wink if we don't ban him too. You see the problem.

(2) Ignore him completely. This is neat because it dovetails with pacifist ostracism strategies. But it too is subject to some of the above problems.

(3) Ignore him when he is being particularly rude and/or incomprehensible. This is my preference.

(4) Have Gene assign Silas' death and dying as a class project. This is surely illegal, an obvious strike against it.

(5) Something we are overlooking?

We invite reader feedback, inasmuch as we need to know how many lurkers are entertained by these shenanigans, versus how many decide to spend their time at other "serious" blogs.

The Futility of a Libertarian Running for High Office

2008-09-03T09:57:00.003-04:00

Lew Rockwell lays it all out for libertarians who are excited about Palin's VP candidacy -- you're just getting duped into involvement in presidential politics:

"When a decent person accepts a job such as vice president, our first instinct is to celebrate that good people are in a position of power and influence. This is what McCain is counting on. But this is an illusion. The influence runs completely the other way. Good people become part of the party machine and surrender all their principles in order to survive. This, sadly, is the future of Sarah Palin, who may have been doing some good in Alaska..."

"There are names I could mention here in our time, former libertarians now holding high political appointments in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. They know who they are. They can pretend superiority, that they are "getting their hands dirty" while the rest of us are merely typing away at our keyboards. But in fact, they have become responsible for great evil..."

I remember when Ron Paul was running for President, and some libertarians foolishly got all enthused, how Lew always would give the same warning, saying, "Don't think putting a good person in the office of President will help -- this is just going to corrupt Ron Paul, and kill off any good he was doing in Congress." How, if he got elected, Paul would only be "responsible for great evil..." and, therefore, libertarians shouldn't support his campaign.

That was what he said about the Paul campaign, wasn't it? "Don't bother getting involved; this is worse than pointless -- it's actually evil." Wasn't it? I can't quite remember now.

Challenging the Climate Change Consensus

2008-09-03T00:56:00.002-04:00

(More alliteration for you.) What we've got here is a failure to communicate. I ran into this back in the day when I was foolish enough to dive into the Intelligent Design debate. I would end up arguing with very smart believers in orthodox neo-Darwinism, and they would keep giving me implications of their theory as if they were evidence for its truth.

The same happens when I (again, foolishly) try to show why the climate change consensus is not as airtight as its strongest advocates assert. For example, the consensus currently says that if you double CO2 concentrations, the long-run equilibrium (i.e. after all feedbacks play out) effect on the global temperature will be about 3C. (They give a range, but 3C is best point guess.) And then this estimate of the earth's "climate sensitivity" is the basis for the projections about the optimal carbon tax, why we need to take immediate action, etc.

Now as you know, there are PhDs in the relevant fields who challenge this consensus view. They say there are serious flaws in the official story. I'm not going to go over their claims here, except this one: If you look at the observational record, so far the historical "transient" (not long-run equilibrium) response to increased CO2 has been much less than the consensus estimates. I.e., just looking at how much CO2 has increased since 1880, and seeing that global temperatures have gone up only 0.7C so far, you get a very low observed sensitivity.

Now there are two main "consensus" responses to this point. First, there are other things going on besides more CO2 (and other GHGs) being pumped into the atmosphere. E.g. industrial emissions also put aerosols up there, which may have had a cooling effect and so masked what would have been greater warming in the 1970s. Second, the 3C best guess is a long-run, equilibrium concept; 120 years is not enough for all the feedbacks to work through the system.

OK everyone got that? The cutting edge models are consistent with the observed trends, but the skeptics' point is that thus far, we haven't actually seen the alarming degree of warming in response to CO2 emissions. So they're saying it lends credibility to their point of view, that these models are bunk, and that people who keep claiming that the models have been "verified" are probably misleading the public with those claims.

Now let's focus in on "PI"'s response to this challenge, in the comments of a MarginalRevolution thread (and if you read our exchange, you'll see he is very sharp, so I'm not picking on a blowhard here):

BOB: "empirical observations THUS FAR have not demonstrated this high sensitivity"

PI: Again, that's misleading. You can't note that the transient response is smaller than the equilibrium response and claim this is evidence against high sensitivity; the transient response is ALWAYS smaller, no matter what the sensitivity. You can equally well say that empirical observations THUS FAR have not demonstrated or even favored low sensitivity. Indeed, from the shape of the estimated climate sensitivity probability distributions, it's been easier to observationally disfavor low sensitivities than high ones.

The fact is that the two are difficult to distinguish from each other at this point, given the limited length of observations, the until-recently small accumulations of excess CO2, the uncertain response time of the system, and the uncertain forcings. We EXPECT low and high sensitivities to give similar responses in these circumstances. The observations so far exclude sensitivities lower than 2 C with high probability, and sensitivities greater than 5 C with somewhat less high probability, but beyond that it's really difficult to say more.

Everyone catch that? The observed 0.7C warming over the last 125 years rules out the 2C estimates more than the 5C estimates of climate sensitivity. (To be clear, the observed forcings have been less than what a doubling of CO2 would have produced; I'm not saying the consensus "ought to have" yielded an observed warming of 3C.)

To put it in other words, I am pointing to the low observed warming as evidence that the models are fundamentally misguided, and PI's response is that no, according to the models, the models are just fine. Yes, that's true, in the model, the model is correct. But we didn't need to look at the data to make that point.

Gene, I am sure my good friends are going to have at me with this topic of climate change, so if you feel inclined please post other examples of this mistake in the comments. I.e., cases where very knowledgeable experts in a field can't step outside their orthodoxy in order to deal with critics who are asking for evidence that their worldview is correct. Basically, scientists who do the same thing as a fundamentalist citing gospel passages when asked to prove the authority of scripture.

Paul Ghostwriting Controversy, Current

2008-09-03T00:27:00.002-04:00

OK cr*p, let's get this out in the open... Here is a WP story that does its best to cast Ron Paul and my personal friend Tom Woods as liars. My quick reactions:

(1) I have no problem with ghostwriting. I have ghostwritten things for people and I don't think it is dishonest, generally speaking. I'm sure you could come up with scenarios (like writing somebody's term paper), but especially if you are drawing on a public person's previously promulgated policies (holy alliteration!!), and then let the person read over what you've done before it goes out the door, I think you're going to have a hard time drawing any meaningful line in the sand. Nobody objects to politicians using speechwriters, right? The only thing I could see being a problem, is if the listeners / readers didn't realize the process and would be disheartened to learn the truth. Then, the ghostwriter might be running into moral issues. But from Tom's description, that doesn't seem to be what happened here.

(2) I do think it's counterproductive for Ron Paul to say that they aren't protesting the RNC. I think they should either have said that's what they're doing, or scheduled it for a different week. On the other hand, maybe they did it this way to gain access to all the bored reporters who might migrate away from the hurricane fund raisers down the street. (I.e. maybe they really did want to make it a different week to not look like jerks--just like Paul didn't run on the LP ticket--but they decided they couldn't pass up the huge press access by hosting it nearby.)

(3) Is Woods implying that he worked on Hillary Clinton's book? If so, then I have problems. Not with her, but with him.

Lew Rockwell Says Bush Succeeded in Energy Policy

2008-09-02T20:55:00.002-04:00

Really, just watch. (And yes, let's open the floodgates to comments about newsletters, race-baiting, blah blah blah. That's definitely what you should focus on now.)

Dorothy Sayers

2008-09-02T16:54:00.003-04:00

I've been reading the novels of Dorothy Sayers for the third time the last week. If you enjoy mystery novels at all, and don't know Sayers, you must check her out. Not only could she write mysteries, she was a brilliant thinker -- one of the first women to earn a degree from Oxford University, the originator of the Guinness ad campaign with the toucan, conversant in the latest intellectual advances, and a renowned translator of Dante -- and this powerful intellect is apparent in her works.

Part of the fascination of her work is the way in which she captures England on the cusp -- the pre-war England of Victoria was fading away, and the new England rising, but, in the 20s, both were visible, and Sayers brilliantly plays on the tension between the two. In ways, the 1920s were like a dress rehearsal for the 1960s, and Sayers also captures this spirit of social novelty: giant cocaine parties, unmarried couples living together, political radicalism, and so on.

Pick up a Sayers novel today! (Busman's Honeymoon may be one of the best.)

UPDATE: Here's Sayers on "The Lost Tools of Learning".

New Band of the Day

2008-09-02T01:23:00.001-04:00

My friend Julian Velard in The Guardian.

How many people have been cryogenically frozen?

2008-09-01T23:53:00.003-04:00

Only about 90, according to this ESPN (!) story. (BTW, the article makes it sound as if the proper term is "cryonically frozen," but that sounds weirder than Walt Disney.) Wikipedia lists 8 of the people.

For What It's Worth

2008-09-01T23:04:00.001-04:00

Bob asked to see my CV some time ago -- here you are!

Another Reason Democracy Is Bad

2008-09-01T21:38:00.002-04:00

It reveals just how awful we all are. Under a monarchy, for example, would Andrew Sullivan have had any reason to demand that a woman make her medical records public, so that he can "breathe a sigh of relief and move on"?

Gene, are cuss words allowed on Crash Landing?

The Philosopher and the Partisan

2008-09-01T20:41:00.005-04:00

In the Phaedo, Socrates makes a distinction between his approach to argument as a philosopher and that of the partisan:

"For the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions."

I ran across a nice illustration of this in The NY Post today, where I found one Kirsten Powers writing the following bit of piffle:

"What of the claim that McCain's pick [of Palin for VP] undermines his assertion that experience is what matters in a president?"

Her entirely partisan response:

"Hmm: Palin isn't running for president; she's running for vice president."

Sure. And what's the whole point of the position of vice president? Why, to be able to step in for the President should need arise, of course! So the exact same criteria for fitness apply to either office.

"Last time I checked, John McCain isn't dying."

Yes, and there are millions of other people who "aren't dying" right this minute but will die in the next four years. John McCain may turn out to be one of them.

"And if experience is your worry, there's plenty to worry about on the opposing ticket if, God forbid, something happens to Joe Biden."

Now she's chased her tail in a full circle. The argument "It's not good to have inexperienced people in high office" is now being offered as a refutation of itself!

Folks, thought and honesty have nothing to do with this "argument". This woman cares not a whit that there isn't an ounce of sense in what she's written -- that was never the point. The point was to feed McCain supporters some snappy comebacks they could use which, if one gave them very, very superficial attention, might seem to defuse the charge that McCain has undermined one of his own attacks on Obama.

Gov't Prohibits Private "Regulation"

2008-08-31T10:53:00.004-04:00

Hey it's a new week so I am allowed to link to Free Advice! In the "Legalize Murder!" thread, John Goes pooh-poohed my private alternatives to government handling of violent criminals (and what a fine job they've been doing on that front). John argued that my proposed private mechanisms could exist today, and so their absence shows that they really aren't a workable solution to the problem of violent people.

I confess I don't know all the specifics, but I think there are government measures that prohibit competing, private sector agencies that perform traditional government services. I discuss a beautiful illustration over at Free Advice today. A meat packer wanted to test all of its beef for mad cow disease, and the government said it can't. An excerpt from the WSJ article on the story:

A federal appeals court said the government can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad-cow disease.

Because the Agriculture Department tests only a small percentage of cows for the rare but deadly disease, Kansas meatpacker Creekstone Farms Premium Beef of Arkansas City, Kan., wants to test all of its cows. The government says it can't.

Larger meat companies worry that if Creekstone is allowed to perform the test and advertise its meat as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too.

What more evidence do you people need? Every single thing the government touches, it makes worse. We all* know that if the government expanded into areas that it currently leaves alone, that those areas would be worse, even from the point of view of the alleged reason for the intervention. So the same holds in reverse: If you started hacking away at the government's interventions, things would get better.

* Except for two obvious libertarian counterexamples, who think the politicians will side with Bengalis against huge corporations.

Pre-emptive Strike Against Protesters in Minneapolis

2008-08-30T23:21:00.003-04:00

Ah, the heavily armed SWAT teams just keep pushing the boundaries back little by little. Apparently they are raiding houses--and doing standard procedure of coming in with semi-automatic weapons, cuffing everyone and putting them on the floor for a half an hour at a time, you know--where people are planning to protest the upcoming Republican convention. The people who were raided claim that they weren't planning anything illegal, and were just going to exercise their rights in this free country.

But that's what you expect lawbreakers to say.

Glenn Greenwald was actually there, interviewing people after the fact, but the videos are kinda boring. You should read his (short) article though to see exactly what I am talking about.

We're getting there, folks. They started doing SWAT raids like this on citizens' houses because of the possibility of armed drug dealers, and nobody cared. "Hey, I don't deal crack out of my living room. They won't knock down my door!" Sure, they burned a bunch of religious nutjobs to death. "But I don't go to church in a polygamist compound, so it's all good." And now they are raiding people's homes because they are planning to protest a political convention. "Eh, I'm not a pot-smoking antiwar activist. Doesn't chafe me."

We're getting there, folks.

Query: How Did Luther Resolve This Bit?

2008-08-30T03:43:00.002-04:00

Since various Protestants have been known to frequent this blog, maybe they can clear something up for me: Luther famously held Scripture to be the sole guidance to the true Christian ("sola scriptura"), always trumping the supposed authority of the Church. But, of course, just what Scripture consisted of had been decided by... the authority of the Church! (There were many candidates vying for inclusion in the status of being scriptural books, and hot debates about which ones would be so stamped with approval.)

So, once Luther rejects the authority of the Church, how can he insist on just those four gospels being scriptural? What if a Protestant wants to follow, say, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of James, the Gospel of Judas, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the alternative Gospel of Luke, the Diatessaron, or the Gospel of Peter? They all had their adherents back in the day, but were declared infra dig by the authority of the Church. So on what basis can Luther criticize a Protestant who finds one of them "more his style"?

The Pre-Christ

2008-08-30T03:16:00.003-04:00

My classes first assignment was Phaedo by Plato, and I must say... well, I had heard/read many times that Christianity was the child of the marriage of Jerusalem and Athens, but I was stunned by how much "pre-Christianity" was in this dialogue: monotheism, the immortality of the soul, turn the other cheek, a disdain for "the world" and devotion to spiritual purification... even the phrase "through a glass darkly"! Of course, you also get a doctrine -- indeed, what Socrates holds to be a proof -- of re-incarnation, which we don't get in Christianity, but, as I understand, that was actually a disputed point early on, and apparently we easily could have had a Christianity that embraced the idea.

UPDATE: By "easily could have" I mean, of course, from an historian's point of view. If you believe the Church Father's were divinely guided and re-incarnation a false doctrine, then, of course, the rejection of it was inevitable.

Is the Falling Dollar Good for Economic Growth?

2008-08-29T11:24:00.002-04:00

I tackle this and other questions in this Free Advice post.*

* I promise to limit the cross-blog contamination to about one post per week. But in truth I better understood the flaws in the typical press coverage about recessions after typing out the post linked above.

Everyone Needs a Hobby

2008-08-27T22:53:00.002-04:00

And mine of late has been salting slugs. These little, slimy %$@^%#$%$^%@ have just been destroying a dozen or so plants in my garden, so I've taken to going out at night with a flashlight and salt shaker, and gleefully watching them dissolve. I'm reminded of reading about the British philosopher F.H. Bradley, of whom, the piece in question said, while he never taught at Oxford, he did like to go about the campus at night and shoot cats.

Death and Dying

2008-08-27T22:37:00.003-04:00

I've started teaching my course on death and dying, and assembling some Internet resources for use in the class.

Any suggestions for more good material?

Panda Bob vs. Komodo Dragon

2008-08-26T23:14:00.004-04:00

Many of you have wondered what sort of posts I would reserve for Crash Landing, now that I have a "serious" blog. Well start your engines...

This article on Komodo dragons in the WSJ really got me mad. First, I was incensed at the arrogant Western environmentalists who screwed up this island's ecosystem and frankly don't give a dang. This is presumably the angle that the WSJ editors were foisting on us, and it worked (on me at least).

But I also got mad at these villagers, and especially this father:

A year ago, a 9-year-old named Mansur was one such victim. The boy went to answer the call of nature behind a bush near his home in Kampung Komodo. In broad daylight, as terrified relatives looked on, a dragon lunged from his hideout, took a bite of the boy's stomach and chest, and started crushing his skull.

"We threw branches and stones to drive him away, but the dragon was crazed with blood, and just wouldn't let go," says the boy's father, Jamain, who, like many Indonesians, goes by only one name.

Are you freaking kidding me?! Your 9-year-old son gets bitten by a huge lizard--and then it starts smacking his head against rocks, as the article described earlier--and your response is to throw branches and stones at it?!?!

These things typically weigh about 150 pounds. As far as I know, their claws aren't as scary as those of, say, a tiger (but I could be wrong about that). I realize I shoot my mouth off a lot where it's safe on the Internet, but there is no doubt in my mind that I would at least grab that monster's head so it couldn't smack my kid's head against the rocks.

If a guy can rescue his nephew from a shark, a father should be able to save his son from a Komodo dragon.* He should at least try something besides throwing sticks and rocks at it.

*In fairness, these people might have ascribed religious significance to the animal, and that may have influenced their response.

Gov't Screwup Again Cited as Proof of Need for Gov't

2008-08-25T00:52:00.002-04:00

In an intentionally provocative post, I called for the legalization of homicide, meaning that the government should stop using its armed agents (paid for with stolen tax dollars) to harass people it classifies as "murderers." (Read the post if you want to see my reasons.)

In the comments, someone calling himself "oj" said:

Son,

This is an excellent proposal!

I assume it will apply retroactively?

That's funny--it made me chuckle--but does everyone see that it proves my point? This is so typical when a libertarian calls for something to be privatized. People point to outrageous things that happen under State monopoly, as evidence of why the State needs the monopoly.

For example, Paulina Borsook ridiculed the idea of abolishing food safety inspectors, and her argument was that people in fast food restaurants had gotten sick the month before she wrote her op ed. See? The government needs to protect us from bad food, because people got sick under the government's protection.

Of course, just because bad outcomes occur in a certain system, doesn't prove the system is bad: People will get sick, and some murderers will fail to be caught, in any human organization. My point in this blog post is to stress that the failures of a system shouldn't be taken as evidence in its favor. Obvious point, but one that people violate all the time.

One last example: Whenever a plane crashes, or whenever journalists uncover rampant safety violations by airlines, the public flips out over the "unregulated" private sector and calls for a bigger FAA budget. Huh?! Suppose for the sake of argument that the government shouldn't be regulating air travel; now what would that world look like? Wouldn't there be plane crashes, lax inspections, etc.?

Crooked Dilians

2008-08-24T17:31:00.001-04:00

Which species is a closer relative of an alligator: a turtle, a snake, a lizard, or a hummingbird? answer may surprise you.