SchansBlog

Mattel is very good at playing this (political) game

2009-12-08T19:32:00.001-05:00

In August, Mattel won an exception to new testing requirements that Congress imposed in 2008 after several toy recalls. (See “Dangerous Toys, Strange Bedfellows,” June.) Six of the recalls that sparked the push for more regulation involved Chinese toys made by Mattel or its subsidiary Fisher Price.

Small toymakers were blindsided by expensive third-party testing and labeling requirements in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. The law treats domestic companies producing small batches of toys, clothes, or jewelry for kids using low-risk materials such as wood and cotton as though they were indistinguishable from massive plastic importers like Mattel. Testing can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per toy model, and many small producers fear enforcement of the law would put them out of business....The agency also allowed a one-year grace period before it started enforcing the testing rules.

While most small toymakers had no idea the law was coming down the pike until it was too late, Mattel spent $1 million lobbying for a provision permitting companies to test their toys in their own government-approved, “firewalled” labs. As luck would have it, Mattel already operates several of its own toy testing labs...

So a law aimed at checking Mattel’s risky behavior left all the other players in the toy market worse off. Meanwhile, Mattel now enjoys a cost advantage on testing and a new government-sponsored barrier to competition.

JCPS Teachers File Class-Action Lawsuit against Union’s Mandatory Membership and Forced Dues Policies

2009-12-08T19:27:00.002-05:00

I heard this story on Francene's radio show on WHAS-- through her interview with Stefan Gleason of the National Right to Work Foundation...

Here are some excerpts from their press release. I wish them well!

With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, several Jefferson County educators have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against local and national teacher unions for a series of schemes designed to force unwilling educators into full-dues paying union membership....

The teachers’ lawsuit, filed against the Jefferson County Teachers Association (JCTA) union and its national affiliate, the National Education Association (NEA), in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, seeks the return of illegally seized dues, a modification of the union’s contract to allow employees to resign from union membership at any time, and a regular notice from the union that informs public school employees of their right to refrain from membership....

Currently, teachers employed in Jefferson County are automatically enrolled as union members and forced to pay union dues unless they explicitly register an objection to JCTA union officials. Moreover, teachers are only permitted to resign from formal union membership during a ten day-window period after an individual teacher’s contract is signed or after the union hierarchy agrees to a new contract with the local school board. If a teacher fails to register an objection to union membership within either period, he or she is forced to remain a union member until the expiration of the union’s five-year contract with the local school board. Many teachers report that JCTA officials never informed them of their right to refrain from joining the union in the first place.

Foundation attorneys believe that any collective bargaining agreement that forces educators to pay union dues to keep their jobs is illegal under state law. Moreover, the Foundation-won Supreme Court precedent Abood v. Detroit Board of Education ensures that teachers and other public employees have the right to resign from union membership....

since we're dealing with high school education, these kids shuold be forced to attend the school assigned to them by JCPS

2009-12-08T19:23:00.002-05:00

If it's the preferred system while they're in high school, why not while they're making up for the deficiencies in their high school education?

From Nancy Rodriguez in the C-J...

Kentucky's higher education institutions are bracing for a spike in students needing remedial reading and math next year — a result of a tougher admissions regulation intended to ensure students have the skills needed to do college work.

All public colleges and universities will be affected, but the state's community colleges might feel the biggest impact, with officials there estimating between 17,400 and 20,000 new students will need to take remedial courses before being allowed to enroll in courses carrying credit toward a degree.

That's a 30 percent to 50 percent increase over the 13,300 first-time students who took remedial education classes this fall in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System.

Dealing with that increased demand comes with a sizable cost.

Jay Box, chancellor of KCTCS, estimates the system will need 50 new faculty members, costing $3 million to $4 million in salaries and benefits — and he is hoping the state will help with those costs....

For students, it will mean having to pay tuition for classes that won't count toward a degree....

Officials at the state's two research institutions — the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky — say they likely will not see a large increase in students needing developmental education, in part because they have selective admissions....

will moonbats apologize to wingnuts?

2009-12-08T19:10:00.002-05:00

Moonbats and wingnuts. Ahh, what creative terms.

I've already blogged on this topic-- in response to some combative moonbat claims by local bloggers. (It's easier to cuss and name-call than to apologize.) But here, we have Ken Blackwell at TownHall.com, calling out Time for the same thing.

“Government Distrust and a Dead Census Taker.” That was the headline of a September 25th story in TIME about the death of 51-year old Bill Sparkman. Sparkman’s naked body had been found in a remote area of Harlan County, Kentucky, with the word “FED” scrawled on his chest. Sparkman had been hanged. Immediately, TIME and others began to speculate. Had Sparkman been hanged by anti-government, anti-Obama violent right wingers? TIME led the speculation, taking the opportunity to drag in Glenn Beck...

Well, now it turns out that Kentucky investigators have concluded that poor Sparkman committed suicide, faking his own death in order to let unnamed beneficiaries collect on a recently-contracted life insurance policy. How very sad for Sparkman and those whom he loved. And how sad for our country when a leading news organ like TIME races to conclude that anti-tax protesters likely had a hand in the unfortunate man’s death....

Will TIME now apologize...

C-J wakes up to Obama's lack of transparency and still doesn't understand the term "conservative"

2009-12-08T19:07:00.002-05:00

From the C-J editorialists through their "Forum Flashes"...

First, they bought into Obama's claims of transparency without rigorously weighing their merits-- until now.

Second, in an otherwise good little editorial, they somehow think Huckabee is a "conservative". Uhh, no...

Wasted privilege

Part of the fallout from the State Dinner Crashing Incident is the hit the Obama administration has taken on its much-advertised promises of openness and transparency.

Those promises don't square with the administration's exercise of executive privilege in turning down Congress on its invitation for White House social secretary Desiree Rogers to answer questions in its examination of the security breach that led to the interloping Salahis' uninvited, unvetted schmoozing with the President last week....

Huckabee's Willie Horton moment

Some conservative commentators and bloggers are shocked — shocked — to learn that Maurice Clemmons, who is accused of shooting four policemen to death last month in Lakewood, Wash., had earlier been freed from prison as a result of a commutation of an 108-year robbery sentence by then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in 2000....

"For the Democrats, a generation in the balance"

2009-12-08T18:58:00.003-05:00

That's the title of an impressive and provocative piece by the NYT's Ross Douthat in the C-J...

Do downturns create Democrats? The Great Depression certainly did: The generation that came of age in the 1930s has cleaved to the Democratic Party like no population before or since. And it makes intuitive sense that experiencing a recession at a formative age could inspire lifelong sympathy for the party of the welfare state and lifelong suspicion toward the party of free markets.

In a recent paper, “Growing Up In a Recession,” Paola Giuliano, an assistant professor of economics at UCLA, and Antonio Spilimbergo, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, offer statistics to back this intuition up. Looking at over 40 years of survey data, the authors report that Americans who experienced “macroeconomic shocks” between the ages of 18 and 25 were more worried about poverty and inequality across their voting lives, and more skeptical about the wisdom of the market.

These findings track with the results of the 2008 election, when a cratering economy helped Barack Obama win an extraordinary landslide among young and first-time voters. And they provide grist for the liberal hope that the rising generation will prove as enduringly Democratic as that of their Depression-era grandparents, with George W. Bush playing Herbert Hoover to Obama's FDR.

But the study shouldn't make liberals too cocky. The authors find that growing up in a recession can encourage conservative instincts as well. Downturns make young voters distrustful of unfettered capitalism, yes. But they also make them less confident in the federal government....

Here, Douthat alludes to a big difference between now and the much larger Great Depression. The level of government involvement is much higher today. In both cases, government involvement extended the problems. But many people still believe that the government involvement of the Great Depression was a good thing. Will they believe the same fantasy about the government's efforts in the economy under Bush and now Obama for the last two years?

Running with that thought, Douthat argues that:

This finding may explain why recent recessions have actually ended up pushing America rightward. The stagflation of the 1970s, for instance, and the hapless liberal response, helped usher in Ronald Reagan's revolution. (The cohort that grew up with Reagan is the most staunchly Republican in modern history.) The slump of the early 1990s bolstered Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign — but it also gave a boost to the fiscally conservative populism of Ross Perot, and then to the Republican wave of 1994.

Recessions, it seems, only benefit liberals when an activist government is perceived to have answers to the crisis. When liberal interventions seem to be effective, a downturn can help midwife an enduring Democratic majority. But if they don't seem to be working — or worse, if they seem to be working for insiders and favored constituencies, rather than for the common man — then suspicion of state power can trump disillusionment with free markets.

Among voters at large, that's what seems to be happening at the moment. Nothing the government has done across the last 12 (sic) months has inspired much public confidence....

So voters are turning rightward instead. In New Jersey, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that 61 percent of voters favored laying off state workers to reduce the current budget shortfall; only 23 percent favored raising taxes instead. Nationally, the percentage of Americans who say that government is doing “too much” hit a 10-year peak this fall. In 2007, 69 percent of the public said that government should guarantee universal health care; now that number is down to 47 percent.

The silver lining for liberals, though, is that this rightward turn hasn't touched younger voters yet. With 18- to 29-year-olds, Democratic identification remains high, and Obama's approval ratings are still up over 60 percent.

This suggests that a Depression-style realignment, in which today's youthful “Obama Democrats” are still voting for hope and change (and grumbling about George W. Bush) in 2050 and beyond, remains within the Democratic Party's grasp.

But even the young will need to see results eventually. And the more that Democrats flail in the present, the more likely it becomes that the Great Recession will be remembered as the time when liberalism let the future slip away.

how to pay for Obama's war? Hoosier senators balk...

2009-12-08T18:54:00.005-05:00

A war tax is generally more admirable than debt, especially for wars that are not clearly in the national interest. In terms of the economics, neither taxes nor debt look attractive right now; the former would slow any recovery and the latter moves us closer to a debt cliff.

From the AP's Maureen Groppe in the C-J...

Indiana's senators have expressed concern about the nation's growing debt and how to pay for military operations in Afghanistan. But neither Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican, nor Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democrat, supports a proposed surtax to pay for the war....

Rep. David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House committee that writes the annual spending bills, introduced a bill last month that would impose a surtax on people earning more than $30,000 and would tax the wealthy more heavily. Obey has said he doesn't expect the bill to pass but wants to draw attention to the war's cost and how it's being financed....

the impact of ObamaCare on health care innovation

2009-12-08T18:47:00.001-05:00

One of many fruits of increased government involvement in health insurance and health care-- from Reason.TV...

No American Should Have to Choose Between Health Insurance and Getting Drunk

2009-12-08T18:45:00.002-05:00

A small but important point to make in understanding the status quo in health insurance-- from Reason.TV...

More broadly, millions of people make quite reasonable choices that still don't involve purchasing health insurance made dramatically and artificially more expensive by an array of government policies.

What if Government Ran Health Care? (Sprint Ad Remix)

2009-12-08T18:43:00.000-05:00

From Reason.TV...

those CBO numbers and the cost of health care/insurance after "reform"

2009-12-08T18:40:00.003-05:00

From the editorialists of the WSJ...

We have now reached the stage of the health-care debate when all that matters is getting a bill passed, so all news is good news, more subsidies mean lower deficits, and more expensive insurance is really cheaper insurance. The nonpolitical mind reels.

Consider how Washington received the Congressional Budget Office's study Monday of how Harry Reid's Senate bill will affect insurance costs, which by any rational measure ought to have been a disaster for the bill. CBO found that premiums in the individual market will rise by 10% to 13% more than if Congress did nothing. Family policies under the status quo are projected to cost $13,100 on average, but under ObamaCare will jump to $15,200...

Finance Chairman Max Baucus chimed in from the Senate floor that "Health-care reform is fundamentally about lowering health-care costs. Lowering costs is what health-care reform is designed to do, lowering costs; and it will achieve this objective."

Except it won't. CBO says it expects employer-sponsored insurance costs to remain roughly in line with the status quo, yet even this is a failure by Mr. Baucus's and the White House's own standards....

Instead, CBO is confirming that new coverage mandates will drive premiums higher. But Democrats are declaring victory, claiming that these higher insurance prices don't count because they will be offset by new government subsidies....

So the bill will increase costs but it will then disguise those costs by transferring them to taxpayers from individuals. Higher costs can be conjured away because they're suddenly on the government balance sheet....

This is the paleoliberal school of brute-force wealth redistribution, and a very long way from the repeated White House claims that reform is all about "bending the cost curve." The only thing being bent here is the budget truth.

Moreover, CBO is almost certainly underestimating the cost increases....

But Democrats don't care because their bill isn't really about "lowering costs." It's about putting Washington in charge of health insurance, at any cost.

or is it O = B1?

2009-12-08T18:34:00.002-05:00

Lind claims that it's O = W or O = B2.

In the WSJ, Jerry Seib argues that it's O = B1.

Neither is particularly flattering! (Seib only discusses foreign policy here, but comparisons to fiscal policy and regulation would be apt as well.)

President Barack Obama and his aides talk a lot about how his approach to the world is different from George W. Bush's. What they say less often is that his approach has a fair amount in common with that of another Bush...the less idealistic, more pragmatic approach of the first President Bush...

For the elder President Bush, the hallmarks of foreign policy were a preference for pragmatism and stability over idealism and risk; an emphasis on multilateralism over unilateralism; and a willingness to work with leaders the world provides rather than the ones America might prefer.

Many of those hallmarks can be seen in President Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan....

It's striking that while Mr. Obama is often criticized for an overemphasis on soaring rhetoric and an excess of ambition in his domestic agenda, his Afghanistan announcement was marked by the opposite -- also mirroring foreign-policy pronouncements by the elder President Bush.

In sum, the younger President Bush, particularly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, aimed to use U.S. power to change the world, and was reluctant to compromise in pursuit of that goal. His father sought more to use American power to stabilize the world, and was prepared to compromise to achieve that end. Both approaches came in for criticism. The younger Bush's approach was faulted for being too idealistic and bombastic, the older Bush's for being insufficiently idealistic and overly cautious.

In any case, President Obama is leaning more toward the elder Bush's category....

President Obama hasn't adopted the elder Bush's approach in its entirety, of course. When the first Bush administration decided to go to war against Iraqi forces in Kuwait, it did so with overwhelming force, which is hardly the approach the current president has chosen in Afghanistan.

And to some extent, the current economic weakness of America may simply demand a less ambitious approach than George W. Bush attempted....The elder Bush's approach may have been a matter of prudence, while Mr. Obama's may be rooted more in necessity.

O = W

2009-12-08T18:27:00.003-05:00

I hadn't seen this new bumper sticker, which serves as the catalyst for William Linds' article at LewRockwell.com...

But it's truer than one would have expected-- on fiscal and foreign policy-- and truer than one would infer from listening to some of the rhetoric from those in both major political parties.

"O=W" is a bumper sticker beginning to show up on liberals’ cars. After the President’s speech Tuesday night at West Point, I suspect it will spread rapidly.

For eight years, conservatives endured the agony of watching President George W. Bush attach the label "conservative" to a host of policies that were anti-conservative: Wilsonian wars, American empire, vast budget and trade deficits, increased entitlements, and the subordination of America’s interests to those of foreign powers. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and liberals are bidden to hold their tongues as President Obama makes Bush’s wars his own. The usual Washington sell-out is in gear.

It should not come as a surprise. America is now a one-party state. The one party is the Establishment party, which is also the war party. Unless you are willing to cheer permanent war for permanent peace, you cannot be a member of the Establishment....

If you're interested, Lind continues by talking about the (potential) strategy behind Obama's decision.

the cost of the Left being distracted by "Global Warming"

2009-12-08T18:19:00.003-05:00

From Econ 101, we talk about "opportunity costs"-- the value of the next-best alternative, the one ignored by devoting resources to the perceived best alternative instead.

On the Left, the focus on Global Warming has come at the expense of some of its other favorite issues-- most notably, poverty and war. (That said, the Left is not much good on poverty and helping the working poor and middle class, so perhaps that's a net gain.)

Here's Lew Rockwell, elaborating on that point...

It might take a while to sink in, but the global warming cause is on the skids. Two issues are taking the whole project down: it is getting cooler not warmer and the email scandal of a few weeks back proved that this really is an opinion cartel with preset views not driven by science....It is no longer a slam-dunk case that we are going to have world central planning in order to control the climate and protect the holy earth from the effects of industrialization. Oh, and tax us good and hard in the process.

But you know what is most tragic to me about this? This whole hysteria led to a fantastic diversion of energy on the left side of the political spectrum. Instead of working against war and the police state, issues on which the left tends to be pretty good, instincts were diverted to the preposterous cause of creating a statist system for global thermometer management....

And methodologically, the whole thing was always nuts. If we can't determine cause and effect now with certainty, how in the heck will we be able to determine it after the world state controls our carbon emissions, and impoverishes us in the process? No one will ever be in a position to say whether the policy worked or failed. That is not a good basis for enacting legislation.

Meanwhile, the left threw everything it had into this hysteria....

The scary George Bush [supposedly] started war after war and kept them going to bolster his own power and prestige, creating as many enemies as possible through provocations and making up enemies if he had to....And what followed Bush? A president who repudiated this ghastly legacy? No, Obama is a supporter of the same wars and continues them, even ramps them up. Does the left consider him a bad guy? Not really. With a handful of exceptions, his critics on the left are friendly critics. They are glad to put up with this because he is willing to do their bidding on the climate change front...

the real and perceived dependence of science on government

2009-12-08T18:13:00.003-05:00

The perspective of an academic economist from the Austrian School of Thought: William Anderson at LewRockwell.com on ClimateGate...

...what happens when the political process completely hijacks science.

As an Austrian economist, I don’t worship at the feet of the “scientific community,” in large part because the “scientific community” is able to engage in trickery but defend its actions in the name of “preserving science.”

Modern science is all about receiving grants, and the biggest checkbooks are those wielded by governments, and governments expect certain results. For example, the government two decades ago funded research into the alleged “acid rain” problems and the researchers reached very different conclusions than what the U.S. Government, and especially Congress and the George H.W. Bush administration (and his William Reilly-led EPA) had wanted to see....

Anyone who was familiar with the history of climate is familiar with the Medieval Warm Period of 1,000 years ago, as well as the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling that lasted from the mid-1500s to the late 1800s....[recent "global warming"] could not have been caused by human activity.

Obviously, this was of huge concern to those who claim that people are causing the changes in temperature, so the “scientists” simply made the Medieval Warm Period disappear by tricking the data. In 1999, three scientists, including Mann, published a paper which showed average global temperatures to be relatively steady for thousands of years, but suddenly shooting up in the last few decades, a “hockey stick” approach....

Austrian economists are quite familiar with the drill here. First, the advocates of a position, be it mainstream economics or human-caused climate change, make sure that no dissenting papers can be published. Second, after having successfully shut out the opposition, they claim that the theories of the Austrians or dissenters “fail the market test” because their views don’t appear in the mainstream literature. The logic is circular, but it sure appeals to the True Believers...

This is the same New York Times that gleefully published illegal leaks from federal prosecutors in the Michael Milken and Martha Stewart cases, which meant that the newspaper was aiding and abetting the commission of real felonies....

ClimateGate, "peer review", and the Chicago machine politics of international science

2009-12-08T08:25:00.004-05:00

Mark Steyn at National Review Online (hat tip: Randy Baker)...

I almost blogged on this earlier, but giving it another read, I decided to excerpt a few clever/amusing and insightful nuggets.

...Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you!

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it’s that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the “peer-review” process.

...When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style....

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask “Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?”...The “consensus” warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as “peer-reviewed” if it’s published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc...

global warming as religion

2009-12-07T15:44:00.004-05:00

Good news, bad news from Chuck Colson at Breakpoint...

The good news: identifying positions of faith-- for example, in Evolution (as a comprehensive explanation for the development of life) and Global Warming-- as positions of faith, and thus, a sort of religion. (Doug Giles labels this "Climavangelism".)

The bad news: monkeying with free association in labor markets and reducing "employment at will" to protect those who hold various religious views .

You don’t think that man-made global warming has become a religion? Well, a British judge certainly does...

That is essentially what has happened in Britain. In July 2008, Tim Nicholson was let go from his job at a property management firm. According to Nicholson, his dismissal was due to his beliefs about man-made global warming...

When he was dismissed, Nicholson sued under Britain’s Employment Equality act, specifically the part that prohibits discrimination on account of “religion and belief.”

According to Nicholson, “Belief in man-made climate change is...a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values.”

For its part, his former employer countered that “green views were political and based on science, as opposed to religious or philosophical in nature.”

In what’s being called a “landmark ruling,” a British judge ruled for Nicholson, saying that “a belief in man-made climate change...is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose” of laws covering discrimination in employment.

...a [U.S.] Supreme Court case defining religion decades ago as “a sincere and meaningful belief which occupies, in the life of its possessor, a place parallel to that filled by God.”

Colson seems bothered by this, but (at least) other evangelical political observers have taken great joy in the finding the "secular humanism" is a religion.

And remember that, last year, Al Gore argued that you could have civil disobedience morally justified in order to stop the construction of a coal-fired electric generating plant.

global warmers bait & switch

2009-12-07T15:38:00.003-05:00

Excerpts from a lot of scientific detail provided by MIT Meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen in the WSJ...

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide....

In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.

That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%....

...even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm....

What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate....

ClimateGate: the credibility of science as Science

2009-12-07T15:31:00.005-05:00

A great, poignant, and ironic piece by Daniel Heninger in the WSJ...

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event....As the hard sciences came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

...the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo....

Nick Gillespie makes a similar point in Reason (hat tip: Mike Kole)...

ClimateGate: follow the money

2009-12-07T15:26:00.002-05:00

From Bret Stephens in the WSJ...

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts...you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere....

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s. Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly...

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely....

the politics of science and the science of politics

2009-12-07T15:22:00.004-05:00

Oh, if we could only get Science and Politics instead...

Here's Congress getting into "the game"-- but that's what you'd expect from an explicitly political body...

From Jillian Bandes at TownHall.com...

The Democratically-controlled Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing yesterday to examine the science behind global warming. Two climate experts from the Obama administration testified, but when Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic at the hearing, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) refused to allow it....the two witnesses who were called, Dr. John Holdren, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, an administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were not put under oath at the hearing.

Markey said that the reason they were not put under oath was because it would be “grandstanding.” But Markey insisted that coal executive be put under oath during hearings last month....

ClimateGate extravaganza

2009-12-07T14:11:00.007-05:00

Wow...a lot of good stuff from TownHall.com the last few days on this amazing story.

As someone who has thought and written about politics as a means to various ends, I find it fascinating to consider the use of illegal means to air out unethical and illegal behavior.

Here are some of the TownHall nuggets that got my attention:

From Jonah Goldberg at TownHall.com...

By now you might have heard something about the scandal rocking the climate change industry, though you can be forgiven if you haven't, since it hasn't gotten nearly the coverage it should...

The Climate Research Unit [CRU] is one of the world's leading global warming data hubs, providing much of the number-crunching to global policymakers on climate change. And, boy, can they crunch numbers.

In a long string of embarrassing e-mail exchanges, CRU scientists discuss...how to manipulate the data they want to show the world, and how to hide the often flawed data they don't....the researchers don't object to just inconvenient truths but also inconvenient truth-tellers. They contemplate and orchestrate efforts to purge scientists and journals who won't sing the same global warming hymnal.

In one instance, Phil Jones, the CRU director, says a scientific journal must "rid (itself) of this troublesome editor," who happened to publish a problematic paper. In another, Jones says we "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

First, the climate change industry is shot through with groupthink (or what climate scientist Judith Curry calls "climate tribalism")....These e-mails show that what's really at work is a very large clique of scientists attempting to excommunicate perceived heretics for reasons that have more to do with psychology and sociology than physics or climatology.

Second, the climate industry really is an industry. Climate scientists make their money and careers from government, academia, the United Nations and foundations. The grantors want the grantees to confirm the global warming "consensus." The tenure and peer-review processes likewise hinge on conformity. That doesn't necessarily mean climate change is untrue, but it does mean sloppiness and bias are unavoidable....

Can anyone imagine the [New York] Times being so prissy if such damning e-mails were from ExxonMobil, never mind Dick Cheney?...

From Jonah Goldberg (again) at TownHall.com...

Next week's Copenhagen summit on climate change already seems doomed to failure, and voices on both sides of the global-warming debate are trying to pin the blame on Climategate....

"Climategate," aka warmerquiddick, aka the CRUtape letters, aka the Mother of All Publicity Disasters, refers to the leaking of vast numbers of e-mails and other documents from a leading British global-warming outfit, the Climatic Research Unit. The e-mails show, depending on your outlook, anything from sloppiness, pettiness and dishonesty to outright fraud among some of the world's leading climate scientists.

The e-mails don't show that the scientists don't believe global warming is real. Rather, they show that the scientists believe in global warming so much, they think they're justified in doing anything to fight it...

Climategate is a big deal, but we should be clear: It's not why cap-and-trade should be scuttled, and it's not why Copenhagen will produce nothing, save enormous expense-account submissions for cookie-pushing climate diplomats (and a massive amount of greenhouse gases; the U.N. estimates the 12-day "green" confab will produce 40,584 tons of CO2 equivalents, roughly equal to Morocco's carbon footprint in 2006).

Here is one simple, inconvenient truth: No developing country with significant and remotely accessible stocks of fossil fuels will agree to leave the stuff in the ground....

It was often said that President George W. Bush "refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol." This is technically true -- because Bush couldn't sign Kyoto. It was already signed during the Clinton presidency (Bush didn't sign the Treaty of Versailles either). The important point is that Clinton immediately shoved it in his desk drawer because he knew it would never be ratified by the Senate. Indeed, the Senate voted 95-0 to not even consider ratifying it so long as developing countries like China were left out of the scheme....Barack Obama has opted to stay out of the Kyoto system for the same reason....

While it's great fun -- and entirely worthwhile -- to make a big stink about Climategate, it would be a shame if people believed that Copenhagen's inevitable failure hinged on this one scandal. Even if the CRU researchers were the model of scientific dispassion, these schemes are pointless. Indeed, even if global warming is the threat the alarmists claim it is, it makes no sense to waste trillions of dollars on "fixes" that will do little to fix the alleged problem....

From Ann Coulter at TownHall.com...

Am I just crazy from the heat or were [the CRU "scientists"] trying to deceive us?

Global warming cheerleaders in the media were quick to defend the scandalous e-mails, explaining that, among scientists, the words "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage" do not mean "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage." These words actually mean "onion soup," "sexual submissive" and "Gary, Ind."

Also, of course, the defenders said that the words needed to be placed "in context"...I have placed the words in context and it turns out what they mean is: gigantic academic fraud....

CRU was regularly cited as the leading authority on "global climate analysis"...received more than $23 million in taxpayer funds for its work on global warming....

The way this episode is unfolding, the environmentalists may be forced to drop their phantom threat of global warming and go back to the phantom threat of global cooling....

It's always the same thing with primitive people -- voodoo practitioners, rain dancers and liberals. In lieu of facts, debate and a weighing of the evidence, religious fanatics respond to all counterarguments by invoking a higher authority...

This is precisely what liberals accuse Christians of doing, but which Christians never do. We don't cite the Bible as authority -- and then refuse to let anyone read it. We certainly don't claim to have "lost" it, so you can't check for yourself. But that's exactly what the CRU has done with its secret data allegedly showing a warming Earth....

Even if the Earth were warming -- which apparently it is not -- the idea that humans using energy-efficient lightbulbs would alter the temperature of the globe is approximately as plausible as the Aztecs' belief that they were required to wrench the beating heart out of living, breathing humans in order to keep the sun on its path....

Brandon's House 1st Annual Holiday Craft Fair

2009-12-01T10:26:00.002-05:00

Saturday, December 5
10 AM - 2 PM
DePauw United Methodist Church in New Albany.

Find some great Christmas presents and support a good cause!

GraphMax on government (spot on!)

2009-12-01T09:13:00.001-05:00

GraphMax hits it on the head...

How a Government Gets a Job Done

graphical depiction of shapes in Lucky Charms

2009-11-30T17:10:00.002-05:00

GraphMax with some breakfast cereal truth!