Friday, March 16. 2007
 "Post-normal science" of climate change. Environmental scientist says: "Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking,..." Piece at Melanie Phillips
I'd call it "post-modern" science. This is creepy. Help me send her piece around, friends, because I think it exposes an important undercurrent of what is going on in the climate discussion: the idea that the ends justify the means (which Al Gore defended here). And what are those "ends"? As always (is it coincidence?) more government control of your behavior, your freedom, and your hard-earned cash - as if government were a fount of wisdom instead mostly a bunch of slippery, self-aggrandizing, smooth-talking sleazes who want easy jobs, with no heavy lifting, and with good pensions. (See "The government is endogenous" by Prof. B.) Yes, in the heart of true Yankees, government is seen as a necessary evil. Dr. Frankenstein's monster - created by us, but then difficult to control, because these folks just want to keep their easy jobs. A big mistake not to put term limits in the American Constitution. A quote from Melanie: So the true battleground has now been illuminated for us. The real fight is between scientists who believe in empirical observation and the truth, and ‘post-normal’ scientists who believe in ideology and lies. It’s a battle between Enlightenment values of rationality and those who wish to return us to a pre-rational era where thought was controlled and truth was a heresy. The stakes could not have been delineated more clearly.
Are some things too important for truth? I doubt it. Here is Galileo recanting his heresy. Image: Jacques Derrida, the now old-hat (and now dead from AIDS - or was that Foucault? Whatever) philospher who taught our young brains full of mush the fallacy that there is no truth but power. Sorry, Jacques, wherever you are, but that was high school bull session material before anyone ever heard of you. We moved past that rebellious fashion long ago.
 We have crocuses in the snow, this morning.
Time, Inc. is shrinking fast. Deservedly so. They do have some fine writers/reporters, but people just do not want their lefty pablum nowadays. The science of jury selection. I have heard about these jury consultants. Big bucks. Psychology Today: Unnatural Selection Kondracke thinks Bush and congress can agree on immigration reform this year. RCP. That's what I'm afraid of. If we can send Mexico a bill for $10 million per illegal, I'd consider it - but I'd still reject it. Another major scientist says anthropogenic warming is a crock. A Great Wall of Bacon? I like that idea. Yum. Powerline. It's about CAIR. The science of jury selection. I've read about these jury consultants. Big bucks. Psychology Today  This question, via Driscoll, via Blair:
If you’re already getting burglarized, do you really want to add to your problems by confronting a desperate criminal with your own loaded weapon?
Umm, damn right I want to. Make my day. More Euro riots - but different, this time. Tangled Web What's your view on gays in the military? I think I tend to agree with Hillary's third or fourth version of her opinion, at Riehl. But I really don't know. I'd like to defer to the opinions of the officers and generals. Thanks, Alphecca. You said it better than we could. Gun control idiot of the day. If rights are conditional, then they do not really exist at all. May we ask, one more time, why it matters whether global climate is man-influenced or not?
Thursday, March 15. 2007
 OK, it's a cold, sleety, soon-to-be blizzardy night in Yankeeland. Stoke up the fireplace or the wood stove, and ask the wife or hubbie to bring a keg over to the computer because this piece by Lanza in American Scholar (to which I recommend subscribing ) - h/t, A&L Daily - will take a few minutes to untangle and absorb. It is either an exercise in solipcism, or else very cool and fun. Lanza is a Professor of Medicine.
It's about consciousness and the real world, which is a subject which tends to require a touch of alcohol - or should I say ethanol, these days? Is reality a biological epiphenomenon? It begins with this quote from the great Loren Eisley: While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”
and ends thus: Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to ask about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them. “Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.”
Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does the music indeed exist.
Go ahead and read the whole thing.
It's the name of a blog, which we recently discovered. We will blogroll it, under our Science category.
 I would never criticize an author, because producing a work of fiction that anyone will pay money to read is an astonishing achievement.
Cooper was prolific as hell, but all I have read is The Last of the Mohicans - a long time ago. Mark Twain, of course, has the bona fides to critique a fellow author. I have heard of his famous humorous and devilish critique of Cooper ("Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"), but never read it until Right Wing Nation posted it today. It's a powerful manual on what not to do in fiction writing. Thanks, RWN.
 Scott: Rev. Hagee's speech brought me to tears.
Have you already seen this video from the Hamas family kids? Inside North Korea. Video clips, at Michelle His face, eight years of photos compressed. Unique. Bush is so wrong on immigration, but his worrying about Mexico's problems is over the top. Would someone please remind him that that is not his job. Darfur. Can anyone do anything? EU Referendum A fertility program for gay men. Is this odd, or am I old-fashioned? Cops can sue you if hurt protecting you. Who knew? There is something wrong with that. Who are the victims in the Flying Imam story? Blue Crab. I would have been off that airplane in a New York minute. Sue me. There's a sucker born every minute. A naive global warming believer gets scammed. No Looking Backwards Does anybody like No Child Left Behind? I doubt it. Pejman. You can blame Bush for this usurpation of state sovereignty. For the children, of course. One of his top three costly mistakes (along with the Medicare drug program and his immigration policies). Eco-fascism in the UK. Moonbattery The media bias poll. Willisms One billion people are online. Club for Growth. A shame they don't all visit Maggie's. It's their loss. How Moslems are taking over Antwerp.
 I stepped outside to do some chores today, and a Killdeer flew over the house, calling his name loudly. It is the time of year when they are on the move north, but the snow and sleet we have coming today will slow the migrants down a bit.
Killdeer is found across the entire US and most of Canada. He is a large plover - technically a shorebird - but more often found in inland fields that at the shore. I have always enjoyed these birds, probably because they are so easy to identify. They are famous for their broken-wing deception - the original victimhood scam. Read about Killdeer at CLO here.
Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it -- it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. . . . The division would have to be re-made every three years or it would do the communist no good. Mark Twain, as quoted in Mankiw
The mantra that we must upend the health care arrangements and economics of the 85% of us with insurance, polls usually showing 80% satisfaction, in order to subsidize the inflated, undeserving and irresponsible bulk of the uninsured 15% is public policy insanity, driven by the Left’s obsession with enlarging government and bureaucrats’ power over us via a government-run, nationalized health care system. Bruce Kesler, at Democracy Project Yes, that is the pattern. Create a sense of crisis, and then bring in Daddy Government to take over. Same with global warming - same with everything.
Wednesday, March 14. 2007
 From Lieberman's speech this week:
I do not need to tell you about these threats because you in AIPAC already understand them. That is why you work so hard and so well not just to preserve a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship but to uphold the cause of freedom. Unfortunately, many in our country today do not seem to share that critical understanding of the threats we face. Increasingly, the debate over our foreign policy is becoming so polarized, so partisan, so bound up in the battles we are having here in Washington, that it seems blind to the real battle outside of America, the challenge of our time from the Islamist extremists who want to destroy us all, who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and intend to do so again. In this regard, if I may have a point of personal privilege, as we say in the Senate, I'd like to talk with you about my own experience over the past year. First, let me again say thank you. Your support helped me win an election, and even more importantly, to continue the fight for the principles and policies we believe in. I don't think it's any secret that much of my fight for reelection was about the war in Iraq. Given all the mistakes made in Iraq, all of the setbacks and disappointments, I understand how well-intentioned people have come to disagree about the war. I also understand the frustration and exhaustion that so many people feel about Iraq, the desire just to throw up our hands and say, "Enough."
The entire speech here.
 Kirsch reviews Clive James' new book, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, in the NY Sun. A quote:
Mr. James is one of those rare writers who convinces you that criticism is not necessarily a handmaiden in the palace of the arts — that it can be transformed, Cinderella-style, from drudge to princess, given the energy and style of a first-rate fairy godmother (or godfather). In a time when criticism is dominated by the theory-sick monographs of academics, and when the future seems to belong to amateur and professional blurbists, it is more than entertaining to read Mr. James's lucid, passionate, erudite essays. It is heartening, and seems to promise that the critical role once played by a Samuel Johnson or an Edmund Wilson is still possible in the 21st century.
Whole review here.
 Is it OK to leave "post-fetal tissue" lying around? Cramer. I call this a natural extension of the abortion ethic.
The pumps don't work cuz the vandals took the handles? New defective pumps in NO. Now everybody is piling on Al Gore. Hey, he meant well, didn't he? Or did he? Small Dead Polar Bear has update. What is a Spartan workout? Synthstuff Pelosi gets booed. She is taking it from all sides. Behead those who insult Persia. More insanity from Iran. Good commentary at Classical Values. Greeks told they will need to work during the summer. Such a hardship The wild and crazy French. French courts say marriage is between a man and a woman. Austin Bay: We aren't losing in Iraq. TCS Deconstructionism and the law. Volokh. Hasn't this dumb fad run its course yet? Hispanics vs. Blacks. You can imagine how LaShawn feels about that. NYT tries to provide cover for CAIR. Captain Ed
I wish this wonderful Abbott and Costello routine were on YouTube, but it doesn't appear to be, at least not yet. Just reading it is a kick, though. Much funnier than "who's on first?"
We missed this odd news item.
 Stumbling and Mumbling takes a look at Dalrymple's piece on The Proletarianization of Doctors.
Indeed, the de-professionalization of physicians is happening all over the US, and not just in countries with socialized medicine. I most recently became disturbed by this when I was told that docs in a certain charity clinic that I am familiar with have been asked to punch time clocks when they come on duty. Of course, it's all about money and power. When physicians become employees with no independent function as professionals, they can begin to lose their identity as professionals. It already happened to public school teachers when they unionized, but docs, being generally made of sterner stuff, do not fold so easily. Fact is, this charity clinic I refer to (which has family practice/general practice, OG/GYN, dental, and psychiatric staff) is staffed by docs who want to sacrifice some of their time to the poor, but they have been told that if they all were to quit, they would be replaced overnight with docs from India and Pakistan who would not view the job as charity at all, and who have a different view of medicine that the traditional American view. Money and power. It all began in the US when hospitals began to be run by managers instead of by doctors, in the 1970s. Hospital boards with an eye on the bottom line wanted compliant employees instead of cranky, demanding, patient-devoted docs running things. We should have seen it coming when insurance companies replaced the line for "physician" with a line for "provider." Provider? I am no provider. As a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, I am quite the opposite: I am a demander, if anything. A demanding friend, whose time is worth a lot. Not a caretaker or care-giver, most of the time. And that is why I am willing to be paid to teach, but am not willing to be paid to work by anyone other than my patients. Medicine is a fraternity/sorority, and a guild, and a priesthood with daunting responsibilities which extend far beyond the technicalities of medicine into the realms of friendship, love, the soul and the spirit. If that doesn't matter to people, they will live to regret it.
 They already block Maggie's Farm. God knows why.
OK, let's give them a good reason: their idiot, people-fearing, totalitarian government is terrified of free thought. Their people might get ideas - and then what? They might not want to be political slaves. China contains a great many intelligent, energetic people. What else do they want to block, besides little ol' us? via Drudge.
Maggie's Farm is one of my favorite blogs because they are the only blog that would post an article on rubber boots. A loyal reader. (Appreciate that comment, because 99% of political blather is ephemera. On the other hand, that remaining 1% can really get you. We try to catch that 1%, plus some of the other stuff in life that really matters - like boots, and God, and fishing, etc.)
Yuppifying Dunkin' Donuts? Tell me it isn't true.  War between the fly fisherman and the bait fishermen, in Maine
How exercise is good for your brain Organic food? A silly notion. A food writer obsesses over the subject. Time. Meet Ben. Michelle Idaho prof: Execute Republicans Jim McGreevy wants child support. Gimme a break. Dems opt for socialism. Democracy Project The way you walk determines your attractiveness. Neo-neo has just decided that she loves Leonard Cohen How to kill a country. Zimbabwe, in Atlantic Monthly (h/t, Viking) NYT says "cool it with the global warming hype". Blue Crab has comments. I think the backlash is only beginning. Who is getting very rich over carbon credits? Moonbattery Joe Lieberman as quoted in Powerline: There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism. There is something profoundly wrong when there is so much distrust of our intelligence community that some Americans doubt the plain and ominous facts about the threat to us posed by Iran. And there is something profoundly wrong when, in the face of attacks by radical Islam, we think we can find safety and stability by pulling back, by talking to and accommodating our enemies, and abandoning our friends and allies. Some of this wrong-headed thinking about the world is happening because we're in a political climate where, for many people, when George Bush says "yes," their reflex reaction is to say "no." That is unacceptable.
More here.
More photos of the church here. 
Tuesday, March 13. 2007
From an important and comprehensive piece by Philip Stott at ABC News, a few quotes: From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness.
and Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases. Outside the tropics, variability should decrease in a warmer world. If this is a "crisis," then the world is in permanent "crisis," but will be less prone to "crisis" with warming. Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age, most rapidly about 12,000 years ago. In recent centuries, the average rate has been relatively uniform. The rate was higher during the first half of the 20th century than during the second. At around a couple of millimeters per year, it is a residual of much larger positive and negative changes locally. The risk from global warming is less than that from other factors (primarily geological).
Read the whole thing.
 We try to blogroll interesting sites, whether we agree with them or not. We do it as a favor for you - our readers. And for our convenience too - it's an easy click.
We really enjoy EU Referendum, and they deserve a special plug. Our beloved Europe - our ancestral homeland - is rapidly becoming a bureau-fascist, soviet-style state, and they seem to understand that. Thank God, they are not alone. We Americans pray that the home of freedom not sink into decadent Euro-socialist neo-fascism, which seems to be all the rage these days - especially eco-facism.
 I do not dislike Mexicans, or anyone else on this earth as a group, except perhaps the French, who are decadent Euro-weenies (but are soon to be a sharia state anyway). However, in general I have learned, over many years, from a long series of unfortunate experiences, to not automatically trust people from different cultures. Not to dislike them, because I tend to enjoy humans - but just to distrust them. I think this is an intelligent decision. (By "culture", I refer to religion, ethnicity, national origin, upbringing, education, and everything else relevant to behavior and world-view - except skin color, which I ignore as irrelevant.)
Why? Not because they are bad, evil, or inferior, but because they are not on my page, and are thinking about things differently and seeing a different picture. Thus they have often let me down when I have the expectations of others that I am heir to. That displeases me. Since I am capable of learning from experience, I am also able to learn to trust some from other backgrounds, but it takes time - and it takes enough data points to draw a graph. Trust is just as basic to relationships as is distrust. Both are worthy of respect and consideration. For me, trust is earned - never assumed. Learned that the hard way. It is the basis for natural, healthy "tribalism." I have no time for multicultural understanding (especially if all of the understanding is one-way) unless I am having fun in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and, neither being nor wanting to be an anthropologist, I do not care to try to understand how people from other cultures think. Nor do I feel any compelling desire to adjust. Just not all that interested, really, although I am willing to listen for a minute or two. Got enough to do as it is, like pruning my own trees and planting the peas and splitting firewood and reading a ton of history and being a grandpa and working 60 hrs/wk. Plus regular unpaid appearances on Maggie's Farm - where my rewards exceed my input, and where I am rewarded by self-education by some of my input.
I think I am fairly normal in this regard. Understanding people with my own cultural assumptions - my dear wife, for example, who is of an alien "gender' - is challenge enough for me.
 A patriotic reveller. Somebody said these cute art photos were from Mardi Gras, but I think they are from this fun and artistic festival on Key West. My only question: Is that paint sugared frosting? Yum. Or is it lead-based paint? If our Editor will permit such art, I may decide to use this art for a little while, to attract the well-deserved attention of art-lovers to my random posts.
Barone. Berger and Libby: A tale of two crimes Chavez "will build heaven on earth." Good deal. Free money and free babes like the photo? Sign me up, Hugo. World's largest horse, with video How we are going to get screwed by this subsidized ethanol scam. Swiss reject nationalized medicine, overwhelmingly. Democracy Project Separate bedrooms to improve your marriage? Oprah's school too strict? Sounds like a normal American boarding school. Structure and disciple are necessary for the youth! Including me. Poll on the DC gun ban. Gun-haters will hate this poll. An EU speed limit for the Autobahn? The Germans will love that. Four year-olds in UK being taught same-sex stories. View from the Right. Is there a point at which we can term perversion "perversion"? Or is anything just swell? I do not have the answer. I only like girls over 16, but I like them plenty. Problem is that they do not seem to like me all that much. Nerdy and awkward. If you enjoy that sort of thing, call me. Bernard Lewis discusses the Crusades, via Asst. Village Idiot. Indeed, the Crusades were the European response to the Moslem invasion that closed Jerusalem. European Jews heading for the exits. Crittenden The political economy of alternative energy, and the surge of rent-seeking. Kling at TCS (h/t, Mankiw, who we will add to our blogroll. We need an economics section.) Update: Done. 12 different views on global warming. Live Science. You already know my view: It doesn't matter and I don't care. Hillary: Walter Reed proves we need more govt-run health care. Scrappleface An Usama bin Ladin mini-biography, at Horsefeathers. Definitely worth reading. Who let CAIR into the US Capitol? Lewis in American Thinker. It begins: If "one's man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," then all wars are the same, liberation equals conquest, tyranny equals democracy, aggression equals defense, and Churchill equals Hitler.
That seems to be the hidden premise of European, and especially Franco-German cant against the American-British overthrow of Saddam. Because the truth is of course that George W. Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam for fear that he was armed with WMDs, is a lineal descendant of FDR's decision to come to the aid of Britain against Nazi Germany, Harry S. Truman's decision to fight in Korea, and Woodrow Wilson's decision to aid Western countries against Prussian militarism in World War I. The United States involved itself in these conflicts to prevent larger and terrible consequences for itself before being militarily attacked by Germany.
Whole thing here. Editor's Note: The News Junkie has a thing about girls. Pardon us if you have opened Maggie's in a public work or educational setting in which some lesbian females or limp metrosexuals might be offended. Too darn bad. I am the Editor Dog, but I am not totalitarian. And I do enjoy the lovely female form myself, especially when presented as "art." And even when not presented as art. Big or small, we love 'em all.
Monday, March 12. 2007
 Our hunter friend has opened a new restaurant in NO. Their last one was Katrina-ized. Good review.
Give it a try, if you are down there, and say Hello to Vincent.
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. This is indeed something to ponder, if intellectual consistency is an issue.
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However, in general I have learned, over many years, from a long series of unfortunate experiences, to not automatically trust people from different cultures. Not to dislike them, because I tend to enjoy humans - but just to distrust them. I think this is an intelligent decision.