Fruits of the Arab Spring

Remember this martyr for his faith when the neocons are celebrating the accomplishments of their World Democratic Revolution. And remember it when Republicans are explaining why it is necessary to export democracy to the savages of the third world while simultaneously importing them throughout the West:

Arab Spring, Egyptian edition: a 17 year old Christian in a high school in Mallawi was ordered by his teacher to cover up a tattoo of a cross on his wrist. True to his faith, he refused to do so and instead exposed a crucifix that he wore around his neck. He was then beaten to death by his teacher and two Muslim students:

And lest they mistakenly conclude that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, I note that neither Jews nor atheists have proven to be any better off under Sharia.

The EU’s democracy deficit widens

No referendum for you!

A statement from Prime Minister George Papandreou scrapping the referendum on the $178 billion European bailout package has been provided to the Associated Press. “The referendum was never an end in itself,” Papandreou said. “We had a dilemma – either true assent or a referendum. I said yesterday, if the assent were there, we would not need a referendum.”

It won’t make any difference. The question isn’t whether it’s all going to come crashing down, it’s just a question of which of the many straws upon the camel’s back will be that does the trick.

My expectation is that once people realize they are not only being railroaded, but don’t even have the opportunity to protest, we’re going to start seeing the revival of the Red Brigades soon. As I told the DC radio guy who interviewed me this afternoon, it’s not the crash that concerns me, that’s inevitable and I’m just hoping to stay buckled in and enjoy the ride. It is what comes after and how the popular fury will be channeled that is worrisome.

If I was an elite strategist, that’s what I’d have focused on for the last two years, not wasting the time on playing King Canute.

A skeptic shows he’s a sucker

Whenever you encounter atheists claiming to be skeptical, rational, logical, and intelligent, you can be relatively confident that they will soon demonstrate that they are absolutely nothing of the sort. Consider these two contradictory claims from SkepticBlog:

1. “SkepticBlog is a collaboration among some of the most recognized names in promoting science, critical thinking, and skepticism.”

2. “Why has no one from Wall Street gone to jail for the financial meltdown? Bill Maher has asked this question several times on his HBO show Real Time. I have asked many experts myself, including economists, lawyers, and Wall Street traders. Answer: no one went to jail because they didn’t break any laws.”

Now, I rather liked Michael Shermer’s “The Mind of the Market” when I reviewed it a while back, but this post is almost astonishingly stupid and is so demonstrably clueless that I very much doubt Shermer has genuinely asked a single expert about this. One need look no further than the mainstream media to know that the Obama administration broke the law. Ben Bernanke broke the law. Henry Paulson broke the law. Every single “too big to fail” bank broke the law. Every bank that registered a mortage with MERS broke the law and evaded county taxes. Karl Denninger has a little list of four of the most obvious and egregious examples.

Shermer then goes on to ask “What, exactly, did these Wall Street people do that was so wrong?” That’s quite simple. Fraud, theft, forgery, money laundering, and tax evasion.

And after this preposterous demonstration of willful stupidity, the “skeptic” Shermer declares that “the government should regulate Wall Street more”. Right, because the answer to government regulators failing to enforce the law is obviously more government regulation. That’s some fine criticial thinking right there, isn’t it?

Shermer should know better. I know for a fact that he’s not as economically illiterate as this post makes him look, but it shows that he is demonstrably inept when it comes to logic. Keep this performance in mind when you consider the value of the science he is promoting and the legitimacy of his arguments concerning atheism.

EU crackdown or crackup

Most likely the former followed by the latter. The EU leaders can blather about the sanctity of the euro and inviolate nature of the Union all they like, but neither threats nor promises can salvage the situation. Their problem is that they can’t keep the Fourth ReichUnion together while continuing to drain the masses dry in order to bail out the bankers. To put the situation in context, imagine the various U.S. states had had the option to opt out of participating in TARP. Why would people in Texas ever choose to materially reduce their standard of living so that Washington could prop up Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and keep them in business? As usual, the bond yields tell a more informative story:

Greece 2-year 92.980% One year ago: 9.784%
Portugal 2-year 19.112% One year ago: 3.521%
Italy 2-year 5.455% One year ago: 1.966%
Spain 2-year 3.872 One year ago: 2.069%

In other words, the Greek default is certain regardless of what happens with the “bailout” or the proposed referendum. Portugal will probably default too, sooner or later. Italy is looking increasingly problematic, while Spain actually appears to be doing relatively well.

Millenials vs Baby Boomers

Well, I certainly know whose side I am on. Keep this generational perspective in mind as you see the same people who are defending the systematic lawbreaking of banks, financial institutions, and government agencies over decades while waxing apocalyptic over a few weeks of a little littering and trespassing. Whatever the downside of Occupy Wall Street might be, as a phenomenon it is still VASTLY preferable to the poisonous activities of Wall Street:

The Occupy movement is being driven by the Millenial Generation. They have used their superior technological and social networking skills to organize, educate, and inspire people to their cause while befuddling and confusing the authorities. They continue to rally more young people to their fight against Wall Street and K Street tyranny. The generational lines of battle are being drawn. The Baby Boom Generation, who is at the point of maximum power in society, fears this movement. They control Wall Street, corporate America, Congress, the courts, academia and the media. They have reached their peak of influence and power, which will rapidly wane over the next fifteen years. They see the Occupy movement as a threat to their supremacy and control of the system. The cynical, alienated, pragmatic Generation X is caught between the Boomers and the Millenials in this escalating conflict. It is likely the majority of this generation will side with the Millenials, realizing the future of the country depends on them and not the elderly Boomers….

Over the last six weeks I’ve watched as the young protestors around the country have been called: filthy hippies, losers, lazy, coddled, socialists, communists, spoiled college kids, parasites, useful idiots, and tools of the left. Most of the wrath being heaped upon these young people for exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly has been from the Baby Boom Generation, who are at the peak of their power in our society. Sixty percent of the Senate is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being the Silent Generation with twenty five percent. Over 58% of the House of Representatives is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being Gen Xers at 27%. They occupy the executive suites of the Wall Street banks (Blankfein, Dimon, Pandit, Moniyan) and the Federal Reserve (Bernanke). They make up the majority of judges, local politicians and school boards. They run the Federal government agencies.

And they dominate the airwaves as the high priced mouthpieces for their corporate bosses. This Prophet generation will lead the country through the trials and tribulations of this Fourth Turning.

The disdain and contempt for these Millenial protestors flies in the face of the facts about this generation. They use drugs at a lower rate than their parents did at the same age. Teen crime rates and teen pregnancies have declined. They will have the highest level of college education in U.S. history. They were protected during their youth as organized sports taught them teamwork. They are the most technologically savvy generation in history. They volunteer at higher level than previous generations. They have been more upbeat and engaged than their predecessors (Gen X). And they are much closer to their parents than Boomers were at the same age. They reject the negativism and cynicism of their parents and believe positive change is possible in our society.

They have shown respect for authority up until the last six weeks. They were primed to be led by Boomers that could articulate a positive vision of the future based on reality and a better tomorrow. They were ready to make sacrifices in order to create a brighter future. But a funny thing happened. The Boomer generation failed to deliver on their part of the bargain….

The youth of America listened to their parents and stayed in school. They’ve racked up over $1 trillion in student loan debt getting college educations. Meanwhile, our Baby Boomer leadership had an opportunity to address the country’s unsustainable fiscal path by accepting the consequences of a thirty year debt binge and liquidating the banks that took extreme risks with extreme leverage. An orderly liquidation (aka Washington Mutual) would have punished the stockholders, bondholders and management of the Wall Street banks, while leaving the depositors whole and purging the system of debt that can never be paid off. Our politicians could have ended our wars of choice in the Middle East and cut our war spending by hundreds of billions without sacrificing one iota of safety for the American people. The political leadership could have put the country on a deficit reduction path that would have insured the long-term viability of our republic.

Instead of doing the right thing, our Baby Boomer leaders did the exact opposite of the right thing.

We can’t Logan’s Run those bastard Boomers soon enough for me. Years ago, when all the magazines were full of “50 is the new 20” stories, I used to joke that it didn’t matter how old the idiots got, they would still be insisting that it was cool to be geriatric. But I was joking… surely even the Baby Boomers couldn’t possibly be that hopelessly, myopically, narcissistically stupid, right?

Wrong. I suppose this headline was always inevitable:

Life begins at 70!

Clearly we need to exterminate the monsters before they finish raping the planet in their never-ending voyage of self-importance.

Mailvox: Exit the Harassinator

NB isn’t buying Herman Cain’s astoundingly inept attempt to deal with multiple historical accusations of sexual harassment:

I saw Herman Cain on Fox News this weekend, discussing the sexual harassment issue. He blew it.

He said he’d never sexually harassed anybody and that if the Restaurant Association settled a claim, he didn’t know about it and he hoped they didn’t pay anybody because he never did anything wrong. Now it appears there’s an out-of-court settlement involving two women who got a year’s pay each. It’s never the offense that sinks you, it’s always the cover-up.

He should have said: “I was accused of sexual harassment when I worked for the restaurant association 20 years ago. I denied I did anything wrong at that time, and I deny it today. We ended up settling out of court because it was cheaper to settle than continue paying the lawyers. Both sides agreed never to discuss the details of the settlement and I’m sticking to our agreement. That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

That would have been honest and believable. Most people would said “huh” and moved on. Now, it’s not the accusation that troubles people – hell, lots of people get falsely accused of stuff and have to settle or take a plea to avoid losing everything in litigation – it’s the lying about it that troubles us. Next, he’ll play the race card and compare himself to Clarence Thomas. When that doesn’t work, he’ll probably enter sexual harassment training for a weekend and have Billy Graham pray for him. When his wife stands beside him on stage saying she’s always believed in him, that’s the death knell.

I have to admit, I simply do not understand these morons who appear to believe that the skeletons in their closet are not going to eventually come out… unless one resorts to conspiracy theory. My explanation for this seemingly stupid behavior is that most, if not all, politicians have some sort of past history that will render them political toast if outed; Cain was probably told by the Republican establishment to settle down and not get too carried away with his success in the polls, but he went cowboy and decided to buck the system in the hopes that they wouldn’t air his dirty laundry.

On the one hand, the fact that the someone in the establishment wants to finish off his campaign tends to speak well for him. On the other hand, he is an incoherent bankster. America is probably better off with him out of the race, assuming this serves to finish him.

Stupefying Stories 1.2

The Original Cyberpunk and team today released the November issue of Stupefying Stories, which features short fiction from various Friday Challenge stars and others, including Aaron Bradford Starr, Clare L. Deming, Anatoly Belilovsky, Sarah Frost, Rebecca Roland, and Henry Vogel.

I didn’t contribute to this issue, but as keen observers of the reading list may have already discerned, I have been working on a story that will appear in a future issue. Or rather, giving the amazing number of stories from very recognizable names now being submitted every week to the fledgling e-publication, may appear in a future issue.

Hiding the decline again

Richard Muller is the latest “scientist” to attempt to pass off another an AGW/CC fraud:

Last week, a research team at Berkeley led by a former climate change skeptic released a study of global temperatures that intended to set the record straight on controversial data collected by the East Anglia Project, NASA, and other organizations that have acted as advocates for action based on anthropogenic global warming. Professor Richard Muller put together a graph of the data that supposedly showed warming from 1800 (roughly the beginning of the Industrial Era in Europe) through 1975, and then a steeper rise in temperatures that appears unstopped. When this data was released, newspapers and other media proclaimed it the end of AGW skepticism and demanded capitulation from the “deniers.”…

A closer look at the data and a Daily Mail interview with one of Muller’s team shows that the chart hides the fact that no warming has occurred in the last 11 years, as has been repeatedly pointed out:

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis. Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago. …

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained. ‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

Let’s take a look at Muller’s chart, and then compare it to the chart for the last 13 years — which the Daily Mail labels an “inconvenient truth”:

First, let’s look at the top chart. A closer reading of the top chart shows that, relative to the 1950-1980 average baseline BEST uses, temperatures didn’t actually warm at all until sometime during the Great Depression, so the entire first century of the Industrial Era apparently had no impact — in a period where the dirtiest of mass energy production processes was in widest use (coal). Temperatures then started to slowly rise during an era of significantly reduced industrial output, thanks to a lengthy economic depression that gripped the entire world. What we end up with is a 30-year spike that also includes a few years of reduced industrial output, starting in the stagnating 1970s where oil production also got restricted thanks to onerous government policies and trade wars.

In climate terms, a 30-year spike is as significant as a surprisingly warm afternoon in late October. Man, I wish we were going to have one of those today.

But then look what happens in the past 11 years in the bottom chart. Despite the fact that the world’s nations continue to spew CO2 with no significant decline (except perhaps in the Great Recession period of 2008-9), the temperature record is remarkably stable. In fact, it looks similar to the period between 1945 and 1970 on the top chart. If global temperature increases really correlated directly to CO2 emissions, we wouldn’t see this at all; we’d see ever-escalating rates of increase in global temperatures, which is exactly what the AGW climate models predicted at the turn of the century. They were proven wrong.

And in fact, Curry explains that the failure of those models finally has some scientists going back to the drawing board….

And what of Muller? When confronted by the Daily Mail about the data from the past 11 years, he denied that temperatures had plateaued, and then admitted that the data shows exactly that.

And yet the unthinking, unquestioning science fetishists still wonder why rational observers are deeply skeptical when scientists seeking huge quantities of money and global fame, and demanding massive societal change on the basis of what provides them with the aforementioned money and fame, are repeatedly caught out faking and misrepresenting the data.

The CO2 model is obviously wrong. It has completely failed as a predictive model. And, as I have been saying for years, global warming isn’t even taking place and hasn’t been for longer than I have been posting on this blog.

Richard Muller may have once been a climate skeptic, (his biography suggests he is either lying or being misrepresented by others), but if so, the evidence suggests that he was not so much convinced by the data as corrupted by the benefits of jumping aboard the AGW/CC gravy train. The increasingly inescapable conclusion, based on this and the increasing reports of scientific fraud, is that science should be considered intrinsically unreliable until it is successfully applied and is considered engineering.

And speaking of hiding the decline, Muller’s fellow-in-fraud, Michael “hockey stick” Mann appears to be losing his battle to hide the data:

“Discredited global warming scientist, Michael Mann, sees his last-ditch efforts to hide data fall apart as legal experts reveal a mountain of legal precedents against him. In his recent papers (filed on September 2, 2011) Mann claims ‘academic freedom’ and ‘proprietary materials’ as his defense. But legal experts who have since reviewed Mann’s submission to the Circuit Court of Prince William County, Va., say they are so full of holes they are doomed to fail.”

These “scientists” are all about the science and expanding human knowledge, aren’t they! Let’s revisit a few of my favorite global warming quotes, shall we?

1. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

2. “Yes, it is quite probable that global warming has a significant anthropogenic component. About as probable as the idea that HIV causes AIDS, species diversity is driven by evolutionary processes, and that the world is round.” – PZ Myers

3. RT: Is global warming a threat to the human species?

Richard Dawkins: Yes.

4. “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. – American Physical Society

5. “The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.” – American Association for the Advancement of Science

6. The Geological Society of America (GSA) supports the scientific conclusions that Earth’s climate is changing; the climate changes are due in part to human activities; and the probable consequences of the climate changes will be significant and blind to geopolitical boundaries. – The Geological Society of America

7. “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify taking steps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” – U.S. National Academy of Sciences

8. Do you consider teaching someone about global warming, ozone holes, or ongoing extinctions, all established facts about our natural world, to be indoctrination?” – PZ Myers

Established facts… established scientific facts are indeed indoctrination. This means that we have no choice but to conclude that the definition of “established scientific fact” is sufficiently broad to include outright fiction and that appeals to “scientific consensus” possess no more legitimacy than appeals to reality TV.

The three levels of science

The fundamental flaw in the common, but erroneous idea that science is an intrinsically superior form of obtaining knowledge is that it relies upon the same human element that various other forms of knowledge do. Notice that the amount of detected scientific fraud appears to be increasing as electronic communications provide greater access to non-scientists, and that even in this case, where the whistleblowing was done by scientists, it was not done as part of the scientific process.

Diederik Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September after three junior researchers reported that they suspected scientific misconduct in a study that claimed eating meat made people more aggressive. Soon after being confronted with the accusations, Stapel reportedly told university officials that some of his papers contained falsified data. The university launched an investigation, as did the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam, where Stapel had worked previously. The Tilburg commission today released an interim report (in Dutch), which includes preliminary results from all three investigations. The investigators found “several dozens of publications” in which fictitious data has been used. Fourteen of the 21 Ph.D. theses Stapel supervised are also tainted, the committee concluded.

Stapel issued a statement today in which he apologizes to his colleagues and says he “failed as a scientist” and is ashamed of his actions. He has cooperated to an extent by identifying papers with suspect data, according to university officials. The investigation by the three universities is ongoing and should ultimately investigate more than 150 papers that Stapel has published since 2004, including a paper earlier this year in Science on the influence of a messy environment on prejudice. “People are in shock,” says Gerben van Kleef, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who did not work directly with Stapel. “Everybody wonders how this could have happened and at this proportion.”

Stapel’s work encompassed a broad range of attention-catching topics, including the influence of power on moral thinking and the reaction of psychologists to a plagiarism scandal. The committee, which interviewed dozens of Stapel’s former students, postdoctoral researchers, co-authors, and colleagues, found that Stapel alone was responsible for the fraud. The panel reported that he would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place, the universities concluded. Stapel made up the data sets, which he then gave the student or collaborator for analysis, investigators allege. In other instances, the report says, he told colleagues that he had an old data set lying around that he hadn’t yet had a chance to analyze. When Stapel did conduct actual experiments, the committee found evidence that he manipulated the results.

Many of Stapel’s students graduated without having ever run an experiment, the report says. Stapel told them that their time was better spent analyzing data and writing. The commission writes that Stapel was “lord of the data” in his collaborations. It says colleagues or students who asked to see raw data were given excuses or even threatened and insulted.

Now, keep in mind that science fetishists often claim that science is intrinsically superior because scientific evidence theoretically can be replicated. But this argument is fundamentally flawed; no one argues that eyewitness testimony that theoretically could be confirmed by physical evidence is intrinsically superior to eyewitness evidence that cannot be independently confirmed in the absence of actually bothering to verify the testimony.

Clearly, a bright line needs to be delineated between scientific evidence that has been independently replicated by experiment, scientific evidence that could be independently replicated but has not been, and scientific evidence that cannot be independently replicated by experiment. And furthermore, it is necessary to stop giving the latter two types of scientific evidence, or more properly, potential scientific evidence, the same level of credence that is given to actual scientific evidence that has been reliably and independently replicated.

And why might that be?

The New York Times contemplates the mystery of how a Goldmanite – and former governor of New Jersey – could be responsible for one of the biggest bankruptcies in U.S. history:

He was from Goldman Sachs.

That is the refrain you hear over and over again when MF Global insiders try to explain why they went along with Jon Corzine’s risky trades — the same ones that caused a crisis of confidence at the firm and, ultimately, its bankruptcy on Monday….

Being a former Goldmanite has long been considered the ultimate calling card. But, in some cases, it has proved to be a liability: A series of blunders by former senior Goldman executives raises questions about whether Goldman’s secret sauce can actually be exported. Think John Thain. Or Robert Rubin. Or J. Chris Flowers.

Let’s consider the possible explanations why there is a pattern of success at Goldman Sachs and failure elsewhere:

1. There is some sort of magic in the Goldman water cooler that permits these financial wunderkinder to outperform the rest of the financial markets.

2. There is a wise old Asian janitor, seemingly ageless, living in the basement of the Goldman building whose cryptic utterings are interpreted and applied by the Goldman executives, leading to astoundingly good results.

3. Goldman leverages its oversized influence in the federal government to secure government policies that ensure it reliable profits.

I don’t know about you, but my money is on number two. I picked up an East Asian Studies major in college and studied Japanese in Tokyo on the off-chance that I might have the opportunity to speak to him one day.