States are operating under an unfair disadvantage. Companies are voting with their feet, moving in large numbers from California to Texas and in lesser numbers from New York to just about anywhere with more reasonable gun-control and right-to-work laws. What's a state to do?
Foreign countries showed us the solution a long time ago: the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea made the border more secure. That is, secure not only in the sense of controlling immigration, but in the even more important sense of stopping those terrible rich people from leaving in disgust. California and New York don't have the power to shake down emigrants at the border, though California has toyed with the idea. In contrast, the U.S. federal government is quite prepared to give it a try.
That's the ticket: Never influence economic behavior by persuasion, or by applying incentives out of your own pocket, when you can do it by force.
Debate, equal sign, over
Klavan:
The time for talking is past. The experts have reached a consensus. We’ve come too far to go back now. The people have decided. The toothpaste is out of the tube. We’re not going to return to the bad old days. Sure, there are some who insist on being anti-science. There are people who are still clinging to their Bibles and their guns. I don’t know why they’re working so hard to keep folks from having health insurance. They want to put y’all back in chains. They want to put women in binders.
Stop me before I buy or sell again!
Two good articles about the market. First, the healing powers of the minimum wage:
So let’s break down what she does for her $8 an hour. She says “may I help you” to a customer, a customer gives her their order which she enters via a touchpad computer. The computer computes and totals the order. She enters the amount of cash tendered and it tells he how much change to give back. Or she swipes a credit card, waits for the receipt to print and hands both back to the customer. At some point after that, she hands the customer a tray with food on it or a bag containing it.
Guess what else can do most of that?Second, Harry Binswanger confesses his guilt for playing a part in "market failure":
You see, a "market" is the interaction of individuals, buying and selling. A market trade is distinguished from seizing goods by force. In the supermarket, I trade my dollars for the items I take from the shelf. That's, as the name says, a market. If I just grabbed stuff from the shelves and ran out the door with it, hoping to evade capture, that would not be "the market" operating but theft. . . .
. . . When people like me are left free to make our own decisions, we screw up. We create chaos. We can't be trusted with freedom. That's when the government has to come in to clean up the mess.
The Elise Situation
I waited for a few days to comment on this, in the hope she might change her mind. Cass has shut down a few times, and come back on second or third thought. Elise seems determined to deprive us of her insights.
I’d also like to thank Cassandra over at Villainous Company for encouraging me early on: You made a world of difference to me, Cass. And I’d like to thank both Villainous Company and Grim’s Hall for taking me seriously as a blogger and for making me feel welcome as a commenter; I’ll be stopping by from time to time.You're welcome. If you want to post here from time to time, just once every few months or years as interests you, let me know. We've been glad to have your company, myself especially.
Context
I'm not sure when it happened, but I noticed several years ago that every damaging admission from a leftist was explained as having been "taken out of context." (I'm open to correction here; maybe I don't notice it when right-wingers do the same thing.) (But see "Gaslighting.") The primary defense to the Climategate emails, for instance, was that some dozens of jaw-dropping admissions of the politicization of the peer review process were taken out of context. Sure enough, when peer reviewers recently rejected a mildly skeptical climate paper on the ground that it would only provide ammunition for those terrible denialists, it wasn't surprising to learn the next day that their remarks had been taken out of context.
I confess, though, that reading their remarks in context hasn't much cleared things up. The paper was rejected because it pointed out an inconsistency in an important recurring feature of climate models, which the reviewer considered a "false comparison" because rational people always understood that no consistency was to be expected on that point. Sorry, not helping.
Mark Steyn is on the case, as usual, with a fine piece about the "Clime Syndicate," entitled "The Descent of Mann." He has not, to put it mildly, reacted to the Michael Mann lawsuit by describing his adversary with more gentleness or caution.
The rejected paper put its finger on the sore spot: the unjustifiable assumption that CO2, a weak greenhouse gas, has suddenly become a greenhouse gas that dominates even its much stronger cousin, water vapor, because of what is often called "forcing" or "sensitivity," which means an assumption that there is a positive feedback loop that is causing greenhouse warming to spiral out of control. There is no physical explanation of why a positive feedback loop should be present, when Nature abounds with far more examples of negative feedback loops tending to equilibrium. The assumption that the feedback is positive is entirely inferred from historical data, then plugged into computer models to create predictions. The problem is that the historical data don't particularly support the positive sign on the feedback loop: at best they support widely varying estimates of its magnitude, and they can with equal rationality be seen to support a negative feedback loop. Nor does a positive feedback loop assumption make for a predictive model that matches experimental data, particularly during the last inconvenient 17 years, which have seen an inexplicable pause in inevitable warming that is sure to be followed by the apocalypse.
Here are the peer reviewer's comments explaining why a paper pointing out problems with various models' feedback assumptions would be "unhelpful":
I confess, though, that reading their remarks in context hasn't much cleared things up. The paper was rejected because it pointed out an inconsistency in an important recurring feature of climate models, which the reviewer considered a "false comparison" because rational people always understood that no consistency was to be expected on that point. Sorry, not helping.
Mark Steyn is on the case, as usual, with a fine piece about the "Clime Syndicate," entitled "The Descent of Mann." He has not, to put it mildly, reacted to the Michael Mann lawsuit by describing his adversary with more gentleness or caution.
The rejected paper put its finger on the sore spot: the unjustifiable assumption that CO2, a weak greenhouse gas, has suddenly become a greenhouse gas that dominates even its much stronger cousin, water vapor, because of what is often called "forcing" or "sensitivity," which means an assumption that there is a positive feedback loop that is causing greenhouse warming to spiral out of control. There is no physical explanation of why a positive feedback loop should be present, when Nature abounds with far more examples of negative feedback loops tending to equilibrium. The assumption that the feedback is positive is entirely inferred from historical data, then plugged into computer models to create predictions. The problem is that the historical data don't particularly support the positive sign on the feedback loop: at best they support widely varying estimates of its magnitude, and they can with equal rationality be seen to support a negative feedback loop. Nor does a positive feedback loop assumption make for a predictive model that matches experimental data, particularly during the last inconvenient 17 years, which have seen an inexplicable pause in inevitable warming that is sure to be followed by the apocalypse.
Here are the peer reviewer's comments explaining why a paper pointing out problems with various models' feedback assumptions would be "unhelpful":
COMMENTS TO THE AUTHOR(S)
The manuscript . . . test[s] the consistency between three recent "assessments" of radiative forcing and climate sensitivity . . . . The study finds significant differences between the three assessments and also finds that the independent assessments of forcing and climate sensitivity within AR5 are not consistent if one assumes the simple energy balance model to be a perfect description of reality. . . . . The finding of differences between the three "assessments" and within the assessments . . . are reported as apparent inconsistencies. The paper does not make any significant attempt at explaining or understanding the differences, it rather puts out a very simplistic negative message giving at least the implicit impression of "errors" being made within and between these assessments . . . . Summarising, the simplistic comparison of [forcing ranges] . . ., combined with the statement they they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side. One cannot and should not simply interpret the IPCCs ranges for AR4 or 5 as confidence intervals or pdfs and hence they are not directly comparable to observation based intervals (as e.g. in Otto et al). In the same way that one cannot expect a nice fit between observational studies and the CMIP5 models.Oh. Well, all right, then. The silly author expected a nice fit between observational studies and models. Can't be printing unfair criticism like that! Especially if he's some kind of wet-behind-the-ears arriviste or a well-known looney denialist:
For a decade, [the author] was director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology. For another decade, he was Director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. He's won the Descartes Prize, and a World Meteorological Organization prize for groundbreaking research in numerical weather prediction. Over the years, he and Michael Mann have collaborated on scientific conferences.That's what peer review is for: to elevate the tone.
Apostates
Liberals exaggerate "much" more, says the study -- meaning that many don't really believe at all.
Nor are we intolerant of questioning. Does not The Ballad of the White Horse say:
But Mark was come of the glittering towns
Where hot white details show,
Where men can number and expound,
And his faith grew in a hard ground
Of doubt and reason and falsehood found,
Where no faith else could grow.
Belief that grew of all beliefs
One moment back was blown
And belief that stood on unbelief
Stood up iron and alone.
Why lie about something so intimate, in an age when you will confess your most intimate transgressions to the crowd?
“I think there’s absolutely a level among liberals of not wanting to be defined by their lack of belief,” says Wear. “But there’s also an element of wanting to hold on to the spiritual benefits or comfort of theological beliefs that come with religion, while not wanting to be associated with a lot of the public implications of faith, including social issues.”One wonders why, in this society, more tolerant of unbelief than ever before, and more tolerant than of any ancient.
Nor are we intolerant of questioning. Does not The Ballad of the White Horse say:
But Mark was come of the glittering towns
Where hot white details show,
Where men can number and expound,
And his faith grew in a hard ground
Of doubt and reason and falsehood found,
Where no faith else could grow.
Belief that grew of all beliefs
One moment back was blown
And belief that stood on unbelief
Stood up iron and alone.
Why lie about something so intimate, in an age when you will confess your most intimate transgressions to the crowd?
Stop calling them rolling coffins
For reasons I cannot fathom, GM included a PowerPoint presentation in its recall agreement with federal safety regulators that included instructions on how to speak like a weaselly lawyer when discussing the stuff we used to call safety defects, n/k/a items that do not perform to design. For reasons I cannot fathom even more, someone seems to have combed through actual employee emails to make a list of particularly unhelpful expressions, and quoted them in this soon-to-be-made-public document. Terms to avoid include:
“Kevorkianesque,” apparently a reference to Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who claimed to have helped more than 130 patients commit euthanasia, was one of the presentation’s “judgment words” to be avoided. Others included: “apocalyptic,” “Band-Aid,” “Challenger,” “Cobain,” “Corvair-like,” “death trap,” “decapitating,” “disemboweling,” “genocide,” “grenadelike,” “Hindenberg,” “impaling,” “rolling sacrophagus (tomb or coffin),” “spontaneous combustion,” “Titanic,” “widow-maker” or “words or phrases with biblical connotation."I am not making this up.
All fixed at the V.A.
What's the count up to, now, seven different V.A. caught falsifying records to hide delays in treatment? But the powers that be are all over it, having demanded the resignation of a top official, Robert Petzel. The administration is so all over it, in fact, that it announced Petzel's replacement several weeks ago, in light of Petzel's planned retirement later this year.
The bare and the clothed
Apropos of the dignified "Golden Buns" discussion taking place over at Cassandra's, a rueful ballad:
I went to see my doctor for my annual exam
Standing there in the buff, till suddenly he said, "Man!"
"What is it, doc? Some dread disease? I have to know the score."
"No," he said, "You just don't look good naked any more."
I went to see my doctor for my annual exam
Standing there in the buff, till suddenly he said, "Man!"
"What is it, doc? Some dread disease? I have to know the score."
"No," he said, "You just don't look good naked any more."
Self-cooling electronics
The NPH, a heat-transfer engineer by training, directed me to this article about some surprising qualities of graphene. Most matter follows a well-recognized law requiring that its heat-transfering properties remain constant regardless of its volume. Graphene, in arrogant disregard of this law, gets better at transferring heat the bigger your sample is. I have no idea why; the answer seems to have something to do with the rigid molecular structure, which transmits the heat "signal" without dissipating it very fast, and something to do with what the journalist is pleased to call "reduced dimensionality" (close-packing of molecules?). It's like a reverse case of the "telephone game."
Anyway, apparently it's a big deal for the electrical engineers, who are always on the lookout for tiny bits of things that can do their work without overheating themselves and everyone around them. Many of the amazing gadgets we take for granted these days are possible only because engineers found a way to perform tasks with tiny moving parts that didn't generate more heat than could be quickly and safely dissipated.
The NPH used to spend a lot of time, too, worrying about how hot some things could get in zero-gravity on the Space Station, where the "hot air rises" rule doesn't apply, which means air doesn't circulate the way we take for granted down here: convection cooling doesn't happen without a lot of fans. They say the fan noise got to be quite a problem on the Station, and of course the fan motors contribute to the heat problem themselves. On the Station's exterior, the problem was even more acute. In vacuum, all you get is radiative transfer to dissipate the heat with, which isn't always easy if you're in sunlight or even reflected Earthlight.
Anyway, apparently it's a big deal for the electrical engineers, who are always on the lookout for tiny bits of things that can do their work without overheating themselves and everyone around them. Many of the amazing gadgets we take for granted these days are possible only because engineers found a way to perform tasks with tiny moving parts that didn't generate more heat than could be quickly and safely dissipated.
The NPH used to spend a lot of time, too, worrying about how hot some things could get in zero-gravity on the Space Station, where the "hot air rises" rule doesn't apply, which means air doesn't circulate the way we take for granted down here: convection cooling doesn't happen without a lot of fans. They say the fan noise got to be quite a problem on the Station, and of course the fan motors contribute to the heat problem themselves. On the Station's exterior, the problem was even more acute. In vacuum, all you get is radiative transfer to dissipate the heat with, which isn't always easy if you're in sunlight or even reflected Earthlight.
Idaho Leads The Way
These are men of the people!
I'd vote for either of the guys with beards for a state-level office. I know exactly what they stand for, and just what they hope to accomplish if elected. There's no doubt that they want to hold the office for those purposes only, and not for self-enrichment.
Are they crazy? Well, most people are. They aren't lying to you, though. Besides, any elected office that's too scary to turn over to an ordinary crazy person is too powerful anyway.
I'd vote for either of the guys with beards for a state-level office. I know exactly what they stand for, and just what they hope to accomplish if elected. There's no doubt that they want to hold the office for those purposes only, and not for self-enrichment.
Are they crazy? Well, most people are. They aren't lying to you, though. Besides, any elected office that's too scary to turn over to an ordinary crazy person is too powerful anyway.
Hashtag Diplomacy Works!
But as always, you can't have truly effective diplomacy without a robust military option.
In response to the new demands, Marine Corps Cyberspace Command unveiled a new Twitter task force of Marine Expeditionary Hashtaggers (MEH). “This is a whole new theater of warfare,” said MARFORCYBER spokesman Lt. Col. Brock Ruggedsson. “The Marines of the MEH will significantly impact world events 140 outraged characters at a time."More on the subject here.
Pleading for Sodom
"Suppose there were fifty righteous people in the city; would you really sweep away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people within it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike! Far be it from you! Should not the judge of all the world do what is just?”I was thinking of this passage while reading Dan Henninger's piece on the closing of minds at some of America's elite academies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was told not to speak, though she is an atheist and a feminist, for she had slandered Islam. Christine Lagarde was told not to speak, though she is one of the world's most successful women and a leader of the International Monetary Fund, for the IMF has gone from being a leftist darling to falling under suspicion of "imperialist" leanings. Robert J. Birgeneau, who as Chancellor of Berkeley was one of the guiding stars of political correctness and a long-time advocate of gay marriage, he was told not to speak. Why? Because Berkeley's police used force to expel Occupy protesters.
The LORD replied: If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.
Abraham spoke up again: “See how I am presuming to speak to my Lord, though I am only dust and ashes! What if there are five less than fifty righteous people? Will you destroy the whole city because of those five?” I will not destroy it, he answered, if I find forty-five there.
But Abraham persisted, saying, “What if only forty are found there?” He replied: I will refrain from doing it for the sake of the forty.
Then he said, “Do not let my Lord be angry if I go on. What if only thirty are found there?” He replied: I will refrain from doing it if I can find thirty there.
Abraham went on, “Since I have thus presumed to speak to my Lord, what if there are no more than twenty?” I will not destroy it, he answered, for the sake of the twenty.
But he persisted: “Please, do not let my Lord be angry if I speak up this last time. What if ten are found there?” For the sake of the ten, he replied, I will not destroy it.
-Genesis 18:24-32
Just as Sodom turned away from the righteousness of the Lord, these academies have turned away from the moral laws on which they were founded. Established as places of free speech and respectful inquiry, they have become dens of anger and oppression. Henninger explains how it began as a purge against conservatives in the academy, but now has come to consume even those who ought to be darlings of the left -- who have, indeed, been men and women of the left all their lives.
It will not take God to destroy an institution that leaves behind the good it was founded to achieve, and out of which its power grew. Their power depends upon their doing that good, for the sake of which good people donate money or pay taxes to support them, and send their children to be educated there. For a while these institutions may linger, while a few righteous remain to do the work that justified these institutions' economic and social support.
When the day comes that you 'can no longer find ten righteous people among them,' though, they will cease to be.
UPDATE: Via Lars Walker, apparently Science Fiction is now undergoing the same process.
Racist Sexist Fascist
[T]olerance, no, is not – it should not be a two-way street. It's a one-way street. You cannot say to someone that who you are is wrong, an abomination, is horrible, get a room, and all of those other things that people said about Michael Sam, and not be forced -- not forced, but not be made to understand that what you're saying and what you're doing is wrong.But what you think is who you are. Doesn't that follow from your own ideology? You aren't your sex, or we're sexist. You aren't your race or the color of your skin, or we're racist. You're not your religion, because we are all free to criticize the tenets of our religion and take them as metaphorically as we want. You're not your upbringing for the same reason. You're certainly not bound by your physical 'gender.'
To be free, on the left-liberal reading, is to be free to self-determine. You are what you decide to be. That means you are what you think. You are what you choose to believe in.
Thus if one cannot say to someone that what they are is wrong, one cannot criticize thoughts or ideas once the thinker of those thoughts has identified with them. That follows logically from what has been said before.
This is a contradiction of the will. Willing this understanding of 'who we are' means that you can't say that "You can't say that who you are is wrong." It's madness. It's irrational. It doesn't make any sense at all.
Or are you a racist? A sexist? You've confessed to being a fascist.
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