Intellectual disarmament

Here's an exceedingly odd article in Foreign Policy about the accelerating collapse of Libya, because Republicans.  What I apparently didn't understand before is that the purpose of a Congressional investigative committee is not to look into malfeasance by United States officials but to solve Libya's internal problems.  The author sputters with outrage that Republicans in Congress have obsessed about the President's "bungled communications" about Benghazi rather than about how to transform Libya into a paradise without committing either treasure or blood.  That turns out to be the proper task of the opposition party rather than, say, the White House or the State Department.  Here are the helpful ideas of the State Department, by the way:

"Libya has many challenges, and we're aware of that," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Monday.  "We believe they cannot be overcome if its leaders don't settle differences through dialogue and work together." 

Last week, in London, Secretary of State John Kerry pledged to do "all we can to help the Libyans" solve their political problems. "We need to try to accelerate the effort to bring about stability and security and the governance that is necessary to provide the time and the space for Libyan authorities to be able to confront the threat from extremism and the challenges that their country faces of just providing governance to their people. . . ." 

But it seems the problem wasn't the flabby emptiness of these sentiments; it was Congress's inexplicable refusal to provide "resources":

With the hours upon hours of hearings dedicated to Benghazi, very little of that time focused on how Congress could help provide the resources the administration might need to improve the situation in Libya.  The fact that this isn't likely to change bodes poorly for the country's future.

The article mentions the administration's alert readiness to evacuate the Libyan embassy as soon as things go from desperate to nightmarish this time.  (Not gonna make that mistake twice!)  Imagine the morale in that embassy.  "Yes, this cesspool of a country's blowing up, and I can't imagine what professional sins I must have committed to have been assigned here, but I take comfort in knowing that Washington has my back."

Hwæt!

Tolkien's Beowulf is out today.

Two True Things From The FBI

The FBI has issued a couple of interesting statements lately: worries about concentrated government power, and a confession of defeat in the War on Drugs.

It would be nice to hear more frankness like this. Well done.

A Debate For Our Times

The truth about the National Democratic Party: Communist or Sith?

Clue bat

The president boasted that wait-times at the VA have been slashed by 50% in the last year.

But wait, wasn't there some kind of scandal about fudged wait times?  Maybe he hasn't heard about it yet.

I shouldn't blame him too much.  Most of the coverage I've seen lately is depressingly confused, focusing on the wait-times themselves instead of the fraudulent coverup.  The wait-times have been with us for a long time and are unlikely to be fixed as long as we're moving in the direction of socialized medicine instead of away from it; they're also an extremely comfortable issue for the current administration, being one of its many "inherited" problems.  The current scandal is, or should be, about the fraud, the coverup, and the President's refusal even to acknowledge it, let alone to effect a remedy.

Even though, as he says, "That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want."  You've got a telephone and a fountain pen, Mr. President.  How about putting your tush in gear to solve a purely executive-department problem?  You may not be able to supply decent medical care to vets (or at least, not until you reform your philosophy), but you can sure address fraud in your own ranks.  It might even be easy to get the voters and Congress behind a solution if the problem isn't deliberately buried.

Books, Covers

Sometimes judgment may be legitimate.

The Quest for Bannockburn

In the run-up to the celebrations attending the 700th anniversary -- 23 June, remember -- BBC Two has put together a fairly neat short history. If you aren't fully familiar with the Bannockburn, you could do worse than to look it over.

Price-fixing, Part . . . oh, I forget

Health insurance rates too high in California?  No problem, we'll respond just as we did to unruly prices on other necessities.  Remember the fabulous success of California's artificial "market" for energy prices?  Me, too:  most of my work starting in 2001 arose out of the nationwide wave of electrical power generator bankruptcies that began with Pacific Gas & Electric, a business failure caused 100% by barking-mad state power utility regulators who thought they could repeal the law of supply and demand with a regulatory wand.  Regulators never dreamed that micromanaging PG&E's business would lead to brownouts.  It worked for the Soviet Union, right?

The more critical a product is, the worse idea it is to jack with its market.  Price caps mean crashed supply and stymied innovation, last time, this time, and every time.

"There Is No More Molly"

Mark Steyn remarks on the fourth anniversary of the disappearance of cartoonist Molly Norris:

[Four years ago]

You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she's been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization's sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine's Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris' own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: "There is no more Molly"?

[Today]

Because of the Muslim death threats, Molly Norris, who started the event, had to go into hiding and change her name. She disappeared completely and nobody knows whether she is dead or alive.

The latter quote is from an article about the "Draw Mohammed Day," which was the event she started. This year it was shut down by Toronto police.

Against Rutgers

P. J. O'Rourke has posted a spirited defense of Madame Rice, a harsh indictment of Rutgers' institutional culture and college education generally, and a reminder of an excellent poem that I hadn't read in many years. Indeed, I had forgotten the poet -- not the poem itself, but for some reason I thought it was Thoreau's work, and not Robert Frost's.

SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

"Elves" is not a bad explanation, after all.

A Day of Civic Duty

Today I both voted and, shortly thereafter, donated blood to the Red Cross. Tonight we'll have the exciting tabulation of the winners and losers, and see how the general election will shape up.

I went with Todd Robinson over Michelle Nunn not out of any strong sense that she was a bad candidate, but just for the reason most people will vote for her: her father was Sam Nunn, a man I greatly respect. On reflection, though her career in charitable organizations is worthy of respect, the real reason she's the out-front favorite is just because she comes from a famous family and has a famous name. Robinson has earned the respect he has all by himself, as for example when he served with the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment.

In a way that's unfair to Ms. Nunn, who isn't at fault for having famous parents, nor for coming of age at the same time that Jimmy Carter's grandson is going to be a candidate for governor, or at the same time that we've recently had two Bushes and two Clintons as serious contenders for President (and a third Bush on the way, according to reports). Of course we have had the Kennedys for years, and of course every President we've ever had has been kin to George Washington.

Nevertheless, I believe that if there is a natural aristocracy, it must be an aristocracy not of blood but of virtue. We should look for the ones who have earned it. I have no doubt that Mr. Robinson will say, at his victory or his concession speech, that he owes everything to his family. In a way he will be right, but not in the same way. Doubtless he owes them a great deal, but not a direct ascension to the top of the ticket; doubtless he couldn't have done it without them, but it was him all alone there in the mud and the night.

UPDATE: With 2% of results in, NBC already feels safe calling it for Michelle Nunn.

Battle of the Nations: Good Parts Version

Well, "best parts version," but that loses the reference.



That Ukrainian in the beginning may have had an unfair advantage in terms of real-world experience.

Foreign Cars Do Sometimes Resemble Trolls

[A]round 7 a.m. as she drove her red BMW by the intersection of Southeast 7th and Morrison.... A man dressed in chain-mail with a helmet, shield and carrying a sword and staff ran into traffic and started attacking her car.

Apparently she called the police and reported that "a pirate" was attacking her. A gross mis-identification!

Pointing the gun turrets in

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 heartbreak of GMO food

Oh, come on.  Who wouldn't want to grow this?

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.

Public Pianos

A great idea, if the guy who stops by to play it is this guy.

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":

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.