Roman Polanski defenders don’t leave any middle ground

I’ve avoided discussing Roman Polanski’s recent arrest for skipping bail on his 1978 statutory rape charge, but I’ve been watching it from afar. And I really don’t believe some of the public comments some people have made about Polanski, and about his 13-year-old victim.

I’m stunned, frankly. And now we can add one more lunatic to the pile: Gore Vidal.

I like to poke fun at Hollywood and the entertainment industry. It’s easy, and it’s fun, because these ridiculous people bring it on themselves. Despite that, the media refuses to criticize any of them, because the media depends on access to these yahoos for much of its content. They are, quite literally, “off limits”.

But what we’ve seen lately really ought to make some of us sit up and pay more attention to the types of people who produce our television shows, our movies, our books and CDs, and our newspapers. Because if their recent comments defending Polanski’s disgusting crime reflect their true vision of right and wrong, then we need to confront some ugly truths about our star-centric culture.

The list of such people is long, and disturbing. I’m not going to bother digging up links to all of them here and glorify their ridiculous statements.

So the big picture here is that it’s easy to dismiss cultural influence as unimportant, but I think that’s a mistake. A really big mistake.

And if the fact that Gore Vidal is an amoral twit with nothing useful to tell us wasn’t clear before, then it is pretty damn clear now.

But he’s like 145 years old, so who cares? Here’s why it matters: his outlandish, insane comments in this Atlantic interview a couple of weeks ago didn’t cause any kind of public backlash in the media.

This tells us just about everything we need to know, about both the media and Hollywood in general. And what it tells us is not good.

I’ll break it down for them: it’s ok to come out in public and criticize creeps that drug and rape and sodomize 13 year old girls. Really.

Give it a shot sometime.

Bears offensive line so bad it screws up the entire offense?

Brad Biggs gives his usual 10Thoughts about Sunday’s Bears game, a dreary 30-6 drubbing of the ridiculous Cleveland Browns.

I have a theory: the Bears’ O-line is so awful that it is screwing up the entire offense.

They can’t run the ball, because the line can’t open any holes. When you can’t run the ball, the defense tees off on pass plays. And since their pass blocking isn’t that great either, this means that on every offensive snap, basically, they are operating at a big disadvantage.

Stated another way, if they had the O-line of the Colts, or the Broncos, or the Patriots, how many of their current issues just go away? A lot, I’ll bet.

I was not convinced when Jerry Angelo said after last season that the QB was the biggest issue to be solved. It seems like I was right, and Angelo was wrong:

Just sticking to offense, and in approximately the order I’d fix them:

• old, slow, offensive line,
• bad, small receivers,
• no discernible fullback,
• a general lack of depth across all positions,
• mediocre position coaches,
• unproven quarterback who has never been given a real chance with a real offense.

Does bringing Tom Brady, or Drew Brees, or whoever else you like, fix all that, too?

Cutler, Brady, Brees, same difference.

Note that Kyle Orton seems to be doing just fine in Denver, with that great offensive line, big physical receivers, and good coaching.

Feel free, then, to draw important conclusions about the people running the Chicago Bears, both on the field, and off.

I know I have.

You can’t really call it “education” if you aren’t teaching enough facts

E. D. Hirsch, who wrote the bestselling book “Cultural Literacy” in the 1980s, seems to have been validated by education reform in Massachusetts over the last 15 years.

His belief—which I completely agree with—is that background facts are an important piece of the educational puzzle, especially as opposed to the popular practice of teaching reading and writing as skills, completely disconnected from the world around us, and from our history.

His Core Knowledge curriculum, for example, specifies:

… in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects.

Today’s high school and college students have great difficulty writing effectively, and comprehending what they read (ask any college or high school teacher). I’ll join Mr. Hirsch in blaming that on the fateful decision to abandon in the early school years both the emphasis on facts, and on reading great literature about real people and places from history.

Context matters. History matters. Knowing what came before us matters. And it all matters in very real ways, not just in being good at Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit.

Hirsch on educating the poor:

“Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”

He’s right, and we know he’s right because we used to educate our children with more practical knowledge, as he advocates, and we didn’t have poor performance in our students that we see today.

But even though his system works, and he can prove it, Education schools have worked hard to discredit him. Hmmm. Whose interests are being served there?

Education schools have been experimenting on our children for decades, and it is not working.

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

Please read the whole thing. I’ve just barely scratched the surface here.

Frankly, it comes down to a debate between what the Founding Fathers wanted, and what today’s Ed schools want. Do we really have to ponder that question for long? I know I don’t.

The future of our children depends, at least in part, on our understanding of (1) why we are failing to educate our children adequately, and (2) how to address it. E.D. Hirsch seems to have a pretty good handle on it. Will he continue to be largely ignored?

Bill Ayers has more legitimacy in Ed schools than a genuine educator like E.D. Hirsch. This tells us a lot. And frankly, it makes me ill.

The only government intervention that will drive the economy is “getting the hell out of the way”

I think I just found a new blog to love. It’s called Mean Street, at wsj.com, by a man named Evan Newmark. Here’s why.

He says we should be very careful about buying into this “the recession is over” stuff in A Sham GDP for a Sham Economy. Our GDP “growth” announced today is from government spending, much of it from cash for clunkers. This is just kicking the can down the road in the form of borrowing against the future. Remember how auto sales tanked horribly in September, after the program ended? That is not, by anybody’s definition, an “economic recovery”.

But even better, this post is a must-read: It’s Official — Obamanomics Isn’t Working.

You likely missed it. But Thursday’s Congressional testimony from Obama Council of Economic Adviser Chief, Christina Romer was the big story. She officially admitted what many of us already knew: Obamanomics isn’t working.

The $787 billion Obama stimulus package that was supposed to keep U.S. unemployment at under 8% will not only fail to keep it under 10%. But by mid-2010 “fiscal stimulus will be contributing little to further growth.”

As for President Obama’s big promise last January to create 3.5 or 4 million new American jobs. Forget it. “Unemployment is unlikely to end 2010 much below its current levels.”

Romer’s admission was startling. You’ll recall that it was her January 10th paper that outlined what a mighty job machine the Obama presidency would be. Every 1% boost in GDP would get a million new jobs.

Now here we are running stimulus-heavy budget deficits that will total almost $3 trillion over this year and next. GDP is on the rise again. And still, no new jobs.

What’s even more depressing, is that the Obama White House still hasn’t figured out why businesses aren’t hiring.

The White House seems pretty certain about how American businesses should behave. And it seems pretty certain that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies and banks aren’t doing what they should be doing.

But all that joblessness? Who knows? Not Romer. It’s all a macroeconomic mystery of time-lags and GDP multipliers. In her testimony, she offers up seven different guesstimates on jobs created by the stimulus.

Does it ever occur to the White House to see the economy as businessmen do? Does it ever occur to the White House that America’s businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t trust Washington?

No. Business is E-V-I-L!

Just check out President Obama’s Saturday radio address on small business to see what I’m talking about.

The president paid tribute to small business, to “mom and pop stores and neighborhood restaurants we know and love.” Small business, he intoned, was the “engine of our economy,” “the heart of the American dream.”

So did the president propose new ways of cutting payroll taxes, employment costs and red-tape for the “engine of our economy?” Nope. Instead, he promised more federal SBA loans and health insurance reform courtesy of federal intervention and mandates.

How many small businessmen do you know that want government more involved in their business?

I know lots of small businessmen and I can’t think of one. I myself employ just one worker in New York City — and the amount of paperwork, fees, taxes and aggravation involved makes it feel like I’m employing a thousand.

I recently discovered that as a self-employed New Yorker I now have the pleasure of paying a new Metropolitan Commuter Mobility Transportation Tax. This measly 0.34% tax on wages is exactly the kind of stupidity that kills jobs. It’s the kind of tinkering that governments can’t resist. And it’s the very reason government terrifies businesses.

Read the whole thing.

How did we end up with a bunch of Keystone Cops in the White House?

 

Pelosi and Reid: “Hey America! Don’t Like My Legislating? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT!”

“Of the People, By the People, For the People”? Pfffffft.

Sen. Orrin Hatch: “Democrats have decided they have to pass a bill no matter how unpopular it is.”

And by “Democrats”, he obviously means “Nancy Pelosi” and “Harry Reid”.

What a stunning time we live in. Harry Reid I can understand. The Senate is composed mainly of pompous pricks.

But the Speaker of the House? The House is the most democratic chunk of our federal government. Pelosi is a Democrat. Ostensibly, this is the party of the powerless, the man on the street, Joe Six-Pack. All House members face re-election every two years, so they have to at least pretend they care about what we think. Usually, anyway. Of course, they get behind closed doors and stab us in the back when it suits them, but at least they gave the impression of caring about what we wanted in the past.

And make no mistake, the public has made it very clear—via face-to-face meetings with elected representatives, and polling data—that they don’t like the expensive, mostly-hidden piles of crap being sold to us as “health care reform”.

Assessing Chicago 2016 financial risks

Chicago learns next Friday, October 2, whether it will host the 2016 Summer Olympics. But if they do win the games, the taxpayers in Cook County won’t learn until much later just how big the bill might be.

There is a 12% profit factored into the $3.8M budget, but that pales in comparison to the potential cost overruns, as described in this eyes-wide-open article “Peeling back the coverage” at chicagobusiness.com.

For instance, while there is $1.1B of insurance promised, there is no insurance coverage (or not enough) for:

• “… the risk that private lenders won’t shell out $1 billion to finance construction of the Olympic Village”
• “… shortfalls in corporate sponsorship sales, which they predict will rake in $1.8 billion, two-thirds more than London expects to collect for the 2012 games”
• “… overruns on the construction of Olympics venues tops out at 10% over budgeted costs”
• “… $246 million in contributions from private donors, a source already tapped for $72 million to finance the city’s bid”

And that’s just the insurance piece of the pie.

Predictably, construction costs are key, with the main costs being the Olympic Village and the sports venues. The plan is to convince private developers to “transform the former Michael Reese Hospital into athletic quarters to be sold later as condominiums or rental housing”. I’m not quite sure if this means converting the actual buildings themselves–which seems sort of crazy to me–or if it means first tearing down the whole thing and building new.

As for sports venues, the 2004 Athens games went double what they budgeted. The 2010 Vancouver games are running 23% higher than projected. Chicago 2016 is only allocating a 10% overrun, plus another 10% in insurance on top of that.

Then we have concerns about revenue projections.

Just read the whole thing.

The money quote by Allan Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago: “Athens was three times over budget; London is four times over budget. I don’t see that happening here. But are they going to come in at $4.8 billion? No, I just don’t see it.”

Holy Skewed Temperature Samples, Batman!

Just because some call it “science” does not make it so:

Eighty-nine percent of official U.S. temperature measurement stations are corrupted by poor site selection that gives false warming signals, according to a new study  by meteorologist Anthony Watts.

According to the federal government’s own siting criteria, the corrupting influences at those stations create a margin of error larger than the entire asserted warming of the twentieth century.

Eighty. Nine. Percent.

For those who don’t understand how embarrassing this is for the entire CO2-is-warming-the-planet theory, let me explain.

There are two key points here: the climate data itself is corrupted, and the climate models that use that data are unproven.

Climate Data is Corrupted

Computer models are the main support for the idea that CO2 warms the planet in the first place. There is no other evidence, to my knowledge, that supports CO2 as a primary driver for warming. These models are pretty much it. In fact, historical ice cores show the opposite, that CO2 is a symptom of warming, not a cause, and that the CO2 buildup lags the warming by about 800 years.

Those computer models, of course, need a bunch of historical data points as input in order to crunch the numbers and make predictions into the future.

Among the data they need, of course, is temperature data. And apparently, 89% of that data is basically garbage.

If the input data is garbage, then it doesn’t matter how great the rest of the modeling software is, the conclusions it presents are garbage too.

Climate Models are Unproven

And as it happens, the computer models used by the IPCC are suspect as well, because they haven’t published the source code so that it can be peer reviewed. Here’s why that is important.

I’ve worked in the software industry for over 25 years, most of that as a software developer. Computers are not magic. They can only do what the code they are running tells them to do. If that code has even minor errors in logic, the results are suspect.

To accept the conclusions of a software model that predicts the future, obviously you have no reality to compare the model’s conclusions with. So you need to have a “code review” by unbiased software developers who did not write that code, in order to check for logic errors, remove potential biases, ask questions like “why are you doing this here”, etc. It has to be examined, line by line, to see exactly what is going on in there, what inputs it is using, what it does with those inputs, the assumptions it makes about the effect of the different inputs, etc.

For all we know, a climate software model that hasn’t had a code review could be reading Ted Williams’ stats from baseball-reference.com and then saying “look, the planet is heating up!”. Who really knows? You can’t. Computer software is inherently secretive unless the source code is accessible to experts who can de-cipher it.

And until that code is available for the experts to examine, the models themselves are little more than a plaything.

What Science Does and Does Not Look Like

Yet, somehow, these playthings have been accepted as proof positive by the IPCC and the various governmental agencies the world over. They are untroubled by the lack of accountability on the part of the climate modelers.

That, my friends, is “advocacy”, not “science”.

So. The temperature samples are flawed, and so are the climate models that use the temperatures samples as input. Which means we have not just one, but two layers of obfuscation hampering our predictive ability regarding climate.

And according to the article above, the margin of error just from the bad sampling methodology alone is greater than the entire asserted warming of the twentieth century. Let that soak in for a second.

We keep hearing about a “scientific consensus” that CO2 is warming the planet. What does all of the above that tell you about the “scientists” who formed that consensus? What does it tell you about the degree of confidence we can have in their conclusions?

Science isn’t about “consensus”. This ain’t American Idol.

Science is about proof, and facts, and using those facts to prove (or disprove) theories. Scientists are supposed to be their own worst critics, and turn every implicit assumption on it’s head, and try to disprove their own theory. The science itself must stand on its own, otherwise, it’s bad science, and deserves to be ignored.

Where is the skepticism, the sharing of ideas, the spirit of pushing knowledge forward for the good of all mankind?

Real scientists do not hide their methods and threaten their questioners. Real scientists welcome examination of their data and methods in a spirit of inquiry and the advancement of mankind.

But in today’s increasingly bizarre world, to question any of this is to risk being considered a lunatic. Supposedly, the sane people are the ones who believe in skewed samples and flawed models. How did that happen? It’s like Pope Benedict and Galileo all over again. As Pope John Paul said about that dark period of scientific history, “This led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.” And so it seems to be happening again.

But as I must constantly remind myself, global warming isn’t about science, it’s about politics and using fear to scare us into supporting new taxes on our energy use and lifestyle.

And it is all based on the most ridiculous “science” one could possibly imagine: bad data feeding bad models. Now hand over your money!

I am always open to theories that are logically sensible and supported by evidence. And I invite anybody who disagrees with my points above to both (a) point me to a qualified review of any IPCC climate modeling source code, AND (b) disprove the conclusions of Anthony Watts regarding corrupted temperature samples. Real science requires that *all* of the steps along the way be correct. Every. Step.

Until such time, I’ll be disregarding all talk about warming the planet with CO2.

And I have to say I’m not wild about money-grubbing politicians and “scientists” using advocacy and obfuscation to deceive me into throwing money at them, on the pretense that it will fix a future problem for which there is no reliable supporting evidence.

Sorry, I’m not riding that train. Why would anybody?

Government Meddling Led to Financial Crisis? Who Knew?

Well, well, well. Lookee here. Congress agrees with me, and blames today’s financial crisis on “federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market”:

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 and led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market intended to help provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. This intervention began with two government-backed corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized their profits but socialized their risks, creating powerful incentives for them to act recklessly and exposing taxpayers to tremendous losses. Government intervention also created “affordable” but dangerous lending policies which encouraged lower down payments, looser underwriting standards and higher leverage. Finally, government intervention created a nexus of vested interests – politicians, lenders and lobbyists – who profited from the “affordable” housing market and acted to kill reforms. In the short run, this government intervention was successful in its stated goal – raising the national homeownership rate. However, the ultimate effect was to create a mortgage tsunami that wrought devastation on the American people and economy. While government intervention was not the sole cause of the financial crisis, its role was significant and has received too little attention.

In recent months it has been impossible to watch a television news program without seeing a Member of Congress or an Administration official put forward a new recovery proposal or engage in the public flogging of a financial company official whose poor decisions, and perhaps greed, resulted in huge losses and great suffering. Ironically, some of these same Washington officials were, all too recently, advocates of the very mortgage lending policies that led to economic turmoil. In a number of cases, political officials even engaged in unethical conduct, helping their political allies, family members and even themselves obtain lucrative positions in the mortgage lending industry and other benefits. At a time when government intervention in private markets has become alarmingly common, government “affordable housing” initiatives offer important lessons about the dangers of government efforts to manipulate or conjure outcomes in the market.

Via Doug Ross’ Twitter feed. and the Carpe Diem blog.

More Restrictive Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan

Sounds to me like this another way of saying “we don’t want to win”:

GIs Told Not to Risk Civilian Lives

KABUL — Beginning today, American Soldiers in Afghanistan will be under orders to back down when they’re chasing Taliban fighters whenever they think that civilians might be at risk.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, will issue the directive as part of an effort to cut down on civilian casualties, which have enraged the Afghan government and residents. Instead of calling in air support or firing into civilian homes where Taliban fighters have sought refuge, commanders will be instructed to reach out to tribal elders or undertake other efforts to dislodge the fighters.

The order is consistent with what national security adviser James L. Jones told McClatchy Newspapers in Washington Wednesday was President Barack Obama’s concern about civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

“General McChrystal has been given instructions when he left here that, in all military operations, that we redouble our efforts to make sure that innocent loss of life is minimized, with zero being the goal,” Jones said, noting that, “In one mishap you can create thousands more terrorists than you had before the mishap.”

Nobody wants civilian casualties, obviously. It is a PR problem, it kills people who may or may not be innocent, and it stirs up local anger.

But we aren’t fighting uniformed fighters on a battlefield with tanks and planes. We are fighting insurgents, who use the fact they blend into the scenery as a tactical advantage. You could even call it a strategic advantage, especially now, with these new rules. In that world, you have to be willing to accept civilian casualties, or you might as well throw your weapons down and go home.

Plus, what is a civilian, anyway, when the local population supports the insurgency, as in a place like Waziristan? It is, essentially, Taliban-istan.

Whose interests are served by pretending there is a bright line to be drawn between civilian and militant in such a place?

We’d better be pretty careful with this question, because it will be used to our opponent’s advantage, and it will hurt our chances of success. It is perceived as weakness during a fight, because that’s exactly what it is. And in a more general sense, it has already affected our perception of who has the moral high ground, in a war against terrorists who blow up children running for candy.

We were already fighting under too-restrictive Rules of Engagement, and now we’ve gone even further in the wrong direction. Supposedly, Obama wants to win in Afghanistan. This is not how you do that.

And don’t be surprised when terrorists play us for suckers by dressing up like women in order to escape confrontation. Hey look, they already did.

Getting Wise Down Under

Good Beer and Demanding Evidence: Two Qualities to Admire in a Country

Australia, at least, is starting to ask serious questions about the “science” behind global warming. Heaven and Earth, a book by Ian Pilmer, is credited with starting that global warming backlash in Australia.

Quoting Rick Moran at the American Thinker piece linked just above:

Cap and trade is not about saving the planet. It is about enriching government at the expense of private industry. Obama expects that selling of carbon credits will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars that will finance his health insurance power grab and other schemes. They are not interested in the science. They are interested in the dollars.

And the American family – to the tune of at least $1300 in increased energy bills – will pay for it.

Exactly right. Same as it ever was.

Read the whole thing.

Our governments are lying to us and treating us like idiots while they prepare to forcibly take our money to pay for a “solution” that won’t work.

Putting aside for a moment all the highly-charged emotion about this … why would anybody want that?

Letterman Finally Offers Real Apology to Palins

Good for Dave. He seems to understand why this was a problem for many people, and he also seems contrite about it. And it’s been accepted, so we can all move on now.

Frankly, I always thought he was better than this, better than the raging loon we’ve been seeing on TV these last eight years or so. Maybe he’s been sucked in by all the other raging loons that inhabit that strange city.

But I’m still not sure people “get” what this is all about.

I think the accepted storyline in the eyes of at least some people is “Letterman made fun of touchy conservatives who then threatened a boycott like a bunch of spoiled children, so he finally had to give in and apologize”.

In truth, the takeaway from this is that Letterman made a joke about conservatives that he would never make about liberals, and he did this because conservatives aren’t viewed as fully human in the eyes of the media establishment, so you can get away with it. They aren’t real people, so who cares?

It’s pandering to the audience they clearly prefer, and nothing more.

“Tolerance: It’s Just a Word We Like to Throw Around!”

The climate that allows it to happen in the first place has to change. And until it does, nothing is really changed.

My earlier post is here: So . . . This is Where We Are Today? Really?

Global Cooling = Very Very Bad

While politicians and other silly people prattle on about global warming, the smart money is on disastrous cooling which could kill crops and people. But “green” is big business today, so that’s the important thing!

Read all of this excellent post at EU Referendum: The road to starvation.

The climate may be changing, all right, but not in the direction you might think.

We live in truly scary times.

Re-Open TWA800?

Jack Cashill says “Reopen the TWA Flight 800 Case”.

Pretty good idea. Not going to happen.

I’ve always been fascinated by this case, and never bought the TWA 800 explanation about a spark in the fuel tank.

First of all, how many billions of air miles have been flown in the last 80 years? And this happens exactly once? Sorry, not buying that. Even an exceedingly rare occurrence, requiring many variables to be just so, happens more often than that.

Second, aerospace engineers go to great lengths to 100% guarantee that a spark could never occur anywhere near a fuel source. If they screwed up, well, once again, we are back to the “just once?” argument. Design failures occur more than once every hundreds of millions of trials.

Third, there is credible eyewtiness testimony from 270 people who say they saw something else happen, and evidence that some witness testimony was doctored or completely made up to support the conclusion that it was due to a spark.

Well, that’s when I say hold the phone.

Two hundred and seventy people. Not just one person, or three, or seven. And not all in one place. They didn’t even know each other. But they all looked into the night sky and saw something bright flying UP from the horizon, turn at an angle, and fly into something else and cause an explosion.

Two hundred seventy examples of this kind of independent eyewitness testimony is awfully tough to explain away. And when you read the way their testimony is twisted into something else, well, what does that tell you?

I don’t claim to know what happened, but I have heard the theories, and all are frightening.

1. Shoulder-fired SAM from terrorists in a small boat in the ocean
2. U.S. Military training accident
3. Submarine-fired missile

None would shock me, and all make more sense to me than a spark in a fuel tank.  

But I do know this: there was more than enough means, motive, and opportunity for shadowy government influence on both the investigation and the official conclusions.

I’m not going to go into tons of detail here. Read the above (including the comments, some very interesting), read Cashill’s book “First Strike”, read the twa800.com site. Examine it yourself. Make up your own mind. Remain open to theories that fit facts. That’s what I do.

Remember, though, that investigations are not perfect. They are subject to meddling, malfeasence, and ineptitude. This is the government we’re talking about. The same goverment that can’t decide if eggs are good for you or not. The same government that included corrupt and overtly political leadership at DOJ, which controls the FBI, and which used that FBI to investigate political enemies of the Clintons.

To pre-suppose that Truth often results from any investigation by that group into an “accident” with a distinct terrorist flavor is to live in fantasy land.

Governments have every motivation to cover up military accidents or terrorist operations run by other nations. Because they are not just embarrassing, they reflect potential national security flaws. And in the face of admitting “yes, some losers dressed in rags sat in a boat a few miles off our shores, and used arms we sold them to shoot down a defenseless civilian airliner”, a government may well try to steer the investigation to a more comfortable conclusion. To the extent that information can be controlled and manipulated, it may well be. None of that should shock us. 

Powerful interests intersect here. Covering up truth, rather than revealing it, is often the whole point.

Again, I don’t have the answer here. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a spark in a fuel tank.

Which line does CO2 get in to get it’s reputation back?

Another day, another debunking of CO2 as a driver of climate:

“Each successive cooling cycle has had an increase in the rate of CO2 growth over the previous warming cycle,indicating that there is no possible correlation of CO2 with global warming.” – How Many IPCC (and Other) Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research?, icecap.us

Note that the data at the link doesn’t even allow a correlation model to be constructed, let alone a causation model.

It’s going to be pretty embarrassing to reel in all that talk about man-made global warming now, isn’t it? Especially since opportunistic politicians are trying to raise our taxes to pay for this non-existent risk?

There are so, so many really good reasons to completely ignore all this global warming hysteria, but the best one continues to be that there is no data to support it.

Things We “Know” That Aren’t True

Facts are stubborn things. By their very nature, they are immutable, unmovable, eternal. There is no equivocation with a fact. It just is, always and forever.

That’s why we like them. Their “truthiness” is an intrinsic good, with real value.

Then we have pop culture facts. Things we “know”, that aren’t really true. These are far less valuable, but we seem to uncover more and more of them every day.

Some of the best pop culture facts are “green” myths. For example, from a csmonitor.com green blog, a few of the Top Ten Green Living Myths:

• Green myth: Recycled paper is better for the environment than virgin paper. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: Local food is always greener. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: Washing dishes by hand uses less water than a dishwasher. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: An electric car is best for the environment. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: If you want to help alleviate global warming, plant trees. Fact: It depends!

But don’t worry. I’m sure all those *other* environmental crises are based on solid, true facts that you can take to the bank, instead of the pop culture kind.

And while you’re there, take out a bucketful of cash to help pay for all the new taxes that we’ll soon have to pay. In order to somehow stop warming that has already stopped.

Not only that, the dangerous warming has turned into dangerous cooling. Potentially historic cooling, the kind that kills crops. Which causes starvation.

Also, the silly idea that CO2 is dangerous and even toxic to our health seems to be losing momentum.

A bunch of pop culture facts we thought we knew. Turns out … a lot of it is b.s.!

Imagine that.

Quote of the Day

Ann Coulter:

Start with the fact that the average Gitmo detainee has gained 20 pounds in captivity. There’s even a medical term for it now: “the Gitmo gut.” Some prisoners have been heard whispering, “If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls.”

From her humanevents.com column “Watching MSNBC is Torture”, May 6, 2009.

In that column, she makes vicious fun of clowns on MSNBC who—get this—actually thought they could compare Japanese conduct re: American prisoners of war in WWII with American conduct re: enemy combatants in the War on Terror, and come out ahead on that deal.

Q: If ignorant yahoos in the media ignore established historical facts, and run around with their hair on fire screaming at me about things I know are stupid and untrue, not to mention anti-American … do they make a sound?

A: Yes. They sound a little bit like little girls in pretty pink dresses playing hopscotch. But not as cute, and not nearly as bright.

When Do We Say “Enough is Enough”?

The number of Chicago Public School students murdered this school year? 35

Alex Arellano, 15 years old, was said to be a quiet kid who stayed away from gangs. He was tortured before he was murdered: beaten with baseball bats, hit by a car, shot in the head, and burned beyond recognition.

Thirty. Five. Children. Murdered. In one school year.

I don’t care how big a school system is, you can’t explain away a statistic like that.

It indicates social breakdown on a mass scale.

People keep trying to address education failures in big cities by treating them as education problems. They are not. They are generally social problems, manifested in many ways, just one of which is poor education performance.

Security is the first requirement in a productive society. Unsurprisingly, kids who have to worry about getting killed while going to school don’t focus all that well.

So, some questions.

Who is really in charge in the city of Chicago? Is it the gangs, or the police?

And can the mayor continue to insist that the problems with crime are caused by legal gun owners? After all, that is the only rational basis for arguments in favor of banning handguns. So why isn’t it working?

I’ll just throw this out there. It isn’t working because it can’t work. It is a fatally flawed idea. It isn’t a matter of not enough money, or not enough laws, or not enough police, or just needing a few tweaks to get the “right” kind of weapons off the streets.

The evidence says that concealed-carry laws reduce crime, while handgun bans increase it; a city that truly wants to be a safer place would opt for policies that work, instead of platitudes that don’t.

Peoples lives depend on these policies. It isn’t a parlor game.

Creating “Green” Jobs that Serve No Market? Good Plan!

Spain tried the “green jobs” thing:

“The U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about nine jobs lost for every four (green jobs) created,” Alvarez wrote in his 41-page study of Spain’s own green-job revolution.

“An examination of Europe’s experience” in trying to green the economy, which dates back to 1997, “reveals these policies to be terribly economically counterproductive.”

Oh. Well, I’m sure it will work much better for us: we’ve got a cool President. Economic markets bow at his feet!

Hmmm. Seems to me the Soviets tried this kind central planning to “create” jobs, and the end result was that they produced too many razor blades and not enough toilet paper.

But never mind all that. “Green” is the hot marketing trend right now. And we know how well economic markets always follow hot marketing trends!

We’re From the Government, and We’re Here to Help You … Er, I Mean, Take Your Money by Force

Dustbury notes some problems with red light cameras in Georgia:

Where there are red-light cameras, says Georgia law, there’s supposed to be one extra second of yellow. Much of the time, though, there isn’t, and Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Cassville) wants to know why.

Like I posted in a comment there, it’s basically a tax on driving, at some point. An illegal tax, in this case.

In Illinois we have these red light cameras in some spots; I’m not sure about the law on yellow light times. Need to check on that.

And now some genius in our gubmint wants to implement traffic cameras all over the place to catch speeders.

I’m not such a big fan. 

1. Using technology to entrap de facto “normal” driving is a little too “1984″-ish for me.

2. Not only that, but lengthening yellow lights seems to reduce or even eliminate drivers running red lights.

3. Which, logically would seem to obviate the need for red light cameras in the first place.

4. Unless, of course, red light cameras are primarily a fund-raising tool, rather than a public safety measure.

As Instapundit says:

If all you care about is safety, then, you can accomplish as much by adding a second to the yellow light. If you care about revenue, though, you’ll shorten yellow-light times — as some places have done — even though that’s worse for safety.

Government and business colluding to screw taxpayers? That, like, hardly ever happens!

Good Morning, North Korea!

North Korea launched a rocket of some kind yesterday, and has been pursuing nuclear weapons research.

A post at Watts Up With That might be worth a read, especially if the term “EMP” means nothing to you: Bzt! Welcome to the dark ages.

Edu-macate yo’ self. And have a nice day!

UPDATE: In light of all this, the President’s idea that the U.S. should unilaterally disarm seems iffy. OK, it’s idiotic, is what it is.

News flash: the world is not full of shiny happy people who want to be our friends. It just isn’t, and it never will be.