Monumental Iraqi Election Roundup.

Against the Grain has all the links.

Lust.

[Via Godspy.]

Daniel Berenger in the New York Times has a long article on The Making of a Molester The article follows "Roy," a man who no one suspected might be "grooming" his stepdaughter and who even after his arrest and conviction may still be only mimicking moral behavior. This passage might be of interest to those with a theological bent:

Facing up to what he has done, he knows, is a requirement for graduating from treatment. And this might lead, he hopes, to a judge's reducing his term of probation. The treatment theory is basic: to acknowledge both his crime and the anarchy of lust that lies within him is the first step toward his finding self-control. So the ability to confront himself -- and to be candid with Liddle about his sexual yearnings -- is a requirement, too, if he wants to do anything outside the bounds of his probation restrictions: visit his parents over the state line in New York or go to a bowling alley or a movie or a family function, anyplace where he might come in contact with children under 16.

It's interesting that modern psychiatry has reinvented confesstion and penance.

Regarding Senator Boxer (Dem., Fever Swamp).

Mickey Kaus offers an explanation for Senator Boxer's decision to represent .01% of California - it's all about funding from the "true believers":

Here's an alternative theory: Money. It used to be that at this stage, opposition party leaders would be making conciliatory noises in an attempt to please voters, and conservative or centrist noises in an attempt to please business lobbyists and PACs. But maybe the amount of money that can be raised over the Internet from Democratic true believers is now more important than PAC money. And if you want to draw a Dean-like share of this Web loot, you have to be ruthless in bashing Bush. Not all the consequences of Internet politics are benign. ... P.S.: Note that this theory explains Barbara Boxer's behavior too. ...

Book Review: Jared Diamond's "Collapse."

Spiked Science says its simplistic and polemical.

A job is a job.

Logos links to a story where a German woman has been denied unemployment benefits because she refused to take a job in a brothel. Prostitution is legal in Germany and it seems that distinctions based on morality are passe for the cultured Europeans.

Back in Action.

The Holy Weblog is back from hiatus.

Signs of Intelligent Life at Democratic Underground.

There is some dissent occurring at DU - until they remove the posts - on the subject of whether leftists should be happy about democracy, even if it's promoted by Republicans. What may be interesting to science fiction fans is a DU post by "Joatsimeon" who lays down this intelligent riff:

"Everyone knows Saddam was basically a CIA agent who was installed and supported by the US."

-- how odd that we ended up fighting two wars against him, then. I knew the CIA weren't infallible, but that's a bit slipshod even for Langley... glyph of irony.

For those who really want to know, I suggest looking up the history of the Ba'athist party. Short form, it's a classic fascist integralist-nationalist party founded in the 20's and 30's by admirers of Mussolini and Hitler.

Incidentally, Saddam was consistently aligned with the USSR during the Cold War. Did you wonder where all those T-72 tanks came from?

This is the sort of nonsense that gives Democrats a bad name.

"and the protection of Israel"

-- which is bad... why? Unless you're of the "death to the Jews" faction?

"I'm not going to believe for one moment the US will let the vote carry any weight that would actually help Iraqi people."

-- Dude, life is not a zero-sum game. The fact that the US benefits does not mean that Iraqis are hurt. Quite the contrary.

To give you an example, the US benefits economically and strategically from our close alliances with, eg., South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.

These are all prosperous, democratic countries which in turn benefit from being under our security umbrella. They benefit. We benefit. Everyone's happy except al-Zawqari and his ilk.

"When one country invades and colonizes another, their will be people who fight back."

-- which is why we're plagued by German, Japanese and South Korean suicide bombers?

Joatsimeon is S.M. Stirling, the alternative history author of the Draka novels, the Nantucket novels and the Peshawar Lancers.

Now, if the gauchistas would just listen to him, there might be hope.

"We're Sorry."

Since all those wimpy, whiny sore-losing lefties think it's right and proper to apologize to dictators and dictator-co-dependents because their a majority of their fellow citizens exercised their constitutional rights, perhaps a few of the California contingent would be willing to offer an apology for electing Barbara Boxer, who has decided to express her gratitude to the hate-filled loons that make up the "Kos Community." Boxer apparently no longer represents California but is now representing a small fever swamp on the radical left.

Iraq Election: High Turnout/Low Violence/Courageous Citizens.

Roger Simons has been covering the event.

Jim Geraghty notes that Iraqis were voting in Jordan and Syria.

History has shown that democracy is contagious.

PoMo Rhetoric.

Watching C-SPAN 2 this weekend, I was introduced to the "academic bad writing" award, which in 1998 was "won" by Judith Butler, a leading feminist professor of Rhetoric, for this gem:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

A purpose of the awards is to call attention to the desirable object of achieving clarity, which is necessary for the purpose of achieving a desirable "chemistry" between writer and reader. But there seems to be something more than "chemistry" at play here: we get the feeling that writing like this is a kind of scam directed at the rest of "us." We get the feeling that with respect to the subject of the writing - all the various skeins of Post-modernist thought - has no "core" and that it's kept alive by people playing a game by strange rules that change moment by moment depending on the whims of the "alpha" intellectuals; that it's the intellectual equivalent of the scam run by the Wizard of Oz, which will be shut down the first time anyone sees the man behind the curtain.

To be fair, the post-modernists haven't given us great assurances that the sums of money our society lavish on them in the form of teaching positions and academic support is not a form of intellectual onanism. We are not so far from the Sokal Hoax, where a mathematician larded a pompous, silly article with trendy misinformation that mimicked post-modern jargon and had it published in a post-modernist journal. As the linked site observes:

Sokal hoaxed Social Text for political reasons. Both are "leftist" politically, but Sokal considers the New Left to be guilty of "epistemic relativism." (Is this another hoax?) He seems particularly peeved that the New Left promotes the notion that reality is a social construction. Furthermore, the New Left has created "a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside." So, apparently Sokal wanted to criticize the "epistemic relativism" and "social constructivism" of the New Left in a New Left journal but felt the only way they would let him do so would be if he pretended to share their ideology.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Butler defended her writing on political grounds. The publishers of the "award" are conservatives and one should remember when reading their "common sense," that "common sense in the past defended slavery.

This defense sounds good, but misses the point. As the Sokal link observes, the risk we run is not being critical of the things we want to believe. Her argument is simply a form of "poisoning the well." She sort of argues that that since her opponents advocate "common sense," and since advocates of common sense (all? some?) were once slavery apologists (except for those who thought it was "common sense" that the "slave was our brother"), their criticism of her is tainted. The "logic" that leads her to her premises and conclusions is suspect.

"Fenster" at 2Blowhards has a sensible proposal for determining if this writing is mystification or utilitarian: translate the sentence back into standard English and see what meaning has been lost.

Advice for the Left: Follow the example of William F. Buckley, Jr.

The New Editor offers advice for the Democrat pary in the thrall of the "sandbox left":

There was a time when the Republicans had a similar problem with irresponsible people on the right-wing being the face of their party -- John Birchers, isolationists, and old-fashioned racists. But responsible Republicans and leading conservatives like William F. Buckley ran those people out of the party and the movement.

There are a few Sandbox dwellers left on the Right, but the fringe Right is tiny and powerless compared with the Sandbox Left, which is neither.

Today, the Democratic Party must follow the lead of William F. Buckley. For the good of their party -- and the country -- they must remove consideration of the Sandbox Left from their political calculations, and demand that their side grow up and abandon ridiculous conspiracy theories and irresponsible historical comparisons.

Communio Thursday.

We watched a video on J.R.R. Tolkien and that led to an attempt on my part to define eucatastrophe, which Terry Mattingly discusses in this essay.

Cool! The Penner & Bradley megafirm makes the headlines at Christitantiy Today.

But, of course, we don't actually get our names in the magazine. Here's the article - A Question of Trusts.

I see that the UMC's attorney, Bob Shannon, gets a mention and, of course, Pastor Smith gets a picture, but where is our opportunity for shameless free advertising. (Apart from this post I mean.)

Hmm, I see that Shannon says that an appeal to the Ninth Circuit is "a topic we are not discussing at this point."

That's worth knowing.

Tough news for "transgender activists."

Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, concludes with respect to "gender reassignment surgery" that "[w]e have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it."

But there is a deep prejudice in favor of the idea that nature is totally malleable.

Further Thoughts: The deep "paradigm" of the academic elites, to which McHugh was referring when he observed that "there is a deep prejudice in favor of the idea that nature is totally malleable," is the topic for dissection in George Will's column on the social pressures that have forced former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to grovel for suggesting that there may be innate differences between the sexes which could account for different aptitudes or interests in math and science. Will writes:

The vehemence of Hopkins's recoil from the idea that there could be gender differences pertinent to some cognition might seem merely to reflect a crude understanding of civic equality as grounded shakily on a certain identical physicality. But her hysteria actually expresses the left's ultimate horror: the thought that nature sets limits to the malleability of human material. Summers should explain this to her, over lunch, when he returns from camp.

I don't know if Summers' recanted hypothesis has merit, but I think we all know that science is not well-served by functioning as a handmaiden for political ideology.

From "It Happened One Night" to "Brave New World."

Christianity Today reviews changing social mores.

Oscar Nominations.

Barbara Nicolosi offers some perspective on this year's Oscar nominated movies; the moral values they celebrate are "poisonous."

And, of course, Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was ignored, which is just irrational. Ignore the theological issues for a moment, Gibson's movie is simply the best movie of the year in terms of its filmmaking concepts. The movie captured audience attention from the beginning and held it to the end, it developed a pallette of emotions from its actors, it utilized beautiful cinematography to tell the story, and it did it all in Latin and Hebrew!

With subtitles!

If the Passion had been anything less than brilliant there would have been no audience. Heaven's knows that there are more than enough Evangelicals who could support Evangelical movies, but they aren't flocking to see the latest Evangelical "thriller" starring Kirk Cameron because they don't want to be bored, however strong their faith is. Audiences watched The Passion, and went back to see it a second time - despite the language barrier - because it was the best movie of the year.

Well this should increase my Canadian partner's jingoistic pride in his country.

Citizen Smash offers an apology to all of the nations in whose internal affairs the United States intruded, including Belgium, Kuwait and South Korea. He recommends that in the future requests for assistance should be directed to Canada.

Except, as Smash points out, Canada couldn't even airlift the 600 tonnes of the DART (Disaster Assistance Response Team) to assist the victims of December's tsunami. Apparently, the Canadian government is dependent on private enterprise to project Canadian power into the Third World, or pretty much anywhere south of Manitoba.

"We are all Thomists now."

Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner points out that The Weekly Standard has an interesting essay outlining the inherent Natural Law perspective of President Bush's second inaugural address. Here is a key paragraph:

So, we've got an enduring and universal human nature ("ancient hope"). We've got final causation ("meant to be fulfilled"). We've got a moral problematic (the "ebb and flow of justice"). We've got intelligible formal causes (the ideal of "liberty" as shaping a "visible direction" for history). And we've even got a prime mover ("the Author of Liberty"). There isn't much more a natural-law philosopher could want in an American president's inaugural address about nature and nature's God. I'd guess not a lot of gloating is allowed around the throne of the Maker of heaven and earth, but somewhere in the vicinity, St. Thomas Aquinas must be smiling.

Andrew Sullivan plays the "religious discord" card, freshly minted during the Wars of Religion circa 1618 - 1648 - by writing:

So those conservatives who favor different philosophical traditions have been put on notice. A particular theology now defines the conservative "movement."

But referring to "natural law" as a "theology" is simply wrong. Natural Law philosopy doesn't assume a theology. In fact, Natual Law philosophy was considered by Hugo Grotius, who wrote during the 30 Years War, as an answer to religious factionalism, since Natural Law grounded political philosophy on reason and nature, and not on any denominations claim to special authority.

But, then, history shouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of efforts to "poison the well" through cliches and prejudice. I assume the next volley will include references to "the Inquisition" and "Galileo."

Global warming to end life as we know it.

A task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world are trying to stampede politicians into action by predicting an irreversible change in global warming in the next ten years. According to the report:

It goes on: "Above the 2 degrees level, the risks of abrupt, accelerated, or runaway climate change also increase. The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 metres over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon."

But as we know, according to the James Hansen - who created the global warming controversy in 1989 - these levels aren't anticipated for 200 years, presumably if current trends continue. Given the pace of technological change over the last 200 years, assuming that our technology will remain the same in the future should not be immediately assumed.

Thomas Aquinas and the Simplicity of God.

Last Thursday, our Communio group considered Question 3 of the First Part of the Summa Theologica - on the Simplicity of God. Parsing St. Thomas' prose quickly led to mass confusion on our part. St. Thomas' language and assumptions simply aren't ours. For example the term "primarily and essentially" probably don't mean what we think of when we say "primarily and essentially." Likewise, primal matter isn't what we might think of - we might thing of "hydrogen" or "quarks"; his understanding was something essentially - of its essence - different. According to this useful site, "matter" for Thomas was the "the capacity (or potentiality) a thing has for substantial change, that by which a thing which has a nature might cease to have it and turn into something else. Matter is the opposite of actuality." So "primal matter" is the thing that has the most ability to change.

However, it isn't difficult to learn the verbal gambits sufficiently well to play the game. The answer in this area always appears to be that God cannot have a body, be composed of parts, be something other than his essence or enter into "compounds" because God is aways "actuality" and never "potentiality." This leads to the obvious question, "what is 'actuality' and what is 'potentiality'?

A possible answer is that "potentiality" is the ability of something to become something different, to change. For example, an acorn has the potentiality to become an oak tree, but it is actually and acorn. For Aquinas, God has no "potentiality" because He is. Hence, God cannot be a "body" - have physical existence - because bodies exist in three dimensions and since anything which has a dimension can be subdivided, God, if He had a body, could potenially be divided, but God has no potentiality.

Rinse, repeat.

At least that's what I think is going on.

There are some web resources on Aquinas. This one offers the following perspective on whether God can enter into the composition of other things:

According to Aquinas, God cannot enter into the composition of other things, by which he means that God is not a part of anything in the universe, so that there is no divine element in created things: "It is not possible for God to enter into the composition of anything, either as a formal or a material principle." First, since God is the first efficient cause, God cannot be the form of the thing caused nor its matter; these two other causes are not to be identifed with the efficient cause. Second, God cannot be part of a composite thing because it is God's nature as efficient cause to act, whereas it is not the nature of a part of composite thing to act, but only the composite thing itself. Third, God cannot be a part of a composite, because "no part of a compound can be absolutely primal among beings" (nulla pars compositi potest esse simpliciter prima in entibus). God cannot be the matter of the universe because matter is only potential and as such is posterior to actuality, the universe itself. Likewise God cannot be the form of the universe because participated form (forma participata) is posterior to essential form (per essentiam).

After about the first 10 words, it kind of makes you break into a sweat.

Seriously, that issue - whether God can enter into composition with other things - has real relevance today. Every pop religious hack wants to affirm a kind of pantheism where "thou art God", "the tree is God", and the "everything is God." But saying that God is actually part of the physical universe makes God dependent on something other than Himself and subjects Him to change and division which is inconsistent with His "actuality."

Here is another site with a quick "cheat sheet" of Thomistic concepts.

St. Thomas writing not only anticipate criticisms of "New Agers" but they also gesture at a rejection of biblical fundamentalism. In Article 1 St. Thomas supports the affirmative of the proposition that "God has a body" with various scriptural passages describing God's physical existence, such as biblical references to God's corporeal parts, posture and dimensions.

After offering his logical explanation for God's lack of physical existence, St. Thomas distinguishes these passages as being metaphors and parallels. For people who invest heavily in a literal reading of Genesis, the following Reply to Objection 2 might be instructive:

Reply to Objection 2: Man is said to be after the image of God, not as regards his body, but as regards that whereby he excels other animals. Hence, when it is said, "Let us make man to our image and likeness", it is added, "And let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea" (Gn. 1:26). Now man excels all animals by his reason and intelligence; hence it is according to his intelligence and reason, which are incorporeal, that man is said to be according to the image of God.

In other words, Thomas rejected the idea that humans were created as they are now in the "image and likeness" of God. Rather, the essence of man is rationality, something which is incorporeal, and it is in their intelligence and reason that humans are said to resemble God.

Something to keep in mind the next time you see a movie or read a book which casually tosses off the notion that the medieval Catholic church promoted a culture which denigrated human reason and promoted superstition and ignorance.

Update: I regret having to mention the name of Giordano Bruno in a post discussing St. Thomas Aquinas, but there is a certain mindset that views any positive acknowledgment of medieval Catholicism as a bull views the color red, and Giordano Bruno - a figure whose memory has been maintained purely to use as a stick to beat up the "papists" - is invariably included in the accusations.

So who the heck is Giordano Bruno? I received a Bachelors with Honors in History with an emphasis on the history of science and I didn't have a clue until Tim Cavanaugh at Hit and Run threw him in my face as a pathetic counter to justify his description of Pope John Paul II as the "Roman dictator." Bruno's residence in the lacunae of my background knowledge is a sufficient testimonial to Bruno's irrelevance, but in the interest of knowledge here is Professor Richard W. Pogge's essay on the Folly of Giordano Bruno. According to Professor Pogge, when you strip past the deluded rhetoric about Bruno as a sacrifice for the cause of science, you find:

Bruno was brilliant, contentious, and ultimately self-destructive. There is nothing in his writings that contributed to our knowledge of astronomy in any substantial way, indeed his astronomical writings reveal a poor grasp of the subject on several important points. I think we pay attention to him today in large measure because among other things he vocally espoused (but apparently did not really understand) Copernicanism, an idea which was to become the key insight that led to our view of the world. In addition, his On the Infinite Universe and Worlds appeals to many today because of its apparent resonance with the deeply held conviction that life exists elsewhere in the Universe, despite the fact that proponents of extraterrestrial life would find little of interest within its difficult pages. It also does not hurt his mystique that he came to a rather spectacular and violent ending, ostensibly in punishment for these beliefs by the reigning authorities of his day. In the end, Bruno bet on the right horse (if perhaps for questionable reasons), and thus has become a kind of culture hero instead of a footnote in books on Renaissance philosophy.

History is funny that way.

I spend this time on such an inconsequential figure because the icon of Bruno has taken on a life of its own among the secular humanists. I wouldn't be surprised to hear in a few years that he flew to the moon and discovered both cold fusion and the solution for global warming. Consequently, since Bruno has such currency for those who would bash Catholic history in their smug ignorance, lovers of history and truth are well advised to learn something about this kook so that they don't get blind-sided by fictions.

Ironically, St. Thomas, who as my post indicates, truly prefigured a scientific worldview by insisting on the application of logic and reason to the observed world, holds no interest for these same self-professed acolytes of reason and science.

Here is my post from May 23, 2003 entitled Who the heck is Giordano Bruno?" The earlier posts points out the historic use of Bruno as an anti-Catholic brickbat. Upton Sinclair, for example, in an episode that doesn't square with his progressive image invoked Bruno to play on fears of the impending Papist theocracy that would soon descend upon America - this was in 1926, a time when, of course, we now conclusively know that America was on the verge of going Catholic! (Apart from the pesky fact that the Al Smith campaign was derailed in part by his Catholic faith.)

So Bruno is useful tool and nothing else.

Smoking: the coming health craze.

A study in Swedish twins confirms that smoking is associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson's disease.

A former member reveals the truth about Opus Dei.

He has never "since met a group who are kinder, more patient or less motivated by personal ambition."

So, naturally, the organization is despised and reviled.

Inauguration Day.

Here is the text of President Bush's Inaugural Address. This passage is worth some reflection:

At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical - and then there came a day of fire.

We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

I like the phrase "shipwreck of communism" because we should never let the world forget that communism was a miscarriage of human of history.

More important is the note of idealism that the President is sounding. Consider this speech in the light of the "monumental essay" by Norman Podhoretz that Lane Core has published on his site. Podhoretz is clearly on to something in his thesis that after 9/11 Bush rejected the "realist's project" of "cuius regio eius religio." Apart from causing goose-bumps on the part of history buffs everywhere by using a phrase whose currency declined shortly after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Podhoretz makes the point that the philosophy of "realists" like Brent Scowcroft during the presidency of Bush 41 was that while America had a great deal of interest in "stability," it should have no concern about the internal politics of any other nation; the leaders of that country would determine the "political faith" of that country - cuius regio eius religio.

Podhoretz explains, and Bush's inaugural address confirms, that that formula no longer holds.


Here is the website for the 55th Inauguration.

Pius XII and Baptized Jewish Children in Post_Holocaust Europe.

History is complex. We want our heroes and villains fitted into tidy boxes when the fact is that most historical figures were just people trying to sort their way through difficult situations. Bill Cork links to John L. Allen, Jr.'s column which further developes the facts surrounding the accusation that Pius XII violated natural law and charity by refusing to return baptized Jewish children to their families.

The short answer is that it doesn not appear that he did. Pius appears to have taken the position that baptized Jewish children who were entrusted to Catholics and Catholic institutions would not be turned over to Jewish institutions where they had no living relatives. Where such children had living relatives, there were some instances where Pius ordered individual Catholics to return children to their relatives with "goodwill and friendship" and there were other instances where the Vatican sided with recalcitrant Catholics who, presumably, viewed these children as part of their families.

The picture that emerges is not one of a pontiff who fits the anti-semitic frame that has been fashioned for him in recent years. Immediately after the war, Pius XII was lauded for his efforts to save Jewish lives. According to this site which references a 1967 book by Israeli consul, Pinchas E. Lapide Pius was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from the Nazi death camps. The Lapide book is referenced by other websites across a spectrum of opinion and would appear to support the laudatory evaluations of Pius. Although this site is generally critical of historical Catholicism, it credits Pius with "speaking out" against Nazism and saving Jewish lives. Its criticism is largely concerned with Pius' "failure" to declare participation in "the slaughter" a sin or to excommunicate any Nazi, although Germans who supported cremation were excommunicated. This seems like a misunderstanding of Catholic practices. Presumably, well-formed Catholics know that they risk their immortal souls by participating in slaughter and after Mit Brennender Sorge - drafted by the future Pius XII - Catholics were well advised that:

8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Frankly, this is a clear indictment of Nazism and compared with the usual impenetrable style of Papal encyclicals, this one is crystal clear; one cannot be both a faithful Nazi and a Christian.

Another thing is the lack of criticism of Churchill and Roosevelt on their "silence." Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew about the Holocaust. Presumably, both wanted to win the war. Neither had any affection for Hitler. They were not on the same continental land mass as Hitler. Yet, they remained silent. Clearly, the cut and fit prescriptions of modern hindsight are not the answer to the question of why these historical figures did what they did.

Titan Pictures.

Here is a site with links to "open source," "amateur composed" images of Titan.

Just keep in mind that the greatest threat to human existence comes from Titan. (By the way, the link leads to a blog that features a nifty picture of Darren McGavin as "Kolchak.")

On a closely related note, here is a site commemorating the Heinlein Trust Prize congradulating the Cassini-Huygens Mission Team. The site observes:

Huygens probe had landed on the Titan surface. No Puppet Masters so far...

According to the site:

The Heinlein Prize honors the memory of Robert A. Heinlein, a renowned American author. Both Robert and his wife Virginia were strong advocates of human advancement into space through commercial endeavors. The purpose of the Heinlein Prize is to encourage and reward progress in commercial space activities that advances their dream of humanity's future in space.

The Heinlein Prize Trust will present a substantial award to the individual or individuals who achieve practical accomplishments in the field of commercial space activities.

Winners will receive a medallion, a diploma and a monetary award. The first Heinlein Prize award has been set by the Trustees at $500,000.

Interesting.

Humans may be a unique species after all.

University of Chicago researchers discover that humans are a 'privileged' evolutionary lineage. The researchers believe that the evolution of the human brain involved something more than a few chance mutations. According to the article:

"The making of the large human brain is not just the neurological equivalent of making a large antler. Rather, it required a level of selection that's unprecedented," Lahn said. "Our study offers the first genetic evidence that humans occupy a unique position in the tree of life. Simply put, evolution has been working very hard to produce us humans."

Will Shill for Money.

Ith points out that she is willing to take money to express her opinions. Likewise, in the spirit of the recent disclosures of members of the punditoklatura shamelessly taking money to express the opinions they would have been expressing anyway, let me point out to any members of the International Globalist/Corporate/Capitalist Conspiracy Dedicated to the Suppression of the Eschatological Reality of Global Warming who might show up here on a Google (tm) search that I can be bought.

Cheap.

It really isn't fair that I'm out here shilling for free when every other skeptic of the Global Warming bandwagon is - according to what I've been reading in the leftie press - a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle thrall of The Man.

Spanglish - An essentially conservative movie.

Michael Williams - who sets quite the standard for courageously flicking a match onto the pool of gasoline which is gender relations - discusses Maureen Dowd's dyspeptic view of recent movies including Adam Sandler's "Spanglish" that depict the successful lead male character passing up the "alpha female" character. Michael and his commenters tackle the question of gender roles and whether women "can have it all."

My take on the movie is somewhat different. Dowd "just doesn't get" Spanglish because her planted assumptions filter the story it tells. Here's MoDo's column in which she observes:

In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.

The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.

So, Dowd saw "Spanglish" and saw that art, or society, was turning "women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection." Also, this quintessential modern feminist liberal also rues the depiction of love between "unequals," without the slightest trace of irony.

There are two interesting things about Spanglish which might shed some light on Dowd's discomfort with the depiction of an "attraction of unequals." First, the Tea Leoni character in Spanglish, Deborah, is absolutely a bipolar she-monster. She is also a stereotype of the bi-coastal liberal. Deborah insists on a facade of egalitarianism -"Call me Deborah" - while insisting on the tacit recognition of her financial, educational and moral superiority to that of the Spanish-speaking maid, Flora, who Deborah feels needs to be pitied and infantilized because of her background. Also, Deborah is distinctly unhappy about a life which she undoubtedly would insist on depicting to her friends as the feminist ideal of the successful creative business women and she has a list of things to blame and therapists to see.

Second, the movie is profoundly conservative in its depiction of "traditional values," particularly those of self-restraint and self denial. Flora the maid stands as a profound rejection of modern values. Flora is offended when drunks send her drinks when she takes her daughter to dinner; she sacrifices for her daughter; she isn't looking for self-esteem or "having it all"; she expects her daughter to obey and to accept her and her values.

Moreover, Spanglish doesn't end with the typical trope by which most contemporary movies validate the ontological worth of their characters, with, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "the beast with two backs." To the contrary, Flora affirms that when one has children one must exercise the unromantic virtues of self-denial and self-restraint.

I suspect that MoDo watched the movie, identified with Deborah and couldn't understand why someone who shared MoDo's powerful resume and values - someone so clearly superior to "the help" - was presented as the villain.

I liked "Spanglish." I think that most parents probably will like it as well. I know that any man who is or has been married to someone like Deborah will identify with Sandler's "walking on eggshells" approach to his character; Sandler's character knows that since his marriage is simply a succession of dramatic scenes as Deborah obliviously inflicts suffering on those around her, he should cherish the quiet moments of sanity.

Here is a review of Spanglish and here is a site with production notes about the movie.

Russia's Impending Demographic Disaster.

The Public Interest reports that Russia's population has declined by 3% during the last 12 years. The reasons are high abortion rates coupled with poor medical practices, which can cause involuntary sterility, a high incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the breakdown of traditional families reflected by European-style marriage and divorce rates, and a high mortality rate.

"...accusations about Pope Pius XII's behavior vis-à-vis the Jews and Nazi persecution seems to have little basis in fact."

Bill Cork links to a follow-up to a disturbing story that apparently advanced the claim that Pius XII was anti-semitic. The latest round of accusation against Pope Pius XII centered on the claim that he issued orders "aimed [at keeping] baptized Jewish children from being returned to their families."

Zenit reports that it has tracked down the supposed documents and that they are not Vatican documents, that they were written by the future Pope John XIII, and that they do not evidence the policy ascribed to them.

Probably the first clue should have been that that original story was a based on a document which was written with Microsoft Word software.

That's a joke.

Lincoln and Kuhn's shifting paradigms.

Upword offers an explanation for the recent flurry of posthumous "outings," including the recent spate of claims that Abraham Lincoln was "gay." Upwords writes:

Kuhn uses the word "conversion" to talk about scientists accepting a new paradigm, suggesting the analogy with religious conversion. "Paradigm shift" and "conversion" are both words I find very appropriate to describe the process of "coming out". There was an "Aha!" moment when the lightbulb went on, and I looked back and suddenly understood earlier life experiences in a whole new way. It was a revelation. Why hadn't somebody told me I was gay sooner? It seemed so obvious in retrospect. Conversion is exactly the right word for such an experience. While I can remember how I used to think, post-conversion it is simply no longer possible to think that way. The new way of seeing the world is clearly right, and everything is reinterpreted in the new light.

The appeal to Kuhn is worth noting as an example of how core ideas of science and philosophy seeps into popular culture. Thus, Kuhn writes a book providing promoting the idea that scientific "revolutions" are not purely a product of logic and data and forty years later we have television commercials that blithely toss around the phrase "paradigm shift." I doubt, though, that the writers of the commercial have the foggiest idea that the term "paradigm shift" comes from Kuhn or that it's genesis comes from a work on the culture of science.

Upwords is definitely correct about the "conversion" experience as a function of "paradigm shift." One of the things that Kuhn meant by a "paradigm" was the set of assumptions and attitudes shared by a scientific community. One thing a paradigm does is to define the "facts" that are material and relevant for the community. A paradigm therefore sets limits on what a scientist looks for and what they see when they examine data. (Lawyers have a similar practice, as can be verified by any lawyer who has had to listen to a stream of "white noise" in order to find the "facts" that can make a case. In fact, the strongest experience of "paradigm shift" can occur when you hear your opponent's opening statement and realize why they had been obsessing on some particularly trivial fact duing pretrial proceedings.)

So, the whole "Lincoln was gay" enthusiasm may speak to something more relevant about us than about Lincoln. Namely, most of us live in a world where the "paradigm" has "shifted" and where, for some, sexuality is identity. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that such people see precisely what their worldview tells them to see when they look at the "facts" sifted by previous generations of historians and, hence, determine that Leonarda, Michaelangelo, Lincoln and Alexander were "gay."

They might be right, incidentally, but this is an area where it is probably wise to be cautious.

More lay people doing science.

Caltech Girl takes on Dean Esmay on the question of whether HIV causes AIDS. I think the position that Esmay is posting is that the fact that HIV infection has remained constant, while the percentage of AIDS case has declined, graphically supports the idea that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Caltech Girl says that's "comparing apples and oranges" and that improved drug treatment explains the graphs.

It's an interesting discussion, but Esmay's graphs don't cause me to reconsider the planted assumption that HIV causes AIDS.

The same level of excitement that a Deadhead would feel if Garcia showed up for a reunion tour...

The Learning Company has a lecture series on the "Story of Human Language" by Professor John McWhorter. Marked down from $269 to $69.

Maybe it's a "nerd thing."

Also, it has a lecture series on Luther: Gospel, Law, and Reformation. Probably, if I'm going to engage in vicious mischaracterization of the man's thinking, I probably ought to know something about what I'm slandering.

That seems only fair.

A Sad, Awe-inspiring Story.

Vancouver Woman Chooses Life for Her Baby just before Dying of Breast Cancer. The "Vancouver Woman" was Dr. Gabrele Helms, an assistant professor of Enlgish at the University of British Columbia. She was 38 years old and this google search presents her as a productive and gifted scholar.

Here's a blog post by someone who knew Dr. Helms, and who notes "...Gabi was 38 years old when she died on New Year's eve, three days after giving birth to her first child, Hana Gabriele Helms-Shore. " Here's another entry on Dr. Helms and her daughter, Hana.

The first post provides a link for anyone wishing to send a donation in the name of Dr. Helms.

Fossil showing that some mammals preyed on some dinosaurs found in China.

It was a small dinosaur and dog-sized mammal, but it does play against the typical picture of all mammals being shrew-like and oppressed by their saurian overlords.

I don't want to be a complete "flat earther" about this, but how is it that so many revolutionary, exquisite and detailed fossils are suddenly showing up in China? Dinosaurs with feathers; birds with teeth, etc. I recall reading something recently about China engaging in "fossil forgery." It may be something to look into.

Implement Kyoto and summarily execute terrorists without trial! Finally a consistent political program.

It's all about reducing catastrophic risks.

Peter Singer reviews Richard Posner's latest book on "CATASTROPHE: Risk and Response."

What an interesting pairing: a utilitarian reviews a pragmatist's prescriptions for dealing with small chances of large losses.

While Posner's book sounds like his typically thought-provoking fare, I am somewhat mortified by the fact that Posner has churned out yet another hefty volume on a subtle topic. I think that now puts me two or three books behind on my Posner reading list. (My 2005 resolutions include "this year I start and finish Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy" and "I will not win the lottery" because I like having one resolution that I can keep.)

Perhaps if someone could persuade him to turn out a couple of techno-thrillers or mysteries, I'd have a chance at catching up.

CBS approached the TANG story like a lawyer approached a trial.

[Via Recovering Liberal - part of the Kathy Shaidle communications empire.]

Colby Cosh points out some of the internal memos reflecting CBS's desparate search for an expert to authenticate the fake TANG documents.

It just has to bring a smile to any practicing trial attorney to read things like:

We need our [document] expert available NOW to speak to all those who are reporting this story. We need the expert. Now. We need him now.

[This] is essential RIGHT NOW. We NEED THAT EXPERT. Without him, we’re TOAST.

Like we haven't all been there. (Which reminds me that I have an expert designation due out at the end of the week.)

I also like this observation by Mary Mapes:

Even as she was fending off Schwartz's pleas, Mapes was telling other executives "that one could always find experts willing to take different sides in an authentication debate."

Yup, and lawyers have a technical name for such experts - "whores."

Now, if it starts a "heroin-induced necrophilia" club, it might be on to something really big.

Jimmy Akins reports that Columbia House has started a "porn club."

Actually, this whole post is just an excuse to use the phrase "heroin-induced necrophilia" which, to the best of my recollection, I "liberated" from P.J. O'Rourke.

On the other hand, if that phrase starts producing google hits, I'm going to get totally creeped out.

I guess I could just go with the amoral philosophy adopted by Columbia House and figure that "a hit is a hit."

Does Affirmative Action Hurt Black Law Students?

The "Debate Club" feature of Legal Affairs is featuring an on-line exchange between Richard Sanders is Professor of Law at UCLA and William Henderson is Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University. The premise of the debate is described by Legal Affairs as follows:

In the current issue of the Stanford Law Review, Richard Sander of UCLA Law School uses empirical analysis to mount a broad criticism of affirmative action. For black law students, Sander writes, the "costs of preferential admissions appear to substantially outweigh the benefits." Sander's core argument is that many black students would perform better and pass the bar at a higher rate if they attended less prestigious law schools.

The sad thing is that this has been an open secret since I was applying to law schools in 1980. At that time there was a publication that would provide a graph of the most recent classes LSAT scores plotted against their grades. One day I marvelled that every school showed the same pattern whereby there was a large cloud of points grouped in the high LSAT/high grade guadrant and a smaller cloud in the low LSAT/low grade quadrant. When I wondered aloud what could produce this uniform phenomenon, I was told "affirmative action" and "wasn't it great that the law schools were producing a situation where we would never be in the bottom of the class." (You'd have to know the person who told this to me in order to appreciate how cold blooded and calculating this statement was.)

When I attended UCLA law school, I was again stunned to learn that law professors were teaching "secret" black-letter law tutorials to the affirmative action students, which the rest of us were not invited to attend, during which the actual rules of law were taught without what I believed at the time was the mystification of the obnoxious "socratic" method. This seemed a tacit acknowledgement by the law school of my friend's observation. (It also seemed like the law school was giving an unfair edge to a selected group fellow students against whom I was competing.)

It was also apparent that any of those students would have been in the top of their class at other law schools because, as anyone who has applied to law school knows, there is a definite hierarchy of law schools based upon the LSAT scores and grades.

I assume that such charts have disappeared from information books about law school application processes.

Fatherhood.

Spiked Science has a fairly interesting article on the recent British proposals to "end to the principle of sperm donor anonymity, giving children conceived by sperm donation the apparently all-important right to know their genetic parentage for sure." The author of the article observes that the issue comes down to one's assumption about the relative importance of "nature" and "nurture" -

In a world obsessed with identity and 'roots', it is considered horrific that some children might grow up ignorant about where they came from. But as most - real, happy, well-adjusted - people will tell you, their own knowledge of who they are is forged in their upbringing. People generally do not lie awake at night worrying about how the particular genetic combination of eggs and sperm involved in their conception might have affected the course of their lives; they think about their families, the people who loved and cared for them from the moment they were born.

Fathers are not a mere biological ingredient of oneself, but individuals with their own lives and personalities - and what matters is the relationship between father and child. This is as true for children who have never had a relationship with their biological father as it is for those who have. For those children who are bothered by the lack of a father, it is the fact that they do not know their dads that upsets them, not the fact that they don't know the colour of his eyes and his precise genetic inheritance.

I think the author has a solid point, albeit there is something real about family characteristics; seeing people who are so similar to oneself in so many odd ways can stimulate a feeling of belonging. I'm not sure that we can entirely discount the importance of the genetic family, however much we may occasionally want to.

The author also argues that the stress laid on the importance of the biological fact of fatherhood - described as "sperm donation" - reflects a social trend that is uncomfortable with the traditional role fatherhood:

The obsession with biological paternity and the expansion of the mummy role reflects a society that, ultimately, can see no need for fathers. The contemporary unease with traditional aspects of masculinity, coupled with an inward-looking obsession with identity, means that the role of the father is reduced to a matter of the genes in his sperm and his presence as a second adult in the home.

Professor Stott has a blog.

Well, really, who doesn't?

Anyhow, Professor Emeritus Philip Stott has a weblog dedicated as follows:

Professor Emeritus Philip Stott. The aim is to assess whether a subject is being fairly covered by press, radio, and television. Above all, the Weblog will focus on science, but not just on poor science. It will also bring to public notice good science that is being ignored because it may be politically inconvenient.

His January 10, 2005 entry has this thought:

In UK bien pensant circles, ‘global warming’ has become one of the grand narratives of the ‘New Age’. To argue against it immediately transforms you into a lackey of the fossil fuel lobby, a paid patsy of industry, an eccentric sceptic, or, to use the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s, phrase, ‘an enemy of the people’. I hope I'm none of these, but I must ask: ‘Is the science really known?’ ‘Are humans the single cause?’ And ‘Are the Kyoto protocol and 'climate management' the most effective ways of facing climate change?’ On all counts, I doubt it, and increasingly so.

Despite the allusions to ‘science’, to rising emission curves of CO2, to melting ice caps, and to this or that climate model, the construct of ‘global warming’ has little to do with ‘science’. It is fundamentally a socio-political idea that can be firmly dated to 1988, when it replaced the earlier ‘threats’ of a nuclear winter and a plunge into another Ice Age.

And:

But ‘global warming’ isn’t climate change. The truth is that, despite all our best efforts, we have no grasp of what is really happening to climate. We can all agree that there has possibly been a small rise in temperature since around 1800 AD, but this is hardly surprising when you recall that we are emerging from a ‘Little Ice Age’ that ended around 1880 AD. Moreover, from the end of the 1940s to the 1970s, there was a cooling trend. Yet more, in 1200 AD we were 1 to 2 degrees C warmer than we are now (despite ‘global warming’). Further, our climate models remain primitive, more primitive than Lara Croft, and they ignore many factors, from soot to Pacific ‘vents’ to the cosmic ray flux. The 'vents' alone could reduce warming estimates by as much as one third. It is vital to remember that all the dramatic projections we see in the media are just politically-selected ‘scenarios’ taken from fundamentally limited models.

More significantly, climate change is governed by millions of factors, some gradual, others catastrophic, ranging from the flip of a Monarch butterfly’s wing, through the character of the Earth’s surface (albedo), volcanoes, oceans, water vapour, the geometry of the Earth, solar cycles, dust, space debris, and chaotic attractors. The idea that we can predict the future direction of long-term climate change based on the human semi-control of just one factor is unbelievable.

This passage from November 12, 2004 is ironic in light of recent comment exchanges:

But, since the late-1980s, ‘global warming’ has been turned, especially by the liberal elites of Europe (and of the Boston (Beacon Hill)-New York-Washington axis) into much more than this, having been re-constructed as a semi-empirical entity, or incomplete symbol, which cannot be easily verified or falsified. In this sense, 'global warming' has morphed into what Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) called in Critique of Judgement a matter of opinion, i.e. an “object of empirical knowledge which is at least in principle possible, but is impossible for us because the degree to which we are capable of empirical cognition is not sufficiently high.” It is thus in the same category as the example recalled by Stephan Körner (in his book, Kant, 1955), namely the assumption that other planets are inhabited by rational beings. Such semi-empirical entities are ultimately neither verifiable nor falsifiable because of the continuing technical limitations involved.

And the technical limitations of our current climate models and knowledge are, in reality, horrifying, with even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitting openly that we know next-to-nothing about 75% of the main proxy (summary) factors implicated. We therefore cannot allow the Global Warmers’ key antinomy to persist, namely that: “Climate is the most complex coupled non-linear chaotic system known, yet we can control it by adjusting just one set of factors.”

Something to ponder the next time you hear that heavy snows in Southern California were caused by "global warming."

Rathergate Memo.

Instapundit has a festival of links to the CBS memo and related commentary.

Here's a link to the actual report. The law partner pointed out this passage:

The Panel views CBS News’ initiation of this investigation and its complete cooperation as the mark of a confident news organization determined to understand and fix the causes of such wide-ranging failures in this one story.

It's good to know that but for the entirely unforeseeable coincidence of a "perfect storm" of unusual circumstances in "this one story," CBS would never allow its "news" shows to be used to channel the ideology that its employees monothically possess. Nonetheless, a panel of experts possessing the same assumptions and worldview as the elite media will obviously prevent a recurrence of the "perfect storm" that led to the farce of "this one story."

I guess we can all go back to watching CBS now.

Update: TKS at NRO is doing a great job of pulling apart the CBS report. I personally am gratified by the fact that CBS's experts did tell CBS that they could not authenticate the memo because they had only been given a copy. Again, in the early feeding period, I went on record as saying that all of the document experts I've used have told me that they had to have the original in order to verify authenticity. My point is really not self-laudatory; my point is that there were so many things wrong in the original story that the explanation can't be a "one off" mistake in judgment.

More on Global Warming.

My post on global warming caused me to revisit the current state of research on the subject, and also to reflect on Thomas Kuhn's insight that even scientific communities accept or reject scientific theories for most unscientific reasons. A classic instance of this phenomenon was the debate between the Ptolemaic Earth-centered model of the solar system and the Copernican Sun-centered model.

It's conventional today to think of the Ptolemaic scheme as the describe the height of scientific stupidity. Most of us believe that the Catholic church outlawed Copernicus' theory and imprisoned Galileo for asserting that the sun was the center of the solar system. Eppur si muove ("and yet it moves"), Galileo was supposed to have uttered - but probably didn't - after being ordered to recant. The modern world has taken the story of Galileo as a "proof text" for the evil of allowing ideology to subvert science.

The problem with that narrative is that ideology, as Kuhn points out, was at work on both sides. In the Seventeenth Century, either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican models explained the observable data. The Copernican system was preferred for a variety of reasons, one of which was the view that it was "fitting" that the Sun be at the center of the solar system. (Another was that the Ptolemaic system was unwieldy, although it did "work.") The theories and observations that conclusively proved that the Ptolemaic system was wrong were developed later.

The point is that anyone who believes that a scientific consensus forms overnight and as a matter of cold data is simply fooling himself.

Which is why I'm so very skeptical about the media treatment of "global warming." In story after story, the media posits that the "global warming" theory has been accepted without substantial dissent by the relevant scientific community and that it has substantial explanatory power for actual events in the real world. Long story short, for anyone who doesn't get their knowledge of how science advances solely from Star Trek - which can knock off a paradigm shift in a 44 minute episode - that's asking for a bit much more than they should be willing to swallow, unless it fits some other agenda.

So, to be clear, my previous post was a critique of the media's unceasing narrative that global warming is an accepted meteorological fact. My point was to juxtapose the data of the ACRC, which provided a 50 year time graph of Alaskan temperatures that showed two periods of stable temperature punctuated by a sharp increase, with Discover magazine’s claim that proof of global warming was “overwhelming.” The ACRC drew the two lines, not me, and they drew the lines because they were annoyed by the New York Times' claims that global warming caused a 7 degree increase in temperature. (In the same spirit that CBS defended its “faked but true” story about Bush's National Guard service, the Times acknowledged that it should have reported a 5 degree rise in temperature, but ignored that the cause of the warming was in dispute.)

Therefore, I deserve congratulations. I established the boring proposition, obvious to anyone with a fair knowledge of the history of science, that in the early stages of a scientific theory there is a considerable debate in the relevant community. I also established that – once again – the media is committing malpractice when it publishes stories that promote a congenial ideologically driven worldview as established reality.

All that is background, let’s move forward.

What is “global warming?” The term can be “all things to all men,” since it used to explain unusually hot summers, unusually cold winters, droughts and floods, substantial changes in regional temperatures and the absence of such changes – which, incidentally, is one of the signs of a “crackpot theory” since, pace Karl Popper, scientific theories are “scientific” only if they are falsifiable. I think the best working definition of the “global warming” posited by global warming theory is provided by Professor Stott in this Spiked Science article. Professor Stott observes that "global warming" involves showing that:

the human emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, is unquestioningly taken as the prime driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will result in a significant warming during the next 100 years and lead to catastrophe for both humanity and the Earth.

Any other definition is trivial because every reasonable person accepts the idea that the Earth’s climate is not constant. According to Professor Stott in Spiked Science:

First, is the climate changing? The answer has to be: 'Of course it is.' Evidence throughout geological time indicates climate change at all scales and all times. Climate change is the norm, not the exception, and at any moment the Earth is either warming or cooling. If climate were ever to become stable, it would be a scientifically exciting phenomenon. To declare that 'the climate is changing' is therefore a truism.

Anyone with any knowledge of the history of medieval Europe knows about the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. These things happen. So no rational person can dismiss the idea that the Earth, or some portion of it, may be getting warmer today. The question is, what’s the data that shows that such a possibility is substantial and anthropogenic?

1. Is the Earth’s climate getting warmer?

It may be getting warmer in some places and cooler in other places, which is not surprising if think of the first point. If you go to this page 5 of this pdf article you can find that some measurements show no warming over the last 30 years, while others suggest recent warming, but cooling during the period between 1940 and 1965.

In other words, the data is hardly conclusive.

One reason for the inconclusive nature of the data is that the trend is hardly as strong as the media implies. The strongest proponent of global warming – James Hansen, who created the whole issue of global warming in 1988 - concedes that global temperatures have increased less than one degree Fahrenheit (.5 degrees Celsius) over the last 100 years.

This is perfectly consistent with the observation of Reid A. Bryson, a Professor of Meteorology, that recent warming, if any, is “not unprecedented and unique”, no matter what you read in the paper. (I say “if any” because a less than 1 degree rise in temperature over 100 years is pretty close to zero in real terms.)

2. What about the future?

Again, global warming skeptics and apologists agree on that subject also. You can read the Hansen PDF or you can go to this Cato article by Patrick Michaels who writes (for the sake of disclosure, Cato is a libertarian organization and Michaels is a climatologist who is skeptical about "global warming"):

But, after a decade-and-a-half of reality, which resists exaggeration, it has become apparent that warming is indeed pretty modest. Jim wrote this in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001:

"Future global warming can be predicted much more accurately then is generally realized ... we predict additional warming in the next 50 years of 0.75 ºC [plus or minus] 0.25ºC, a warming rate of 0.15ºC [plus or minus] 0.05ºC per decade."

Which is exactly what Hansen says in the same article where he acknowledges the .5 degree Celsius rise in temperature.

Now, concededly, Hansen asserts:

Although this warming is more moderate than in business-as-usual scenarios, if it is maintained for a century the Earth’s temperature will approach that of the middle Pliocene (2.75 million years ago), when the world was about 2°C warmer than today and sea level was at least 25 m higher (43). This conclusion supports the need for actions that slow the growth of climate forcings.

Two things to note: first, this is small potatoes compared to the scare tactics that we’ve been exposed to over the last decade.

Second, notice the shell game; Hansen's article makes a projection about the next 100 years but has to gesture at 200 years in order to find a time when the Earth was warmer. Nonetheless at .15 degrees Celsius (plus or minus .05 degrees C), we don’t reach those Pliocene temperatures until 2200, at which point the evolved dolphins will be driving cars powered by hydrogen fusion. The serious point is that no one can predict today what human technology will look like in 200 years. This is small potatoes stuff indeed.

3. Human causes versus natural causes.

A major plank of the global warming thesis is that anthropogenic sources are the major driver of whatever warming there is. Rick at Unspun has linked to a global warming apologist site that systematically analyzes other potential causes of global warming and comes to the conclusion that those sources are irrelevant to the less than 2 degree over 200 year warming that may occur.

I’m skeptical. We’ve seen dramatic changes in shorter times, such as the Little Ice Age that wiped the Viking cultures out of Greenland. That change was not anthropogenic. Dismissing natural causes of climate change seems naïve or, worse, part of an ideological agenda. The premise of discounting natural causes would imply that we should be living in a world of stable temperatures, but that isn’t the historical data.

In fact, Hansen's need to point to temperatures 200 years from now - rather than the 100 years that he references in his projections - in order to find a period when the Earth was warmer, suggests to me that there were plenty of times in the recent past when the Earth was warmer than Hansen's 100 year projection. I haven't looked for the data, but, when you see that kind of discrepancy, that's where you should lay your bet.

Moreover, even Hansen’s data shows that solar variability as being equal to CFCs, which is gesture toward something we all should know anyhow: natural factors play an important role in climate. (Also, note that Hansen has backed off the position that CO2 is the culprit in global warming, and I guess it’s a damn good thing we didn’t sign up for Kyoto.)

4. What about that scientific consensus that the media must be relying on when it writes stories that global warming has caused this or that problem?

It just doesn’t exist. I have frequently read anecdotes to the effect that climatologists are skeptical about “global warming.” In fact, if you go through the articles I link, you’ll see a lot of climatologists who are skeptics. (Of course, I await the explanation that they are all whoring shills for corporate interests.) The McLean PDF article asserts that:

The IPCC report was signed by 2000 scientist of whom only about 100 are regarded as climatologists (see reference 16.1). In contrast about 18,000 scientists, among them about 2500 people who are meteorologists, climatologists, physicists, geophysicists, oceanographers or environmental scientists, have signed a document opposing Kyoto (see reference 16.2).

Again, if you go back to my original point about how science works, this shouldn’t be surprising. There ought to be disagreement on a subject while it’s going through the “paradigm shift” phase – if it does – and before it becomes “normal science.” That’s what allows progress in science.

Conclusions:

Based on the data I have linked to and to the explanations offered by the proponents of the data, I believe the following positions are reasonably supported by the various writings of climatologists:

1. There is no consensus among climate scientists that “global warming” is occurring.
2. Insofar as “global warming” has occurred, it has been modest, amounting to less than one degree over the last 100 years.
3. It is not clear that global warming has occurred – some studies show some warming; others show none –but even the studies that show some warming do not show a consistent warming trend that would mirror the consistent increases in anthropogenic CO2 over the last century. (This, incidentally, is one of my repeated questions about the ACRC graphs; if global warming is caused by human activity, why hasn’t Alaska gotten warmer over the last 25 years?)
4. Insofar as global warming is occurring, it will amount less than one degree over the next 100 years.
5. Media sources that report that this or that effect is caused by “global warming” are engaging in a systemic distortion of the truth inasmuch as they are representing that the theory of global warming has been accepted by the scientific community in the same way as, say, plate tectonics, when no such consensus exists.

Rathergate Revisited.

Patterico is not impressed with what he describes as the Columbia Journalism Review's "lousy revisionist history."

More criticisms of Democrat criticisms of Justice Thomas' judicial skills.

The Volokh Conspiracy locates the dissent that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid says caused him to claim that reading one of Justice Thomas' opinion is "like looking at an 8th grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard."

The problem with this criticism is that Justice Thomas' dissent isn't badly written and while somewhat dry and technical is hardly an "embarrassment" to an institution that gave us Dred Scott or the concrete legal principle that [a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Kelly Freas Passes Away.

A Voyage to Arcturus advises that Kelly Freas has passed away.

If you don't know who Kelly Freas is, you didn't grow up reading Analog magazine.

These people are not helping.

Kathy Shaidle has a post generously entitled "And now -- our cute little Protestant friends" which links to an article about Kentucky's Museum of Creation - a $25 million musuem designed to "convert more people to the view that the world and its creatures, including dinosaurs, were created by God 6,000 years ago."

There are days I'm so happy I'm not a literalist.

Actually, the museum sounds like it could be fairly entertaining. Bill Cork provides a link to interactive map to the museum. I like station 14, which promises:

Explore the wonders of creation. The imprint of the Creator is all around us. And the Bible’s clear—heaven and earth in six 24-hour days, earth before sun, birds before lizards.

Other surprises are just around the corner. Adam and apes share the same birthday. The first man walked with dinosaurs and named them all!

God’s Word is true, or evolution is true. No millions of years. There’s no room for compromise.

Adam and Eve named the dinosaurs? That's odd. I didn't know they spoke Latin.

Anti-War sailor goes AWOL on mission of mercy.

Actually, the reason I'm linking to this Powerline post is that the Bonhomme Richard, aka the "Bonny Dick," was one of the carriers my dad served on.

I thought it was decommissioned.

LeGuin not pleased with Sci-Fi Channels version of "Earthsea."

I missed this Slate article by Ursula K. LeGuin entitled "How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books."

Actually, LeGuin's article is fairly disappointing. Her principle concern is that the producers didn't pay attention enough to multi-racial casting. She seems to miss comletely the point that the problem with the translation of her story to film wasn't that it was insufficiently "politically correct;" it was boring.

Global Warming in Alaska.

Global warming must be real.

First, Discover Magazine declared in its end of year top 100 news story that the biggest news story of the year was that evidence of global warming became "overwhelming." Second, the cab driver who drove us back to the Anchorage airport reminisced about his early days in Anchorage in the late '70s that while Anchorage regularly had winter days in the -20s, it now was much warmer with winter temperatures in the balmy 20s.

Now, the anecdotal evidence from the cab driver is nothing like the solid scientific data on which Discover based its editorial decision to name global warming the top story of 2004 ... actually, it's pretty similar since the "overwhelming evidence" consisted of the "amazing" fact that stinkbug nymphs were found somewhere in England. Discovery didn’t feel that it was necessary to qualify this discovery with a description of the microclimate where the nymphs were found, since, apparently, it is inconceivable that there just might be a garden that was atypically warm in an urban area.

Likewise, I am gratified that I was not the only one who noticed the earth shaking news that we have entered a period of horrifying warmth not seen since the 1500s. (!) As Sergeant Stryker (linking to Rich Galen) observes:

* Deep in the article, Discover points out that Swiss researchers claim the summer of 2003 was “the hottest in Europe since 1500.”

* Wait. What? Since 1500? What was going on in 1500? Were oxen – the SUVs of the age – belching greenhouse gasses at an alarming rate? The Renaissance was in full bloom, but did Leonardo da Vinci code for global warming?

As any historian knows, that period is near the end of an unusually warm period which segued into the "Little Ice Age" that resulted in, inter alia, the extinction of the Norse civilization of Greenland.

But what about that Alaskan weather situation, after all I frequently hear one of the Kennedy boys - the one who had such difficulties in passing the bar - regularly claim on the O'Reilly Factor that the ice is melting at the North Pole.

The answer is actually quite interesting. For example, although the mainstream media often claims that Alaska is 7 degrees warmer today than it was 30 years ago (see, for example, this republication of a New York Times article), according to the Alaskan Climate Research Center the Alaskan mean winter temperature between 1977 and 2003 has remained virtually constant. Anchorage has experienced a .9 degree increase in temperature, which contradicts my cabbie's claim about dramatic warming in Anchorage. (Ironically, the New York Times did "correct" the claim about the 7 degree rise in temperature - to 5.4 degrees, but it completely ignored the evidence of steady temperatures during the most recent quarter century.)

Now, what is interesting is that there has been a definite rise in temperature over the last 30 years, with a "phase shift" in 1976 as a result of "Pacific Decadal Oscillations." It's an interesting phenomenon, but not one that reflects any support for a theory of global warming caused by human action; unless, of course, we managed to lick the problem shortly after 1976, which would be good news because we could move on to other issues.

My problem with "global warming" is not with the idea that it may be occurring; it may well be occurring. It is the fact that "global warming" has achieved the status of an article of faith for people who mostly claim that they don't need faith. For example, the extremist claims about the effects of global warming are suspicious; if the world is now as warm as it was in 1500 and if the world did not at at that time suffer the parade of horribles that are regularly trotted out by global warming apologists, then why should they happen today? Likewise, if the data is so strong - overwhelming - why do the proponents have to distort the data that conflicts with the premises of human-caused global warming?

Why I love this guy.

William F. Buckley, Jr. was on CSPAN-2 this morning giving an interview to the late David Brudnoy. The best part of the hour were the "off-mike" discussions between Buckley and Brudnoy, particularly where Buckley talked about coming to terms with his age.

Likewise, read this New York Times interview with Buckley and some typical leftist reporter. The questions are sneering, loaded and superficial, and Buckley tees off on them all with good spirit and charity, such as in this exchange (Questions are by the interviewer, Deborah Solomon):

You have made so many offensive comments over the years. Do you regret any of them?

I regret all spontaneous exchanges, because they aren't as concise as you can make them deliberately. Charles de Gaulle used to memorize replies to anticipated questions from the press.

It's not fair to blame the press. Some of your most inflammatory comments have been made in your essays and columns. In the 50's, you famously claimed that whites were culturally superior to African-Americans.

The point I made about white cultural supremacy was sociological. It reflected, in a different but complementary context, the postulates of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

What are you talking about?

The call for the ''advancement'' of colored people presupposes they are behind. Which they were, in 1958, by any standards of measurement.

"What are you talking about?" You can almost see the befuddled but offended expression of the reporter as Buckley dared to commit heterodoxy in her presence.

Then, there's this closing:

Must you be so clever at all times?

I haven't practiced the alternative.

Why are conservative writers generally wittier than liberal writers?

I'm not sure that's true. Karl Marx was a gas, they say.

Game, set and match to Buckley.

Update: As if the sneering, loaded questions weren't enough of a clue, Times Watch documents Solomon's knee-jerk leftwing credentials.

Doing justice to Clarence Thomas.

Legal Affairs has an excellent article on Justice Clarence Thomas. The article dispels any notion that that Thomas' selection was a pure example of affirmative action putting an unqualified man on the bench, or that Anita Hill told the truth about Thomas or that Thomas is "over is head" on the bench.

It's worth reading for a variety of reasons, including the description of his hard-scrabble childhood which was overcome by hard work; needless to say, if this biography belonged to anyone other than a conservative, it would be the stuff of legends. This part was interesting:

There can be no doubt that Thomas's approach to the Constitution is the clearest contemporary example of originalism, a belief that the Constitution and its amendments ought to be interpreted only in the manner in which they were understood by those who framed and ratified them. Anything else, for Thomas, is judicial usurpation of the legislative role.

This aspect of Thomas's judicial philosophy has been no secret (it was one of the themes of Scott Gerber's 1999 jurisprudential study of the justice, aptly named First Principles). But Foskett, at least according to one Washington Post op-ed writer, has revealed a "bombshell" by quoting Scalia in saying that in constitutional cases, Thomas "doesn't believe in stare decisis, period," referring to the practice of following judicial prior precedents instead of re-examining the merits anew each time a decision is made. With this view, Thomas differs even from his purported puppeteer, as Scalia acknowledged to Foskett. According to Scalia, Thomas believes that "if a constitutional line of authority is wrong, [Thomas] would say 'Let's get it right.' I [Scalia] wouldn't do that."

On this point, Thomas may be more right than Scalia; stare decisis is obviously an important value, but one can't help notice the "elasticity" of this value. Stare decisis was declared to be the overwhelming concern in Casey, but has no value in Lawrence. As Scalia notes:

"Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt." Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 844 (1992). That was the Court's sententious response, barely more than a decade ago, to those seeking to overrule Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973). The Court's response today, to those who have engaged in a 17-year crusade to overrule Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U. S. 186 (1986), is very different. The need for stability and certainty presents no barrier.

Conservative jurists would be playing a foolish game indeed, if they allow liberal jurists to "ratchet up" their preferred positions, which then must be "conserved" by stare decisis. Contrawise, if the goal of constitutional interpretation is "originalism" then "ad fontes" might as well be the slogan; the words and meaning of a text don't change over time. [Alright, I don't believe in "ad fontes." This isn't the Eighteenth Century, after all, and texts and words contain general principles that have to be worked out through practical applications of principle to real world examples.]

From the "Fresno is just another name for nothing left to lose and other cultural metaphors" file.

Someone in the Videsso/Harry Turtledove mailing list that I'm belong to sent an e-mail with the tantalizing subject line:

Subject: [videssos] has anyone else here read the Turtledove story "Joe Steele" (alternate world w/Stalin a Fresno-born Democrat politico-turned-tyrant)?

Apparently the story is "Joe Steele" and can be found in the anthology "Stars," which is a collection of stories based on Janis Ian's songs. Turtledove's story is inspired by Ian's song "Stalin was a Democrat" and posits that Stalin's father and mother relocated to the United States before his birth in Fresno and that he rose through the Democrat party by doing and saying the same things as the historical Stalin.

I haven't read the story, but the Fresno connection is cute. Also, I've always wondered if Dan Whitehurst wasn't born 9 months after Stalin's death. (Just joking, for the record and for the sake of my homeowner's insurance.)

Save your hard-earned money movie review - "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou."

I saw The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" yesterday. All I can say is that it's two hours of my life that I will never get back. Looking at this page of links to reviews of the movie, though, I don't think I can be blamed for thinking that it should have been a pleasant way to greet 2005.

The movie promised solid comedy with some outstanding actors, including Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe and Cate Blanchett. The ads suggested that the movie would trade on a parody of Jacque Cousteau. SFgate.com gives it a respectful review:

It's almost a great movie. For half of its running time, Anderson maintains a distinct and arresting tone of vague absurdity, and then he loses control and the film begins to dip into silliness. Individual scenes become labored. Yet even at its worst, "The Life Aquatic" is always interesting -- there's really nothing else like it. Although its humor is shrewd and arch, the world of "The Life Aquatic" is so thoroughly imagined that it's hard not to feel on the receiving end of a generous act. It seems the product of a uniquely pure impulse.

The truth was so much less. It was so boring that halfway through the movie I was seriously thinking about leaving. I could sense the desperation of the crowded theater audience who greeted the most anemic attempts at with inordinately forced laughter. Heck, even Bill Murray seemed bored with the movie and he was being paid to act it. (On the other hand, the fine character actor Willem Dafoe certainly brought energy to his character, but what he thought he was doing with the character is anyone's guess.)

While the SFgate review lauds the details that the director pumped into the movie as keeping "The Life Aquatic" "interesting," I think the rest of the audience shared my confusion as to the proliferation of details that went no where. For example, why was it necessary to kill Ned? What was the point of the "mystery signal" from the downed aircraft? Was it really funny that Zissou "sparks a fatty" every ten minutes? (I think that Roger Ebert, who is a study in ambivalence, may be on to something when he observes that "[t]his could have been a scene from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" if Captain Nemo had been a pothead." I mean, didn't that schtick stop being per se funny back in the '80s?)

This review by Jack Mathews nails part of the "Zissou" experience:

If there's anything more tiresome in film today than hip irony, it is forced irony, and here comes a boatload with Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou."

Save your money. Rent it on DVD if you must.