Cool Latin Commencement Speech.



Scrutinies explains:

So, this is made of awesome. Via The Deacon's Bench. If I am reading this correctly, graduating senior Mary Anne Marks won an open speech-writing competition that is a Harvard tradition. And guess where she's headed next!

In the fall, Marks is headed to Ann Arbor, Mich., to enter a community of Catholic teaching nuns called the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, where after three years of classes in the convent on theological and ecclesiastical topics, she’ll attain a teaching certificate at a local university and teach in Catholic schools.

Oh, that's the reason for Al Gore's curious silence in the face of the sexual assault accusations against him...

...the alleged victim claims to have DNA evidence.

Curious and curiouser.

But fortunately Gore is not a hypocrite about family values, so there is no story here, as there would have been when accusations are made against Republicans.

Laws with unintended consequences.

The Endangered Species Act leads to more killings of endangered species, boxing gloves lead to more brain injuries, and other great moments in forgetting that human beings are more perverse than lawmakers imagine.

Cat Lassie.

Intellectual Integrity and Bart Ehrman.

I originally like Bart Ehrman's work.  I thought that his courses on the Teaching Company were very good.  However, as I've listened to Ehrman's popular stuff, such as his debates and interviews, I've come to wonder how much I can trust Ehrman.  Simply put, Ehrman says stuff that he knows is either overstated or wrong. 

It's not just me who says this.  William Lane Craig points out that there is a "Good Bart" and a "Bad Bart."  "Bad Bart" will make the claim in popular circles that there are more errors in the Bible than there are words, and will foster the impression that we really can't know for sure what the original text said.  However, when called out on it, "Good Bart" will forthrightly admit that we actually do know what the original text said and that the "errors" can be corrected or aren't all that significant. 

Similarly, in one debate, in support of his argument that the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus were delusions, Ehrman argued that grieving people have such delusions all the time. When it was pointed out that people don't often have the same delusion, Ehrman said, "yes, they do", leaving the impression that he had some academic support for the claim that groups of grieving people have been known to have the same delusion.

It turned out that Ehrman was conflating different events.  Individually, grieving people have been known to have visual and tactile experiences of their dead loved ones, but not in groups.  Ehrman's reference to "group delusions" was to things like the vision of Our Lady of Fatima, which have never been shown to be delusions.  They might be delusions and atheists might assume they are delusions, but most people would never confuse an individual grieving person with the mass phenomenon of Fatima.  By carefully omitting the important details, Ehrman was using his role as "neutral academic" to mislead listeners.

Darrell Bock issues a similar warning with respect to Erhman's academic writing.  Bock discusses Erhman's The New Testament: An Historical Introduction:

This volume is one of the most popular texts for early Christianity classes in the USA, which is why we are discussing it in the class. It is clearly written and engaging. It summarizes many commonly held positions that are held about the Bible and New Testament in some scholarly circles. It is important to know what generations of college students are being taught in the name of knowledge and understanding. I am discovering that it is what Ehrman does not mention that is often important.

For example, in treating the authorship of the gospels (all of them), he does not address any of the external evidence for authorship that comes from sources like Eusebius or Irenaeus or any of the canonical church lists. This is historical evidence and ignoring it prejudices his volume's work, cutting out one of the two key factors one has to address in treating authorship, namely external evidence for a work's authorship. Vincent Taylor and C. E. B. Cranfield regarded such evidence as decisive in treating this question in terms of Mark's gospel.

I am quite aware that many think the internal evidence is against such an authorship claim for Mark (and Ehrman does present those arguments). Those arguments can be addressed. So given a fair debate over the issues that lead one to think about who wrote a gospel, here is a point the claim Mark did not write the gospel has to deal with. What commends Mark as the author, if we are going to simply pick someone to enhance the reputation of a gospel when no one supposedly who knows the author is (which is what the alternative view claims is the situation)? What is Mark's reputation? He failed to survive the first missionary journey and caused a split between Paul and Barnabas according to Acts. So how does randomly attaching his name to the book enhance that gospel's credibility? Such a theory does not work here. Mark's reputation, such as it was, on its own does not enhance the credibility of the work. More than that, the tradition also consistently associated Peter with Mark, so why was this gospel not simply called the Gospel of Peter, if one is free to name any author the church could choose? Given a choice between Peter and Mark on the basis of reputation, Peter would be the obvious choice. Something else must be at work, namely, a tradition careful about who it called an author, naming someone who in this case had an otherwise less than stellar resume. Arguments like the ones I just noted go completely ignored in his volume (and these are fair historical questions). So user beware that if you are being asked to use this text in a college class, some key points are not even being raised.

That really does sound like the "Bad Bart" of the debates and popular lecture. 

A Scandal that is "Hiding in Plain Sight."

Powerline blog describes the history of the New Black Panther scandal, and has the original videos, to boot.  The post ends:

This is a scandal that, thanks to Rubin, von Spakovsky, and Adams, is now hiding in plain sight. The basic facts of the case were captured in real time on video (above). Yet other than a few posts by Dave Weigel regarding the Civil Rights Commission's hearings in the case on the Post site, I cannot find a trace of it in either the Washington Post or the New York Times. While justice has been politicized in a most disgusting manner in the Obama administration, the mainstream media have averted their eyes and moved on.

The Black Panther Case, Liberal Racism and the End of Equal Justice.

J. Christian Adams - the Justice Department attorney ordered not to cooperate with the Civil Rights Commission in the New Black Panther case - has an essay describing the internal workings of the Elections Division of the Justice Department with respect to the decision to dismiss a case of clear voter intimidation, which had already been won.
 
Adams writes:

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.

And:

Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

And:

Most disturbing, the dismissal is part of a creeping lawlessness infusing our government institutions. Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.


Some of my co-workers argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it "payback time." Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.

Refusing to enforce the law equally means some citizens are protected by the law while others are left to be victimized, depending on their race. Core American principles of equality before the law and freedom from racial discrimination are at risk. Hopefully, equal enforcement of the law is still a point of bipartisan, if not universal, agreement. However, after my experience with the New Black Panther dismissal and the attitudes held by officials in the Civil Rights Division, I am beginning to fear the era of agreement over these core American principles has passed.

This is a scandal.  As Tom Smith at the Right Coast says "I know it's a cliche by now, but if anything remotely like this had happened in the Bush administration, every legal worthy you can think of would be on about it, and rightly, until no one could stand it anymore."

Feminist Women's Rights Attorney finally comes down against Gore on sex-assault claim.

It takes Wendy Murphy a lot ink to get there - and one suspects it wouldn't have involved such soul-searching if the accused wasn't politically correct - but she gets there eventually, fueled in part by Gore's failure to deny the charges, which Murphy suggests might be backed up by DNA evidence:

Regardless, her story rings true. In more than 70 pages of a transcribed interview with police, her descriptions of the sexual assaults seem credible simply because of the restrained nature of what she accused him of doing. The woman describes Gore moving her hand down toward his penis during an abdominal massage and how he touched her breasts and buttocks, "painfully" squeezed her nipples, and "flipped" her onto the bed, pinning her down and lying on top of her. If she were lying, why not make it juicier?


She even included things about herself that could paint her in a bad light. She told the police that she sat on the bed next to him even after she feared being assaulted and that she didn't leave right away.

Back in 2006, the women told the police, according to the same transcript, that all she wanted was the return of her "pre-assault sense of peace and safety. . . and for this man to be stopped from what he has been doing."

I believe her account.

Murphy's focus is largely on the possibility that Gore might have been buying her silence.

If true, however, this paints Gore as the same kind of opportunistic exploiter of women that we learned Bill Clinton is.  And it makes the amazing non-denial denials issued by Gore about his "friend" Bill Clinton at the height of the accusations of rape against Clinton more creepy.  In "No One Left to Lie to", Christopher Hitchens took Gore to task for his claim that he couldn't say whether he believed Juanita Broadrick's claim that Bill Clinton had raped her because he hadn't seen her televised interview. Hitchens observed that this was very weak stuff and that he would want his friends to stand up and say "No! I know the man and he is just not that kind of person."  Gore, it seems couldn't say that about Clinton, and if Murphy's assessment is correct, then we may be able to see why.

Nemesis.

David Weigel describes his fall from grace:

But I was cocky, and I got worse. I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was “really” happening out there, and snarking at conservatives. Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean. Yes, I’d trash-talk liberals to Republicans sometimes. And I’d tell them which liberals “mattered,” who was a hack, who was coming after them. Did I suggest which strategies might and might not work for liberals, Democrats, and the president? Yes, although I do the same to conservatives — in February, for example, I told many of them that Scott Brown’s election hadn’t killed health care reform, and they needed to avoid dancing in the endzone, because I was aware of what liberals were saying about how to come back.

A lot of this sounds true.  Weigel claims to be a conservative, but he experienced the same need to mirror his new friends when he went to a new place, and so dropped his previous persona. In fact, he may have become more liberal than anyone else in order to show that he had dropped his previous commitments. This sounds like the typical Washington D.C. arc, and explains how banner-chasers like Weigel often move from their conservative roots to being lauded by their new liberal friends as "growing."

Note that Weigel's evolution began before he joined Journalist.  He had voted for Obama and was a supporter of gay-marriage and open-immigration while at Reason.

On the other hand, as a convert, he was never really going to be part of the inner sanctum.  There was always going to be a suspicion that he was simply the unprincipled banner-chaser that he seemed to be.  So, if anyone was going to get outed, it would be him.

Sophocles could not have written a better script.

In future classes on decision-making, much ink will be spilled on why Obama rejected the Dutch offer to provide its superior oil clean-up technology to help in the BP oil spill.

The Financial Times describes the BP oil spill as the "avertible catastrophe":

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.


The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

Well, if they didn't want to be falsely accused of committing rape, they shouldn't have been someplace where they could have been falsely accused of committing rape.

English women jailed after falsely accusing two men of raping her.

A lying mother-of-one who claimed she had been raped because she wanted to get rid of her husband has been jailed for 18 months.


Bernadett Kore, 29, told police she had been brutally attacked by two thugs in an alleyway in October.

But it transpired that the woman made the whole story up - leaving the two men she accused devastated by their terrifying ordeal.

Kore described two men she had seen at a nightclub and the police used the nightclub's closed circuit televisions to identify and arrest them.  The two men were not exonerated until Kore admitted that she was lying.

This stuff amazes me in that it must take a unimaginably depraved mind to randomly select a person to lie about and ruin their lives, often for a fairly trivial end.  Also, it is a reminder of the prima facie unbelievable claim that something like 40% of rape accusations are false, not just unproven, but actually fraudulent.
 
If I had sons, I might be giving the advice outlined in the headline.

Anonymous oil industry insider points to apocalyptic scenario.

From Mother Nature Network:

With BP's recent admission that 100,000 barrels of oil are leaking into the Gulf per day, confirmation that the wellhead is now tipping as much as 11 degrees, and new video evidence that sea floor has begun cracking under the pressure, I am starting to believe the semi-apocalyptic worst case scenarios now being put forth by oil industry insiders.


Below I am reprinting one very in-depth analysis I just received via email by a Texan oil industry expert who wishes to remain anonymous. Take from it what you will. If you can make it all the way through, there is also an excellent analysis of what actually went wrong on April 20.

OK let's get real about the GOM oil flow. As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don't feel bad, there is much that doesn't make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about.


There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform people, and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there.


First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new BPO or LMRP, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud, etc etc etc....forget that. It won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.


So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:


The well bore structure is compromised "down hole".


That is something which is a "worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place...

Check out what the insider has to say about the unexplained reason that the "Top Kill" procedure might have failed.

And:

It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot...the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the BPO the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?...it doesn't leak so bad. You close the nozzle?...it leaks real bad, same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off...or tried to anyway...but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks "down hole". I'm sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed...because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below.



Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became the direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed.....and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why.. gee thanks.

And:

All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of." The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the Gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.



It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo.

Take it with a grain of salt, but this thing sounds stranger all the time.

Small mistakes can have huge consequences when a 14 inch drill bit hits the wrong geological formation.

From Io-9: "When an oil-drilling team on the lake hit a salt mine beneath it, the ensuing whirlpool sucked up not only the water, but a good bit of the land around it as well. Puts Charybdis to shame."

Flores "Hobbits" were distinct species.

Scientists claim to have ruled out the idea that their small size was due to an iodine deficiency.

This could be really, really bad.

Perhaps,speculates Energy and Capital, the BP well has causes a weakening and fissuring of the surrounding geological strata, which will cause a mass release of oil outside of the BP well.

Geologists are pointing to other fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead.


According to CNN:

The University of South Florida recently discovered a second oil plume in the northeastern Gulf. The first plume was found by Mississippi universities in early May.

And there have been other plumes discovered by submersibles...

Some geologists say that BP's arrogance has set off a series of events that may be irreversible. There are some that think that BP has drilled into an deep-core oil volcano that cannot be stopped, regardless of the horizontal drills the company claims will stop the oil plume in August.

And:

Obviously, the oil and gas pressure hasn't fallen off


In fact... it's increased.

The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano.

I recently heard a recording of Richard Hoagland who was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM.

Mr. Hoagland has suggested that there are cracks in the ocean floor, and that pressure at the base of the wellhead is approximately 100,000 psi.

Furthermore, geologists believe there are another 4-5 cracks or fissions in the well. Upon using a GPS and Depth finder system, experts have discovered a large gas bubble, 15-20 miles across and tens of feet high, under the ocean floor.

These bubbles are common. Many believe they have caused the sinking of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle.

That said, a bubble this large — if able to escape from under the ocean floor through a crack — would cause a gas explosion that Mr. Hoagland likens to Mt. St. Helens... only under water.

The BP well is 50 miles from Louisiana. Its release would send a toxic cloud over populated areas. The explosion would also sink any ships and oil structures in the vicinity and create a tsunami which would head toward Florida at 600 mph.

Now, many people have called Hoagland a fringe thinker and a conspiracy theorist. And they may be right... But that doesn't mean he isn't on to something.

Coast to Coast is "batshit nuts" and Hoagland is - as far as I know - always wrong, which is somewhat reassuring, but:

EPA finds high concentrations of gases in the area


The escape of other poison gases associated with an underground methane bubble (such as hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and methylene chloride) have been found.

Last Thursday, the EPA measured hydrogen sulfide at 1,000 parts per billion — well above the normal 5 to 10 ppb. Some benzene levels were measured near the Gulf of Mexico in the range of 3,000 – 4,000 ppb — up from the normal 0-4 ppb.

More speculation of doom

The Oil Drum, an industry sheet, recently ran an article about the sequence of events that tried to stop the oil spill.

The upshot of industry insiders was that after trying a number of ways to close off the leak, the well was compromised, creating other leaks due to the high pressure. BP then cut the well open and tried to capture the oil.

In other words: BP shifted from stopping the gusher to opening it up and catching what oil it could.

The only reason sane oil men would do this is if they wanted to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed... And that sort of leak — known as a “down hole” leak — is one of the most dangerous kind.

No stopping it

It means that BP can't stop if from above; it can only relieve the pressure.

So, more oil is leaking out while BP hopes it can drill new wells before the current one completely erodes.

BP is in a race against time... It just won't admit this fact.

The author also notes the odd fact that BP agreed to cave in to Obama's financial demands in 20 minutes, unlike other companies that have fought tooth and nail for years and decades.

Let's hope this is all tinfoil hat stuff.

Parodoxically, it seems that a population's risky sexual behavior is somehow mysteriously related to whether that population will have higher levels of AIDS.

First Things points out the data that distributing condoms causes an increase in AIDS:

The predominant Western approach to preventing the spread of AIDS in Africa has failed. Though in theory the risk reduction strategies favored by Western governments and aid agencies—handing out condoms, promoting counseling and testing, and treating other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) to block HIV transmission—can “work” in theory, they have not done so in practice. In Africa, despite years of promised improvements, they have not brought any downturn at all.


But a handful of African countries have actually forced down the AIDS rates, each of them by changing behavior—particularly reducing sexual partnerships—not through the heavily promoted risk reduction measures.

Well before western donors and condoms arrived on the scene, Uganda had cut its level of casual sex by two-thirds and subsequently its HIV rate by two-thirds. Several years later, Kenya replicated this success. A few other countries have also done so, with partner reduction always the most important factor.

In sharp contrast, South Africa has maintained high rates of multiple (and concurrent) partnerships and, despite its vigorous promotion of condoms, still suffers from persistently high rates of HIV infection. The same can be said of many of its neighboring countries, which lead the world in the prevalence of HIV, with some 15 to 35 percent of all adults infected.

These successes and failures are, tellingly, too often treated in a manner inversely proportional to their merits. Behavior change, though responsible for success, remains the least emphasized approach, while risk reduction invariably receives the benefit of the doubt despite its failure to deliver as promised. Its disappointing results always mean that efforts—along with funding—must simply be doubled.

Many in the AIDS Establishment will only unreservedly applaud success if it comes through the technical means promoted by Western governments and activist groups. In a 2005 PBS documentary, UNAIDS’ executive director Dr. Piot refused to concede that behavior change played the paramount role in Uganda’s unparalleled success. “But we also know,” he added, “that no country has been successful in bringing down the number of new infections of HIV without strong condom promotion.”

To viewers who have never had reason to think twice about the issue, this might sound like a sober assessment. Human sexual behavior, we tend to assume, is hard to change and so the most effective way to reduce the number of people getting sexually transmitted diseases must therefore be to reduce the risk of sexual activity. That appears to many people just common sense.

But Uganda clearly refutes Piot’s claim, as does the fact that the countries with the most robust condom promotion programs have some of the most severe AIDS epidemics in the world. The evidence suggests that common sense may be wrong.

For starters, people tend to take greater risks when they feel protected by technical innovation. In a state of the art program in Uganda, for example, those explicitly encouraged to use condoms ended up at greater risk than the control group not exposed to the sophisticated intervention, because they had more sexual partners than those not told to use condoms. People have also been seen to take greater risks when antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS became available.

This “risk compensation” or “behavioral disinhibition” is now, fortunately, receiving more attention in scientific circles. It is one reason why vigorous promotion of risk reduction—even if it “works” in isolated cases—can do more harm than good. The “common sense” presupposition that condoms will decrease infection rates does not easily give way to the common sense observation that promoting devices capable of reducing risk encourages people to take more risks.

But risk reduction measures have a deeper and more damaging defect: a deflating absence of hope. They too often imply that we cannot influence behavior—that the best we can hope for is reducing and controlling the damage of behavior people will engage in whatever we say. More damagingly, they too often imply that we cannot change our behavior, that in matters of sexuality in particular we are doomed to live dangerously, that we are too weak to do what is best for us.

Thoughtful strategies to change behavior, on the other hand, reinforce the human capacity to recognize and choose what is good. As the Ugandan experience has proved, all people—especially the young—respond to this message when it is sincerely delivered.

Abstinence and monogamy - they work in practice, but can they work in theory?

The historical background to Agora.

Faith L. Justice has some interesting posts on the actual history concerning the history distorted in the film Agora.

Concerning arguments about "going beyond the text" and "stealing second base."

A little while ago, over at Theology for Dummies, I attempted to respond to Russ's buried argument that Aquinas - and other attempts to reason to theological doctrines - were suspect because they "went beyond Scripture":

Likewise, when Russ says that we have to be careful about "going beyond the text" that assumes that we are going beyond the text. As I pointed out on Saturday, no Church Father ever felt that they were "going beyond the text." Aquinas didn't feel that he was "going beyond the text." Rather they, and Aquinas, felt that they were staying within the text by properly applying reason to the the text.


They might have been wrong. Maybe they are going beyond the text. However, saying that we have to be careful not to go beyond the text is problematic because it assumes that the person who says "let's be careful about going beyond the text" is in a privileged position to know where the text ends.

Where a text "ends" depends on how the community that reads the text actually reads the text. This tells us a lot about where a given community says a text ends, but little about the proper reading of the text. Moreover, if we really were going to know where a text "ends" then we ought to give a lot of weight to how the text was originally read, since the best way of knowing what a text means is what its original writers and readers thought it meant. (But this is not always the case since texts can have latent meanings and implications.) This, then, means that if we want to know where a text "ends" we should give weight to the original understanding, which would mean looking at the Early Church Fathers, but, ironically, they tended to say things like that which we have been saying and which Russ says "goes beyond the text."

Over at Called to Communion, the ever-perspicacious Bryan Cross explains the problem with the "going beyond Scripture" argument better than I could ever hope to.

I hear this “over-realized eschatology” claim quite often. The problem with this frequent appeal to “over-realized eschatology” is that the principled basis for the standard for what is “properly-realized eschatology” is usually not provided. So in practice the claim amounts to “anything that goes beyond what I myself get out of Scripture.” For that reason, the standard by which to judge what is “over-realized eschatology” and what is “under-realized eschatology” is in that way subjective and relative, and so is no standard at all. My statement that persons have an unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification has nothing to do with eschatology. My statement follows from the very nature of persons as rational beings. For example, if you ask me to clarify something I have said, and then you still need further clarification, you can ask for it, and, because I can hear you and understand you and have memory and communicative ability, I can provide it. And if you need still more clarification you can ask me for it, and I can provide it. So long as I remain alive and conscious and capable of communication, I can provide interpretive self-clarification. That’s what I mean when I say that persons have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. We can get to the point where you say, “Are you saying x?” And I can reply, “Yes”. And that point, with respect to that question, the hermeneutical spiral comes to an end.

Books do not have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. And because books don’t have that, they cannot function as interpretive adjudicator when there are competing interpretations facing the Church: each side can appeal to the book to support its own position, and without a magisterium, the disagreement can be a perpetual deadlock or impasse. But a living magisterium can not only adjudicate an interpretive dispute, it can also provide clarification regarding previous statements or judgments it has made. That is why having a living magisterium does not leave us in the same epistemic quandary that we would be in if we had only a book and no interpretive authority.

This is what has made it possible within the history of the Catholic Church for theological disputes to be resolved. The reason the Church is not still wrestling with Arianism and Nestorianism and Monophysitism, etc. is precisely because she could speak definitively and authoritatively in condemning them. But the Bible alone could not do that. Because the Bible does not explicitly address those questions, persons on both sides could and did appeal to the Bible to defend their interpretation. And so a living personal divinely authorized voice was necessary in order to provide the authoritative interpretive decision in those cases.

As for St. Paul’s statement about seeing through a glass dimly, we (Catholics) understand that to be referring to the Beatific Vision. Faith is the evidence of things unseen. The object of faith is presently unseen, but we have some awareness of it, by way of the gift of faith. So we are neither ignorant of the object of faith, nor do we see the object of faith. But then, in the paraousia, we will see Him face to face, we will see even as we are seen. We do not take this verse to be teaching that until Christ returns we cannot have certainty regarding doctrinal or interpretive questions. In other words, the verse is not denying that we can know with certainty what are the dogmas of the faith and which positions are heretical; rather, it is talking about our present inability to see the object of the faith, and that object is God Himself.

Cross also makes this interesting empirical point about the claim that we don't need a human authoritative interpreter for scripture:

In other words, at this present point in history, almost five hundred years down the road from the start of the Protestant experiment, it seems safe to say that the historical evidence shows that Scripture is not sufficiently perspicuous to maintain unity of the faith, without a divinely authorized teaching and interpretive authority. Apart from the magisterium, Scripture cannot fulfill its authoritative function within the Church, because apart from a magisterium, there can be no unified Church preserved for Scripture to govern and guide. Without a magisterium, the situation necessarily reduces (in principle) and collapses (in time) into solo scriptura. So for these reasons, Scripture functions authentically as the divine word only as divinely interpreted by a living and divinely authorized magisterium. The content of the Sacred Scriptures can be understood only by the same Spirit who inspired them, and thus only with the guidance of those persons to whom Christ gave that gift of the Spirit by which it became true to say, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” (Luke 10:16)

The Parasite's morality: A tapeworm is shocked - shocked! - at his host's ingratitude.

Vice President Biden calls frozen custard store owner an "asshole" for saying "lower our taxes."

Here's the video.

The serious point is made by John Hinderaker at Powerline blog:

If you are a government employee, you have little reason to favor tax cuts: taxes pay your salary. As confiscatory taxation and over-regulation strangle private enterprise, the government is presented with endless excuses to increase public employment as a supposed response to the crisis in the private sector. It is a vicious cycle, but one that inevitably comes to an end. The goose stops laying eggs, or, as Margaret Thatcher put it, eventually you run out of other people's money.

In the meantime, the sharp conflict we are experiencing between government and the private sector is almost enough to make a neo-Marxist out of me. We have an oppressive ruling class--the government and its foot-soldiers, members of AFSCME--and an exploited, subservient working class, those who toil in the private sector for wages that currently average only around one-half of what our ruling class, government employees, are paid. The tick, in other words, is now faring much better than the dog.

Workers of the private sector, arise! You can no longer afford to keep your public sector masters in the lavish style to which they have become accustomed.

Here is an interesting graph showing that the recession has been bad for the private sector, but has actually been a period when government jobs have grown. Hinderaker aptly observes:

Everyone involved laughed it off, but a serious point lingered. A simple way to think about the Democratic Party is, you're the human being, they're the tapeworm. Yet they claim a weird sort of parasite's moral superiority over you: if you point out that they have their hand in your pocket, you're a "smartass." The Democratic Party needs to be torn, root and branch, from our public life.

Weigel, the Washington Post, Journolist and the myth that there is a "myth of media bias."

The critical point about the defenestration of Washington Post's "conservative" blogger Dave Weigel is that it puts the lie to the liberal cantrip that liberal bias is only a myth concocted by sour grapes conservatives.  Check out the data from Hot Air:

Weigel used JournoList for exactly the purpose its critics suspected it would be used, i.e., to attempt to shape media coverage for the benefit of the Left. And he did it more than once. As the DC’s Jonathan Strong reports:

After Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat, threatening to kill the health care legislation by his presence, Weigel stressed how important it was for reporters to highlight what a terrible candidate his opponent Martha Coakley had been.

“I think pointing out Coakley’s awfulness is vital, because it’s 1) true and 2) unreasonable panic about it is doing more damage to the Democrats,” Weigel wrote.

In addition:

After Sarah Palin claimed Obama’s health care legislation included “death panels” that would ration health care, for instance, the Huffington Post reported that many Americans believed the claim was true. Weigel suggested that reporting on the subject might be counter-productive to liberal policy aims. The Huffington Post, Weigel pointed out, ran “a picture of Sarah Palin, linking to a poll that suggests 45 percent of Americans believe her death panel lie. But as long as the top liberal-leaning news site talks about it every single hour of every day, I’m sure that number will go down.”

“Let’s move the f*** on already,” Weigel wrote.

No wonder folks at the WaPo who were backing Weigel on Thursday night were ready to accept his resignation after today’s DC piece.

The second example is particularly striking because Weigel was explcitly urging his fellow J-Listers to engage in what Weigel’s buddies and fellow travelers like to call “epistemic closure,” to operate as a closed media ecosystem that excludes competing political narratives. (It’s arguably there in the first example, too.)

So how are the bloggers that spent a decent chunk of this year complaining about “epistemic closure” reacting to Weigel’s resignation? Andrew Sullivan is on Team Weigel, natch. So is Conor Friedersdorf. So is Marc Ambinder. And all of them sidestep the worst things Weigel did. But taking the cake is the guy who mis-coined the term “epistemic closure,” Weigel’s pal, Julian Sanchez. Sanchez not only ignores Weigel’s advocacy of Lefty closure on JournoList, he manages to get in a swipe at contemporary movement conservatism, which he calls “Manichean,” and “tightly in the grip of a bunker mentality,” before conceding (as he must) that Weigel got submarined by someone on or with access to JournoList, which was closed to conservatives.

A business model designed to bankrupt the company.

The Washington Post's ombudsman acknowledges:

Alas, it took only one listserv participant to bundle up Weigel’s archived comments and start leaking them outside the group. The result is that Weigel lost his job. But the bigger loss is The Post’s standing among conservatives.

This could be what the Post's ombudsman is thinking about:

4) What do all the other so-called objective journalists who are members of JournoList have to say? How can they claim any loose association with the concepts of truth and fairness as they stood by and participated in this fraud?



Few members of JournoList have commented publicly on Weigel to date. One of the few who has anonymously defended him to POLITICO:

Whoever broke the confidentiality of the list obviously has no respect for some pretty basic journalistic norms. But I can’t talk about it because it’s supposed to be confidential. Whoever leaked that is obviously extremely jealous of the exceptional work that Dave is doing for the Post, and whatever Dave said should be viewed in that light.

Excuse me? The Washington Post holds out Weigel as their reporter of choice to cover conservatives and Republicans. Weigel spends all his time going to conservative and Republican events and claiming to be an objective reporter there to cover them fairly. In between these events Weigel goes online and vents on JournoList to 400 other journalists — many who claim to be of the “objective” variety — about just how much he hates those “ratfucker” (his word) conservatives and Republicans. All of the other journalists in the know about this fraud just sit tight and let the fraud continue. Are these the “basic journalistic norms” that those on JournoList are upholding? The reporters on JournoList owe their readers an explanation.

A rose in the slaughter-house.

Steven Greydanus reviews the new movie on Germany's "White Rose," which is based on transcripts of Scholl's interrogation and which Greydanus gives an A+:

The sheer intellectual and emotional rigor of the back-and-forth between this terrible old lion and his cagey young prey is both crushing and exhilarating; my friend and colleague Jeffrey Overstreet compared it (brilliantly, I think) to the electrifying exchanges between Clarisse Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.


Throughout her ordeal, Sophie’s guiding light — symbolized by the rays of the sun, often regarded by Sophie with upturned face — is her Christian faith, a cornerstone of her critique of Nazi ideology and atrocities, and a taproot of her moral strength. A devout Protestant, Sophie unapologetically invokes God and conscience under cross-examination as the basis for her actions, the source of human dignity and the necessary guiding light to put the German people on the path to recovery. In her private moments, when she allows herself to be vulnerable and afraid, Sophie opens her heart to God, pleading for help and strength. In an hour of extreme need she gladly prays with a prison chaplain, receiving his blessing in the name of the Holy Trinity.

As the interviews progress, there are hints that, despite himself, Mohr — a family man with a son of about Sophie’s age — is ultimately somewhat taken with his prisoner’s luminous intellect and conviction. It is almost a kind of cognitive crisis for him: Here is this young woman, to all appearances the flower of German womanhood, an initially enthusiastic member of the girls’ wing of Hitler Youth, educated at National Socialist expense — yet she inexplicably rejects the world the Nazis are trying to build. “You’re so gifted,” he finally says in frustration. “Why don’t you think like us?”

This article argues that Scholl was influenced in her views on the primacy of conscience by Cardinal John Henry Newman.  Scholl gave her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel - a German officer serving on the Eastern Front - a copy of Newman's writing:

On arriving in the town of Mariupol, Russia, Hartnagel saw corpses of Soviet soldiers who had been shot by their German guards and began to hear reports of mass killings of local Jews.


He later wrote to Scholl to say that reading Newman's words in such an awful place were like tasting "drops of precious wine".

"What a fallacy it is to take nature as our model for our actions and to describe its cruelty as 'great'," he said in a letter of July 1942. "But we know by whom we were created and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. Conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil."

Mr Knab has identified Hartnagel's words as being taken verbatim from a sermon given by Newman called "The Testimony of Conscience".

Newman taught that conscience was an echo of the voice of God enlightening each person to moral truth in concrete situations. Christians, he argued, had a duty to obey a good conscience over and above all other considerations.

Lieutenant Hartnagel's convictions later led him to protest against the mass murders of the Jews.

There were protests by German soldiers against German atrocities - all too rare, perhaps, and all the more courageous for their rarity.

The article also connects Scholl to Newman in this way:

In his speech Fr Fenlon explained that Sophie, a Lutheran, was introduced to the works of Newman by a scholar called Theodor Haecker, who had written to the Birmingham Oratory in 1920 asking for copies of Newman's work, which he wanted to translate into German.


On reading Newman, Haecker converted to Catholicism and he later became such an outspoken critic of Nazism that he was forbidden to publish his work by the regime. Early in the Second World War he became a good friend of the Scholls and a direct inspiration of the White Rose movement, which opposed Nazism by circulating thousands of leaflets telling German Christians that they had a "moral duty" to rise up against Hitler, the "messenger of Anti-Christ".

The movement, made up mostly of German students, also condemned the persecution of the Jews in 1942 - the year Hitler began to implement the Final Solution - as the "most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history".

Much of the language of the fourth pamphlet in particular directly echoed Newman's theology, said Fr Fenlon.

He said: "Newman's influence on the movement took the form of a light which questioned the darkness."

"Newman had won Haecker to the Church," he said. "Haecker sought to win the younger generation to Newman understood on his own terms."

Ideas have consequences.  The New Atheists attempt to link Nazism to Christianity, but the question they should answer is, "where were the atheist Sophie Scholls?"

A Classic.

Greeks v. Germany in Philosophy Soccer!

Surprise! It turns out that the Washington Post journalist chosen to cover conservatives was....

...a liberal masquerading as a conservative.

This was the guy who tried to defend Rep. Etheridge's assault and battery.

From Big Journalism:

The flap has created a furor in the blogosphere, and for lots of reasons, few of them having anything to do with the unimpressive Weigel himself, other than this one salient fact: he was, as Politico’s Ben Smith notes, a liberal masquerading as a conservative and thus not the man the Post thought they were hiring to write the “Right Now” column.

The Post seems simply not to have understood what they were getting when Klein suggested they hire him. National editor Kevin Merida told me for my story on the subject in May that he never asked Weigel about his politics, and Klein said he presented him to the paper simply as the best reporter covering conservatives. (Weigel’s blog is subtitled, “Inside the conservative movement.”)

“The way I explained Dave is that he’s the best reporter on the conservative movement beat,” Klein said, describing Weigel as “hard to characterize politically.”

“I have not heard him express many policy opinions,” he said.

Merida, in a web chat in April, was asked if the paper would be “adding more conservative/Republican voices to better balance what is now your predominately liberal/Democratic leaning coverage?”

He replied, “[W]e recently have added to our staff the well-regarded Dave Weigel, and also mentioned columnists Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer. (Merida and a Post spokeswoman didn’t respond to questions about Weigel this morning.)

The "conservative" Weigel actually belonged to the liberal "Journolist" that has been used to coordinate coverage of stories:

Weigel’s resignation — which came on the heels of more leaked emails, this time by the Daily Caller website — also brought back into prominence Ezra Klein’s “Journolist,” a private email circle of center-left to hard-left journalists. One member of the list describes it as a “fairly boring list, mostly concerned with stuff like the Blue Dog Democrats. It’s not ‘how can we screw the Right today?’” Still, the notion that Weigel could call for an informal information boycott of the influential (and eminently fair) Byron York only serves to reinforce the notion on the right that there is something sinister about the “Journolist,” something beyond the usual lefty policy-wonkism — although there’s much merriment in the thought that there’s a mole in Klein’s sewing circle.

From Ben Smith:

The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he's a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he's liberal is primarily the Post's fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper's brass to put him in an unsustainable position.


Weigel first had to apologize for a tweet expressing incomprehension of "bigots" who oppose same-sex marriage. He's now apologized for intemperate, leaked emails sent to a large, private listserv started by his Washington Post colleage, Ezra Klein. They were the sort of angry, snarky attacks that most people know better than to put in writing (though most people occasionally slip), and which nobody (other than certain aides to General Stanley McChrystal) would say knowingly for print. But nobody would bother leaking what Klein himself wrote privately, or forwarding his tweets to management, to prove he was a crypto-liberal, because Klein isn't crypo-anything. He's a liberal blogger, and the Post hired him into a slot that required no pretense otherwise.

And this is a good point:

That said, I can understand why Weigel would leave at this point, and why the Post wouldn't argue with him. Prior to yesterday, Weigel could claim to be something other than just another hostile Leftie journalist thanks to his previous stint at Reason. Once the mask was ripped off, though, the odds that anybody to the right of David Gergen would take Weigel's calls dropped to somewhere around absolute zero. It'd be tough to maintain a blog ostensibly about the conservative movement when actual conservatives were liable to treat Weigel about the same way military officers will be treating Michael Hastings for the rest of his career--with cold silence.


Now, I don't think for a second the Post was ever remotely serious about honestly covering the Right in Weigel's blog or anywhere else, but maintaining the myth of Olympian objectivity is a sufficiently-potent cultural totem among "journalists" that they probably couldn't keep running Weigel with a straight face after today. Certainly no right-of-center blogger will ever link to or even reference Weigel without mentioning his JournoList scarlet letter. That'd make him quite popular among the Lefties, but for everybody else, he'd become an ignorable nonentity.

I know that when I first saw Weigel's blog at the Washington Post, I thought the Post was trying to achieve some balance in its coverage by offering the conservative position a place in the discussion.  I didn't understand that Weigel's Post blog was an agent provocateur.  After Weigel unmasked himself, he was useless to movement and, in the fine tradition of leftist movements everywhere, had to be "liquidated."

I blame Global Warming.

Your worst nightmares realized! 

A Taiwanese re-enactment of the Al Gore "crazed sex poodle" incident.

Al Gore, the "Crazed Sex Poodle."

The Smoking Gun on the sex assault claim made against the former Vice President Noble Prize Winning Carbon-Offset Billionaire:

JUNE 24--In a bizarre statement to police, the Oregon woman who claims that Al Gore fondled and groped her during a massage session described the former Vice President as a giggling "crazed sex poodle" who gave a "come hither" look before pouncing on her in a Portland hotel suite. In a taped January 2009 interview with cops, the 54-year-old woman, a licensed masseuse whose name has been redacted from police records, read from a lengthy prepared statement that detailed her alleged October 2006 encounter with Gore at the Hotel Lucia. Excerpts from the Portland Police Bureau transcript of the 2009 interview can be found on the following pages. In December 2006, a lawyer for the woman told police about the purported encounter, but after the masseuse cancelled three interview appointments, the case was closed due to her refusal to "cooperate with the investigation or even report a crime." It is unclear why, two years later, she approached Portland police and sought to memorialize her allegations against Gore, who she portrayed as a tipsy, handsy predator who forced her to drink Grand Marnier, pinned her to a bed, and forcibly French kissed her. The woman's statement--which could be mistaken for R-rated Vice Presidential fan fiction--describes Gore as a man with a "violent temper as well as extremely dictatorial commanding attitude besides his Mr. Smiley Global Warming concern persona." After fleeing Gore's suite, the woman returned home to discover, a la Lewinsky, "stains on the front of my black slacks." Suspecting that the stains were Gore bodily fluids, the woman made sure not to clean them. "I carefully hung them up and decided to be sure not to launder them until I knew more what to do with what had happened. Just my intuition." While the masseuse hired a civil attorney, "I was not interested in making any money from this case," she told cops. "I did not want to be labeled a gold digger like the women in this situation are often labeled." The woman recently eased off this principled stand when she offered to sell her story to the National Enquirer for $1 million. (15 pages)

Sure, the story sounds ridiculous, but if there is one thing we learned from the Democrats during the Clarence Thomas hearings it is that women do not lie about this kind of thing.

Oh, wait....if there is one thing we learned during the Bill Clinton presidency it is that women who accuse Democrats of these kinds of things are "nuts and sluts."

Never mind.

Needless to say, if this story targeted a Republican, the Media would be treating it as already proven and that America should engage in a "national dialogue" on the need to protect masseuses from sexual assault.

Although skeptical, this essay suggests reasons why the masseuse's story is not prima facie incredible:

Or, there's the Kurt Andersen argument: "You professionally rub naked flesh & call the *cops* about an untoward request?" This is, of course, the appropriate reaction: out of hand dismissal, besmirching of accuser's character and a scramble for reasons to not believe that a man whose environmental policy you admire is capable of such actions. (And speaking of hunches: this account is really consistent with the behavior of grabby drunk men we've encountered, just saying, especially the "he just giggled and acted like I was only teasing him" part.) It's equally premature to go ahead and deem this woman another Girl 27 - but the arguments against her credibility are uncomfortably reminiscent of that case. In her police report, the alleged victim said, "I was in a room with someone who was Teflon coated in terms of his credibility and celebrity status." How right she was.

Update:  And there's more!  Al Gore's accuser made contemporaneous statements to people she knew, which was a very important point against Clarence Thomas.

Unless you were hoping for the destruction of Western Civilization, this counts as "Good News."

"Peak Oil" postponed by human ingenuity.

So there is plenty of oil and gas after all. Prices will bumble along gently until well into the next decade. We are becoming more efficient in our use of energy, with 3pc extra savings annually. That is a faster pace than the rising real cost of fuel. Mankind will not run out of fuel for a very long time.

That at least is the story today from the International Energy Agency. Their medium-term outlook for fossil fuel markets is a dazzling contrast with last year’s warnings that a combination of break-neck industrialisation in China and lack of investment in new oil fields (thanks to the credit freeze) would exhaust global spare capacity by 2013.


The IEA said then that we would need “four new Saudi Arabias” within a generation to cope with the rise of China, and there were no such Saudi Arabias in sight. Such are the perils of forecasting the volatile variables of supply and demand for oil.

What has changed – apart from human emotions? For starters, the global gas market has been undergoing a revolution as a result of a) liquefied natural gas, a technology that is only just coming into its own and allows countries such as Qatar to ship their once useless reserves of gas on frozen hulls across the world; LNG output will increase by 50pc from 2008 to 2013. Actually, this is not that new, but never mind.

b) advances in US gas extraction from rock, which have turned the US into the world’s biggest producer of gas. Europe is jumping on the bandwagon. “The development of unconventional gas in North America is of global significance,” said the agency. Indeed it is. The knock-on effects run right through the energy complex.

The IEA now expects spare capacity of oil to remain at a comfortable 3.5m barrels a day (bpd) in 2015, with consumption edging up by an extra 1m bpd each year to around 90m bpd (or 92m if global growth is stronger). All this is quite manageable. It talked of a “gentle nominal price escalation through mid-decade, with prices rising from $77 to $86″.

The alarmist stories we heard last year from certain City banks about collapsing supply (I will spare the names) were wildly wrong. The IEA’s upward revisions from 2009 come from the US, Russia, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Egypt, and even the UK (+80,000).

Supply is rising from off-shore Brazil, the Caspian, Canadian oil sands, and biofuels, offsettting declines in the North Sea. Non-OPEC output will actually grow from 51.5m (bpd) to 52.5m by 2015. No crisis there … Latin America will jump from 3.9m to 5.1m, the old Soviet bloc from 13.3m to 13.8m.

On the demand side, America’s gasoline use is slowly “evaporating”. Consumption is falling by 0.6pc a year. This will continue after the new standard of 35.5 miles per gallon for light vehicles that came into force in April. Battery technologies for electric vehicles are on the cusp of a break-through, so long as lithium does not run short, (Half the world’s reserves are in Bolivia). Japanese researchers have built an 8-wheel prototype with a motor in each wheel that massively extends battery life because less energy is lost. “The transportation game-changer is just beginning,” said the IEA.

Knock on wood.

Great Moments in Crisis Management.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Mr. Robinson told the Monitor that requests for more help after a large swath of oil washed up on Pensacola Beach Tuesday night were initially rebuffed because central command in Mobile said they couldn't put certain kinds of equipment on a national seashore. But most of Santa Rosa Island is a public beach. "How could they not know that?" Robinson said.


In Plaquemines Parish, Mr. Nungesser blamed "government bureaucratics" for shutting down construction of a piece of a new protective berm structure over concerns they were dredging an area outside the allowed perimeter, possibly damaging the natural sand dunes. The delay came as northwesterly winds drove the spill toward the Chandeleur Islands. Two weeks ago, the Coast Guard temporarily shut down a barge pumping operation run by the state of Louisiana because the boats didn't have enough life vests aboard.

It's as if the Dunkirk evacuation was called off because of OSHA and EPA regulations.

"If we had to summarize Christianity's history, we would probably reference the apostle Paul, Billy Graham, and our congregation's building committee."



Carl Olson on a particular kind of historical illiteracy.

Victor Davis Hanson: "McChrystal had to go."

As a thought experiment, imagine if Bush was President: would liberals and Democrats have supported the decision to fire a field commander who had said the same thing about Bush that McChrystal said about Obama?

In general, conservatives have supported Obama's decision.  Victor Davis Hanson  supports the decision, but notes that Obama is once again beset by nemesis:

3) McChrystal’s crudities, of course, were mostly on target. The Afghanistan policy and those who carry it out do not inspire confidence: Deadlines only empower the Taliban to wait us out. (Remember that George Bush refused to set them for that very reason.) Obama did not meet with McChrystal for months. It was foolish to pick a public fight with our Karzai ally. It was sillier to turn loose mega-egos like Holbrooke and Eikenberry with the expectation they would be team players. (NB: this reminds us that we can see that one of the reasons that the surge worked was a particular tone established at the top by Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Crocker is also a much underestimated figure, whose professionalism and competence will increasingly be appreciated, in contrast to the current diplomatic team in Afghanistan. We owe him a great deal; he was not an advocate of invading Iraq, and yet when asked to serve did his best to carry out a policy that saved lives and a country itself. He was a far better candidate for a Nobel Prize than Obama will ever be.)


4) Conservatives err by citing all sorts of legitimate reasons for McChrystal to have expressed frustration: sorry — all are irrelevant in terms of his dismissal. We all agree with almost all of them. But they are not the issue. It remains judgment, the chain of command, civilian/military relations, and the very wisdom of palling around with a reckless loose-cannon reporter in Paris. He had to go, pronto.

5) The politics of McChrystal were weird, at least as I observed them. For weeks conservatives and many in the military complained of his restrictive rules of engagement — to a degree far more so than during the Anbar Awakening under Petraeus. One cannot be faulting McChrystal for having a COIN strategy that endangers troops in the field, and then regret that Obama is, with good cause, relieving someone who was the avatar of that strategy. So what is it? (I suspect that troops in the field will be split over the decision to remove McChrystal, with some perhaps relieved.)

6) The Left is in a trap in Afghanistan of its own making. From 2007-8, Obama et al. created a false narrative of Afghanistan as the good war and Iraq the bad, predicated not on facts, but only on casualty rates, public opinion, and their own desire to strut national security toughness without ever making gut-check decisions. Afghanistan was quiet in 2007 and so seen as stable—so why not adopt a “let me at ‘em” attitude? Iraq was scary, so why not trash it as Bush’s lost and unnecessary war? But Afghanistan has no tradition of secular literacy, Iraq a little—and no ports, terrible terrain, no oil or cash to work with, a nuclear Pakistan next door, and so on and on. Some of us cringed when we saw that Obama was taking the tougher challenge and boasting of his warrior cred, and trashing a war that was winnable, and indeed in the very process of being won. Nemesis again for the nth time with this president. (Cf. Guantanamo suddenly no longer the gulag, or renditions and Predators no longer terror).

This may explain why McChrystal wanted an interview published in a magazine with Lady Gaga on the cover.

Atlantic magazine reports that McChrystal was really an unabashed liberal:

Even more about McChrystal: now it can be told. The story about him voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really. This puts to rest another false rumor: that McChrystal deliberately precipitated his firing because he wants to run for President.

Ironically, Fox News turned out to be his chief supporter at the end.

It explains why McChrystal felt comfortable acting like a punk and sharing the fact that he was an Obama supporter. McChrystal probably felt that those on his side of politics would understand and support his punk behavior.

McChrystal out, Petraus in.

Victor Davis Hanson notes:

 

A final note: It is one of ironies of our present warped climate that Petraeus will face far less criticism from the media and politicians than during 2007–8 (there will be no more “General Betray Us” ads or “suspension of disbelief” ridicule), because his success this time will reflect well on Obama rather than George Bush. It is a further irony that Obama is surging with Petraeus despite not long ago declaring that such a strategy and such a commander were failures in Iraq. And it is an even further irony that he is now rightly calling for “common purpose” when — again not long ago, at a critical juncture in Iraq — Obama himself, for partisan purposes on the campaign trail, had no interest in the common purpose of military success in Iraq.

Hanson also notes that McChrystal voted for Obama - which might explain his ascension to command. Here's the Rolling Stone interview.  Despite McChrystal's idiocy in giving this interview, and the fact that he richly deserves to be fired, the interview provides a disturbing look into Obama's obvious lack of qualifications for his job, and this by someone Obama personally selected after the unceremonious and basically unprecedented firing of the previous commander:

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Make no mistake, McChrystal was Obama's guy. 

Rich Galen is worth reading on the subject, particularly his description of how a press secretary should act before the boss immolates himself in a stupid interview. These observation, however, seem spot on:

If I were Gen. Stanley McChrystal's boss, he not only wouldn't have to offer his resignation (I would have fired him), he would have had to pay his own cab fare home from Kabul.


I would also fire every member of his staff - civilian and military - who could have, but did not, intervene in the decision for McChrystal to do an in-depth interview with a free-lance reporter who was writing for Rolling Stone magazine.

To get the politics out of the way early, I will stipulate that if McChrystal had said awful things about President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney many members of the national press corps would be writing essays about how great it was that Gen. McChrystal had the "courage to speak truth to power."

 Finally, what was McChrystal thinking. Look at the cover of the Rolling Stone magazine in which his interview was published - you're welcome - and ask yourself how McChrystal intended his interview to favorably advance his mission to win.

Things were so much better for Obama when he could carp and snipe at the guy that he now has had to call in to fix his problems:

Calvin and the Development of Freedom of Conscience.

The usual narrative is that Americans owe their ideas of Freedom of Conscience to their Protestant heritage.  I think that there is a great deal of truth to this, inasmuch as Freedom of Conscience seems to be an implicit value in democracy and grass-roots democracy was nurtured in many ways in the tradition of electing pastors and self-government in the congregational and presbyterian ecclesiastical systems.

But sometimes the case gets overstated.  The Protestant Reformation was not about a universalized right of the average person to Freedom of Conscience.  Rather, it was about the right of some people - Luther, Calvin, etc. - to their Freedom of Conscience, with everyone else going along for the ride.

This is a very interesting essay at Called to Communion by Dr. David Anders about how learning about John Calvin made the author Catholic.  Dr. Anders writes:

Calvin’s most important contribution to Geneva was the establishment of the Consistory – a sort of ecclesiastical court- to judge the moral and theological purity of his parishioners. He also persuaded the council to enforce a set of “Ecclesiastical Ordinances” that defined the authority of the Church, stated the religious obligations of the laity, and imposed an official liturgy. Church attendance was mandatory. Contradicting the ministers was outlawed as blasphemy. Calvin’s Institutes would eventually be declared official doctrine.


Calvin’s lifelong goal was to gain the right to excommunicate “unworthy” Church members. The city council finally granted this power in 1555 when French immigration and local scandal tipped the electorate in his favor. Calvin wielded it frequently. According to historian William Monter, one in fifteen citizens was summoned before the Consistory between 1559 and 1569, and up to one in twenty five was actually excommunicated.1 Calvin used this power to enforce his single vision of Christianity and to punish dissent.

And:

Calvin took very seriously the obligation of the laity to submit and obey. “Contradicting the ministers” was one of the most common reasons to be called before the Consistory and penalties could be severe. One image in particular sticks in my mind. April, 1546. Pierre Ameaux, a citizen of Geneva, was forced to crawl to the door of the Bishop’s residence, with his head uncovered and a torch in his hand. He begged the forgiveness of God, of the ministers and of the city council. His crime? He contradicted the preaching of Calvin. The council, at Calvin’s urging, had decreed Ameaux’s public humiliation as punishment.


Ameaux was not alone. Throughout the 1540s and 1550s, Geneva’s city council repeatedly outlawed speaking against the ministers or their theology. Furthermore, when Calvin gained the right to excommunicate, he did not hesitate to use it against this “blasphemy.” Evangelicals today, unaccustomed to the use of excommunication, may underestimate the severity of the penalty, but Calvin understood it in the most severe terms. He repeatedly taught that the excommunicated were “estranged from the Church, and thus, from Christ.”4

It wasn't burning at the stake, but, then, neither was the Roman Inquisition for the most part.

Chimp Warfare.

Scientists have observed bands of Chimpanzees using raid and ambush techniques similar to those used by foraging cultures.

There have been several books that have demolished the "peaceful savage" model, which argues that it was civilization - or religion if you are a nutcase New Atheist - that led to war.  A book on the subject that I recommend is "Warfare before Civilization" by Lawrence Keeley.  Keeley's book is interesting for pointing out how much self-delusion anthropologists must engage in to to identify obvious defensive structures - such as thick walls - as mysterious cultic artifacts of no particular pragmatic consideration.  Keeley also explains how one community can devastate another community over the long term by periodically raiding and murdering isolated indviduals of the other community, which it seems is a strategy that Chimpanzees engage in.

Via Mark Shea.

"Amid crises, Obama declares war -- on Arizona"

Byron York explains:

The Obama administration has a lot of fights on its hands. Putting aside real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there's the battle against leaking oil in the Gulf, the struggle against 9.7 percent unemployment across the country, and clashes over the president's agenda on Capitol Hill. Despite all that, the White House has found time to issue a new declaration of war, this time against an unlikely enemy: the state of Arizona.

Then there's this:

And now, there's the Kyl controversy. On June 18, Kyl told a town meeting in North Phoenix that Obama personally told him the administration will not secure the U.S.-Mexico border because doing so would make it politically difficult to pass comprehensive immigration reform. "I met with the president in the Oval Office, just the two of us," Kyl said. "Here's what the president said. The problem is, he said, if we secure the border, then you all won't have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform."


"In other words," Kyl continued, "they're holding it hostage. They don't want to secure the border unless and until it is combined with comprehensive immigration reform."

After Kyl's statement went viral on the Internet, the White House issued a sharp denial. "The president didn't say that and Senator Kyl knows it," communications director Dan Pfeiffer wrote on the White House blog. "There are more resources dedicated toward border security today than ever before, but, as the president has made clear, truly securing the border will require a comprehensive solution to our broken immigration system."

Kyl is not backing down. "What I said occurred, did occur," he told an Arizona radio station. "Some spokesman down at the White House said no, that isn't what happened at all, and then proceeded to say we need comprehensive immigration reform to secure the border. That is their position, and all I was doing was explaining why, from a conversation with the president, why it appears that that's their position."