House of Eratosthenes

My thoughts on the Supreme Court decision that concludes a seven-year battle by the parents of the Seattle students. The issue is affirmative action, and in the decision under discussion, the Supreme Court struck down a diversifying plan as unconstitutional.

1. There’s a lot of yelling going on, even though if you bother to read the majority opinion, you find the Supreme Court didn’t gut much of anything, eviscerate anything, throw anything out, overhaul much of anything…it simply decided something the way our leftists don’t like things decided, 5-4. Seems to me, the reason we’re hearing so much about it, is in Grutter v. Bollinger it was Sandra Day O’Connor who was a swing vote — she’s no longer there, and now the Court is perceived to have ruled the other way. Panic! But read the decision. The methodology for deciding these issues is substantially consistent with the methodology implemented before. The news is in the politics, and the appearance that the ruling has something to do with changing faces on the Court. It would be difficult to assert that this is really what happened. If that is really what happened, it would further be difficult to assert this is a bad thing. O’Connor’s comments in the majority opinion of Grutter, at least in my mind, represent a potential low point in her career.

2. This decision is unusually hard to find. Every year as the fireworks stands open, the Supreme Court closes out a term and hands down a small picnic-basket of controversial opinions, about which our newspaper colums and our blogs sing the praises, or complain, or which our television pundits then use to predict dire consequences like dogs & cats living together. I find it interesting that with this one, you have to do a great amount of digging to just get past the complaining, and scoop up some raw data you can use to make up your own mind. The decision is Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, et al, and you can find it here.

3. The Washington Post notes ominously that the decision “culminates a fractious term in which the new Roberts court moved the law significantly to the right.” I, on the other hand, take note of something else: On Planet Journalism, the Supreme Court never moves the law significantly to the left. Didja ever notice that? Our Supreme Court never, ever, ever “moves left.” It issues landmark decisions. When those “landmarks” are found to have started precedent that is open to abuse, or is just plain bad, and the Supreme Court takes action to repair the damage — our journalists somehow don’t see that as plugging a hole in a dam or fixing a leaky hose. It’s always a “shift.”

4. Should I choose to go vertical on the 185-page opinion, and join the ranks of bloggers bloviating about how they would handle it, I’ve got a decision ahead of me: Comment about the Court’s consistency with it’s own jurisprudence, or about the Court’s consistency with common sense. I have never agreed with this business about “compelling interests,” at least as that phrase is used to describe a principle that can be put up against the text of the U.S. Constitution, and emerge victorious. I always found that horrifying. Maybe President Bush should do that with the interrogation of terrorists who want to blow us all up, and with the warrantless wiretapping issue: Government has a compelling interest in providing voters like me, with bodies of dead terrorists, because that’s what we want to see rolling on in when we vote. But I digress.

5. Barack Obama is deeply invested in CALWWNTY: “We have made enormous progress, but the progress we have made is not good enough.” Now I know how intelligent the Obama supporters are, and even more importantly, I know what Obama himself thinks of them. The mindset is so simplistic, the wording so constant, that I’m now closing out a year-and-a-half of lampooning it — and nobody’s bothered to sit down with a thesaurus and find a substantially different way of phrasing it. Let’s face facts: We’ve Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet is just another way of saying “I think my supporters are all drooling idiots.”

6. Hillary Clinton remains as consistent as I expect Obama will be, but in a different way. “If HIV-AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34 there would be an outraged, outcry in this country.” Clinton is amazing this way. Since 1992, her husband has changed his tactics based on the circumstances at hand, with amazing flexibility — and she herself has frustrated her constituents by waxing and waning in her support of certain causes, like socialized medicine, or finding new ways to hate George Bush. But her political tactic has always been the same: Someone’s overly-privileged, someone’s gotten away with shenanigans, and Hillary’s here to take ‘em down a peg. If the issue under discussion is missing this kind of villain, Hillary will inject a villain into it. You could adjust a precision timepiece by watching her do this. In my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve become aware of a more negative candidate, male or female, for anything.

7. Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion is sprinkled with arguments, that appear pretty sound from where I’m sitting, reconciling it with previous decisions on the same issue. This seems to be the source of the criticism from Scalia about which I’ve been hearing so much. For the issue under consideration, I’m not sure the Scalia/Roberts split is as important as it has been made out to be. But the quote of the day has to go do C.J. Roberts, in the second-to-last paragraph of the majority opinion, pp. 40-41: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

8. And as is usually the case, our liberals are sucking wind and exploring ways to chart new degrees of suckage. They’re haughtily intoning to each other, and anyone else paying attention, to be upset and angry about this decision without having read it yet. Observation: Progressive movements are invariably — at least the non-anti-war ones — about curing a social ill. “Curing” is something that, assuming it involves an effective remedy, we are going to presume will involve a diminishing level of intensity and effort over time. You’re out of shape, you’re going to adopt an exercise regimen that will hurt like the dickens at first, but will eventually become second nature. You owe someone a lot of money, you’re going to make regular payments until someday, the last one will have been made. We expect an effective cure to asymptotically diminish in intrusiveness and overall intensity, with the passage of time. It’s just the way cures are supposed to work. Progressive “cures” are never expected to be this way, and nobody’s ever explained why that is, to my satisfaction. Progressive cures for our social ills, championed by the left-wing, have to be exploding constantly. Every year, every decade, every generation: Bigger, broader, more intrusive, more expensive, more in-your-face. This doesn’t impress me as the way an effective remedy is supposed to be.

Update 7-2-07: Wow, did James Taranto ever get a lick in on this:

the most striking dissenting statement in Parents Involved was Justice John Paul Stevens’s conclusion:

It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.

There’s a lovely irony in Stevens’s appealing to the authority of dead white males while styling himself the champion of oppressed minorities. But by invoking the ghosts of justices past, Stevens reveals that his views of the subject are rooted in personal preference and not legal principle.

It’s reminiscent of another pronouncement a justice made 15 years ago:

I am 83 years old. I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today. That, I regret, may be exactly where the choice between the two worlds will be made.

That was Harry Blackmun in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the “constitutional” right to abort that had sprung from Blackmun’s imagination 19 years earlier. Blackmun retired in 1994 and died in 1999.

Stevens is 87 years old. He cannot remain on this court forever either. Like Blackmun in his twilight years, he seems dimly aware that “law” based on the preferences of men is as evanescent as the lives of men. Only principle endures.

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Best Movie One-Liners
Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Well, now the innernets are complete; this was the one thing they were missing.

Not a list of one-liners — no, the web is bursting at the seams with lists of things. But an insightful, semi-psychological analysis of what makes movie one-liners memorable and great. It’s sufficiently thorough enough to nudge up against, and some might even say cross, the line that defines something as being actually interesting.

Many one-liners are bad, if treasured, puns (Arnold put his stamp on “You’re fired” long before Donald did). Others display a wit that we might grudgingly concede (“Barbeque, huh? How do you like your ribs?”). The one-liner is also remarkably versatile. It spans the grandiose (“I’m going to show you God does exist”; “I’m your worst nightmare”) to the minimalist (“Get off my plane”; “Whoah”).

I’m going to have to revisit this later when I have the time and attention span to really do it some justice. There are a lot of things you can do with this, not the least of which is to condemn it for failing to list some treasured artifact. And with a cursory read I’m failing to see “Watch out for your cornhole, bud”, and “Around the survivors a perimeter create”.

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Watts Up With That?
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

Via Gerard: The home page of Anthony Watts, a Chico, CA weatherman who’s been picking a bone on the whole global-warming-climate-change subject. His bone to pick is, get this: How are we taking these measurements?

Huh. Well…however you define “earth’s mean temperature,” which is what the whole argument is about — that figure, is nothing more than an average taken of these. So logically, the issue Mr. Watts has raised, can be no less important than climate change itself.

And the facts he’s managed to scare up, are probably more interesting than you might otherwise think.

One of the really odd discoveries that I’ve made while surveying climate monitoring stations around the USA is the fact that many of the official stations are located at sewage treatment plants…this picture comes in today from from surfacestations.org volunteer Steve Tiemeier, who visited the climate station of record located at the Urbana, Ohio Waste Water Treatment Plant:

The small item in the center of the picture labeled “MMTS” is the temperature sensor that is used to submit monthly climate reports to NCDC.

Now in case you don’t see some of the obvious problems with this location and why its a terrible place to measure temperature, I’ll list them one by one:

- Sensor is attached to the building, just mere inches away from brickwork
- Sensor is near windows, which radiate heat from heated interior rooms in winter
- Sensor is directly above effluent grates for waste-water, Waste-water is often warmer than the air many months of the year
- Sensor is between three buildings, restricting wind flow
- Sensor is between three buildings, acting as a corner reflector for infrared
- Several exhaust fans near sensor, even though one is disable, there are two more on the walls (silver domes)
- Air conditioner within 35 feet of sensor, enclosed area will tend to trap the exhaust air near sensor
- Sensor is directly over concrete slab
- Refrigeration unit nearby, exhausts air into the enclosed area
- Shadows of all buildings create a valley effect related to sunlight at certain times
- There are two nearby digester pools, which release heat and humidity in the sensor vicinity
- Heat and humidity plume over the site from digesters is often tens of degrees warmer than the air in the wintertime

Something to keep in mind, at least? Maybe to ponder next time you see a Climate Change Chicken-Little hautily scolding you that “The Science Is In On Global Warming”? You decide.

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On Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces
Monday, June 25th, 2007

Conn Iggulden is a man on a mission: To round up our boys, pump out all that bad overly-feminine wussiness we all know they’ve been fed over the years like fattened veal calves, and re-inject that rugged, noogie-giving, bug-squishing, “Hold My Beer and Watch This” stuff the Good Lord intended them to have.

He’s written a book, with his brother, called “The Dangerous Book for Boys.”

It’s about remembering a time when danger wasn’t a dirty word. It’s safer to put a boy in front of a PlayStation for a while, but not in the long run. The irony of making boys’ lives too safe is that later they take worse risks on their own. You only have to push a baby boy hard on a swing and see his face light up. It’s not learned behavior — he’s hardwired to enjoy a little risk. Ask any man for a good memory from childhood and he’ll tell you about testing his courage or getting injured. No one wants to see a child get hurt, but we really did think the bumps and scratches were badges of honor, once.

Since the book was published, I’ve discovered a vast group that cares about exactly the same things I do. I’ve heard from divorced fathers who use the book to make things with their sons instead of going out for fast food and a movie. I’ve received e-mails from 10-year-olds and a beautifully written letter from a man of 87.

I thought I was the only one sick of non-competitive sports days and playgrounds where it’s practically impossible to hurt yourself. It turned out that the pendulum is swinging back at last. Boys are different from girls. Teaching them as though they are girls who don’t wash as much leads to their failure in school, causing trouble all the way. Boys don’t like group work. They do better on exams than they do in coursework, and they don’t like class discussion. In history lessons, they prefer stories of Rome and of courage to projects on the suffragettes.

I’ve done very much the same thing with my son, although not on quite so grand a scale. On the Doofus Dad list that was picked up and passed ’round a few weeks ago, there are three or four titles I have never seen. My son came up with those, after seeing them himself, assuring me they all met the criteria.

I walk a fine line. To me, inculcating the boy with my jaundiced sentiments about the feminist movement, crosses the line. But to deny him the observations I’ve made about it over the years, withholding even a smidgen of the things I consciously wish others had taught me when I was his age, seems like a crime. And, sometimes he asks questions — in response to which I can change the subject, tell the truth, or lie. There’s no fourth option.

So in response to “How come you refer to the feminist movement in the past tense, and my Mom doesn’t?” I tell him the truth. I tell him there are revolutions that try to make the world a better place, and there are cynical political movements that just try to accumulate power. When President Clinton mistreated women, and the feminist movement gave him cover, it was revealed as a political movement, nothing more, never mind the good intentions that might have started it. And people gave up on it.

Some folks wouldn’t like that explanation one bit. Some folks think the boy would have a better shot at it being raised in the woods by wild animals. And yet it occurs to me: A father who just regurgitates the crap he’s been fed himself over the years, in order to avoid the wrath of third-parties, must be worth — what? Not a whole helluva lot. I’ve made my share of mistakes as a Dad, but I’m better than that. If it’s the truth he seeks, it’s the truth he shall have.

Not to say I’m unbiased. To the question about whether my bias has ascended to lunacy, my defense plan is to hide behind what other folks are doing, and entertain the time-honored question: Which is worse? And what a stellar example I can capture from the work of Iggulden himself:

It’s all a matter of balance. When I was a teacher, I asked my head of department why every textbook seemed to have a girl achieving her dream of being a carpenter while the boys were morons. She replied that boys had had it their own way for too long, and now it was the girls’ turn. Ouch.

The problem with fighting adult gender battles in the classroom is that the children always lose.

I expected a backlash. If you put the word “boys” on something, someone will always complain. One blog even promoted the idea of removing the words “For Boys” from the cover with an Exacto knife so that people’s sons wouldn’t be introduced to any unpleasantly masculine notions such as duty, honor, courage and competence.

Boys had it their way and now it’s the girls’ turn. Removing “For Boys” with an Exacto knife.

Christ on a cracker, we can get silly sometimes. There’s something going on here, not just with the womens’ movement, but with all those rabble-rousing movements from the second half of the twentieth century. They all seem to have followed the same path: Promoting the interests of a designated class; promoting political movements friendly to members of that designated class; opposing political movements hostile to members of the class; opposing people who are members of other classes — and getting stuck there. Stuck in the role of bringing discomfort and pain to individuals outside the membership, punishing the outsiders for the crime of simply being what they are.

And so in 2007, the feminist movement seems to find it difficult to help little girls without hurting little boys. All these movements engineered to conquer injustice on behalf of pre-defined groups of people…they all descend into a muck of negativity, and stay there like a pterodactyl in a tar pit.

Thing I Know #196. Real freedom is actually pretty boring. It has very little to do with noteworthy events, save for the one event marking its arrival. When classes of people take turns, over time, enjoying special privileges, not one man among them enjoys genuine freedom.

I think the lesson here is pretty obvious: All absolutist statements eventually lead to problems, including this one.

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Opening a Beer Bottle
Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Via our blogger friend Bartender, we come to find out about the sexiest way to open a beer bottle. I’ll set it up so you can click once instead of twice. You get tired, after all…

You know what…I think I got that one beat.

Let the reader decide.

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Memo For File XLIII
Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Evidence arrives to indicate Tom Leykis, some four years and change ago, really pushed the envelope. I haven’t listened to Tom in about a decade, so I didn’t hear the show in question. It seems to be over the line, I’m convinced, even after reading MOJO Radio’s response to an official complaint.

The issue is drunk driving. Actually, that deserves elaboration. The issue is our society’s response to the problem. I can personally testify to the fact that Leykis has been harping on this for years; his politics are way different from mine, but I found him to be entertaining and enlightening, and made a point of catching his show whenever I could while it was playing here.

I can’t think of a more controversial position I’ve heard him take, on anything.

And I can’t think of another issue on which I agree with him more strongly.

Reckless and offensive as this stunt seems to have been, his point is right on the money. As a society, for all the bluster you hear we don’t do anything that seems calculated to mount an effective countermeasure against the drunk driving problem…and we do quite a few things that seem calculated to keep it going strong.

I have a favorite example in mind: Ordering beer with your pizza delivery. Can’t do it. Not in my county; wherever you sit as you read this, you probably can’t either. Now at first glance, this seems like a reasonable and effective rule. Hey it’s Sunday and the game is on, come on over to my place and we’ll get three pies with some brew. After everyone’s smashed and needs to get home, we’ll worry about transportation at that time. So yeah I can see the logic. Such a status quo can lead to nothing but trouble.

My objection is to the absolutism — the notion that if a little of something is good, a lot of it must be a whole lot better, and thus our nascent movement is betrayed by anyone stopping for a moment, for whatever reason. The notion that putting one foot in front of the other a few more times, is always an adequate substitute for thinking. As is so often the case with laws, it is non-productive and even demonstrably counter-productive. Who orders pizzas? A gaggle of guys watching a football game on Sunday…or slobby lazy bachelors without a date on a Friday night who don’t feel like cooking? Really — am I to believe the pizza parlors sit around six nights a week, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for Sunday when the real business starts? That’s just too much for my fragile little mind to absorb. Call me a dreamer, but I think most pizza is ordered by lazy people. No occasion involved. Just don’t feel like firing up the stove. Guys like me.

People who are in for the night.

Want a pizza? No problem, I’ll pick up the phone. Pizza with beer? Sorry. There’s beer in the fridge, or if there isn’t…you go without. Tap water. Milk.

Or…we can go on down to Round Table or Mountain Mike’s, and get a pitcher. C’mon. We’ll drink responsibly, like the commercials say…and with two glasses, maybe three, I’m sure we can limp home. We’ll be there for awhile, right? Four beers over an hour or more, isn’t that okay?

You can probably see my point now. The “no beer with delivery” rule might prevent some instances of drunk driving. Clearly, it might very well be responsible for causing some. A society that is really serious about stopping it from happening, with zero tolerance, ought to at least look into the issue. We don’t.

I don’t remember if Leykis discussed that, but I do remember him talking about this: Insurance premiums. And driving school. Now, if you have a real problem with alcohol and you just can’t be persuaded to stop driving when you’re tanked, these are two big expenses that you’ll have to make room for in your budget. Why? Your lifestyle choice is an ongoing threat to entirely innocent people, and you have to be “stopped” before someone gets hurt…but these things don’t stop you. They get money out of you, they don’t stop you. Stopping you, would be: Your license is gone. If you continue to drive, we’ll take the car. If you’re caught borrowing someone else’s car, you go to prison until someone’s convinced you’re going to change your ways. Which means a life sentence, because there aren’t too many ways to demonstrate that in prison. And if you do happen to get someone killed, you’re put up against a wall and shot.

And then there are bars. Bars with parking lots. Why? If at any given time there are going to be five employees there, there should be five or six parking spots, plus maybe a space for a limo. Of course, if we were to start yanking liquor licenses from establishments that don’t want to tear up their parking lots, we’d hear a lot of protestations about “designated drivers.” This is an entirely legitimate complaint; I’d invoke it myself, and I’d have cause to do so.

But that’s the only way you justify it. And apart from the fact that the designated-driver convention has been open to, and fallen prey to, abuse — now it’s the sole justification for bars to have parking lots. I mean bars — not places where you can pick up television equipment and digital cameras and ice cream and oh by the way, we have Budweiser on tap too. Not those. Bars. Retail establishments that are there for the purpose of serving alcohol.

They have parking lots for the vendors? For the Coors company representative who wants to talk to the owner about a new contract? For the plumber to stop by when the toilets won’t flush? For people who want to drink Dr. Pepper? Give me a freakin’ break.

Those are three things just off the top of my head, that we do or don’t do — somewhat oppositional to the goal of stopping people from getting hurt or killed. If I really worked at it, I could probably keep adding to a growing list all day long.

I was born within a year of Candy Lightner’s daughter. Therefore, I’ve been able to watch the anti-drunk-driving movement blossom from it’s humble beginnings during my early adolescence, after the daughter’s tragic demise, and of course it had a direct bearing on the process to which I was subject when I was first learning to drive. I’ve been fully conscious of this for most of my mortal life, and I think I’m in a position to authoritatively state: Leykis is right. Like so many things we do that are supposed to save lives, it’s a money grab.

That’s not to say the two missions don’t overlap here & there. In the early stages of what’s called “increasing public awareness,” I think those who seek to make a profit pursue a common mission with those who seek to mitigate the danger to innocents. But once we shifted out of that phase, based on what I’ve managed to see, the public-safety objective became secondary, and tragically, random. Maybe, now that we’ve got bushels of public and private bureaucratic machinery in place that’s all expected to do one thing, but is probably engineered to do something else — the time has come to run a complete audit on all of it, every nut, bolt, screw and rivet.

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Lyrics to Jaws
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Yeah…there are some. Starts to get good after twenty seconds or so, then ascends into the realm of genius.

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Is It Getting Warmer?
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Quote of the week: U.W. Madison Prof. Emeritus Reid Bryson, speaking about global warming, or as it’s cheerleaders have renamed it to coincide better with ongoing evidence, “climate change.”

Reporters will often call the meteorology building seeking the opinion of a scientist and some beginning graduate student will pick up the phone and say he or she is a meteorologist, Bryson said. “And that goes in the paper as ’scientists say.’”

The 87-year-old, who founded the department of meteorology at the U.W. Madison, as well as the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, concedes that it is indeed getting warmer.

There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the “Little Ice Age,” he said in an interview this week.

“However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We’ve been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It’s been warming up for a long time,” Bryson said.

The Little Ice Age was driven by volcanic activity. That settled down so it is getting warmer, he said.

Humans are polluting the air and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but the effect is tiny, Bryson said.

“It’s like there is an elephant charging in and you worry about the fact that there is a fly sitting on its head. It’s just a total misplacement of emphasis,” he said. “It really isn’t science because there’s no really good scientific evidence.”

Interestingly, a lot of scientists are coming out of the woodwork to bluster away about this unqualified yokel — until they figure out that whoever taught those scientists what they know about weather phenomena, were themselves Prof. Bryson’s students. The guy is the freakin’ Yoda of scientific climatology…and he ain’t buyin’ it.

Well, it gets even more interesting than that. Because some climate change skeptics raise some intringuing questions about the recent warming trend itself:

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

So says Bob Carter, professor of Marine Geology at James Cook university in Australia. Interestingly, the pro-global-warming tattletale website SourceWatch is mum in Prof. Carter’s case, on what has become an obligatory smear against all climate change skeptics: that he would have been bought-off by the energy industry. There’s no such slur on Carter’s page there. Instead, the onslaught is limited to a quote from the Sydney Morning Herald that Carter “appears to have little, if any, standing in the Australian climate science community.”

If you know SourceWatch, you know this is virtually a compliment. “He got such-and-such a grant from Exxon” would be the attack of choice; “the whitecoats haven’t let him into their club so we shouldn’t listen to him” is decidedly second-rate, used only when the first-tier smear has been thoroughly evaluated for use, and found not to apply.

Okay, so it seems both of these gentlemen are relatively “clean” and can’t be slandered into irrelevance with gossip about industry-funded research. And they’re both saying we really need to look before we leap onto the whole curtail-carbon-emissions bandwagon, in whatever form we’re propositioned to do so.

But amongst the two of them, it seems there is disagreement about whether it’s getting warmer. How do you explain that?

Well, as Dr. Carter himself pointed out, the disagreement is likely illusory because the two authorities are speaking about different timeframes. But I would like to inspect, also, the definition of “it” we are using when we say “it’s getting warmer.” What it? Seems to me, since the Earth is a three-dimensional object, if it is to be considered as a closed ecosystem and we’re going to start hyperventilating with worry and angst because that three-dimensional ecosystem’s “mean temperature” has been ticking upward, we should be measuring all of it. Which means, you pull up an enormous blender, big enough to accomodate the entire planet. Without adding anything or taking anything away, you grind up the entire planet into a liquid puree — once the temperature has been fully stabilized and distributed throughout the contents, you measure it.

By which time, of course, you’ve destroyed the SUV’s and the factories that are supposed to be causing global warming so you can’t test the theory anymore…besides of which, you probably can’t find a blender that big. But you find a way to do the equivalent. Which would yield a “mean temperature” of nine or ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

You know what?

That’s probably not what scientists are talking about when they say “mean temperature.”

But that’s about the only definition of it that can be produced, with real scientific merit. Nothing else takes into account all of the matter that contributes to the ecosystem. And if you aren’t going to do that, what you’re then going to do is disregard distribution, convection, wakes, currents…all the stuff that climatology is. You would be doing what I suspect our climate eggheads really are doing: Measuring “local” temperature, wherever the instrumentation happens to be, and calling it gobal temperature.

Averaging it out not according to heat density of the surrounding matter, but according to where the readings may be taken.

How far down? Well, you can stop wherever you want, to give the final result an alarming twist that will end up getting your name in the paper. Sea level…a hundred feet above…fifty feet below…if nobody’s calling you on it, you can measure it however you want. So I guess I’m calling the whole notion of a “mean temperature” into serious question here.

And that seems fair, from where I sit. The agent whose readings are going to be most drastically affected by the questions I’m raising, it seems, is sea water. Ya know what? I’m not a scientist myself, but I know water weighs a lot. And every pound of it, can absorb a lot of energy without much temperature variance. If you switch to the metric system it gets really easy: Just a gram of water will tick upward by one degree Celcius, for every calorie absorbed. One degree, in that situation, is a whole lot less than the temperature differential you’ll measure in a gram of — let’s say — sand. Or asphalt, or dirt.

The issue is heat density. Your satellite measures a heat differential over a square kilometer; you have to ask, a square kilometer of what? Peat bog? An empty lot? Water? If water, then how far down does it go? There are a lot of ways you could settle this; most of those methods, the least expensive ones, are going to be utterly invalid, contaminating your entire “model” or experiment. And I don’t see anyone speaking to that anywhere.

But they’ve “proven” an increase of 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit over a hundred years. There. That might be why there’s disagreement about why it’s getting warmer. Meanwhile, the “proof” is there, so I’m supposed to join everybody else, fling spittle around, and panic. Pardon me if I’m a little slow to climb on board.

But anyway. These are just some of the questions I have, assuming that we’re all settled on the notion that global warming is really taking place. Our skeptics aren’t settled on that…and the cheerleader-chicken-littles aren’t settled on it either, for if they were they wouldn’t have renamed it to “climate change.”

Oh, and one other little thing from Bob Carter’s column that bears some emphasis:

As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.

Um, yeah. High time someone raised that as an issue. But I doubt we’re ready for it, because we’re still stuck in the mold of watching movies made by former presidential candidates and calling them “documentaries.”

And, might I add…driving monster vehicles that get about eight-miles-a-gallon to the theaters to see those movies.

See, we like to think we’re treating this “scentifically,” or that if we’re not, at least the “scientists” who are trying to get us all scared and riled up, are doing that. We like to think that. But that isn’t what’s really going on, and deep down I think just about everyone understands that. It’s a fairy tale, and it’s getting more and more popular because the line between “scientist” and “politician” is quickly eroding. That is a climate change that should be capturing more of our attention.

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Happiness Is Paying Your Taxes
Sunday, June 17th, 2007

Aw…would you look what our clipboard-carrying, white-coat-propeller-beanie wearing researchers have done this time.

Contrary to the common notion that paying taxes can be a painful experience, researchers at the University of Oregon say the practice actually may trigger feelings of satisfaction and happiness.

“Paying taxes can make citizens happy,” Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology, said in a release accompanying the study in the Friday issue of Science.

Now when we all have to pay taxes, do I really have to have some letters after my name to criticize or to question this? I mean, really? Because on tax day I’m lots of things, but I don’t think you could call any of those things “happy.”

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, the researchers observed the brain activity of 19 women who were given a balance of $100 each. The researchers created the effect of taxation by making mandatory withdrawals from their account. The withdrawn money was actually sent to a food bank’s account.

Participants also made additional choices about whether to give away more money or keep it for themselves.

The article then goes on to explain why all nineteen of them were female, and whether they were drifting though their financial life-circumstances like dandelion seeds, or whether they had some real hard-and-fast responsibilities to fulfill of their own. Or something in between.

Oops! I made that up. No, the article doesn’t explain any of that. So…these are nineteen enterprising female students, working their way through college while holding down two or three jobs apiece, supporting massive families of babies and toddlers all by their lonesomes, living on Top Ramen with mean old landlords hassling them for money…or, not one of the nineteen has any responsibilities to meet, whatsoever. Which means, of course they’d get warm fuzzy thoughts giving it away. ‘Cause otherwise, y’know, they’d have to find something to do with it.

Or anything in-between those two extremes.

The resolution to which…on the planet from whence I come…this would have an effect on what is to be learned from the research.

But not on planet Oregon-Pinko-Commie-Researcher-land, nosiree! Nineteen women, that’s all ya need to know.

“The fact that mandatory transfers to a charity elicit activity in reward-related areas suggests that even mandatory taxation can produce satisfaction for taxpayers,” the study said.
:
Mayr said the findings show people are willing to pay their taxes as long as they support good causes. The authors noted, however, that the results may have differed if people had been presented with a tax that seemed less fair or benevolent.

So in other words, the research doesn’t prove or suggest jack-squat. People feel good when required to make mandatory donations, so long as the funds are used in a manner that meets their liking. So to feel happy, they don’t have to choose whether the funds are spent, but they do want to choose where the funds go.

People — women — like to spend money.

I hope they didn’t spend a lot of time or energy figuring that out.

I find it interesting that the research could have been so much more explosive and charged with not-so-phony importance, if they just took it one teeny tiny step further. What parts of the brain start getting tingly when the money goes to bad places? That would have made more of an issue of the involuntary nature of taxes, I think all would agree.

Or how about when the money goes to a program that does or does not meet your approval…and, once there, it gets wasted on graft, fraud and corruption? What if the waste takes place because of a lack of controls you just know would have been in place, at least to some extent, had the money been spent in the private sector?

But stopping where it seems to have stopped, the research tells us next to nothing.

Well, it does tell us one important thing. It tells us our clipboard-carrying white-coat-propeller-beanie-wearing researchers can miss important points, points that rob all the value that might have been left in the research they’ve been trying to do.

We see it in the executive summary of the study being explored…

Civil societies function because people pay taxes and make charitable contributions to provide public goods. One possible motive for charitable contributions, called “pure altruism,” is satisfied by increases in the public good no matter the source or intent. Another possible motive, “warm glow,” is only fulfilled by an individual’s own voluntary donations. Consistent with pure altruism, we find that even mandatory, tax-like transfers to a charity elicit neural activity in areas linked to reward processing. Moreover, neural responses to the charity’s financial gains predict voluntary giving. However, consistent with warm glow, neural activity further increases when people make transfers voluntarily. Both pure altruism and warm-glow motives appear to determine the hedonic consequences of financial transfers to the public good. [emphasis mine]

It’s a thought process that ends up precisely where it began. The assumption is made that when you pay taxes, you are directly contributing to some nebulous concept that is haphazardly summarized in the words “public good.” The assumption is further made, and it seems not to be contested anywhere, that charitable contributions and taxes are responsible for the functioning of “civil societies.”

Appearances being any indication, it hasn’t even occurred to the propeller-beanie-wearing researchers that some of us might possibly have questions or issues about this.

Or that “public good” is a subjective concept, not an objective one. For example…our government now-and-then funds programs overseas to assist the indigent in family planning. This education includes abortion counseling, so whenever a Republican President is sworn in he invokes or reinstates a ban on the program, and whenever a Democrat President is sworn in he repeals the ban. That’s because some among us think these programs are in harmony with the public good, and others of us think it is oppositional to that public good. See, it’s an opinionated thing…decided by values that are ingrained deep within the personality and ethical/philosophical values embraced by that individual. There are many more issues just like this one; I’m simply picking out the one whose support, or whose opposition, is the most deeply offensive to selected subsets of the electorate.

This is, I would suggest, all of what meaningfully separates private donations from public ones. In the former, you get to decide what is good; in the latter, you don’t.

By failing to take this into account, the researchers have released a study that essentially reports on exactly what I’ve crudely summarized above: Whether our gals like to spend cash on things.

Why were they all female, anyway? It’s disturbing that this is never explained. It almost looks like they were trying to figure out how the two sexes react differently to a situation, and stopped halfway through. Maybe in the days ahead we’ll get an answer to that.

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Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… XIII
Saturday, June 16th, 2007

I always suspected as much: All these various left-of-center causes, from socialism to vegetarianism to driving-a-hybrid to the hostility against religion, are really all about one thing: Nihilism. Becoming a zero. Slipping through this existence like prunes through your digestive tract, leaving not a single trace that you were ever here.

I need suspect no more. Now I know.

North Americans who spend their lives reducing, reusing and recycling can keep doing their bit for the environment after they die, if Europe’s “green funeral” trend makes its way across the Atlantic.

Canadian activists say green send-offs could help the dead contribute to a sustainable environment, with funerals that use shrouds or biodegradable containers and involve no embalming, no headstones and no grave linings.

“Having a green burial is one more thing a person can do to lessen the impact we’re having on our environment,” said Dorothy Yada of the Memorial Society of British Columbia.

Ugh. It’s the ultimate in bathosploration, something like a cartoon character jumping into a hole, reaching up, and pulling the hole in after himself. Maybe I should retract that prune analogy; prunes leave something of an aftertaste. So there’s no carcass and therefore no space being occupied, therefore no plot, no tombstone. Just memories and a eulogy that reflects those memories. Uh, what’s the eulogy going to be if these activists have their way? “He was relatively harmless”?

You know what is so attractive about offering the opportunity to people to eliminate themselves? Here’s my theory: It’s not the objective of quiet self-destruction itself, it’s the political movement that always seems to be attached to it. When you tether a political movement to this nihilism, it greatly enhances the potential of that political movement as a contagion. If someone suggests to you there̵

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On The Seattle Schools DecisionFriday, June 29th, 2007

Best Movie One-LinersThursday, June 28th, 2007

Watts Up With That?Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

On Skinned Knees and Grubby FacesMonday, June 25th, 2007

Opening a Beer BottleSunday, June 24th, 2007

Memo For File XLIIISunday, June 24th, 2007

Lyrics to JawsSaturday, June 23rd, 2007

Is It Getting Warmer?Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Happiness Is Paying Your TaxesSunday, June 17th, 2007

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… XIIISaturday, June 16th, 2007

On The Seattle Schools Decision
Friday, June 29th, 2007

Best Movie One-Liners
Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Watts Up With That?
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

On Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces
Monday, June 25th, 2007

Opening a Beer Bottle
Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Memo For File XLIII
Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Lyrics to Jaws
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Is It Getting Warmer?
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Happiness Is Paying Your Taxes
Sunday, June 17th, 2007

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… XIII
Saturday, June 16th, 2007