Warming Trend Becomes Obvious...

It's warming here in Boston, I tell you! Just three months ago I was freezing my a$$ off. Now I'm sitting here in shorts with the window open. My goodness, what if this trend continues? (Kmaru pulls out calculator; quickly makes rough calculations; eyes pop out of head, cartoon-style).

Yikes! If my numbers are right, things could literally reach the boiling point by this time next year--and I don't mean the pre-election political rhetoric. We should do something! Everyone should do something! (except me, of course.) Now!

Where's Al Gore's phone number when you need it?...

Not taking on his well-informed teenage critics, apparently.

I begin in lame jest only because I'm no longer sure how to respond to a world that seems to have willfully chosen to lose its collective mind. OK I do know why: it's fashionable (and profitable) and thinking, doing independent research and swimming upstream against an ill-informed consensus is lonely and difficult. But really... don't cry for me, Argentina. :)

Yes, the planet is warming (as it has many thousands of times over throughout its history). Yes, CO2 plays a role (about 1/3 as much of a role as water and probably a good deal less than the sun, but we'll let that go for the moment). Yes, mankind has generated some of that CO2 (and could generate a lot more without much new impact, since CO2's insulating effects are limited, even as they are essential).

(Wait. Did he just say "essential"? Well, yes. As Avery and Singer note in their excellent (if dry) and heavily footnoted book, a world without CO2's contribution to the so-called "greenhouse effect" would be too cold to support life. Reduce it too much and we're done as a species. We're done as a life-supporting orb. That's entirely separate, btw, from the obviously necessary chemical role of CO2 in supporting plant life.)

From the above three facts (planetary warming, CO2's role in it and a human contribution to CO2 increases) do not follow the sweeping conclusions that everyone seems to be drawing (including, to my continuing dismay, a president I otherwise love). Not hardly.

Yet the successful recruiting efforts of the cliff-diving global warming faithful--as they yell back at the rest of us that we're the real lemmings and just-you-wait-and-see 'cause when we've spent $553 trillion of your money and reversed the inevitable effects of the sun, you'll thank us--have not led me to despair.

Gradually, with reluctance at having to re-state the obvious, a few sane, stable voices with authority, common sense and scientific discipline are resolutely deciding that--having not reached many with logic or science or patience--it's time to come out and re-frame the debate. Specifically NASA Adminstrator Michael Griffin, who was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition today:

"I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take." [emphasis added]

It's a fascinating question: who gets to decide? And packing the punch that it does (or hopefully will), it deserves a moment for unpacking. But first it's worth noting that in the ABC version of the quote linked by Drudge the "first of all" part (in red) is left out. That's significant in that it's the most powerful (and scientifically grounded) part of his argument. Emphasizing only the second, more political portion of the quote has the subtle effect of painting Griffin as a simple crank with a personal agenda. Let's get to the unpacking:

First, Griffin's comment highlights the well-established fact that the earth's climate (and not just its weather) is in a nearly constant state of flux and has been since its inception. Get used to it. When was the last time you pined for there to be more seracs on Mt. Everest? Last time I checked, their main function was killing unlucky mountain climbers.

Several of the documented changes in climate have made things much much hotter than they are today. Some periods during which the climate was significantly warmer than today have been within the span of recorded human history. And people thrived--yes you read that right. When it was cold, they did not. And they do not. It is common sense--one of several reasons why there are more homeless people in (say) San Diego than (say) Minneapolis. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but ask your average drunk on the street and he knows this.

Do yourself a favor and read Avery and Singer. It may put you to sleep with the density of facts and citations, but it will be with a highlighter in your hand and the warm feeling that comes from learning a lot very quickly.

Second, the Griffin interview raises the important question of how and by whom decisions about climate ought to be made. It's an absolutely massive question that's been largely brushed under the rug by global warming activists. Why? Because real motion in support of their cause requires, as Al Gore has ominously said, "...expand[ing] the limits of what’s now considered politically possible."

That's a mild way of saying what all tyrants feel in their heart--and act on if they get the chance. When a Democratic president who was your boss and two-time running mate tells you to take a hike and the Senate casts not a single vote in support (and 95 opposed) you're pretty much toast politically--at least in this lifetime.

That leaves you with two strategic avenues: "re-invent" politics, or so scare the crap out of people that they'll just go along with you. What Gore really means is that democratic institutions are too slow, and people too stupid to enable him to consolidate power around this issue before his own personal CO2 emissions drop to zero. Of course, some will respond, that's more characteristic of Bushitler. To which I reply: really? Show me.

Third, the Griffin quote (in its original form on NPR--though not as spun by the rest of the MSM) starts the ball rolling towards looking at climate change through an historical rather than a hypothetical lens.

That's a hugely important point, especially so to this former geology student and scenario planner. I've worked in both realms. They're different. Misusing the latter to solve problems best dealt with by the former is tantamount to using a science fiction novel to understand the lessons of the Civil War era. Which is not to say it hasn't been tried. That's Hollywood

The historical emphasis is the primary one Avery and Singer hang their hats on also. Natural history can be (and to an astonishingly great extent has been) documented over centuries through meticulous and largely uncelebrated science--counting tree rings, analyzing sediment records in remote lakes, looking at ice cores and pollen counts and the writings of monks and a hundred other narrow disciplines that nobody ever got famous for. The larger montage adds up to much more than what any set of climate model gurus could ever hope to assert no matter how sophisticated they made their speculative creations.

To say that mankind is facing an unprecedented set of climatic conditions (even under the most pessimistic and hyperbolic warming forecasts) is simply inaccurate historically. To say that we cannot understand--in part--what is coming by examining the historical record (rather than relying heavily on speculative models that have never retrofit well) is foolish.

Finally and perhaps most subtly, the Griffin quote draws out the projection made by Al Gore and his flock that everyone else is arrogant. That's rich--a tough one to pull off when your latest book is entitled 'The Assault on Reason'.

Of course Al could always go hook up with the Russians who seem to have the problem solved:

Russian scientists have found a way to prevent global warming of the Earth... by air spraying of a sulfur-containing aerosol in lower stratosphere layers at a height of 10-14 kilometers (six to 10 miles). Sulfur drops would then reflect solar radiation.

Which is not to be confused with the way they solved the problem prior to 1989, though it's remarkably similar in many respects...

Our planet's air has cleared up... allowing more sunshine to reach the ground... 'global dimming', reversed more than a decade ago, probably following the collapse of communist economies and the consequent decrease in industrial pollutants.

Then again, this might put Gore in a 'sticky wicket' as my British friends like to say. If he cozies up to the Russians, he exposes his Socialist leanings as well as tyrannical tendencies. Yet if such a plan was to prove workable and Prince Al opposed it, he would expose his real agenda: not the reduction of global warming per se but the use of global warming as a mechanism to gain power. Under some darker geopolitical scenarios, we might solve global warming by default.

UPDATE: Cheat Seeking Missiles has analyzed Bush's latest speech on global warming in advance of the G8 summit and almost convinced me that condemning his 'caving' may have been over-hasty on my part. CSM writes:

As evidence mounts that predictions of global warming doom are just mis-reads on what's happening on the planet ... or the solar system ... it looks like Bush is buying time by initiating a cautious, slow process that has plenty of opportunity for other nations to blow it. I'm warming up to it. [emphasis added]

The political cost to the president of fighting a global mania stirred up by his opponents may simply have become too high. The best strategy may therefore have become one of co-opting their power and calling their bluff--most importantly, by bringing China and India into the equation, potentially as allies. As with most things from the left these days however, I'm deeply skeptical of the value of appeasement (illusory or real). Rather than spending time verifying that C02 emmission targets are being met, how about spending time verifying that warming is a problem problem, C02 is the major component of it and that humans are the prime cause--something historically grounded scientists know they cannot do without deceit.

Go Ahead. Make My Day. Impeach Bush.

The Anchoress must play poker because this is one of the more brilliant wish-I'd-thought-of-that bluff calls I've seen in awhile. She has challenged the Democratic 'leadership' in Congress as well as the wacko lefty fringe (if that's not totally redundant these days) to, in effect: Go ahead. Make my day.

Please. Impeach the president. Do it. Bring all of your accusations, narratives, memes, large conspiracy theories and small distrusts, petty dislikes and visceral hatreds. Let’s make it a very thorough impeachment, with long, hard looks and bright, hot lights, and everyone under oath and on the record! You won’t mind if - once we finally lance the purulent boil that is George W. Bush - some of the pus splashes up on you, will you? For the good of the nation?

Her well-reasoned, point-by-point challenge to the Al Gore's I'm the only reasonable person on the this boiling hot planet (aka, 'Assault on Reason') list of foolish, petty and outright incorrect anti-administration grievances is a must read. Gore may be a darling of the left, but the reality is, he's holding 2, 4, 6, 8, 10... in four different suits... with no wild cards. And he's gone 'all in'.

(For the record, I don't play poker for money, though in a hotel room on a long business trip the big poker tournaments on television can be marvellously soporific.)

Memorial Day Reflections

Having procrastinated earlier in the weekend, I find myself here at my desk on Memorial Day, doing something tremendously ironic--and hopeful. I'm working to finish some contract work for a company based in a country we once deemed a mortal enemy. And I'm enjoying it.

The client is one of the most pleasant and intelligent individuals I've ever had the pleasure to work with. We don't talk about old wars. To us, they are only in textbooks. It is only today that I have cause to reflect on the fact that people of my grandparents' generation (give or take a few years) once fought desperately with people of their grandparents' generation.

Now we are at peace. We are doing business. We (my client and I) are on the verge of real friendship. The past is... the past.

Yet let us not imagine that this happy state of affairs could have been so without the sacrifice of millions of American and other Allied soldiers. They (the sane ones anyway) did not revel in killing but neither did they shy from the reality that force of arms is sometimes necessary to oppose evil men and to bring and keep the peace.

Jimmy Carter has never understood this. Sadly and frighteningly, some politicians in control of Congress seem not to understand it either. One could not have simply pressed Fast Forward in the early 1940s, waved a magic Chamberlainian wand of clever words and brought about the state of peace we now enjoy. We only got here by wading through a river of blood--reluctantly but with clarity and resolve.

Speaking of which, Clarity and Resolve has reluctantly signed out of the blogosphere (just over a week now). I'll miss him. His parting message is appropriate to this day:

I remain unshakably convinced that we will see victory, most likely in our lifetime, over jihad, tyranny, and other forms of anti-human evil. We have so much to lose and so little to gain from inaction and appeasement. We have the legacy of our fathers and the inheritance of our children to honor. We care, we are just, and we are good. Most of all, we love life.

If you missed Chris Muir's Sunday Day-By-Day Cartoon yesterday, check it out. Surprised that there's this much positive stuff going on in Iraq? You're not alone. Here's to hoping that my as-yet-unborn grandchildren will someday work happily (with a thriving Iraqi high-tech company) on a contract such as the one I'm working on now, remembering the current war as just a thing to study in textbooks.

Don Feder has up a speech he delivered three weeks ago that has special Memorial Day resonance to this Boston boy. I grew up passing these two landmarks on a regular basis (one of them almost daily):

The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson never fail to move me: "By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world."

"Here once the embattled farmers stood" - not the intellectuals, not the media elite, not the Congressmen or the consultants - but the yeoman farmers of New England. The British disdained them - called the "gullies," Scottish for peasants. But they weren't peasants; they were small landowners, who were educated (they had the Bible and Shakespeare), church-going, patriotic and ready to defend their rights to the death. In fact, those "embattled farmers" were the middle class of 18th century America.

They were also the Forgotten Americans of their time. They were taxed without their consent. Their elected assemblies were abolished. Troops were quartered in their homes. And the Redcoats were coming to confiscate their guns. On April 19, 1775, those forgotten Americans had their revenge - at the Concord's North Bridge and on the long, bloody British retreat, all the way back to Boston.

And finally, Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost comments on the almost obligatory but never inappropriate poem "In Flanders Fields":

...the blood of heroes truly never dies. Their sacrifices truly do live on, enriching the fertile soil of my memory, bringing forth red poppies that grow in honor of those who've passed on the torch. Sleep sweet, brave comrades, until you arise anew.

Adult 'Breastfeeding'(!) Sanctioned for Muslim Men

As Dr. Sanity remarks, you just can't make this stuff up. MEMRI reports:

The head of the Hadith Department in Al-AzharUniversity [in Egypt], Dr. Izzat Atiyya, recently issued a controversial fatwa dealing with breastfeeding of adults. The fatwa stated that a woman who is required to work in private with a man not of her immediate family - a situation that is forbidden by Islamic law - can resolve the problem by breastfeeding the man, which, according to shari'a, turns him into a member of her immediate family.

To be fair, there is intense and ongoing controversy within Islam as to the propriety of this fatwa. Nonetheless, it comes from a reasonably senior, well-respected muslim scholar and managed to get published in a mainstream journal. As I noted last August, the fact that bizarre religious legalisms like these even spring up for serious debate:

...point up... the sharp difference between religious traditions that hold up balanced monogamy as the single true ideal (even if secular institutions provide plenty of 'outs') and a religion that seems to go out of its way to accomodate male-fantasy lifestyles... [as well as] ...the idea that passions potentially damaging to the social fabric are best managed by feeding them...

Perhaps this is a (positive?) sign that universities in the muslim world are diverse enough that they're having to deal with as many fringe nut-jobs as we are here in the West. Maybe. After all, super-radical feminist Mary Daly (who famously, refused to acknowledge male comments at her lectures or admit them into her classes) spent much of her career in "theology" at Boston College.

UPDATE: For anyone puzzled by the above fatwa, check out this epic, professionally-informed, commenter-fed, thoroughly referenced post by Dr. Sanity on the misogyny deeply-rooted within Islam.

From the Mouths of Babes: Climate Analysis That Actually Works

Kristen Byrnes, a fifteen-year-old in Portland, Maine recently put up a website as an extra credit assignment for her high school Honors Earth Science class. Well, give that girl an A and let the UN's IPCC mandarins know they're being held back for the remedial class.

Ms. Byrnes' analysis of complex climate and weather data has proven prescient in calling the end of the Australian drought almost a month in advance. By itself, that would only make for intriguing human interest copy. If enough forecasts are made, someone somewhere will always get lucky.

This story is different.

The analysis and common-sense reasoning that enabled Ms. Byrnes to see what the Gorethodox flocks had not tells a much more interesting story, raising serious questions about some of the most critical assumptions and uncertainties behind long-term climate models and forecasts.

In late April, heading into the southern autumn, Ms. Byrnes wrote on a discussion board:

I was just looking at my ENSO 3.4 chart... [and it's] been positive for 95% of the last 6 years. Since Austrailia [sic] experiences warm and dry conditions during positive ENSO, six years of drought would not surprise me. But it is headed negative very quickly now, so you might want to dust off your umbrella. [emphasis added]

('ENSO' stands for "El Niño/Southern Oscillation", as Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters explains.)
As if on cue, Australian news reported last week that:

The El Nino weather system has run its course... the worst drought in a century could be coming to an end, as heavy rain soaked parched southeastern Australia.

Ms. Byrnes explains (far more succinctly than the IPCC's massive report) what led her to make the call:

The reason that computer climate models do not work is because they cannot predict volcanoes, ENSO and solar variance. They also do not understand how water vapor and clouds work...

Read that again. Write it down. And tack it to your computer monitor. Re-read daily as needed. The kid has nailed it. In two sentences. From the mouths of babes...

The lack of attention to water vapor and clouds as massive sources of uncertainty in climate models is a glaring omission in most coverage of global climate. We hear much about CO2 (because it enables an elaborate and wholly synthetic sin-guilt dynamic, filling a void in our increasingly secular culture). We never hear about how water variables are three times as important as CO2 in affecting climate. (There's less Bush-bashing potential in going after Poland Spring or Dasani.) Byrnes continues:

From about 1944 to 1976 the ENSO was mostly negative and solar increased then decreased. Temperatures during this time cooled a little. Since 1976 the ENSO has been more positive. This along with increasing solar activity has combined to warm the globe. What is expected over the next few years is for the ENSO to move back to a negative phase and for solar activity to level off then go down. That is why the weather guy said that in 5 years global warming will be a joke.

If someone from the Harvard or MIT admissions offices is reading this, do yourselves a favor: Call this girl. Offer her a full ride. Now.

H/T and much more detail: Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters via Steven Milloy's JunkScience.

Closing thoughts:

1) In much of the Islamic world (to put it mildly), a 15-year-old female would not have access to the kind of intellectual cultivation, encouragement or freedom this young woman obviously has.

2) This is an interesting illustration of the value that outsiders can bring to a problem that 'officials' and 'experts' are unable or unwilling to crack. The fresh eyes of the uncredentialed, unbiased and marginalized often hold the key to new insights in science--the ultimate meritocracy. So it has been throughout history. The Internet gives legs to that dynamic. The freedoms of liberal (old meaning) Western Democracies give it staying power.

3) As I've said all along (usually in jest!) it is those of us in colder climes who have a natural incentive to challenge global warming hysteria. Who woulda thunk... Maine. Go figure.

4) The Byrne story reminds me of Elijah's prophecy in 1st Kings, 18:1,43-45:

1 After a long time, in the third year, the word of the LORD came to Elijah: "Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the land."
...
43 "Go and look toward the sea," [Elijah] told his servant. And he went up and looked. "There is nothing there," he said. Seven times Elijah said, "Go back."

44 The seventh time the servant reported, "A cloud as small as a man's hand is rising from the sea." So Elijah said, "Go and tell Ahab, 'Hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you.'"

45 Meanwhile, the sky grew black with clouds, the wind rose, a heavy rain came on and Ahab rode off to Jezreel.

Or to quote one of my favorite politicians:

"...an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm."

Bottom line: we don't, can't and shouldn't attempt to control the climate. We should listen more carefully to fresh voices like Kristen Byrnes who are trying to understand it and who don't (yet) have to feed at the official scientific and academic funding troughs with the biases they inevitably introduce.

UPDATE I: I just ran across this well-informed analysis of the IPCC preliminary report from a February post over at Error Theory (lots more detail in his post).

The Report acknowledges that indirect solar effects are the only candidate for powerful natural warming effects. Evidence that some kind of powerful indirect solar effects exist is acknowledged. But indirect solar effects are then omitted from both the computer models that are discussed, and from the conclusions that are drawn based upon the computer models. The result is the classic problem of the omitted variable. Warming effects get misattributed to the greenhouse/anthropogenic effects that ARE included in the model. Thus the main conclusion of the Report is based entirely on elementary errors of logic and statistics. [emphasis added]

In other words: it's the sun, stupid.

UPDATE II: Anchoress was way ahead of me with this story on Friday, throwing down a challenge to Al Gore--would he debate Ms. Byrnes? Don't hold your breath. Anchoress writes:

I’m wondering if Al Gore... would be amenable to a public debate with this 15 year old high school student who is impressively and credibly debunking Gore’s entire “Inconvenient Truth” by using actual science... Aside from the scientific information Byrnes lays out, she takes “An Inconvenient Truth” apart, almost scene-by-scene, concurring with what she believes Gore got right, and convincingly taking a baseball bat to what she thinks he gets wrong.

I repeat: Brava, Kristen!

UPDATE III: Welcome Anchoress readers! (I am always delighted to read her stuff.) If you're in an Al Gore-fisking mood and haven't had enough yet, you might want to check out a long fugue/rant I penned last week--Al Gore, Demagoguery and the Danger of Delusional Distraction--inspired after meeting with some extraordinary Boston-area bloggers doing some original reporting on the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) story. Don't know about that one, think it's a local flap, or can't imagine how it's connected to Al Gore and global warming? Check it out:

Gore has moved in my book from amusing distraction and nuisance to loud and powerful distraction and nuisance to a potentially dangerous and demagoguic distraction and nuisance. Every moment Gore keeps a phantom fear of slightly warmer temperatures and slightly higher sea levels in the public eye drains resources and resolve from fighting a battle that could easily make this nation unrecognizable within a generation--as is already happening in Europe.
---
The short take [on the ISB] it seems, is this: Wahhabist Saudi money becomes instrumental in funding takeover of local Boston mosque by radical, anti-Semitic, hate-spewing, terror-apologist foreign nationals who score an eye-poppingly sweet deal with the city and who, when reporters and bloggers start asking questions, explode a veritable cluster bomb of speech-chilling lawsuits and gag-order attempts at anyone and everyone within range--to the point (thankfully) that Jews, Christians, Muslims, and (even more unbelievably) the Boston Globe and Boston Herald all find themselves on the same side, looking at one another and asking:

Wait just a doggone minute... Isn't this America? Isn't there a First Amendment?

...and concluding that well yes, there is, but it doesn't really mean much if everyone is chilled into silence by fear... unless some brave soul is willing to get up on the barricades, paint a target on his or her chest and without trembling or looking down yell: Stop! No! This will not stand. I was privileged to meet some of those individuals last night.

UPDATE IV: Couldn't resist sharing this gem from Bert Prelutsky over at Attack Machine, who remarkes that global warming hysteria "reminds me a lot of religion".

I am not a religious person [he writes], but if I’m going to accept anything on faith, I would prefer to lay my money on an invisible force than on Al Gore. The one, after all, somehow managed to create the seas and the stars, dogs, deer, peaches, sunsets and Man, himself; and also found the time to act as a muse for Johann Sebastian Bach, Thomas Jefferson and, I suspect, the fellow who invented baseball. On the other hand, we have Al Gore, the pumpkin-headed schnook who couldn’t even carry his home state in a presidential election and claims to have created the Internet, but never quite [got] around to getting a patent.

Global Warming Faith Unshaken By New Data

The title of this post could have been the headline in yesterday's New York Times, coming as it did over a convoluted, virtually self-obviating lede:

Over the last 5,000 years, the eastern Caribbean has experienced several periods, lasting centuries, in which strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today, according to a new study.

The authors, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, say their findings do not necessarily conflict with recent papers asserting a link between the region’s hurricane activity and human-caused warming of the climate and seas.

But, they say, their work does imply that factors other than ocean temperature, at least for thousands of years, appear to have played a pivotal role in shaping storminess in the region. [emphasis added]

Note that the primary finding is that centuries are the proper timescale on which to measure any significant impacts. If you take nothing else away from this post, remember that. Only in the last two paragraphs do we get a glimpse into the Gorethodox world view shaping the authors' spin on the study:

Judith A. Curry, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech, said the new study, together with other recent research on warming and storms by her and others, added to a picture of rising risk and lagging government action on reducing vulnerability of coastal populations in the Atlantic and Caribbean hurricane zone.

In other words, whatever the problem... more government action is the answer.

The idea of providing the public with more and better and more timely information about the risks--of a range of capricious natural hazards: from West Nile virus outbreaks to forest fires to earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes--and then letting people make their own free choices and economic trade-offs seems not to be part of Ms. Curry's thinking. In a free market, absent government intervention, those homes most likely to be destroyed or rendered unlivable every few years are cheaper--all other things being equal.

Should we have compassion on people caught up in natural disasters? Absolutely. Yet working through charitable organizations to help those in need after the fact is very different from governments taking $Billions from the prudent and risk-averse and spending it to insure the less prudent against their risky decisions. (The 1980s S&L crisis is instructive in this regard.)

The NYT article conlcludes:

“The bottom line is that we are in an unusually active period of hurricane activity, as a result of a combination of natural variability and global warming,” Dr. Curry said. “Analyses have been done, plans have been put on the table, but nothing seems to be happening.”

That could have been the concluding paragraph to practically any MSM piece on climate or weather these days: it's global warming of course... now can I please have some more funding? The movement has wisely migrated away from playing on fears only about hot days in populated areas where the MSM lives to playing on fears about just about anything that seems out of the ordinary. And 'seems' is the key here.

There is and always has been something to remark about relative to weather. It's just like that. Anyone who's taken a course in elementary statistics knows however, that what is freakishly unlikely is a series of coin tosses that perfectly alternates heads-tails-heads-tails ad infinitum.

Weather and climate are subjects that layer complexities and probabilities on top of one another so thickly as to render prognostications about climate as laughable today as they were thirty years ago when the serious proposal on the table was to coat the poles in coal dust to keep everyone from freezing by the turn of the century. The only thing different now is that the folks doing the proposing may gain the power and influence to take on such foolish projects and send us the bill.

Dr. Curry's spin also conveniently ignores the graphic above, which I grabbed from Wikipedia. In asserting that we're in a period of unusual hurricane activity, she is admitting something that the meteorological community was loathe to admit in the wake of Katrina. Yet she conveniently doesn't mention the egg on the face of climate-forecasters after their gross over-estimate of the number of hurricanes in the 2006 season. (Almost double the actual figure, depending on whose forcast you use and what you choose to count.) The Wikipedia entry, citing an Agence France Press wire published in USA Today on November 20th, 2006 also notes this:

"[the 2006 Atlantic hurricane] season was unusual in that no hurricanes made landfall in the United States..."

Begging the question of why the government should play the kind of activist role that many were asserting was essential in the wake of Katrina. The global warming faithful are using projections such as the post-Katrina scare numbers to argue for global warming being human caused and a massive threat when it seems convenient. When it's not--when those forecasts prove grossly misguided--they are retreating to the complexity arguments I've used above saying, in essence: it's complicated, it's wildly variable, it's impossible to predict... but we know it's coming anyway and what should be done about it.

Where I come from, they call that faith.

VDH on Europe

I can't do better today than to refer readers to the ever-amazing Victor Davis Hanson.

...after getting their teen-age anger out, [Europeans] are starting to see that the United States did not fabricate Islamic radicalism nor order them to let in and then not assimilate millions of now angry Muslims...

Europeans know they won’t or can’t stop the Iranians from getting a nuke, but hope someone—that is, the United States—will...

Europe knows that radical Islam is both dangerous and has little respect for either European moral authority or force of arms.

...it being difficult to respect something that doesn't really exist anymore...

The first comment on the post neatly sums up the esteem in which VDH's readers wisely hold him:

Will Fred [Thompson] put you on the ticket as VP, and will you accept, sir?
[link added]

A scenario devoutly to be wished...
H/T: No Oil for Pacifists

Litvinenko's Polonium Poisoning--Part of Something Bigger?

Wretchard over at Belmont Club notes:

...rumors that Litvinenko was actually the buyer of a polonium shipment to be used in a dirty bomb attack on Britain, not the simple victim of a KGB poison plot.

What he doesn't mention (because it is fairly well known) is that Litvinenko was a convert to Islam. That's old news surrounded by so much conjecture, theorizing and rumor as to render Litvinenko's true motivations opaque.

Was his conversion primarily political (e.g., expressing solidarity with Chechnya)? What role did Islam play in what he was doing as a spy? Was Litvinenko driven by anti-Western animus? Was his poisoning actually an elaborate suicide designed to discredit Putin? (If so, the man must have had an unbelievably high tolerance for pain--and a rather large expense account.) Was he a player in a jihadi plot against the West? Or maybe benignly, did he feel some kind of spiritual call? (Hey, there's an idea!) We may never know and it feels dirty speculating further.

That said, one of Wretchard's commenters ('jms') has a fresh theory about the larger context:

Polonium is... the key ingredient in the trigger for nuclear weapons. It's used for virtually nothing else... if you have an atomic bombs program, but don't have any nuclear reactors to generate polonium, then you have to purchase some...

Polonium has a very short half life. It's the last ingredient you purchase before your nuclear weapon is ready to use... if the object were to build a "dirty bomb", there are plenty of other sorts of nuclear materials that would make more sense to use... Using polonium for murder or a dirty bomb would be like using gold bricks as weights to sink garbage into the ocean...

Britain cannot publically accuse Russia of allowing the covert transfer of nuclear weapons components into Britain because that would be an act of war that would have to be acknowledged. However, they want to get their hands on the other participants in the plot for vigorous questioning. So the only diplomatic way to proceed is to engage the convenient fiction that this case is an ordinary case of murder. But it isn't. It's a screaming alarm bell that some entity has nearly completed, or has completed nuclear weapons, and is looking for the detonation material to deploy them.

Atlas Shrugs has done a great job of assembling links on the Litvinenko story. She points especially to AJ Strata (here and here) for more analysis and background than I have time to digest. Short version: the smuggling theory (Po-210) may have some merit but it runs in the opposite direction(!)

Berezovsky was coordinating a smuggling effort of Po-210 into Russia using is two previous employees (yes, Lugovoi was Berezovsky’s bodyguard and also guarded his daughter) to move the material into Russia in order to plant evidence against Putin to foment the coup d’etat...

To my mind, Wretchard's mysterious commenter still has as good a theory as any as to why Polonium and not something less exotic. The commenter's theory is agnostic as to which way the Polonium may have been flowing and may even be compatible with Strata's explanation. (I.e., discredit Putin and arm some jihadis). As Strata notes: "...if it was smuggling [instead of political assassination], every person in the West needs to take note of what could have been a nuclear attack in the making."

As Alice would say: curiouser and curiouser...

Meanwhile a film on Litvinenko is opening at Cannes.

UPDATE: A very steep learning curve on this one... but fascinating. Many, many angles. Pamela's (Atlas Shrugs') comment thread is instructive. Turns out that there are other--more slowly degrading--ways to trigger real (read: big boom) nukes and these have been used for years in tactical devices...which still doesn't answer the question of why Polonium was kicking around Britain. It was ridiculously stupid overkill (expensive, flashy, traceable, dangerous) for any assassination.

Turns out also that theorizing about a live or nearly-live nuke in Britain is not new either (link worth visiting not only for the theory but for the cool wolf-in-the-forest background)... which doesn't mean it won't happen. I wouldn't be surprised, though I was disabused of the idea of suitcase nukes after reading Richard Miniter and attending some eye-opening sessions at the 2006 Intelligence Summit. Container ships or panel trucks? A totally different story.

Tired of theorizing and want to just get on with building one of these things, martyring yourself and meeting those 77 virgins? Information and a web store here. (Yes, you read that correctly. Yikes. Thankfully, the quantities are extremely small.)

Al Gore, Demagoguery and the Danger of Delusional Distraction

I would rather not be writing about Al Gore--again--but with today's New York Times Sunday Magazine feature on him ("Al Gore Has Big Plans"), I feel I have to if for no other reason than that it's cold and raining here in Boston. We hit near record (low) temperatures on Thursday, at forty degrees Farenheit. This city can be miserable enough in the Spring and so I'll come right out and state a personal agenda and admit that I don't want Al Gore making things any more miserable around here with grandiose schemes to turn down the global thermostat while he relaxes with his heated pool in Nashville.

As I remarked to a fellow blogger at a local gathering last night, writing about Gore feels like a rear-guard action: necessary but not exactly exciting. More on that in a moment, but the short version (with which I may be dating myself) comes from Poltergeist II (1986), when young Carol Anne Freeling (played by the late Heather O'Rourke) says, eerily: "They're baaack!"

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether who or what is back in this case is as ominous and evil as the shadowy, soul-stealing spirits in the film.

Folks like Solomonia and Miss Kelly have been doing the truly hard work on the front lines of a much more real and immediate threat to the future of Western Civilization, researching and reporting on the insidious incursion of Islamofascism, radical Wahabbism, Saudi money (when do those two not go hand in hand?) and thinly veiled front groups for various Middle Eastern terrorist organizations into our backyards--in my case almost literally here near Boston.

They have been doing the kind of face-to-face, original investigation that puts them in another realm of blogging in my view--that of physical courage, lawsuits, steely gazes... and stainless steel cojones (or whatever the female equivalent).

A confession by way of admiration: I don't do well facing (or even conversing) my opponents in person and in real time. Never have, and after more than four decades, I'm not waiting to suddenly be endowed with that skill. Something about the way my brain works always leaves me with the perfect insight-generating question, the arcane case-busting factoid or the brilliant rhetorical rejoinder hours after those things would have done any good. I knew enough as a teen to write more and debate less. There is a difference between fisking a piece from the comfort of one's own office and taking mental notes in real time amidst a hostile audience trying to distract you. I have enormous respect for those who have been given that gift.

For those who haven't yet read Martin Solomon's groundbreaking piece over at Pajamas Media on the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), brew up a pot of your favorite caffeinated beverage and do so. It takes some concentration to follow all of the various threads, but you will be rewarded knowing that you've been privy to a story that's important, embryonic and (sadly) likely to be emblematic of a much larger trend. When you eventually read about it in the MSM (and you will), you can smile smugly and proudly and tell your neighbors that you--as a blog reader--knew that stuff all along.

The short take it seems, is this: Wahhabist Saudi money becomes instrumental in funding takeover of local Boston mosque by radical, anti-Semitic, hate-spewing, terror-apologist foreign nationals who score an eye-poppingly sweet deal with the city and who, when reporters and bloggers start asking questions, explode a veritable cluster bomb of speech-chilling lawsuits and gag-order attempts at anyone and everyone within range--to the point (thankfully) that Jews, Christians, Muslims, and (even more unbelievably) the Boston Globe and Boston Herald all find themselves on the same side, looking at one another and asking:

Wait just a doggone minute... Isn't this America? Isn't there a First Amendment?

...and concluding that well yes, there is, but it doesn't really mean much if everyone is chilled into silence by fear... unless some brave soul is willing to get up on the barricades, paint a target on his or her chest and without trembling or looking down yell: Stop! No! This will not stand. I was privileged to meet some of those individuals last night.

Anyway, read it. Democrat or Republican--or by whatever name you happen to call God (or don't)--you will find a core to this story that should rouse a hearty flame of indignation in your free speech soul. But brew the coffee first. Sol's piece (described by one commenter as Pulitzer-quality) is not as easy to digest as the latest Justin Timberlake gossip in People. (That's a compliment, btw.)

But I was writing about Al Gore, wasn't I?

I cite such goings on--incursions by a real and present enemy--as background to understanding why Gore has moved in my book from amusing distraction and nuisance to loud and powerful distraction and nuisance to a potentially dangerous and demagoguic distraction and nuisance.

Every moment Gore keeps a phantom fear of slightly warmer temperatures and slightly higher sea levels in the public eye drains resources and resolve from fighting a battle that could easily make this nation unrecognizable within a generation--as is already happening in Europe.

I looked up the word 'demagogue' on Wikipedia and found this. I think it fits Gore's crusade rather nicely [emphasis added]:

[Demagogue] refers to a political strategy for obtaining and gaining political power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist or populist themes... humorist H. L. Mencken... defined a demagogue as "one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."

Though this definition emphasizes the use of lying and falsehoods, some point out that demagogy does not require such, but that skilled demagogues often need to use only special emphasis by which an uncritical listener will be led to draw the desired conclusion himself, seeding a belief that is self-reinforced rather than one based on fact or truth.

Demagogues may make use of logical fallacies, though persuasion may require no use of logic. While it may not rely heavily upon outright lies, the use of half-truths, omissions, and distortions are what define demagogy — it is, in essence, giving bad-faith arguments for the purpose of political gain.

Did I mention coffee? You'll need it for this piece too. I've barely gotten started. :)

Today's NYTimes Sunday Magazine piece on Gore is my jumping-off point, but for more on Gore I highly recommend Sisu's "You are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don't feel like it". (She gets extra points not only for being as delightful in person--at our first face-to-face blogger confab last night--as in print, but for weaving in a reference to the slough of despond in a piece otherwise not about religion. That's not easy to do. Brava, Sissy!) She writes:

"Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" asks a psychologically projecting Al Gore without irony atop a Time Mag soapbox this morning. [emphasis added]

The nub is this: There are two crises in the world today: global warming and Islamofascism. (One, in my view is a crisis only in the mind, but lets leave that aside for now since the other side would accuse me of the same thing--three thousand dead in an unprecedented attack on the United States witnessed live on television notwithstanding).

Those worried about one tend not to give much credence to the importance of other. Each side accuses the other of undue fear--its leaders of lying and misleading. What I have observed about the global warming true believers at least is that, at least for the moment, and painting with an admittedly broad brush here, resolution of all other problems in the world are being harnessed to the lead one. That's too bad because they needn't be. Leading with human-caused and human-fixable global warming is a big bet on a future scenario that cannot by definition be proven. Not in advance and maybe not ever. More on that in a moment.

Thus it rests on faith. Faith in a man and his message. Faith in a man named... Al Gore. Instead, the New York Times makes a false analogy that makes it all seem lock tight [emphasis added]:

...mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument — the smoking-causes-cancer part — is only the beginning.

The "smoking causes cancer argument"... In other words: nefarious and deeply vested corporate interests are holding back a very simple, essential truth! It's the Al Gore party line and the line of the anti-capitalist WTO-protesting reactionary left-wing set. It's a convenient analogy in that it rallies those who don't like smoking (or cancer) to inexplicitly imagine that humanity itself is a 'cancer' on the planet and we'll all be victims of one another's secondhand 'smoke' without recourse to getting up and leaving the proverbial restaurant.

I could spend a month blogging daily and still be finding ways to poke holes in just that short paragraph. Did you also notice the implication that CO2 is not only the critical cause of global warming (they never ever talk about what any five-year old would talk about: the sun) but that CO2 is the end of the world as we know it.

Never mind human adaptation, never mind continuing controversy over the magnitude of warming or that each new increment of CO2 causes less warming, or that other gasses (like water vapor and methane) are far more important than CO2. Never mind that people benefit from warming. Just never mind. And that's the point. Gore purports to be about truth and facts and yet he really cannot harbor the idea that other people have looked into this, come to different conclusions and disagree with him. Back to the definition of demagoguery: believing people to be idiots.

Here's the most amusing part of the piece, only adding to my ever-developing thesis that global warming is a religion:

By 2005, climate science had advanced to the point where the urgency of reducing CO2 emissions had become manifest, though only to the small circle of cognoscenti. And that was the problem. Gore had talked himself blue on the subject without making much headway... When I asked Gore why the [Alliance for Climate Protection] had taken so long to get in gear, he blurted out, “Because I wasn’t chairman of it.” ... Meanwhile Gore continued to proselytize the heathens, gaining adherents by the hundreds and thousands. It had not occurred to him that he could win converts by the million.

In this narrative, Gore is a St. Paul figure, toiling in righteous and lonely obscurity until he finds his stride and then becoming instrumental to a global movement. Except that what we're talking about here is not the elevation of God, but the elevation of man (and one man in particular) to a position of such omniscience that he wants quite literally to control the entire planet. It sounds grandiose, but that's what this is about: power. Ominously, the writer quotes Gore:

"The central challenge is to expand the limits of what’s now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what’s considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis."

Does that strike anyone else as utterly frightening? The UN's own scientists (hardly opposed to global warming hysteria) have already weighed in: the 'crisis' is not solvable. Period. It is not a matter of political will. It is impossible. And even attempting the impossible (with a high degree of uncertainty in any outcome) could cost 1/3 of global GDP ($553 trillion). Read that last quote again and imagine a Mao or Stalin or Hitler saying the same thing. Do I exaggerate? Try this: the subtext is similar in the following regard... Gore is saying, in essence:

This problem is so big and important and time-critical and certain that all of what we have agreed upon to date as a nation, and a planet--all of it: political checks and balances, freedoms, culture, economics, rule of law, self determination... in fact anything standing in the way of reaching this one overriding goal and protecting all human beings from total destruction... all of it may need to be altered to get there quickly... and I, Al Gore have the blueprint to do that.

If that assertion on my part seems too strong, try this from the article and imagine the man with his hand on the tiller of American, much less global power:

When the international negotiations looked as if they were about to collapse, in part owing to American resistance, Gore suggested that he fly to Kyoto to demonstrate Washington’s commitment. David Sandalow, who worked on environmental affairs at the National Security Council, recalls a meeting with a dozen advisers “in which nobody recommended he go, with the range of opinion running from neutral to strongly against.” Gore went anyway. “His arrival was galvanizing,” Sandalow says. (Others are less convinced.) Gore returned in triumph — and instantly encountered, he recalls, “resistance in the White House to even signing it, much less submitting it to the Senate for ratification.” Gore used his last dram of political capital to persuade Clinton to sign the Kyoto pact; it was never sent to the Senate, where it surely would have died an ugly death. The Clinton administration thus surrendered without firing a shot. For Gore, it was a humiliating denouement.

To true zealots, that may come across as bold and principled on Al Gore's part but to my eye, it reveals him for the dangerously distracting (and delusional) demagogue he is.

For one thing, it gives the lie to President Bush (and Republicans in general) as being the dark forces opposing truth and light and environmentalism and small soft bunnies and pretty flowers. Clinton opposed Kyoto. All of his advisors opposed it. And the NYTimes editors don't bother to mention a small technicality: Kyoto was in fact voted on by the Senate (in the middle of summer, and pre-emptively no less) and it did not garner a single vote. Not from John Kerry. Not from Teddy Kennedy. Not one.

More to the point though, it confirms what many of us already knew. Al Gore is not just a lone voice in the wilderness, sitting aside truth and riding boldly into the breach leading the forces of enlightenment and science. He is all about Al Gore... and power for Al Gore. He does not take input. He does not take criticism. He does not even acknowledge that he has critics, much less taking them (and their arguments) on. Until recently, he was still shilling the idea that there was consensus on global warming and that that mattered. Yet as James Schlesinger (a Carter administration appointee and the first DOE chair circa 1977) wrote a few months back:

Much has been made of the assertion, repeated regularly in the media, that "the science is settled," based upon a supposed "scientific consensus." Yet, some years ago in the "Oregon Petition" between 17,000 and 18,000 signatories, almost all scientists, made manifest that the science was not settled, declaring:

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

...science is not a matter of consensus, as the histories of Galileo, Copernicus, Pasteur, Einstein and others will attest. Science depends not on speculation but on conclusions verified through experiment. Verification is more than computer simulations -- whose conclusions mirror the assumptions built in the model. Irrespective of the repeated assertions regarding a "scientific consensus," there is neither a consensus nor is consensus science.

Now Al Gore doesn't even bother to assert as much--not because he acknowledges the complexity of data and opinion on the subject but because now, he regally assumes consensus. Where I come from, they call that arrogance. Why else would he title his new book "The Assault on Reason" if not to appoint himself as reason's primary flag-bearer?

The even darker side to that title (if it's possible to get even more ego-centric and hubristic) is that Al Gore's enemies (and we are manifest!) are by definition, without reason. Perhaps in that light, we should reach further back than the list of 20th century tyrants I named earlier. Perhaps Al Gore is better characterized as a 21st century Napoleon. And like the little general, we should never count out his destructive return.

UPDATE: Some may already have seen the Drudge link to this National Post (Canada) article talking about how 'Inconvenient Truth' has become high school indoctrination material. (If we New Englanders have much to lose with a Gore-cooled planet, Canadians definitely ought to be worried.) The piece is worth a thorough read. Note especially the copious links to previous hard-hitting articles busting global warming.

In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year... Two weeks ago, 900 students from grade 7 to 12 in Ontario's Halton Region were treated to a screening -- sponsored by ethanol producer SunOpta Inc... SunOpta has donated 60 copies of the DVD and the book version of An Inconvenient Truth to public and Catholic schools as a resource...

Incredible. ExxonMobil = evil. SunOpta = who? Indoctrination much?
OK, now wait for it... here it is... I really love this next part...

...since the film's release last year, scientists have rejected Mr. Gore's claims that 2005 was the warmest year on record (temperatures have been receding since 1998), that polar bears are heading for extinction (their numbers are growing), that Antarctica is warming (interior temperature readings show cooling) and that sea levels will "rise 18 to 20 feet," swamping coastal cities (the International Panel on Climate Change predicts a few inches).

Truth. Yeah. Right.

Apologetic Friday

Those unfamiliar with the term 'apologetic' as I was until very recently might imagine that this post is about eating crow for yesterday's edgy post. It's not. That would be an apology and I've already done that for any legitimately righteous toes potentially stepped on in haste.

Instead, apologetics refers to "the field of study concerned with the systematic defense of a position... against attack". In this case, the Christian position. Other references here and here. Two quick resources for folks to check out, then it's off to a busy day of "real" work.

First, is a blow-by-blow, three-part series (parts one, two and three) by Paragraph Farmer Patrick O'Hannigan in which he chronicles the first rounds in Christopher Hitchens' pugilistic battle against God.

Score: God, by decision (and only because His particular agents this time did not come equipped to score a TKO.) Where are C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton when we need them? The central point on which Hitchens loses: any appeal to morality begs the question of authority.

I don't have time to unpack that one, but someone who does and has--with love and zeal and wisdom and precision--is Ravi Zacharias. I've grown fond of listening to his podcasts. Though some are better than others (what in life is not?) most are very good indeed. A friend and regular reader who saw Ravi in person in Austin recently called his lecture "magnificent".

One particularly relevant and timely series is a two-parter: "The Anatomy of Faith and the Quest for Reason" (parts one and two). The first one takes a while to wind up. The second bears listening to at least twice.

Bottom line: it is a fools errand to consign reason to a sphere of exclusively human, scientific concern. God invented it. He expects us to use it. Wielded properly and with humility, it is a veritable superhighway to Him. The corollary is that secular rationalists claim more than their due when they say that faith plays no part in science--at least as popularly understood in such hysterias as global warming, which asks believers to have faith in computer models and future scenarios impossible to test with the same kind of rigor as other kinds of science.

UPDATE: Patrick O'Hannigan has written part four of his series on the Wilson/Hitchens debate and kindly quoted yours truly. Check it out.

Assassins Sans Frontieres

Drudge led with this story early this morning. Reuters has expanded on it. Google News finds less than a dozen mentions. Inexplicably, it's now completely absent from Drudge's site. It is an assassination plot story. If the target were George Bush or Tony Blair, this would be big news--perhaps of the gleeful kind, given the tilt of the MSM, but big news nonetheless.

Mazab Bashir 25, a Palestinian in Gaza working with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) was indicted this morning in Jerusalem District Court on charges that he: "plotted to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli officials".

Bashir...began working with Doctors Without Borders five years ago... collecting intelligence on senior Israeli officials - including Olmert and a number of Knesset members.

Bashir met with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP] in September 2006 [and]... also underwent arms training with the PFLP, and was picked to carry out the planned assassination.

...Bashir decided in December 2006 to kill David Be'eri, head of the Elad organization, a group involved in purchasing Arab homes in Jerusalem's Old City.

That same month, he underwent combat training in the Gaza Strip in order to learn to kill without using weapons.

In January 2007, Bashir again entered Israel again on behalf of Doctors Without Borders, and began collecting information on Be'eri... Bashir said he had planned to return to Gaza to complete his combat training and learn, among other things, how to break necks. He said he intended to use his skills to kill Be'eri. [emphasis added]

Got that? Now here's MSF's response in the same JPost article:

Duncan Mclean, head of 'Doctors Without Borders' in the region, told Israel Radio, "I don't think embarrassed would be the right word. We are very sad for Bashir who has been working for us for almost six years. But we would like to make it very clear that we make a distinction between his professional work and what he does on his personal time..."

So MSF is emphatically not embarassed that one of their own seems to have intentionally used his status with MSF to gain access to Israel and that the PFLP hand-picked an MSF worker to carry out its terrorist mission? Not embarassed? One would hope they would be saying that as they searched for a stronger adjective. Perhaps "mortified", for example. Or maybe "shocked and outraged"? No, they are sad. For the Israeli officials and their families who almost fell victim to this trained killer? No, sad for their own. Sad... what a meaningless word in this context. I suspect they are sad he got caught.

No, they are sad and not embarassed because they buy into the fallacy that there is one's personal life and time and then there is one's professional life and time--and never the twain shall meet. Like Jekyl and Hyde, one can be the worst kind of sinner in private and a saint in public and the former in now way impugns the effectiveness or truth of the latter. Just like Bill Clinton. Or vice versa: Hitler was nice to his kids... until he shot them in the head.

Except that of course it doesn't work that way. The separated man concept is a relatively recent construct-- convenient and necessary to the freewheeling 60's generation and (dare I say) naturally appealing to libertarians. Yet when the integrated human being goes out the window, so does the ability to make moral distinctions that mean anything in practice.

Oh, that assassin thing? Heh. That was in my spare time. You can't fire me for that. Or conversely: Sure I skimmed my expense account, but I'd never cheat on you, honey.

The notion of the divided man perpetuates a legal culture of "guilty but not responsible" that's already eaten deeply into the foundations of an orderly society by eroding and providing exceptions and loopholes to something very simple: personal responsibility for one's actions.

In any case it isn't even necessary in this situation to slay the divided man argument. Without MSF credentials, a random 20-something Palestinian would not have had the access (much less the credibility) to go wandering around Israel doing reconnaissance for a terrorist organization.

If on my "own time"--say at 5:01PM on a Friday--I use my IBM employee badge (I'm making this up; I don't work for IBM), to gain access to CIA mainframes at Langley in order to sabotage them, then IBM is and ought to be on the receiving end of a whole lot of pointed questions about why they hired me, how the screened me and why they didn't have more oversight in place to ensure that my credentials weren't misused. Someone higher up at IBM is probably going down hard in such a scenario.

It ought to be the same for MSF. Like it or not, they are embroiled in this. They have a lot to answer for... which is why they wasted no time in legalistic verbal back-pedaling. Which didn't stop France from naming the founder of MSF as its new Foreign Minister.

...the new French president was likely to appoint Socialist Bernard Kouchner... who founded the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)... as foreign minister.

Adding to the sad irony and upside-down news reporting of what ought to be an assassination plot story, what's the CNN lead story on Israel today (garnering nearly 2,500 hits on Google News)? "Israel Launches Retaliatory Airstrikes, Killing Two". Bias much? Blame the victim.

P.S., none of this should in any way be construed as a slam against the humanitarian work of MSF. Rather, it is intended as a kick in the pants to an organization that--if it is to preserve its mission and its neutrality--needs to come to grips with how it has (apparently) been used and denounce in clear, firm and unambiguous terms the alleged activities of one of its workers.

UPDATE I (Friday morning): A quick thought exercise that came to me late last night: How would the MSM have reacted had it been revealed, instead, that Israel's Mossad had been carefully cultivating agents inside MSF for 'wet work' inside Muslim countries? Would MSF have claimed that what those agents did "on their own time" was their business?

UPDATE II (Friday afternoon): The AP adds more to the story (via Forbes):

Bashir said he easily entered Israel with a permit he held because he worked for the Paris-based Doctors without Borders... An official from Doctors without Borders, Michael Neuman, said Bashir has worked with them for five years, but the charges were "completely unrelated to his work."

So, the MSF/DWB credential was indeed critical to Bashir's terrorist plottings and furthermore, the segmented man idea is not just one MSF/DWB official winging it in the moment, but the carefully considered MSF/DWB party line.

So I ask again (a variant on my question from this morning):

If it were to come out that the CIA was placing agents within the Red Cross for the express purpose of assassinating foreign leaders, to what standards of accountability would they be held?

I believe they and others like them would and should be held to the highest standards of accountability not despite their unquestionably good works, but because of them.

Noah, Floods, Global Warming and Nukes

Drudge is leading this morning with a story about a Greenpeace guerilla theatre stunt to build an ark on Mount Ararat to dramatize the threat from global warming [emphasis added]:

Environmental activists are building a replica of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat—where the biblical vessel is said to have landed after the great flood—in an appeal for action on global warming, Greenpeace said Wednesday.

Turkish and German volunteer carpenters are making the wooden ship on the mountain in eastern Turkey, bordering Iran. The ark will be revealed in a ceremony on May 31, a day after Greenpeace activists climb the mountain and call on world leaders to take action to tackle climate change, Greenpeace said.

"Climate change is real, it's happening now and unless world leaders take urgent, decisive and far-reaching action, the next decades will see human misery on a scale not experienced in modern times," said Greenpeace activist Hilal Atici. "Those leaders have a mandate from the people ... to massively cut greenhouse gas emissions and to do it now."

Many countries are struggling to address global and national standards for carbon emissions. U.N. delegates are meeting this week in Germany to prepare for December negotiations on a new set of international rules for controlling emissions. The new accord would succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012.

Where to start? There are some obvious problems with the piece and then some fascinating ones that took research to uncover. Bear with me here. This one is richer than it may appear.

First off, note that the piece would not even exist but for the Greenpeace press release. One source. The thing probably took all of ten minutes to brush up into a "news" item, conferring on it the unquestioned legitimacy of the AP wire.

Second, the appeal to a "mandate" from the people. Which people? Liberal elites, that's who. The Senate--under the Clinton administration--voted 95 to 0 against ratifying Kyoto. Congressional representatives aren't stupid. They often have their own agendas, but it's more than a little unlikely to think that all of them would ignore a clear mandate from their constituents at the same time. Which leaves the rest of the world, including China (exempt), India (exempt) and a host of Middle Eastern and European countries who will jump on any bandwagon so long as it's anti-American. Even Clinton knew Kyoto was stupid and unworkable. I won't even go off on my usual jag about how UN scientists themselves have concluded that reducing greenhouse gasses would do next to nothing to stop global warming. Really, I won't.

Third, something I almost wrote about yesterday relative to Jerry Falwell: Why is it that those with no religious faith seem to revel in using religious iconography, stories and constructs to make their points?

E.g., if one doesn't believe in a biblical God, what sense is there in a triumphant appeal to His biblical condemnation (e.g., of Falwell)? By the same token, what are militant anti-American secular environmentalists trying to say by staging a stunt with biblical backdrop? At the very least they must know it is overly literal--even fundamentalist. If Greenpeace doesn't believe it, why are they using it to dramatize their cause? Irony abounds... As this site notes:

"Mount Ararat was not involved in the original flood legend. The ark grounded in an estuary at the mouth of the Euphrates River. The mountains of Ararat got involved in the story because Noah's son Shem traveled on foot to the mountains of Ararat after the barge grounded. Story tellers confused the mountain that Noah's son visited with the hill on which Noah offered a sacrifice. The ark never came close to a mountain."

...which takes nothing whatsoever away from the divine importance of the Noah story. In fact, it adds scientific support to it.

A fourth point, and this is more subtle. Scholars peg the Noah flood around 2900 BC. That puts it just past the end of what Avery and Singer call the 'Climate Optimum' (p. xiv): "9,000 to 5,000 years ago... warmer and wetter than the Earth's present climate... The Saharan and Arabian deserts became wetter, supporting hunting, herding, and some agriculture."

In other words, the fact that Noah was living at all, the fact that what are now deserts were green and lush (rivers flooding their banks provided nourishment for the soil), and the fact that human society (biblical and otherwise) was innovating, expanding and flourishing in the millennia preceding Noah (in short, "going forth and multiplying") was largely due to what we now call "global warming". Funny, I don't remember the Bible (or any secular history of that period) talking about SUVs...

What none of the global warming zealots like to confront is the fact that, throughout human history, warming periods have been associated with a reduction in disease, an increase in agricultural production, a reduction in severe weather events and a general flourishing of human society. Avery and Singer are hardly the first to document this. My theory: if one is rooted in a culture-of-death world view in which humans are vermin and population growth is anathema, one doesn't think about any of what I just mentioned as being a good thing.

Now here's where it gets even more interesting. Who is Hilal Atici--the Greenpeace 'activist' quoted in the article? And why is this stunt taking place in Eastern Turkey, right near the border of Iran? It took a little digging, but one of Mr. Atici's other roles within Greenpeace, it seems is as an apologist for Iran's burgeoning nuclear program--opposing Mohammed El Baradei and his work to deal with Iran peacefully via the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Hilal Atici, Energy Campaigner for Greenpeace Mediterranean said... “Dr. El Baradei and our government might be looking closely at Iran’s nuclear ambitions but to ignore the 90 US nuclear weapons based here in the Turkey at the same time as promoting nuclear technology is hypocritical. These weapons, located at Incirlik just across the border from the Middle East, are not subject to any UN inspection system and are a violation of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty’, Ms Atici added, “You do not need to go far; Dr. El Baradei should inspect Incirlik”

In addition to missing the moral distinction between Iran building nukes with the express intention of destroying Israel as soon as possible and the U.S. holding over some as deterrent in its reluctant role as Leviathan (aka, de facto world police), he's flat out wrong about U.S. nukes violating the NPT. Readers would be excused however, for assuming he is correct.

It's a lie so oft repeated in the MSM that it's seldom questioned: the U.S. was supposed to give up all of its nukes long ago, thus it has no authority to call on others to give theirs up. Yet various articles by those who actually know something about the subject (e.g., this one--$ub$ only--by Stephen Rademaker in the May 7th Wall Street Journal) have pointed out the fallacy:

There are... two basic flaws in the suggestion that nuclear proliferation is rooted in U.S. nuclear policy. First, the reasons why Iran, North Korea and other would-be proliferators seek nuclear weapons have nothing to do with Washington's nuclear policy. Second, the claim that the U.S. is disregarding its legal obligations under the NPT does not withstand scrutiny.

Those who argue that the U.S. has disregarded its nuclear disarmament obligations under the NPT are quick to make categorical assertions about the treaty's requirements, but almost never quote the pertinent language of the NPT, for the simple reason that it provides no support for their claims. The key provision, Article VI of the treaty, consists of only one sentence: "Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

It is impossible to discern from this language a binding legal obligation on the U.S. and the other four nuclear-weapon states to give up nuclear weapons. The operative legal requirement is to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating . . . to nuclear disarmament. . . ."

The U.S. has not only negotiated on such matters for more than three decades, but it has signed and implemented a series of arms control agreements beginning in 1972 that have ended the nuclear arms race and substantially reduced the U.S. nuclear inventory.

In other words, Hilal Atici is your run-of-the-mill, title-switching activist looking for any excuse to bash America and its policies. He works for Greenpeace--an organization that simultaneously opposes a viable energy source that produces no 'greenhouse' gasses as well as all sources that do. De facto: societies that use no energy are not idyllic; they are nightmares (think sub-Saharan Africa). Renewable sources are nice to contemplate, but they are so far off as to be unrealistic alternatives for several decades.

Hilal Atici is completely in synch with Al Gore... and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If this were a math exercise, that would make for an interesting transitive proof. What's truly scary is that the AP gives him a hall pass to drive his press release straight through into news copy, echoing un-questioned across the MSM.

Decorum and the Golden Rule: The Left-Leaning Blogosphere on Jerry Falwell's Demise

In case you haven't been watching the news, Jerry Falwell is dead. This post is not about him. God gets to decide. At least the man acknowledged there is one.

Falwell's passing--in media terms--is analagous to the opportunity solar researchers have to observe the sun during a solar eclipse. Whether you loved him, hated him, were totally indifferent to him, didn't know who he was or what he did, or as is the case with most fallible human beings, you had reservations about some things and respect for others, Falwell's demise provides an almost unique opportunity to make empirical observations on the differences (long noted) between the relative restraint (speaking broadly) of the conservative blogosphere and the much more frequently expletive-laced, vitriol-filled liberal blogosphere.

Here's a sampling from some of the more "authoritative" (read: most heavily in-linked) blogs on the left. The comment threads and minor blogs are even riper. Some, like Andrew Sullivan offer restrained contempt. Many more however, seem to give a nod to the fact that a human being is dead, then carve out an exception in this case, that enables them to say whatever they like:

Wonkette: "PRAISE GOD, JERRY FALWELL IS DEAD! Hooray!"

Whiskey Fire: "Far be it from me to delight in the death of any human being, but since I'm not completely convinced Falwell falls in that category, I shall feel free to do my Snoopy dance in the backyard."

Bring it On: "Enjoy eternity. I hope it’s hot."

FourFour: "Hee. Did anyone have a reaction to Jerry Falwell's death that wasn't, "AWESOME!!!" or at least glee-based? I'm just curious if another reaction was humanly possible."

Pandagon: "The gates of hell swing open and Satan welcomes his beloved son"

Boi From Troy: “Hell is a litle more crowded this morning”

Aside from the obvious, another thing one discovers in diving into the liberal blogosphere is how homogeneous and shallow it is. How many ways is it really possible to say "go to h%&l" and have it be interesting.

Book Review: "Apostle Paul" (James Cannon)

One of the books I took with me on my recent trip was "Apostle Paul" by James Cannon. I give it a qualified endorsement--interesting and educational but not compelling for purchase unless you're a fan of fictionalized history (an oxymoron, really). Borrow it from the library... but do read it. I was happy to have done so.

It definitely helped to increase my appreciation for the sweep of Paul's life, the challeges he faced, the decisions he had to make, and the impact he ultimately had. In particular, it gave me a much richer sense for the tenuousness of the early church. Those who see Christianity as an inevitable juggernaut should read "Apostle..." and ask themselves how and why the institution we see today grew out of a rag-tag bunch of misfits out of cash and on the run from the law.

Those who see Christianity as the easy, conventional choice in today's society would do well to read "Apostle..." and ask themselves why someone with the power and privilege Paul enjoyed would give up so much and endure so much had he not been convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christ was and is the real deal.

Another counter-conventional question one is forced to think about in reading "Apostle..." is how someone of such native intelligence and analytical ability could become so convinced of the reality of Christ. I ask that not in the derogatory, but in the factual sense. I.e., Paul was no dummy. He was neither emotionally volatile, simple-minded nor naively conformist. Had Paul lived today, he'd have been the National Merit Scholar with a 2400 SAT score and offers from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

Yet Paul chose to follow Christ.

Modern critics who like to portray Christians as simpletons are forced to confront that fact in an honest assessment of Paul and his life. The book is a reminder that faith in the Christian context is not the ability to suspend one's disbelief a la the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Rather, it is the steady trust one chooses to put in a real individual person based on an evolving understanding of his or her character. E.g., "I have faith that my best friend will show up on time, do what he says he will, not cheat me, not hit on my wife, etc."

"Apostle..." is billed as a novel in that it attempts to fill in the large blank spaces in what is known about one of the most potent forces (some might argue the sustaining force) in the early church. The Booklist review linked on Amazon notes that it covers:

The story of Paul, Saul of Tarsus, the apostle who brought Jesus to the Gentiles, is given a sweeping treatment... Cannon, a journalist, masters both character and setting as he brings Paul and the world of first-century Christianity to life.

One of the top endorsements for the book on Amazon is from President Bush. (Yes, dear liberal friends, despite what the Kerry campaign may have told you, he can and does read.)

My main complaint is that, as a novelist, Cannon reads like a writer of non-fiction who's been given a list of rules he should follow in order to turn research notecards into a novel... which is probably not far from the truth. This is Cannon's first novel after stints in public service (e.g., in the Ford administration.)

If "Apostle..." were a wine, it would taste somewhat 'green' and 'young'. All the key elements are there, but it would have benefitted from a few more rounds of edits to better integrate facts with fictional flourishes. Whenever a group of characters sits down to a meal, for example, it is not sufficient that they simply eat together, but that we hear about a completely made-up (and ridiculously detailed) description of what was on the menu. Such asides can sometimes be jarrring.

My other complaint is Cannon's liberal slant (largely by omission) on some of the more controversial social doctrines Paul put forth in his epistles. I can only guess that an editor insisted on that course in the interest of sales. Readers would do well to temper Cannon's fictionalized version of Paul with a strong scriptural grounding in what he actually wrote.

Bottom line: Those able to suspend their impatience with the author's sometimes awkward injections of color will appreciate the sense that the book conveys of the sweep of the man's life. Style aside, "Apostle..." is a credible and easily accessible overview of a major pillar of the church--and ultimately, of Western Civilization.

The MSM on Abortion in China - Libertarian Impulse or Moral Awakening?

I just became aware this week of at least two MSM pieces from late April dealing with the almost unbearably tragic subject of forced abortions in China: one from NPR's April 23rd Morning Edition, the other from Time Magazine's April 30th issue. It's hardly a new story. NPR's coverage (WARNING--GRAPHIC):

...dozens of women in southwest China have been forced to have abortions even as late as nine months into the pregnancy... Wei Linrong... was 7 months pregnant when 10 family planning officials visited her at home on April 16.

[Wei's husband] Liang describes how they told her that she would have to have an abortion, "You don't have any more room for maneuver," he says they told her. "If you don't go [to the hospital], we'll carry you." The couple was then driven to Youjiang district maternity hospital in Baise city...

The couple was given a consent agreement to sign. When Liang refused, family planning officials signed it for him...

The officials gave Wei three injections in the lower abdomen. Contractions started the next afternoon, and continued for almost 16 hours. Her child was stillborn.

"I asked the doctor if it was a boy or girl," Wei said. "The doctor said it was a boy. My friends who were beside me said the baby's body was completely black. I felt desolate, so I didn't look up to see the baby."...

"The nurses dealt with the body like it was rubbish," Wei said. "They wrapped it up in a black plastic bag and threw it in the trash."

The tenor of both pieces seems to be incredulity that such an environment persists--begging the question of where the outrage was over the last 35+ years when this was an even more pervasive, explicit and systematic practice. The fact that the MSM is covering the story at all is remarkable, even if they're a little late and their moral reasoning remains convoluted, naive and at times implicitly apologetic.

Both pices, for example, buy in to using China's own preferred terminology in referring to these atrocities as part of the one child "policy" and administered by "family planning" officials, while referring to Christian groups and others bringing them to light as "activists". Were Nazis doing the same thing, it beggars belief that the MSM would use the government's own truth-hiding rhetoric in such a way. The Time piece goes even further, noting that:

...the one-child policy has been... successful in checking China's population growth... critics point out that India has achieved broadly similar declines in fertility without state coercion or occasional brutality.

The Chinese government's systematized campaign of murder is described as "successful". Counter-examples proving that it is unnecessary are attributed to "critics". Checking population growth is assumed in all cases as an all-around good thing (a very particular world view that the authors probably don't even recognize they inhabit).

The Time piece gets at the root cause without really knowing it: top-down state control in a moral vacuum. Get results. We don't care how.

Despite the growing consensus calling for change, however, Beijing continues to make enforcement of the policy one of the two main yardsticks by which the performance of local bureaucrats — and hence their prospects for advancement — are judged. (The other is tax collection.) It is this pressure from above to comply with population quotas that prompts local officials to adopt measures such as forced abortion (sometimes heart-rendingly late in term), forced sterilization and the like, says Nicolas Becquelin of New York-based Human Rights in China. [emphasis added].

Now here's where it gets interesting.

This is one of those stories with the potential for making strange bedfellows, e.g., libertarians with social conservatives, anti-globalization zealots with evangelical Christians and many other combinations. And while the issue is about as morally clearcut as it's possible to be, implications for the domestic abortion debate--and for America's China policy--are anything but.

Wait. Did they really say "heart-rendingly late in term"? Time Magazine?!

Did they mean that this is about emphathy with the child... or with the mother--or both? The authors don't say and may not have taken the time to sort it all out. I sense a degree of schizophrenic hydroplaning over the real issues.

Is this about individual freedom or sanctity of life? The number of questions being begged is absolutely staggering. Whose heart? How late in term? Does one day earlier in term make a difference? How about two? How about sixty? Does the fact that one's heart is rended only sometimes make the whole thing any less abhorrent? Under what circumstances is one's heart only partially rended and does that mean it's OK to look the other way?

What about the heart of the child which--not to put too fine a point on it, but frankly we must to get to the core of it--is being rended in a very literal sense? Is emotion the sole and proper gauge of morality here? If so, whose?

Many in the West would desperately like to perceive China as new, improved and somehow (vaguely) morally 'progressive'. (Oh how I hate that meaningless term! Few if any who use it ever answer the question: "progressing... towards what?".)

But progressive in what sense? Is it really possible to say that China is 'reformed' when few in the liberal media have even bothered to hold Mao to full account for killing twice as many as Hitler? Charles Colson may not have coined the term, but in a recent Breakpoint editorial he referred to the situation in China generally as the "Starbucks paradox".

It's the false and unreasoned assumption that economic liberalization inevitably leads to democracy, followed by social and moral advancement (again, begging a fixed reference point towards which one can measure an 'advance'). It is the world view espoused by Thomas PM Barnett and Tom Friedman, among others. Flat world. Globalizing, Westernizing, capitalizing world. It's a view in which economics precedes and determines political structure (inevitably democratic) and where politics then leads inevitably to something approaching Western mores and values.

But why? How? In America it was the opposite. We started with values (rather strictly religious ones, I might add). From them, we derived democracy and freedom of conscience and sanctity of individual human life, then from all that sprang economic success. The libertarian cowboy entrepreneurs nearly died trying to colonize this continent. It was the value-driven religious zealots who made the real go of it at Plimoth Plantation. OK, that's a gross oversimplification but it's becoming increasingly difficult to argue that Western morality naturally takes root as a result of capitalism and democracy. (Yes, that's a fly in the ointment of U.S. mideast policy.)

Just because China's cities are beginning to look and feel like the West (in some cases even exceeding it in outward modernity and adherence to capitalist principles), does not mean that they will evolve like the West. Bottom line: when the life of the state and the elites who feed and profit from it takes predecence over individual, innocent human life, one is witnessing an abomination--no matter how pretty the skyscrapers, how magnificent the Olympics and how many Western franchises are in place.

Weekend Links and Sound Bytes

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross in Thursday's Daily Standard (H/T: Abu Al-Fin)

"One reason the United States is short on friends throughout the world is that we haven't stood by our allies in the past."

In his post "You Get What You Pay For", Val at Babalu Blog has compiled an impressive set of links exposing the realities of "free" healthcare in Cuba just as the Communist-apologetic film "Salud" premiere's at the Princeton "Human Rights" Film Festival.

Did you see the piece in the NYT about Palestinian gunmen burning down the YMCA* in the West Bank town of Qalqiliya (a city controlled by Hamas)? I didn't either--because it was never written. *(In that part of the world, the 'C' in YMCA actually stands for something). Melanie Phillips has the goods on this and other recent "attempt[s] at religious cleansing targeted principally at Christians" that you won't read about anywhere in the MSM.

More later... time to do some gardening...

Speaking of Epidemiology...

Listening to Larry Brilliant's talk last week has got me thinking about global epidemics and how they are eradicated. Apparently, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, Peter Huber has been thinking about the same thing.

Huber's extensive article in the latest City Journal is rich, insightful and well worth reading. Unless you're already very deep into the field you're bound to glean something from it. Key take-aways for me: the next epidemic disease 'shoe' will drop sooner or later; we will (almost by definition) be poorly prepared to deal with it when it does; AIDS was not only a warm-up and a prelude to it, but a likely incubator for it.

(For the biblically inclined, it's worth noting that at least half of the seven bowls of God's wrath outlined in Revelations could be construed without much trouble as referring to outbreaks of new, highly virulent infectious diseases... which wouldn't be the first time He chose to do such a thing to accomplish His larger purposes.)

One other thing that's interesting relative to the current obsesssion with global warming as root cause for infectious disease is a parallel from the midst of the cholera epidemic in London. Huber writes:

Epidemiology—the rigorous science of public health—was born with physician William Farr’s appointment as controller of London’s General Register Office in 1838. Directed to do something about the cholera epidemic, Farr began systematically recording who was dying and where.

The most important things he discovered were negative. Wealth didn’t protect you from cholera. Neither did occupation, or residing close to the sea. What mattered was how high above the Thames you lived. Farr concluded [incorrectly] that the river’s horrendous stench caused the disease. [emphasis added]

In other words, the initial (wrong) hypothesis about cholera was that it was due to a diffuse cause that nobody could do much about except by fleeing the city. The theory was partially true (proximity to water was loosely related to the actual cause) but it was not precise enough to be helpful to the vast majority who had no option but to stay where they were.

Remind you of anything? Global warming and hysterically speculative scenarios about how rising sea levels will cause disease, perhaps? (Ignoring the many other deaths that would result.)

One wonders what might have happened had Dr. Farr had more political power and had the British government had enough money in 1838 to consider buying giant air-filtering machines and forcing everyone on the planet to pay for them. Such measures would have been utterly ineffective. That wouldn't have stopped the elites from pursuing something that would have let them feel good about "doing something".

More hard science, please.

California Nightmare

I spent last week in the Bay Area ('California Dreamin'). The following pictures come from my sister-in-law in LA, showing Griffith Park burning earlier this week. Apologies for the copyright notices. She and her husband are in the photo/film industry. I.e., this is their livelihood. The pictures were taken from the balcony of their condo(!)

Google.org and Larry Brillliant: Good Works, False Assumptions

During my California trip last week, a longtime friend and professional colleague invited me to a talk by Dr. Larry Brilliant, MD (see left) at Ideo's main offices in Palo Alto. Free wine and beer. Nothing else on the calendar. A chance to hear a big name talk about globe-spanning problems...

Why not? Here is an overview of Larry Brilliant's formidable list of life accomplishments. They are impressive by any measure. Another brief summary can be found here.

...the aptly-named physician is a world health care specialist, founder of the Seva Foundation, and recently-appointed chair of Google.org, the philanthropic branch of the internet search giant. He’s helped eradicate smallpox, return sight to the blind, and minimized the effect of polio throughout the world - so what is he doing on Google’s payroll? Nothing different, it seems.

The event was one of those things you just had to know about. I can find no announcement or reporting of it anywhere on the web. There were approximately 50 people in attendance. In the small Ideo lobby/lunchroom that meant standing room only. (On a hunch that I might be out-numbered, I managed to get a seat near the exit with my back to the wall. As it was, I stayed under cover not wanting to 'out' myself and embarrass my friend.)

I will admit to being completely unfamiliar with Larry Brilliant before the talk aside from what my friend had told me. For the past year, Brilliant has served as the Executive Director of Google.org: "the philanthropic arm of Google". You've supported them already with your search activity, intentionally or not. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Their priorities include:

develop[ing] scalable, sustainable solutions to poverty by focusing on economic growth in the private sector and improving access to information and services for the poor [and]... enabl[ing] the world to better predict, prevent and eradicate communicable diseases through better access to and use of information.

That's part of the story and it's utterly laudable. What I have to say in the rest of this post should not be construed as anything but admiration for the fact that this guy is actually doing something--and doing it with energy and lifelong commitment--about the problems many liberals just complain about.

As Dennis Prager remarked recently, we conservatives are sometimes hampered by a kind of real or perceived libertarian instinct away from compassion in matters of public policy. That can hamper our credibility and effectiveness in gaining backing for solutions that adhere to conservative values and principles. Springing as it does from Silicon Valley however, the Google.org venture seems completely 'hip' to many of these things: the unbreakable laws of economics; the necessity of personal accountability; the value of networks and information.

Given this, I went into the talk with as open a mind as I could manage. I really wanted to believe that what I'd find was a "third way" or at least an intellectually honest liberal. A nice glass of Chardonnay made that task much easier, though it didn't turn off my brain to some in-your-face inconsistencies I'll talk about in a moment.

Based on Brilliant's lifetime accomplishments, which include key roles in helping to eradicate smallpox and polio, my assumption had been that Brilliant (and Google.org) were not your ordinary run-of-the-mill self-aggrandizing liberal boomer retread do-gooders throwing money at unaccountable UN-style bureaucracies, lost causes and cynically corrupt dictators. To a large degree that seemed true... until Brilliant started his talk...

The talk appears to be nearly identical to this one (complete with summary and video clips) that Brilliant gave five weeks earlier at the Said Business School at Oxford University.

It quickly became clear that the foundational assumptions and motivating justifications behind all of the good stuff (e.g., free-market poverty programs and disease eradication efforts) were fundamentally flawed. In Brilliant's world view, the primary root-cause bogeymen of most of the world's problems are: 1) global warming, 2) income inequality and 3) population growth. Where have we heard this before?

Well, credit Brilliant with enough intellectual honesty to come right out and remind us. While carefully avoiding overt references to the Bush administration, he noted in passing (but with marked pride) that his son works directly for Al Gore. Then he mentioned Paul Ehrlich.

Most liberals won't do that. Ehrlich tends to ruin their case. Ehrlich is the crazy uncle you endure on Thanksgiving but have to invite anyway. He's the widely discredited but still going 1970s Cassandra who predicted critical shortages of a wide range of essential natural resources (most notably oil). The exact opposite happened. He also predicted widespread famine resulting in a classic Malthusian population 'crash' by the turn of the last century. The opposite happened.

Paul Ehrlich in short, is a crank. Paul Ehrlich is simply wrong and has been proven so publicly--over and over and over again. That doesn't stop the folks who'd like to believe that next time maybe he'll be right.

Brilliant put up a chart, not of natural resource prices or famine numbers or population but of total global energy consumption (short take: it's going up) claiming this as proof that Ehrlich may turn out to be essentially correct in a few decades. At which point they'll both probably be dead. It was chart and a statement (and a tactic) that beggared belief: a lie about a lie about a liar, none of which can be proven wrong in the present. And that was one of the primary support beams undergirding Brilliant's case. I was disappointed. It got squishier from there.

Brilliant went on to tug at the heartstrings of liberal guilt as we sat in this gorgeous etched-glass conference room sipping fine wine. We all need to reduce our carbon footprint he noted, without a trace of irony, as he noted his three-hour round trip commute from his home in Marin County.

See what melting icecaps could do to Bangladesh? he asked, as he put up a chart showing how a twenty foot sea level rise would devastate the country and cause widespread famine and disease. It wasn't that I didn't have the heart to confront him with the UN's consensus number (still highly speculative) of up to twenty centimeters over the next 100 years. Rather, it was becoming clear that asking such a question might lead to my being mugged in the alley outside.

Here's where it gets tough. I really wanted to believe that there was a substantive, fact-based, well-reasoned argument driving all of this man's good works and the massive investments that one of the world's most prominent and cash-rich corporations will be pouring into the world's problems over the next several decades. What I found was dry rot, termites and sub-standard concrete. The foundation (in both the metaphorical and literal senses) simply doesn't stand up.

Brilliant made no mention, for example, of the Copenhagen Consensus which:

...analyzes the world's greatest challenges and works with organizations concerned with mitigating the problems facing the world. With the process of prioritization, the center aims to establish a framework in which solutions to problems are prioritized based upon economic and scientific analysis.

Al Gore has refused to debate one of the CC's organizers, Bjorn Lomborg and it's not a surprise why. The Copenhagen Consensus puts global warming well down on its list and for good, common sense reasons. These include: a) the mechanisms and effects remains speculative, b) even supporters agree that the outcome cannot be changed in any significant way and c) what has been proposed is expensive to a degree unparalleled in human history ($553 trillion). Oh, and if for some reason we could change things for the cooler... it would probably kill lots of people. That doesn't get talked about much.

In other words, going after global warming as a root cause of many other real and immediate human problems (e.g., malaria) is pi$$ing money down the toilet for the sole purpose of assuaging liberal first-world guilt over our relative wealth and comfort. It is a mis-placed attempt at atonement for a new, safe, human-defined version of sin. Better to buy mosquito nets and bring back DDT.

Yet tilting at the impossible windmill of global warming is Larry Brilliant's (and by extension, Google.org's) core argument for action on virtually every global problem. Reducing income inequality (as opposed to absolute poverty) is a primary goal (one of the first times I've seen an explicit link between Communist principles and global warming efforts... the implicit link has been there all along). Population control is an essential method for getting there.

In short: hallucinatory science fantasy mixed with Communist doctrine and a culture of death.

Same old stuff. Better packaging. Here's another example from Google of the degree of physical energy and passion being poured into these false assumptions.

It's sad really. Dr. Brilliant told stories and showed pictures (firmly grounded in his professional medical and epidemiological training--unlike the global warming stuff) from his field experience tending to adults and children with Guinea Worm. It is a heart-rendingly awful disease and worthy of our human compassion and help. Making its eradication dependent on a highly politicized fantasy problem nobody can solve though seems so unnecessary--a distraction of time, energy and money on a massive scale and to little effect.

But let me draw something else together here that's important. The three pillars of Brilliant's case (global warming, income inequality and population) have something in common: a big dose of blame for America and what it stands for. Everyone in the room could nod their head sagely and say: since I drive a car, since I'm relatively wealthy by world standards, since I'm sexually emancipated and since I've had an education beyond what 99% of the world's population ever gets, all of this nasty stuff about third world poverty and disease must be my fault.

The parallels with conventional religion (particularly Christianity) are uncanny. There is a natural instinct it seems, to see oneself as unredeemable and yet to try and redeem oneself by works anyway, knowing it is fruitless.

What was notably absent from the talk was any discussion of any root cause that would push blame onto third world peoples or hint at geopolitical solutions like military action. E.g., the primitive social structures and oppressive intellectual climate under Islam (to say nothing of jihadism), the free reign of petty third-world dictators unopposed by international bodies like the UN, the 80-year vacation from economics that Communism represented and the consequences of that foolish idea. Perhaps most importantly, there was no mention of the dynamism, inventiveness and potential of individual human beings to make decisions on their own behalf and adapt to changing circumstances given the freedom to do so.

Values simply didn't play a part in his argument except in a kumbaya kind of fashion. His final slide showed himself and several others decades ago in some third world hellhole working to eradicate smallpox. His point: back then, every religion could work together amicably so why not today? (Big hint: Bush's war). Brilliant didn't bother mentioning that people from different religious backgrounds do work together today in the United States (it's called pluralism) and could work together better today internaionally but for one of them engaging in murderous jihad.

The picture Brilliant painted was of a world where there is them and there is us and we must help them because they cannot really help themselves. It is a world view that completely fails to perceive the power of the human mind and spirit that's unleashed by living in a free society and yes, by having more people born in that free society.

In short, Brilliant described a pair of worthy goals (the eradication of poverty and disease) mixed in with several highly debateable ones (e.g., ZPG, income equality), all supported by assumptions that will inevitably collapse. I.e., supported by a lie.

It's kind of like what liberals say about Bush and the war. As Gore lies (distracting people into focusing on a problem that isn't real and can't be solved) people are dying who don't have to--of diseases that Brilliant as Dr. Brilliant, MD can help to solve. Being an Al Gore wannabe isn't going to help.

UPDATE: The W$J today carries an opinion piece on how Congress is forcing the CIA to study global warming. This is just one example of the real and immediate effects of bowing to political priorities rather than those threats rationally most likely to harm the interests of the United States (which, after all, is paying their salaries) and the lives of U.S. citizens shorter term.

Here we go again. The 2008 intelligence authorization bill, which the House may vote on this week, diverts CIA and other intelligence resources away from critical terrorism-related missions to study global climate change. If it becomes law, the legislation will force agencies to complete a National Intelligence Estimate with a 30-year assessment on the effects of environmental change within nine months.

We've been down this road before. In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, declared that environmental concerns and national security would share equal status in U.S. foreign policy. Immediately following that announcement, CIA Director John Deutch said in July 1996 that the U.S. was diverting spy satellites to photograph "ecologically sensitive" sites.

I also wrote about this last month ("Just in Case the Easter Bunny Goes Psycho...")

California Dreamin'

Apologies for the long dry spell on the blog here. I was in California for ten days, and while I had my laptop with me, it's a kludgy old clunker with about 15 minutes of battery life and no wireless connectivity. (I'm cheap.) Besides which, I needed a break. Time with Mrs. Maru in wine country, early-morning conference calls with my European client and a string of meetings in Silicon Valley during the week left little time or inclination for recreational blogging.

The highlight of the trip (see right) was my participation--on a twelve-person team--in the Calistoga-to-Santa Cruz Relay, aka "California's Longest Party". Collectively, we covered 199 miles in just over thirty hours. The once-in-a-lifetime highlight was running south over the Golden Gate Bridge just after midnight Saturday as a nearly full moon rose over the city. We waded into the Pacific Ocean at the Santa Cruz boardwalk at the end.

The format is an interesting one. Two vans, with six runners in each rotate around the clock, with each runner covering three legs of 3-9 miles each over the course of the event. (I ended up running about 18 miles in total--at 6PM, at 4AM and finally, at 2PM.) Where and when does one sleep, you may ask? Wherever and whenever one can find a place to lie down. That's me racked out on a pile of dirty laundry in a parking lot somewhere west of Palo Alto, trying to catch a few Z's before running again. It's not hard to develop empathy for the homeless after such an experience. Parking lots are hard and dirty.

Such empathy-generating experiences however, were short-lived and artificial. The race goes directly through Napa. Since our van had a little time while the other one was running, we took full advantage (see right). This is the third such relay I've done and I plan to do another this fall. The cameraderie that develops is unrivaled in my adult experience. One comes away feeling a close bond with one's teammates by virtue of having pursued a common objective, supported one another and lived in such close quarters.

For those considering this particular event, the scenery is incredible. The race organization however, left much to be desired. Ostensibly run in support of a local organ donation charity, we joked that the organizers might have had ulterior motives. Over a thousand fit young athletes were out on narrow, twisting roads, running with traffic through the night. Nearly everyone broke the rule against wearing headphones--all on a Saturday afternoon in wine country where three quarters of the drivers were thoroughly buzzed. Oh, and most vans carried ice chests. You connect the dots. Fortunately all on our team arrived safely, as did everyone else.