Error Theory

Andrew Bolt has been blogging for the past week about the totalitarian tendencies in the just released "Media Inquiry" commissioned by Australia's Labor government. This "Finkelstein Report" advocates unlimited regulation of virtually all published and broadcast speech in Australia.

The actual proposal can be scanned in a few minutes (pages 290-300 here). It would set up a 21 member News Media Council, charged to enforce at least some level of oversight:

While the setting of standards should be left to the News Media Council, they should incorporate certain minimum standards, such as fairness and accuracy [§ 11.52, p. 291].

But there is no corresponding limit on how much the Council is allowed to regulate. Just the opposite, the Report explicitly declares that protecting freedom of speech is not part of the Council's mission! §11.55, p. 292:

The News Media Council requires clearly defined functions. It is not recommended that one of them be the promotion of free speech. There are ample bodies and persons in the community who do that more than adequately.

Really? In a country that has no constitutional or statutory protection for speech, how are non-governmental "bodies and persons in the community" more than adequate to protect speech from a governmental body that is endowed with unlimited power to regulate speech?

The report explicitly calls for opinion to be regulated along with news (§11.64, p. 294) , and while low-readership blogs would possibly be exempted, Bolt notes that the suggested threshold for regulation would cover any blog that averaged even one reader a day, and even that would be at the complete discretion of the Council (§11.59, p. 293).

In addition to making whatever rules they want, the Media Council will also sit in judgment (§11.70, p. 296):

If not resolved informally, complaints should be dealt with by a complaints panel consisting of one, three or, only in exceptional cases, five members of the News Media Council.

Envisioned remedies (§ 11.74, p. 297-8) include forced corrections, forced withdrawals, and forced publication on the offender's website of contrary views.


Crime and punishment

Elsewhere the Media Inquiry makes perfectly clear which views are to be corrected: global warming skepticism and criticism of the Labor government.

Skeptics could even be forced to take their own views down and post contrary views in their place. Just impose all the contemplated remedies at once, and why not? There are no stated limits. There are no limits on scope: that political speech is to be granted wide play, or even whether challengers for office must submit to oversight on their claims about the incumbent regime. Neither are any procedural limits imposed. The Council can make up whatever rules it wants. And if people refuse?

Failures to comply (§11.77, p. 298) are to be turned over to existing courts (civil or criminal not specified) which would be called upon to punish non-compliance as contempt of court (i.e. running fines or jail until compliance is forthcoming). In other words, unlimited punishment.

In the name of efficiency there are to be no "internal" or "external" appeals (§278, p. 299), but judges deciding on contempt charges would be allowed to review Council rulings if they feel that their dockets are not full enough already (§11.79, p. 299).


Orwellian "benefits"

§11.86 (p. 300) lists the proclaimed benefits that justify this system of unlimited regulation. Compared to the barbaric system of liberty, where people compete to offer the most convincing arguments, having the government be the arbiter of truth will:

[enable] the public to have confidence that journalistic standards will be upheld and that complaints will be resolved without fear or favour.

Yes, government is well known to never play favorites, and Solomonic power is famous for its even handed wisdom: "Cut the baby in half!" Liberty is way overrated.

Solomon did not actually cut the baby but we can be certain that this 21 member Council, all appointed by a single "independent committee" (like the authors of the Finkelstein report!), would be an abattoir.

"Independent" the report clarifies (§11.46, p. 291), means "Independent from government" (emphasis added), and yet it is to have the power of government. In other words, it is to have unaccountable power, and this independence from accountability is to be conferred upon a well known permanent Labor constituency, Universities Australia, which would get to appoint a majority of the "independent committee."

Thus the entire enterprise would have the great virtue (from the Labor point of view) that unlike the sitting government, the voters cannot "throw the bums out." Here the appointing committee and the appointed Council will violate the fundamental principle of republicanism as articulated by Alexander Hamilton, who appealed at the New York Convention that:

The true principle of a republic is, that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.

Too bad the Australian Constitution also lacks a republican guarantee.

The final punctuation mark on Finkelstein's plan, the last proclaimed benefit of allowing dissidents to be swallowed whole by the Ministry of Truth, is timeless virtue:

Enhancing the public flow of information and the exchange of views.

"Was is peace," and "we've always been at war with Eastasia." As Brendan O'Neill writes in The Australian:

...we’re witnessing the unravelling of many of the values and virtues of the modern era.

All in a knee-jerk snit over the fact that the left-dominated media does not yet have a complete publishing monopoly. Dissenting voices can still be heard, and Finkelstein finds that very disturbing.


Negative liberty: non-existent in Australia and in peril in America

To an American, what is most striking about the Australian plan is the complete absence of any statement of negative rights, or freedom from restrictions on speech. Our entire concept of free speech is framed in negative terms: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." The Australians have no constitutional protection for speech, but it is still astounding to see how readily the left would overthrow this pillar of Western liberty in exchange for partisan advantage.

The same totalitarian ambitions are at work in America too. They face greater legal obstacles here, but key actors are powerfully placed. Obama's "regulatory czar" Cass Sunstein wants to use the system of "notice and takedown" from copyright law to shut down "conspiracy theories." As an example, he wants to suppress claims that:

the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

If SOPA had passed then all of the necessary machinery would have been in place, ready to expand from copyright infringement to the suppression of conspiracy theories at the drop of a one-line rider on any bill. At that point our freedom to speak our minds would lie in the hands of Sunstein booster Elena Kagan (who brought Sunstein to Harvard, calling him "the preeminent legal scholar of our time"); the racist Sonya Sotomayor (a long-time member of La Raza, or "the race"); and a borderline Court-majority of similar un-worthies.

We dodged a bullet and it looks like Australia will too, given how well the Finkelstein report is being received down under, but dodging bullets is a precarious business. If we don't somehow manage to effect a fundamental retrenchment of liberty it won't be long before we lose it.

Crossposted at WUWT.

The most essential Aussie blog is Andrew Bolt. It's appalling what the left is up to down under and Bolt is on top of it all, like the "media inquiry" that was just released by the Australian government, calling for legal oversight of all published speech, even down to blogs that get one reader a day.

The proposed scheme of regulation (pages 290-300) includes NO limits on the restriction of speech. Page 291 calls for open ended power to regulate speech, and the only stated constraint is that the ten-man ten-woman News Media Council MUST regulate:

While the setting of standards should be left to the News Media Council, they should incorporate certain minimum standards, such as fairness and accuracy.

As for how much the News Media Panel can regulate, no constraints are listed anywhere in the plan. Don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself. Opinion is explicitly subject to regulation, and absolutely no stated freedoms from regulation are mentioned anywhere, unless maybe you're a blogger who gets less than one reader a day, but that too is flexible.

In addition to making whatever rules they want, the panel will also sit in judgment (p. 296):

If not resolved informally, complaints should be dealt with by a complaints panel consisting of one, three or, only in exceptional cases, five members of the News Media Council.

Envisioned remedies (p. 297-8) include forced corrections, forced withdrawals, and forced publication on the offender's website of contrary views.

Elsewhere the government makes perfectly clear which views are to be corrected: global warming skepticism and criticism of the Labor government.

Take that skeptics! We'll force you to take down YOUR views and put our OURS in their place! Eeee-Haw.

Truly Orwellian is the last benefit that the government claims for this system of unlimited regulation (p. 300):

Enhancing the public flow of information and the exchange of views.

Using speech to attack speech IS legitimate

Bolt has already been prosecuted for running afoul of Australia's already crazy speech laws. He had the temerity to point out that many of the benefits set aside for Australian aborigines are going to people with no visible aboriginal ancestry (i.e. the set-asides are going to people who look like Andrew Bolt). ILLEGAL! So it's understandable that he's sensitive about any attack on speech.

Still, when I was vicariously visiting the anti-pode of the Anglosphere a few days ago, I was surprised by Andrew's take on a media controversy. As Bolt relates it , a television chat-show grossly insulted a hero-soldier who had won Australia's Victoria Cross, suggesting he must be stupid and probably couldn't perform sexually. Yet Bolt was disgusted that viewers were complaining to the network and were urging sponsors to stop supporting the show.

Andrew has been attacked for his views in this same way, with critics trying to get him shut down, but I think he's gotten off track here. There is no comparison between official suppression of speech and people using their own speech to attack what they disagree with.

It's easy for Andrew to say that people should limit themselves to changing the channel. He has his own platform. He has more powerful ways to express himself. Most people don't, and expressing their opinion that a particular person is not worthy of being sponsored to an elevated position of public influence is perfectly legitimate, not implying laziness or a "fat bottom" or any other of Bolt's pejoratives.

If the exercise of this form of expression puts sponsors to the acid test as to what public voices they are willing to stand behind, so be it. If that's where the evolution of liberty takes us, then that's where we go. Andrew's moralizing against these "moralizers" does not impress, but I guess even the colossus of Australia has to have a toe of clay.


Not unilateral disarmament, but tit-for-tat

We face the same boycott issue in this country, with the left's phony outrage at Rush Limbaugh for daring to suggest that a woman who goes before the United States Senate demanding that other people buy her a thousand dollars worth of contraceptives a year could be likened to a "slut." Seems pretty mild to me, but the left is good at scaring advertisers and a few of Limbaugh's actually jumped ship.

They have since figured out that the people who demanded they jump ship weren't really customers and that their actual customers are the people who have listened to their ads on Rush Limbaugh's show since the 1980's (duh), so now they want to jump back on-ship, but Rush is having none of it. They betrayed his listeners and to be loyal to these fans there will be no backtracking, which sends the message to other advertisers that they had better figure out where their bread is buttered before knuckling under to left-wing manipulation. Hey, this liberty thing might sort itself out after all!

But just because these attacks might prove survivable by conservatives doesn't mean that conservatives should themselves refuse to boycott. In the name of his young daughters, President Obama himself joined the dog-pile against Rush while studiously ignoring far more misogynistic attacks on women by his own supporters. Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin are regularly called the worst names by the highest profile pro-Obama hacks. If the left is going to set the standard that Rush must be ostracized for calling a 99.999th-percentile contraception-user a slut, then surely top Obama donor and television host Bill Maher should be ostracized for calling the Governor of Alaska a c&#+, right?

Otherwise conservatives are unilaterally disarming, which is just brain dead. If you don't want to use chemical warfare you at least demand that the other side foreswear chemical weapons as well. You don't promise not to use them no matter whether other side uses them or not. You use "tit for tat." If they use chemicals, you use chemicals, until they lose enough battles that they stop using this weapon.

I've joined in twice in recent days. Being a Carbonite customer, I'm dropping them for dropping Rush as soon as I get up to speed with another online backup provider. Plus I nixed HBO, telling them (in response not just to Bill Maher, but also to their new anti-Palin mockumentary):

Goodby HBO. So you have decided you want to be a left-wing boutique? So be it.

Being a victim of chemical warfare himself, Bolt is well aware that the other side IS using it. They need to be punched back, "twice as hard" as our thug-in-chief likes to say, and the most important reason to fight back is precisely because it is the thug-in-chief and his Media Matters co-conspirators who are involved. That turns the left's private boycotting into a semi-official policy, which is bad behavior, and if this attack on conservative speech is actually being orchestrated from the White House, it could even be unconstitutional.

For countering left-wing speech, I would never want to see conservatives make the phony charges of offense that the left does, but come on, the people in the Aussie case are genuinely offended! Bolt's latest indicates that the conservative boycotters are proving to be just as ineffective as the Limbaugh boycotters. Good news, perhaps, but it doesn't stop him from continuing to rip on conservatives who are angered by total disrespect of a war hero. I would rather see Andrew simply use his powerful voice to speak out in favor of the offending television host NOT losing her job, without trying to de-legitimize those who think otherwise.


Bimbos down under: pretty little chat-host channels Andrew Dice Clay

To see how forgivable the offending chat-show segment actually was, I took a look at the video of Yumi Stynes and her "Circle" commenting on Corporal Roberts-Smith. She was trying to be sexy and ended up sounding like Dice (i.e. a female version of "put a beer holder and an ash tray on her back and she'd be perfect"). It was meant to be a sexist joke obviously, but also a sexist compliment, and it came out more clueless than nasty, so no big deal. Her male co-panelist, on the other hand, should never appear on television again. The comment I left at Andrew's place is below:

Okay, I went and looked at the video. She sees how well built this soldier is and the first thought that pops into yummy little Yumi's vacuous head is "BIMBO!" Set aside that a man who surmised that a woman must be stupid just because she has a good figure probably WOULD be fired. What the comment shows about Yumi is that she must not have ever reflected with any appreciation on the soldiers who defend her liberty or on what they actually do.

Pretty much ALL frontline troops work themselves into the best shape they can as a matter survival and battle effectiveness, but she looks at this guy and is absolutely clueless about why he looks the way he does. That's what is so telling about her bimbo joke. If she had an iota of patriotism she would see his strength-of-mind carved right into his physique. When she sees the opposite, the irony is how her comment applies so perfectly to herself. SHE'S the bimbo.

Here's this titty, pretty, giggly, airhead who is obviously there precisely for the flirty appeal of those qualities. She was palpably breathless as she called Roberts-Smith a bimbo, so she obviously DID mean it as a compliment. She probably thought he would take it that way too. After all, he's just a bimbo, right, just like her? What more could he want than to be complimented on his body? And he probably didn't mind the compliment, but the catty jealousy displayed by the elderly man, suggesting that the male bimbo probably can't get it up, truly is disgusting. That nasty old fool should be out of public life.

Elderly man as catty little bitch? Are you kidding?

Cross-posted at WUWT

"Expert review" of the First Order Draft of AR5 closed on the 10th. Here is the first paragraph of my submitted critique:

My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call "the omitted variable problem" (or when it is intentional, "omitted variable fraud"). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included. This problem is manifest at the very highest level of AR5, and is built into each step of its analysis.

Like everyone else who participated in this review, I agreed not to cite, quote or distribute the draft. The IPCC also made a further request, which reviewers were not required to agree to, that we "not discuss the contents of the FOD in public fora such as blogs."

Given what I found—systematic fraud—it would not be moral to honor this un-agreed to request, and because my comments are about what is omitted, the fraud is easy enough to expose without quoting the draft. My entire review (4700 words) only contains a half dozen quotes, which can easily be replaced here with descriptions of the quoted material. Cited section numbers are also easy to replace with descriptions of the subjects addressed, so here is the rest of my minimally altered review:

Read more »

When German ex-climate-alarmist Fritz Vahrenholt came out last week as a climate skeptic, he related his moment of epiphany, when he was firsthand witness to the alarmists' sheer disregard for error:

Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

For a comedy of errors, witness American Physical Society president Robert Byer's response to the 16 climate skeptics who recently criticized his organization's statement on climate change in the Wall Street Journal. It should serve as a Vahrenholtian moment for APS members. Here is Byer's complaint:

The APS statement is unequivocal. It notes that "global warming is occurring." ... The statement does not declare, as the authors of the op-ed suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible.

See how up-to-speed the APS is? Byers is aware that climate skeptics don't deny global warming—that they only question whether this warming is attributable to human action—and so he assumes that the critics must have accused the APS of claiming that human attribution is incontrovertible. But if he had actually read the skeptic article that he presumes to correct, he would know otherwise. They explicitly questioned the statement that "global warming is occurring." How did Byers miss this sentence:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.

It may be incontrovertible that the planet WAS warming, past tense. But the claim that the planet is incontrovertibly STILL warming is nothing short of bizarre.

It's not just little news items like: "Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years." It's the very idea of making an unequivocal statement about the content of incoming data, about the direction that our ever-changing climate is currently heading. Byers really doesn't see the problem?

Byers attacks the APS statement itself

Of course the sixteen critics also took the APS to task for its presumption that warming is primarily caused by humans, but they did this entirely with quotes. When Byers attacks the claim that APS attributes warming to human activity, he is blissfully unaware that he is attacking the APS statement itself.

Here is the full skeptic paragraph on the APS:

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

Giaever is directly quoting the APS statement. The quote is not out of context. There are no omitted ellipses. It is APS itself that jumps directly from the claim of incontrovertible warming to the claim that greenhouse gases must be reduced, implicitly attributing the proclaimed warming to human GHG production. Nobody can blame Byers for taking this quote to imply that APS also considers human attribution to be incontrovertible, but it is quite amazing that he somehow fails to realize that it is in fact a quote.

Byers is all het-up about this scurrilous aspersion. How dare the skeptics accuse the APS of such perfidy! It is a ludicrous concatenation of error, all in a mere 200 word response to a 1200 word op-ed.

Who can write 200 words for a national newspaper without bothering to check the few facts addressed? Does Byers even know what the APS statement says? He can't have bothered to read the WSJ op-ed. And he is clearly unaware that there is some leeetle bit of doubt about whether the planet is in fact still warming.

Witness your naked president, APS members. He actually thinks he is wearing clothes. Maybe you could just shuffle him out the door, and that egregious APS statement with him.

(Crossposted at WUWT)

At last Thursday's National Prayer Breakfast, Obama claimed that his policies are motivated by "God's command to 'love thy neighbor as thyself'." He then conflated this law of love with the golden rule, and made a blatantly dishonest claim about Islam:

I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs — from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of Plato

In fact, Islam repeatedly and explicitly rejects the law of love, teaching instead a law of hate.

When Jesus was asked "who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29), he answered (via the parable of the good Samaritan) that everyone is everyone's neighbor. Islam, in contrast, instructs Muslims to be good only to other Muslims. Koran, verse 48.29:

Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and those with him are firm of heart against the unbelievers, compassionate among themselves.

Verse 3.28 says that Muslims can only pretend to befriend infidels:

Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah: except by way of precaution, that ye may Guard yourselves from them.

Of course we are very familiar with this in practice, as one revealed terror-plotter after another is described by surprised neighbors and co-workers as the nicest guy.

Read more

"That" Golden Rule vs. "The" Golden Rule

I guess Obama can call the law of love "that Golden Rule" if he wants, but there actually is a corollary of the law love (implied by the law of love but not implying it) that is called THE Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12). There is a hadith in Islam (a reported saying of Muhammad) that is similar in form to the Golden Rule, but opposite in substance. It only calls for goodwill towards other Muslims:

None of you will have faith till he wishes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.

Bukhari 1.2.13, translated by M. Muhsin Khan.

Preceding hadiths back up Kahn’s non-universalist translation of the Muslim version of the Golden Rule. Bukhari 1.2.10 reads:

The Prophet said, "A Muslim is the one who avoids harming Muslims with his tongue and hands…”

In Islam the principle of reciprocity is extended only between Muslims, which makes it a principle, not of reciprocity at all, but of bigotry and prejudice. Islam is the only religion of any significance that does not embrace a universal principle of reciprocity.

Islam rejects even the idea of cooperation. Koran, verse 9.28:

O ye who believe! Truly the Pagans are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach the Sacred Mosque. And if ye fear poverty, soon will Allah enrich you, if He wills, out of His bounty, for Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.

i.e. Go broke rather than have dealings with infidels.


Not loving: the Koran's endless instructions to subjugate and kill infidels

Verse 9.29:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

Another murderous verse (Koran 9.5) is the infamous “verse of the sword,” so central to traditional Islamic doctrine:

Slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush.

Etcetera ad nauseum.

Well meaning left-wing multiculturalists convince themselves that these verses are no worse, and no more relevant, than God's Old Testament instructions to the Jews to annihilate one people after another on their mission to conquer the promised land, but those were not universal instructions to conquer everybody. They are framed as specific permissions from God to attack a specific people at a specific place and time. In accordance with this specificity, these Bible verses have rarely if ever been used as a justification for aggressive conquest.

Not all Christians have always heeded the law of love in its properly universal Christian form, but that was no fault of the Bible, while to Christianity's great credit its various churches have all long since dedicated themselves to understanding and following the law of love as well as flawed human beings are able, and Judaism has done the same.

Decades before Jesus declared that the commandments to love God and to Love your neighbor are all the law and the prophets, Rabbi Hillel had said the same about the golden rule:

"What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary."

Orthodox Islam, in contrast, is aggressively carrying its law of hatred and violent aggression to every corner of the globe.


Our taqiyyist president

Obama quite obviously "don't know much about history," and "don't know much about a science book," but he does know the Koran. He studied it for years as a child and even took classes in "menjaji," or Koran recitation in Arabic, which is the gold standard of fundamentalist Islamic education.

Hatred of the infidel is not hidden in Islam. It is the essence of it. No one can study Islam at all without comprehending this, and Obama surely does comprehend it. His claim that Islam embraces the law of love can only be a strategic lie, what in Islam is called taqiyya, and the fact that he seems to be engaging in taqiyya is pretty good evidence that Barack Hussein Obama actually is Muslim and is using the Oval Office to promote Islamic supremacism.

Obama's claim that he is Christian, not Muslim, is not probative because Islam's very first instruction to converts is that they should lie about their religion. Tabari 8.23 (one of the hadiths, or reported sayings of Muhammad):

en Nu'aym came to the Prophet. 'I've become a Muslim, but my tribe does not know of my Islam; so command me whatever you will.' Muhammad said, 'Make them abandon each other if you can so that they will leave us; for war is deception.'

If Obama is Muslim, he would lie about it. Muslims who live amongst Christians are supposed to pretend that they are Christian, if by doing so they can advance the cause of Islamic conquest.

In one set of hadiths, Muhammad asks who will murder a man whose poetry Muhammad finds offensive. He then grants a volunteer (Muhammad bin Maslama) permission to lie to the victim in order to get close enough to do the deed, and the volunteer proceeds to pretend that he has turned against Muhammad (i.e. that he is no longer a Muslim). This is regarded by orthodox Islam as model behavior.

In sum, Obama is certainly lying about Islam, and hence is almost certainly an orthodox Muslim who embraces the Islamic law of hate. So what else is new? Honestly, we knew this before the 2008 election.


How to FORCE Islamic reform

Well here's something new, for those who are interested: Part III of this commentary on Obama's Prayer Breakfast [Will add link when I get it posted.] continues with a demonstration that if we take the Koran seriously, there is no way that Muslims can ever escape the Ten Commandments, making the orthodox Islam of today, with its relentless murder lust, a definite non-contender for the title of "true Islam."

I attach this discussion as a Part III here because presupposes the above documentation of the hateful and murderous character of orthodox Islam. In other words, you've already read the introduction. The conflict between this murder-cult Islam and the Ten Commandments provides an opportunity for the West to FORCE Islamic reform.

They aren't going to reform themselves. They use blasphemy laws to intimidate or kill anyone in their jurisdictions who criticizes orthodox Islam in any way, but now they are challenging societies that are built on liberty and free speech, and WE can hold them to the Ten Commandments. Their only choices will be comprehensive reform (matching the comprehensiveness of their violations of the Ten Commandments) or they can deny that they need to abide by the Commandments, and reveal themselves as marching their followers into Hell. Very doable, if we will just do it.

(Part I points out the sheer destructiveness of the policies that Obama claims to be required by love: "You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet".)

Our President at yesterday's National Prayer Breakfast:

When I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, I do it because ... I believe in God’s command to 'love thy neighbor as thyself.'

Forcing insurance companies to cover people who are already sick (a key Obamacare provision) is like forcing automobile insurers to cover accidents that applicants have already been involved in. It is not insurance at all. It is confiscation, paid for by those who are actually trying to buy insurance instead of get a handout.

In Obama's mind, "love" commands this complete destruction of the very concept of an insurance market. Sounds more like the Stalinist dictum that "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Ditto for Obama's other example of his supposed love:

... making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us.

What "advantage" have banks been taking? Why they have very cruelly been stuffing the pockets of bad credit risks with far more money then these people could ever pay back. This has been so advantageous for the banks that we had to bail half of them out with tax dollars. Nevertheless, Title XIV of the Frank-Dodd Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act does indeed "impose obligations on mortgage originators to only lend to borrowers who are likely to repay their loans."

Why would the government have to order banks not to throw money away on bad credit risks? Because for years the government has been enforcing anti-discrimination laws that require banks to lend to bad credit risks. That's where the mortgage meltdown came from. Using the Community Reinvestment ACT for leverage, the Alinskyite "community organizer" group ACORN succeeded in forcing banks to lower their credit standards on the grounds that existing standards (standards that only lend to borrowers who are likely to repay their loans) had a disparate impact on blacks.

(Read the whole thing. In addition to forcing banks to make bad loans, ACORN also succeeded in forcing the quasi-government mortgate companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase these loans and implicitly guarantee them with taxpayer dollars, which is what turned the A-bomb into an H-bomb.)

Obama was intimately involved in all of this. He worked for ACORN as a lawyer and participated in a 1994 lawsuit against Citibank for having too discriminatory (too strict) a credit standard. The woman who pioneered ACORN's pressure tactics against the banks, Madeleine Talbot, also brought Obama in to teach Alinsky tactics to ACORN personnel. You may have seen the picture of Obama teaching Saul Alinsky's "power analysis" at the University of Chicago Law School:



Obama trained ACORN leaders and foot-soldiers in these commie pressure tactics for years. Here is Obama meeting with the ACORN in 2004:




Oops, I did it again

So Obama screwed everything up when, as "the senator from ACORN," he helped force banks to loan to bad credit risks, and now he thinks the answer is to force them not to lend to bad risks. But guess what? Title X of Frank-Dodd creates and entire new bureaucracy dedicated specifically to enforcing the very anti-discrimination laws that Title XIV of Frank-Dodd is trying to counteract!

Title X is Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to enforce The Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, and a mish-mash of other re-distributionist and anti-discriminatory lending laws. (When Obama helped sue Citibank, it was under the ECOA law.)

Each of these moves is in itself destructive. If banks are left alone they won't make bad loans and they won't leave profitable loans un-provided on account of anyone's race. Some individual bank might pass up profitable loans on account of race, but they would just be leaving money on the table for some non-racist bank to come in and pick up, which means some non-racist bank will come in and pick it up.

Remember what it took to stop such equal economic opportunity in the old south: a vast network of Jim Crow laws, working to outlaw the thousands of ways that free economic activity kept treating blacks as equals. Markets are an anti-discriminatory force. To maximize anti-discriminatory effect they should run free. There is no possible benefit to roping them down with anti-discrimination law, but there is vast potential to do any amount of harm, as the mortgage meltdown demonstrates.

Marvel at the sheer manic insanity, ordering one contradictory mandate after another when every single one of them is in itself destructive. We've got Moe Howard in the Oval Office.



You know Moe's gonna get mad, and Curly (should be Elizabeth Warren) is not backing down so: Egg fight!!!!!!! It's a Three Stooges breakfast party, with our lives hurtling like cream pies through the air. Smash everything! Leave no table unturned! Feel the Obama love.


Part II: "You lie!" (Obama claims that Islam teaches the law of love.)

As Congress considers vastly expanding the power of copyright holders to shut down fair use of their intellectual property, this is a good time to remember the other activities that Obama's "regulatory czar" Cass Sunstein wants to shut down using the tools of copyright protection. For a couple of years now, Sunstein has been advocating that the "notice and take down" model from copyright law should be used against rumors and conspiracy theories, "to achieve the optimal chilling effect."

What kinds of conspiracy theories does Sunstein want to suppress by law? Here's one:

... that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud. [From page 4 of Sunstein's 2008 "Conspiracy Theories" paper.]

Read more...

Freedom of speech requires scope for error

At present, limits on speech are governed by libel law. For statements about public figures, libel requires not just that an accusation must be false, but that it must have been:

... made with 'actual malice'—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard to whether it was false or not. [New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964]

The purpose of the "actual malice" standard is to leave wide latitude for errant statements, which free public debate obviously requires. Sunstein thinks that room-for error stuff is given too much weight. He'd like it to see errant statements expunged. From Sunstein's 2009 book On Rumors (page 78):

On the Internet in particular, people might have a right to ‘notice and take down.' [T]hose who run websites would be obliged to take down falsehoods upon notice.

Further, "propagators" would face a "liability to establish what is actually true" (ibid).

Suppose you are a simple public-spirited blogger, trying to expose how Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, and other Team members conspire to suppress the research and destroy the careers of those who challenge their consensus views. If Sunstein gets his way, Team members will only have to issue you a takedown notice, and if you want your post to stay up, you'll have to go to court and win a judgment that your version of events is correct.

Today that should be doable, at great expense. But before the first and second batches of climategate emails were released there were only tales of retaliation, with one person's word against another's. Thus at the most critical juncture, when documentary proofs of The Team's vendettas were not yet public, even a person who was willing to run Sunstein's legal gauntlet might well have been held by a judge to be in error.


Escalation

The path from Sunstein's 2008 "Conspiracy Theories" article to his 2009 On Rumors book is straightforward. According to Sunstein's 2008 definition, a conspiracy theory is very close to a potentially libelous rumor:

... a conspiracy theory can generally be counted as such if it is an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role. [Abstract]

At this time, Sunstein's "main policy idea" was that:

government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories....

... government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. ["Conspiracy Theories," pages 14-15]

Government funding of trolls? Sounds like a bad joke, but Sunstein quickly upped the ante. In On Rumors he followed the conspiracy theory as slanderous rumor angle as a way to justify adopting the "notice and take down" artillery from copyright law. So Sunstein already has a history of escalation in his legal crusade against ideas he does not like. If SOPA and PIPA are enacted and the machinery of copyright protection becomes vastly more censorious, its pretty much a certainty that Sunstein will want to use these more powerful tools against rumors and conspiracy theories as well.


Sunstein's target has always been the very core of the First Amendment: the most protected political speech

In On Rumors, the rumor that Sunstein seems most intent on suppressing is the accusation, leveled during the 2008 election campaign, that Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists." ("Look Inside" page 3.) Sunstein fails to note that the "palling around with terrorists" language was introduced by the opposing vice presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin (who was implicating Obama's relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers). Instead Sunstein focuses his ire on "right wing websites" that make "hateful remarks about the alleged relationship between Barack Obama and the former radical Bill Ayers," singling out Sean Hannity for making hay out of Obama's "alleged associations" (pages 13-14).

What could possibly be more important than whether a candidate for president does indeed "pal around with terrorists"? Of all the subjects to declare off limits, this one is right up there with whether the anti-CO2 alarmists who are trying to unplug the modern world are telling the truth. And Sunstein's own bias on the matter could hardly be more blatant. Bill Ayers is a "former" radical? Bill "I don’t regret setting bombs" Ayers? Bill "we didn't do enough" Ayers?

For the facts of the Obama-Ayers relationship, Sunstein apparently accepts Obama's campaign dismissal of Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." In fact their relationship was long and deep. Obama's political career was launched via a fundraiser in Bill Ayers' living room; Obama was appointed the first chairman of the Ayers-founded Annenberg Challenge, almost certainly at Ayers' request; Ayers and Obama served together on the board of the Woods Foundation, distributing money to radical left-wing causes; and it has now been reported by full-access White House biographer Christopher Andersen (and confirmed by Bill Ayers) that Ayers actually ghost wrote Obama's first book Dreams from My Father.

Whenever free speech is attacked, the real purpose is to cover up the truth. Not that Sunstein himself knows the truth about anything. He just knows what he wants to suppress, which is exactly why government must never have this power.


Soulmates (cue music)


You, on the other hand, are the enemy

In climate science, there is no avoiding "reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role." The Team has always been sloppy about concealing its machinations, but that doesn't stop Sunstein from using climate skepticism as an exemplar of pernicious conspiracy theorizing, and his goal is perfectly obvious: he wants the state to take aggressive action that will make it easier for our powerful government funded scientists to conceal their machinations.

Cass Sunstein may be the most illiberal man ever to present himself as a liberal. He also holds the most powerful regulatory position in existence, overseeing every federal regulation. For a sample of his handiwork, realize that he oversaw the EPA's recently issued transport and MACT rules, which will shut down 8% of current U.S. electricity generation.

Maybe you don't think it's a good idea to unplug critical energy infrastructure just to achieve marginal further reductions in micro-particulates that have already fallen to well below half of their 1980 levels:



Sorry but there is no place in Sunstein's EPA for such doubts and, as far as he is concerned, no place for them in the realm of public debate either. The environmental bureaucracy has everyone's best interest at heart. To question that is the very definition of conspiracy mongering.

Next people will be claiming that Obama actually intends for energy prices to "necessarily skyrocket." Such vile rumors need to be silenced, and this can easily be done. Once the SOPA/PIPA machinery is in place, it will only take one line in some future omnibus bill to extend it from copyright to criticism.

Crossposted at WUWT.


Addendum: Sunstein's version of constitutional interpretation

How to overthrow the clear language of the Constitution in two easy steps. Sunstein, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, claims to know what end the authors of our Constitution were pursuing when they established freedom of speech as their means. From there he simply claims to have a better means to that end, as if his opinion of what is the better means could in any way alter the means that is framed in the Constitution:

Sunstein quoted Felix Frankfurter as saying, “Freedom of the press is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of achieving a free society.” After offering some examples in which uninhibited press freedom leads to the destruction of other freedoms, he proposed a reconsideration of the idea of the ‘chilling effect’”:

“Many First Amendment questions in this domain are resolved by reference to the ‘chilling effect’ concern. Indeed, it has become quite clear that references to the ‘chilling effect’ have had a very serious ‘chilling effect’ on engagement with the constitutional question …The question shouldn’t be whether there’s a chilling effect and how to avoid it, but how to achieve the optimal chilling effect.”

Sunstein wants to chill those views (theories even) that the courts judge to be wrong. Instead of letting the contest of information and argument reveal where truth lies, Sunstein wants to let these government overseers decide. But the Constitution establishes the exact opposite answer to the problems that speech can create. The founders didn't want government deciding what is true and what is false. They knew that free exchange advantages truth, while censorship is the handmaiden of falsehood, so they laid down that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech."

Sunstein thinks by divining the objective of this constitutional requirement, and claiming to have a better way to achieve it, he is thereby justified in replacing that constitutional requirement with its opposite: Congress shall make laws abridging the freedom of speech. His On Rumors book is short on details of how his system would work, but it is clear from the quoted remarks that he does not consider Supreme Court precedent to be any kind of fixed barrier. He thinks the Constitution should be interpreted differently, in a way that gives people like him a free hand to establish what they think are better means than those actually written in the Constitution.