Error Theory

Regulatory Czar wants to use copyright protection mechanisms to shut down rumors and conspiracy theories

2012-01-19T14:41:00.001-08:00

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.

Interesting paper by Hans Jelbring: The Greenhouse Effect as a function of atmospheric Mass

2012-01-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

Does gravity induced atmospheric pressure warm the atmosphere going down? On the one hand, this would seem to be the mechanism behind the adiabatic lapse rate (the temperature change of a parcel of air as it rises through the atmosphere in the absence of any heat exchange with surrounding air parcels):

As air descends through the troposphere it experiences increasing atmospheric pressure. This causes the parcel volume to decrease in size, squeezing the air molecules closer together. In this case, work is being done on the parcel. As the volume shrinks, air molecules bounce off one another more often ricocheting with greater speed. The increase in molecular movement causes an increase in the temperature of the parcel. This process is referred to as adiabatic warming.

[This website does not relate the temperature gain to the loss of potential energy from descending the gravity well, but I think they should be equal.]

On the other hand, Willis Eschenbach over at Watts Up With That has offered a proof that gravitational warming of the atmosphere would violate conservation of energy:

I hold it can be proven that there is no possible mechanism involving gravity and the atmosphere that can raise the temperature of a planet with a transparent GHG-free atmosphere above the theoretical S-B temperature.

"The theoretical S-B temperature" is the theoretical equilibrium temperature of the planet's surface in the absence of an atmosphere. Thus Willis is claiming that an atmosphere can only cause warming through the mechanism of heat trapping green house gases (GHGs), and his argument seems airtight. (Check it out here.)

I have a few naive comments to offer, but my immediate purpose is just to make a 2003 paper on the pressure-warming side of the debate more available. Tallbloke has the whole thing posted but Willis, feeling that Tallbloke has engaged in censorship of contrary views, just censored MY link to Tallbloke's posting of Hans Jelbring's 2003 paper. (Hellooo Froma Harrop!)

If Han's gives me permission, I'll post his full paper. (Done. Thank's Hans.) Here is his abstract:

The Greenhouse Effect as a function of atmospheric mass
JELBRING Hans
Abstract

The main reason for claiming a scientific basis for Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming (AGW) is related to the use of radiative energy flux models as a major tool for describing vertical energy fluxes within the atmosphere. Such models prescribe that the temperature difference between a planetary surface and the planetary average black body radiation temperature (commonly called the Greenhouse Effect, GE) is caused almost exclusively by the so called greenhouse gases. Here, using a different approach, it is shown that GE can be explained as mainly being a consequence of known physical laws describing the behaviour of ideal gases in a gravity field. A simplified model of Earth, along with a formal proof concerning the model atmosphere and evidence from real planetary atmospheres will help in reaching conclusions. The distinguishing premise is that the bulk part of a planetary GE depends on its atmospheric surface mass density. Thus the GE can be exactly calculated for an ideal planetary model atmosphere. In a real atmosphere some important restrictions have to be met if the gravity induced GE is to be well developed. It will always be partially developed on atmosphere bearing planets. A noteworthy implication is that the calculated values of AGW, accepted by many contemporary climate scientists, are thus irrelevant and probably quite insignificant (not detectable) in relation to natural processes causing climate change.

Journal Title
Energy & environment ISSN 0958-305X
2003, vol. 14, no2-3, pp. 351-356

UPDATE: My earlier comment exchange with Hans Jelbring

The lapse rate is a well established real phenomenon, but I've always had a little trouble squaring it with my own experience with altitude and temperature. Riding up Windy Hill near sunset, it always gets much colder towards the bottom when I'm going back down, not warmer. This "temperature inversion" (where the temperature gradient is opposite of the lapse rate) is a ground effect. Local topology creates local cold spots from which cold air flows into local cold air sinks.

I've thought a little about these things while mountain biking, but I never sat down before and tried to figure out how the lapse rate and local ground effects combine to explain my own experience. That is, until about a week ago, when I first saw Han's Jelbring's 2003 paper at Tallbloke's. Reading his paper prompted me to try to figure out the Windy Hill to Portola Valley temperature dynamics, and I left my rumination on the subject as a comment on Tallbloke's Jelbring post.

Han's very nicely left me a reply that filled in a key point. I surmised that the sun dropping behind the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains was creating create a local cold spot on the east slope of the mountains. At the same time, the sun would still be heating the western slope on the east side of Portola Valley, and since the difference in afternoon sun exposure can be a couple of hours, it seemed that a pretty big east-west temperature differential could develop, creating a U-shaped flow of cold air streaming down the shaded slope towards the valley floor, pushing warm air up on the still lit side of the valley.

This would explain why the warmest location in such an area will be well up from the valley floor, but in his reply Hans added another crucial element to this story, explaining why these warmest locations can be surprisingly warm: it is because when the cold air flows down the shaded mountainsides, it doesn't just push air up on the other side of the valley, but it also pulls air down from up above the shaded hillside, and as this air is pulled down, its potential energy is converted into heat energy at the adiabatic lapse rate.

Of course the question arises: shouldn't this air have been colder by the adiabatic lapse rate before it got pulled down? Why would this air from above be warmer than what it displaces? But there could well be reasons for that, maybe convection of air from local hot spots during the day tends to accumulate a certain distance above the hilltops. In any case, there is an empirically documented phenomenon of an especially warm layer that can often be found a few hundred meters above a valley floor.

Not this leads me now to a further speculation: that the warm elevation on the western side of a valley (the east facing slope) might turn out to be substantially warmer than the warm elevation on the east side of the valley, or at the least there could tend to be a systematic difference between the temperature on the two side, because the source of the evening warm-belt air on the two sides will tend to be very different. On the west side of the valley, it will be air that is pulled down from above, replacing the down-slope cold air that is sliding to the valley floor. On the east side of the valley, it would be air from below, pushed up by the cold air coming in from the west side of the valley. As this air gets pushed up from the valley floor it will cool at the adiabatic lapse rate, and if it had already lost its hot-spot air to convection, it might end up on the cool side.

Or maybe the fact that the east side is in sunlight longer offsets, or more than offsets, any such effect, leaving the east-side warm-belt as warm as, or warmer than, the west-side warm-belt. Just the fact that there is a glaring asymmetry in the sources of these warm-belts makes it an interesting empirical question whether there tends to be any systematic temperature differential between east and west side warm-belts.

If there is, it might even be important to know. Current survival advice is for people caught out at night to get themselves well up off of a valley floor should it it be easy enough to do so. If it is actually more advantageous to be up on one side of a valley than the other, serious outdoorsmen might want to know that too.

In any case it could be an interesting exercise for amateur naturalists, if they live in an area where some data points could be collected.

UPDATE II: Jelbring vs. Eschenbach

I also collected some thoughts on Eschenbach's "proof" that gravity induced atmospheric pressure cannot be a source of surface warming. In short, I think he is right, and that the explanation for how this can be squared with the fact of the adiabatic lapse rate is pretty simple: the lapse rate implies a temperature gradient, but it does not by itself imply anything about the level at which this gradient is set. It can shift up or down, and its position is determined by the surface temperature. To think that atmospheric pressure is creating the surface temperature is backwards. It is surface temperature that creates atmospheric pressure by causing the atmosphere to evaporate up from the oceans, at least in the special case world under consideration.

Anyone who wants to bother with this might want to read Willis' post first. Here is my comment. Willis asked for an account of Jelbring's theory that can be summarized in an elevator conversation. I offered instead:

A maintenance elevator story FOR Willis' QED

He already provided a simple enough argument (an express elevator story) but the following working-through of the history of a liquid planet dropped into a uniformly irradiated environment might help flesh it out a bit:

Assume the liquid is just like water, except that it does not freeze, and its gaseous form is not a GHG. Instead of water, call it fauxter. Assume that the incoming radiation levels are such that the SB equilibrium temperature of the planet Fauxter is below the boiling point of fauxter, and that when it pops into existence, Fauxter is entirely liquid and is colder than the SB equilibrium temperature.

When incoming radiation starts to strike Fauxter's ocean, the ocean will begin to warm and some of the surface fauxter molecules will transition to vapor. Evaporation will cool the oceans as energy gets pumped into the atmosphere, but the overall effect will be warming. Both the oceans and the atmosphere will gain heat content, and the more the planet warms, the more readily the surface fauxter will transition to fauxter vapor, building the atmosphere.

In this initial phase, incoming radiation exceeds outgoing radiation. The difference is stored both in the rising heat content of the ocean and the atmosphere, and in the increased potential energy of the atmosphere as it gets lifted up through the planet's gravity well.

Conduction should tend to bring the surface temperature of the ocean together with the near-surface atmospheric temperature. If they are brought fully together then the temperature above would lapse from the ocean surface temperature according to ideal gas law, decreasing with decreasing atmospheric pressure as altitude increases.

This seems to me to be the crux of the issue. The heat content of the atmosphere is all determined by the ocean surface, both through the warming of fauxter into fauxter vapor, and by heat conduction between ocean and atmosphere. If we assume no convection, then the temperature profile from the surface on up just follows the lapse rate, and it is the surface that determines the LEVEL of this profile. The temperature profile can be stepped up or stepped down but the level of the profile is driven from the bottom of the atmosphere, not the top.

This is why atmospheric pressure cannot warm the surface. The causality goes the other way, at least in this GHG-less-atmosphere example. It is surface heat that lifts the atmosphere in the first place and is responsible for the level of the temperature profile going up. That result of the surface temperature cannot in turn be the cause of the surface temperature. The push only goes one way. Atmospheric mass does determine the lapse rate, but not the level of the temperature profile.

Once the ocean surface temperature reaches the SB equilibrium temperature, the system does not gain or lose energy. Solar radiation will still pry fauxter vapor from the ocean, but an equal amount of fauxter should be phase transitioning back to liquid.

The upshot is that atmospheric pressure will not drive surface temperatures above the SB equilibrium surface temperature because the causality goes the other way. It is surface temperature, not atmospheric pressure, that determines the level of the atmospheric temperature profile.

You have now arrived at the Fawlty Towers penthouse. How's the view?

Secure the border first: to be "comprehensive," immigration reform must be a 2-step process

2011-11-23T09:55:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich risked his standing with conservatives last night by calling for a "comprehensive approach" to immigration reform. "Comprehensive immigration reform" is a poisonous a term to conservatives because of the reckless dishonesty with which it has been applied to a long series of bills that have been anything BUT comprehensive. In particular, these bills have promised to both secure the border and establish a path to citizenship for those illegals who are already here (amnesty), while only actually providing amnesty, which together with our still unsecured borders dramatically increases illegal immigration. It's like hosing gasoline on a burning house and calling it "a comprehensive approach to firefighting." Comprehensively dishonest and comprehensively disastrous perhaps.

It took a huge fight to turn back the last such attempt (the McCain-Kennedy Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007). Newt had been asked about his vote for the first such phony-comprehensive bill and stepped in it by making a renewed appeal to comprehensiveness:

I did vote for the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. Ronald Reagan, in his diary, says he signed it -- and we were supposed to have 300,000 people get amnesty. There were 3 million. But he signed it because we were going to get two things in return. We were going to get control of the border and we were going to get a guest worker program with employer enforcement.

We got neither. So I think you've got to deal with this as a comprehensive approach that starts with controlling the border, as the governor said.

A comprehensive approach vs. a comprehensive bill

It is a tricky rhetorical question: how to call for a genuinely comprehensive approach to immigration reform when the term "comprehensive immigration reform" has been systematically used in the most dishonest fashion as cover for what are actually pro-illegal-immigration policies? But there is a simple answer. Truly comprehensive immigration reform MUST be a two-step process. The border must be secured FIRST. Until that is accomplished, even to talk of amnesty, never mind legislate about it, only increases illegal immigration.

In other words, a "comprehensive immigration" BILL is the diametric opposite of a comprehensive immigration APPROACH. Anyone who talks about a comprehensive immigration reform bill (McCain) is a anti-conservative fraud who should be routed out of the party.

Newt's control-the-border-first statement shows he understands the problem, but does he understand the solution? Does he understand that a comprehensive approach to immigration requires, not just that legislation to control the border comes first, but that actual achieved control of the border has to come first, before any other steps can be taken?

It is not a good sign that Gingrich spent most of his "comprehensive" immigration reform comment talking about the need to provide a path to citizenship for long-term illegals. A lot of us agree with him that such a path should be enacted AFTER the borders are secure. But if Newt would try to achieve it through the same bill that initiates border control it's a total fail, it's hosing the burning house with gasoline. If Newt wants to keep from terrifying his would-be supporters, he needs to be specific that by comprehensive reform he does not mean a comprehensive bill, but a comprehensive approach that enacts and achieves border security before any amnesty legislation is considered.

UPDATE: Details of Gingrich plan make him sound like another McCain, or worse (if that is possible)

See Ace's critique here. A tidbit:

Gingrich proposes, goofilly, that we'll have "Community Boards" to decide on whether or not illegal immigrants within specific communities will be granted amnesty or deported.

For starters, it is very odd to say that ordinary citizens will essentially be elevated to the position of judge -- without any sort of standards binding their decisions -- to essentially grant illegal immigrants an immunity from the operation of the law, or to order them deported.

Could he really support such an arbitrary and STUPID process?

...illegal immigrants would just game the system by moving to the blue areas where they know the Commmunity Boards would give them amnesty.

What is worrisome about Newt is that he is as confident in his stupidest ideas as he is in the things he actually understands and gets right. How is that possible? But he does get a lot right.

The other week I posted a comment on why I support Newt's candidacy at this point, regardless of his (sometimes glaring) imperfections. This in response to an astute analysis of Newt's pretend walk-back of his global-warming love-in with Nancy Pelosi (where he actually only said that his advisors had convinced him that he should distance himself from the issue, regardless of his beliefs):

Seems like you've hit on the most likely interpretation. Well, Newt has a lot of flaws, which can pretty much all be attributed to his being bullheaded on things he is wrong about. He gets an opinion in his head and is absolutely uninterested in hearing any contrary reason and evidence. BUT, we don't need the president to be right about everything, or even reasonable about everything.

If Republicans can get control of Congress, then Congress can keep Newt's failings in check. As long as he is competent on enough important things, and will spend the bulk of his energy on them, he'll make a good president, and Newt has the one strength that is missing from pretty much all other Republican pols: he knows that our deepest problem, what has allowed all of our problems to proceed, is our lying Democrat controlled media, who spin absolutely everything for maximum partisan advantage.

Newt is willing to fight that enemy and he has the skills to do it effectively. Bush was a great war president but decided not to fight the Democrat media, effectively handing the presidency to the Democrats. With EVERYTHING on the line, he decided not to campaign AT ALL in the 08 election. Insane. Newt is a different animal entirely, and will fight that most important battle.

He doesn't need to get everything else right. I would rather have Bolton or Palin but, inexplicably to me, both bowed out early. Of the folks still in, Gingrich has the best combination of competence and conservatism. So we'll have to fight him on a few things. What else is new?

Friday not-so-funny: Europeans can now be imprisoned (2 yrs!) for claiming that water protects against dehydration

2011-11-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

"It took the 21 scientists on the panel three years of analysis into the link between water and dehydration to come to their extraordinary conclusion," reports the UK Express. To be precise, the European Union has barred vendors from claiming that "regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration." Apparently there are some skeptics:

Perhaps a dictionary would have helped. Dehydration, from "hydor," the Greek word for water, means to lose water, or suffer water deprivation.

"The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are, highly paid, highly pensioned officials trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true," says Conservative MEP Roger Helmer.

Wait a minute. How does an anti-science flat-earther like Helmer rate mainstream ink? Leave science to the scientists!

UPDATE: EFSA and/or EFBW issue a blatantly fraudulent "clarification," lying about the actual basis of EFSA's ruling

Anthony Watts links to what seems to be a clarification by EFSA, scolding the press for what it claims are misrepresentations of its ruling. (I say that the clarification seems to be be from EFSA because that is how it is written, but instead of being posted on the EFSA website, it is posted on the website of one of the organizations that EFSA regulates (the European Federation for Bottled Water), with no indication of authorship. It's hard to believe that the regulated body would have posted such a clarification without guidance from EFSA, so it is most likely that this IS an EFSA clarification, but as yet this is uncertain. Given the blatant dishonesty of the statement, authorship really should be established.)

The "clarification" claims that the EFSA ruling rejected the proposed health claim on the grounds that dehydration is not recognized as a disease (leaving the implication that since no actual health claim was made, there would be no prohibition on making it):

Among those claims was a claim related to the role of water in the prevention of dehydration filed earlier this year by two German scientists. At the time, the claim had to be rejected by EFSA because it was filed under the wrong legal provision (Article 14 of Regulation 1924/2006/EC instead of Article 13). In short, Article 14 deals with diseases and illnesses whereas dehydration was not regarded by EFSA as a disease.

The actual ruling, however, says no such thing, but quite clearly accepts that dehydration IS a disease:

… the applicant proposed water loss in tissues or reduced water content in tissues as risk factors of dehydration. On the basis of the data presented, the Authority concluded in its opinion received by the Commission and the Member States on 16 February 2011 that the proposed risk factors are measures of water depletion and thus are measures of the disease. Accordingly, as a risk factor in the development of a disease is not shown to be reduced, the claim does not comply with the requirements of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 and it should not be authorised. [Emphasis added.]

As this excerpt makes clear, EFSA's actual grounds for rejecting the proposed claim was a bizarre assessment that the claim does not address a risk factor for the disease, but only a measure of the disease, and hence is not a valid claim about reduction of a risk factor.

This is incredibly stupid. Failure to drink enough water is not a risk factor for dehydration? Just to try to make this distinction is nonsensical enough, but then they get it wrong to boot, on the most trivially simple matter: can drinking water help prevent dehydration?

Also, EFSA does declare the claim unauthorized, meaning disallowed, which would not be the case if they had ruled that it was not actually a health claim. So everything in the clarification is just a fraud. It seems they got embarrassed when people noticed how stupid their ruling was and concocted a completely dishonest excuse.

I emailed both EFSA and EFBW inquiring whether EFSA had provided guidance on the clarification posted by EFBW, or whether EFBW was just brown-nosing on their own initiative. Hey, no answer. I may have to try a Freedom of Information request.

Even if this was just brown-nosing, EFSA is complicit by not correcting the bogus "clarification," and for a government agency to be involved at all with this kind of blatant dishonesty is serious in itself, regardless of the inanity of the issue.

UPDATE II: The UK Register's attempt to make sense of EFSA's ruling is also at odds with the ruling

From the UK Register's report, the same day as the Express story:

After due deliberation, the panel concluded that "the proposed claim does not comply with the requirements for a disease risk reduction claim pursuant to Article 14 of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006". This sticking point appears to be whether water alone, and how much, will cure dehydration.

One understands the need of the human brain to impose order onto chaos, but the ruling itself is quite clear. There is nothing in it about the inadequacy of water as a means of reducing risk of dehydration. EFSA never reached that question, thanks to its ludicrous decision to declare that drinking water does not address a risk factor for dehydration, but only a measure of dehydration. (What?) Sorry Register, but you need to restrain your reporters from substituting what their subjects might sensibly have said for what they did say.

Not to suggest that the ruling would have been reasonable if it were based on a sufficiency argument. The claim in question was very modest. It only said that drinking water "can reduce the risk of development of dehydration.” So a negative ruling (if the actual issue had been reached) would have said no, drinking water cannot reduce the risk of dehydration. Really, it can't? Not ever? Can't even reduce the risk? That would be almost as insane as their actual ruling.

Republicanism, not democracy, is what we should be promoting in the Middle East

2011-11-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

With popular sovereignty and populist revolution bringing Islamofascism (or orthodox Islam) to power across the Arab world, it is important to remember that democracy is not the criterion of legitimacy. To be legitimate, government must be republican. That is, it must serve to establish a system of liberty under law. If the majority use democracy to violate the natural liberty rights of the minority, that "tyranny of the majority" is no more legitimate than the "tyranny of the minority" that is exercised by unelected dictators. Such, at least, is the founding ideology of the United States.

The framers of our Constitution were highly suspicious of democracy, which they often denigrated as "mob rule." To them democracy was a necessary evil. If we must be ruled, let it be by ourselves. But there are many ways in which we are not supposed to be ruled at all, but are supposed to be free, according to natural law (i.e. according to what can be understood about right and wrong on the basis of moral reason, regardless of whether our capacity for moral reason comes from God or from godless nature).

Hence the enumeration of limited federal powers in Article I of our Constitution, and the enumeration of individual rights in the Bill of Rights (explicitly incomplete). Unfortunately, our Democratic Party seems to take its name literally. They have been systematically breaking down constitutional limits on majority power since the New Deal, when FDR tore down the Constitution's system of limited federal power.

With the Democrats in control of all of our information industries (academia, news and entertainment media, all of our biggest philanthropies, all of our professional organizations), the priority of liberty is no longer widely understood. As a result, democracy is often held up as a first principle, when in our system it's value is purely instrumental. It is valued as a way to secure liberty, and it is without value if it fails to be advantageous for that purpose.

Our loss of understanding of the priority of liberty leaves the nation standing perplexed as the Arab world falls in a single sweep to popular tyranny. Democracy—our supposed criterion of right—is leading to the most evil outcome: the empowerment of al Qaeda and Iran in country after Middle Eastern country, while America mumbles half a cheer and a lot of quiet fretting.

Daniel Pipes on the disastrous consequences of regarding democracy as principle in the Middle East

Pipes has a nice piece on our state of impotent discombulation. He does not say anything about democracy not being the correct criterion of legitimacy—very likely he does not understand this point himself—but he nicely sums up the confusion that is created when U.S. policy-makers treat democracy as principle in the Arab-Muslim world:

•Democracy pleases us but brings hostile elements to power.
•Tyranny betrays our principles but leaves pliable rulers in power.

"As interest conflicts with principle," says Pipes, "consistency goes out the window."

But is inconsistency really the problem? Obama has actually been perfectly consistent. Where dictators are friendly or pliable, he throws them to the wolves (demanding that Ghaddafi and Mubarak leave). Where they are hostile to the U.S. and not at all pliable, he is silent and unmoved when protesters are slaughtered en masse (Iran and Syria).

The obvious explanation is that Obama himself is not just a Muslim, but is an Islamofascist. (The evidence for both is overwhelming.) He skillfully uses the Democratic Party's immoral priority of democracy over republicanism to advance democracy where the outcome will be anti-republican, and suppress it where republicanism is likely to prevail.

The key is Iran. A democratic Iran would almost certainly embrace liberty/republicanism, but so long as it remains in the hands of the Islamofascists, it can usurp every populist movement in the area to the Islamofascist side. Hence Obama's determination to see that Iran gets The Bomb.

Assert republicanism over democracy

Faced with a president who is actively making use of the errant principle of democracy to undermine the national interest, it is not enough to advocate some wise balancing of democracy and interest. Instead, it is necessary to clarify and insist that republicanism, not democracy, is our principle, and that democracy should only be advanced where doing so advances the cause of liberty. Until we get regime change in Iran, that means no-where else in the Islamic world should we be pressing yet for democracy. Iran has to come first, or it will usurp every other attempt at democratic reform.

This strategy would expose Obama for what he in fact is doing, using a false principle to advance the Islamofascist cause. Pipes, in contrast, casts Obama as a bumbler, presumably well intentioned. Would that it were the case. Pipes' suggestions for how to deal with the conflict between democracy and interest are fine as far as they go:

Aim to improve the behavior of tyrants whose lack of ideology or ambition makes them pliable. They will take the easiest road, so join together to pressure them to open up.

Always oppose Islamists, whether Al-Qaeda types as in Yemen or the suave and "moderate" ones in Tunisia. They represent the enemy. When tempted otherwise, ask yourself whether cooperation with "moderate" Nazis in the 1930s would have been a good idea.

Help the liberal, secular, and modern elements, those who in the first place stirred up the upheavals of 2011. Assist them eventually to come to power, so that they can salvage the politically sick Middle East from its predicament and move it in a democratic and free direction.

If Obama was merely a bumbler, he could learn from this advice. Since he is actually an Islamofascist, the only counter is to assert correct moral principle: that our goal is to advance liberty, and that democracy is only on the side of principle where it serves to promote liberty. Otherwise Obama can just continue to pretend to be acting on American values as he helps elevate Islamofascists to power across the Middle East.

Addendum: the New Deal actually ushered in a new (and un-ratified) Constitution

Since everything affects interstate commerce in some way, post-New-Deal Supreme Courts have held that Congress is empowered to regulate anything and everything under its power to regulate interstate commerce. Pre-New-Deal Courts had rejected that interpretation on the grounds that it violated Justice Marshall's first principle of constitutional interpretation:

It cannot be presumed that any clause in the Constitution is intended to be without effect; and, therefore, such a construction is inadmissible unless the words require it. [5 U.S. 137, 174 (1803).]

Allowing everything to be regulated under the commerce clause did not just render one clause of the Constitution without effect, it vitiated the entire system of limited enumerated powers.

That system of limited enumerated powers stood in the way of FDR's desire to implement a Soviet-style command economy, where the government dictates to industry the quantities that it will produce and the prices it will charge. Yes, Roosevelt did actually try to implement such a system, dictating prices and quantities to every major industry in America. That was the job of the NRA (the National Recovery Administration), created by the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA). (See FDR's Folly, by Jim Powell, chapter 9.)

NIRA was struck down by the Supreme Court, prompting FDR's infamous court-packing scheme and "the switch in time that saved nine." Intimidated by a popular president during a time of national agony, the Supremes agreed to abandon the Constitution, and we have never gotten it back.

UPDATE: Secretary of State Clinton endorses Islamist regimes, calls their ascention to power a triumph for freedom

Robert Danin lists some main points from Hillary's November 7th speech:

– reaffirmation of the “Freedom Agenda” and America’s commitment to democracy in the Middle East, exclaiming “What a year 2011 has been for freedom in the Middle East”
...
– a headline grabbing pledge for the United States to work with the Islamist al-Nahda party in Tunisia
– an oblique reference for the need of “unelected officials” (read: the military) in Egypt to relinquish their role as the most powerful political force lest they plant the seeds for future unrest
...

Islamofascist triumph in Tunisa, YAY! But while the Islamofascists are making great headway in Egypt, the military is threatening to block them from taking complete control, BOOOOO! The worst bit (via Barry Rubin) was her opening:

Not all Islamists are alike. Turkey and Iran are both governed by parties with religious roots, but their models and behavior are radically different. There are plenty of political parties with religious affiliations—Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim—that respect the rules of democratic politics. The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong. They do it in this country every day.

Actually, as Rubin notes, all Islamists ARE alike, as Obama's Turkish hug-buddy Erdogan proves every day. ("Erdogan is openly taking steps to transform Turkey into an Islamic state along the lines of Iran," summarizes Carolyn Glick.)

Certainly faithful Muslims can thrive in a democracy, and they might even respect the rules of democratic politics, where doing so is an effective way to advance Islam, but they can never be small "r" republicans, at least if they are orthodox, and that is what matters.

The bold ruthlessness with which the Obama administration is using the false principle of democracy as a weapon against the genuine principle of republicanism could hardly be more explicit. Clinton actually declares unabashed tyranny of the majority—the electoral triumph of unabashed totalitarians—to be a triumph for "freedom." This blatant dishonesty invites the obvious and correct response. Yes, "freedom" is the right criterion, but no, totalitarianism is not freedom.

RELATED: How the Democrat-endorsed Occupy morons are explicitly calling both for tyranny of the majority and for the destruction of liberty. It's right in their two names: "the 99%" and "Occupy." They are urging everyone not in the top 1% of earners to Occupy (to take over, to confiscate) what the 1% has.

Of course that is very far from a majority opinion. It is more like a 1% opinion, or at worst (I hope) a 10% opinion. But as an expression of their anti-republican ambition, the label is appropriate. What a heap of moral trash, and they look like it too:

An island of human flotsam planted with an America-hating upside-down flag and the blood red flag of the left's favorite sadistic communist mass-murder, plus cheery slogan.

Good for Newt for shaming these idiots:

There is no such thing in America as 99 percent. We are all 100 percent Americans.

Of course they think they are just the loveliest people:

From Zombie, who notes:

Rule #451 of protest sign-making: If you put a unicorn on it, no one can accuse you of malice.

What a cute little liberty-hater:

The male-looking masked coward seems to have poop on his pants.

UPDATE II, 11-25-2011: Obama still pushing hard for Islamofascist take-over of Egypt

The only hope for Egypt not to go to the bin Ladenists is if the Egyptian military re-asserts control and forcibly suppresses the Muslim Brotherhood (which is trying to forcibly suppress everyone else). So what does our Islamofascist president do? Exactly what you would expect:

The White House demanded the transfer of power to a civilian government in Egypt must be "just and inclusive" and take place "as soon as possible". "Most importantly, we believe that the full transfer of power to a civilian government must take place in a just and inclusive manner that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people, as soon as possible," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.

To our democratic but not republican president, the "legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people" is whatever the Islamofascist majority or minority is able to impose through elections, however corrupt. He already proved in Iran that his criterion of democratic legitimacy is not an honest election, but just the outcome of the de facto election process, whatever that may be. His only proviso there was that not too many of the people who were protesting the stolen election should be murdered in the process:

My understanding is, is that the Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place. ...

I think it's important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.

He doesn't care whether their votes are counted correctly. He just doesn't want too many of them to be stifled (or killed, which is how the Iranian Mullahcracy "stifles").

See also "False AP report." (No, Obama did NOT say that Iran must respect voters' choice.)

Explaining Muller vs. Muller: is BEST blissfully unaware of cosmic-ray-cloud theory?

2011-10-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

Crossposted at Watts Up

Here is the puzzle, as noted by Nigel Calder and others: how can BEST insist that a modicum of additional evidence of late 20th century warming should put skepticism of the CO2-warming theory to rest, while at the same time admitting that they never even tried to examine the possible causes of warming?

Elizabeth Muller's press statement in support of anti-CO2 alarmism is extreme:

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and Executive Director of Berkeley Earth, said she hopes the Berkeley Earth findings will help “cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid concerns of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way.” This will be especially important in the run-up to the COP 17 meeting in Durban, South Africa, later this year, where participants will discuss targets for reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG)emissions for the next commitment period as well as issues such as financing, technology transfer and cooperative action.

She is strongly implying that BEST's findings not only support the CO2 theory of late 20th century warming, but justify radical worldwide government action to reduce carbon emissions.

Richard Muller's statement of ignorance on the cause of the observed warming is equally absolute:

What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human actions.

Contradictory, yes, but also explanatory. Muller et al. must be so ignorant of this climate science subject that they are brand-new to that they are not even aware that the leading competing climate theory, where solar-magnetic activity modulates cloud formation, also predicts and explains late 20th warming. All they know is that the CO2 theory predicts warming, prompting them to see evidence of warming as evidence for that theory.

This is the only logical explanation for Muller vs. Muller, and it would also explain why BEST made such a complete hash of the only part of their data that does have any power to discriminate between CO2-warming and solar-warming.

Continue reading...

Opposite temperature predictions for quiet-sun era

If late 20th century warming was mostly caused by the industrial release of atmospheric CO2, then warming should be continuing apace, but if 20th century warming was mostly caused by the 80 year grand maximum of solar activity that waned in the 1990's and ended in 2005, then planetary temperature (as measured by the heat content of the oceans) should have been falling for several years now. In a less smooth way, surface temperatures would also be passing the peak of the Modern Warm period.

Nature is right now conducting an ideal experiment for determining which theory is right, but on this crucial part of the temperature record—what happened when solar activity waned and then dropped into the cellar—BEST's presentation is remarkably confused. The sample station analysis that they released shows substantially more post-98 cooling than any of the other land records, while their full data set has recent temperatures going up compared to the other records.

Here is a zoom-in on figure 1 from BEST's "decadal variations" paper. It shows the most recent temperatures for a sub-sample of temperature stations ("[t]he Berkeley Earth data were randomly chosen from 30,964 sites that were not used by the other groups"):

Wow, this sub-sample really favors the sun as the primary driver of climate, certainly compared to the NOAA, GISS and Hadley evidence. The BEST temperatures are equal or above the other temperature records throughout the 80's and 90's, then drop precipitously below them over the last ten years, as the sun has gone quiet.

BEST's full data set tells the opposite story. Here is their 12 month average surface temperature (figure 8 from their "Temperature Averaging Process" paper):

The second part of figure 8 shows the differences. NOAA and GISS both drop off a couple of tenths of a degree relative to BEST after 2000, while Hadley drops off about a half a degree!

Wow, compared to the evidence provided by the other temperature records, BEST's full sample really favors the CO2 theory over this critical period. Thus on the only part of the temperature record that is probative, BEST displays two strongly contradictory graphs without a word of commentary. That's a pretty good sign that they are oblivious to the discriminatory power of this part of the record, indicating again that they are not even aware of the GCR-cloud theory and its implications. No wonder they can do such incredibly biased things as calling "the late part of the 20th century," "the anthropogenic era" (p. 30). Anthropogenic warming is their premise.

BEST evidence is not best evidence

Almost all of the heat capacity of the biosphere is in the oceans. Thus climate change over time means a change in ocean heat content. Land surface temperature is a volatile expression of this global temperature, depending on whether colder or warmer ocean currents are at the surface. That volatility makes surface temperatures an iffy way to track climate change, and today, better evidence is available.

In recent years, ARGO's automated fleet of temperature sounding devices provides much improved direct measurement of ocean temperature. According to NOAA, data from these floats show ocean heat content for the top 700 meters as close to flat for about 10 years now:

(Bob Tisdale says that NOAA has recently started reporting heat content for the top 2000 meters, but apparently it is still a work in progress, as they don't display it on their heat content page.)

Ocean heat content can also be measured by sea level, which is determined by the thermal expansion of the oceans, plus net land-ice melt. Here is NOAA's sea level data, compensated for land-ice melt and variations in salinity. It shows ocean heat content as roughly flat for about the last eight years:

This best evidence indicates that global warming has stopped, which militates against the CO2 theory of late 20th century warming, but the oceans do not show the global cooling that the solar-theory predicts, so it does not clearly favor the cosmic-ray-cloud hypothesis either. The very latest sea level data, however, may finally be telling the tale:

Steve Goddard, September 2011: "The latest sea level numbers are out, and Envisat shows that the two year long decline is continuing, at a rate of 5mm per year."

That's actual sea level, not steric sea level. Subtract out the ongoing land-ice melt from our currently warm climate and thermosteric sea level is falling even more rapidly. If cosmic-ray-cloud effects do dominate CO2 effects, we'll probably have full proof within the next couple of years.

Can BEST actually be unaware of the cosmic-ray-cloud theory, or are they just accepting the CO2-alarmists' excuses for dismissing solar effects?

Unless Muller is a world-class fruitcake, he can't have waded into the climate arena without at least being aware of Svensmark's theory. He must also know that the sun has gone quiet, and his Nobel-physics brain would be able to figure out how this natural experiment provides a test of which theory is right. Yet he might still act as if he is unaware of solar warming theory if he has been convinced by the alarmists' bogus excuses for why recent warming can't have been caused by the sun.

Over and over, these folks claim that late 20th century cannot have been caused by the sun because solar activity was not rising over this period. e.g. Rasmus Benestad, 2005:

A further comparison with the monthly sunspot number, cosmic galactic rays and 10.7 cm absolute radio flux since 1950 gives no indication of a systematic trend in the level of solar activity that can explain the most recent global warming.

That reasoning obviously requires an assumption that ocean temperatures had equilibrated to the high level of 20th century solar forcing by 1950. Otherwise the continued high level of solar forcing (the hypothesis under consideration) would cause continued warming until ocean equilibrium was reached. Yet Benestad did not even acknowledge this assumption, never mind make any case for it, and this has been the pattern.

I have written several posts on the alarmists' excuses for dismissing the solar explanation and how they utterly fail to stand up to scrutiny. But without even going into those details, the more basic point is that the various rationales for dismissing the solar warming hypothesis are theoretical. They are, in effect, part of the CO2 warming theory. Our recently quiet sun offers a test of which theory makes the right prediction. To ignore that test because one already agrees with one of the theories, as BEST seems to be doing, is to put theory over evidence, the opposite of what scientists are supposed to do.

UPDATE: Justia DID expunge references to key natural-born case, they did NOT just change citations to modern format

2011-10-24T02:06:00.000-07:00

Original post title: "Justia did NOT expunge references to key natural-born case, they just changed citations to modern format"

Original first line: "Somewhere Gilda Radner is laughing." That first line still holds, but now it is me who has to say, "never mind," as Gilda used to say after learning that the premise of her tirade was upside-down. Only instead of "never mind," I have so say MIND! It seems that Justia really did delete politically inconvenient portions from its online Supreme Court rulings.

This is Leo Donofrio's claim: that in the run up to the 2008 election, Justia tampered with its online full-text copies of Supreme Court cases, systematically altering the Court's citations of Minor v. Happersett so as to hide this important precedent from modern view. Minor is the 1874 case that first established the meaning of Constitutional requirement that the president be a "natural born citizen." My mistake was believing reports at World Net Daily and the Examiner that claimed to be presenting Donofrio's strongest evidence.

Looked at closely, the evidence WND and Examiner evidence is susceptible to a perfectly innocent explanation. WND showed screen shots from 2008 in which the Court's original citations of Minor v. Happersett in the case of Luria v. United States were replaced with modern-form citations that only list the volume and page number where the cited case can be found in the Supreme Court reporter. Further, WND's Bob Unruh only noted that the name-citation had been taken out. He did NOT note that a modern-form citation for Minor v. Happersett had been inserted in its place. Neither did he note that this new citation had a link attached that connected directly to the Minor v. Happersett case itself.

In other words, WND's report overlooked an obvious innocent explanation. Justia should never have deleted the court's old-form citation, but it was certainly possible that they had just been going through their documents replacing old-form citations with new-form citations with no intent to cover anything up, and the fact that a link had been added cut against the idea that Justia was trying to hide the Minor v. Happersett precedent.

Dianna Cotter's Examiner article did the same thing, and so did Clayton Cramer's less accusatory post, which focused on Justia's strange editing in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. All were overlooking the available innocent explanation.

So that was what my original post was about: how the editing that was being presented as evidence of an effort to hide the Court's embrace of the Minor v. Happersett precedent had an obvious innocent explanation that all of these folks were overlooking.

My exchanges with Leo Donofrio

I left a link to my post on Leo comment thread, which elicited a very strange response. He claimed to have not yet released his clearest evidence that Justia had engaged in malicious tampering with Supreme Court opinions, holding it in reserve for the day when someone made the criticisms that I had articulated:

...since I anticipated your EXACT theory... I protected the story by documenting the following evidence... as well as the evidence I have previously reported on. Having dealt with this kind of subterfuge before, I utilized a few skills I learned from my poker and chess fanaticism... it's called thinking ahead and planning ahead... moves and moves ahead... The evidence I haven't published yet only became relevant after the other side played two moves in this game. The first move that was required was for Justia to place robot.txt blocking over their entire domain. That happened today. Second, someone had to come along espousing the theory you have stated. Both of those moves have been made, so now it is my turn to move. Now I will discuss the evidence which I have not previously discussed.

Leo promised "a follow up on this no later than tomorrow with screenshots from the Wayback Machine." He would detail how, rather than just substituting modern-form citations for old-form citations, Justia had at first done the right thing: they had left the old-form citations exactly as they were and only ADDED the modern-form citations (with hyperlinks) alongside, deleting nothing. Only LATER, as the 2008 elections got nearer, did Justia go in again and remove the Court's original old-form citations, which included the Minor v. Happersett name.

Obviously I was skeptical. If Leo had screenshots comparing Justia pages without the old-form name-citations to earlier versions of the same pages that had both the name-citations and the modern-form citations, why did the big WND and Examiner exposes compare the pages without the name-citations to earlier versions contained only the old-form name-citations? That comparison made it look as if Justia had only switched from old-form citations for new-form citations, when Leo said he could prove that they actually went back in to delete the name-citations only after the modern-form citations were already in place.

Such screenshots would indeed seem to constitute proof of intent to hide the Minor v. Happersett precedent. But would Leo really sit on such important evidence? Why? Just to spring it as a gotcha on someone like me who pointed out that what he had already put out as proof was not actually proof at all? Is he crazy?

Only pretending to be crazy

Well it turns out that Leo really does have screenshot-proof that Justica first put the modern-form citations and hyperlinks in alongside the Court's original old-form name-citations for Minor v. Happersett and only later came back and deleted the old-form name-citations. I don't even have to wait until tomorrow to see these screenshots. Doing some poking around on his blog, I discover that he them last June!

So no, he has not been sitting on this evidence, waiting to spring it on some unsuspecting person like myself. Who knows why he ever said so. I'm just glad to learn that he is actually much more sensible than he presents.

Turns out the guy's solid. He's got the goods. Justia has been deleting politically inconvenient facts from its online Supreme Court record, which as Leo points out is actually a criminal offense: misrepresenting state documents. Leo has just been ill-served by his publicizers (including himself, if his response to me is any indication).

My original take-down of Leo's evidence as presented by WND and the Examiner is below, followed by my full exchange with Leo. I'll just end here with the damning screenshots that SHOULD have been front and center in the WND and Examiner exposes.

First is Leo's screenshot of Justia's Boyd v. Nebraska page from February 19 2008 (via Wayback). Scroll down to the highlighted text to find the Court's citation of Minor v. Happersett. You'll see the Court's original old-form citation (Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162), followed by the modern-form citation (88 U.S. 167), with hyperlinks:

http://supreme.justia.com/us/143/135/case.html

And here is Justia's Boyd page as captured by the Wayback Machine on October 2 2008:

http://naturalborncitizen.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/boyd-edited-justia-way-back-october-2-2008.jpg

The Court's original name-citation of Minor v. Happersett has been deleted, and no, this was not an unintended byproduct of switching from old-form citations to new-form citations, because the new-form citation was already in place. They must have gone in with the sole intent of deleting the name citation, because that is all they did. Q.E.D.

Good going Leo. You crack me up. Gilda's laughing at both of us.

This isn't to say there CAN'T be an innocent explanation, but when the only change was to remove a part of the Court's original text, it doesn't seem that it could be a cut-and-paste error, or any kind of legitimate update, no matter how ill advised. If Justia DOES have an innocent explanation, they need to detail it to the public. So GO LEO: keep the pressure on (and never mind my never mind).

NEW UPDATE: Justia claims a programming glitch

Justia CEO Tim Stanley has now given a statement to CNET claiming that the alterations are the product of a cut-and-paste bug they had to correct. They released this bit of corrected code:

CNET's caption: This code excerpt shows that Justia's programmers incorrectly typed in ".*" (which matches any character) instead of "\s" (which matches only spaces). (Credit: Justia)

Could this broad-acting change be responsible for the removal of a particular chunk of the Court's original text without affecting anything around it? Stanley claims that this bug corrupted other Supreme Court cases as well, not just cases citing Minor v. Happersett:

"This has nothing to do with President Obama and it is not a conspiracy," Stanley said. "When we discovered the issue, we corrected the script and the cases now render correctly. The issue was not limited to the cases these folks are focused on. We've had internal discussions on how to make sure this does not happen in the future with additional visual and parsing checks."

It turns out, according to Mountain View, Calif.-based Justia, that the blame can be laid on a poorly-crafted regular expression. In computer science terms, regular expressions (often abbreviated as "regex") are used for complicated forms of text matching and substitution. They rank among the highest forms of programming arcana, primarily because of their flexibility, but are also some of the most prone to bugs.

In this case, Stanley said, what happened is that Justia's programmers typed in ".*" (which matches any character) when creating a regex. It's now an "\s" (which matches only spaces).

Stanley said he wasn't sure how many cases were affected before the bug was discovered and fixed. "It was just the U.S. Supreme Court cases, not the state, federal appellate and district court cases," he said.

With the help of the Wayback Machine, it should be possible to round up a bunch of the bug-affected cases and see if the same sort of errors really did appear in unrelated cases at the same time, especially if Justia would help track these cases down. Unfortunately, Justia has shut down access to it's Wayback archives.

Until Justia re-allows access to its Wayback archives and assists Leo in performing this check, this issue should be considered unresolved. MIND!

Original post, now defunct: "Justia did NOT expunge references to key natural-born case, they just changed citations to modern format"

Somewhere Gilda Radner is laughing.

Leo Donofrio recently made an alarming-looking discovery. Justia.com, a main online source for full text Supreme Court opinions, seemed to be systematically expunging citations to a key Court ruling on the meaning of the Constitution's requirement that the president must be "natural born citizen." But Leo was not careful enough. He failed to notice that the citations to "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" were not just being deleted, but were being replaced with a different citation: "88 U.S. 165." As it turns out, both are valid citations for Minor, with the latter being the more modern citation form.

Here is a snapshot of the University of Missouri's full-text Minor v. Happersett page. It lists both ways of citing the case:

162 is the first page of the Minor case in the Supreme Court reporter. "88 U.S. 165" is a reference to something on the fourth page of the opinion. The standard form of reference for page 165 is "88 U.S. 162 (165)," but Justia's minor bit of shorthand is perfectly unexceptional.

Leo somehow did not realize that "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" was being replaced with a different way of citing the same case. He just saw Justia dropping all of its "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" citations and thought he had uncovered an elaborate effort to keep online researchers from finding and making use of this very important case, whose long affirmed precedents could bar both Barack Obama and John McCain from the presidency.

That's certainly enough incentive for a dishonest supporter of either candidate to try to suppress Minor, and the importance of Leo's charge if it were borne out was enough to induce the always brave World Net Daily to issue a major report. Clayton Cramer saw another report in the Portland Examiner and declared the case a genuine mystery, which in turn induced Glenn Reynolds to broadcast the mystery to his own large and eclectic audience.

Much todo about nothing, as it turns out. Minor was NOT suppressed, and the proof is in Leo Donofrio's own screen-shots of Justia' Luria v. United States page, as recorded by The Wayback Machine. Notice that in the 2006 screen-shot, the "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" citation in the last paragraph does NOT include a link to the cited case:

Now here is Leo's Wayback snapshot of Justia's 2008 Luria page. Notice that in place of the original unlinked "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" citation is a citation for "88 U.S. 165," and that citation IS linked:

The inclusion of an active link to Minor v. Happersett under the "88 U.S. 165" citation makes it EASIER to track the reliance of later cases on the Minor precedent, proving that the change was NOT intended to make Minor harder to find.

The obvious explanation is that Justia must have been going through its postings and adding active links. Whoever was doing it just got overzealous and replaced the Court's actual citation with a modern format citation (not required in order to add a link).

Justia IS partly responsible for the confusion

It is not hard to see how Leo and others got confused. They started with Justia's current Luria page, which includes both the Court's original citation of Minor AND the modern form citation:

Citizenship is membership in a political society, and implies a duty of allegiance on the part of the member and a duty of protection on the part of the society. These are reciprocal obligations, one being a compensation for the other. Under our Constitution, a naturalized citizen stands on an equal footing with the native citizen in all respects save that of eligibility to the Presidency. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, 88 U. S. 165; Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U. S. 94, 112 U. S. 101; Osborn v. Bank of United States, 9 Wheat. 738, 22 U. S. 827. Turning to the naturalization laws preceding the Act of 1906, being [Emphasis added.]

Page 231 U. S. 23

That's a step in the right direction by Justia. Obviously the Court's original language should never have been removed. But Justia still does not get it quite right.

The added modern-form citation should have been placed in square brackets, to indicate that this was an editorial addition, and those square brackets should have been placed before the comma to the next citation, to indicate that the citation was to the same case. Justia did put a semi-colon after the modern-form citation, which should have tipped off Misters Donofrio, Cramer et al., but it is not as proper as the square-bracket solution.

Thus Leo understandably got the mistaken idea that "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" and "88 U.S. 165" were two different cases. That error bit him when he looked back at 2008 and saw that "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" gone while "88 U.S. 165" was still there. If to begin with these were two different cases, it is obviously alarming to see the case that one knows to be important get disappeared. But Leo was not actually beginning with two different cases. He was not starting at the beginning at all. He was starting at the end, which is how he got screwed up.

It is an interesting screw up, and an interesting mystery to solve, but that is the extent of the story. Once the confusion is discovered, the whole thing is just an odd bit of happenstance that led to a very peculiar misunderstanding. If everyone makes sense from here on out, this episode should turn into one of the grander homages to Gilda Radner's "never mind."

Justia-gate get's even wackier: Clayton Cramer's cut-and-paste head-scratcher

The example that mystified Clayton was a case where Justia had edited out "Minor v. Happersett ,21 Wall. 162" and replaced it with "88 U.S. 422," which is NOT a valid reference to Minor. This one really looks like obfuscation.

Here is Justia's U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark page (as recorded by Wayback) in April 2008:

The constitution nowhere defines the meaning of these words, either by way of inclusion or of exclusion, except in so far as this is done by the affirmative declaration that 'all persons born r naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.' Amend. art. 14. In this, as in other respects, it must be interpreted in the light of the common law, the principles and history of which were familiarly known to the framers of the constitution. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162; Ex parte Wilson, 114 U.S. 417, 422, 5 S. Sup. Ct. 935; Boyd v. U. S., 116 U.S. 616, 624, 625 S., 6 Sup. Ct. 524; Smith v. Alabama, 124 U.S. 465, 8 Sup. Ct. 564. The language of the constitution, as has been well said, could not be understood without reference to the common law. 1 Kent, Comm. 336; Bradley, J., in Moore v. U. S., 91 U.S. 270, 274. [Emphasis added.]

Here is Justia's U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark two months later, in June 2008, five months before the presidential election:

The Constitution nowhere defines the meaning of these words, either by way of inclusion or of exclusion, except insofar as this is done by the affirmative declaration that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." In this as in other respects, it must be interpreted in the light of the common law, the principles and history of which were familiarly known to the framers of the Constitution. 88 U. S. 422; Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 116 U. S. 624, 116 U. S. 625; Smith v. Alabama, 124 U. S. 465. The language of the Constitution, as has been well said, could not be understood without reference to the common law. Kent Com. 336; Bradley, J., in Moore v. United States,@ 91 U. S. 270, 91 U. S. 274. [Emphasis added.]

Ah, but look at what else is changed. It's not a straight swap of "Minor v. Happersett ,21 Wall. 162" for "88 U.S. 422." Also missing is the citation that was originally right after the Minor citation: "Ex parte Wilson, 114 U.S. 417, 422."

It seems that whoever was going through replacing "Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162" with "88 U.S. 165" made a copy and paste mistake. They deleted both the original Minor citation and all of Ex Parte Wilson except for the 422, and in place of this excision put back in, not the full "88 U.S. 165" citation, but just "88 U.S."

Well, that is what happens when human beings are tasked with robotic functions. Ask someone to replace a whole slew of existing citations with new cut-and-paste citations and they will occasionally select more text to replace than they intended, select less text to past in than they intended, etcetera.

And that's how you get a really big "neeeeever mind." Good going Gilda. You got 'em.

I haven't looked at all the examples, so there still could be more going on, but given that the highlighted examples are quite certainly innocent (and actually made Minor EASIER to find) it seems very unlikely that the un-highlighted examples are not innocent as well.

UPDATE I left some comments on Clayton Cramer's post and, at my urging or on his own, he seems to have figured it out:

Clayton said...: If the goal was to surgically remove Minor from Wong Ark Kim, why did they leave references to that case in later paragraphs? In addition, 88 U.S. 422 was not a reference to Minor or to Ex parte Wilson, but to Minor's volume and Wilson's page number--which is what you might expect if someone wrote a script intended to stick in a hyperlink to Minor (which was not present on April 20, 2008) that was defective: you could perhaps end up with something that scrambled these together.

There are aspects of what justia did that are worrisome. If they recognized that they had unintentionally damaged these cases, they should have admitted this, rather than silently restore everything, and use robots to stop further archiving.; October 24, 2011 9:31 AM

Clayton said...: Yet the hyperlink actually pointed to 88 US 162, even though the text was 88 US 422. Yes, I suppose that someone might have intentionally made those mismatch, but if you were going to do that to make it hard to find the relevant case, why not make the hyperlink point to 88 US 422 as well?

This really smells of a defective script that tried to insert a hyperlink pointing these cases to the correct location, and scrambled the results. I have written a few scripts over the years that tried to do things like this, and even a few peculiarities in the underlying HTML could cause this. It certainly is more plausible of an explanation than removing Minor v. Happersett from one paragraph, but leaving it in the next paragraph.; October 24, 2011 10:38 AM

Unfortunately, Leo Donofrio is digging his heels in, claiming that he has been holding his strongest evidence in reserve and promising to publish it tomorrow. Here is our back and forth from his site. Leo's replies are in bold:

Alec Rawls Says:
October 24, 2011 at 9:58 AM

Leo: Given how far this story has gotten, I decided to write a post on my discovery of what actually happened:

“Justia did NOT expunge references to key natural-born case, they just changed citations to modern format”

http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2011/10/justia-did-not-expunge-references-to.html

My email is alec@rawls.org

[ed. Perhaps if it happened one time, your theory might be plausible in some way. But it happened 25 times... the case name was removed, the citations were changed and in some cases whole sentences of text were removed. Regardless, I have been out in front of your argument and have planned for it accordingly.

As to the specifics of your theory, you claim that when Justia updated the cases to include hyperlinks, somebody screwed them up - in all three ways, case name and citation... 25 times...which you claim was totally due to human error... and you also infer that the removal of full sentences directly on point as to POTUS eligibility was also due to human error... Even without the evidence I (and others) are in possession of, evidence which I have not published yet... your theory is ridiculously naive at best and intentionally fraudulent at worst. I don't know you and I won't guess which side of that curve you fall on. But you have made an argument that by removing the case name, "Minor v Happersett", this somehow made the case easier to find. That is truly one of the classics of Seussian hooplah and it goes in the hall of fame.

Regardless, since I anticipated your EXACT theory... I protected the story by documenting the following evidence... as well as the evidence I have previously reported on. Having dealt with this kind of subterfuge before, I utilized a few skills I learned from my poker and chess fanaticism... it's called thinking ahead and planning ahead... moves and moves ahead... The evidence I haven't published yet only became relevant after the other side played two moves in this game. The first move that was required was for Justia to place robot.txt blocking over their entire domain. That happened today. Second, someone had to come along espousing the theory you have stated. Both of those moves have been made, so now it is my turn to move. Now I will discuss the evidence which I have not previously discussed.

Your theory is that when the cases were updated to include hyperlinks, the citations were "modernized". Here is what you wrote at your blog:

"Much todo about nothing, as it turns out. Minor was NOT suppressed, and the proof is in Leo Donofrio's own screen-shots...The obvious explanation is that Justia must have been going through its postings and adding active links. Whoever was doing it just got overzealous and replaced the Court's actual citation with a modern format citation (not required in order to add a link)...Well, that is what happens when human beings are tasked with robotic functions. Ask someone to replace a whole slew of existing citations with new cut-and-paste citations and they will occasionally select more text to replace than they intended, select less text to past in than they intended, etcetera."

But you skipped a step Errol. You skipped a very big step.

It is correct that many of the first snapshots from 2006 did not have hyperlinks at Justia... but then at various points between 2006 and early 2008 all of the cases were changed to add hyperlinks.
All 25 of the cases were just fine after they were hyperlinked and not sabotaged in any way. The citations were perfect including the official reporter citation, ie 88 US 162 or 88 Wall. 162... as well as a secondary citation to the actual page in question. Beautiful. The benevolent update from non-hyper linked cases... to complete hyper-linked cases... was accomplished at Justia PRIOR to any of the sabotage. This is proved by the timeline of Wayback Machine snapshots.

I have those snapshots saved because I was waiting for this argument.

So, the pattern is as follows:

1) In 2006, all 25 cases are published by Justia in full with their original text but most hyperlinks are missing.

2) Then, at various times between 2006 and early 2008, all 25 cases were changed to include hyperlinks and none of the cases were sabotaged upon those benevolent updates. Hyperlinks are perfect, case name is there, citations and opinions are perfect.

3) Then in 2008, all 25 cases are sabotaged to remove the case name, screw up the citations and in some cases remove whole sentences of text.

It was the second revision which exhibits the sabotage, not the first. The first revision was accomplished by Justia PERFECTLY with no human error leaving no reason for the second revision other than sabotage. The cases had already been updated, or "modernized" as you put it... This was accomplished perfectly to include the case name, full citation to official reporter, secondary citation to page number, and no text was removed. There was no human error. Then, the cases were revised again. Benevolently? Uh... not so much. How about not at all.

The Wayback Machine snapshots tell the story, but I guess Justia thought that by removing their entire site from the scrutiny of the Wayback Machine (so much for freedom of information for the benefit of society) they might be protected by the fatal flawed theory you have forwarded.

I am preparing a follow up on this no later than tomorrow with screenshots from the Wayback Machine.

Foresight. It's a wonderful concept. - Leo]

Alec Rawls Says:
October 24, 2011 at 3:03 PM

Leo: If Justia really did what you say–if their first revision left their pages as they are now, with the original citation intact but adding a modern-format citation with a hyperlink, and only afterwards did they go back and delete the original-format citations–then THAT is the evidence that they were trying to hide Minor v.Happersett. But that is not what you published, and what you did publish–at least the examples from Luria and Wonk Kim Ark that were promoted by WND and the Examiner–do NOT evidence suppression. Why would you do that? Why would you publish an account that doesn’t include the REAL evidence of wrongdoing?

[ed. The evidence we published proved the case firmly. That's why it's gone viral as is. Your theory made absolutely no sense. Seriously. Mistakes are not made systematically 25 times... and over three criteria. Not to mention that as you published, you failed to state that Justia had blocked access to the Wayback Machine this morning. And your theory - that clipping the actual case name made searching the case easier - was total bunk. Arguing that changing the official citation made it easier to find the case is also bunk. Hyperlinking didn't make it easier to search for references to Minor in other cases, that's also bunk. Hyperlinking made it easier to ACCESS the case once you've found a reference to it. But if the cases name is clipped when one is searching for the case name, one is not going to find the case. Same for bogus citations. Nobody is searching for 88 US 448 or even 88 US 171... they are searching for 88 US 162 or 88 Wall. 162... the hyperlink doesnt help them find the reference, it only makes it easier to access the case once the reference is found. That doesn't help one find something which isn't showing up in a search. If they find the reference because the case is cited properly, then they are certain to find the case even if no hyperlink exists. Not so if one searched for the case name and it's been clipped.

The rest of the evidence was kept in reserve to smash this bogus theory. I'll grant you the benefit of the doubt and assume your intentions were well... but really, I am not impressed. I saw this coming and planned for it. The story was proved on the evidence presented. 25 cases, 25 sabotaged cases is not human error. Furthermore, your report was very arrogant stating conclusions you had no ability to even research as access to the Wayback Machine was shut down by Justia.

Before you put your name behind something, maybe you would consider checking the evidence at the Wayback Machine first. And if all access was blocked, maybe you would put that mind of yours to work trying to find out why it was blocked. After all, why does Justia have to block access to US Supreme Court cases that are in the Public Domain if they don't have something to hide? They're entire mission statement has been to champion freedom of information across the web. Why aren't you calling them out for hiding the goods.

So don't give me slack for playing better chess. I published the goods. Now I'll publish the back up plan. Word.- Leo]

Frankly, that makes no sense. It is not chess. It is not thinking ahead on your part. It is failure to think ahead. Once people see that your initial report got the story wrong, how many people are going to give you a second chance? If the evidence actually is as you now say, that is an important story, but you have made it harder to get that story out, to say nothing of wasting a significant chunk of my time. Why should I need to spend all night exposing your proclaimed evidence of wrongdoing as non-evidence before you are willing to be forthcoming with the real evidence? Don’t expect WND and the Examiner to be too happy either.

[ed. You haven't exposed anything but a serious lack of credibility and a failure to see the truth in front of your own eyes. And nobody is happy about this fraud by Justia. There's nothing to be happy about. It's a damn shame. Dianna Cotter at the Examiner is very pleased with the story and everything I've written in this comment to you and my previous comment. Maybe you should try asking her what she thinks before you assume. Try that sometime, Sherlock. That benefit of the doubt is fading fast. -Leo]

If the truth is that you just made a mistake and did not realize that “88 U.S. 165″ was an alternate citation for “Minor v.Happersett, 21 Wall. 162,” well mistakes happen, and nobody will hold it against you.

[ed. It's not an alternate citation. It's a citation to a page in Minor which is not an official citation. Big difference. Nobody is searching for 88 US 165... they are searching for references to the case, which is 88 US 162. And since it's not there, they won't find it... be design of Justia. - Leo]

It’s a little embarrassing, but no harm done. On the other hand, intentionally withholding your real evidence of wrongdoing until after your first proclaimed-evidence is exposed as non-evidence, that would be a kind of bad behavior that WND, the Examiner, myself, and a lot of your readers would all justifiably be a bit annoyed at.

[ed. Just speak for yourself, and not for people who you haven't interviewed. You had the ability to look for the evidence before you published your wack theory. The other evidence of wrongdoing which I did not publish was available to the public at the time this story went to press. Therefore, I didn't hold anything from the public that wasn't available to the public. If Justia didn't remove the evidence a few days later, the evidence would still be available to the public. So, when I published the story, anyone could have found the evidence by doing a Wayback Machine search. I'm not the one who hid the evidence that was available to the public at the time I published. The situation has now changed. Justia has removed the evidence and it is no longer available to the public. Therefore, I will fill the gap they created. Why don't you go get the info from Tim Stanley, bastion of freedom of information? Why do you need to get it from Leo Donofrio? I will supply it, but the need for me to supply is caused by Justia removing it. You had a few days to see it before they hid it. But that doesn't bother you. Benefit of doubt... caput. - Leo]

If there IS real evidence of suppression, I’ll be glad to help expose it, but you don’t really seem like the bad-behaving type, and the only evidence I have seen so far is evidence of error on your part, so at this point, that is what I am thinking is the real story here. If it is, you would by far be best to admit it.

[ed. You should already have the evidence in your possession. Don't blame me because you don't have it. It was freely available since I first published back in July all the way through this morning. Maybe you do have it, which must be considered since you mentioned something about staying up all night writing this blog of yours...and Justia didn't block access to their entire domain until this morning. And the fact that you haven't mentioned Justia's removal of evidence is kind of telling.

The bottom line is this... the evidence which disproves your theory was available to the public when I published the story... not just this story, but the one on July 1 as well. Justia hid the evidence by blocking Pope and Boyd at the Wayback Machine back in July. And now they've blocked their entire domain. Had they not blocked it, you would have had access to it right now as everyone did for the last few days. Now that Justia has hid the evidence, I will present what they have hidden. But it was their act of hiding it which makes the evidence so relevant now. Your theory was a fantasy I foresaw might come to pass... but only if Justia hid the evidence. Before they hid the evidence, your theory could not have existed because you, like the rest of the free world, would have seen in the Wayback Machine that there were two revisions, not one. It was the removal by Justia of that evidence which gave rise to your mis-guided theory.

I am out for the night. I will post more comments tomorrow. I couldn't moderate comments other than Alec's posts which needed special attention more than the numerous messages of praise and various points in favor of the story. I will get to the rest of your comments tomorrow.- Leo]

UPDATE CORRECTION: It turns out that Leo's real evidence, what he says above that he has been sitting on, has already been public since July. Very surprising that he didn't say that, but the upshot is that he seems to be right. It seems that before Justia decided to remove the Court's original citations for Minor v. Happersett they had already gone through and added the modern-format citations with the active links. Thus when they went in and removed the Courts original Minor v. Happersett language they were NOT substituting a modern-form citation for an older-form citation, but were simply removing the older-form citation. It does not seem that there could possibly be an innocent explanation for that, so this evidence changes the picture entirely. Here is the comment I added to our exchange in Leo's comment thread:

Leo: I looked at your screenshots for Boyd (Feb 19 2008 and Oct 2 2008) and see that they do indeed show what you say: that the changes Justia had made by February left the original citations intact and only added the modern-form citation. So why in the world does WND's publicization of your work contrast the expurgated version, not with the full earlier version, but with the earlier version that lacks the modern-form citation? Dianna Cotter's piece does the same thing! Neither of these publicizations shows the actual evidence that proves your case.

Of course these publicizations are how I heard about your work: I got an email from a friend early Monday alerting me to the WND and Examiner stories. I guess you can't control what these publicizers do, but their reporting is a major fail. Hadn't you better let them know? As for your response to me, you could have pointed out that you had already posted screenshots of Justia's pre-expurgated pages that include the modern-form citations, instead of telling me that you have been holding this evidence in reserve, just waiting for someone to made the criticisms that I made. Sheesh. I'm Glad to see that that is not actually what you were doing.

So there is the source of our conflict. The examples that were put forward by Bob Unruh and Dianna Cotter as your strongest evidence were not actually showing the evidence at all. Okay, so now Gilda Radner is laughing at me, and I'll update my post accordingly, but this a really REALLY bad job of publicity by Unruh and Cotter. They MANGLED your story. And you didn't realize it?

Obviously I could have been more thorough before posting, but when I followed the links from Examiner and WND to Leo's site, he was endorsing the WND and the Examiner pieces at the top of his post, which I took as an endorsement of their assertions that they were highlighting his strongest evidence. That's why I didn't feel the need to look at his other findings. I had supposedly already seen his strongest stuff.

Not so as it turns out. So I'll take my share of the blame, but Cotter, Unruh and Mr. Donofrio himself all led me down that garden path. I also let Leo know that I had updated:

Hi Leo:

I updated my post to credit your solid evidence of suppressive tampering by Justia:

http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2011/10/justia-did-not-expunge-references-to.html

Too bad Unruh and Cotter did not lead with this. I hope that oversight didn’t cost you a window of opportunity to reach a broader audience.

The moral perversity of "consensus" decision-making: how to suppress minority views AND overrule the majority

2011-10-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street has brought to light an unsettling new social form, where "assemblies" of Occupiers robotically repeat each person's words in a highly inefficient ritual of "consensus" decision-making. Inefficient, that is, in terms of communication, but maybe not so inefficient as a way of implicating all of the participants in the group's proclaimed unanimity, which these people hold to be a better form of democracy than majority rule.

In actuality, the requirement of unanimity is fundamentally anti-democratic. It pressures dissenters into abnegating their dissent while at the same time letting select minority viewpoints veto the will of the majority. No surprise there. The only actual alternative to majority rule is minority rule, which prevailed through most of human history. Only in the last three centuries has power shifted to the majority, most dramatically with the constitutional establishment of American republicanism (the system of liberty under law).

The first pillars of American republicanism are majority rule and minority rights. Select individuals are no longer able to lord over the majority and ALL individuals are accorded unbreakable scope for dissent and individual action. The rituals of unanimous consent are deeply hostile to both of these achievements, so why would anyone submit to it? Why would anyone agree to be silenced when in the minority and give way when they are in the majority?

A possible answer—the most likely answer—lies in the extraordinary manipulative power of consensus rituals. Leon Festinger discovered in the 1950s that if a person is somehow induced to act in violation of their beliefs then their beliefs will alter so as to come more into line with how they have acted. Take somebody whose desire is not to impose on others, tell them that unless they change their vote they will be blocking the will of the majority, and they can be manipulated into acceding to a unanimous vote that does impose on less-immediate others. I've seen it happen, and that act can change a person's beliefs.

Through an unconscious process, like the mind integrating a picture, the person starts to believe both in the particular imposition that she was pressured into voting for, and in the dissent-suppressing consensus rituals that she acceded to. Thus someone who does not want to impose on anyone or suppress dissent is turned into someone who is comfortable with both.

That is a potent little trick. For all of their foolish appearance, consensus rituals have the potential to be a serious instrument of totalitarian power, an engine for unplugging the most basic political morality. Many years ago I saw a less developed version of these rituals in action, and even then, the manipulative power was impressive.

"We do not allow (We do not allow) UNCONSENSUS! (UNCONSENSUS!)"

If you have not seen the incredible spectacle of these consensus rituals, take a look at what these people actually do. Here is Occupy Atlanta last week, turning down Congressman John Lewis's request to address their "assembly." Ten minutes of mind-deadening repitition:

At 9:34:

"This group (this group) makes its decisions (makes its decisions) by CONSENSUS! (by CONSENSUS!) We do not allow (We do not allow) UNCONSENSUS! (UNCONSENSUS!)"

In other words, they do not allow independent thought. The hive-mind repetition of every tedious word is a bizarre new development, but my one encounter with a Democratic Socialist group back in the mid 1980s had the "consensus" lunacy on full display, and the way it worked was very revealing.

Gorgeous chick baits the trap

The gorgeous chick was a purely coincidental part of my particular experience, but probably not uncommon, as much of the reason anyone ends up anywhere at that age is romantic. I had met a most attractive girl while randomly grabbing dinner at Stanford's activist "hippy dorm." This gal was Joan Baez pretty. Vivacious and modest, she even managed to be endearing in her little nods to political correctness.

Guys can be pretty flexible about things like that. Most Girls are followers so if we liked each other, she would follow me, right? I'd pull that stick out of her ass, and really, this gal was irresistible. I was unable to get her away from a couple of leftist guys who hovered possessively around but we still managed to catch each other's interest and she invited me to come to the Democratic Socialists meeting the next evening at the Old Union.

I wasn't sure what strain of illiberalism the Democratic Socialists represented, but for her sake, I poked my head in to see. When I arrived they were just taking up an urgent action-item. A conservative had been invited to come to Stanford to speak—in support of the Contras I think—and the leaders of the Democratic Socialists wanted to rush a statement over to the student government, then in session, calling for this "extreme" conservative (on the right side of history etcetera) to be barred from speaking on campus.

Before voting, or as their way of voting, they went around the room asking for each person's view. I let them know that I was just dropping in to check out their group. They said their policy was to include newcomers like me in their decision-making, so I participated.

The once-around revealed that I and a couple of other people were against any effort to block the conservative speaker. My fellow dissenters did some weighing back and forth. I opined that the idea was simply perverse. Somebody wants to speak. Others want to listen. Do you all actually want to forcibly block this consensual act?

Consensus!

It was about 12 to 3 in favor of banning the speaker, so we opponents would obviously lose the vote. To my surprise, that wasn't good enough for the Democratic Socialists. It turned out that they did this consensus thing, where anyone who disagreed with the majority was put in the position of having their individual vote outweigh the votes of everyone else unless they relented and changed their vote.

That was enough to pressure the couple of actual Democratic Socialists who disagreed with the ban into switching their votes to the majority position. They didn't want to be guilty of imposing their minority view on the majority, so they gave up their minority view. I challenged the consensus ideal itself. "Do whatever you want," I said. "What do you need MY permission for?"

"Because we do things by consensus," their lead speaker said: "We want to make sure we are representing everyone," as if minority rule was some better form of democracy, when it was really just classic peer pressure, leaning on people to pretend agreement with what they actually opposed. Then everyone would be equally implicated afterward, making it difficult for anyone to break away. The whiff of danger to reputation was palpable. I'd just seen two people attach their names to something grotesque, not because they agreed with it, but because their arms were twisted.

Interestingly, this oppressive groupism was the very rationale the more vocal members gave for wanting to ban the conservative speaker. If a conservative was allowed to speak at Stanford it would supposedly imply that everyone at Stanford had in some measure approved, not just of freedom of speech, but of this particular speaker's views. It didn't matter that this was counter-factual. Stanford does NOT operate on a principle of unanimity, where someone is allowed to speak only if everyone else approves, and nobody would be absurd enough to think it does, but minority rule WAS the mentality of this tiny minority group, which somehow made them feel that it was okay to overrule the basic liberties of the entire Stanford community.

If they really cared about consent, why were they trying to trample other people's consensual activities? The whole thing was absurd. "You're never going to get me to be part of your consensus," I assured them. If that meant they couldn't issue a call to ban the conservative speaker, so be it. I wasn't forcing them to follow the anti-democratic principle of minority-rule. The idea that they might follow it in this case was actually pretty amusing. In the end, of course, they did not follow their own rule.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance

It took them some puzzling to get around my opposition because they claimed that they had previously always included newcomers in their consensus rule. The better to force newcomers into identification with the group I presume, a la Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance.

The unanimity requirement takes a person's desire not to impose her minority view on the group (especially a group that she is just meeting), and levers it into pressure to go along with a consensus vote. If she succumbs to this pressure, and actually goes along with something she doesn't agree with, then a dissonance is created between her beliefs and her actions. In the 1950's, Festinger and others found that the mind tries to reduce such dissonances. It seems to seek out a coherent understanding that it can act from, and since the mind can't change past actions, the only way to reduce dissonance is for the mind to alter a person's beliefs so that they come more into line with how the person has acted.

For the newcomer who submits to a unanimity voting ritual, Festinger's theory says that there will be a subconscious tendency for her to come to believe both in the majority position that she acceded to, and in the concept of consensus decision-making that she participated in. That's a powerful cult-inducing mechanism, using a person's desire not to impose on others to turn her into someone who does believe in twisting people's arms. It's actually virus-like, turning the body's own resources against it. It's actually HIV-like, because it is the body's defense against illiberal invasion that gets re-programmed into its opposite.

Was I really the first newcomer who hadn't gone along with this arm twisting? In any case, since I questioned not just the particular action they were voting on, but the whole idea of consensus voting, their lead speaker decided that I really wasn't part of their group at all, allowing them to go ahead and form a consensus without me, which is the first reasonable thing I had heard all night.

Today's consensoids take it to another level

So ended my reconnoitering mission to see if I could slip an especially beautiful and engaging young woman away from the leftist camp. How she could abide those totalitarian-minded men is a mystery. Either she was an uncritical follower, or she was just not as nice as I wanted to imagine. Either way, I was not going to waste any more time on the Democratic Socialists.

Now seeing in these new repeat-every-word groups how thoroughly cult-like the petty tyranny of phony "consensus" can become, I wonder if I missed an opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress, but it was all so patently wrong that it really did not occur to me how anyone could be unable to withdraw on their own. Yet there sit all those people on the video, slavishly repeating each slavish word.

This is their picture of an ideal society? Not even Mao tried to control people's minds to this extent. It's Borg-like. Do they call themselves "The Borg Collective"? Did they get the idea from watching Star Trek? That would actually seem to be a likely explanation if not for the clear roots of this behavior in earlier leftist protocols of "consensus" decision-making.

Festinger's theory suggests the effect that participating in such rituals will have on the human mind. Just the fact of doing it will tend to flush all of the beliefs that are inconsistent with it, and consensus decision-making is deeply hostile both to minority views and to majority rule. Thus whatever was at one time semi-understood by these people about respect for minority rights and majority rule will soon be expunged.

To the extent that Festinger identified a real psychological mechanism, these rituals of consensus are an eggbeater, systematically lobotomizing whatever allegiance to liberty and democracy these people ever possessed. Very not good.

RELATED: The Flight 93 Memorial Project used demands for consensus to keep the public from learning about the extreme level of conflict on the design competition jury that selected the Crescent of Embrace design

I wrote about this last month:

Flt 93 mother on Crescent jury: "I don't want to reach out to those people! THEY MURDERED MY DAUGHTER!"

Left wing design professionals on the jury had already charged Tom Burnett Sr. with anti-Muslim bigotry for objecting to the Crescent design just because the crescent is a long established symbol of Islam. It was in the face of this bald attempt at censorship that the mother cried out against the Crescent design. In her agony, she refused to be silenced. Brave woman.

The left-wing design professionals, who outnumbered the family members 8 to 7, were able to win the vote. The official tally was 9 to 6 for the Crescent, with the family members almost certainly voting 5-to-2 or 6-to-1 against.

If the details came out, that result would never stand, so the Park Service conveniently "lost" the minutes (which were supposed to be made public), and they have refused to provide the roll of the vote (which was not supposed to be secret). These were volunteer representatives of the people, conducting the people's business. All was supposed to be transparent, but the Park Service went to the opposite extreme.

In the wake of the vote, extreme pressure was brought on all participants to approve a declaration of unanimous support. The Memorial Project offered a deal to Mr. Burnett that they would change the Crescent name if that would bring him on board with such a declaration. He said "no," which explains why the Park Service did not heed the jury recommendation to do away with the Crescent name: it did not buy them the unanimity they were looking for, so why bother?

Mr. Burnett says that in the face of his opposition, the vote to unanimously support the chosen design never took place, but that hasn't stopped the Memorial Project (in a 2007 White Paper on the memorial controversy) from claiming that the jury did vote unanimously to support the chosen design.

They certainly did apply tremendous pressure on dissenting jury members to make a show of unanimity, which would require remaining silent about their opposition to the Crescent design. This is the likely explanation for why that Flight 93 mother, who saw the Islamic-shaped Crescent as a symbol of outreach to the people who murdered her daughter, never spoke out publicly against Murdoch's design. The Memorial Project bullied her into accepting that if she maintained her minority view, she was failing to support the majority decision.

That is not what acceptance of majority rule means. It does NOT mean that disagreements with the majority get silenced. Is it not enough that the minority loses to the majority? Should they really also have to shut the hell up? Again, the doctrine of unanimity shows its totalitarian essence. Far from being a better form of democracy, this fraudulent pretense of minority empowerment is an instrument for the extreme suppression of minority views.

Not that minority views will always be suppressed under consensus rules. When the leadership is in the minority, you can be guaranteed that the majority position will be blocked for lack of unanimity. The abandonment of majority rule allows the leadership both to silence the minority AND to overrule the majority. That this flesh-eating bacteria would be efflorescing all across the body of the activist Obama-left is a very alarming sign.

Obama's minions

The robotic chanters of unanimity are a would-be Red Brigades. All across the nation they are clamoring for power, determined to stamp out dissent from their own inarticulate ideas. They can't even figure out what they are protesting about. All they know for sure is that they hate capitalism (economic liberty), and they hate "unconsensus" (liberty of thought). Oh yeah, and they love Obama.

No surprise there. Obama's entire pre-electoral career was as a paid professional communist in the actual employ of "community activist" groups started by the immediate students and acolytes of Saul Alinsky, the leading American communist of the 20th century. There have never been more than a handful of paid professional communists in the entire history of the country. Now, thanks to our radical left-wing Democrat-controlled media, we actually managed to elect one to the presidency, with the vast majority of Americans having no clue that Obama was/is an actual literal professional communist by trade.

With Dear Leader in the White House, the incipient Red Brigades of chanting "consensus" should not be taken lightly. These are HIS minions, organized by his communist comrade Van Jones and funded by his top political advisor Patrick Gaspard, another paid professional communist in the employ of another Alinsky-fathered group (ACORN).

Gallery of consensus-ritual videos

Consensus chanting from Van Jones:

And from Occupy Chicago:

Unholy cow! Now they're chanting "sex with animals":

UPDATE An insider account of Occupy Wall Street's "General Assembly" details how leaders use consensus rules to silence opposition and usurp power. Apparently six leaders have been conspiring to take personal control of the half million dollars that OWS has raised, vesting themselves as Spokes Council (like the UN's Security Council vis a vis the UN's General Assembly), with final say on everything.

The creation of such a council is rationalized on the grounds that, under consensus rules, nothing can get done otherwise, and while the General Assembly has a figurehead power to overrule the council, it can never happen because council members are part of the General Assembly and can under the minority rule of consensus rules can block any attempt to overturn their own decisions. "Animal Farm meets Animal House" as Ed Morrissey puts it.

Other psychology posts

Study linking utilitarian moral views to psychopathology is actually measuring irreligiosity

Slanderous theory of the "conservative" mind reveals the actual working of the illiberal "liberal" mind

Eliminate weight-cutting from combat sports by controlling for water weight

2011-10-05T00:45:00.000-07:00

Weight-class combatants who are able to cut the most water weight for weigh-ins, then get it back before fight time, gain a size advantage. That makes the ability to cut weight a basic component of fight competition. But should it be, and does it need to be?

There IS an alternative. Instead of having fighters actually go through the process of losing water weight, blood samples could be used to measure the water content of bodily fluids and calculate how much additional water weight the person could safely lose, without their actually having to lose it. Subtract that amount of "excess" water weight from the fighter's scale-weight to get their weigh-in weight.

This water-controlled weigh-in weight would arguably be a fairer measure of fighting weight than the weight-cutting system produces. Fighters with the same water-controlled weigh-in weight would have the same tissue mass, sans fluids. Thus a fighter who has been exceptionally good at cutting and regaining water weight, like current UFC featherweight champ Jose Aldo, will lose his size advantage. Aldo (who needs no size advantage) has been consistently larger than his opponents come fight time. Under a water controlled system, they would be the same size, which seems right. Is an ability to lose water weight a fighting skill? No. So why should it be rewarded inside the Octagon?

The biggest reason to switch to water-controlled weigh-in weights is to avoid the health risks of severe dehydration. Less water makes bodily fluids thicker, which can put tremendous stress on the circulatory system and other organ systems, depending on how extreme the water loss is. That combatants at all levels are engaging in this practice, even in high school wrestling, means a huge price is being paid by a huge number of people just to be able to compete.

A coordination problem

Cutting water weight is what economists call a "coordination problem." If everyone is equally good at it then nobody gets an advantage from it, but everyone has to do it in order to keep the OTHER guy from getting an advantage from it. If only everyone could agree not to do it, then everyone would be better off. Everyone would be spared the discomfort and the health risks of dehydration, but there is no way to enforce such an agreement. Everyone would have an incentive to cheat, and it would be impossible to even define what cheating was. How could an agreed upon level of hydration even be defined?

Technology can solve this coordination problem by simply removing water from the equation. Drink as much water as you want before weigh-in. Blood samples will allow that water weight to be subtracted back out. If somebody tries to get an advantage by losing water weight, they can't do it. The blood test detects their low water weight and accordingly subtracts less water weight when calculating their weigh-in weight.

"Making weight" will become a long-term rather than a short-term proposition. Fighters will still have some ability to lose weight in the short-term by fasting for a day or two before weigh-ins (allowing the alimentary canal to empty out), but they will only be able to lose a couple of pounds this way. Water-controlled or water-compensated weight will primarily be a function of how much muscle and fat a person has.

Moving muscle and fat up and down takes longer time periods, on the order of weeks at least. Fighters just have to make sure far enough ahead of a fight that their weight is on the right trajectory (just as they do now). They'll need to be a little bit more disciplined than now, because they won't be able to drop an extra couple of pounds through more extreme dehydration. On the other hand, the formula they'll need to follow is very simple. They just stay at the maximum weigh-in weight for their class, plus their normal water allowance, plus the three or so pounds for what they can lose by last minute fasting. Then the only way to get a weight advantage will be to have a higher ratio of muscle to fat than the other guy, which is as it should be.

Calibrating the "excess water weight" measurement

Substantial testing would be required to identify just how blood thickness varies with water-weight at each level of hydration. The formula for using blood thickness to calculate excess water-weight would also vary by body size, but the "experiments" necessary to calibrate these calculations are already being run. Fighters and wrestlers all over the country are cutting weight all the time. We just need to start collecting the data. How much does their blood thicken per pound of water-weight loss? Once we calibrate that relationship for each body size then we can determine, for a given blood thickness, what the fighter's weight would be if the maximum safe amount of water was removed, and that's their water-controlled weigh-in weight.

If a suitable water-content test for blood is not already available then one would have to be developed. Maybe a simple mechanical viscosity test would do. Then a couple of years of the UFC systematically collecting data on how blood thickens with water-weight loss and the relationship would be well enough calibrated to enable a switch over to water-controlled weigh-in weights.

Better for the fans too, as fighters will be sharper, not having just put themselves through the dehydration ringer. Soon the fight world will be looking back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries as the bad old days, when everybody had to go through hell just to get in the door for weight-group competition. Good riddance. Training and fighting are grueling enough.

Cross-posted at MMAlinker. For background, you can read here about Jose Aldo's struggle to make weight for the Mark Hominick fight (where he gassed, but still won), and here is Dr. Benjamin's Q and A on the medical dangers of weight cutting.

Study linking utilitarian moral views to psychopathology is actually measuring irreligiosity

2011-10-01T17:33:00.000-07:00

The study, "Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas," asked about hypotheticals where the subject could save several innocent lives by taking steps to sacrifice fewer innocent lives instead. E.g.:

"A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people, and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people. Would you push the man?"

People who answered "yes" turned out to also score higher on tests for psychopathic tendencies. Interesting, but the "utilitarianism" answer to this kind of question turns on a lot more than utilitarian views. It also turns crucially on religious views. A person who believes that there is a God who has his own mysterious purposes for the directions that people's lives take will not want to step in and "play God" himself, deciding who should live and who should die, because he knows that he himself DOES NOT have some wise master plan for the course of other people's lives. Religious people will be glad to try to save lives, but will be very reluctant to intervene to trade one life for another.

Thus the actual correlation that the study is finding could well be between irreligiosity and psychopathology. Is there a way to separate out the religious from the utilitarian components of the question, in order to determine which is responsible for the correlation with psychopathology? One possible control would be to preface the trolley question with an instruction to "suppose that there is no God," but religious people might not really be able to inhabit that hypothetical, making the control ineffective. You can't very well discern someone's moral framework by asking them to assume it away.

Another possibility is to ask at what point someone would sacrifice their OWN life to save x number of innocent others. Would they trade their life for ten innocent others, a hundred, a thousand, for everybody else in the world? The lower the number the more utilitarian the subject (so long as the number is greater than one). THAT measure of utilitarian tendencies would presumably not correlate with psychopathology. Did they ask it?

It sounds like they didn't. At least, that is the gist of the authors' own critique of their own study (!), as contained in their own press release:

While some might be tempted to conclude that these findings undermine utilitarianism as an ethical theory, Prof. Bartels explained that he and his co-author have a different interpretation: "Although the study does not resolve the ethical debate, it points to a flaw in the widely-adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas to identify optimal moral judgment. These methods fail to distinguish between people who endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (like those captured by our measures of psychopathology and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse them out of genuine concern for the welfare of others." In short, if scientists' methods cannot identify a difference between the morality of a utilitarian philosopher who sacrifices her own interest for the sake of others, and a manipulative con artist who cares little about the feelings and welfare of anyone but himself, then perhaps better methods are needed.

If their questions fail to distinguish between people who would sacrifice themselves vs. people who would only sacrifice others, this would seem to be an easy lack to supply. Just add some questions about self sacrifice. And why not probe for religious views while they are at it, since a correlation between irreligious views and psychopathology is clearly part of what their initial results are measuring. Might as well try to find out how big a part.

UPDATE: I sent a note to one of the authors, professor Bartels:

How people answer "playing god" type questions will obviously be affected by whether they believe that there is already a God who is playing god.

Haven't heard back.

Flt 93 mother on Crescent jury: "I don't want to reach out to those people! THEY MURDERED MY DAUGHTER!"

2011-09-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

Alec Rawls, who has been working with Tom Burnett Sr. to stop the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93, explains the circumstances (related by Mr. Burnett in 2008, but not published until now).

Mr. Burnett had been telling his fellow design competition jurors that the crescent is a well known Islamic symbol. In addition to the giant central crescent (now called a broken circle) Tom also objected to the minaret-like Tower of Voices. "I made a point at that meeting," says Mr. Burnett, "to tell people that we have an Islamist design here that can't go forward, please, stay with me."

One of the left-wing design professionals on the jury, Tom Sokolowski (then director of Pittsburg's Andy Warhol Museum) thought that objecting to the crescent shape, just because it happens to be used by Muslims, was anti-Muslim bigotry. In a rude attempt to shut down criticism, Sokolowski actually called Mr. Burnett "asinine" for objecting to the huge Islamic-shaped Crescent. (Sokolowski would later repeat this performance to the press, calling a local preacher "asinine," "small minded," "bigoted," "repellant," and "disgusting" for protesting the Crescent design.)

It was in this atmosphere, charged with universal awareness amongst the jurors that the giant crescent was indeed a well-known Islamic symbol shape, but also charged with uncertainty as to whether people would be allowed to mention this fact, that another family member, Sandra Felt, started to explain what she liked about the Crescent design. She liked the "embracing" nature of it, says Mr. Burnett. She liked the way it "reached out..."

At which point another family member "lost it" (Mr. Burnett's description), screaming in agony: "I don't want to reach out to those people! THEY MURDERED MY DAUGHTER!"

The Park Service claims it "lost" the minutes

This extreme level of conflict on the jury over perceived Islamic symbolism should have come out years ago. The jury included a designated, non-voting, minutes taker. This was not supposed to be a private deliberation. These were volunteer citizens, doing the people's business, and the jury minutes were supposed to be made available to the public.

The Memorial Project and the Park Service claim that the minutes were "lost." No doubt, but that doesn't mean the loss was accidental, and defenders of the Crescent design had good reason to make the minutes go away. Any faithful record would have been explosive, revealing these fierce objections from multiple Flight 93 family members to the blatant Islamic symbolism in the Crescent design.

The ballot wasn't supposed to be secret either, but the Park Service refuses to account for what they claim was a 9 to 6 tally in favor of the Crescent design. What does 9 to 6 even mean on what was a ranked vote amongst three designs? Did every ballot that did not rank the Crescent last get counted as a vote in favor?

The whole thing is fishy, and there is one most obvious reason why the defenders of the Crescent might want to keep the vote details hidden. The seven family members on the jury were outnumbered by eight academics and design professionals. Thus all six of the votes against the Crescent could have come from the kin, with only Sandra Felt voting for it. This is more than just possible. It is likely.

Another mother of the murdered said only that she agreed with Mr. Burnett, and he thought that the other two men amongst the family members (Gerald Bingham and Ed Root) were on his side as well, though both have since spoken out against his ongoing effort to rescind the chosen design. Bingham and Root are angry at the anguish that the families are still being put through over the memorial design, but could such men have voted for the Crescent in the first place, in the face of that mother's anguished cry?

A vicious left-wing ideologue like Sokolowski, yes, but it seems almost inconceivable that family members could vote for a design that other family members saw as a tribute to the terrorists, or at the very least, as reaching out to Islam. Since Bingham and Root are willing to speak out, can they please tell us whether they voted for the Crescent? If they didn't, then the vote amongst the family members was at least 5 to 2 against.

In support of Powerline's John Hinderaker

The immediate impetus for making these revelations public now is to support John Hinderaker's 10th anniversary 9/11 post:

You may remember that there was considerable controversy when the design for the Flight 93 memorial was unveiled. It was called “Crescent of Embrace.” The crescent is, of course, the central symbol of Islam, and the design apparently was intended to symbolize some sort of rapprochement with that religion. The winning design was chosen by a jury, and some members of the jury, including Thomas Burnett, whose son was one of the heroes who brought down the airplane, vigorously opposed it. As I understand it, no one on the jury questioned the Muslim reference inherent in the crescent, but a majority believed that it would somehow be “healing” for the memorial to be, in part at least, a sort of tribute to Islam.

That was John's response to Tom Sr.'s revelations, and his statement is fully supportable, but for people to know why, the supporting information has to be available to everyone. Now it is.

Given the conflict between Mr. Burnett and Tom Sokolowski, there could not have been any doubt in any juror's mind that the Crescent was an Islamic symbol shape. Indeed, the jury made a specific request, not honored by the Park Service or by architect Paul Murdoch, that:

The crescent should be referred to as 'the circle or arc,' or other words that are not tied to specific religious iconography.

The only question was whether the use of this Islamic symbol shape should be seen as bad, and for a majority to favor the crescent design, a majority just have decided that it wasn't bad, even in the face of family members who found it horrific.

Maybe these left-wing design professionals actually wanted to torture the families, but the generous interpretation is the one John gives: that they saw the Crescent design as symbolizing "some sort of rapprochement" with Islam. Certainly that seems to have been Sandra Felt's idea, and at least one family member not on the jury thought it obvious that this must have been the intent of everyone who voted for the Crescent design. Mark Bingham's mother, Alice Hoglan, just wished that the outreach to Islam had been made explicit:

The Flight 93 Memorial selection committee has admitted to misgivings about the word 'crescent.' I almost wish that instead they could claim they deliberately chose the crescent design as a gesture of peace and unity with the Islamic world. If they were to make that claim, I would not object. I would welcome such a compassionate gesture.

Unfortunately, regardless of the intentions of the jurors, architect Paul Murdoch did not have a compassionate gesture in mind.

A terrorist memorial mosque

Mr. Hinderaker's anniversary post does not investigate whether the giant crescent actually does point to Mecca (allowing it to serve as an Islamic mihrab), or whether the Tower of Voices really is a year-round-accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial. Perfectly understandable, as these claims take some work to check and John had only just learned that the memorial controversy is still aboil, after thinking that it had been resolved in 2005.

But he does provide links to the evidence, and notes that some of it is accessible just by looking. Like why in the world does the Tower of Voices have an Islamic-shaped crescent on top?

The minaret-like Tower of Voices is formed in the shape of a crescent and is cut at an angle at the top so that its crescent arms reach up to the sky, as seen on mosque minarets across most of the Islamic world.

Literally dangling down below these symbolic Islamic heavens are the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes. This symbolic damnation is repeated over and over in Murdoch's design. The memorial is not just any mosque, it is an al Qaeda victory mosque.

So much for trying to reach out to Islam without bothering to vet what part of Islam is being reached out to. Nothing could be worse for the decent people of the Islamic world than to hand a great victory to the very worst in the Islamic world. That is the problem with doing this Muslim-outreach thing on the sly.

Knowing the American people would never go along with intentional Islamic outreach, the Memorial Project had to cover up what actually went on in the jury room, and once they got into cover-up mode, they just kept covering up revelation after revelation about what is actually contained in Murdoch's design.

Sokolowski's own vile cover-up: attributing the Crescent choice to the families, after vilifying family members who opposed the Crescent design

Here is how the Post-Gazette reported on local preacher Ron McRae, who believed that architect Paul Murdoch had intended the Crescent as a tribute to Islam:

It's a memorial to the terrorists," McRae said. "It's not a memorial to the innocent Americans who died there."

But Tom Sokolowski, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum, and one of the Stage II jury members, said that claim is "asinine."

"If the families of the 40 people who were killed felt this was an appropriate symbol to honor their loved ones, then I think he is delusional," he said. "To take this small-minded, bigoted view is disgusting and repellent."

Sokolowski knew that family members on the jury had taken that exact same "disgusting and repellent" view because he had said as much to their faces, and now here he was pretending that it was McRae, not himself, who was vilifying the families. Absolute moral trash of the highest order, even if he is just a feckless little worm. By intent, he is as evil as Murdoch.

Gordon Felt's defense of the Crescent design is also belied by what transpired on the jury:

Gordon Felt, whose brother, Edward, died in the crash, called the focus on the crescent an "unfortunate distraction," from the fourth anniversary memorial service tomorrow at the crash site.

Still, he continued, "It would be silly of us to have some sort of symbolism [in the memorial] that would be offensive to people."

This from the man whose own sister in law had spoken in favor of the "reaching out" symbolism of the Crescent, symbolism that was seen by other family members as intending to reach out to Islam, inspiring the most dreadful offense. All this is FACT, and Gordon Felt waves off any thought of it as "silly."

Did Gerald Bingham lie in his letter to the Memorial Project?

Mr. Bingham's letter to the Memorial Project (p. 21 here) was timed to counter Mr. Burnett's appearance at the 2008 Project meeting. It in-effect calls Mr. Burnett a liar, denying that Tom Sr. had ever raised any protest about Islamic symbolism when they served on the jury together:

Attention: Joanne Hanley
RE: Mr. Tom Burnett’s disapproval of the Memorial scheduled to be built honoring those on United Flight 93

Please read the following letter into the minutes of the Flight 93 board meeting scheduled for August 2, 2008.

I served on the Jury to select the final design for the Flight 93 Memorial along with Mr. Burnett. As I recall, Tom liked the design with a line of rocks along a 2 ½ mile walking trail. He indicated in his discussion with me that when it came to final vote that this would be the design of his choice. After the vote was taken and his design was not chosen he was very upset. Not once during these discussions did he mention that the design chosen by a majority vote of the committee had anything to do with a “symbol to the terrorist” as he is now saying.

The final design was chosen because its’ layout fit the landscape where the plane crashed and kept with the surrounding area.

I believe that Mr. Burnett has forgotten that this memorial is for 40 individual people who were on a flight taken over by terrorists and that all 40 of those people became heroes that day. All he is accomplishing at this point is causing other families aggravation and needless controversy.

We need to forge ahead with the plans as voted upon and join together as one just like our loved-ones did on United Flight 93, September 11, 2001.

Respectfully,
Gerald Bingham
Father of Mark Bingham

Mr. Bingham's denial that Tom Sr. said anything about Islamic symbolism is contradicted by numerous data points, starting with the fact that Mr. Burnett spoke out to the press immediately after Crescent design was unveiled in 2005:

Tom Burnett Sr., whose son died in the crash, said he made an impassioned speech to his fellow jurors about what he felt the crescent represented.

"I explained this goes back centuries as an old-time Islamic symbol," Burnett said. "I told them we'd be a laughing stock if we did this."

But his fellow jurors -- and it turns out, many of the other family members -- disagree with his interpretation.

"I got blown off."

But not entirely. The jurors, in their final report, suggested the name of Murdoch's design be changed from crescent to something with less religious significance, like an arc or circle.

This is corroborated by Helene Fried, who helped to manage the design competition:

Fried said the connection was raised by some history buffs on the jury during three days of deliberations last month.

Compare "old time Islamic symbol," with "history buffs." And if the Jury's statement that the Crescent name is "tied to specific religious iconography" was not in response to Mr. Burnett's protests, where did it come from? Is Bingham saying that others on the jury were more vehement than Mr. Burnett in pointing out and objecting to this tie?

Then there is Mr. Burnett's account of Tom Sokolowski calling him "asinine" for objecting to the Islamic symbolism of the crescent. This is corroborated by the fact that Sokolowski used the exact same language to condemn Pastor Ron McRae. Altogether, the evidence is overwhelming that it is Gerald Bingham who is lying when he accuses Mr. Burnett of lying.

For the sake of the families

Bingham makes his motivation clear. He opposes Mr. Burnett because:

All he is accomplishing at this point is causing other families aggravation and needless controversy.

But notice what Bingham doesn't say. He is willing to discuss how Mr. Burnett voted, but he keeps his own vote secret. (Gerald Bingham has been divorced from Mark Bingham's mother Alice Hoglan since the 1970's, so her stated approval of Muslim-outreach in the Flight 93 Memorial should not be linked to him.)

If Bingham voted for the Crescent, his secrecy about his vote would make no sense. Everyone from Sokolowski on up appeals to the will of the families. Bingham himself does this. These appeals obviously turn on whether the nine votes for the Crescent design came from family members or from the cadre of left-wing design professionals who outnumbered the families 8 to 7.

For Bingham's objective of ending the controversy, the most weighty thing he could say is that he voted for it, but he doesn't. And how could he have voted for the Crescent? This is a man who is so keen to avoid pain for the families that he is even willing to tell slanderous lies about the one family member he blames for dragging out the controversy. Surely such a man would never have voted in the first place for a design that was already causing the most extreme anguish to multiple family members.

Ed Root is also loud in his condemnations but mum about his vote

Jury member Ed Root also attacks Mr. Burnett and Mr. Rawls for continuing to oppose the Crescent design (p. 22 here):

Those who oppose this Memorial, for whatever misplaced reasons, have voiced their belief on numerous occasions. That is a striking example of the democracy we hold dear. When those unfounded beliefs turn to a zealotry that attempts to overthrow the very democratic process that selected the winning design it does a terrible disservice to those who worked long and diligently during the design process and, to me, it mocks those very 40 that we long to honor. Our nation is one of laws and due process. To let a few destroy what many have built is not democracy, but tyranny.

Yet Root too keeps his vote secret. It could just be embarrassment, not wanting to admit that he voted for such an obvious perversion, crammed to the gills with Islamic-shaped crescents. Or it could be that he was better than that, and despite the magnificence of Murdoch's Crescent, was unwilling to vote for as design that other family members found so appallingly offensive.

Mr. Burnett says he liked Mr. Root, and it is easy to see why. They both believe the passengers and crew were fighting, not just to stop the terrorist attack, but to get back to their families:

“The people of Flight 93 wanted to live,” Root said while visiting “Father Al” and the chapel in July. “There’s no doubt in my mind, they didn’t want to die.”

That distinguishes the passengers and crew from the hijackers, in Root’s eyes.

“[The passengers and flight attendants] wanted to try to get control of the plane and, if possible, to survive,” he said. “But they knew from all of the phone calls that if they didn’t do something, it would be far worse. So it really is this comparison of philosophies of a free society versus a terrorist society. One is, their cause is death; the other is, their cause is life. And that’s what makes this worthy of a national memorial. That’s what makes this worth being remembered.

Maybe he can join with Mr. Burnett in demanding an explanation for Memorial Superintendent Keith Newlin's claim that it was the passengers and crew who crashed the airplane: "They are the one’s who brought the plane down," says Newlin. This is his way of avoiding the implication that the circle-breaking crescent-creating theme of the memorial can only be depicting the actions of the terrorists. "[The terrorists] TRIED to break the peace," says Newlin, "but they failed." Surely Root would disagree.

But Root is wrong about who is refusing to respect democratic principles. Their 15 person jury does not take precedence over the will of the nation, clearly expressed in the national uproar over the original Crescent of Embrace design. The Memorial Project promised to remove the offensive features—the Islamic symbol shapes—but they never did. They just disguised them.

"The difference is at best a subtle one"

Thanks to Powerline for exposing this as well:

Crescent of Embrace, left. Circle of Embrace, right.

They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace. All they did was recolor the graphics, then add an extra arc of trees, placed to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent, that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. As a result, Murdoch's circle-breaking crescent-creating theme is now even more explicit, and so are its obvious terrorist-memorializing implications.

Will other front-line conservative blogs and publications take notice?

John Hinderaker is a top lawyer, a lifelong expert at evaluating evidence. When he announces that there is serious substance to the Flight 93 controversy, serious people ought to listen.

Everybody understands the difficulty. With multiple Flight 93 family members crying their anguish against anyone who prolongs the controversy, people need to actually look at the facts before taking a position. So take a look! MANY of the facts are perfectly straightforward and utterly damning. Not everyone can be as brave as Pamela Geller, but no one should let the whiff of danger stop them from examining this most important issue.

We're talking no less than the re-hijacking of Flight 93 by an actual al Qaeda sympathizing architect. Think 9/11 folks. The whiff of danger should be an attractant, a chance to tackle a hijacker. Those lied-to and in some cases lying family members need to have their fat pulled out of the fire. Ride to the sound of the guns.

Blogburst posters and linkers (THANKS): 1389 blog, Flopping Aces, Bob McCarty Writes. Solsticewitch13.

Muslim consultants LIED to Park Service

2011-09-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

The Park Service enlisted three outside consultants to assess whether the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 really can be seen as a giant mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. All three consultants, including two Islamic scholars, were blatantly and provably dishonest.

Consultant #1 (details below) confirmed to the Park Service that the giant crescent (now called a broken circle) does indeed point almost exactly at Mecca, then when asked about it by the press, denied that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca (insisting that "you can face any direction to face Mecca").

Consultant #2, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, lied about one of the most familiar of all Islamic doctrines, claiming that a legitimate mihrab must point exactly at Mecca. (The original Crescent of Embrace pointed less than 2° north of Mecca. The broken-circle "redesign" points less than 3° south of Mecca. Both highly accurate by Islamic standards.)

Consultant #3, a professor of sharia law at Indiana University (!), came up with an almost comically dishonest rationale for dismissing concern about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent: don't worry, no one has ever seen a mihrab anywhere near this BIG before. Not so funny is the Park Service's eagerness to embrace such a transparently ludicrous excuse.

The details are documented in a large advertisement that Alec Rawls and Tom Burnett Sr. are running this week in Somerset Pennsylvania as President Obama and the national press arrive in town for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

The press has so far been unwilling to check even the most basic facts about the memorial, like whether the giant crescent really does point to Mecca (takes about 2 minutes). Maybe charges that the Park Service and its consultants are telling easily verifiable lies will be more up their alley.

That's the hope, but a strong push might also make the difference. If you want to help, here are email addresses for the new Park Superintendent Keith Newlin and for a few Pennsylvania newspapers. You can write your own letter, or just copy the first four paragraphs above, and tell them that you want these charges checked!

Keith_Newlin@nps.gov, alec@rawls.org, swischnowski@phillynews.com, chepp@phillynews.com, ajohns@tribdem.com, cminemyer@tribdem.com, news@dailyamerican.com, skalson@post-gazette.com, TBirdsong@post-gazette.com, mcollier@sfchronicle.com, newsdesk@kpix.com

Ad copy, with links do documentation

After a brief primer on the giant Islamic crescent-and-star flag that the Park Service is building on the Flight 93 crash site, the ad exposes the three blatantly dishonest consultants that the Park Service invited to please pull the wool over their eyes:

Academic charlatan calculates the direction to Mecca, then tells the press that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca

Here's a novel way to deny that the giant crescent points to Mecca. Just deny that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca. This from the Park Service's first consultant, as reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round.

That is not an errant paraphrase. Griffith said the same thing to Tribune Democrat reporter Kirk Swauger:

He said you can face anywhere to face Mecca.

So when Muslims face Mecca for prayer, they are just deluding themselves? They could actually face any old direction and still be facing Mecca? Is there really no such thing as a direction on planet earth?

Griffith was lying of course, and the Park Service knew it, because the first thing Griffith's report on the orientation of the Crescent of Embrace does is calculate the direction from Shanksville to Mecca:

I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to Mecca of roughly 55.20°.

"Azimuth" means direction, in degrees clockwise from north. Muslims calculate the direction to Mecca by the "great circle" or "shortest distance" method ("as the crow flies," curving only in the over-the-horizon direction), and this is the method Griffith used. He also accepted that the Crescent in the original design drawings points a mere .62° away from Mecca (about a degree closer than it actually points, but no matter).

In short, Griffith confirmed the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, then denied it to the public, but the Park Service knew the truth, because they had Griffith's actual report. Thus when the Park Service repeated Griffith's denials that the giant crescent points to Mecca, they too were knowingly hiding the truth from the public. One example is the previous Park Superintendent Joanne Hanley. Asked directly whether the giant crescent points to Mecca she denied it, telling the Post Gazette that:

The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site.

The Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent is clear evidence of an enemy plot to re-hijack Flight 93. The American people need to know the facts, while these public figures have worked desperately to keep the facts from them.

Muslim consultant from MIT lied about one of the most familiar of all Islamic doctrines, claiming Mecca-orientation must be exact

After Griffith verified that the crescent/broken-circle does indeed point almost exactly at Mecca, the Park Service asked two Islamic scholars whether there was any Islamic significance to this giant Mecca-oriented crescent. Could it by any chance be seen as a giant mihrab? After all, the archetypical mihrab IS crescent shaped.

The Park Service's second consultant, a professor of Islamic and mosque architecture at M.I.T. named Nasser Rabbat, assured the Park Service that because the crescent does not point exactly at Mecca it cannot be seen as a mihrab:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

That is a bald lie, and every practicing Muslim knows it. For most of Islam's 1400 year history far-flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it developed as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca, with no requirement for precision in actually facing Mecca. Two or three degrees off is highly precise by Islamic standards. Many of the world's most famous mihrabs face 20, 30, 40 or more degrees away from Mecca and it matters not one whit.

Every practicing Muslim knows that they only need to face very roughly towards Mecca for prayer because they are constantly availing themselves of this allowance when, five times a day, they seek out walls that they can pray towards that will leave them facing roughly towards Mecca. Not having to face exactly at Mecca for prayer is one of the most familiar of all Islamic doctrines.

Saudi religious authorities confirm: mihrab orientation does NOT have to be
exact

The mihrab-orientation issue came up in 2009 when the denizens of Mecca itself realized that even their local mosques only face very roughly towards the Kaaba. is is an unusual case because the people who built these mosques couldn't say they didn't know the actual direction to the Kaaba. They could see it. No problem, according to the Saudi Islamic Affairs Ministry, which assured worshippers that, "it does not affect the prayers."

Nobody would know this better than Nasser Rabbat, who actually teaches mosque design. Indeed, he would know the full basis for the primacy of intent: that intent is given preeminence throughout Islamic teaching, not just in Mecca-orientation. For instance, Islam's first instruction to converts is that they are supposed to lie about their religion (Tabari 8.23):

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.'

What matters in Islam is not whether Muslims tell the truth, but whether their intent is to advance Islamic conquest.

Of course we made sure the Park Service saw the proof from the Saudi Islamic A airs Ministry that their Muslim consultant had lied to them about the Mecca-orientation of a mihrab needing to be exact. That was a couple of years ago now. If they had any integrity they would re-open their investigation, but then if they had any integrity they would never have handed their watchdog role over to a pair of Muslim consultants in the first place.

Islamic scholar from Indiana University says don't worry, no one has ever seen a mihrab anywhere near this BIG before

Kevin Jaques, a professor of Islamic sharia law at Indiana University, does not say whether he is Muslim (remember Tabari 8.23: converts who live amongst the infidels are supposed to hide their religion), but he did write an article right after 9/11 urging that any U.S. response should be based on the principles of sharia law, so he pretty much has to be Muslim. He is definitely an Islamophile.

Professor Jaques' report to the Park Service acknowledges that the crescent is geometrically similar to the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built, but dismisses any concern about Islamic symbolism on the grounds that no one has ever seen a mihrab anywhere near this BIG before:

... most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large as the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You know, like no one can recognize Abe Lincoln's likeness on Mount Rushmore. It's just too darn big for ordinary folks to get their tiny little minds around, and the Flight 93 crescent is much bigger than that. It's actually big enough to be easily visible from airliners like Flight 93 passing overhead. The scale would be epic beyond belief so ... don't believe it!

[Jaques full comment was left anonymously on this radical fruitcake left-wing blog (scroll to the last comment at the bottom). It can be identified as Jaques' because a chunk of the text is identical to what the Memorial Project released a few months later, naming Jaques as the source. Notice that the Park Service did not release the revealing part of Jaques' statement, where he acknowledges that the giant crescent IS similar to a mihrab, but is too big to worry about.]

Too big to worry about is not technically a lie perhaps, but it is a transparently dishonest excuse. That it was good enough for the Park Service shows how badly they wanted to be deceived. It would even be funny if the issue were not so deadly serious. Muslims are not allowed to deceive for just any reason. Orthodox doctrine tells them to deceive when by doing so they can advance the cause of Islamic conquest, and one of the oldest traditions of Islamic conquest is the building of victory mosques on the sites of their attacks.

To be completely certain that the memorial is actually intended to be a mosque one has to work through Murdoch's endless proofs of intent: his elaborate repetition of the Mecca-orientations, the year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial (tomorrow's ad), the 38 instead of 40 Memorial Groves (Thursday's ad), etcetera. But the Park Service's extensive lying to the public about the most basic facts of the design should by itself be a clarion call to everyone to insist on an independent investigation. The Service’s own internal investigation was nothing but proven lies from beginning to end. That is not acceptable!

Neither is the news media's consistent refusal to check and report the facts. News-people all know that Muslims face Mecca for prayer, yet the Post-Gazette did not question Griffith's claim that "anything can point to Mecca, because the earth is round." They too are complicit in foisting this lie on the public. Every reporter who reads this ad and does not try to fact-check our easy-to-verify claims is part of the problem.

What this means, people, is that you have to stand up on your own. Your opinion leaders have abandoned you to this Islamic assault, but if you do stand up to your supposed betters, if you check the facts for yourselves and demand that the press and the government conduct proper investigations, then Murdoch's plot can still be undone. The hijacker can still be ousted from the cockpit. Now that would be a fitting memorial to Flight 93.

Alec Rawls and Tom Burnett Sr.

UPDATE: some much appreciated help in spreading the word

Many thanks to Pamela Geller for letting her many wonderful readers know about our ad campaign.

Also nice boosts from 1389 Blog, from The Atheist Conservative, from Talk Wisdom, from Defending Crusader, from Findalis, from creeping sharia, and from Nice Deb. Thanks!

How unemployment insurance insures unemployment

2011-08-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

White House spokesman Jay Carney claims that paying people not to work is one of the best ways to create jobs:

It is one of the most direct ways to infuse money directly into the economy.

How about not taking it out in the first place? Carney apparently thinks the money appears by magic, but it is actually extracted in the most perverse way possible. Here is the beginning of Michigan's Unemployment Insurance information sheet for employers:

When a worker becomes separated from his or her job and files for unemployment benefits, the worker’s past employer or employers will probably be charged for any benefits that may be paid.

With slight differences, that statement applies to every state. Some are a little more rigorous, like Georgia:

In Georgia, employers pay the entire cost of unemployment insurance benefits [paid to former employees].

It's not a cost sharing system. It is not society that picks up the tab for this social insurance. In general, employers are on the hook for all payments made to their own former employees. Just like when you get in a car accident, it is your own insurance rates that go up. Psuedo-insurance you might call it. But in the case of unemployment insurance this is taken to the extreme. The unemployment benefits come straight out of former employers' bank accounts.

As a consequence, when the duration of unemployment insurance is doubled, as Obama pushed through in his inaugural "stimulus" package, the unemployment insurance liability faced by employers was doubled, and the only way they could avoid that liability was not to hire, so that's what happened: no hiring since February 2009.

If you were going to be on the hook for half an employee's salary for a full year for anyone you had to let go, would you hire? It is an insanely high penalty. $20,000 of liability for any $40,000/yr employee you take on. Absolute murder for the economy.

Add that the actual hit, when it lands, is going to land on precisely those companies that are already struggling to stay afloat. That's why they are laying off workers. So not only are firms not hiring, but when they try to save themselves by cutting back their workforces, they get pushed into bankruptcy by still having to pay half the laid off worker's salaries for up to a year.

Add also the perverse incentives for employees: that quite a few people will prefer not to work when they can get paid for staying home. It's a triple whammy.

The White House is blissfully ignorant of the destructiveness of the funding source for this job killer, ignorant enough that Spokesman Jay Carney could actually spew contempt at the reporter who questioned how paying people to stay home creates jobs:

I would expect a reporter from the Wall Street Journal would know this as part of the entrance exam.

Carney just passed his exit exam: time for this Baghdad Bob to leave.

"Briareus" claims Flt93 crescent does NOT point to Mecca

2011-08-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Duped by the Memorial Project's 2007 "White Paper" apparently.

Briareus calls himself an "occasional contributor" to the Diary of Daedalus blog, which has done important work in documenting Charles Johnson's efforts to flush his former (anti-jihadist) self down the memory hole. If it was just himself that Johnson was flushing down the toilet, few would care, but he is also flushing the work of thousands of commentators. A lot of genuinely important fact-checking, investigation and documentation was conducted in the LGF community's epic comment threads.

Of particular relevance for present purposes, it was five "lizardoids" who first suggested, then discovered, then verified the Mecca-orientation of the giant Islamic-shaped crescent in the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93. How ironic that someone who has been helping to preserve these people's contributions is now trying to deny them.

Briareus' recent comments at Atlas Shrugs actually constitute a pretty serious ad hominem attack against me, but they only include one substantive claim:

"Rawls' strongest argument is that the "crescent" points toward Mecca. IT DOESN'T."

No need for quotes on "crescent"--they named it Crescent of Embrace--and it is trivially easy to verify that this giant crescent does in fact point within a couple of degrees of Mecca.

Just use any online Islamic prayer-direction calculator to print out the direction to Mecca ("qibla" in Arabic) from Somerset PA. Place this print-out over the Crescent site-plan on your computer screen, and you'll see that the Mecca-line almost exactly bisects the giant crescent:

A person standing between the most protruding tips of the crescent structure and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow), will be facing almost exactly in the “qibla” direction. To be precise, the crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1° (calculations here).

The Memorial Project's 2007 White Paper

So where did Briareus get the idea that the crescent does NOT point to Mecca? He isn't explicit, but he does mention an "independent study" he read, and links to the copy of the Memorial Project "White Paper" that I have posted on my Crescent of Betrayal website. This joint effort by the Park Service and the Memorial Project is anything but independent. It was developed internally by the very people I had been criticizing as a ploy to put my criticisms to rest. Still, it is very worth reading. The details it contains are utterly damning, to the Park Service and to the memorial.

On the Mecca-orientation of the crescent, they cite one Dr. Daniel Griffith, a professor of "geospatial information" at the University of Texas, who confirms that the giant crescent does indeed point almost exactly at Mecca. He just tries to deny that this implies any Islamic meaning or intent: "just because calculations are correct does not make the resulting numbers meaningful."

Obviously the meaning of a crescent that points almost-exactly at Mecca is not a question that falls within Dr. Griffith's field of expertise. Briareus can approve Griffith's ignorant declaration that the Mecca-orientation doesn't mean anything if he wants to, but on the point at hand--does the crescent point to Mecca--Griffith and the White Paper confirm this orientation, they do not refute it, as Briareus seems to think.

Hey, let's leave it up to a couple of pious Muslims

The two other consultants on the White Paper are a pair of pious Muslims, both of whom are indeed knowledgeable about the meaning of a Mecca-oriented crescent, and both of whom are transparently dishonest with the Park Service. One, a professor of Islamic and mosque architecture at MIT named Nasser Rabbat, claims that the Crescent of Embrace cannot be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built) because it does not point exactly at Mecca. To constitute a legitimate mihrab, the crescent could not be off at all in its orientation, or so Rabbat claims:

"Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees."

That is a bald lie. For most of Islamic history far-flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it developed as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca, with no requirement for precision in actually facing Mecca.

The Flight 93 crescent faces within 2 (now 3) degrees of Mecca, which is highly precise by Islamic standards. Many of the world's most famous mihrabs face 20, 30, 40 or more degrees away from Mecca and it matters not one whit. Further, all practicing Muslims know that they only need to face very roughly towards Mecca for prayer because they are constantly availing themselves of this allowance when, five times a day, they seek out walls that they can pray towards that will leave them facing roughly towards Mecca. Not having to face exactly at Mecca for prayer is one of the most familiar of all Islamic doctrines.

Saudi religious authorities confirm: mihrab orientation does NOT have to be exact

The mihrab-orientation issue came up recently in Saudi Arabia when the denizens of Mecca itself realized that even their local mosques only face the Kaaba very roughly. This is an unusual case because the people who built these mosques couldn't say they didn't know the actual direction to the Kaaba. They could SEE it. No problem according to the Saudi Islamic Affairs Ministry, which assured worshippers that “it does not affect the prayers.”

Nobody would know this better than Rabbat, who teaches mosque design at MIT. Indeed, he would know the full basis for the primacy of intent: that intent is given pre-eminence throughout Islamic teaching, not just in Mecca-orientation. For instance, Islam's first instruction to converts is that they are supposed to lie about their religion (Tabari 8:23). What matters is not whether they tell the truth, but whether their intent is to advance Islamic conquest ("for war is deception").

Consulting with the Muslim Brotherhood

Rabbat knowingly lied about one of the most familiar of all Islamic doctrines. That's a fact. He HAD to know that he was giving the Park Service misinformation. The most likely explanation for why he lied is that he was following this other basic Islamic instruction: to deceive in the service of Islamic conquest. The evidence is that Rabbat is an Islamofascist.

What did the Park Service expect, going to an orthodox Muslim for advice? Don't they know that Osama bin Laden was a perfectly orthodox Wahabbist? The Park Service might as well have asked the Muslim Brotherhood what they thought of Murdoch's al Qaeda victory mosque. (Just fine and dandy, of course.)

There are plenty of moral Muslims, but they are not orthodox. If they are orthodox then they are Islamic supremacists and supporters of conquest by terror, because that is what the orthodoxy demands. Muhammed: "I have been made victorious with terror" (Sahih Bukhari 4.52.220).

I have shown the Park Service the proof of how their devout Islamic consultant lied to them about mihrab orientation having to be exact but they pretend they can't hear. So Rabbat is a jihadi and the involved Park Service personnel are a bunch of cowards. What is Briareus' excuse?

A lot of people have just been duped. Maybe he is one of them. Whatever the case, he really ought to rethink.

We all know who broke the circle of peace on 9/11

2011-08-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

It was 19 Islamic terrorists. That makes the broken-circle memorial to Flight 93 a memorial to the terrorists, who are depicted not only as smashing our circle of peace, but as leaving a giant Islamic crescent-and-star flag in its place:

They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace: a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, pointing to Mecca.

The damned thing is actually an al Qaeda victory mosque, with the Mecca-oriented crescent as its mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built.

That is the short version of an advertisement that started running in western Pennsylvania newspapers last week. Alec Rawls sends along this update on the effort to stop the crescent mosque.

10th anniversary ad campaign now underway

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review recently solicited Tom Burnett Senior's response to some new design images for the Flight 93 memorial. When he said that the so-called redesign leaves all of the terrorist memorializing features intact, editors instructed reporter Kari Andren to leave his remarks out. They preferred un-interrupted praise from the same few family members who always speak up for the broken-circle design.

The people of Pennsylvania deserve to see what their information gate-keepers don't want them to know, so Mr. Burnett and his backers decided to begin their 10th anniversary ad campaign a few weeks early. The first full-page color ad just ran in the Somerset Daily American and will appear in two other local papers next week.

For a PDF of the ad copy, click on the thumbnail below, or scroll down for the same content formatted for browsing. If anyone wants to help fund additional advertising, a very generous soul has offered to match all donations up to a total of $5000.

More explicit than a giant Islamic crescent-and-star flag?

As the ad-headline notes, the Circle of Embrace "redesign" only accentuates the circle-breaking crescent-creating theme of the original Crescent of Embrace. Mr. Burnett's full remarks explain:

The only visible change is the addition of an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace: a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

People also need to know that a Mecca-direction indicator is the central feature around which every mosque is built. It is called a "mihrab," and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.

So the terrorists broke our circle of peace on 9/11, and all that remains standing is the central feature of a mosque. The inclusion of a broken-off part of the circle only accentuates this terrorist-memorializing symbolism. It bastardizes what my son Tom and the other heroes of Flight 93 accomplished. The crescent/broken-circle design is a desecration of sacred ground.

Tom Burnett Sr. Northfield MN

Park Service calls the circle "broken"

A proper newspaper would ask the Park Service if the extra arc of trees really does represent a broken-off part of the circle. Still, people can easily verify this crucial fact for themselves. It is right on the Park Service's own website. Their "questions about the design" page asks "Is this circle 'broken' at all?" Their answer is yes:

... the circle is symbolically "broken" or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.

The locations of these two breaks in the "circle of embrace" are spelled out:

...first, where the flight path of the plane went overhead (which is the location of the planned memorial overlook and visitor center), and second, where the plane crashed at the Sacred Ground (depicted by a ceremonial gate and pathway into the Sacred Ground).

These are the two ends of the extra arc of trees, which starts near the original upper crescent tip and continues down to the crash site. So Mr. Burnett is right. Both ends of the new arc of trees are explicitly broken off. The unbroken part of the circle—what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11—is just the original Islamic-shaped Crescent of Embrace that the Park Service promised to change.

To illustrate, the ad includes a side-bar of graphics, showing just what is changed and what is not changed in the memorial. This is slightly complicated by the fact that the Park Service pretended that they were going to make one very big cosmetic change that they are not actually making, but a few pictures easily tell the tale.

The Park Service pretended the outside of the crescent would be filled in with a forest of trees

A publicity shot of the original Crescent of Embrace design shows what appears to be a bare-naked Islamic crescent-and-star flag planted atop the crash site:

When this blatant Islamic symbolism caused an uproar, architect Paul Murdoch re-worked his mock-up to show a forest of additional trees surrounding the outside of the original Crescent:

Only the inner arc of the crescent remains visible, making the new Circle of Embrace name seem reasonable. But none of these surrounding trees made it into the actual Circle of Embrace design drawings. (The "Stage 1" drawings, encompassing the area seen in these images, were released in 2009.)

The Park Service may eventually let the bare field grow in with trees, but this is not a change in the design. The only actual change is the extra arc of trees, seen below in orange. It explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle:

What the Circle of Embrace actually looks like. The original giant crescent still sits naked on an open field and the flight path still "breaks the circle" at the upper crescent tip.

Remove the explicitly broken off part of the circle (in orange), and what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11 is the same giant Mecca-oriented crescent the Park Service promised to change. It constitutes a classic "mihrab," the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built, and will form the centerpiece for the world’s largest mosque.

Who broke the circle of peace on 9/11?

When the "Crescent of Embrace" was unveiled as the winning design, architect Paul Murdoch explained the crescent name and the crescent shape by saying that the circle was broken on 9/11, leaving only a part of the circle still standing: the giant crescent. The fact that this circle-breaking crescent-creating theme remains completely intact in the broken-circle design demands the question of WHO is being depicted as breaking the circle of peace on 9/11.

The final section of the ad points out that there can only be one answer. We all know who broke the peace on 9/11. Thus the memorial can only be depicting the actions of the terrorists, who are seen not only as smashing our circle of peace, but as replacing it with their own crescent and star flag.

With the media censoring all criticism, people who don't like all this blatant Islamic symbolism need a way to signal each other directly, so the ad finishes with a handy dandy flyer that readers can post on windows, walls, bulletin boards etcetera:

If you want to put a few up yourself, click the image above for a printable PDF, complete with urls for our petition to stop the memorial and for more information. And here is an ad-copy version that anyone can run in their own local paper (the free weeklies can be pretty reasonable).

As Flight 93 showed, just because the hijacker has control of the cockpit doesn't mean he can't still be stopped.

A double leverage trucker's hitch that comes completely undone once the tension is off of it

2011-07-08T02:30:00.000-07:00

Ace of Spades linked a double leverage truckers' tie-off knot and asked if this is most awesome knot on the planet. Almost. The version he linked starts by putting a slip-knot-loop into the rope a couple feet before the tie-off hook is reached, then running the remaining rope down around the tie-off hook, back up through the loop, then back down to the tie-off hook. Pulling the rope will then apply double leverage. When you've got the rope as tight as you want, secure it to the tie off hook with a couple of half hitches.

That part is plenty fast. The slow part is undoing it. After releasing the half-hitches, the rope has to be pulled back through the slip-knot-loop. Then the loop itself, which can cinch up pretty tight, has to be untied.

Another version, the version I learned decades ago when I drove a lumber truck, gets its mechanical advantage from a loop that remains in place only so long as there is tension on it. Once you undo your half-hitches and release the tension on the rope, you just give the rope a shake and the loop comes undone. The whole shebang just pulls out straight.

Below are some written instructions that I left as a comment on the original truckers-hitch post. I'll add pictures if I can get around to it, but I think the verbiage here is actually followable:

With the far end of your rope secured to one of the downward pointing tie-off hooks or rope-hooks on the far side of your truck, pull your rope over your load and towards one of your near-side rope-hooks.

Using your left thumb and forefinger, hold the rope at a point about 3 feet above or before the hook. Now with your right hand, come about a foot further down the rope and lift that spot on the rope up to your left thumb and forefinger so that you form a loop hanging off to the right of your left hand. Don't cross the rope over itself or twist it. Just bring it up and hold it next to the first passing of the rope.

Now go down a foot again, lift that point of the rope up, and wind it twice around the loop that you have hanging from your left hand. The wind should go over the top (or clockwise as seen from the right). Very important: the second wind should be TO THE LEFT of the first wind (further up the loop). This is where the knot's holding power comes from. The pull down on the second wind sucks it in tight behind the first wind so that it can't pop out.

Depending on the thickness of your rope, this double wind will use up somewhere between an eighth and a half of that last foot of rope you grabbed. The rest of that foot of rope will be hanging down, forming another little loop, while the continuing part of the rope hangs down from your right hand.

From here, take the index finger or the ring finger of your right hand and push a loop of the continuing part of the rope towards yourself and to the left, through the loop that is left over from the winding action. Now reach around and grab this loop that you just pushed through the previous loop and pull it down over (under?) your rope-hook.

Pull down on the free end of the rope it will pull this last loop upwards, snugging it up onto the rope-hook with the same two-times-mechanical-advantage as with the slip-knot-based truckers-hitch. To finish off either version of the truckers' hitch just pull down hard on the free end of the rope and secure it to your rope-hook with a couple of half-hitches.

To undo, just undo the half-hitches and let out enough slack to take the last loop off of the tie-off hook. Then shake and tug the free end of the rope and the whole shebang comes out. This is the advantage of the wind-it-over-twice method. When you are done, you don't have to pull the free end of your rope back through the slip-knot-loop or undo any slip-knot.

As the author of the slip-knot version wrote, it takes a bit of practice get a feel for where to place the first loop with these kinds of knots. The more give there is in your load and in your rope, the further you have to start from your destination rope-hook.

Also, you can create 4 times mechanical advantage by repeating this knot, in which case you have to start WAY back from your tie-off hook. I have used the quadruple leverage method a couple of on items that can't be gripped firmly without substantial squishing--like cushioned furniture.

The shake-out or double-wind version of the truckers-hitch doesn't LOOK reliable, and indeed, from the front of the knot, it is actually pretty easy to push the inner winding over the outer winding so that the whole thing comes undone, even when there is substantial load on it. But if nobody is standing there pushing the front of the inner winding out over the outer winding then there is no pressure in that direction.

All the pressure that the knot itself creates is at the BACK of the inner winding, where downward force is pulling the inner winding hard to the inside of the outer winding. Thus the knot should be secure, and in practice it seems to be. I have used this hitch thousands of times, including on plenty of heavy loads, and it has NEVER come undone on me.

Very fast, very easy to learn, and very reliable in my long experience. Highly recommended.

Is the Corps of Engineers trying to forcibly revert Missouri River floodplain to its natural state?

2011-06-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

That's the eye-popping thesis suggested by Joe Herring at American Thinker, and his prima facie evidence, while thin, is also hard to get around. The key fact is this:

On February 3, 2011, a series of e-mails from Ft. Pierre SD Director of Public Works Brad Lawrence sounded the alarm loud and clear. In correspondence to the headquarters of the American Water Works Association in Washington, D.C., Lawrence warned that "the Corps of Engineers has failed thus far to evacuate enough water from the main stem reservoirs to meet normal runoff conditions. This year's runoff will be anything but normal."

For the why, Herring quotes the Corps' Master Water Control Manual:

Releases at higher-than-normal rates early in the season that cannot be supported by runoff forecasting techniques is inconsistent with all System purposes other than flood control. All of the other authorized purposes depend upon the accumulation of water in the System rather than the availability of vacant storage space. [Emphasis added.]

Originally, these other purposes were water supply, river navigation and recreation, none of which are served by failing to leave enough reservoir space for normal runoff in a high runoff year. But through thirty years of environmentalist domination of the federal bureaucracy, additional purposes have gained ever higher priority. The Missouri River should be "natural":

The Clinton administration threw its support behind the change, officially shifting the priorities of the Missouri River dam system from flood control, facilitation of commercial traffic, and recreation to habitat restoration, wetlands preservation, and culturally sensitive and sustainable biodiversity.

Herring even quotes a Corps biologist celebrating the current flood:

The former function of the river is being restored in this one-year event. In the short term, it could be detrimental, but in the long term it could be very beneficial."

Sherlock Holmes' method of exclusion

The direct evidence here is merely suggestive. "Habitat restoration" is a high priority goal and there is a bit of overt cheerleading for flooding. Far from conclusive, but how else to explain not vacating even a normal amount of reservoir space in a peak snowpack year?

Climate contrarians know to be wary of argument by the principle of exclusion. That's what the CO2 alarmists do. Eyes wide shut to extensive evidence that 20th century warming was caused by an 80 year grand maximum of solar-magnetic activity, they claim warming has to be due to CO2 because every other possible explanation has been ruled out.

But in The Case of the Waterlogged Corps(e), Sherlock's method of exclusion is reasonable. The usual problem of failing to identify all the possibilities doesn't apply because the list of agency objectives is specified. Of these, "habitat restoration" is the only one that is served by the Corps' actions.

The other possibility is that these government functionaries failed to notice that they had not vacated even the usual amount of space from their reservoirs, but low as expectations are for government work, this isn't really plausible. Such a mistake would have to be motivated, and as Herring points out, we know these people's motivations. Almost to a man they are eco-leftists, and we know the eco-leftist position on rivers.

It isn't the dot-connecting that is outlandish, it is the dots. People who expressly want to see floodplains returned to their natural state followed policies that guaranteed massive flooding. Herring is right: this calls for investigation.

Rational environmentalism

To the extent that risk of flooding can be lowered by flood-control infrastructure, the extra building on floodplains that this risk-reduction encourages is perfectly rational. What induces irrational building on flood plains is the federal government's longstanding policy of providing subsidized or implicit flood insurance.

After major flooding the government is prone to declare a disaster area. Even if the flood victims are not made whole, their losses are substantially mitigated, reducing the natural disincentive to build in flood zones. Get rid of this market interference and flood damages would be much diminished. In particular, flood plains would end up relegated mainly to agricultural uses that can weather occasional flooding with limited damage.

Seasonal flooding can actually be good for farmland so there is room for a win-win solution where flood control systems are set up to inundate large agricultural bottom lands as necessary to provide room for floodwaters. Instead of farmland on the outside of our riparian cities, substantial amounts of the best farmland would be on the inside of these cities. We see some of this now, but it would go much further if the government limited itself to infrastructure and did not interfere in markets. Safer for people, better for farming, better for migratory birds and the environment, and better for taxpayers.

Not easy to get there, after people have been building on the strength of government promises of relief for many decades, but it is a solution that is rational both economically and environmentally. Unfortunately, this is not what the eco-freaks want.

Instead of "natural" in the market-driven or liberty-driven sense, they embrace a sans-human naturalism, and it looks like the administrators of our flood-control infrastructure are in this camp. They have been hostile to flood-control infrastructure per se since the Clinton era, which is the only obvious explanation for why this infrastructure has been so completely misused.

Crossposted at WUWT.

UPDATE: Well, it turns out I did omit one of the Corp’s objectives: hydroelectric generation. Thanks to Harry for bringing up the new factor of dam operators being required to hold back hydroelectric generation to make room for wind-power when the windmills are in operation. The specific complaint of Pierre’s water manager was about the high level of lake Oahe. The Oahe dam is a major provider of electricity to the north-central U.S. and the Dakotas are the site of substantial new wind farming. Could this account for the deviation from past norms?

If so, wind-hydro effects could also have contributed to the flooding of Minot North Dakota. The main dam on the Souris River is the Canadian Rafferty-Alameda project, which in addition to providing flood control and water supply also supplies water to the Shand Power Station in lower Saskatchewan. The Canadians have also been going whole hog on windfarms, which would have displaced hydro. Were the Canadian dams fuller than usual as a result? Worth looking into.

The implications for wind-farming would be devastating. The water for the hydro that they replace will sometimes NEED to be released, meaning that if it is not used for hydro, it will have to be released without generating any electricity, so that wind generated electricity will at these times have zero value. If in order to avoid that implication they are holding the water in reservoirs when it needs to be released, then the wind farming becomes responsible for the resulting flooding.

Facepalm: More casual death wishes from Australia

2011-06-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Alec Rawls

Jill Singer, long time Aussie talking head:

I'm prepared to keep an open mind and propose another stunt for climate sceptics - put your strong views to the test by exposing yourselves to high concentrations of either carbon dioxide or some other colourless, odourless gas - say, carbon monoxide.

You wouldn't see or smell anything. Nor would your anti-science nonsense be heard of again. How very refreshing.

Her mind is OPEN to wishing for the deaths of those who disagree with her ignorant presumptions. All in good fun of course! But this totalitarian closed-mindedness really does seem to strike her as a kind of open mindedness. She finds the thought "refreshing."

Maybe its just an Aussie thing, like the forced tattooing of political opponents. And Singer does make a serious charge. She accuses Aussie business leader David Murray of a very unscientific leap:

Murray states there's no link between global warming and carbon dioxide emissions because carbon dioxide is necessary for life, colourless and odourless - and therefore can't be considered a pollutant.

If Murray actually said that because CO2 is necessary for life it cannot cause warming then flamboyant gibes would be merited and the rest of us could only drop our faces into our own palms. We would never hear the end of it, sigh. But the charge is false. David Murray and his interviewer both clearly distinguished the pollution question from the warming question:

DM: [Carbon dioxide] has got nothing to do with pollution.

Financial Review interviewer Colleen Ryan: What do you mean?

DM: Well, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is colourless, odourless. It is not a pollutant.

FR: Yes, but it is still bad for greenhouse gases.

DM: No it isn't. It is a tiny proportion of greenhouse gases.

FR: So, if you believe in the warming of the planet, it is a tiny proportion of that?

DM: There is no correlation between warming and carbon dioxide.

FR: So if you accept the warming of the planet, what should you do?

DM: Take measures to stop the effects of it.

FR: What about the melting of the glaciers?

DM: They're not. The amount of ice in the world is slightly increasing. It's not decreasing. It's just staggering. Staggering. So you call something a pollutant, which it is not. It is actually necessary for life. And then the people who disagree with you, you call skeptics or scumbags or doubters or something.

Murray gave a perfectly logical reason for dismissing the greenhouse effects of CO2 as dangerous and it has nothing to do with CO2 not being a pollutant. CO2's greenhouse effects can be dismissed because they are so tiny!

Exactly right. The only way CO2 warming could be dangerous is if it were dramatically amplified by water vapor feedback effects, in which case our climate would be radically unstable and sneezing would be dangerous. In other words, the only way CO2 is dangerous is if EVERYTHING is dangerous, and there is no evidence for such instability.

Singer is really just lying when she says that Murray denies a link between global warming and carbon dioxide "because carbon dioxide is necessary for life." After reading his remarks on a conservative Aussie site she accuses Murray of an unscientific leap that he absolutely did not make, then she uses this deception to justify her happy death wish for everyone who doesn't toe the party line.

If casual death wishes really were just an Australian mannerism they would appear on both sides, but Murray, for example, is the opposite of Singer. He appeals to Singer et al. to stop calling their opponents dirty names and she responds by dreaming of his annihilation. Nope, it's a believer thing, as believers in authoritarian religions have always wanted to expunge heretics.

The only twist on this old story is how today's eco-religious believers are able to imagine themselves on the side of science even as they do things like knowingly deceive their readers about what their opponents are saying. What does science mean to them if it doesn't require truth? And if they don't care about the truth, how can they possibly think they are right?

Because their religious authorities tell them so. Facepalm.

As the heat continues to go missing, expect to see a lot more of this:

Cross-posted at WUWT.

UPDATE: evidence vs. models

A Watts Up commenter thought I was being as silly as Singer with my "sneeze" remark. Actually, I was being serious. My reply:

Steveta thinks it is silly of me to suggest that if CO2 is dangerous then sneezing is dangerous. I'll admit I was taking the point to an extreme when I went all the way down to a sneeze, but isn't the general point correct?

Best estimates are that the water vapor feedback effect is negative: that it dampens temperature forcings rather than amplifying them. If we lived in a very different world, where instead of being dampened, forcings were amplified at least a couple of times over (the IPCC assumption), then otherwise transitory fluctuations could have grand effects.

As it is, the big internal variations--the ocean oscillations--can have profound effects on surface temperatures over periods of years (El Nino) and even decades (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). Switch damping for amplification and these swings could be an order of magnitude deeper and longer. Weather would become climate. What is normally a sneeze (for the planet) would send the planet careening off in a warming or cooling direction.

Is this an unfair argument? After all, the IPCC claim is that we already live in a world with strong water vapor feedbacks. They don't see themselves as talking about a different world, but they ought to, because they are not actually looking at our world at all.

The IPCC does not estimate water vapor feedbacks (or climate sensitivity) directly. Rather, they calculate amplification effects to be whatever they would have to be in order to explain 20th century warming as being driven by CO2's tiny forcing effect. This is what Gavin Schmidt et al. are doing when they calibrate their GCMs to the data, and it is the GCMs that the IPCC is using to make all of its scary predictions.

But model-fitting isn't evidence. The fact that by tweaking hundreds of variables they can get an elaborate model to roughly track a century of temperature history is not evidence that their model is correct, any more than the fact that the geocentric model of the universe could be propped up with epicycles was evidence for the geocentric model.

So yes it is fair to say that they are looking at a different world than the one we live in, because they don't even TRY to look at the real world. They only look at what the world would have to be in order for 20th century warming to have been caused by CO2. They are looking only at this object of their own mental obsession, NOT at the evidence.

Fingerprints of global weirding weirdos found on CO2 "hotspot"

2011-06-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Newsweek's egregious call to Weather Panic (previous post) took the handoff from Katharine Hayhoe, an invoker of "global weirding" from Texas Tech, and ran with it. Hayhoe had called a single incident of freak weather in west Texas "the new normal," prompting Newsweek "science editor" Sharon Begley to suggest that this freak weather would in the future be seen in all places at all times. Eeeehaw!

In addition to citing self-proclaimed global weirdist Katharine Hayhoe, Begley's subtitle refers to "freak storms" and her article is accompanied by a photographic "freak weather gallery." Yup, Newsweek is all aboard the weirdo bandwagon.

So how do the weirdos justify blaming every weird weather event on people? Just ask leading global weirdist Donald Wuebbles, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois. He dusted for fingerprints and the culprit was revealed:

Climate does of course vary naturally, but the large changes we have been seeing in recent decades have the fingerprints of human emissions as being the primary driving force.

The IPCC did try to claim that their predicted CO2 warming "fingerprint"—a "hotspot" in the upper troposphere—had been found, but that claim has long since been debunked, as recounted in David Evan's recent piece in the Financial Post. (Evans also has a more formal presentation with citations).

If the CO2 explanation for late 20th century warming were correct, the hotspot would have to be there. The CO2 theory produces a testable hypothesis and the empirical falsification of this hypothesis proves that the theory is wrong. Ditto for the "global weirding" that stands upon it.

Trenberth is a weirdo too

Kevin Trenberth follows the Weirdo Wuebbles model for blaming every extreme weather event on human-caused global warming. We know that global warming is proceeding apace, says Trenberth (despite humanity's failure to cause any 21st century warming), so pitch it in strong:

“Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”

Trenberth's call to blame every bad thing on CO2 was used by the leftists at Think Progress to blame this year's killer tornadoes on global warming, just like Begley and Newsweek. It's one big global weirdo convention on the eco-left.

Video of Bastardi discussing the actual correlates of tornado activity

"We've got record breaking snow on the ground in the mountains in the Pacific Northwest. If you look at the tornado statistics, it's either cold or getting colder when this kind of thing goes on. And to see people say... well, because it's warm...

You need a clash in the atmosphere to do this. Do you know, according to the satellites, we've had the greatest drop in temperatures ever recorded between fifteen and twenty-five thousand feet in the middle of the troposphere since last year? And we've never seen something like this.

Now granted, we didn't have the satellites trained on the atmosphere back in the 1970s and 1950s, but there's been a tremendous drop in mid-level temperatures and that comes southeast into warm humid air, and what do you think is going to happen?"

All that is actually getting weirder are the claims of the warming alarmists. Foot soldiers of panic like Sharon Begley are not proceeding just on their own ignorant initiative. They are following the marching orders of unscientific scientists like Wuebbles, Trenberth, and Heyhoe.

I come not to praise Stephen Schneider, but to bury him

It is appropriate that Trenberth presented his sweeping justification for alarmism in a talk dedicated to the late Stephen Schneider, the spiritual grandfather of politicized eco-science.

It was Schneider who in the 1970's tried to blame global cooling since the mid-forties on the human burning of fossil fuels. When the planet started to warm a few years later he smoothly switched to blaming global warming on fossil fuels. It never mattered to him if any of it was true. His objective was to curtail the human burning of fossil fuels and any excuse would do. Honesty was not a requirement, as he explained to Discover Magazine:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.

If what one wants to be effective at is discovering and advancing truth, there is no such conflict. It is only ulterior motives, like the unplugging of industrial capitalism, that can only be effectively promoted through dishonesty. Bad behavior springs from bad motives. Unfortunately, we've let a lot of bad people gain a lot of power, and it's going to be very difficult to dislodge them.

Addendum: Roy Spencer on the hotspot fingerprint

Roy denies that the absence of an upper troposphere hotspot invalidates the CO2 theory of late 20th century warming, but this conclusion seems to be a non sequitur:

The famous “hot spot” seen in [AR4 figure 9.1] has become a hot topic in recent years since at least two satellite temperature datasets (including our UAH dataset), and most radiosonde data analyses suggest the tropical hotspot does not exist. Some have claimed that this somehow invalidates the hypothesis that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for global warming.

But the hotspot is not a unique signature of manmade greenhouse gases. It simply reflects anomalous heating of the troposphere — no matter what its source. Anomalous heating gets spread throughout the depth of the troposphere by convection, and greater temperature rise in the upper troposphere than in the lower troposphere is because of latent heat release (rainfall formation) there.

For instance, a natural decrease in cloud cover would have had the same effect. It would lead to increased solar warming of the ocean, followed by warming and humidifying of the global atmosphere and an acceleration of the hydrologic cycle.

Thus, while possibly significant from the standpoint of indicating problems with feedbacks in climate models, the lack of a hotspot no more disproves manmade global warming than the existence of the hotspot would have proved manmade global warming. At most, it would be evidence that the warming influence of increasing GHGs in the models has been exaggerated, probably due to exaggerated positive feedback from water vapor.

Roy’s “thus” at the beginning of the last paragraph refers to his assertion that warming caused by a decrease in clouds (as would result from an increase in solar activity under Henrik Svensmark’s GCR-cloud theory) would create an upper troposphere hotspot, so long as there is a positive water vapor feedback effect. This does demonstrate that the existence of a hotspot would not uniquely implicate the CO2 warming theory, but it does not demonstrate that late 20th century warming could be due to CO2 in the absence of a hotspot. In fact the opposite is known to be true.

CO2 by itself does not trap enough heat to account for 20th century warming. The CO2 warming theory depends on a strong water vapor amplification mechanism, where the initial CO2 temperature forcing evaporates water into atmosphere which traps yet more heat, creating yet more water vapor, etcetera. As Roy notes, it is this “warming and humidifying of the global atmosphere” and the resulting “acceleration of the hydrologic cycle” that creates the upper troposphere hotspot. Ergo, no hotspot means no powerful water vapor amplification mechanism and no CO2-based account of late 20th century warming.

Svensmark’s theory, on the other hand, does not imply that there will be a hotspot. It is merely compatible with a hotspot. In the presence of a powerful water vapor feedback effect, the temperature forcing created by a GCR-cloud mechanism would create an upper troposphere hotspot. If the water vapor feedback effect is weak or negative, temperature forcing from the GCR-cloud mechanism will not cause a hotspot, but it could still account for 20th century warming just by the magnitude of its un-amplified forcing.

ThanksRoy, for all of your great work. Hope you don’t mind this bit of editing help.

Yes, impossibly stupid "weather panic" IS the new normal

2011-06-04T12:48:00.000-07:00

Is Newsweek actually heeding the instruction of Linnaeus to "know thyself"? Their latest panic-mongering cover seems pretty self aware.

Panic is a loss of reason:

pan•ic (pænɪk), noun: a sudden, overpowering terror, often affecting many people at once.

Verb: to feel or cause to feel panic

Synonyms: go to pieces, overreact, become hysterical, have kittens

Yes, Newsweek "science editor" Sharon Begley is all het-up with teh kittehz, and offers readers a guide for how they too can work themselves into a state of unreasoning fear. A few details from her grab bag of hysteria provide an interesting look into this pathological mind.

Drier and wetter, IN THE SAME PLACE

This is just strange:

Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state's trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water.

Higher temperatures (unlikely to be coming, now that the sun has quieted down) would probably change some weather patterns, making some places wetter and some places drier. Overall increased evaporation would make for more rain, but this rain might miss California, as a scare story from 2009 alleged.

That was KTVU's tropopause height extravaganza, put together by "science editor" John Fowler. There is speculation that the width of the tropical weather zone is a function of the height of the top of the troposphere, which has risen since 1958. If continued warming continues to raise the tropopause, we're doomed:

Fowler: Since 1960, the sand colored desert regions have crept northward, according to this research, now up to about Los Angeles. They could cover the [San Francisco] Bay Area in a few decades.

All of the world's increasing rainfall is apparently going to land on Seattle. But at least they weren't claiming that the same part of California was going to become both drier and wetter. Where did Begley get the idea that global warming will cause flooding and droughts in the same place?

A little poking around on the Newsweek website (now a subsidiary of The Daily Beast) turns up Begley's source, another "new normal" story posted on May 21st, linking the following "global weirding" drivel from Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a "new normal" of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday."It's a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we're seeing," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.

"We are used to certain conditions and there's a lot going on these days that is not what we're used to, that is outside our current frame of reference," Hayhoe said on a conference call with other experts, organized by the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.

An upsurge in heavy rainstorms in the United States has coincided with prolonged drought, sometimes in the same location, she said, noting that west Texas has seen a record-length dry period over the last five years, even as there have been two 100-year rain events.

So west Texas had a record five year drought punctuated by two 100-year rain events. Is that even possible? Wouldn't the rainfall from two 100-year events be enough to lift the rainfall total of that five year period far above the lowest totals on record? In any case, this is the epitome of local weather, and Sharon Begley is extrapolating it to the entire world. Unusual weather seen in one place one time will now be seen everywhere all the time. Some science editor! And I thought Fowler was bad.

But let's give Katharine Hayhoe credit as well. What did she expect when she called a single cherry-picked five year span of weather in one location "the new normal"? Begley is just following Hayoe's instructions for inciting irrational PANIC. Still, aren't science editors supposed to, you know, edit? When they see something scientifically insane, aren't they supposed to cut it out, not extrapolate it as world-covering truth?

Blast from the past: in 1974 Newsweek blamed tornadoes on global cooling

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds — the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world. Indeed it is the widening of this cap of cold air that is the immediate cause of Africa's drought. By blocking moisture-bearing equatorial winds and preventing them from bringing rainfall to the parched sub-Sahara region, as well as other drought-ridden areas stretching all the way from Central America to the Middle East and India, the polar winds have in effect caused the Sahara and other deserts to reach farther to the south. Paradoxically, the same vortex has created quite different weather quirks in the U.S. and other temperate zones. As the winds swirl around the globe, their southerly portions undulate like the bottom of a skirt. Cold air is pulled down across the Western U.S. and warm air is swept up to the Northeast. The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms—the Midwest's recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.

That's a lot more plausible than tornadoes being caused by "global weirding." As our friend Dr. Spencer notes, it is influxes of cold air that tend to create tornadoes. What keeps getting weirder are the claims of our global weirding scientists.

Cross-posted at WUWT. Here I have broken the post into two parts. This is part one. Part two follows above.

“May snow depths are deeper than anything we have seen in the last 45 years”

2011-05-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

That’s from the avalanche center in the Tetons, and here is a current web-cam view up Yosemite Valley towards still-closed Tioga Pass (in the left background):

AP has a nice roundup of late snow and snowpack news (including the Teton quote). Just weather. No mention of climate. Nothing this time about snow and cold being caused by global warming. Now if we could just get the press to do the same when there is a regional hot spell. Still, it’s progress. Remember the spinning on last winter’s snowzilla?

Most amusing was Al Gore’s quote from “the scientific community“:

A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.

A click on Gore’s link showed “the scientific community” to be Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. Gore should also have quoted Page’s credentials, which Page listed in his next line:

That’s simple science even for me, a guy whose scientific education pretty much ended with the old “Watch Mr. Wizard” TV show and a subscription to Popular Mechanics.

Unfortunately, Gore could have quoted some actual scientists to the same effect, as Andrew Bolt quoted the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research:

The overall warming of the earth’s northern half could result in cold winters… Recent severe winters like last year’s or the one of 2005-06 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it.

But as Bolt also quoted, the Potsdammer’s IPCC bible had predicted the opposite:

Fewer cold outbreaks; fewer, shorter, intense cold spells / cold extremes in winter” as being consistent across all model projections for Europe

What, are there no takers this time around? Are they tiring of the ridicule?

(Cross-posted at WUWT on 5/29/11. I didn't get around to posting it here until 6/5/11, but I set the post date here to 5/30/11 so that readers won't get confused about the dates on the referred to weather events.)

“People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful.”

2011-05-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

Andrew Orlowski at the UK Register has an anecdotal account of Downing College’s skeptics-vs-believers mash-up. Ace of Spades pulled the juiciest bit:

In short, the day lined up Phil Jones, oceanographer Andrew Watson, and physicist Mike Lockwood, the latter to argue that the sun couldn’t possibly have caused recent warming. He was followed by the most impressive presentation from Henrik Svensmark, whose presentation stood out head and shoulders above anyone else. Why? For two reasons. The correlations he shows are remarkable, and don’t need curve fitting, or funky statistical tricks. And he has advanced a mechanism, using empirical science [image above], to explain them.

At the other end of the scale, by way of contrast, the Met’s principle research scientist John Mitchell told us: “People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful,” adding, “Our approach is not entirely empirical.”

Yes, you could say that.

Ken Haapala on the history of models vs. empirical evidence

He notes that the opponents of Galileo held the attractiveness of a model to be a kind of evidence that could outweigh against the empirical evidence that Galileo amassed. Worth reading.

Lockwood’s failed argument against a solar explanation

Orlowski on Lockwood:

The strongest argument, according to Lockwood, for the sun not being a driver in recent climatic activity is that “it has been going in the wrong direction for 30 years.”

Hmmm. So as soon as solar magnetic activity passed its peak, when it was still at some of the highest levels ever recorded, these very high levels of solar activity could no longer have caused warming?

As I have noted a number of times, this argument depends on an unstated assumption that, by 30 years ago (by 1980 or so), ocean temperatures had equilibrated to whatever forcing effect the 20th century’s high level of solar activity might be having. Otherwise the continued high level of forcing would continue to create warming until equilibrium was reached, regardless of whether solar activity had peaked yet. (The actual peak seems to have been solar cycle 22, from 1986-96, not 1980, as Lockwood claims.)

When I pressed Lockwood on his implicit equilibrium assumption he justified it by citing evidence that the planet's surface temperature response to solar activity peters out (as measured by decorrelation) within a few years:

Almost all estimates have been in the 1-10 year range.

But decorrelation between surface temperatures and solar activity is very different from equilibrium. All decorrelation is measuring is the rapid temperature response of the upper ocean layer when solar activity rises or falls. That rapid response indicates that the sun is indeed a powerful driver of global temperature, but it says next to nothing about how long it takes for heat to carry into and out of deeper ocean layers.

This was brought out by AGW believers like Gavin Schmidt who are concerned about the energy balance implications of equilibration-speed. In a simple energy balance model, rapid equilibration implies (other things equal) that climate sensitivity must be low. Since belief depends on high climate sensitivity, the rapid equilibration claim cited by Lockwood had to be shot down, which was managed quite successfully (ibid).

In sum, Lockwood’s rapid equilibrium assumption is dead and buried, leaving him no grounds for dismissing a solar explanation for post 70′s warming. I’ll keep an eye out for video of Lockwood’s presentation, but I doubt he mentioned the rapid equilibrium assumption upon which his argument depends.

More punk students

Remember these graduate student “climate scientists,” going all Clockwork Orange for the planet or something:

Sounds like they made an appearance at Downing College too:

The audience had been good enough to heed Howard’s opening advice that “if anybody mentions Climategate, they’ll be evicted”. Nobody ambushed the CRU crew all day – it was all very polite. I noted that the skeptics made a point of listening politely to the warmists, and applauding them all. A group of students and a few others, simply giggled and mocked the skeptics, however from start to finish. One of their tutors (I presume) was in hysterics all day.

Give ‘em an A. They learned their “observational evidence is not very useful” lesson well.

(Posted a couple weeks ago at WUWT. I'm being kind of lackadaisical about updating things here.)

Solar warming and ocean equilibrium, Part 3: Solanki and Schuessler respond

2011-04-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

Solar physicist Sami Solanki and his colleagues at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research helped pioneer the use of cosmogenic isotopes from ice cores to create a proxy record for solar activity going back hundreds and thousands of years. Together with a group led by Ilya Usoskin at University of Oulu in Finland, Solanki describes "grand maximum" levels of solar activity from 1920 to 2000, with the sun being especially active since the 1940's.

Comparing this solar record to temperature, these scientists find a strong correlation between solar activity and temperature persisting until quite recently. For example, over the period of the instrumental temperature record, a 2004 paper by Solanki and Krivova finds that the correlation is quite close, "however":

However, it is also clear that since about 1980, while the total solar radiation, its ultraviolet component, and the cosmic ray intensity all exhibit the 11-year solar periodicity, there has otherwise been no significant increase in their values. In contrast, the Earth has warmed up considerably within this time period. This means that the Sun is not the cause of the present global warming.

But does this conclusion follow? Their own evidence says that until 1980 the dominant driver of climate was solar activity (and their longer-term temperature-proxy comparisons say the same thing). So how can they assert that two decades of the highest solar activity on record can't be the cause of concurrent warming?

I suggested to Solanki and his colleagues that they must be implicitly assuming that by 1980 ocean temperatures had already equilibrated to whatever forcing effect the high level of solar activity was having. Otherwise warming would continue until equilibrium had been reached. Yet equilibration is never mentioned in any of their analyses.

Many thanks to Sami Solani and Manfred Schuessler for their important reply, finally making the implicit explicit. Here is the main part of their answer:

Dear Mr. Rawls,

You have raised an interesting question. Correlations between solar activity indices and climate assume that there is a constant lag between solar and climate variability (this is implicit in the nature of correlations). In some cases authors even implicitely or explicitely assume that this lag is zero, i.e. that the relationship is instantaneous. If we consider the period of time up to ca. 1970, then this lag lies roughly between 0 and 12 years (e.g., Solanki and Krivova 2003). Newer reconstructions, such as that of Krivova et al. (2007) tend to favour the lower lag. If we consider the period since 1970 alone, then the solar irradiance hasn't shown an increasing trend, but rather a decreasing one, in contrast to global temperature, which has increased substantially. If this increase is due to the hypothetical influence of the oceans, as you suggest, then of course these short lag times would not be realistic. This, however, would mean that the relatively good correlation between solar and climate variability prior to 1970 would also have to be discarded as due to chance and would cease to be of relevance. Lags cannot be changed at will, certainly not without a good physical reason, i.e. one based on computations, that at least approximately model the Earth system's behaviour.

To clarify, I did not quite suggest that post-1970 warming might be due to the influence of the oceans. I suggested that it could be due to the sun. The hypothesis isn't that the oceans were giving up stored heat content but that they were continuing to absorb solar-driven heat. (Under the GCR-cloud theory, high solar wind blows the clouds away, increasing the amount of solar shortwave that pours into the oceans.)

Since Solanki and Schuessler see this slow-ocean-equilibration story as incompatible with short correlation lags, they are clearly identifying short lags with rapid equilibration. The question is whether this identification makes sense. If the equilibration process is not rapid, does it really mean that the short correlation lag between solar activity and temperature that these folks discovered must be mere chance? A simple counter-example shows the answer to be no.

Day vs. season

If you map the diurnal correlation between the strength of the sun's rays on your back porch and temperature in the shade, you will find that the maximum correlation occurs with only a few hour lag. At noon, sun strength is no longer increasing, while the rate of temperature increase is near its maximum, with temperatures continuing to rise until sometime mid-afternoon.

So you find this very strong and rapid correlation between sunlight and backyard temperature. You've been plotting it for a few months, and now it's June. There is no significant change day by day in the strength of the sun's rays, or their duration, yet somehow peak backyard temperatures keep going up. The end of June is hotter than the beginning of June. Do you say that this can't be explained by the sun because solar forcing has not been rising and you know that the temperature response to the sun is only a few hours?

This is exactly what Solanki et al. are doing. Instead of day vs. season they are finding temperature signals within the solar cycle and from one solar cycle to the next and assuming that these same response times apply to longer term changes in solar activity. But climate systems don't just respond on one time scale.

This is what came out of the previous post, where Mike Lockwood cited the rapid response time that was estimated by Stephen Schwartz on the assumption that the planet can be represented by the simplest possible energy balance model with only one heat sink. Make the model one step more realistic by giving it two heat sinks, so that the sun and the atmosphere do not warm the entire ocean at once, but warm an upper layer which in turn, over time, transfers heat to a deeper ocean layer, and everything changes. Time to equilibrium from a step-up in forcing could be centuries, but as Daniel Kirk-Davidoff's analysis of the two heat-sink model shows, a correlation study that does not span several times the period of any long term fluctuation in forcing will only pick up the relatively rapid response time of the upper ocean layer, revealing next to nothing about time-to-equilibrium for the full climate system.

The one thing we can say from the observed rapid temperature response to short term fluctuations in solar activity is that solar activity clearly does drive temperature. Add that the sun does not warm the ocean all at once—that the deeper ocean is warmed over time by the upper ocean as the two heat-sink model describes—and we can expect that the demonstrated warming effect of solar activity will cause long-period deeper ocean warming when there is a longer period rise in solar activity.

That is, the short time-lag correlation actually implies that longer period responses should also be taking place, once the most obvious steps to model realism are incorporated. Thus no, the finding of a short correlation lag does not contradict a solar explanation for late 20th century warming but supports it, just as the suns' warming of the day supports a solar explanation for seasonal change.

This is why it is so important that widespread but unstated assumptions of rapid equilibration be made explicit. The assumption does not stand up to scrutiny, yet it has been allowed to escape scrutiny even as it does the heavy lifting in many scientists' dismissal of a solar explanation for late 20th century warming. So again, many thanks to Doctors Solanki and Schuessler for making this assumption explicit.

GCM equilibration time

Here is the rest of the Solanki-Schuessler response:

You can rightly argue that a simple linear analysis, such as that carried out by Solanki and Krivova 2003, does not fully reflect the complex behaviour of the Earth system. Indeed, such an analysis does not replace introducing the solar irradiance record into a GCM (General Circulation Model), which includes the coupling between the oceans and the atmosphere, and computing the influence of the Sun's behaviour. Such studies have not, to our knowledge, reached conclusions that differ significantly from those reached by the simple correlation analysis. If anything, they tend to indicate that the influence of the Sun is even smaller than the correlation studies suggest. The attached review paper gives a good and up-to-date overview of the state of research on Sun-climate relations. Figs. 27 and 28 (pp. 36 and 37) of this paper show that GCM models support the assumption of a short time lag, i.e., quasi-instantaneous reaction of the global temperatures on changes in forcing (as is well known to be the case for major volcanic eruptions, for instance). We think that this is due to the fact that only the mixed layer of the oceans is involved in climate variations due to short-term (decadal to centennial) variations of the forcing, so that the global equilibrium time of the oceans is irrelevant - but you may want to contact a climatologist if you wish to obtain more detailed information.

We hope to have been of help.
Sincerely yours,

Sami Solanki and Manfred Schuessler

What I have been able to glean about equilibration time in the IPCC GCMs is rather different from what Solanki and Schuessler assert. This came up in Part 2, where Schwartz' short estimated time constant implied a low climate sensitivity, prompting a vigorous response from Gavin Schmidt and other "consensus" GCM compilers. Foster, Schmidt et al. said that in contrast to Schwartz' 4-6 year time constant, the AR4 model "takes a number of decades to equilibrate after a change in external forcing."

In a later RealClimate post, Schmidt suggests that:

Oceans have such a large heat capacity that it takes decades to hundreds of years for them to equilibrate to a new forcing.

The review paper that Solanki and Schuessler cite is Solar Influences on Climate, by Gray et al. 2010. S&S cite Gray's Figures 27 and 28 as support for quasi-instantaneous temperature adjustment in response to a change in forcing, but it is hard to see the connection. The figures are from AR4 and just show the amount of recent warming that is attributed to CO2 in the AR4 models. That would be all of it, post 1955:

Figure 27 [Gray]. Global mean temperature anomalies, as observed (black line) and as modelled by thirteen climate models when the simulations include (a) both anthropogenic and natural forcings and (b) natural forcings only. The multi-model ensemble mean is shown in grey, and individual simulations are shown in colour, with curves of the same colour indicating different ensemble members for the same model.

Are S&S interpreting Figure 27a as showing a fit between forcings and temperature (in which case the close fit to observed temperatures would indeed indicate a rapid response to forcing)? But this isn't what the graph shows at all. It compares observed temperatures to the temperatures that the AR4 model predicts in response to 20th century forcings. Equilibration speed (or lapse time) is one of the variables that modelers tweak to achieve a fit between predicted and actual temperatures.

It is not surprising that modelers manage to achieve a reasonably close fit over their calibration period (the 20th century). Every detail of their very complex model is tailored to achieve this. They presumably could achieve this level of fit in many ways. The fact that they do achieve it doesn't say anything about how they achieve it. The equilibration speed could be anything.

Of course we do know a few fun facts about how the AR4 models are fit to the data. In particular, we know that the IPCC engages in blatant question begging by including only one solar variable in its AR4 models: Total Solar Irradiance, which is parameterized by the IPCC as having 1/14 the warming effect of CO2 (0.12 vs 1.66 W/m²).

Gray's Figure 27 makes the impact of this assumption graphic. When total solar effects are fixed on the input side of the model to have 1/14th the warming power of CO2, the model output "shows" CO2 to be the dominant climate driver. It's called "garbage in, garbage out."

Data vs. assumption

The question is why Solanki and Schuessler are satisfied with the IPCC's TSI-only characterization of solar effects when their own data screams out so strongly against it. They look at how little solar effect on climate is built into the AR4 model and say:

If anything [these models] tend to indicate that the influence of the Sun is even smaller than the correlation studies suggest.

The discrepancy between their correlation studies and the AR4 model can be seen in the glaring difference between 1955-1985 in Figure 27b above and in Figure 2b from Solanki and Krivova:

The black line is instrumental temperature. Dotted lines are inverted GCR (reconstructed, and as measured in Climax Colorado since 1953). Close correlation between solar activity and temperature continues to 1985.

Henrik Svensmark finds a still longer correlation. After controlling for PDO, he finds that the short term correlation between solar activity and temperature continues to the present day:

FIG. 2 [Svensmark]: ... The upper panel shows observations of temperatures (blue) and cosmic rays (red). The lower panel shows the match achieved by removing El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation, volcanic aerosols, and also a linear trend (0.14 ± 0.4 K/Decade).

There is no way that the high degree of short term correlation between solar activity and temperature observed by Solanki and Schuessler pre-1980 can be explained by the tiny variations in Total Solar Insolation (about a tenth of a percent over the solar cycle). Yet when they see how the IPCC's TSI-only model under-predicts their own observations, they don't question the IPCC's fixing of total solar effects at 1/14th the strength of CO2, but count this garbage-in model as evidence against their own data. That's not right guys. Data is supposed to trump theory/assumption. That's the definition of the scientific method.

Solanki, Schuessler and their colleagues have done some of the most important climate research of the last decade, creating several of the paleo-reconstructions of solar activity that make extended solar-climate studies possible. Unfortunately, they are misinterpreting the correlation between solar activity and temperature. Short correlation lags do not imply rapid equilibration. They just reflect the rapid temperature response of the upper ocean layer, leaving the equilibration speed of deeper ocean layers an open question. Thus short correlation lags provide no grounds for dismissing a solar explanation for late 20th century warming. Scientists who have been presuming otherwise should be willing to reconsider.

[Cross-posted at Watts Up With That?]

Does solar activity have to KEEP going up to cause warming? Mike Lockwood responds

2011-03-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

Posted at WUWT a couple of days ago. That original post included some discursions that I have decided are better placed at the end with the other addenda, so this is the optimized version.

My first post on this subject remarked on the number of scientists who assert that late 20th century global warming cannot have been driven by the sun because solar activity was not trending upwards after 1950, even though it remained at peak levels. To follow up, I asked a dozen of these scientists whether solar activity has to KEEP going up to cause warming?

Wouldn't that be like saying you can't heat a pot of water by turning the flame to maximum and leaving it there, that you have to turn the heat up gradually to get warming?

My email suggested that these scientists (more than half of whom are solar scientists) must be implicitly assuming that by 1980 or so, ocean temperatures had already equilibrated to the 20th century's high level of solar activity. Then they would be right. Continued forcing at the same average level would not cause any additional warming and any fall off in forcing would have a cooling effect. But without this assumption—if equilibrium had not yet been reached—then continued high levels of solar activity would cause continued warming.

Pretty basic, but none of these folks had even mentioned equilibration. If they were indeed assuming that equilibrium had been reached, and this was the grounds on which they were dismissing a solar explanation for late 20th century warming, then I urged that this assumption needed to be made explicit, and the arguments for it laid out.

I have received a half dozen responses so far, all of them very gracious and quite interesting. The short answer is yes, respondents are for the most part defending (and hence at least implicitly acknowledging) the assumption that equilibration is rapid and should have been reached prior to the most recent warming. So that's good. We can start talking about the actual grounds on which so many scientists are dismissing a solar explanation.

Do their arguments for rapid equilibration hold up? Here the short answer is no, and you might be surprised to learn who pulled out all the stops to demolish the rapid equilibration theory.

From "almost immediately" to "20 years"

That is the range of estimates I have been getting for the time it takes the ocean temperature gradient to equilibrate in response to a change in forcing. Prima facie, this seems awfully fast, given how the planet spent the last 300+ years emerging from the Little Ice Age. Even in the bottom of the little freezer there were never more than 20 years of "stored cold"? What is their evidence?

First up is Mike Lockwood, Professor of Space Environment Physics at the University of Reading. Here is the quote from Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich that I was responding to (from their 2007 paper, "Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature"):

There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth's pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.

The estimate in this paper is that solar activity peaked in 1985. Would that really mean the next decade of near-peak solar activity couldn't cause warming? Surely they were assuming that equilibrium temperatures had already been reached. Here is the main part of Mike's response:

Hi Alec,

Thank you for your e-mail and you raise what I agree is a very interesting and complex point. In the case of myself and Claus Froehlich, we did address this issue in a follow-up to the paper of ours that you cite, and I attach that paper.

One has to remember that two parts of the same body can be in good thermal contact but not had time to reach an equilibrium. For example I could take a blow torch to one panel of the hull of a ship and make it glow red hot but I don't have to make the whole ship glow red hot to get the one panel hot. The point is that the time constant to heat something up depends on its thermal heat capacity and that of one panel is much less than that of the whole ship so I can heat it up and cool it down without an detectable effect on the rest of the ship. Global warming is rather like this. We are concerned with the temperature of the Earth’s surface air temperature which is a layer with a tiny thermal heat capacity and time constant compared to the deep oceans. So the surface can heat up without the deep oceans responding. So no we don’t assume Earth surface is in an equilibrium with its oceans (because it isn't).

So the deep oceans are not taking part in global warming and are not relevant but obviously the surface layer of the oceans is. The right question to ask is, "how deep into the oceans do centennial temperature variations penetrate so that we have to consider them to be part of the thermal time constant of the surface?" That sets the ‘effective’ heat capacity and time constant of the surface layer we are concerned about. We know there are phenomena like El-Nino/La Nina where deeper water upwells to influence the surface temperature. So what depth of ocean is relevant to century scale changes in GMAST [Global Mean Air Surface Temperature] and what smoothing time constant does this correspond to?

......

In the attached paper, we cite a paper by Schwartz (2007) that discusses and quantifies the heat capacity of the oceans relevant to GMAST changes and so what the relevant response time constant is. It is a paper that has attracted some criticism but I think it is a good statement of the issues even if the numbers may not always be right. In a subsequent reply to comments he arrives at a time constant of 10 years. Almost all estimates have been in the 1-10 year range.

In the attached paper we looked at the effect of response time constants between 1-10 years and showed that they cannot be used to fit the solar data to the observed GMAST rise. Put simply. The peak solar activity in 1985 would have caused peak GMAST before 1995 if the solar change was the cause of the GMAST rise before 1985.

This is a significant update on Lockwood and Fröhlich's 2007 paper, where it was suggested that temperatures should have peaked when solar activity peaked. Now the lagged temperature response of the oceans is front and center, and Professor Lockwood is claiming that equilibrium comes quickly. When there is a change in forcing, the part of the ocean that does significant warming should be close to done with its temperature response within 10 years.

The Team springs into action, ... on the side of a slow adjustment to equilibrium?

Professor Lockwood cites the short "time constant" estimated by Stephen Schwartz, adding that "almost all estimates have been in the 1-10 year range," and indeed, it seems that rapid equilibration was a pretty popular view just a couple of years ago, until Schwartz came along and tied equilibration time to climate sensitivity. Schwartz 2007 is actually the beginning of the end for the rapid equilibration view. Behold the awesome number-crunching, theory-constructing power of The Team when their agenda is at stake.

The CO2 explanation for late 20th century warming depends on climate being highly sensitive to changes in radiative forcing. The direct warming effect of CO2 is known to be small, so it must be multiplied up by feedback effects (climate sensitivity) if it is to account for any significant temperature change. Schwartz shows that in a simple energy balance model, rapid equilibration implies a low climate sensitivity. Thus his estimate of a very short time constant was dangerously contrarian, prompting a mini-Manhattan Project from the consensus scientists, with the result that Schwartz' short time constant estimate has now been quite thoroughly shredded, all on the basis of what appears to be perfectly good science.

Too bad nobody told our solar scientists that the rapid equilibrium theory has been hunted and sunk like the Bismarck. ("Good times, good times," as Phil Hartman would say.)

Schwartz' model

Schwartz' 2007 paper introduced new way of estimating climate sensitivity. He showed that when the climate system is represented by the simplest possible energy balance model, the following relationship should hold:

τ = Cλ^-1 where

τ is the time constant of the climate system (a measure of time to equilibrium); C is the heat capacity of the system; and λ^-1 is climate sensitivity

The intuition here is pretty simple (via Kirk-Davidoff 2009, section 1.1 ). A high climate sensitivity results when there are system feedbacks that block heat from escaping. This escape-blocking lengthens the time to equilibrium. Suppose there is a step-up in solar insolation. The more the heat inside the system is blocked from escaping, the more the heat content of the system has to rise before the outgoing longwave radiation will come into energy balance with the incoming shortwave, and this additional heat increase takes time.

Time to equilibrium will also be longer the larger the heat capacity of the system. The surface of the planet has to get hot enough to push enough longwave radiation through the atmosphere to balance the increase in sunlight. The more energy gets absorbed into the oceans, the longer it takes for the surface to reach that necessary temperature.

τ = Cλ^-1 can be rewritten as λ^-1 = τ /C, so all Schwartz needs are estimates for τ and C and he has an estimate for climate sensitivity.

Here too Schwartz keeps things as simple as possible. In estimating C, he treats the oceans as a single heat reservoir. Deeper ocean depths participate less in the absorbing and releasing of heat than shallower layers, but all are assumed to move directly together. There is no time-consuming process of heat transfer from upper layers to lower layers.

For the time constant, Schwartz assumes that changes in GMAST (the Global Mean Atmospheric Surface Temperature) can be regarded as Brownian motion, subject to Einstein's Fluctuation Dissipation Theorem. In other words, he is assuming that GMAST is "subject to random perturbations," but otherwise "behaves as a first-order Markov or autoregressive process, for which a quantity is assumed to decay to its mean value with time constant τ."

To find τ, Schwartz examines the autocorrelation of the temperature time series and looks to see how long a lag there is before the autocorrelation stops being positive. This time to decorrelation is the time constant.

The Team's critique

Given Schwartz' time constant estimate of 4-6 years:

The resultant equilibrium climate sensitivity, 0.30 ± 0.14 K/(W m-2), corresponds to an equilibrium temperature increase for doubled CO2 of 1.1 ± 0.5 K. ...

In contrast:

The present [IPCC 2007] estimate of Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity, expressed as the increase in global mean surface temperature for doubled CO2, is [2 to 4.5].

These results get critiqued by Foster, Annan, Schmidt and Mann on a variety of theoretical grounds (like the iffyness of the randomness assumption), but their main response is to apply Schwartz' estimation scheme to runs of their own AR4 model under a variety of different forcing assumptions. Their model has a known climate sensitivity of 2.4, yet the sensitivity estimates produced by Schwartz' scheme average well below even the low estimate that he got from the actual GMAST data, suggesting that an actual sensitivity substantially above 2.4 would still be consistent with Schwartz' results.

Part of the discrepancy could be from Schwartz' use of a lower heat capacity estimate than is used in the AR4 model, but Foster et al. judge that:

... the estimated time constants appear to be the greater problem with this analysis.

The AR4 model has known equilibration properties and "takes a number of decades to equilibrate after a change in external forcing," yet when Schwartz' method for estimating speed of equilibration is applied to model-generated data, it estimates the same minimal time constant as it does for GMAST:

Hence this time scale analysis method does not appear to correctly diagnose the properties of the model.

There's more, but you get the gist. It's not that Schwartz' basic approach isn't sensible. It's just the hyper-simplification of his model that makes this first attempt unrealistic. Others have since made significant progress in adding realism, in particular, by treating the different ocean levels as separate heat reservoirs with a process of energy transport between them.

Daniel Kirk-Davidoff's two heat-reservoir model

This is interesting stuff. Kirk-Davidoff finds that adding a second weakly coupled heat reservoir changes the behavior of the energy balance model dramatically. The first layer of the ocean responds quickly to any forcing, then over a much longer time period, this upper layer warms the next ocean layer until equilibrium is reached. This elaboration seems necessary as a matter of realism and it could well be taken further (by including further ocean depths, and by breaking the layers down into sub-layers).

K-D shows that when Schwartz' method for estimating the time constant is applied to data generated by a two heat-reservoir model it latches onto the rapid temperature response of the upper ocean layer (at least when used with such a short time series as Schwartz employs). As a result, it shows a short time constant even when the coupled equilibration process is quite slow:

Thus, the low heat capacity of the surface layer, which would [be] quite irrelevant to the response of the model to slowly increasing climate forcing, tricks the analysis method into predicting a small decorrelation time scale, and a small climate sensitivity, because of the short length of the observed time series. Only with a longer time series would the long memory of the system be revealed.

K-D says the time series would have to be:

[S]everal times longer than a model would require to come to equilibrium with a step-change in forcing.

And how long is that? Here K-D graphs temperature equilibration in response to a step-up in solar insolation for a couple different model assumptions:

"Weak coupling" here refers to the two heat reservoir model. "Strong coupling" is the one reservoir model.

The initial jump up in surface temperatures in the two reservoir model corresponds to the rapid warming of the upper ocean layer, which in the particular model depicted here then warms the next ocean layer for another hundred plus years, with surface temperatures eventually settling down to a temperature increase more than twice the size of the initial spike.

This bit of realism changes everything. Consider the implications of the two heat reservoir model for the main item of correlative evidence that Schwartz put forward in support of his short time constant finding.

The short recovery time from volcanic cooling

Here is Schwartz' summary of the volcanic evidence:

The view of a short time constant for climate change gains support also from records of widespread change in surface temperature following major volcanic eruptions. Such eruptions abruptly enhance planetary reflectance as a consequence of injection of light-scattering aerosol particles into the stratosphere. A cooling of global proportions in 1816 and 1817 followed the April, 1815, eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Snow fell in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and portions of Massachusetts and New York in June, 1816, and hard frosts were reported in July and August, and crop failures were widespread in North America and Europe – the so-called "year without a summer" (Stommel and Stommel, 1983). More importantly from the perspective of inferring the time constant of the system, recovery ensued in just a few years. From an analysis of the rate of recovery of global mean temperature to baseline conditions between a series of closely spaced volcanic eruptions between 1880 and 1920 Lindzen and Giannitsis [1998] argued that the time constant characterizing this recovery must be short; the range of time constants consistent with the observations was 2 to 7 years, with values at the lower end of the range being more compatible with the observations. A time constant of about 2.6 years is inferred from the transient climate sensitivity and system heat capacity determined by Boer et al. [2007] in coupled climate model simulations of GMST following the Mount Pinatubo eruption. Comparable estimates of the time constant have been inferred in similar analyses by others [e.g., Santer et al., 2001; Wigley et al., 2005].

All of which is just what one would expect from the two heat reservoir model. The top ocean layer responds quickly, first to the cooling effect of volcanic aerosols, then to the warming effect of the sun once the aerosols clear. But in the weakly coupled model, this rapid upper-layer response reveals very little about how quickly the full system equilibrates.

Gavin Schmidt weighs in

Gavin Schmidt recently had occasion to comment on the time to equilibrium:

Oceans have such a large heat capacity that it takes decades to hundreds of years for them to equilibrate to a new forcing.

This is not an unconsidered remark. Schmidt was one of co-authors of The Team's response to Schwartz. Thus Mike Lockwood's suggestion that "[a]lmost all estimates have been in the 1-10 year range," is at the very least passé. The clearly increased realism of the two reservoir model makes it perfectly plausible that the actual speed of equilibration—especially in response to a long period forcing—could be quite slow.

Eventually, good total ocean heat content data will reveal near exact timing and magnitude for energy flows in and out of the oceans, allowing us to resolve which candidate forcings actually force, and how strongly. We can also look forward to enough sounding data to directly observe energy transfer between different ocean depths over time, revealing exactly how equilibration proceeds in response to forcing. But for now, time to equilibration would seem to be a wide open question.

Climate sensitivity

This also leaves climate sensitivity as an open question, at least as estimated by heat capacity and equilibration speed. Roy Spencer noted this in support of his more direct method of estimating climate sensitivity, holding that the utility of the fluctuation dissipation approach:

... is limited by sensitivity to the assumed heat capacity of the system [e.g., Kirk‐Davidoff, 2009].

The simpler method we analyze here is to regress the TOA [Top Of Atmosphere] radiative variations against the temperature variations.

Solar warming is being improperly dismissed

For solar warming theory, the implications of equilibration speed being an open question are clear. We have a host of climatologists and solar scientists who have been dismissing a solar explanation for late 20th century warming on the strength of a short-time-to-equilibrium assumption that is not supported by the evidence. Thus a solar explanation remains viable and should be given much more attention, including much more weight in predictions of where global temperatures are headed.

If 20th century warming was caused primarily the 20th century's 80 year grand maximum of solar activity then it was not caused by CO2, which must be relatively powerless: little able either to cause future warming, or to mitigate the global cooling that the present fall off in solar activity portends. The planet likely sits on the cusp of another Little Ice Age. If we unplug the modern world in an unscientific war against CO2 our grandchildren will not thank us.

Addenda

There is more to Lockwood's response, and more that I want to say about it, but this post is already quite long, so for anyone who wants to comment, please don't feel that due diligence requires reading this additional material.

Addendum 1: A slow equilibration process does not necessarily support solar-warming theory and a fast equilibrium process does not necessarily support the CO2-warming theory

In my enthusiasm to pitch the importance of being explicit about the role of equilibrium, my email suggested that it could provide a test of which theory is right. If these scientists could show that the temperature gradient of the oceans had reached equilibrium by 1970, or 1986, then their grounds for dismissing a solar explanation for late-20th century warming would be upheld. If equilibrium was not reached, that would support the solar warming theory.

Well, to some extent maybe, but equilibrium alone doesn't really resolve the issue. This was the second topic of Professor Lockwood's response:

Incidentally, one thing I cannot agree on in your e-mail is that the response time is the only thing separating solar and anthropogenic “theories”. Our understanding of greenhouse trapping (by water vapour, CO2, methane etc) predicts the right level of GMAST (without it the GMAST would be -21 degrees) and it also predicts that changing from 280 ppm by volume of CO2 to 360 (which has happened since pre-industrial times) will have caused a GMAST change by a sizeable fraction of a degree – the science of the radiative properties of CO2 are too well understood and verified for that not to be true. (There are utterly false and unscientific statements around on the blogosphere that adding CO2 doesn’t add to the greenhouse trapping – this is completely wrong. It is true of some CO2 absorption lines but not of them all so if you integrate over the spectrum (rather than selecting bits of it!) one finds a radiative forcing rise that matches the observed GMAST rise very well indeed. Our best estimates of the corresponding radiative forcing by solar change are smaller by a factor of at least 10. So solar change is too small to have caused the rise we have seen, greenhouse trapping by extra CO2 is not.

I hope that helps

Mike Lockwood

I would just disagree with Mike's conclusion. The reason the IPCC fixes the radiative forcing effect of solar variation at less than 1/10th the effect of CO2 (0.12 vs 1.66 W/m^2) is because the only solar effect that the IPCC takes into account is the tiny variation in Total Solar Insolation. TSI, or "the solar constant," varies by one or two tenths of a percent over the solar cycle while other measures of solar activity can vary by an order of magnitude. If 20th century warming was driven by the sun, it pretty much has to have been driven by something other than TSI.

Maybe the spectrum shift that accompanies solar magnetic activity has a climate-impacting effect on atmospheric chemistry, or it could be the solar wind, deflecting Galactic Cosmic Radiation from seeding cloud formation. That is Svensmark's GCR-cloud theory. Noting that TSI alone could not have caused 20th century warming does nothing to rebut these solar warming theories.

Where I think Svensmark would agree with Lockwood is in rejecting my suggestion that knowing the state of equilibrium in 1970 or 1980 would tell us which theory is right. His own reply to Lockwood claims that if ocean surface temperature oscillations are controlled for, then the surface temperature tracks the ups and downs in the solar cycle to a tee. I asked Doctor Svensmark if he wanted to chime in and did not get a reply, but there's a good chance he would fall in the short-path-to-equilibrium camp. As the two heat-reservoir model shows, rapid surface temperature responses to forcing does not imply rapid equilibration, but a lot of people are reading it that way.

Also, it is possible that time to equilibrium is slow, but that the 300 year climb out of the Little Ice Age just did happen to reach equilibrium in the late 20th century. Thus I have to agree with Mike that time-to-equilibrium is not in itself determinative. It is one piece of the puzzle. What makes equilibrium particularly needful of attention is how it has been neglected, with so many scientists making crucial assumptions about equilibrium without being explicit about it, or making any argument for those assumptions.

Addendum 2: collection of quotes from scientists

Below is a list of the dozen scientists I emailed, together with quotes where they dismiss a solar explanation for recent warming on grounds that solar activity was not rising, with no qualification about whether equilibrium had been reached. These are just the one's I happened to bookmark over the last few years. Undoubtedly there are many more. It's epidemic!

Most of these folks have responded, so I'll be posting at least 3 more follow-ups as I can get to them.

Professors Usoskin, Schuessler, Solanki and Mursula (2005):

The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 — .8 at a 94% — 98% confidence level. …

Note that the most recent warming, since around 1975, has not been considered in the above correlations. During these last 30 years the total solar irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most warming episode must have another source.

Solanki (2007):

"Since 1970, the cosmic ray flux has not changed markedly while the global temperature has shown a rapid rise," [Solanki] says. "And that lack of correlation is proof that the Sun doesn't cause the warming we are seeing now."

Solanki and Krivova (2003):

Clearly, correlation coefficients provide an indication that the influence of the Sun has been smaller in recent years but cannot be taken on their own to decide whether the Sun could have significantly affected climate, although from Figure 2 it is quite obvious that since roughly 1970 the Earth has warmed rapidly, while the Sun has remained relatively constant.

Professors Lockwood and Fröhlich (2007):

There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth's pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.

Professor Benestad (2004):

Svensmark and others have also argued that recent global warming has been a result of solar activity and reduced cloud cover. Damon and Laut have criticized their hypothesis and argue that the work by both Friis-Christensen and Lassen and Svensmark contain serious flaws. For one thing, it is clear that the GCR does not contain any clear and significant long-term trend (e.g. Fig. 1, but also in papers by Svensmark).

And 2005:

A further comparison with the monthly sunspot number, cosmic galactic rays and 10.7 cm absolute radio flux since 1950 gives no indication of a systematic trend in the level of solar activity that can explain the most recent global warming.

Professor Phil Jones (interview with the BBC, February 2010):

Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period [1975-1998] could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

Dr. Piers Forster (quoted by the BBC, October 2009):

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Johannes Feddema (quoted in the Topeka Capital-Journal, September 2009):

Feddema said the warming trend earlier in the century could be attributed to anything from solar activity to El Ninos. But since the mid 1980s he believes data doesn't correlate well with solar activity, but does correlate well with rising CO2 levels.

Professor Kristjánsson (quotede) by Science Daily in 2009):

Kristjansson also points out that most research shows no reduction in cosmic rays during the last decades, and that an astronomic explanation of today’s global warming therefore seems very unlikely.

Plus here's a new one I just found. Ramanathan is paraphrased in India's Frontline magazine this month as saying:

GCR trends (as seen in Graph 2) underwent monotonic decrease from 1900 to 1970 and then levelled off. The trends do not seem to reflect the large warming trend during 1970-2010.

I'll see if he wants to weigh in too. If anyone finds more, feel free to send them to alec-at-rawls-dot-org.

Addendum 3: How little Lockwood's own position is at odds with a solar explanation for late 20th century warming

Suppose the solar activity peak was not in 1985, as Lockwood and Frohlic claim, but several years later, as a straightforward reading of the data suggests. (As documented in Part 1, solar cycle 22, which began in 1986, was more active than cycle 21 by pretty much every measure.) If the solar activity peak shifts five years then instead of predicting peak GMAST by 1995, Mike's temperature response formula says peak GMAST should have occurred by 2000, which is pretty close to when it did occur.

Then there is the lack of warming since 2000, which is fully compatible with a solar explanation for late 20th century warming but is seriously at odds with the CO2 theory. Of course 10 or 15 years is not enough data to prove or disprove either theory, but the episode that is held to require a CO2 explanation is even slighter. The post 1970's warming that is said to be incompatible with a solar explanation didn't show a clear temperature signal until 97 or 98:

By this standard, the subsequent decade of no warming should be seen as even stronger evidence that climate is being driven by the sun, and the quicker the oceans equilibrate, the less room there is for CO2 driven warming to be hidden by ocean damping. Maybe it is time for another update: "Recent samely directed solar climate forcings and global temperature."

Not samely directed trends, because the equilibration mechanism has to be accounted, but a leveling off of surface temperatures is just what a solar-driven climate should display when solar activity plummets. This most recent data is a big deal. It's hard to justify reading so much into the very late 20th century step-up in temperature while ignoring the 21st century's lack of warming.

Addendum 4: Errant dicta from Lockwood and Fröhlich

Professor Lockwood says that his updated paper with Claus Fröhlich ("Recent Samely Directed Trends II") addresses the issue of equilibrium. Here is the second paragraph of their updated paper:

In paper 1 [the original Lockwood and Fröhlich article that I cited in my email], we completely removed the solar cycle variations to reveal the long-term trends. The actual response of the climate system may not have as long a time constant as the procedure adopted in paper 1. Indeed, as discussed in §3 of the present paper and in paper 3, the fact that solar cycle variations are not completely damped out tells us that this is not the whole story. The key unknown is how deeply into the Earth’s oceans a given variation penetrates. If it penetrates sufficiently deeply, the large thermal capacity of the part of the ocean involved would mean that the time constant was extremely long (Wigley & Raper 1990); in such a case, the analysis of long-term trends given in paper 1 would be adequate to fully describe the Earth’s response to solar variations [emphasis added]. However, the recent studies suggest that the sunspot cycle variations in solar forcing, in particular, do not penetrate very deeply into the oceans and so the time constant is smaller; this means that solar cycle variations are not completely suppressed. For example, Douglass et al. (2004) report a response time to solar variations of τ ˂ 1 year and, recently, Schwartz (2007) reports an overall time constant (for all forcings and responses) of τ = 5 ± 1 years. In §3, we show that this uncertainty in the response time constant does not influence our conclusion in paper 1 that the upward trend in global mean air surface temperature cannot be ascribed to solar variations.

In the bolded sentence above, Lockwood and Fröhlich are making the same mistake that they made in their first paper. A long time-to-equilibrium would most certainly NOT leave the conclusions of paper 1 unchanged. There it was assumed that as soon as solar activity passed its peak, this passage should tend to create global cooling, which would only be the case if the oceans had already equilibrated to the peak level of forcing. In effect, paper 1 assumes that equilibrium is immediate. If equilibrium instead takes a long time, then equilibrium would not have been reached in 1985, in which case the continued near-peak levels of solar activity over cycle 22 would have continued to cause substantial warming.

Still, this is only what a lawyer would call "dicta": the parts of an opinion that don't carry the weight of the decision, but simply comment on roads not taken. Lockwood and Fröhlich proceed to argue that time-to-equilibrium is short, so their assertions about the case where time-to-equilibrium is long are dicta, but it does raise the question of whether they grasp the implications that time-to-equilibrium actually has for their argument.

Addendum 5: an economist's critique of Schwartz

Start with Schwartz' assumption that forcings are random. Not only does solar activity follow a semi-regular 11 year cycle, but Schwartz only looks at GMAST going back to 1880, a period over which solar activity was semi-steadily rising, as was CO2. Certainly the CO2 increase has been systematic, and solar fluctuations may well be too, so the forcings are not all that random it seems.

I'm not a physicist so I can't say how critical the randomness assumption is to Schwartz' model, but I have a more general problem with the randomness assumption. My background is economics, which is all about not throwing away information, and the randomness assumption throws away information in spades.

By assuming that perturbations are random Schwartz is setting aside everything we can say about the actual time-sequence of forcings. We know, for instance, that the 1991-93 temperature dip coincided with a powerful forcing: the Mount Pinatubo eruption. This allows us to distinguish at least most of this dip as a perturbation rather than a lapse to equilibrium, and this can be done systematically. By estimating how volcanism has affected temperature over the historical record, we can with some effectiveness control for its effects over the entire record. Similarly with other possible forcings. To the extent that their effects are discernable in the temperature record they can be controlled for.

Making use of this partial ability to distinguish perturbations from lapses would give a better picture of the lapse to equilibrium and a better estimate of the lapse rate. Thus even if Schwartz's estimation scheme could be legitimate (maybe given a long enough GMAST record?) the way that it throws away information means that it certainly cannot be efficient. Schwartz's un-economic scheme cannot produce a "best estimate," and probably should not be referenced as such.

Is ATF gun-running operation a ploy to demonize U.S. gun rights?

2011-03-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

Has to be, because the rationale that ATF higher-ups gave to the operators makes no sense at all:

Agent Dodson and other sources say the gun walking strategy was approved all the way up to the Justice Department. The idea was to see where the guns ended up, build a big case and take down a cartel. And it was all kept secret from Mexico.

How could it possibly matter where criminal Mexican drug gangs get their illegal weapons? ALL their guns are illegal under Mexican law. If the illegality of their weapons could bring them down, there would be no need for their guns to come from America.

Unlike our sweepingly stated Second Amendment, the Mexican constitution only enumerates a highly qualified right to possess arms, and as in my state of California, enumerated gun rights in Mexico are not enforced. Thus Mexico's armed-to-the-teeth criminal gangs could in theory be taken down by gun prosecutions (if Mexico had the wherewithal to do it) by enforcing MEXICAN law. Evidence of violations of AMERICAN law is completely irrelevant, never mind its being tainted by U.S. government complicity.

The only actual reason the ATF would have to let American-sourced guns "walk" into Mexico is to provide facts in support of the Obama administration's ongoing effort to blame Mexican gun violence on American arms dealers, as justification for further infringing the constitutionally protected gun rights of American citizens. They have been putting out trumped up charges of U.S. blame for Mexican drug violence since they got into office, but their weak evidence hasn't stood up to scrutiny. So they decided to manufacture some hard evidence. It is the only logical explanation.

Where do Mexican drug-war weapons actually come from? This from James G. Conway Jr., "a former FBI special agent and program manager of FBI counterterrorism operations in Latin America":

On the surface, a cursory review of the high-powered military-grade seized weaponry -- grenades, RPGs, .50-caliber machine guns -- clearly indicates this weaponry is not purchased at gun shows in the United States and can't even be found commercially available to consumers in the United States. The vast majority of the weaponry used in this "drug war" comes into Mexico through the black market and the wide-open, porous southern border of Mexico and Guatemala. This black market emanates from a variety of global gunrunners with ties to Russian organized crime and terror groups with a firm foothold in Latin America such as the FARC, as well as to factions leftover from the civil wars in Central America during the 1980's. Chinese arms traffickers have managed to disperse weapons, particularly grenades, on the streets of Mexico. In addition, many of the Mexican military-issued, Belgian-made automatic M-16s currently in the hands of traffickers have been pilfered from military depots and the thousands who have deserted the Mexican army in recent years.

The exception would be those few thousands of semi-automatic M-16's and AK-47's let into Mexico by the ATF, along with however many Barret-50's. Yeah, those are serious weapons. Obama's minions definitely added to the murder spree, all in pursuit of their unconstitutional war against gun rights here at home.

Mexico getting guns from America?

For those leftists who have trouble with this language, no, Mexico is NOT part of America. It is part of North America (the continent) and is part of The Americas (the two continents). Would you tell someone that you are from the continent of America? Are you dumber than a third grader?

Under "countries" for $200 Alex, the case is just as unambiguous. The only country with America in its name is The United States of America. We, and only we, are "America."

Wrong and wrong, pea brains.

UPDATE: Evidence that the ATF did indeed have anti-American skullduggery in mind

The Christian Science Monitor reports that one of ATF's objectives was indeed to prosecute the involved gun dealers:

Under the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, gun smugglers were allowed to buy the weapons in the hopes the US agents could track the firearms to the Mexican drug runners and other border-area criminal gangs as well as build cases against the gun dealers themselves.

But it is known that the dealers were operating under instruction from the ATF:

Dodson said some of the cooperating gun dealers who sold weapons to the suspects at ATF’s behest initially had concerns and wanted to end their sales. One even asked whether the dealers might have a legal liability, but was assured by federal prosecutors they would be protected, he said.

The case logs show ATF supervisors and U.S. attorney’s office lawyers met with some of the gun dealers to discuss their “role” in the case, in one instance as far back as December 2009.

Was ATF planning on double-crossing the dealers? That fits with ATF's willingness to deny involvement, even to the point of lying to Senator Grassley about it. This would be natural if they were planning from the beginning on lying in court. And notice how easily the videotaped sales (at the 1 minute mark here) could be used as evidence of lawbreaking by the dealers, if the ATF just denied that the dealers were operating under their instructions.

They DID deny this to Grassley, automatically hanging the dealers out to dry. Thus at least from the moment on of the ATF guns was used by Mexican bandits to murder US border patrol agent Brian Terry, prosecution of the dealers became the ATF's de facto strategy. Add the report from the Christian Science Monitor that the ATF was after the gun dealers all along, and the fact that they actually did try to pin the murder gun on the dealers becomes powerful confirmation.

UPDATE II: AP dirtbag Will Weissert lying by omission

How could ATF and DOJ think they could get away with lying about their involvement in the sale of the rifle that was used to murder Brian Terry? They know that the press wants to omit the same facts that they do. This from AP's Will Weissert:

BROWNSVILLE, Texas -- Federal agents are barely able to slow the river of American guns flowing into Mexico. In two years, a new effort to increase inspections of travelers crossing the border has netted just 386 guns - an almost infinitesimal amount given that an estimated 2,000 slip across each day.

The problem came into sharp focus again last month when a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed on a northern Mexican highway with a gun that was purchased in a town outside Fort Worth, Texas.

Never does the article note that the murder gun was sold to Mexican criminals on the instructions of the ATF. Instead, the article uses this consequence of ATF perfidy as an excuse to retail fabricated propaganda from Bill Clinton's anti-gun zealots. He does note that their report "did not include information on how [the 2,000 illegal guns a day] figure was reached," but that does not stop him from touting it as "the last comprehensive estimate on the subject." How does he know the study was comprehensive if they never revealed where their estimates came from? Is the study comprehensive if they pulled the numbers out of thin air?

Weissert goes on to mention the ATF gun running scandal, but instead letting his readers know that the current news story, the murder of agent Terry, is part of it, he just offers the ATF's nonsensical justification as his own analysis:

The ATF's work on the border highlights the tension between short-term operations aimed at arresting low-level straw buyers - legal U.S. residents with clean records who buy weapons - and long-term ones designed to identify who is directing the gun buys.

Since he is presenting this as his own understanding, he ought to note that if the Mexican government wants to identify who is directing illegal gun buys, they have plenty of cases to look at already. Under the guise of showing the magnitude of the problem that ATF is trying to solve, Weissert even provides some relevant figures:

From September 2009 to July 31 of last year alone, the Mexican government seized more than 32,000 illegal weapons, even though purchasing guns in Mexico requires permission from the country's defense department, and even then buyers are limited to pistols of .38-caliber or less.

Mexican authorities already know where the illegal guns are going because they are finding large numbers of them on a daily basis. As for their ability to prosecute gang leaders for illegal weapons that are confiscated from low level gang members, that problem is the same whether the guns come from the ATF or from Croatia.

Remember, ATF is not in any way following the guns they "let walk." Their own claim is that they are just looking to see where the guns end up, which offers no value-added for identifying the gang leaders who are buying them. If authorities can't trace a low level gang member's Croation gun back to the gang leader who bought it then they can't trace an ATF gun back to the gang leader who bought it.

The ATF is providing a blatantly fraudulent excuse for its gun running, and Weissert takes it as his job to make this excuse look as good at possible. That this is not just stupidity on Weissert's part, but is willful deception, is proved by his pretense that Terry was murdered with an illegally sold weapon. He is self-consciously hiding the truth from his readers. Evil trash.

Another Weissert tidbit:

Many guns used to kill in Mexico never have their origins traced. Still, ATF has long estimated that of the weapons discovered at Mexican crime scenes which authorities do choose to trace, nearly 90 percent are eventually found to have been purchased in the U.S.

Duh. Guns legal for sale in the United States are identifiable by their import stamps, serial number ranges, and other markings. Those are the guns that are examined for U.S. gun trace data. Even then, the 90% figure only refers to those guns that are successfully traced. Of course the guns that the U.S. actually has trace data for are almost entirely U.S. guns. The actual percentage of Mexican crime guns that have been traced to America is 12.

These issues have been much discussed, and Weissert's article shows enough research that he would certainly be aware of them, yet he leaves the crucial context out, and again, the fact that he lies by omission about the Terry murder gun indicates that these other omissions are also intentional.

Crossposted at Flopping Aces and Astute Bloggers.

UPDATE III: direct proof that ATF was using Gunrunner sales to attack Gunrunner-involved gun shops

Just before agent Terry was murdered, ATF had used trace data on Gunrunner gun sales to slander two of its Gunrunner gun shops. That data had been leaked to WAPO by ATF, which leaked similar data to Mexican newspapers.

Senate Fort Hood report whitewashes Obama's culpability

2011-02-05T19:23:00.000-08:00

One year ago I noted that: "All three major domestic terror attacks of 2009 were directly enabled by Obama's reverse-profiling orders, exempting Muslims from scrutiny."

First was the shooting of two soldiers at a Little Rock Army recruiting office. Shortly after Obama ordered our intelligence agencies to "back off" from investigating black Muslims, a black Muslim who had previously been under surveillance killied one soldier and critically wounded another.

The case of the Christmas 2009 "underwear bomber" indicates that Obama's "back off" command extended to ALL Muslims. According to one State Department employee, watch-list monitors were: "encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Muslims." The employee admitted that this policy was the reason Abdulmutallab was not flagged for scrutiny after the British denied him a visa for trying to attend a phony school in England, proving that State Department personnel understood Obama's policy as a general order not to investigate Muslims, even when they had cause that had nothing to do with a person being Muslim.

This reverse-discrimination goes beyond counter-terrorism. The recent Civil Rights Commission report on Obama's DOJ found a systematic refusal to enforce civil rights law against minority perpetrators on behalf of white victims, and Barack "I will stand with the Muslims" Obama has made it perfectly clear that he places Muslims on the favored side of that unequal justice.

The Fort Hood massacre itself also suggests that Obama's counter-terrorism "back off" command extended to all Muslims. It came out in November 2009 that agents dropped their Nidal Hasan investigation because they deemed his communications with al Qaeda leader Awlaki to be protected speech:

U.S. officials now confirm Hasan sent as many as 20 e-mails to Awlaki. Authorities intercepted the e-mails but later deemed them innocent or protected by the first amendment.

Could such a glaring misapplication of the First Amendment have occurred if agents were not looking for ways to give Muslims special consideration? Not likely.

The Senate's "Ticking Time Bomb" report fails to mention Obama's reverse-profiling orders, or the First Amendment excuse for ignoring Hasan's emails to al Qaeda

The Senate report covers up the Obama administration's First Amendment excuse by attributing the dropped Hasan-Alwaki ball to confusion of responsibilities between regional and central Joint Terrorism Task Force offices (p. 85):

There was a fundamental disjunction between the San Diego JTTF and the Washington JTTF concerning who was responsible for investigating [REDACTED] communications between Hasan and the Suspected Terrorist. ... As a result, the FBI's inquiry into Hasan was terminated prematurely.

Sorry, but the Obamatons admitted otherwise. The Senate report does do some dancing around the First Amendment issue. Page 57 notes that investigations are required to be protective of First Amendment rights:

Also as discussed in the Guide, investigations or assessments are precluded appropriately - "based solely on the exercise of First Amendment protected activities or on the race, ethnicity, national origin or religion of the subject.

But there is no discussion about what this means and how it might apply to Hasan. To consist with what the First Amendment actually requires, the stated rule should be understood to mean that investigations must be based on concerns that go beyond what trouble someone might cause by exercising his right to free speech. Thus the question for agents should have been whether, in listening to Hasan, they found reason to worry that he would go beyond saying nasty things and start doing nasty things.

The answer to that question was a glaring "yes." Page 31 of the Senate report lists some of Hasan's worrisome conduct:

• Giving a class presentation perceived as so supportive of violent Islamist extremist conflict against the United States that it was almost immediately stopped by an instructor after classmates erupted in opposition to Hasan's views.

• Justifying suicide bombings in class at least twice, according to the accounts of classmates.

• Suggesting in writing in his proposals for presentations that some actions of Osama bin Laden may be justified.

• Telling several classmates that his religion took precedence over the U.S. Constitution he swore a military oath to support and defend.

• Stating three times in writing that Muslim-Americans in the military could be prone to fratricide.

Hasan was not hiding the fact that he was likely to go beyond just saying nasty things, but the Senate report can't be bothered to clarify what the First Amendment actually requires.

The conclusion of the report includes another brush with the First Amendment issue, finding on p. 87 that:

JTTF personnel never cited any legal restrictions as the reason that Hasan's communications were not shared with DoD counter intelligence officials.

But this finding is about the sharing of information. It is not about the failure of the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to keep investigating Hasan on their own. Thus it does not cover the question of whether First Amendment concerns were the reason the JTTFs gave Hasan's emails to Awlaki a pass, as unnamed Obama administration "officials" claimed. In short, the Senate report does consider whether legal restrictions came into play, but it ignores the one such restriction that was front page news!

Given the direct evidence that the First Amendment WAS misapplied, this should have been a key subject for Senate review. Was it ignored despite the strong evidence of why the egregious misapplication occurred: that Obama had issued sweeping orders NOT to investigate Muslims? Or was it ignored because of the strong evidence that Obama is to blame?

The report notes the obvious: that "political correctness" is out of control in the Department of Defense (p. 31), but it completely ignores all that we know about WHY the politically correct thing at this point in time is to give even the most dangerous Muslim's a pass. It ignores the clear evidence that failure to investigate Muslims is a top-down policy directive from President Obama himself.

That is a dangerous whitewash, which is about what we should expect from a bi-partisan effort. Republicans should know by now: if we want to get to the truth of anything, we can't rely at any point on Democrats.

Is Obama following the Carter strategy of fomenting unrest, then sitting by as America's enemies take over?

2011-01-30T13:39:00.000-08:00

First the United States helps to undermine a stable but unpalatable ally. See "The American Left’s Role [the Obama left's role] in Leading Mid-East Regime Change."

Then we stand by and let America's enemies come to power in the aftermath. See "Clinton on Egypt: 'We're not advocating any specific outcome'."

Just as Carter did in Nicaragua and Iran. Undermining a stable but unpalatable ally COULD be tenable, but not in the absence of any plan or effort to guide the nation towards a superior alternative. So instead of the Shah and Somoza, we got the Stalinist Sandinistas and the Islamofascist Ayatollah. This time we could well get the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of al Qaeda).

This Tea Party signage I concocted last July seems appropriate:

Obama already propped up the Islamofascists in Iran

In the wake of Iran's stolen 2009 election, Obama said that the future of Iran had to be decided by Iranians, but he did not say it had to be decided by legitimate election. On the contrary, he called for letting the regime's legal process decide the matter and only asked that the Islamofascists try not to kill too many people in the process of enforcing their election theft:

My understanding is, is that the Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place. ...

I think it's important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.

Whatever the outcome of the election conflict might be, Obama expressed his determination to proceed with diplomatic engagement (i.e. with friendly concessions). To justify all this passivity, Obama invoked the assumption that the whole world hates America as much as he does. If we took the side of the Iranian people, it would only de-legitimize their cause:

I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be; that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football...

Thus obama left the field to the Islamofascists, insuring the failure of the side we should have backed: the Iranian majority.

Now after a public-private consortium of his own minions has helped to undermine the a psuedo-ally in Egypt, Obama seems to be doing the same thing. America will stay out of the aftermath (can't make ourselves the issue!) again leaving the field to the Islamofascists. Unlike Iran in 2009, the Islamofascists are not the challenged regime this time, but are one of the challengers: a small but organized sect, poised to steal the regime change, just as the Nicaraguan communists managed to do with Carter's help/acquiescence in 1979.

Carter's post-presidential career proves he favored the communists all along

Time has revealed Carter's post-presidential career as an elections monitor to have been in pursuit of legitimately elected Communism. I can't find the citation, but I once read a report from someone on the scene in Managua when Sandinista presidential candidate Daniel Ortega was defeated by Violeta Chamorro in the Carter facilitated Nicaraguan election of 1990. Carter reportedly spat a stream of the most bitter vituperation over the Communist defeat. The closest reference I can find is this statement from Steven Hayward that "Carter returned to the U.S. bitterly disappointed that his Sandinista pals had been turned out."

Since then Carter has given up on achieving a legitimate communist electoral victory and has become a shameless backer of communist election stealing. (Ibid.)

If Obama acquiesces in the rise to power of Muslim Brotherhood favorite El Baradei, it will be pretty clear that he is indeed pursuing the Carter strategy for advancing America's enemies.

UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. Top Obama Middle-East advisor pens op-ed: "Don't fear Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood." Also, "US Ambassador in Cairo Margaret Scobey spoke on the phone today with Mohamed ElBaradei." Now this: "White House open to role for Muslim Brotherhood in post-Mubarak Egypt." Too bad the American people were never apprised of the overwhelming evidence that Obama is actually a Muslim.

UPDATE II: I see that Ann Althouse put out a call last week for Obama-cized Gadsen flags. I like Hazy Dave's:

Is there STILL too much recent warming to explain by solar activity?

2011-01-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

If you are not familiar with Watts Up With That, click on over to see my latest post on the phony science of human caused global warming. It critiques the numerous solar scientists who claim that, because solar activity had no upward trend since the 1970′s, solar activity cannot be the cause of post-1970′s warming.

Actually, solar activity from 1940-2000 was the highest since 9000 BC. Most solar scientists accept that there is a close correlation between temperature and solar activity over the geologic record, so they accept that high solar activity must create a temperature forcing, but they are at the same time trying to claim that steady peak levels of this forcing CANNOT cause warming. Only if the levels KEEP going up can warming be created.

That’s impossibly stupid. It’s the same as saying that you can’t heat a pot of water by turning the burner all the way to maximum and leaving it there. No, you have to gradually turn the heat up, as if it is the act of raising the level of the flame that heats the water, rather than the level that the flame is raised to.

Alternatively, they could be silently assuming that global temperature had already equilbrated to grand maximum levels of solar forcing by 1970, so that continued grand maximum levels of solar activity should not have caused further warming, but none them has ever stated such an assumption, or made any kind of argument for it, and how could they, when the only thing we know about long term equilibration to altered forcings it that it can can take a long time, as with the centuries of warming from the depths of the Little Ice Age (when solar activity was very low) until 2000. There is no basis for arguing that these hundreds of years of natural warming had to have reached equilibrium by 1970, and a scientist certainly cannot proceed on this assumption without arguing for it.

My post shows just how many solar scientists are invoking this stupid-science as a way to say that modern warming must be due to some other cause than the sun, something like CO2 perhaps, as the people who control all the research money insist. Stupid AND corrupt, though I tone down my language a bit for Mr. Watt’s sake.

Guest blogging at WUWT: Lump of coal award for Trenberth

2010-12-24T16:31:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Anthony Watts for inviting me to help fill in while he takes a much needed Christmas break. Here's my Christmas Eve post.

Lump of coal award: to IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth for hiding the decline (or the lack of increase) in global temperatures

Old, but untold. Trenberth treated us to a trick in his Halloween interview with Bill Sweet by changing the sign on his own most famous quote. As Trenberth now tells it:

One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100,000 hits online.

The email in question actually bemoaned how Trenberth couldn't account for the LACK of global warming:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.

Global warming... LACK of global warming. Hey, what's the difference?

This is Trenberth's answer to having his doubts exposed by the ClimateGate leak: just cover them back up. Pretend that the revealing email said the opposite of what it actually said and PROBLEM SOLVED. The guy's a genius. No wonder he rose to the esteemed lead author position.

Of course he's not fooling anyone who knows what he actually said. Add that lack of warming does have to do with the state of global warming, and most knowledgeable people will grant Trenberth the benefit of the doubt, but should they? Ignorant people will be fooled, and Trenberth has a habit of misleading the ignorant.

Here is Trenberth in a follow-up interview with Sweet (after Sweet was apparently inundated with comments and email mail calling Trenberth a liar and castigating Sweet for playing softball—yay WUWT):

Sweet: Can you say something about the widespread belief that solar activity somehow accounts for the temperature changes we’ve seen in recent decades?

Trenberth: That’s easily disproven. It’s nonsense. Since 1979 we've had spacecraft measuring total solar irradiance, and there's been no change—if anything the sun has cooled slightly. There's nothing in the record that indicates that the sun is responsible for any of the warming in this period.

Trenberth knows full well that "solar activity" refers primarily to solar-magnetic activity, which varies by an order of magnitude over the solar cycle, while total solar irradiance is almost invariant over the solar cycle (which is why it is called the solar constant). Does he really think he can disprove the theory that 20th century warming was caused by solar activity without looking at anything but the least active solar variable?

Again, the knowledgeable will not be fooled, but it is perfectly clear that Trenberth's intent in this instance is to deceive the ignorant. He is also providing us with an example of what he was talking about in his original IEEE interview when he said:

Scientists almost always have to address problems in their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.

That pesky data about solar-magnetic activity and earthly temperatures being highly correlated? ("The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 - .8 at a 94% - 98% confidence level.") "Best disregarded."

And it is easily done. Just pretend that "solar activity" means "the solar constant" and, voilà. As easy as replacing "lack of global warming" with "global warming."

As J.R. Ewing put it, "once you give up integrity, the rest is easy."

Any other "lumpies"? (Santa must have had anti-CO2 alarmists in mind when he chose coal for the bad. Like crosses for vampires.)

Guy stuff

2010-12-18T21:32:00.001-08:00

Which is the prettier picture? This:

Or this:

I can't decide.

(More at Theo Spark)

Hello flamers, goodbye Marine Corps

2010-12-18T01:31:00.000-08:00

How badly will the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell damage our military? Just read today's Strategy Page report on our military's suppression of heterosexual behavior in combat theaters ("No Sex Please, We're American Soldiers"). Heterosexuals in the military have always known that their sex lives are liable to be put on hold for long periods of time, but for soldiers off fighting in Muslim countries, the deprivation is extreme. The only outlet is relationships with other soldiers:

Troops are forbidden from establishing relationships with local women in Iraq, and warned against buying booze and drugs from Iraqis. In Iraq, few women cover their faces, or wear any head covering at all. Many of them are quite attractive, and frequently cast admiring glances at U.S. troops (who often do foot patrols in public areas). But there are not supposed to be any marriages. This is a particular problem in Islamic countries, where non-Moslem husbands are expected to convert and elopement often leads to the bride being murdered by her angry family. ...

Troops having sex with each other is generally tolerated, although that can cause trouble as well. Only about ten percent of the troops in combat zones are female, and not all are single or in the mood.

Heterosexual young men are willing to join the military and put their sex lives on hold because the manliness of fighting for their nation makes the lack of access to females bearable. That will change if a subculture of active homosexuality is allowed to burst out and grow amidst the suppressed heterosexuality of our military. Instead of a manly brotherhood, military service will become a chore and even a gauntlet of having to abide whatever in-your-face homosexuality the flamers want to throw up, and they will throw up plenty, as proven by every out-homosexual locale in the world. Flamboyant and even aggressive homosexuality is just what the end of DADT implies. No one is talking about replacing the DADT line with any other line. Full out homosexual flaming will not just be tolerated but will be legally protected, from overt homosexual behavior to every kind of homosexual come on. It will be a death sentence for heterosexual recruiting.

Obama's "Pentagon" study was grossly dishonest

Soldiers were only asked whether having "having an openly gay person in a unit would have an effect in an intense combat situation." They weren't asked about the development of an openly gay subculture, which the end of DADT would create, and they weren't asked about effects on non-combat quality of life, even though life outside of combat is just as important for recruiting. Even so, 40% of marines said out-homosexuality would be a problem, maybe because they are more often assigned to combat theaters where the contrast between suppressed heterosexuality and unleashed homosexuality would be most glaring.

Don't Ask Don't Tell is actually a good solution. It allows homosexuals to serve and only draws the line at their going public with their homosexuality. They have to stay in the closet, which is a pretty mild imposition, compared to the broad harms that out-homosexuality would inflict.

What part of YOU HAVE A MANDATE do our idiot representatives not understand?

With voters handing Democrats in Congress a historic drubbing you would think Republicans would understand that they have a mandate to stop the repudiated Democrats from passing ANY major bills before their lame duck term expires, yet instead of proclaiming their mandate and promising to filibuster DADT, START, DREAM, etcetera, the Republicans are letting one major bill after another waltz down the aisle. They are even logrolling their votes on these Democrat abominations. Here is Republican Senator Bob Corker, telling Democrats to:

...drop plans to repeal a military ban on gays serving openly or risk the fate of a nuclear pact with Russia.

Really? If we don't let the ousted Democrats make one major military policy change we have to let them make another? How about NO MAJOR LEGISLATION until the voters' new representatives are seated? This isn't hard. Just tell soon to be minority witch Nancy Pelosi to go to Hell! Haven't they all been wanting to do that for two years?

Why DADT is the correct policy as seen by moral theory

It has to do with the correct understanding of the right to privacy. Yes, there is such a right, but it is not a right of the individual against the power of the state. Rather, it arises as a right of the state (the rights of the majority) to limit what individuals are allowed to do in public.

Kind of obvious once you think about it. What else does a right to privacy mean but a right to do certain things in private, which implies the lack of a right to do them in public.

In moral theory, the right to privacy derives from John Stuart Mill's principle of liberty. Mill's principle is based on a distinction Mill made between "direct interests" and "indirect interests." Direct interests in impinge directly on a person's physical movement or welfare. If you throw someone in jail or take away their sustenance you are affecting their direct interests. In contrast, indirect interests are the interests that one takes in OTHER people's direct interests. That is, they are vicarious interests in how other people live.

Mill's principle says that injury to some people's indirect interests can never justify injury to anyone's direct interests. In particular, it can never justify STATE infringement of anyone's direct interests. As to how Mill's principle itself is justified, think of it as an obvious requirement for securing the maximum equal liberty: when liberties come in conflict, no one's more important interests (their direct interests) are to give way to anyone else's less substantial interests. Thus once moral theory is able to establish that society should secure maximum equal liberty, Mill's principle follows. (Going back one step further, maximum equal liberty is justified by recognizing that all progress in discovering and securing value comes through liberty, since progress in either would be impossible without liberty.)

Where direct interests are involved on both sides, Mill was explicit that majority rule should take precedence, but he was silent on one crucial case: what to do when there is a conflict with only indirect interests on both sides? Since the priority of direct over indirect interests is not in play, such cases should again be left to majority rule. So where does this situation arise? When the question is what people should be allowed to do in public. Then the question becomes one of social approval, and nobody has a right to approval.

Note that tolerance and approval are opposites of a sort. Liberty rights are rights to have one's behavior be tolerated, so long as one is not infringing the direct interests of others. Their mere opinions are not to take precedence over your physical liberty and welfare. A demand for approval is a demand to be allowed to force other people's opinions, which is a close parallel to letting vicarious interests trump physical interests. It is insisting what is in other people's heads cannot be allowed to rule your body, then turning around and claiming a right to reach into their heads and tell them what they have to think. When this is backed up by state power, it violates the priority of direct over indirect interests. It is allowing some people's opinions to trump other people's physical reality.

Same sex marriage is such an issue. Marriage is an explicit mark of social approval and homosexuals only have an indirect interest in social approval. They have a right to have their relationships tolerated, but they have no right to ANYONE'S approval, never mind majority approval in the form of state recognition for homosexual marriage.

There are a few more bases to touch if one wants to be thorough. As for the few direct interests involved in social support for marriage, there are direct interests on both sides. Dollars that homosexuals would receive in support of their marriages are dollars out of other people's pockets. On the question of equal rights, homosexuals have the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex that heterosexuals do. Equality does not arise in regards to the few benefits society confers on married couples because these benefits are not directed at parents at all. They are intended to assist in raising of children, and there is no requirement that such efforts at assistance must be perfectly or even very well targeted. Thus the basic issue prevails. There is no right to approval, hence there is no right to homosexual marriage. (Quite a bit more thoroughness here.)

Out vs. closeted homosexual behavior is a similar issue. It is not quite as clear cut as marriage, which is explicitly about social approval, but when an activity can without much difficulty be conducted in private, an interest in being allowed to engage in that activity specifically in public will generally be an indirect interest in social approval. It might seem surprising, but yes, liberal moral theory allows a LOT of scope to ban public displays. The one public display that can rarely be limited is speech. There must be free exchange of ideas and information. But out-homosexual behavior? Like cross-dressing, very much a proper subject for majority rule by the affected public.

With gay marriage, the affected public is the national electorate, since marriages recognized by one state must be recognized by others. For homosexual flaming, it could be city by city. San Francisco could allow homosexuals to have public sex (as it regularly does allow). Fresno might ban homosexual kissing in public, or all kissing in public. All perfectly legitimate. And how else could it be? Does anyone really think that matters of fundamental right narrow down the range of morally legitimate societies to the publicly libertine? Absolutely not. Don't be so illiberal.

Of course military necessity would trump liberty rights in any case, on the simple logical principle that protection of the tree of liberty must take precedence over protection for the fruits of the tree of liberty. If in trying to protect the fruits of the tree you sacrifice the tree then the fruits are lost anyway, while sacrificing a few fruits allows the tree to fruit another day. But that is all moot, since DADT does not violate anyone's rights in any case. Like same sex marriage, DADT repeal is fundamentally a demand for approval, and no one has a right to approval.

Flight 93 Blogburst: Bristol Palin vote-rigging perpetrated by HOMOSEXUAL PRANKSTERS, not by socially conservative Sarah Palin supporters

2010-11-22T18:34:00.000-08:00

Blogburst readers should be familiar with the periodically terrible judgment of Hot Air's Allahpundit. How can we forget, after he dismissed concern about the crescent memorial to Flight 93 precisely because the giant Islamic-shaped crescent points to Mecca:

A good rule of thumb is: if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you’ve probably gone too far.

Now Allah is again trying to play the role of "decider," telling everyone else what they should be concerned about. This time he is buying the Washington Post claim that it is conservatives who are exploiting a flaw in Dancing With the Stars voting-software to advance Bristol Palin through the competition (now all the way to the finals, to the shock and dismay of the professional judges). Thinking that it is conservatives who are implicated, Allah tries to dismiss the whole business as "a moronic non-scandal." Again, he manages to get the story wrong in every possible way.

A coordinated vote rigging effort has indeed been uncovered, with participants voting hundreds of times apiece for Bristol Palin, but the perpetrators are not conservatives, as WAPO reporter Lisa de Moraes told her readers. The actual perpetrators are an online network of FLAMING HOMOSEXUAL PRANKSTERS. Here is head prankster Kevin Dujan, exposing the WAPO fraud:

I also love that HB is now considered a leading conservative site.

Literally written by a gay dude, standing next to a gaysian, who is next to a stripper, who is chatting with a feisty Whitney-in-her-prime black woman while I keep trying to get the lame VJ Otho to play Twisted Sister or anything else kickass.

Hilarious.

Welcome to the new, more fabulous face of conservatism.

Unlike Allahpundit, de Moraes knows how seriously the Palins will be damaged if they are blamed for this travesty, which is exactly why she lied about who was doing the vote rigging.

By playing the whole thing up as a big joke, Allah is playing right into the WAPO ploy. Some of his followers are even jumping on the vote-Bristol bandwagon. Ditto for Ace of Spades HQ, which also fell for de Moraes' disinformation and is also going vote-Bristol. Smarten up people. The Palins are being set up for a world of hurt.

Competition shows are top ratings getters

Allah admits that he has never watched Dancing With the Stars, but a lot of people do. 20 million viewers watched it last week, second only to Sunday Night Football. That's twice the size of Obama's historic 2008 margin of victory (the largest for a non-incumbent), and a high percentage of these viewers are likely to be swing voters: generally conservative, but more interested in entertainment than politics.

Don't underestimate how annoyed these people already are that their competition has been gate-crashed by people who are gaming the vote in favor of an undeserving contestant, and Bristol is not just an inferior dancer, she is BAD. Nothing wrong with that, except when she gets promoted to the finals of a dance competition (kind of like Obama getting the Democratic nomination for president).

No purpose is served by a graphic description of Bristol's ineptitude. Just note that, to cover up her galumphing gait, her professional partner covered her up in both dances last week with curtain-like black dresses that completely obscured her legs. Be assured, it wasn't for no reason.

Other competition shows have been subject to the same kind of prank, just not this far in. Anyone remember Sanjaya Malakar of American Idol 2007, a gay-dar popping semi-talent who made it alarmingly close to the final thanks to a website called Vote for the Worst? If they had gotten him to the final it would have destroyed the honest competition.

Well this time the pranksters have gotten their golem into the final. The only question now is whether they can actually cram the final crown of thorns down onto the undeserving Bristol Palin's head.

Anyone who is sympathetic to Bristol should vote against her (until 11AM Eastern on the 23rd). She could also save herself by rejecting a winning vote. If she had done that last week, letting the show come down to what would have been a terrific final between Jennifer Grey and the wonderfully talented Brandy (already ousted), she would be a national hero right now, but better late than never.

It IS an epic prank

Nothing against the flamers for having their fun. A little culture clash can be a good thing. Heterosexual fans of the most heterosexual of all sports can always get friendly revenge by hosting a Jennifer and Derek vs. Brandy and Maksim TV special.

Good on the flamers too for using conservatives' partisanship against them. Undoubtedly there are substantial numbers of conservative Dance voters who are favoring Bristol because they like her mother. The same thing happened with Sanjaya Malakar, who had mountains of legitimate votes from adorably silly pre-teen girls, somehow drawn to Sanjaya's incandescent effeminacy. (Poor Sanjaya was so effeminate he had to explain to People Magazine why everyone thought he was gay.)

The Sanjaya pranksters only needed to add enough votes to push him over the top. Undoubtedly that prank was also largely the work of our relentlessly "transgressive" homosexual subculture, with their constant war on everything "normal." That's okay. It's a free country. Homosexuals can be as transgressive as they want and the rest of us can be as repulsed as we want. Just don't let conservatives get blamed for a transgressive effort.

It shameful enough that some conservative voters have been violating conservative principles by voting for other than the best dancer. We are not pre-teen girls, and voting for a blatantly inferior talent on the basis of political affinity is not adorable. If the homosexual pranksters want their victory, make them do the work.

Allahpundit still an obstacle to stopping the Flight 93 mega-mosque

Michelle Malkin played a key role in forcing the Park Service to agree to change the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93, but they never did change it. They call it a broken circle now, but that is what architect Paul Murdoch always called it. Our peaceful circle was broken on 9/11, turning it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent that just happens to point to Mecca. A more obvious memorial to the terrorists is hard to imagine.

The only actual change was to add an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace.

A crescent that points to Mecca is a very familiar construct in the Islamic world. Every mosque is built around a Mecca-direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just as with the Crescent of Embrace.

Most mihrabs are small. A large one might be 20 or 30 feet across. The Crescent/broken-circle in the Flight 93 memorial is over half a mile across. The full memorial will be the world's largest mosque by a factor of about a hundred, yet Allah dismisses the whole thing on some supposed principle that we shouldn't be worried which direction things point. Tell that to the Muslims, whose only universal symbol is orientation on Mecca.

When Michelle Malkin started Hot Air, she handed the Flight 93 portfolio to Allahpundit. Because of Allah's mishandling, most of Michelle's readers think the Flight 93 memorial controversy must have been taken care of, even as the world's largest mosque is right now being planted atop the graves of our murder heroes.

We are not against AP. He is perfectly well meaning and does a lot of good work. He is just incredibly careless sometimes. So here is an invitation to Allah and to Michelle: please read the full page color advertisement that Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls (the author of this post) ran in the Somerset Daily American this 9/11, when Laura Bush and Michelle Obama were both in Pennsylvania for the anniversary. Take a fresh look at what is actually being built right under our noses.

To join our blogburst against the crescent mosque, just send your blog's url.

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Bristol Palin vote-rigging perpetrated by HOMOSEXUAL PRANKSTERS, not by socially conservative Sarah Palin supporters

2010-11-18T09:33:00.001-08:00

You'd think the Washington Post could bother to note this. They run a piece about supposed conservatives kicking over the playing field on Dancing With the Stars by exploiting a weakness in the online-voting software, voting hundreds of times apiece for Sarah Palin's daughter, but omit that the person behind this exploitation is not a Bristol Palin fan at all but is a PRANKSTER.

He is also a flaming faggot (not that there's anything wrong with that), coordinating with his flamer friends. HillBuzz blogger "kevindujan01" is fully aware of how the Post is using him as a weapon against conservatives and is just "fabulous" with it:

I also love that HB is now considered a leading conservative site.

Literally written by a gay dude, standing next to a gaysian, who is next to a stripper, who is chatting with a feisty Whitney-in-her-prime black woman while I keep trying to get the lame VJ Otho to play Twisted Sister or anything else kickass.

Hilarious.

Welcome to the new, more fabulous face of conservatism.

The new more fabulous face of conservatism, as deliberately misrepresented by WAPO's Lisa de Moraes.

Ace and Allahpundit are getting rolled by the homosexual pranksters

Both are accepting the WAPO line that the vote rigging is being perpetrated by Palin conservatives and are dismissing the whole foo-forah on the grounds that its just a popularity poll and "everybody does it." Indeed, these polls are actually set up to encourage multiple votes. That's part of how competition shows make their money, by taking commissions on the call-in votes. But over the years there have been a number of online-coordinated voting attacks aimed specifically at gaining a perverse result and these shenanigans are seriously annoying to the non-cynical viewers of these hugely popular shows.

Anyone remember Sanjaya Malakar, the effeminate semi-talent from American Idol 2007 who got alarmingly close to the final thanks in large part to a website called "Vote for the Worst"?

Lots of little girls apparently liked Sanjaya's puppy-dog manner and the way he fondled his luxurious locks, but it was outside groups--not actual fans of the show--that kept him in week after week. Undoubtedly the gays had a large role in that prank as well. Sanjaya is so overtly effeminate that he had to explain to People Magazine why everyone always thinks he is gay:

I got teased in school because people figured I must be gay because I understand women.

Apparently he only has one wire crossed and just seems gay, which was plenty benough to make his prank-advancement irresistible to our aggressively transgressive homosexual activists.

If the pranksters had actually gotten Sanjaya into the final it would have been a complete debasement of the competition. This seems to be what has actually happened with Bristol Palin. No one should underestimate how annoying this is to actual fans of the show. They are watching to see a real competition and just when they get to the ball, Lucy pulls it away. The Washington Post is trying to direct the fallout to conservatives when its own evidence points to homosexual pranksters. Fans of the show need to be told where the evidence actually points, so that they can direct their ire accordingly.

How bad is Bristol?

I'm a ballroom dancer. I've been doing it for 15 years and have always had a special talent for leading. Give me a girl who has never danced before and if she has above average natural ability I can have her smoothly following intermediate level steps by the end of one song. If she has serious natural talent, she'll be flying in two.

The first time Bristol Palin took the floor it was completely obvious that she was a BAD beginner. NO natural talent. After a couple weeks of preparation she clomped through her dance like she was trudging through a swamp. "Oh no," I said to myself, "this is going to get gamed: the pranksters are going to keep her in for the humiliation value." With Bristol intentionally dressing up like her mother, this had disaster written all over it.

Bristol has made progress. She's worked at it to the point where she's managed to reach an average level of dancing. She's kept her head and her spirits up and thankfully has managed to remain oblivious to her own shortcomings. Good for her. But her reaching the final above the wonderfully talented Brandy is a travesty. Brandy would have made it a final for the ages. Now we are going to see Bristol Palin get absolutely crushed by the beautiful and talented Jennifer Grey. Then comes the worst part: waiting to see whether the pranksters are able to deliver the final perversion and cram a crown of thorns onto the undeserving Bristol Palin's head.

Help save the Palins by voting against Bristol

I've never voted on one of these shows, but I will next week. The only way to counter the pranksters is for Bristol Palin fans to vote for the best performance which, excluding a miracle, will mean voting NOT for Bristol Palin. Otherwise they are playing into the hands of these cynical homosexuals whose great desire is to pervert a heterosexual competition. Listen to kevindujan01's cynical flaming:

The judges want the woman claiming to be Jennifer Grey (but looks nothing like her) to win, with Scotch-on-the-Rocks as a close second (good thing the consolation prize isn’t a car).

The guy's a total dirt-bag, justifying bad behavior with the most ludicrous snark. Jennifer Grey looks nothing like Jennifer Grey? Amazingly, she looks almost the same as she did when she played a 15 year old in Dirty Dancing, one of the great movies of all time. And "scotch on the rocks"? Brandy was a hundred times better in week one than Bristol Palin could EVER be.

Bristol can't even motivate herself to lose a few pounds for national television. It's ridiculous. She's out there waddling around with a 25 pound tummy. Sigh.

With the media primed to blame Sarah Palin supporters for a perverse result, the only way out for conservatives is to make sure the perverse result does not happen. Conservatives are not supposed to vote for semi-talented favorites in the first place. It is already an embarrassment to conservative principles that Palin fans helped her get this far. The only way to limit the damage is by voting at last for the better dancer.

Flamers and DADT

On the subject of flamers, this is why Don't Ask Don't Tell should not be repealed. Under DADT, homosexuals can serve in the military but they are not allowed to flame. End DADT and they will be allowed to flame. Merely being openly, suggestively, struttingly, fabulously, wrist bendingly, hip-pointingly, gaydar-explodingly homosexual is exactly what will no longer be off limits.

Anyone who thinks that is not going to damage unit-cohesiveness and recruiting isn't thinking at all. The heterosexual young men who make up the vast majority of recruits will continue to be deprived of female company, but now they will have to put up with gay-as-I-wanna-be drama queens. Each squad, platoon, company and battalion will be prone to develop its own "boytown" as Kevin Dujan calls his gay circuit, pushing as far towards civilian gay norms as the military will allow, and the ending of DADT means precisely that they will allow it.

Read Goodby Good Men, about the take-over of the American Catholic church hierarchy by a cabal of homosexual church haters, for an idea of what can happen, and that was on the sly. Just wait until open homosexuality is allowed.

Cat fighting. In-your-face come ons directed to gay and straight alike. Subtle serious come-ons. Where is it going to end? Nobody's thinking about that. Once the DADT line falls, there is no plan to replace it with any other line.

The transgressive-for-transgressive's sake culture of Dujan et al., debasing a simple dance competition just because doing so is "hilarious," will be just as corrosive to the military. Thirty percent of the military (40% of the Marines) already think it will be corrosive, and that's before they have seen the homosexual behavior that would be released. Give them a tour of the coming Boytown (the Pentagon poll only asked if having "an openly gay person in a unit" would be a problem, it didn't ask about the development of an openly gay subculture) and the percentage of objectors will increase dramatically, but by then it will be too late. Long built-up traditions and institutions can't just be blown up and then restored.

The answer is to make the corrosive homosexual behavior--the "out" behavior—off limits from the beginning. That is just what DADT does. We may have arrived at it through a bumbling political process, but it is actually well targeted.

Laughing at Barbara Boxer's inadvertently pro-Fiorina ads

2010-10-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

She's for risky new oil drilling that could threaten our jobs....

Really? It's oil drilling that is destroying California's economy? Not the state's draconian restrictions on oil drilling?

Fiorina couldn't ask for better publicity. She'll actually uncork our energy resources? Lowering gas prices and bringing jobs to the state? Some attack ad:

All of Boxer's attacks are like this: assuming that voters are too stupid to see how ass-backwards her insinuations are. The first line of the above ad says:

She's against banning assault weapons, and that's reckless and dangerous...

What a hoot. She actually thinks pushing gun control is going to win her votes. Increased gun control polls terribly even in California, and in these hard times, not letting people defend themselves can only grow less popular. With every level of government going broke, people are smart enough to know that they will face a greater need to take care of themselves.

That won't jar California's legions of the politically correct, but calling oil drilling a job killer could be a real preference cascade initiator. Even Boxer's leftist base has to do a double-take, and anyone at all middle of the road will certainly revolt at the sheer cognitive dissonance of it, setting them up to question Boxer's other talking points as well.

Fiorina want's to "slash Social Security" and other government entitlements? Implausible, but hey, maybe not such a bad idea, when faced with trillion dollar deficits. "She'd make abortion a crime"? No one is going to belive that, even if they don't know that Fiorina's "pro-life" stance explicitly rejects imposing her abortion beliefs on others.

Fiorina is "Endorsed by Sarah Palin." Wait a minute. How can this be an appeal to the middle, when the Tea Party has much higher positives than either Democrats or Republicans?

I get it. It's not that Boxer thinks other people are that stupid. This is an honest expression of Boxer's own stupidity, as she tries to rally other like-minded (stupid) people. She is throwing what she regards as red-meat to her leftist base, and is too clueless to grasp that her logic-free attacks will alienate the middle.

Blaming Fiorina for jobs lost to the Democrats' anti-business climate

My favorite Boxer ad is her recounting of Hewlett-Packard's California job losses during Fiorina's ten year stint as HP's CEO (half the length of Boxer's tenure as senator from a state where Democrats have dominated the state legislature forever):

Again, Boxer just assumes that viewers are too stupid to grasp the obvious, even as she rubs their noses in it. As the litany of HP's California job losses is recounted the listener is forced to wonder why. What was the context? Why wasn't it good business to keep jobs here? Isn't someone else a part of this story too? Then with perfect timing, "I'm Barbara Boxer, and I approve this message." Hilarious.

It's not like California's anti-business climate is some big secret. It takes the willful blindness of Boxer and her minions not to get it. More of the same:

"I was supposed to retire there," says the entitlement-addled Cheri, as she shills for the party whose entitlement mentality is actually responsible for her HP job being shipped to China.

This glaring obliviousness to California's anti-business climate pegs Boxer as a paleo-leftist dinosaur, as does her ludicrous pretense that oil drilling is a job killer. The willful blindness here is not just dishonest, but advertises how flat out stupid Boxer is, the absolute last person you'd ever want making decisions for you. Just a brutally incompetent woman. And she puts it neatly on video for all to see. Awesome.