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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, September 08, 2007
Wrong Approach to Opium in Afghanistan? Anderson Cooper on CNN had a report this evening about how opium production is creating problems for the war in Afghanistan. The Afghan government, with the assistance of NATO, is attempting to suppress opium production, both because of the problems heroin (derived from opium) causes in the rest of the world, and because, as one of the opium farmers Cooper interviewed admitted, it was contrary to Islamic law. The Taliban have apparently turned a blind eye to the violation of Islamic law to buy opium, and then resell it in the international market as a way to raise money for weapons. The more we push on the opium eradication effort, the more we push desperately poor farmers into the arms of the Taliban. Now, some people would say that we should just abandon the ban on heroin, and wipe out the high profits of that business. That's not a realistic proposal, simply because there is no significant support for such a change. (Surveys that I have seen show at most 10% support for legalization of hard drugs such as heroin.) It also isn't clear to me that reducing the profitability of it on the streets of New York is going to have anywhere near as dramatic an effect on reducing the profitability at the earliest stages of production. A more realistic, short-term proposal would be to buy the opium from the farmers. If we pay the farmers as much as the Taliban are paying for opium, it is not available for the Taliban to resell at a profit. We aren't going to get all of it, of course, but if we could even knock down the Taliban's share of the market to 30%, that would be a substantial reduction in Taliban revenue, as well as ending a source of hostility from Afghan opium farmers towards the Afghani government and NATO. The Taliban would also likely have to raise the price that they pay for opium, reducing their profit margin on resale. How much will this cost? According to this December 2, 2006 Washington Post article, the 2006 opium crop was 5,644 metric tons. I'm not sure what the market price of that is today. This September 24, 2001 BBC report indicates that the pre-9/11 price that farmers received was $700 per kilo, which fell to $200 to $300 per kilo with the prospect of the Taliban being forced out of power, and the Afghani government abandoning its campaign to eradicate opium production. That's $700,000 per metric ton at the high end, or $200,000 per metric ton at the low end; we could buy the entire 2006 crop for somewhere between $1.1 billion and $4 billion--and that assumes that we could buy the entire crop, which we probably can't. There is a legitimate use for opium; you can refine morphine from it, and that's still a legal, although controlled drug. I suspect that buying up the entire Afghan opium crop would give us far more morphine than we are going to use for many, many years (because current legal production apparently comes from about 1000 tons of opium, and unfortunately, morphine does not last forever). Maybe it would be more expensive than the current, legal channels, but what's the cost of defeating the Taliban in lives lost and equipment destroyed? We also don't have to run this opium farm price support program forever--just a few years, until we can decisively defeat the Taliban, and then slowly phase it out. Interesting Phone Scam And since it came from a newspaper, with police officials quoted, it's a couple of steps up from something you get forwarded to you in email! From the September 6, 2007 St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
The Advantages of a Small Machine Shop in the Garage I wanted to do some videography from my car--but no matter how I strapped the tripod into the passenger's seat, it kept falling over when I went around corners. (I don't know why; the Corvette just insists on going around corners fast.) So I looked for a hard point on which to mount a camera mount--and I found one. This is the passenger side latch point for the roof panel. It's made of steel or aluminum, and it is bolted to the body.  There's a 0.17" diameter hole that goes all the way through. The latch point is variable width and height, maximum .631". So I machined a piece of Delrin with a 15 degree angle at the front, and a .631" slot through it. Then I dropped an 8-32 screw through the Delrin, through the hole in the latch, and back through the Delrin. A nut holds the 8-32 screw very securely. You can see a silver circle on top; that's a 1/4"-20 thumbscrew that comes up from the underside, and screws into the camera's tripod hole. It is very secure, even when going down the old highway.  I don't have any video to show you right now--because of this cause of haze and air pollution, a few miles from us:  I photographed this a few nights ago as darkness set in, so it's not much of a picture. Amusing Accidental Test of Autofocus & Light Sensitivity I forgot to remove the lens cap from this older Sony Handycam--and I found myself wondering what was this rather strange image that it recorded:  Eventually, I figured out that even with the small amount of sunlight getting in through the edges of the cap--and at a distance of a few millimeters--the camera was successfully adjusting its sensitivity and focus to capture the inside of the lens cap.  Friday, September 07, 2007
Danes At War (And Canadians, and Germans) Don't forget: we've got a lot of allies in this War on Terror. Here's a YouTube video of Danish military fighting in Afghanistan. And this one. And Canadian forces in Afghanistan. And German soldiers in Afghanistan. Labels: terrorism Living Wages Radley Balko over at Reason Hit & Run mentions this charming bit of hypocrisy: The workers who clean Baltimore's Camden Yards baseball stadium are planning a hunger strike to protest their $7 per hour wages. The stadium is the largest employer of the city's homeless day laborers. The kicker, though, is that the Maryland legislature recently passed a "living wage" bill, setting the minimum at $11.30 per hour. But while the bill covers any business with state contracts in the Baltimore area, the state government is exempt, and Camden is owned by the state of Maryland.He also mentions that the leftist organizing group ACORN has a history of not paying a living wage to its workers--and then challenging the law when applied to them with a free market critique of a law that they want applied to everyone else! ACORN isn't the only leftist operation that wants laws that it won't follow itself. Back in the late 1970s, the Campaign for Economic Democracy (Hayden and Fonda's operation) was demanding a raise in the minimum wage--but they weren't paying their workers a minimum wage. Why? They were a non-profit, and thus exempt from California law for that reason. If the left really wanted to do something to alleviate the misery of the poor, they would be shutting off the spigot that supplies vast quantities of poorly educated illegal aliens. But that wouldn't do anything for their campaign against capitalism. A reduction in the supply of cheap labor would drive up wages. Would it drive wages up enough to pay the equivalent of these "living wage" laws? I don't know. I do know that in the 19th century, before steamships made travel to America cheap, the perpetual shortage of labor here meant that even unskilled workers did much better here than in Europe--with daily wages often three or four times that of Britain, for example. In Britain, workers averaged about a shilling a day. In America, three or four shillings a day was more typical. The response of the privileged classes, at least during the Colonial period, was to pass maximum wage laws, so that the poor wouldn't exploit the rich. A couple of years back, I mentioned an example from Massachusetts Governor Winthrop's journal of an "insolent" worker, and why they just had to pass a maximum wage law. Some colonies set a maximum wage of three shillings a day for skilled laborers, and 2 1/2 shillings a day for unskilled laborers. Accounts from English travelers to America in the early Republic also mention how difficult it was to keep servants, because they could, if mistreated, find another equal or better paying job on short notice. I know, I know, interfering in the free market by enforcing our immigration laws would drive up prices of anything that has unskilled labor in it. There's no question that this is true. But I rather doubt that even a 25% increase in labor rates for lettuce pickers would mean a 5% increase in the price of lettuce. Remember that a lot of the cost of food isn't the labor to pick it, but packaging and transportation. Even labor in restaurants isn't the major cost of your meal. I would much rather pay another 50 cents for a Big Mac Meal, in exchange for stopping the flood of illegal aliens, and see the people working behind the counter get paid enough that leftist ideology doesn't sound so attractive. And remember: these are our neighbors, sometimes our friends, and even our kids (at least until they get through college). Another Failure of Deinstitutionalization The police are treating this as a self-defense shooting--and by the newspaper account, this guy had a history of violence and mental illness. So why is it more humane to have him out on the street, where he is a threat to others, and gets shot, instead of hospitalized? From the September 7, 2007 Gainesville [Georgia] Times: A mentally disturbed man who authorities say approached a neighbor's home in a threatening manner was shot and critically wounded Thursday in South Hall County. Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun self-defense Thursday, September 06, 2007
Added Dabbs v. State (Ark. 1882) and In re Brickey (Ida. 1902) I put a bunch of images of 19th and 20th century state supreme court right to keep and bear arms decisions up on my web page a year or two ago--but I lost steam part way through the process. Okay, I just put the aforementioned decision up. This was an Arkansas Supreme Court decision that upheld a ban on sale of handguns other than "such as are used in the army and navy of the United States...." The argument was that military pistols were protected because they could be used in the common defense, while pocket pistols were not. The law was enacted as a measure of precaution for the prevention of crimes and calamities. It is leveled at the pernicious habit of wearing such dangerous or deadly weapons as are easily concealed about the person. It does not abridge the constitutional right of citizens to keep and bear arms for the common defense; for it in no wise restrains the use or sale of such arms as are useful in warfare.It appears that no one challenged the statute on Second Amendment grounds--or at least, the Supreme Court did not allude to it, only a Fourteenth Amendment challenge. Once upon a time, gun control groups liked to cite this case as a justification for bans on Saturday Night Specials. Since they are now at least as interested in banning "such arms as are useful in warfare" (you know, evil black rifles), you aren't likely going to see them cite this case today. It is amusing to see this as an example of how the Arkansas legislature felt that it had a valid basis for banning guns that were not "useful in warfare" but recognized that even with the claim of "for the common defense," they knew that they could not ban private ownership or sale of military-style handguns. The In re Brickey (Ida. 1902) decision struck down a territorial-era law against carrying deadly weapons in towns for violating both the Second Amendment and the Idaho Constitution's RKBA provisions. UPDATE: And State v. Boone (N.C. 1903), and State v. Burgoyne (Tenn. 1879). Labels: gun history, gun rights Fred's Running! Everyone knows that he's running, of course, and I've been supportive because of what he has had to say. The announcement over here emphasizes:
Let me give you an example. Some years ago, when Republicans in Congress were proposing to ban partial-birth abortion, my first reaction was, "That's okay with me." But Instapundit (who at the time was still just an obscure Tennessee law professor) wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal pointing out that this was contrary to federalism, because it proposed to take away the authority of the states to make this decision. I found that a very persuasive argument--very much like the argument that the states should be free to either allow, regulate, or even ban abortion, as was the case before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade (1973). Of course, Congress could pass a ban that applied only to federal territories, the District of Columbia, military hospitals. (I've never been terribly impressed with the use of interstate commerce regulatory authority to justify banning actions that take place entirely within one state, even when I agreed that the action was a bad idea.) Some states will continue to allow abortion on demand; most will not. Some states will make homosexuality a crime; most will not. A few states will recognize same-sex marriage; most will not. If you don't like the particular policy decisions that your state makes, moving isn't so difficult. In some cases, the different laws of different states will reflect genuine differences in the conditions and needs of the people. In other cases, states will make mistakes, but with fifty laboratories, those errors will become obvious over time. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Does This Qualify as News? It reminds me of the famous saying that "dog bites man" isn't really news. From the September 6, 2007 New Jersey Herald News: Unfortunately, this kind of corruption is endemic in New Jersey: More than 100 public officials in the state have been convicted on federal corruption charges in the last five years, the A.P. reported. Labels: politicians behaving badly My Daughter's Criminal Dog He is both smart and ill-behaved--a bad combination. He managed to get the bag of chocolate covered coffee beans off the kitchen counter--with predictable results throughout the house. And now this amazing incident. This Really Freaks Me Out From September 6, 2007 Reuters: And I admit that it is primarily an emotional reaction to something that reads like really creepy science fiction--except that Stalin's Soviet Union made similar attempts at creating cross-breeds of humans and animals. I've blogged before about proposals to create rats with human brain cells, and how disturbing I find this. Labels: cross-species breeding Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Scrappleface Explains The Un-Resignation You can always count on Scrappleface to come up with a satirical explanation of something stupid:
Labels: homosexuality, Idaho politics More Hsu Puns Than You Can Jump Bail At There are more puns that shake a stick out about Norman Hsu's fundraising for Democrats. Now Hsu failed to make his bail hearing--and remember, he jumped bail 15 years ago. Over at Michelle Malkin's website, an excessively clever commenter rewrote the Dion song: Instapundit points to a headline at the San Francisco Chronicle website: ANOTHER HSU PUN: The Norman Evasion: "Demo fundraiser skips court hearing, whereabouts unknown."It's all very funny--but the disturbing questions about where the money is really coming from (Red China, maybe, like apparently happened in 1996 for the Clinton/Gore campaign) are simply being ignored by the mainstream media. Admittedly, there's no sex involved, so I guess that it doesn't really matter, does it? Or is it just that the corruption involves Democratic politicians--and therefore it meets party standards for ethics? Labels: politicians behaving badly Interesting Question: Is This Extortion? I don't know enough about the extortion statute to know if this claim is right--but wouldn't it be interesting if it is? From Red State:
I share Red State's concern that being a hypocrite isn't okay--but if this qualifies as extortion (and it sounds like it does), then Mike Rogers should be prosecuted. Labels: homosexuality, Idaho politics CBS Admits Progress in Iraq You know things must be going well when CBS's news anchor has this to say: CBS) BAGHDAD, Iraq One week before Gen. David Petraeus is expected to give his report on U.S. progress in Iraq, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric says she has already seen dramatic improvements in the country.Obviously, CBS wouldn't say this unless they were terribly afraid of looking stupid at a later time. Jules Crittenden is calling her the "anti-Cronkite" because of the way in which Walter Cronkite helped the Viet Cong win the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive. Labels: terrorism D.C. v. Heller This is the appeal by the District of Criminals to the U.S. Supreme Court on the Parker decision, which ruled that parts of DC's gun control law violate the Second Amendment. There's no word yet on whether the Supreme Court will hear the appeal. Contrary to popular impression, there are only a few types of cases that the Supreme Court must hear. It is true that where there is a "circuit split" (meaning that different U.S. Courts of Appeals have come to different conclusions), and the point of law in question is considered important, the Supreme Court should and often does hear the appeal. But they aren't required to do so, and there are some really ugly political reasons why they might not. Consider this: it takes four justices to agree to hear a certiorari appeal. The justices will be making decisions about whether to grant certiorari based on whether they believe that the Court will make the right decision or not. If you are Justice Thomas, for example, and you believe that there are five votes to uphold the Court of Appeals decision, then you might be inclined to vote to grant certiorari. If you believe that there are five votes to strike it down, you might vote against hearing the appeal. Similarly, if you are Justice Ginsburg, you might vote against hearing the appeal if you think it is likely that a majority will recognize that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. The petition for certiorari from the District of Criminals essentially makes the following claims: 1. "The Right Protected by the Second Amendment Is Limited to Weapons Possession and Use in Connection With Service in State-Regulated Militias" Their argument is that the Second Amendment was never intended to protect an individual right. This is an astonishingly silly claim, because the individual right understanding is the only view that can be documented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea that the Second Amendment protects only a right to possess weapons as part of state-regulated militias is a twentieth century invention--as my book For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (Praeger Press, 1994) demonstrates. Even the one decision of the nineteenth century that denies that there is a right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, State v. Buzzard (Ark. 1842) admits that the right is still individual in nature, even though the purpose is to maintain the ability to rise up against the government: But it was also well understood that the militia, without arms, however well disposed, might be unable to resist, successfully, the effort of those who should conspire to overthrow the established institutions of the country, or subjugate their common liberties; and therefore, to guard most effectually against such consequences, and enable the militia to discharge this most important trust, so reposed in them, and for this purpose only, it is conceived the right to keep and bear arms was retained, and the power which, without such reservation, would have been vested in the government, to prohibit, by law, their keeping and bearing arms for any purpose whatever was so far limited or withdrawn; which conclusion derives additional support from the well-known fact that the practice of maintaining a large standing army in times of peace had been denounced and repudiated by the people of the United States as an institution dangerous to civil liberty and a free State, which produced at once the necessity of providing some adequate means for the security and defense of the state, more congenial to civil liberty and republican government. And it is confidently believed that the people designed and expected to accomnplish this object by the adoption of the article under consideration, which would forever invest them with a legal right to keep and bear arms for that purpose; but it surely was not designed to operate as an immunity to those who should so keep or bear their arms as to injure or endanger the private rights of others, or in any manner prejudice the common interests of society.The whole decision is written like that--and the reasoning that went into it wasn't any better. More typical are decisions such as State v. Newsom (N.C. 1844), which do not dispute the individual nature of the right: The Constitution of the United States was ordained and established by the people of the United States, for their own government, and not for that of the different States. The limitations of power, contained in it and expressed in general terms, are necessarily confined to the General Government. It is now the settled construction of that instrument, that no limitation upon the power of government extends to, or embraces the different States, unless they are mentioned, or it is expressed to be so intended. Barrow v. The Mayor, &c. of Baltimore, 7 Peter's Rep. 240. Raleigh and Gaston Rail Road Company v. Davis, 2 Dev. & Bat. 459. In the 2d article of the amended Constitution, the States are neither mentioned nor referred to. It is therefore only restrictive of the powers of the Federal Government.You can see a long list of decisions here. This is so clearly the case that those arguing for the collective rights theory are reduced to claiming that "bearing arms" is only used in a collective sense, and this proves that the Second Amendment is not an individual right. This turns out to be factually incorrect--and this claim has not a single statement from anyone in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries to back it up--while we have lots of statements by courts, constitutional commentaries, and newspapers of the time demonstrating that the right was individual in nature. 2. "Laws Limited to the District of Columbia Do Not Violate the Second Amendment" This is essentially a claim that even if the Second Amendment was an individual right, it was only intended to limit the states, not the federal government. This is incorrect because Barron v. Baltimore (1833) explicitly defined that the Bill of Rights was a limitation on the federal government's power--and James Madison's notes for the introduction of the Bill of Rights clearly establish that they were to "protect private rights." Even DC's petition points to a large number of state courts that refused to consider the Second Amendment as applying to state laws--but those decisions overwhelming recognized the Second Amendment as limiting what actions the federal government could take. They were not protections of the states, but of individuals against the federal government 3. The DC petition argues that even if the right is individual, there are good public policy reasons for banning handguns, because rifles and shotguns aren't banned. This is a position that gun control groups used to use, back in the 1970s and even in the early 1980s, when they were only trying to ban handguns. But a lot of the decisions that they used to defend that position are ones like English v. State (Tex. 1872) that argued that only weapons of civilized warfare (you know, like AR-15s and AK-47s) are protected arms. What also makes this argument not work pragmatically is that handguns are indeed criminally misused more than long guns--but they are also used defensively more than long guns, simply because they are so handy. From a Constitutional standpoint, the problem is that handguns were commonly owned in 1791 when the states ratified the Second Amendment. In my research for Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nelson Current, 2007), I have been surprised at how little regulation of handguns there was. In the entire period before the War of 1812, I could find only one difference between how handguns were regulated, and other firearms. During the American Revolution, Tories were often disarmed of long guns, partly because they weren't trusted, and partly because those guns were needed to arm the poorest members of the militia. But handguns were often exempted from those confiscations. Labels: gun history, gun rights Fred Thompson's Hat Is In The Ring The first television ad is a bit light on content. And the web site that the ad refers us to seems to be empty at the moment. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Senator Craig's Story Just Gets Worse And Worse The comments over at Huckleberries Online suggest that Senator Craig went rather far out of his way--outside the security zone, and thus he would have had to go back through security--to use the public restroom that he did: I can't figure out from the map if this is correct, and it is certainly possible that Craig had some reason to go elsewhere in the airport--and then suddenly had an urgent need to go to that particular restroom. If I have a bit of time to kill on a layover, I walk around the airport a good bit--but I have to have a very good reason to leave one security zone, knowing that I will have to go back through security again. It's a nuisance: removing shoes; emptying my pockets; often removing my belt. It also isn't something that you do by accident--it is very clear when you leave a security zone. As Idaho Values Alliance points out, Craig did not have a lot of time to kill: Further, the senator, as a frequent traveler, most likely had access to a VIP lounge for his use during layovers. His layover, according to press accounts, was from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., in other words, over the lunch hour. Most observers will find it inexplicable that a traveler with access to free food and a comfortable and clean bathroom in an essentially private lounge would go out of his way to seek out a public bathroom.It also isn't looking good for Craig to claim that he had no idea what was going on. Craig admitted that he had used that restroom frequently, and claimed that the police officer solicited him:
If Senator Craig had claimed, "I had no idea that these were signals for soliciting sex in a public restroom," he could have played the Idaho rube card. But claiming "You solicited me" makes it rather difficult to not realize that there was a homosexual signaling process underway. At best, he might be able to argue that this was entrapment--but that's quite a bit different from, "I had no idea what all this meant." I hear now that Senator Craig is reconsidering resignation. I hope not. Even if he somehow manages to withdraw his guilty plea, his credibility and judgment are shown by this whole sordid affair to be wanting. Senator Craig needs to move on, and allow Lt. Gov. Risch to start working on representing Idaho in the Senate. Labels: homosexuality, Idaho politics ADS Tech DVDXpress DX2 Video Capture I spent a bit of time trying to figure out if I should buy a digital camcorder or a video capture device that would let me use my existing analog Hi-8 Sony Handycam. There were some strong arguments for buying a digital camcorder, primarily that it was more likely to produce a crisper and clearer image without having to do the analog to digital transformation. But when I started looking at the choices of digital camcorders, there seemed to be the following options: 1. Really cheap ($100 to $150) digital camcorders that record to SDRAM cards and produce what many reviewers said was really poor quality video. 2. Somewhat more expensive ($280 to $380) digital camcorders that record to SDRAM cards and produce really beautiful video--but are limited to about an hour or so of video storage before you have to stop and put in another card. For many applications, that's not a problem. I have some time-lapse video requirements that make this impractical. 3. Digital camcorders in the $600 and up range that record to hard disk, and can record several hours of video at a time. What was behind door number 1 wasn't worth my time. Door number 3 was just too expensive for what I am doing. (This has been an expensive month for new tires and car repairs.) Door number 2 would be attractive--except that using my existing analog camcorder costs me nothing, gives me several hours of video without changing tapes, and the video capture gadget cost me $75 from Newegg.com. I've bought the ADS Tech product before--but I was trying to run it from Windows98, and it never worked very reliably. I installed it on my son's Windows ME box--and while it worked the first I installed it, he was constantly getting his PC infected with all the viruses that teenagers tend to download, and the second installation of the capture software did not work. Anyway, I'm pleased with the latest version. It consists of a little box that either takes an S-Video or three RCA plugs, and uses a USB connector to talk to your PC. There is both a standalone capture program (CapWiz) that takes incoming analog video and converts it into an MPEG2 file, and Ulead Video Studio 9 SE, which can either do the video capture itself, or use the file that CapWiz produces. Ulead Video Studio isn't Adobe Premiere, but it has a few features in it that Windows Movie Maker does not, including the one that really matters to me: control over playback speed. (Windows Movie Maker does give you the ability to double or halve the playback speed, but you have to drag the effect to each individual segment on the timeline, and 1/2 and 2x are pretty coarse adjustments.) I would have preferred time-lapse video capture capability (the ability to grab every sixth frame, for example, to save disk space), but this is an adequate alternative. Along with many other editing features, you can create a video output file at any speed from 10% to 1000% of the captured frame rate, so you can do either slow motion or speeded up video. This won't do if you want to do time-lapse video of a flower opening--but your video camera probably doesn't have enough storage capacity to do this real-time anyway. (And you can do a 1000% speedup, save the file, then import it, and repeat the 1000% speedup.) So far, everything works pretty well. The final saving of the video output file to either MPEG2 or WMV (Windows Media Video) takes a long time, even on this very quick laptop that I have--but I rather expect that, considering the enormous amount of processing it takes to calculate all the base frames and delta frames. To my surprise, WMV format manages to be both much more compact than MPEG2 and better image quality! How Did I Miss This? Eric over at Classical Values claims that the Watergate burglars were actually not trying to get evidence of Cuban involvement in the 1972 campaign, but the records of a call girl business run out of the DNC--and that John Dean's interest in it--and later turning on the Nixon Administration--was because the records implicated him as a customer. Very, very interesting. I don't know it is true, but it certainly explains a lot of what did and didn't get said during the investigation. Labels: history Global Warming Consensus (Again) I mentioned yesterday that Martin-Klaus Schulte has redone Naomi Oreskes 2004 review of papers about climate change, and found that the "consensus" in support of anthropogenic global warming that she found isn't there anymore. A reader pointed me to evidence that maybe it wasn't even there in 2004. Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University wrote a letter to Science disputing Oreskes' claim, which you can read here. Unfortunately, they wouldn't publish it, first because it was too long--then, when he cut it the requested length: After realizing that the basic points of your letter have already been widely dispersed over the internet, we have reluctantly decided that we cannot publish your letter. We appreciate your taking the time to revise it.So first it's too long--then everyone knows it, so we can't publish it. Now, there are some criticisms of Peiser's claims, such as this one that claims that some of the abstracts that Peiser put in the "rejects or doubts" category don't belong there. Even the examples picked don't seem to be clearly wrongly categorized. Without Schulte's recent attempt to replicate Oreskes' results, I am not sure that I could have an opinion about whether Peiser was right or not. Schulte's results--and the absurd reasons why Science rejected Peiser's letter--suggest to me that Oreskes' 2004 results should not be accepted as valid. Labels: global warming Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Carbon Offsets: I'm Ready To Start Selling Them! I've been very interested ever since I had this house built to use solar and wind power. I want to reduce my consumption of fossil fuels (some of which might come from places where they wind their turbans too tight), and to be more self-sufficient. There's one big problem: I just can't see any way (yet) to buy photovoltaic cells. To be cost-competitive with Idaho Power's roughly 6 cents per kilowatt/hour charge, I need photovoltaics to get down to about $2 per watt to really make sense. (I figure that it would take about 27 years for the capital costs of the panel alone--not counting batteries, installation, and inverter--to pay for itself with the current $5 to $6 per watt price.) I'm working on a scheme that improves the number of hours of operation a bit, but I'm not expecting to get more than a 50% improvement in output, even if my clever idea works perfectly. Now, I know that there are a lot of very guilt-ridden people out there--the kind who fly their private jets around the U.S. every week or two, and who drive Hummers, and have enormous electricity bills (yes, I mean you, Al Gore). And so I've got a deal for you: If you really want to get over those guilt feelings about your crimes against Mother Earth, just write me a check for however many watts you want me to put up in photovoltaics--and I'll be happy to do so! I don't need you to pay the whole cost--just give $4 per watt, in 1000 watt increments, and I promise within six months to have photovoltaic panels up and operational. Thank you! Labels: alternative power Hypocrisy Considered As A Human Failing Jonah Goldberg has an amusing column about how Democrats are using Senator Craig's bathroom antics as a tool: Since most on the Left think Craig’s alleged sexual liaisons are perfectly benign, they shouldn’t object. “Who are we to judge?” and all that. Rather, the Left claims it hates Craig’s hypocrisy, not his behavior.More to the point, Goldberg points out that hypocrisy isn't a failure of an ideology, but a failure of individuals, using the example that I mentioned a few days ago--John Edwards asking us all to sacrifice, and give up SUVs--but he hasn't done so. What really bugs me, however, is how many liberals do things just as hypocritical as family values politicians playing footsie in the men's room--and they do it and say it in public, with no sign of shame: You don’t even have to give up traditional religion, so long as you now define the teachings of your faith in perfect compliance with the Democratic platform.I happen to agree that concern for the poor is a Christian value, and even government providing some basic level of subsistence is a Christian value. It is also a conservative value; American and English government has been doing so since the Elizabethan Poor Laws. Contrary to what a lot of ignorant liberals and conservatives want to believe, the New Deal wasn't the beginning of governmental assistance to the poor. The real dispute is about what is the most effective way to provide that assistance, what level of assistance is obligatory, and whether particular programs help the poor--or encourage destructive behaviors. But a politician who claims to be a Christian, and therefore has a moral obligation to use governmental power to care for the poor and the needy is in no position to suddenly claim that the government has to ignore Christian values when it comes to defining marriage, or prohibiting obscene materials, or punishing sexual immorality. There might be pragmatic arguments for why and how the government writes these laws. There might be a case for writing laws that reflect a societal consensus about these issues. But pretending that Christian values require the government to care for the poor--and ignoring those values when it would offend the immoral minority--that's not principle. It's hypocrisy, no different from preaching against homosexuality while sneaking off for your afternoon session of homosexual sex. Labels: hypocrisy The Global Warming Consensus Environmentalists keep telling me that there is a consensus of scientists about global warming, its causes, and its possible severity. I've pointed out in the past that a large majority isn't the same as a consensus, and that even a large majority can be defeated by one scientist who shows that the majority is wrong. When 100 prominent German physicists signed a declaration denying the validity of "Jewish physics," Einstein observed that it would have only required one of them to prove that he wrong--if that were the case. As this article from Physics Today some years ago pointed out: Philosophers of science say that measurements are "theory laden," and they are. But good experimenters are irredeemable skeptics who thoroughly enjoy refuting the more speculative ideas of their theoretical colleagues. Through experience, they know how to exclude bias and make valid judgments that withstand the tests of time.3 Hypotheses that run this harrowing gauntlet and survive acquire a certain hardness--or reality--that mere fashions never achieve. This quality is what distinguishes science from the arts.Still, it does sound pretty impressive when you hear that most scientific papers accept that global warming is happening, and is largely man-made. Or is it still so impressive when you read something like this? In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.I can see some potential problems with this analysis. Papers that are neutral might not bother to take a position because they don't feel a need to do so. I think I can safely assume that a survey of papers published in astrophysics journals would find that they are overwhelmingly neutral about the shape of the Earth; but this doesn't imply an absence of consensus that the Earth is flat. (Well, yes, there is the Flat Earth Society web page, and it doesn't seem to be a parody, but I doubt that its members are publishing papers in astrophysics journals.) Still, there is some controversy about the extent (if any) of anthropogenic contributions to global warming, as the papers that I mentioned here demonstrate. It does seem that there is a genuine question about whether this scientific consensus still exists. If Schulte truly used the same methodology as Oreskes--and the consensus Oreskes found no longer exists, then I can see two real possibilities: 1. If Oreskes' finding of a consensus was valid, and Schulte uses the same methods today and finds the consensus isn't there, then perhaps the consensus has evaporated. 2. If Schulte's use of Oreskes' methodology is defective for determining consensus or its absence, then perhaps Oreskes finding of consensus was defective, too. UPDATE: More about the history of the dispute here. Labels: global warming Addicted To Deception: What Passes For History These Days I ran into a most peculiar book the other day--a comic book presentation of American foreign policy, titled, Addicted to War: Why The U.S. Can't Kick Militarism. What worries me is that a piece of inaccurate and deceptive trash like this has been adopted by the San Francisco Board of Education. As I've mentioned in the past: I have some sympathy for the point of view that says that U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other countries have often been counterproductive to democracy, capitalism, and human rights. Libertarian critics of U.S. foreign policy claim that our intervention in Central American countries in the early twentieth century was driven by commercial interests. Major General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket makes this claim concerning Nicaragua and Haiti--both places where Butler played a major role in the operations. (There's nothing quite as gauche as Butler walking into the Haitian Congress in 1915 and telling them to go home; he was now in charge.)There are serious criticisms of our pragmatic foreign policy out there, not only by academics, but by politicians: We seek democracy in that region for the same reasons we spent decades working for democracy in Europe -- because freedom is the only reliable path to peace. If the Middle East continues to simmer in anger and resentment and hopelessness, caught in a cycle of repression and radicalism, it will produce terrorism of even greater audacity and destructive power. But if the peoples of that region gain the right of self-government, and find hopes to replace their hatreds, then the security of all free nations will be strengthened. We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others. And so, with confidence and resolve, we will stand for freedom across the broader Middle East.Addicted to War, however, does not qualify as a |
