A Canadian astronaut on a six-month stay aboard the international space station said on Sunday it looks like Earth’s ice caps have melted a bit since he was last in orbit 12 years ago.
Bob Thirsk said that there is a “very thin veil of atmosphere around the Earth that keeps us alive … Most of the time when I look out the window I’m in awe. But there are some effects of the human destruction of the Earth as well,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
“This is probably just a perception, but I just have the feeling that the glaciers are melting, the snow capping the mountains is less than it was 12 years ago when I saw it last time,” Thrisk was quoted as saying. “That saddens me a little bit.”
It’s “probably just a perception” and he “has a feeling”, eh? Oh that’s solid scientific evidence right there. He actually used instruments from space to somehow measure the amount of ice on the surface of the earth? No? Yeah that’s what I thought.
Why is this bullshit even reported? Why is an astronaut, supposedly a highly trained, intelligent, scientifically-minded individual, offering a totally subjective opinion about something that he is in no position (figuratively or literally) to have information about? His education is in mechanical engineering and medicine (he’s an MD). What the hell does he know about polar ice?
Naturally, we can expect the viros to latch onto this throwaway opinion as “evidence” of global warming or some shit.
Interestingly, we don’t really need that evidence. It is true that the data show a general warming trend over the past 100 years or so. It is also true that polar ice volumes are changing, apparently getting smaller, and that glaciers are moving and losing volume.
What is NOT clear, however, is the cause. The link between global CO2 levels and global temperatures is actually reversed from what is commonly believed. That is, the temperature went up, and THEN the CO2 levels increased. CO2 increase is not causal. And yes, I am aware of the so-called refutations of this conclusion:
The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.
So basically, this guy is saying that a warming cycle takes 5000 years to complete, and yet we have somehow concluded that the earth is warming up because of human activity just within the past 100 years? That makes no sense. Also, the assertion that warming “could” have been caused by CO2, is dishonest, because it is speculation with no data to support it. I’m not a geoscientist, but the article in question seems intentionally circuitous and misleading. If anyone cares to explain more clearly the position being advocated, I’m interested.
Then there’s the famous “hockey stick graph” that supposedly shows a dramatic increase in global temperatures over the past thousand years. It is highly flawed, one might even conclude intentionally so, and is no longer considered valid.
So what exactly is my point here? My point is, the data we have indicate that we are in the early stages of a trend that is normal for this planet over many past millennia. Whether or not human activity is contributing is something we are not able to discern. Astronaut Thirsk is showing an unscientific and unsupportable bias in his statements that serves no purpose other than to be inflammatory and perpetuate an irrational belief about human civilization and the planet we live on. It is beneath him as a scientist and a human being to speak this way, given his highly public occupation.
You folks may be aware of an incident that happened in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently. A Harvard scholar named Louis Gates, Jr. was observed by a neighbor shoulder-forcing the door of his own home at night after returning from a trip and being unable to find his keys. Crucial of note here is the fact that the neighbor didn’t know that it was Gates himself, and that Gates is black (and apparently famous even though I never heard of the guy). The cops show up, responding to a possible break in at a residence. Gates refuses to show identification (according to the police report) and becomes belligerent. He calls the cop a racist, pulls out the “do you know who I am” card, and finally gets arrested for disorderly conduct.
There are a number of interesting details about this story. One is that Gates is supposedly some famous Harvard “black scholar”, whatever that exactly means. Another is that the cop refuses to apologize for how he conducted the situation:
Crowley, however, has refused to apologize, and he told the radio station he did nothing wrong. He added he was surprised that a man as educated as Gates would start yelling epithets about Crowley’s mom, part of the incident that never made it into the police report.
“That apology will never come. It won’t come from me as Jim Crowley. It won’t come from me as a sergeant in the police department,” Crowley told WEEI.
“I know what I did was right. I have nothing to apologize for,” he added.
This is 100% pure awesome. This is exactly how the cop should respond to this situation. Indeed, he did nothing wrong and acted properly. I mean come on. Somebody reports a guy busting into a house, the cop knows a lot of things could await him at the scene. A burglar might be there. The homeowner might be in trouble. It’s entirely possible that people could still be in the house without the homeowner’s knowledge after the cop arrives.
The officer has to make sure he knows who he’s talking to. That requires ID. He’s checking to see if the person he’s dealing with is, in fact, the resident of the home. Then he has to check the house to make sure nobody unauthorized is there. Officer Crowley was alone when he first responded, so he had Gates come outside onto the porch, for his safety and for Gates’ safety, and waited for backup.
But the only thing on Gates’ mind is that some white cop is hassling him for being a black man, and he won’t shut the fuck up about it:
“I can’t believe that an individual policeman on the Cambridge police force would treat any African-American male this way, and I am astonished that this happened to me; and more importantly I’m astonished that it could happen to any citizen of the United States, no matter what their race,” Gates wrote.
“I would sooner have believed the sky was going to fall from the heavens than I would have believed this could happen to me. It shouldn’t have happened to me, and it shouldn’t happen to anyone,” Gates continued.
You would think, from the level of whaargarbl in this response, that the cop had randomly stopped him while he was walking down the street and proceeded to arrest him for being a negro in the wrong part of town. The officer responded to a disturbance, acted in the best interest of everyone there, and this is the thanks he gets? What if it hadn’t been Gates, and the officer had ignored the call and the house had been robbed? What if Gates was being held hostage by armed thugs in his house? He could be dead, or worse.
The whole thing got worse when Obama decided to offer his totally unnecessary and uninformed opinion on the matter:
Asked about the incident, Obama, who is friends with the professor and documentary filmmaker, told reporters at a Wednesday night press conference that he didn’t know all the facts. But he said, “the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”
Later, a press secretary tried to spin it to be a little less insulting:
“Cooler heads should have prevailed. That’s what the president denoted,” he said. “He was not calling the officer stupid. The situation got out of hand.”
No, I’m pretty sure that this comes perilously close to Obama simply calling the cop a racist without actually saying it in those words. As for Crowley being surprised that Gates would insult his mother, call him a racist, and say “You don’t know who you’re messing with”, he shouldn’t be. Gates is just one of that class of elitist, leftist oligarchs in our society who thinks that everyone should recognize him and accord him some kind of deference based on that.
The fact that Gates has a PhD in English Lit and a BA in History (neither is from Harvard, he just teaches there) is no guarantee that he has manners, or, ironically, class. It’s not even a guarantee that he has any common sense, wisdom, or sense of fucking perspective.
So, Officer Crowley, you go right on ahead telling people to shut the hell up, including the President of the United States. You acted correctly and Gates is being a whiny bitch whose shit suddenly got real.
Kyle tends to give good advice. Following my message to the White House conveying my displeasure regarding Obama’s support of Zelaya, Kyle suggested that I balance that out by letting the Honduran Embassy in DC know that I support their decision to remove Zelaya from power. So I sent the following message:
As an American, I want to let you know that not all Americans support President Obama in his attempts to return Manuel Zelaya to power. We know that Zelaya is a criminal, that he was trying to circumvent the Honduran Constitution, and that he is no friend of freedom or the rule of law.
I am angry that Obama supports Zelaya, but not surprised. I have sent a message to the White House expressing my disapproval. Hopefully my countrymen will do the same.
Hondurans, take comfort in knowing that not everyone is against you. Many of us support your decision to remove Zelaya. You are doing the right thing, and his removal is just. He should not be allowed to return. Ignore the rest of the world; they are fools who believe in dictators. Stand strong and do not give in.
I do not know if the sentiment will be appreciated, but I feel better for sending it. Balancing the negative with the positive — it’s good for me as well as for them.
I just sent this letter to the White House through their comment form at whitehouse.gov. I am thoroughly disgusted with the United States’ support of that socialist thug.
Mr. President,
I am angry and disappointed that your administration supports Manuel Zelaya in returning to power in Honduras. It is clear that Zelaya violated Honduran law in his failure to enact properly passed legislation in Congress, and it is also clear that as a friend of Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, he is an enemy of freedom and democracy. He sought a referendum that would have removed term limits in the Honduran Constitution, thus cementing his power as dictator of that nation. How can America support this? Further, why are we interfering in what was clearly a legal and proper removal of a criminal from government? They even managed it without anyone getting hurt. Zelaya tried to return, and they blocked his plane from landing. They could have simply shot it out of the sky, and would have been fully justified in doing so, yet they did not.
You say that we should be impartial regarding other nations’ form of government. I disagree. We can and must be vocal defenders of liberty, and we should take every opportunity to denounce socialism and leftist thuggery no matter where it is found.
Mr. Obama, we should not be attempting to return Zelaya to power. We should be supporting the just rule of law in Honduras, and congratulating them on their successful defense of democracy in removing Zelaya.
I feel a sense of despair in being just one voice in this nation. I debate the merit in even sending such comments. Kyle points out that positions are counted, and the government does tally such things. I presume this is true. I have to, otherwise I succumb to apathy and disinterest like so many of my countrymen.
Yesterday, Anne and I swung by the San Jose Tea Party protest. We didn’t have time to prepare anything, so we simply wandered around taking pictures and chatting with people. I was fairly impressed with the turnout, considering that San Jose is a fairly liberal city in a very liberal state. I know nothing about estimating crowd sizes, but the San Jose Mercury News reports the turnout at 1000. (I’ve been told that the local talk radio station estimated 2000, but since they helped organize they’re likely to skew high. So I’d guess somewhere in the middle.) We don’t have a decent panoramic shot, but here’s a couple of the crowd:
There were a lot of signs, ranging from the clearly home-made to the professionally printed. The overall theme was, sadly, political, with objections to taxation, excessive government spending and rapidly increasing debt. There was a lot of talk about what people were against, but much less about what people were for. That’s a problem, which I’ll talk about a bit more towards the end of this post.
Congress took some well-deserved hits for passing the so-called stimulus bill without actually reading it first.
There were some people with a more positive message. Nice to see a good word for capitalism.
I didn’t see any giant puppets, but large revolutionary-era flags are always a winner.
These guys probably win the award for “Longest Trip To The Protest”. It must be scary to flee socialist oppression in one’s homeland only to witness the same thing rising in your new country, aided and abetted by people who should damn well know better.
In spite of the attempts by the port side to present the Tea Party movement as a purely partisan affair, it isn’t. George W. Bush and profligate Republicans took a fair amount of smacking right along with Obama and the Democrats. There’s discontent brewing here, but it isn’t going to automatically turn into votes for the GOP on election day unless they take steps to earn them.
Not everything was serious. This guy wanted Obama to help him. Well, sort of.
Get a group of a thousand people together and there’s always going to be a few people who are off-message.
(For those who don’t follow sports, the Sharks are San Jose’s NHL team.)
Speaking of folks who were off-message, we had a small group of left-wing counter-protesters show up. Oddly enough, their focus was on amnesty for illegal aliens, which is just weird given that the Tea Party was about fiscal policy. I don’t know if they were hoping to provoke a fight with the racist right-wingers who turned out for the Tea Party in their minds, or what, but the people I talked to were mostly bemused. There was some back-and-forth chanting, but for the most part we ignored them. This guy pretty much sums up my reaction.
the protest turned tense when a competing group of about 40 people began circling the tax protesters, banging drums, shouting epithets, screaming about immigrant rights and promoting anarchy. At one point, the smaller group stormed the stage of the tax protesters, and more than a dozen San Jose riot police separated the groups. Meanwhile, dozens more officers stood guard on mounted patrol, in police cars and on foot to maintain peace. No arrests were made.
I didn’t see the charge on the stage, but that does sound like the kind of behavior I expect from leftists. There was a point later in the rally when the police were separating the lefties from the rest of us, but both groups were just standing there.
The Tea Party people I spoke to were almost uniformly calm, friendly, smiling and open to discussion. (I did chat with one hard-core religious nut who was, frankly, scary. I’ve got an invitation to a class on Biblical Prophecy. I won’t be going.)
Here’s me in black next to the woman with the pro-capitalism sign. I want one of those tri-corn hats.
There were a couple of other Objectivists around who had taken the time to put together signs. Here they are in Q&A format.
No literature, though. I understand that the Golden Gate Objectivists had something a bit better prepared for the San Francisco Tea Party.
Overall impression: the people I saw and spoke to are very unhappy with where they see the country going, but they lack ideas to explain why the country is going that way. Lots of outrage, little reasoning. This is a serious problem, because ultimately it is ideas that drive cultural and political change. If you can’t explain why you’re outraged, what would be a better alternative to the status quo, and why, you’re dead in the water. That’s the bad news. The good news is that people are looking for the answers they need. This suggests that bringing literature to these protests for free distribution should be a high priority for the next wave. Literature at multiple levels of information density would be even better, ranging from simple one-page fliers at the low end, to pamphlets and article collections in the middle, all the way up to copies of Atlas Shrugged at the high end. On this note the Ohio Objectivist Society did something brilliant, collecting together a number of excellent articles on aspects of the current crisis, its roots and Ayn Rand’s relevance to the solution into a reprint booklet called The Portable Objectivist. (They also have a web version. And yes, they got permission from the copyright holders — Objectivists respect property rights, and try to practice what we preach.) Something I’m hoping will emerge from the various write-ups I’m seeing is a set of ‘best practices’ for working future protests. There’s a learning curve here and we need to move up it, fast.
I was very pleased to read that a number of Objectivists spoke at various Tea Parties. Rational Jenn had a short recorded video which was played before the 16,000 people at the Atlanta Tea Party. Greg Perkins of Noodlefood was the kickoff speaker at the Boise Tea Party, and on short notice at that. John Lewis gave a good speech focused on moral fundamentals at the Charlotte Tea Party, and there’s YouTube video of that that I can’t resist using to wrap things up. More like this in Boston on the 4th of July, please.
Ok, I lied… there’s also a post-speech interview with Dr. Lewis, and I’m going to wrap up with that instead. He’s bang-on… we need a moral change if we’re going to get a sustainable political change. The American people are divided in spirit, and we send inconsistent signals to our elected officials — we want free stuff, but we don’t want to pay for it ourselves and we don’t want to go into debt for it either. Something there has to give, and if we want to avoid a total loss of freedom it had better be the desire for free stuff.
For many years, environmentalists have been criticizing Americans for consuming too much. We were a wasteful “consumerist” society, and they wanted people to learn to live with less. The Obama administration is clearly sympathetic to viro ideology — his appointments and the cap-and-trade provisions in his budget proposal make that clear. But the administration is also telling us that the current economic crisis is caused in part by a lack of consumer spending — i.e. by people consuming less. In other words, consuming less is simultaneously a moral imperative and is contributing to a practical disaster.
I sense inconsistency. I wonder what Obama’s viro supporters think of the so-called stimulus package?
The good thing about automatic code generation is that it lets you easily generate thousands of source code files you can commit individually into your source code repository.
The bad thing about automatic code generation is that when it has a bug, it lets you generate thousands of buggy source code files you can commit individually into your source code repository.
The very bad thing about automatic code generation is that it doesn’t prevent hand-modifications of the committed individual source code files which prevent you from fixing the original bug in the generator and just replacing all the buggy source in one fell swoop.
The only good thing about this situation is that I didn’t write the generator in question. Still… d’oh!
I like this. People justly mock Republicans who lecture the rest of us on the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family values, then have marital affairs and solicit sex in public restrooms. It’s well past time to mock Democrats who lecture the rest of us on cronyism and financial management problems, then obtain special “Friends of Angelo” mortgages and fail to pay their taxes.
Moral principles are universal, and apply equally to all people. This business of applying one standard to government officials and another to everybody else is more like the relationship between feudal aristocrats and their serfs than anything that should exist in a free society. At least they haven’t resurrected the droit de seigneur — so far, they’ve restricted themselves to screwing us economically.
In an interview with Al-Arabiya, President Obama commented that “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that.” 30 years ago, in 1979, the relationship between America and the Muslim world was dominated by the Iranian Hostage Crisis. 20 years ago, in 1989, it was the first Gulf War. In other words, the “respect and partnership” that America had with the Muslim world 20 or 30 years ago was characterized by a virulent Islamic totalitarian movement waging a terror war against the United States, and a large-scale American invasion of Iraq. Sounds familiar. What exactly needs restoring, again?
Those ignorant of history…
Update: Sorry, brain fart. The first Gulf War was, of course, in 1991 — not 1989 as I said above. I think I conflated it with the fall of the Berlin Wall for some bizarre reason. ‘Those ignorant of history’ apparently includes me. Ok, so it was 18 years, not 20, and the irony only holds 50%. Still, I think the basic point — that the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world over the last three decades has been a pretty consistently bloody and violent one — stands up.
Oftentimes people respond to a crisis by claiming that it could not have been foreseen. (Government officials said this in the wake of 9/11, as one example.) With regard to the housing crisis, I have an answer: Henry Hazlitt. From his 1946 book Economics In One Lesson:
The case against government-guaranteed loans and mortgages to private businesses and persons is almost as strong as, though less obvious than, the case against direct government loans and mortgages [for homes]. … Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to ‘buy’ houses that they cannot really afford. They tend to eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion. In brief, in the long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.
Over sixty years ago, and he nailed it. What a shame nobody was listening.
