Mike’s Nature trick  … to hide the decline.

Climategate 2 is self summarized by the theme:  ‘

help the cause

Climategate 1

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Meaning hide the fact that alleged proxy measured temperatures for the past several hundred years failed to replicate alleged instrumentally measured temperatures for recent decades by replacing the proxy with “the real temps”.

The theme running through through the over a thousand emails and three thousand other documents was that these “scientists” were hiding unfavorable information, and were, as Harry Readme complained, making up favorable information.  Every document, one way or another, supports the story that global warming is indeed Mann made, in that the evidence for it is Michael Mann made.

Climategate 2

<3115> By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.

<3940> They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a bit.

<0810> I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s doing, but its not helping the cause

I have not read a lot of the Climategate 2 documents, whereas I have read most of the Climategate 1 documents.

It looks to me that the Climategate 1 documents were hand selected by human judgment to tell a coherent and complete story, whereas the Climategate 2 documents appear to be more of a grab bag of random stuff.  Climategate 1 is a story, Climategate 2 is a pile of emails.

But since grabbed from a team of human beings, a uniting theme appears anyway:

While the uniting theme of the Climategate 1 documents was that the warmists were not practicing science, the uniting theme of Climategate 2 is that the warmists are engaged in a holy crusade.

Climategate 2, unlike Climategate 1, contains a lot of emails where scientists expressed doubt in anthropogenic global warming, but often these demonstrate the response to doubt. Doubt is treated as sinful, evil, doubt needs punishment, as for example, the effort to cancel Pat Michaels’s PhD.

Whereas Climategate 1 showed us that these were salesmen and political campaigners, rather than scientists, Climategate 2 showed us that these were priests, rather than scientists.

From Watts up

I have not read through these, and it took me a long time to understand and read through the first batch.

The biggest and most important fact about the first batch is not that some of the documents were anti scientific, but that none of them reflected a scientific inquiry.  All of them, every single one, were the internal documents of a political and religious campaign.  None of them, not a single one were the internal documents of a scientific inquiry.   It was not that some of those documents stank badly, but that every single one smelled at least a little bit funny.

… we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse  of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of  political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds  of reality television and popular entertainment

… how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change,  evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s  and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration:   We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads  in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde  in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. …

… One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career.…

… In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and  a half.
…

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, …

Incomes, stalled since 1973, are now falling, across the board, afflicting all income quintiles, with no end in sight. Japan has been in decline for over a decade. There is no reason to think that this decline will end until its causes are remedied – and if never remedied, we may well wind up like so many vanished civilizations before us.

Since the decline effects all of society, every aspect of society, we have the luxury of looking of looking for causes where the light is best.

Let us look at three well studied instances of decline:   the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, Wikipedia, and Washington Mutual.  I did not select these cases because they all support my thesis, but because they are conspicuous and good information is available for what went wrong.

1. The space Shuttle Explosion

   Low ranking engineers explained to their superiors in detail that the Challenger would explode if launched in cold weather and explained in detail how and why it would explode, but the high ranking “engineers” neither understood nor believed.

   Chairman Rogers: Well, let’s read it. “Loss of mission” – this is actual loss.

   “Failure effects summary: Actual loss. Loss of mission, vehicle and crew due to metal erosion, burn-through, and probable case burst, resulting in fire and deflagration.”

   …
   Mr. Mulloy: But about halfway through, after we had looked at all of the data, the conclusion and recommendation charts that Mr. Lundhad prepared came in and the logic for his recommendation, which did not specifically address don’t launch 51-L, what itsaid was that, within our experience base we should not operate any solid rocket motor at any temperature colder than we have previously operated one, which was 51-C.

   Chairman Rogers: Didn’t you take that to be a negative recommendation?

   Mr. Mulloy: Yes, sir. That was an engineering conclusion, which I found this conclusion without basis and I challenged its logic.

   Mulloy then repeats over and over again that he was not able to understand the explanation of why the shuttle was going to blow up, from which he concluded not that he was an idiot, but the engineers telling him it was going to blow up were idiots.

   “And this was a rather surprising conclusion, based upon data that didn’t seem to hang together, and so I challenged that.”

   Further, in describing how it did blow, he reveals he still does not understand the explanation of how it did blow up. In other words, he is an idiot, and, being too stupid to understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, and not wanting to believe it was going to explode, insisted on it being launched. Mulloy not only did not understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, but after it exploded, and the cause of the explosion had been found, studied, and explained again step by step, still did not understand how it exploded.

   So how is it that Mr Mulloy, and people like him, who do not know $#!% shit from beans, are in charge of people who knew and understood stuff?

2. Wikipedia

   Wikipedia has less information, and less useful information, than it used to.  This reflects its policy of presenting the official view on everything.  Where there is no official view, facts tend to get deleted as unsupported, or not encyclopedic, or some such.  Truth and knowledge is supposedly what comes from universities and the mainstream media.  If not in the universities or the mainstream media, is supposedly not truth. This leads to particularly bitter contention in political fields like climate science, evolutionary psychology, race, and Darwinism, but causes widespread damage in many non political fields, for example on computer science, since the vast majority of computer science knowledge is not academic.

   Contributors are instructed:  “Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook. Wikipedia articles should not read like … instruction manuals. ”

   When I look something up related to computer science, it is normally because I am working on a project, and need to know how to do something, so I need something that reads like an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook.  Further, anyone who knows computer science stuff is usually an engineer, so is apt to write like a textbook or instruction manual.  The effect and application of the not-a-manual rule is to prohibit contributions from people who actually do stuff, which contributions they intend to share with other people who actually do stuff, in favor of contributions by people who do not do stuff, and are incapable of doing stuff – which is to say, in favor of academic knowledge.

3. Washington Mutual

   Washington Mutual was able to take over many other better run banks, not because shareholders had confidence in Washington Mutual, but because regulators had confidence in Washington Mutual willingness to enthusiastically hurl vast amounts of money in the general direction of desired voting blocks. Kerry Killinger, CEO of Washington Mutual, became rich and powerful in substantial part through his cozy relationship with left wing activist organizations such as Acorn, which enabled him to control regulators as much as it reflected the fact that regulators controlled him.

   Washington Mutual took out ads condemning themselves for racism, and was given a bunch of other, more soberly run banks, to loot and destroy.

   Banks were told by regulators: “Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor … In reviewing past credit problems,  lenders should be willing to consider extenuating circumstance”

   If a bank prevented people with no credit history from borrowing, this was a practice with “disparate impact” – which is “Raaaacism”. “Disparate impact” means you cannot apply standards at which non Asian minorities fail disproportionately – such as having documented income, a past history of paying their bills, and so on and so forth.

   When your regulator tells you that you “should” make easy money loans, you will make easy money loans, or suffer dire punishment.  And indeed, banks that did not make easy money loans did suffer dire punishment – they got taken over by Washington Mutual and its merry band of idiots.

   It is clear that Kerry Killinger and Angelo Mozilo sincerely believed that lending unemployed no-hablo-english wetbacks money to buy million dollar houses no money down was a good idea. They conned everyone of gigantic amounts of money, but their biggest victims were themselves and their banks.

   They did not pretend to believe in order to become rich and powerful, rather the regulatory apparatus efficiently selected stupid people who sincerely believed stupid things to become rich and powerful. If their beliefs had been feigned and cynical, a lot more of the disappeared money would have stuck to them.

   That Kerry Killinger was quite genuinely stupid was also demonstrated by the inability of Countrywide and Washington Mutual to manage their paperwork. Many of the titles that passed through their hands now have no paper trail showing who is the rightful owner, which suggests that bank was for the most part staffed by people whose IQ was below 105.

   Because political correctness requires stupid beliefs, selection for people who are sincerely politically correct, such as Kerry Killinger, selects stupid people, who in turn hire and promote other stupid people, so that no one in his bank could do a banker’s paperwork.

This is consistent with Codevilla’s analysis:  That that we are ruled by a ruling elite, credentialed but not educated by the very best universities, that is increasing narrow, ignorant, out of touch, and stupid!

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. …

…regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.…

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity – being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.…

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. … But didn’t our [ruling elite] go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades?  … getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

We have statistical evidence that our ruling elite selects people who fit in at the expense of ability – that people who are excessively able in unappreciated ways do not fit in.

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

all other things being equal, being an officer in the ROTC is likely to get you excluded from a prestigious university – any fool can see that political correctness counts more than ability or experience – whether in college admissions, or Obama’s picks for the federal reserve, or the post of CEO of HP, people are chosen primarily for their theology not their ability.

Codevilla continues:

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what amounts to indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting unequivocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

This means that there really is no private enterprise any more. Everything is to a greater or lesser extent run by the ruling elite – and the ruling elite is not very bright, and is steadily getting dumber.

If someone is important and under pressure to perform (perhaps the board, being composed of major shareholders, wants the CEO to make a profit and will fire him if he does not) he will surround himself with the smartest people he can get – the Google policy. But if he is under no pressure to perform, he will prefer that those lower in status than him are not quite as bright as he is, other wise he is apt to find himself in the uncomfortable position of Mr Mulloy, wherein a low status person explains why he is wrong about something, and he fails to understand the explanation. Since our ruling elite exclusively works in fields where there is no pressure to perform it naturally finds itself more comfortable inducting new members of the ruling elite that are dumber than the existing members, so that with each generation, our ruling elite gets stupider and stupider. Once upon a time, the ruling elite was kept smart by the continual infusion of smart people from business, and was prevented from declining by an hereditary elite, but now, completely self enclosed, and under no pressure to perform, a purported meritocracy by slow degrees becomes an idiocracy.

I predict that wherever membership of the government bureaucracy is controlled by some meritocratic test, the test will be subverted to that it no longer has much to do with intelligence, because bureaucrats do not much like smart people.

Observe that even at Google, though they get the smartest engineers that they can, they have a very different policy for other parts of the company. Those that might have to deal with the state, are selected to fit in, and if you are dangerously smart, you are unlikely to fit in.

We are in decay because the our ruling elite, including our top scientists (who are not really scientists, but rather a priesthood who preach pseudo scientific rationales for whatever our rulers desire to do), are steadily getting dumber and dumber.

How many new drugs, Dr. Lajos Pusztai asks, were approved for breast cancer treatment in the past decade? His answer: seven. None was much different from drugs already on the market.

Yet in the same decade, he said, there were 8,000 publications in medical and scientific journals on breast cancer and more than 3,000 clinical trials at a cost of over $1 billion. “What came out of this is seven ‘me too’ drugs,” Dr. Pusztai said.

Until about 1946 or so science in the west was advancing rapidly.  However, shortly after the war ended peer review was widely adopted, and at about the same time science history was abruptly rewritten so that science had always practiced peer review, and at the same time also rewritten so that Roger Bacon, instead of being imprisoned in solitary confinement  on bread and water by the Church for advocating the scientific method as in the earlier histories, was instead supposedly placed under “a form of house arrest” for advocating astrology.  With the adoption of peer review, the scientific method was de-emphasized.  It was not written out of history, but in the new version of official history, the scientific method lost its starring, heroic, and revolutionary role in western civilization.  The scientific method was still routinely taught in schools, though after the seventies, less so.

It is hard to say exactly when science slowed down, but after we landed on the moon, obviously slower.  I suspect that the decline is caused by peer review and the de-emphasis of the scientific method, but because it is hard to say when science slowed, hard to say what caused it.   I say the problem is that if the scientific method is central to science, then it is science, but if peer review is central, then nothing distinguishes “science” from any other state sponsored theocratic priesthood.  That is my explanation of the problem, but your interpretation of the evidence may differ.

Julia Szabo reminds us:

many Americans frustrated by declining health and understandably eager to improve their quality of life are booking flights to state-of-the-art facilities where they can expect to receive high-tech treatments (for orthopedic injury, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, spinal injury, COPD, cardiovascular disease, and many other conditions) that American hospitals simply cannot offer.

Many are returning home significantly improved — like Bartolo Colon. Sidelined by a series of arm and shoudler injuries, the pitcher underwent adult stem cell therapy in May in the Dominican Republic. Samples of his fat and bone marrow were processed for his own stem cells, then injected into the afflicted areas of his arm to repair ligament damage and a torn rotator cuff. The procedure had previously been shown to work for sidelined race horses; that was good enough for Colon, who is now at work for the Yankees, in the pink of health, delighting his fans.

It seems that the reason this therapy is not available in the US is that the science underlying the therapy subtly discredits one of the arguments in favor of abortion – demonstrating that science in the US is subservient to progressive theology.

The theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming assumes a number of points without evidence, assumptions that might well be true, but which they have made no attempt to test.

One is that warming would be a bad thing, another is that the world is very sensitive to quite small CO2 greenhouse effect, supposedly because the CO2 greenhouse effect will be enormously amplified by the H2O green house effect.

And another is that human burning of coal and oil can have a significant effect on atmospheric CO2. The latter point seems reasonable, since the amount of coal and oil that has been burnt is comparable to the amount of CO2 in the air.  It is, however, insignificant compared to the amount of CO2 in the ocean, and the ground. The threat of acidifying the oceans with CO2 is incompatible with the threat that human are capable of significantly affecting the amount of CO2 in the air.  If CO2 in the air rapidly equilibriates with CO2 in the oceans, then for humans to make a significant difference by burning coal would be like humans raising the level of lake Michigan by spitting in it.  There is a lot of CO2 in the oceans. It is physically impossible for humans to change the acidity of any substantial part of the oceans.

CO2 in the air has been rising, at about half the rate that would be expected if all the CO2 in the coal we are burning stayed in the air, but, over the last twenty thousand years, CO2 has been a lot higher than it is now, and a lot lower than it is now, so the recent rise may well reflect forces far mightier than puny humankind.  Usually rise in CO2 follows rise in global temperatures by a couple of hundred years, so we would expect CO2 levels to be naturally rising today, because we are recovering from the little ice age that ended during the nineteenth century.

Clive Best therefore proceeded to do what the “consensus” failed to do, and assess carbon flows from isotopes.  He concluded that over a decade or so, the atmosphere equilibrates with some much larger carbon reservoir.

One of his lines of evidence was that in the fifties, nuclear testing added a lot of carbon fourteen to the atmosphere, which, according to wikipedia, disappeared from the atmosphere over a decade or so.

Wikipedia being notoriously unreliable, I am replicating his data analysis, though we all rely on Cromer et al’s data.

Cromer et-al reported C14 measurements to 1983, and their data is on the web.

The value they report, d14C, is not the absolute level of carbon 14 in parts per million, but the change, the difference between the observed level, and the historic level before nuclear tests raised it.

I loaded their data into an open office spreadsheet, and plotted it.

Observe, exponential decay on a decade time scale

The grey line is an exponential decay, that is to say, a straight line on a logarithmic graph, of the form exp(-date/ 5330 days)

The fact that it fits the decline so well, once atmospheric nuclear testing stopped, indicates that carbon fourteen is equilibrating with a reservoir vastly larger than the atmosphere over a period of 5330 days.

And if carbon fourteen is equilibrating, so is carbon twelve and carbon thirteen, so is the carbon from coal.

So humans can no more have a significant affect on the carbon dioxide levels in the earths atmosphere, than they can raise the level of lake Michigan by spitting in it.

Lately, people who are quite politically correct and academically respectable, are acknowledging that Gould and Lewontin were wrong and making $#!% up, and no heresy charges ensue.  Indeed, they have been pissing on Lewontin since 2003.  Now if Lewontin is wrong, then the races are genetically different in important ways, if Gould is wrong, then Darwin is right that races are the origin of species, and Morton was right that negroes and native Americans have smaller cranial capacities than whites.

So what is the version that a politically correct person with career that could be subject to reprisals now permitted say about races?  Lewis et-al piously assure us that though cranial capacities differ significantly, this is wholly a function of environment, offering no explanation or evidence for this.

In 1972, holy writ became that genetic differences between races are insignificant, and that races are entirely social constructions.  Supposedly we only imagine that humans come in different races.  Supposedly there is no phenotypic or genotypic difference between so called races.  Supposedly,  not only is it impossible to tell what race someone is by looking at his DNA, it is also impossible to tell by looking at his face!

Of course that was obviously ridiculous, so people were reluctant to actually say it.  But it was quite dangerous to contradict it.  So official doctrine tended to be sort of endorsed, and quietly contradicted.  People continued to study races, racial differences, and genetics, but used the word “populations” as code for races, and got away with saying things that would have got them into very big trouble if they had used plainer words.

And then in 1996 Nei et al said “human populations are known to vary considerably over evolutionary time and thus the evolutionary rate would vary from population to population”, and produced a bunch of diagrams implying that certain “populations”, for example the “Nigerian population”, had not evolved much from the common ancestor of man and chimp.

Suddenly the hammer came down hard, though plenty of academics before Nei had said worse.  Nei et-al recanted and repented, and piously proclaimed that there is no significant genetic, evolutionary, or phenotypic difference between “populations”.

This strictness put people in something of a bind, since strict conformity prohibited what any fool could see, and an entire field of academic study.

In the twenty first century, the strictness seems to have eased up somewhat, so what now is permitted to be said?  What is the official line?

Since it was supposedly impossible to tell people’s race merely by looking at them, terminology that acknowledged such distinctions became politically incorrect.  Thus race, supposedly, refers to continent of origin.  Thus Turks and Iranians were supposedly Asians, and Chinese also supposedly Asians, thus supposedly the same race.

This was particularly confusing in Britain.  Since they had to call all sorts of people Asians who were obviously not Asians, they had difficulty calling actual Asians, for example Chinese and Vietnamese, “Asians”.  They tended to call actual Asians “orientals” or some such instead, though with much fear that such language was politically incorrect.  And since they so many of the people that they were required to call “Asian” look very like people from Somalia or Morocco, they tended to call Somalis and Moroccans Asians, since they were unclear on the rationale for assigning people to the correct racial group.  Supposedly Moroccans are Africans, even though they are obviously not Africans, any more than Iranians are Asians.  So in England, Somalis tend to be “Asians”, and Chinese not “Asians”, contrary to the use of language that the politically correct intended.  Instead of racial terminology referring to continent or origin, without regard to the supposedly invisible appearance, it merely became confused.

The intent was to force people to categorize races on the basis of continent of origin without regard to actual race, since supposedly they are all alike, but the actual effect was that people used racial terminology inconsistently and incoherently.

This confusion, however, gave the politically correct a way out of the bind in which they had put themselves:

The politically correct are now allowed to acknowledge that natural differences exist, but supposedly races as conventionally defined do not correspond to these natural populations.  Only the politically correct are allowed to notice these naturally distinct populations, thus the politically correct are now allowed to be as racist as they like.  The politically correct can now even acknowledge what Nei was reprimanded for acknowledging, that certain populations evolved at a slower rate than others, that some populations evolved more rapidly towards the use of complex artifacts, and other populations also evolved quite rapidly, but in directions other than towards intelligence and use of artifacts.

But no one else is allowed.

For the rest of us, it is still the case that it is supposedly impossible to tell someone’s race by his genes or physical appearance, and as I write this, the columnist Andrew Bolt is undergoing a heresy show trial over this very question, even though he has repeatedly recanted, repented, apologized, and denounced his previous views.

Andrew Bolt got in trouble for noticing that the chief beneficiaries of grants to aboriginal Australians and affirmative action were not natives living in poverty on reservations, but people who were more than 98% white by ancestry and members of the white ruling upper class culture, often descended from people who had also been members of the white ruling upper class culture and also been beneficiaries of government grants.

He is now undergoing an extremely lengthy show trial.

From his recantation and apology, we now know it is terribly racist to think that race has anything to do with race.  Rather, race is socially ascribed or self chosen.  It is horribly racist to deny that certain people are aboriginals just because they look 100% white and have never had more exposure to aboriginal culture than that which is obtained by reading National Geographic.

Thus when the politically correct tell us that races as socially defined have nothing to do with natural differences really existing between different human kinds, what they actually mean is that races as socially defined better not have anything to do with natural difference really existing different human kinds, and if they do have something to do with such difference, you are going to be in big trouble.  It is not a statement about popular usage of racial terms, but a threat.   Use racial terms that way or else what was done to Andrew Bolt shall be done to you!

I was listening to Chris Rock’s hilarious rant “We hate black people too!” and my son became alarmed, lest some one sneak up on my house and listen near the windows.

Everyone in America tells the official story of the banking crisis: “de-regulation”.  The Israeli central bank correctly blames government intervention aimed at making loans available to poor people with bad credit – though even the Israeli central bank somehow neglects to mention that in America, those poor people were not poor white males.

Observe that every fiction book must have properly counterstereotypical characters to rebut the characteristics of race and sex.  Thus, for example, John Ringo, having committed the unpardonable sin of a few lines about stereotypical blondes in “live Free or Die” has to make the main character of the sequel (“Citadel”) a counter stereotypical blonde.  In the sequel, the rhetoric about freedom mysteriously mutates into anticolonialist, or decolonist, rhetoric, perhaps because merely having a counter stereotypical blonde as main character is insufficient penance for making a joke about blondes.  Everything published must serve the higher purpose of inculcating correct political attitudes.

If you are an executive, and you use the word “blonde” as a noun your company can get whacked with a multimillion dollar lawsuit, and if you are an untenured academic and use the word “blonde” as a noun you will never get tenure.  (Tenured academics, however, can and regularly do say “blonde” without losing tenure.)

Everyone is terrified of tripping over some incredibly obscure rule of political correctness that they have never heard of.   My favorite in this regard comes from the history of science.  Among the many recent rewrites of the history of science is that before 1972, Darwin’s big idea was natural selection, and the idea that families of species were related by blood, were actual families, with a common ancestor, was attributed to Lamarck and other predecessors of Darwin.  After 1972, history was abruptly rewritten – though the original books by Lamark are still around and continue to say what they so plainly said.  Yet whenever I raise this story as an example of PC, no one dares notice that old books say what they said, and that Lamarck says what he said.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and four fingers extended. “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston”

“Four”

“And if the party says it is not four but five—then how many?”

I point people to what Lamarck said:H Elliot’s translation of Lamarck’s book , pages 19 to 38, Lamarck discusses of species, the fact that forms naturally occur in group. Pages 38 to 39, he explains them by common descent, by shared blood or sap from an individual common ancestor, Page 179, he gives a family tree of the animals, And I point them to what old books say he said, and yet, upon being notified that since 1972 the politically correct position is that Lamarck did not say what he said

Page 641 “Biology Today”, 1972:

Lamarck’s theory is not a hypothesis of common descent, which ascribes the common characteristics of a particular species to their common descent from a single species. He claims that mammals are produced by the gradual complexification of reptiles and that this elevation is going on constantly. Although all mammals are descended from reptiles, they are not descended from the same reptiles.

They will dutifully say that O’Brien is holding up five fingers, dutifully say that the position stated in Page 641 “Biology Today”, 1972, is true, even though they never heard of it until I raised as an example of political correctness gone crazy. What appears in a 1972 textbook supposedly must be true, even if it flatly contradicts what appears in a 1965 textbook, and flatly contradicts the source materials it describes. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Check the origins of the theory of common descent, that similar species are similar because related by blood or sap, and try it on someone.   Anyone who is in the slightest bit politically correct will chicken out.  All the books that address the topic before 1972 say that Lamarck proposed common descent in the sense that families of species are families by blood, all the respectable books after 1972 that address the topic say he did not.  And therefore, every respectable person will say he did not, no matter that what the textbooks said before 1972, no matter what Lamarck himself said.

The testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing and not like hauling, and a single Barbary steed can outrun a hundred dray horses

Peer review is consensus. Consensus is religion, not science. Peer review works as depicted in this excellent cartoon: Click on the snippet of the cartoon to see the full cartoon.

Peer Review in action

Observe the priestly robes worn by the scientists

Radiation inside the plant is arguably dangerous, but radiation at the plants main gate is 0.647 milliserverts per hour.  By comparison, when you take a flight, you get about 0.04 milliserverts per hour from cosmic rays, so standing at the main gate is fifteen times worse than flying.  So someone who flies to Japan from New York, and then wanders up to the main gate to take a look, and hangs out at the main gate for half an hour or so, is likely to get more radiation from his flight than from the nuclear power plant.

Of course if your house is in front of the main gate, 0.647 milliserverts an hour is still a problem if it remains that high year after year – but if your house was in front of the gate, it is no longer in front of the main gate, because the tsunami washed it away, in which case radiation levels are a long way down on your list of troubles, and in any case, radiation levels will not remain that high for long.

This disaster looks like being worse than three mile island, but not nearly as bad as Chernobyl.

How many died as a result of Chernobyl?

Sixty people died.   Pretty similar compared to coal mining disasters, of which there are many each year, killing in total world wide thousands of people every year, usually without making much news.

People have been trying to get alarming cancer statistics from the vicinity of Chernobyl, and have come up empty.

If Chernobyl has elevated cancer rates in its vicinity, as is frequently alleged, somehow no one has been able to produce persuasive epidemiological evidence for it, the only epidemiological evidence being a high risk of thyroid cancers among children that were under four at the time of the incident or conceived but not yet born – leading to the deaths of nine children from thyroid cancer!  Nine!  Nine!  Nine! That is the worst anyone has been able to come up with for a great horrible horribly disastrous Chernobyl cancer epidemic disaster.

Nine!