The perfect storm: Bernie Baran

Here is the trailer from the film Freeing Bernie Baran along with a short excerpt. I recommend seeing this film if you are able to do so.

Baran was just a teenager when he started working at a day care center in Massachusetts. When a set of very low-class parents, with dubious parental skills themselves, discovered Baran was gay they started making accusations against the boy. It was the era of the day care witchhunts where the media, government agencies, and feminist-oriented therapists, created a hysteria that swept the nation. People became convinced that organized rings of Satanic pedophiles had infilitrated hundreds of day care centers. Police and prosecuters had a field day.

Literally hundreds of innocent people were rounded up across America, thousands of children were psychologically tortured by the child abuse industry and taken from their parents. To this day many of the victims of the hysteria still sit in jail. It was 25 years before Baran finally had justice and was released.

For those with short memories, or who are too young to remember, it was this bogus hysteria that inspired short-sighted politicians—as if they are any other kind—to pass hundreds of new laws to "protect" young people from sex. The result of that hysteria is that today teens are routinely arrested and charged as child molesters for normal adolescent sexuality. A teen, exploring their sexuality, takes a photo of themself standing naked in front of a mirror, discovers they are a child pornographer. Two young people have sex when their parents aren't around only to find they are now guilty of mutual molestation. Personally I'm surprised that some moronic politician hasn't introduced legislation to define masturbation as self-molestation. Worse yet the politically-induce "sex offender" panic, the resulting legislation, means these kids will be legally tormented for the rest of their natural life.

Bernie Baran was the victim of the perfect hysteria. He was gay and accused of child molestation. Combine anti-gay bigotry with a sexual panic of this kind and you know something ugly will happen. It is the kind of campaign that only the most despicable amoral scum would knowingly initiate, but many of the instigators were just terrified parents believing the breathless stories fed them by the media.

When fear inspires "urgent" political action you can bet the farm that the action taken will almost always be the wrong action. Political campaigns that rely on fear, something that Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of, are attempts to stampede the public into supporting precisely the wrong sort of legislation. Be it child abuse, drugs, the war on terror, gay marriage, illegal immigration, global warming or whatever the panic d'jour may be, fear campaigns intentionally shut down the critical reasoning faculties of the human mind. The results are always wrong, always ugly and victims are created.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

HL Mencken.

The Coming Landslide and Mushy Libertarianism

Political analyst Larry Sabato has penned a piece on the upcoming Republican landslide. There is little in it that I disagree with. The Republicans are expected to make major gains in the Senate and the House. They are expected to take the House and possibly the Senate as well.

Sabato says the GOP may pick up 47 seats in the House and are likely to gain 8 Senate seats but possibly as high as 10 seats. When it comes to governorships Sabato says the GOP should gain 8 more seats and that somewhere between 8 and 12 state legislatures will be under Republican control.

This is precisely the sort of landslide I've been predicting ever since Obama used strong-arm tactics and government-funded bribes to ram his health insurance scheme through Congress. A lot of Democrats, who were not fond of the bill, were pushed into voting for it. And many of them will lose their seats as a result.

Sabato does note something that touches on points I've made numerous times: "2010 will generate a substantial pendulum swing from the Democrats to the Republicans. It is not that Republicans are popular—most polls show the party even less liked than the Democrats. Many observers find it amazing that the less-liked party is on the verge of triumphing over the better-liked party."

Sabato thinks this is simply because voters want to reduce the power of those in office. That is true. But the voters don't particularly care for either party. The middle of the road in American politics today is a sort of mushy libertarianism. Voters don't want high taxes, don't want lots of regulation, are tired of the wars and foreign interventionism, don't trust politicians of any party, and aren't particularly interested in imposing "Christian values" on our largely secular society.

This doesn't mean there is a consistent libertarian streak by any means—just witness the ugly anti-immigration hysteria disgustingly pandered to even by some Libertarian Party candidates. This is why I refer to the middle as a mushy libertarianism. It is not consistent and it is not principled but it is there. For the most part the American middle ground wants to leave people alone.

The two extremes in modern politics are busy-body Democrats and busy-body Republicans. The Democrats are dominated by the Nanny Statists and the Republicans dominated by nasty Theocrats. Given those choices I too would like the Democrats more. The Democrats think I'm stupid and need them to care for me. That is pretty disgusting. But what really scares me is that Republicans think I'm sinful and need to be punished. While trying to stamp out stupidity is, well, stupid, trying to force people to be virtuous is downright dangerous.

While I'm not a fan of C.S. Lewis he did describe the danger of Republican-type controls. He said that "tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." A perfect example of this is the hateful Maggie Gallagher and her Mormon-funded antigay campaign. She really does believe she is saving gay people from themselves so she is unrelentingly intrusive. If ever we need a face for the Nanny State, Maggie's fat mug ought to be used.

The voting public is not divided into two camps: Democrats and Republicans. It is divided into three: the latter two plus independents. Of those groups the independents are the largest. And the independents are the mushy libertarians personified. The Democrats tend to not have the moralistic agenda of the intrusive Republicans but the Republicans don't tend to have the central-planning mindset of the Democrats.

On any particular issue the majority of the population tends to lean libertarian. For instance, with taxes, most Republicans and Independents oppose high rates thus the majority leans for less taxation. When it comes to government enforced "Christian" values the Democrats and Independents tend to oppose such big government intrusions while the Republicans, in the clutches of the American Taliban, are hysterical proponents of such moral authoritarianism.

The problem is that the political elites in the parties tend not to give their voters what they want. Witness how the Republicans betrayed free markets and low taxes every time they have controlled the government. Witness also how Obama has not done anything of substance to bring the sort of equal rights in sexual orientation that he promised. Both betray the party base that keeps them in power.

What keeps the party base loyal to the two dominant parties is fear: fear of the other party. The Democratic base fears the Republicans will push their moralistic agenda on everyone—and rightly so. The Republcians were terrified that the Democrats would push for higher taxes, more regulation and more state control—and rightly so. So the voting public swings back and forth, first electing Democrats then getting disgusted with them and electing Republicans. But the Republicans prove to be equally disgusting and voters swing back to the Democrats.

The American public is being tag-teamed by the two major parties. Each jumps into the ring and beats up the public for a bit before being replaced by the other. The Democrats may use a few well-placed left hooks to blacken the eyes of the public and then the Republicans "save" them by using a few right-hooks to break their nose. American partisan politics is now in the position where neither party represents the dominant few on most issues.

Most Americans would bring the troops home, neither party is willing to do that. On civil liberties the anti-freedom Republicans tend to dominate and Democrats are afraid of standing up to them. On economic liberties the anti-freedom Democrats tend to dominate and Republicans, well, Republicans have just learned to love big government and use it to enrich themselves.

So the real story of American politics is that the two giants in the political arena are both in opposition to the vast middle ground of American politics. Neither the Democrats, nor the Republicans are willing to cater to that mushy libertarianism that dominates the views of the public. And sadly, these days the Libertarian Party isn't doing that very well either. But they are an irrelevancy and will remain such.

If either the GOP or the Democrats get the nerve to tell their base to fuck off there is hope for the country. The first party to jettison the extreme statists and embrace this mushy libertarianism is likely to be in power for some time. So far neither has the courage to do that.

Memory Lane and Boy Were They Wrong.

I was reading Wendy McElroy's website which mentioned the continuing controversy in Texas over textbooks. She linked to a history of the controversy and I went to take a look. The originators of this whole textbook movement were a couple of far Right fundamentalists by the name of Mel and Norma Gabler, both deceased now.

Now, if we go back further than I care to admit I went to observe a conference of extremely conservative folks—emphasis on the the extreme please. Among the participants were Mel and Norma. One of their allies was the Rev. Ezra Graley, a fundamentalist minister from West Virginia who led the protests about textbooks in Kanawha county. Graley I knew better than the Gablers. All three, I should say, were John Birch Society types, heavily into far Right politics and theories. Where the Gablers merely protested textbooks some of Graley's allies resorted to violence. My conversations with Graley left me with the impression that while he claimed to have no knowledge of who was behind the incidents that he approved of them.


One of Graley's ministerial allies, Rev. Charles Quigley led public prayers asked God to kill board members. Several schools were firebombed. Someone set 15 sticks of dynamite near a gas meter at the board of education offices, which exploded shortly after a board meeting adjourned. A friend of Graley's, another fundamentalist minister, Rev. Marvin Horan was sentenced to three years in prison on charges related to the bombings. All of this was kicked off by Alice Moore, the wife of yet another fundamentalist minister, who used the Gablers as her resource bank for the protests. As you can see it was incestuous and completely riddled with fundamentalists.

During that trip to Salt Lake City it was Graley who decided that a day trip through some of the canyons would be a good idea. There were four us in the car. Graley, myself and Mel and Norma Gabler. I wish I could remember more of the details of the conversations. It was time when they all let their hair down and weren't so guarded in their comments. And what I vaguely remember was discussion that was supportive of violence and tinged with racism. Yet, like so many fundamentalists I've known, they could be sweet a pie if they thought you could be won over. Like many very bitter individuals they had these saccharin voices that they could use to sooth you. But remember saccharin is fake and so was their pleasantness.

Among the material I was reading on the protest movement was an article from the New York Times about the Gablers. The article quotes a fund-raising letter from the Gablers which said: "Until textbooks are changed, there is no possibility that crime, violence, veneral disease and abortion rates will decrease." That was in 1981.

It is now almost 30 years later and the fundamentalists are no happier with the textbooks today than they were back then. All the same "errors" are being taught to the kids. Yet all the trends in these areas are down, something the Gablers said couldn't happen without getting rid of the sinful textbooks.

In 1981, the year this was said, there were 593.47 violent crimes for every 100,000 people. In 2008, the last year I was able to find stats for the number of violent crimes had dropped to 454.6 per 100,000 people. That is pretty significant. For murder the decline was even more dramatic; from 9.9 per 100,000 in 1981 to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2008. And the textbooks are still evil.

I looked at VD rates and found that they were already declining when the Gablers were claiming that couldn't happen. Here is a chart from the CDC showing gonorrhea rates from 1970 to 1993. The rate for that disease had peaked in 1974 and was in a slow decline which escalated not long after the Gablers were claiming that couldn't happen, unless the textbooks were changed. As for syphilis, the height of infections in the US were during the youth of the Gablers, in the 1940s, when rates had reached almost 600,000 cases. By 1981, with a much larger population, the rate was around 100,000 per year. Now if the textbooks in 1941 were acceptable to the Gablers this would indicates that syphilis rates dropped as the textbooks got more ungodly.

Now lets look at abortion rates in the United States. Obviously there was a sharp rise in the number abortions once women were allowed the choice and no longer regulated by the state to prevent it. Once again the Gablers, however, predicted that a decline in rates couldn't take place, even while the decline had already started. If you look at the following chart you will see abortion rates had already begun a slow deline when the Gablers made their statement.

What this reminds me of is the dire doomsday predictions of another hysterical extremists, Paul Ehrlich of "population bomb" fame. Erhlich has a history of making the same sort of dire predictions as the Gablers and being as spectacularly wrong as the Gablers as well. I remember reading a follow-up book he wrote where he damned Vietnam to famine just at the time that food production was rapidly expanding and Vietnam became a food exporter. Unlike the Gablers, who tended to make the same false claims over and over, Erhlich had a tendency to remove the statement from later books and simply make similarly wrong claims about new areas instead.

Here is the reality. There are scary things in the world and always have been. But, for the most part, things have gotten better not worse. Crime rates are down, not up. The amount of food per person in the world has expanded, not declined. Most trends are positive.

Political types, like the Gablers and Ehrlich, use fear to manipulate the public. Any campaign that relies on dire consequences is most likely exaggerated or entirely false.

The other day I was walking through the parking lot to a local store when I heard a hysterical mother screaming at a child who had gotten out of the car that was parked, before the mother had gotten out. She was shreiking that the child must never leave the car first and "wander" around as bad things could happen to the child. The entire tirade was clearly premised on the "stranger danger" scenario that has fueled parental hysteria for some time now.

At an airport, not that long ago, a mother was standing in the waiting area with a small girl. The girl walked a few feet to look out a window. The mother lost eye contact momentarily and then panicked screaming out the child's name. The girl was grabbed by the arm and yelled out loudly and hysterically that bad people could grab her and that she must never walk a few feet away from her mother.

But, once again, these numbers have been steadily improving—and they were NEVER that high to begin with. When I was a kid we wandered all around the neighborhood without any parental monitoring. We didn't have cell phones that parents could call to "check up" on us. Now parents panic if the kids play in the front yard. We hiked through the fields and woods surrounding the town, and this was a suburb of a major city. Kidnappings and abductions today are at the same levels they were when I was a kid, but the parental hysteria level is higher.

I don't want to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That is quite true. What we have to fear is the solutions politicians propose to solve our imaginary fears. Those really scare me because they almost always mean a loss of freedom, greater taxation, and unintended consequences that are more negative than the "problems" they are meant to solve.

How politics follows social change, and doesn't lead it.

Politicians frequently have the courage to ban a dying practice, but only when it is on its deathbed. Of course, for centuries later they will continue to claim that it was legislative fiat that killed the practice and proof that their interventions are thus proper and necessary.

Child Labor

Child labor was not created by the capitalists as a means to exploit the working classes, contrary to the deluded history of Marxists. Child labor was widespread and rampant in the millenniums prior to the first capitalist-owned factory. The work was different, but the expectation that children would work, was common. Even today in peasant farming communities children are put to work in the fields the moment they can do anything useful.

The reason for child labor was simple: the productivity of any single laborer was relatively low, making it difficult for families to survive without every member of the family laboring for the food they needed. In pre-industrial Europe standards of living were extremely low, poverty rampant and starvation not uncommon.

The introduction of new modes of production offered families a means of actually starting to make progress in their death race with poverty. The new machinery made each worker more productive and more valuable. The children who flocked to the factories, along with their mothers and fathers, didn’t leave behind some idyllic childhood, roaming green valleys and picking flowers. They left behind hunger and death.

These “free labor” child workers were watched after by their parents and for the most part their lives improved dramatically. A second class of child laborers also existed, those under the care of various government agencies, usually at the local, or parish, level. It was these parish children who were the worst off, and the worst conditions described in relatively accurate, though exaggerated, tracts of the day were descriptions of the parish children—that is those children whose labor was being exploited by the local government. With bureaucrats, not parents, watching out for them, these children did have brutish and nasty lives.

As capital was invested in new production techniques the value of individual workers rose substantially. During this period there were steady and strong improvements in the standard of living of all working people. As wages rose, the ability of parents to care for their families, through their own wages alone, became more prevalent and the number of children working alongside parents declined. Increased productivity pushed up wages and the higher wages made child labor unnecessary. By the time the politicians got around to banning child labor the practice was no longer widely practiced. Had it been, it is unlikely the political classes would have banned it.

One unfortunate result of the labor laws that were passed, and which still exist today, is that young people find it difficult to secure employment. Part-time work is possible under certain conditions, but teens, who leave school for one reason or another, find it difficult to find full-time employment. Young people who are forced to leave violent and abusive homes find themselves on the streets with few legal options open to them. One result is that many teens turn to less than legal methods to earn a living—sometimes drug dealing and sometimes prostitution, as two examples.

In the zeal to abolish a practice that had largely died out already, legislation created legal straightjackets for young workers. The restrictions are so onerous that many young people needing full-time employment are forced into illegal occupations where “working conditions” are far more dangerous than from what the legislation was meant to save them.

Apartheid

Consider the matter of apartheid in South Africa. By the time apartheid was officially repealed it had already been dead.

Apartheid was itself a web of regulations and laws restricting voluntary markets in order to force a result that the central planners didn’t deem possible without coercion. That result was not just segregation of whites from blacks, but the reservation of particular occupations to white workers, or more accurately to Afrikaner workers. Apartheid was seen by its architects as a temporary system of racial preferences necessary to end the problem of “poor whiteism.” Of course, with the normal nature of bureaucratic expansionism it evolved into a system that was much more than this, and much worse.

Throughout the history of apartheid, legislation was used to force results into the marketplace. Companies that hired black workers were punished. This didn’t end them from hiring black workers, but it made it much more difficult. The trade unions in South Africa, including those backed by the Communist Party, were explicitly racist. And during the ill-fated Rand Rebellion of 1922 these workers marched through the streets of Johannesburg carrying signs saying: “Workers of the World Unite and Keep South Africa White.” Note: If you look carefully in the lower left of the photo you can see this sign being carried by the revolutionary unionists during the rebellion.

Prior to the election of the first clearly “apartheid” Nationalist government in 1948, earlier attempts at government-mandated racism were being pushed by the Communist dominated trade unions. The Mines and Work Act created job reservations for whites in 1923. But these laws were soon replaced with other pieces of legislation doing the same thing. Following the Rand Rebellion, a coalition government of the communist-dominated Labour Party and the white, racialist Nationalist Party came to power.

The enemy of this system was a class of men despised by the unionists and the nationalists alike: entrepreneurs and businessmen. The business classes in South Africa were primarily made of two minorities: individuals of English descent and Jews. And the Nationalist Party despised both. Virtually all the architects of apartheid were open haters of capitalism and free markets and immediately set about to politicize markets. The purpose was simple: excluding rural blacks from moving to the cities kept wages higher in the cities, benefiting trade unionists, and it suppressed wages for farm workers, benefiting Afrikaner farmers who were the backbone of the National Party. Together these two groups politicized the marketplace in order to transfer wealth from two despised classes—businessmen and blacks—to their supporters, farmers and unionists.

By the time I first visited South Africa, well before the release of Mandela and the end of apartheid, economic reality has already eroded the laws to a large extent. The Group Areas Act, which restricted where the races could live, had collapsed and “grey” areas were thriving. Blacks were flocking to the city, begging employers to “exploit” them at double the wages they would received in the homelands—that is if they were lucky enough to find employment there. With many Afrikaners having escaped the government-created jobs and becoming businessmen themselves, the pressure was on to loosen the laws that restricted labor supplies.

When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison the laws creating apartheid were still on the books, but the actual practice of apartheid had died long before. When these laws were repealed officially they had already been repealed unofficially throughout the country, by the natural forces of marketplace transactions. (Merle Lipton’s book Capitalism and Apartheid: 1910-1986 is a must read for this history.)

Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Act

In light of the recent debate about the Civil Rights Act, and whether or not it was necessary to ban private discrimination, this sort of history has some relevance. Based on what I’ve said it could be assumed that the Civil Rights Act didn’t create the change, as the modern Left claims, but was a result of a change that already taken place. Is that true?

Ilya Somin, points out the evidence that Americans had already changed their views on race by the time the Civil Rights Act was passed. He writes:

The Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964 because “the thinking of the white portion of the country” had already changed over the previous 20–30 years. As Howard Schuman and his coauthors document in their comprehensive book Racial Attitudes in America, there was an enormous liberalization in white opinion on race from the 1940s to the 1960s. By 1963, one year before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, 85% of whites polled in a National Opinion Research Center survey endorsed the view that “Negroes should have as good a chance to get any kind of job” and rejected the position that “white people should have the first chance at any kind of job” (endorsed by only 15%). This contrasts with 55% who said that “white people should have the first chance” on the same question in 1942 and 51% who said so in 1944.

Similarly, 73% whites questioned in a 1963 NORC poll embraced the view that “Negroes should have the right to use the same parks, restaurants, and hotels, as white people.” The same 1963 study also showed that 79% of whites rejected the idea that transportation in streetcars and buses should be segregated, compared to 54% who had endorsed it in 1942 (both the 1942 and 1963 questions used the same wording). The 1963 figures probably overstate the actual degree of white support for integration and equal opportunity. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that white opinion had moved strongly in an integrationist direction relative to previous years, and that discrimination against blacks in employment and public accommodations was opposed by a majority of white voters by 1964.

Schuman and his coauthors show that white racial attitudes continued to move in a more liberal direction after 1964. But the enactment of the Civil Rights Act does not seem to have accelerated the pace of change.

None of this means that the Civil Rights Act was insignificant. Although national white opinion was generally favorable to integration by 1964, southern whites were still much more hostile. Moreover, southern businesses that wanted to employ black workers on an equal basis with whites and/or serve black customers in an integrated setting were often prevented from doing so by state law and government and private violence. On these fronts, the Act really did make a major positive difference. The South probably would not have desegregated anywhere near as fast without it.

Somin is correct that violence against businesses that integrated was a possibility but it should also be noted that such violence indicates a failure of the state to fulfill its primary function: the protection of the life, liberty and property of the citizens. Discrimination existed because government in the South actively intervened in the marketplace to secure results that the politicians felt would not be possible without that intervention: in this case segregation. And for integration to fail to evolve it was necessary for government to turn a blind eye when it came to protecting the rights of businesses to act in a non-discriminatory way. For instance, Southern Streetcar companies actively fought racial segregation of their customers. Like the businessmen in South Africa, these companies preferred to act in a manner far less discriminatory than the politicians wanted.

To secure segregation Southern politicians actively politicized the labor market, without that intervention they would have found their segregationist cause severely hampered.

On unfortunate result of this debate is that everyone is concentrating on the aspect of the Civil Rights Act that criminalized private discrimination, as if that was the main thrust of the law. In reality the Civil Rights Act, for the most part, was a massive roll-back in governmental power. Law professor Richard Epstein wrote:

The primary feature of the Civil Rights Act was the removal of the formal barriers to entry that had been erected by the Jim Crow legislation. At this point the historical evidence tells a libertarian story, not a government intervention story. …The successes of the civil rights movement derived from the shrinkage, not the expansion of total government power, both state and federal.

The Civil Rights Act abolished the web of laws which Southern racists had erected in order to force people to act as if they were racists, whether or not they were.

Marriage Equality

We can again turn to one active civil rights struggle in America today—that of marriage equality for gay couples. A handful of states have ended the discrimination that existed against gay couples. But throughout the country private businesses have granted equal benefits to gay employees and their spouses—whether or not the law requires such things. The roadblock to marriage equality is NOT the private sector but the governmental sector.

Not only do laws exist which explicitly forbid the recognition of same-sex marriages but the legal system often interferes with private decisions to recognize such relationships, at least on equal terms. No private policy can remove the differential tax rates at which gay couples are taxed, nor can such policies remove the discrimination inherent in the social security system, US immigration laws, or other similar areas.

These policies will change, but they will change after the public has changed. As we already saw public opinion has shifted dramatically on this issue, and I suspect that shift will continue as the opponents to equality tend to be old and the old die out. In addition opponents tend to be strong Christians and religion, Christianity in particular, is also on the decline in the United States. This means that many of the young aren’t joining sects that would encourage them to be prejudiced.

So, reform is possible. But history seems to show that political reform rarely tips the social scales. Politicians rarely lead, they look for the trends and then try to jump in front of them, only at the last minute, and then claim credit for shifts that had already taken place. In reality, they do very little to change society, and in each of these areas the political classes actively worked to prevent the change that had taken place without them.

Does Obamacare push Abstinence?

One of the problems of passing legislation that no one has read is that no one is sure what it contains until it is too late. Now it appears that the professional abstinence pushers, that special interest group that sucks up taxpayer money to lie to schoolkids about sex, believe that clauses in it will refund their efforts. The Washington Post reports that "the rescue plan for the nation's health-care system will also save their programs..." [Please note that referring to the bill as a "rescue" plan is not objective reporting but media bias. It is the same as if the Post had said "disastrous plan." Journalists are supposed to report the facts and whether this is a rescue or disaster depends on your politics—but then the political bias of the Post has never been questioned.]

The Obama bill "includes $50 million for programs that states could use to try to reduce pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease among adolescents by teaching them to delayy when they start having sex. " Amazing that the government is involved in teaching people not to have sex.

Valarie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Assocation says they are "otpimtistic" about the Obama bill providing them funds. By the way, that there is now such an association shows just how quickly government funding creates special interest groups of parasites who then lobby to keep the program forever. This is why "temporary" government programs become permanent.

Hilariously only James Wagnoner of Advocates for Youth said: "This is a last-ditch attempt by conservatives to resuscitate a program that has been proven to be ineffective." First, this bill was proposed by conservatives but by statist progressives. Conservatives didn't support the bill, not that there aren't plenty of awful bills they would support. If the funding is provided then blame Obama for that one, not conservatives.

And since when did effectiveness become important in analysing government policy? Our foreign policy is ineffective and continues. The war on drugs is not just ineffective but also counter-productive. Ethanol subsidies do more harm than good, so do agricultural subsidies. If you made a line by line list of every project that government funded, put them all on a wall, and then randomly threw a dart at it, you would hit an ineffective program most of the time.

In essence the best of government is ineffective and at it's worst it is lethal and destructive. Calling a government program ineffective is a compliment since accuracy would probably be much harsher. Neither the Left, nor the Right, give a damn about effectiveness. Playing politics is not about solving problems but capturing resources and both sides do that very well to the detriment of the people.

The high price of fear-based politics.

Francisco Lotero and Miriam Coletti were true believers in the various doomsday scenarios that some attach to the "threat" of global warming. The couple wrote their fears out in a letter, actually in a suicide pact. The couple shot themselves to death. Unfortanately these two fear-driving individuals were also parents. Their two-year-old son, Francisco, died after being shot in the back. Their daughter was shot as well, but the bullet missed any vital organs. Neighbors investigated the situation three days after the shooting and discovered the girl, still alive. She is in hospital and expected to recover. Police say the couple left a note explain their fear of global warming.

" Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." Al Gore.

The climate blunders continue

The Times of London reports another major screw up by the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. And they report that a former chair of the IPCC, Robert Watson, "has warned the United Nations' climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility."

The IPCC claimed that global warming was likely to reduce crop yields in north Africa in half by 2020. The IPCC loves apocalyptic claims like this. This was so popular that IPCC chair, Rajendra Pachauri (who has no credentials in climate science at all), and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, have publicly quoted this section of the IPCC report. In addition the IPCC thought the claim was so important that they included it in the IPCC's Synthesis Report, "the IPCC's most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers." Among the lead authors of this report os Pachauri himself.

Pachauri wrote: "By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised.” Pachauri has made this claim publicly in highly reported meetings. The problm is that there is NO verified, scientific evidence for the claim. Watson says that the report shows "no data supporting" the claim.

According to the Times this claim lists as its source a policy paper written by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The Institute is an environmentalist think tank, not a scientific body and the paper never underwent peer-review. The IPCC had repeatedly claimed that its apocalyptic vision of global warming is based on the science, and the science alone. Yet we have seen a growing body of evidence that the IPCC report is hobbled together using advocacy literature from left-wing, non-scientific sources.

In recent days the IPCC was asked by the ministers of the Dutch government to correct other errors from the report regarding the Netherlands. According to the IPCC report Holland is threatened by global warming because more than half the country is below sea level. While the Dutch are known for reclaiming land from the sea, they haven't been that industrious. The IPCC's report doubled the number.

Apparently an IPCC chart on energy production was also incorrect. In this case they reported on the potential of wave energy. The IPCC claimed the source was a company called Wavegen, note that the source is company, not peer-reviewed literature. But what the IPCC showed in their chart differs significantly from the chart that Wavegen published and Wavegen says they haven't changed the chart they published. But Wavegen also says they aren't the source for the chart as they merely reprinted it. Apparently the IPCC didn't verify the numbers, cited a secondary source for them, and wasn't interested into whether the claims were based on peer-reviewed information or not.

The Telegraph reports numerous other uses of non-peer reviewed literature in order to bolster the IPCC's political agenda including "ten dissertations" by students seeking their degrees. One such "unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development."

As for the false claims about the Himalayan glaciers the Yale Climate Media Forum has released a fairly in-depth article outlining precisely how the IPCC screwed up. This report appears to have pieced together all the evidence into a coherent whole. The YCMF says that the controversy was created by the IPCC alone and has "prompted intense, and warranted criticism of the IPCC review process." They do note that the "likely" source for the IPCC's "copied and pasted" claim was "an Indian environmental magazine." Think about that. The IPCC "copied and pasted" information from a magazine, no peer-review included, and reported the claims under the mantle of "peer-reviewed science."

And while Pachauri had been droning on about "one" mistake the reality is the paragraph on glaciers along contained three major errors. The YCMF lists them:

1. The first sentence predicts disappearance (a 100 percent loss) by 2035. The next sentence predicts an 80 percent loss. Nonetheless, the first prediction is made using more confident language. 2. The second sentence begins with “Its,” ungrammatical if it is referring to “glaciers” and unclear otherwise. It’s as if the two sentences were simply copied and pasted from different sources. 3. The approximate area of the Himalayan glaciers is 33,000 km2, so the 500,000 km2 starting figure in the second sentence is off by a factor of 15, and the decreased area predicted in 2035 - 100,000 km2 - is three times greater than the current Himalayan glacier area.

YCMF notes that one reviewer, David Saltz, caught and reported the first two errors but that the IPCC went ahead and published the paragraph unchanged. The third error couldn't have come from the World Wildlife Fund report that was cited originally because those numbers aren't found there. Instead they come from a paper by V.M Kotlyakov, as this blog reported two months ago. Kotlyakov wrote about all "extrapolar glaciers" not just the Himalayan glaciers and, as we reported, he listed the year 2350, not 2035. But when an environmental publication reported on these reports it made errors. And it appears the IPCC merely copied the claims as this publication reported them, errors and all. In other words, the IPCC didn't even bother to look at the science, they merely copied text from environmental publications and reported information as factual, without checking sources, or verifying data.

Climate Science Watch reported on how the IPCC "relied on an err0r-riddle online article when it it discussed the likely state of Himilayan glaiciers in 2035. It did so dispite questions raised by some reviewers." YCMF also shows that the IPCC had a chart on glacial melting which was "directly copied" from the environmental magazine in question. What is a dead give away is that the IPCC copied the chart which had its own internal errors—that is the data in the chart had a mathematical error.

The environmental magazine claimed that Pindari Glacier retreated 2,840 meters between 1845 and 1966. The magazine then said this meant the glacier was retreating by 135 meters per year! Do the math yourself, you will see that it is wrong. Had Pindari retreated 135 meters per year, from 1845 to 1966 (121 years) then it would have retreated 16,359 meters, not 2,840. The magazine had divided by 21 years not 121 years and thus got the wrong result. The IPCC, that paragon of science and peer-review, merely copied its material from this advocacy publication and that meant copying the bad math as well. So, in haste to report disaster, two major numerical errors were made. Someone transposed the year 2350 to 2035 and someone divided 2,840 by 21, instead of 121. And no one bothered to check original sources or verify the math.

Consider the main theory I hold regarding the IPCC and their reports. I do not contend that they intentionally distort or lie about information. I contend that they act precisely as we would expect someone to act who is absolutely convinced they have the right suspect apprehended. I see this similar to how police and prosecutors act when they arrest someone and are absolutely convinced of that person's guilt. If they find contradictory evidence they tend to ignore it. Anything that seems to point a finger at the suspect is emphasized. If they don't ignore exculpatory evidence they will go to great lengths to debunk it but make little effort to verify evidence that points a guilty finger.

Periodically they come across evidence that seems to prove the innocence of the suspect, but they are able to dismiss it, even if they can't debunk it. They convince themselves that "all the other evidence" proves their case. So this one piece that seems to contradict their claims can't be right. They may not know why it is wrong but they know it must be wrong. So they sweep it under the rug, not because they are trying to convict an "innocent" man, but because they are convinced they are convicting a "guilty" man. It is highly unethical either way, but these people are normally not attempting to incarcerate the innocent but tend to honestly believe they are seeking justice.

The scientific process is supposed to reduce the likelihood of this same sort of distortion. But the legal process has safeguards as well, to prevent this from happening, yet it happens all the time. The reason for that is that the process relies upon the investigators voluntarily following the rules. But often investigators see the rules as an obstacle to achieving the "right" goal. So they will selectively ignore, or bend the rules. This is why evidence, which proves a man's innocence, is often hidden from defense lawyers, even though the rules say that shouldn't happen.

We understand the courtroom is supposed to help prevent this by having open debate, with the defense and prosecutors appearing before a supposedly neutral judge and jury. The adversarial system supposedly helps justice come to the forefront. And it usually does, provided everyone plays by the rules. But with the IPCC there is no adversarial system. There are only prosecutors writing the final reports and the judges involved already know the guilty of the suspect before the evidence is heard.

There is an adversarial system in that papers may be published in any one of many journals. But the Climategate emails shows how the clique of warming scientists try to distort that process to guarantee only one side is heard. Even the papers that get published are easily ignored by the IPCC as the prosecutors then seek out papers (and apparently a large amount of non-scientific claims as well) that bolster their own theory. After selecting which evidence is submitted and which is ignored it is passed up a bureaucratic ladder where each new judge or prosecutor has the guilty verdict in their pocket and is just writing up the judgment, not checking the facts and making sure the rules have been followed.

This tendency to have the guilty verdict already written out is the reason that the errors that have been exposed all lean in one direction. All the major errors have predicted dire consequences if the IPCC's political agenda is ignored. So far none of the errors have underestimated catastrophe, only exaggerated it. That is because prosecutors err in their assumptions of guilt, not innocence. And the IPCC is a "scientific" body the same way the district attorney's office is a judicial one. They may be part of the process but they are advocacy bodies meant to achieve a specific goal. The district attorney is out to secure convictions, leaving the verdict up to the court. But the IPCC is acting both as prosecutor and court, and that makes it even more suspect.

Return of the Mugwumps.

You know Obama is in trouble when the Democrats can't hold on to Ted Kennedy's seat. Make no mistake about it, very few voters in Massachusetts voted for Scott Brown, the new Republican Senator. They voted against Obama, in particular they voted against his push to grab health care as a political prize for the party of government.

I have long argued that the independent voters, those who think for themselves and aren't ruled by party loyalty, vote for the candidate they despise the least. Or they vote for the party they despise least. There used to be a coattails effect, where local candidates won office because the popularity of the leader of their party. That hasn't been true for a long time. Now we have the skunk effect. Candidates perceived to be close to the major politician who stinks the most, pick up his scent and voters reject him.

For several years the biggest stench in Washington came from Dubya. The result was loss after loss for the Republicans. That meant wins for the Democrats.

Stupidly the Democrats took that as a mandate to put the Bush big government programs on super-steroids. The Democrats very dumbly thought that people voted FOR them, instead of AGAINST Bush. This caused them to be ambitious as they really believed America had gone over for European style socialism. But they never had the support of the majority of voters, they just disgusted them less than Bush was doing at the time.

Bush is gone, not in prison as one would hope, but at least gone. Dubya is no longer the big stench in DC. That honor goes to Obama, who has ambitions to remake America into something that the European Left would worship, much as they worship the man himself. Like all messiahs before him Obama is a fraud. And the independent voters turned on him very quickly.

The independent voter is an interesting demographic. They tend to like lower taxes, tend to support freer markets, and don't seem obsessed by the moralistic rubbish that the Christians in the GOP love to salivate over. They seem vaguely libertarian in their sentiments. The Democrats would sell their grandmother to get state control of the economy, the Republicans would burn her at the stake in order to ram antiquated religious values down the throats of the public. Neither party is remotely close to holding libertarian values—even the Libertarian Party has trouble doing that, preferring to run two conservatives at the top of their ticket last time around.

Unthinking parasitic Democrats are wedded to their party and won't budge. They want the right to pick the pockets of others. Unthinking theocratic Republicans are wedded to their party and want the right to plunge the country into some religiously-motivated revival of the Dark Ages. Independent voters are in the middle, not particularly thrilled by either set of choices. So they rock back and forth between the two parties depending on which party has repulsed them the least during that election.

This happened once before in American politics. It was the 1880s and many Eastern liberals, that is liberal in the classical tradition, abandoned the Republican Party to elect Grover Cleveland, one of the least lethal men to occupy the White House. These men tended to me pro-free market and anti-imperialist. In fact many were involved in the Anti-Imperialist League of America at the time. Including in the Mugwump camp were old classical liberals like E.L. Godkin, William Graham Sumner, Moorefield Storey and Edward Atkinson. They were derided for supposed sitting on a fence, with their mug on one side and their wump on the other side—this to refer to the ease with which they could from Republican to Democrat and back again. I always admired the Mugwumps.

The Mugwumps were often involved with the struggle for equal rights for blacks, many were closely tied to the now unnecessary abolitionist movement to abolish slavery. For instance, Moorefield Storey, was a founded of the NAACP but a free market advocate. They embraced sound money, opposed US foreign interventionism, wanted small government and were not particularly inspired by some moralistic, religious agenda. In modern day terms they sound an awful like the "independent voter." The difference is that today's independent voters are even more Mugwumpish than the Mugwumps. They will turn on a party in the course of just one election cycle.

Take independent voters in Virginia and New Jersey. In the last presidential election they were repulsed by Bush so they voted for Obama. But only last November both states elected Republicans as governor because the independent voters had already abandoned the Democrats.

This is what we saw in Massachusetts. It was only more dramatic there because the seat had been Ted Kennedy's seat for some many years. When it became apparent that the vote in Massachusetts was going to be close, the Democrats pulled out all the stops. They even sent Obama into the state to push for their candidate, Martha Coakley. All they managed to do was grab the skunk from the White House and throw him into the arena with their Senatorial candidate. She was bad enough on her own, but was unelectable once she had been sprayed with the essence of the Obama skunk. Instead of shoring up Coakley's support Obama's presence reminded independents of precisely why they didn't want to vote for her. Republican Scott Brown, who is no gem I might point out, only increased his lead as a result.

Polls show that independent voters simply are not positive toward either the Republicans or the Democrats, only 25% of them see one of the two major parties in a favorable light. Democrats are trying to remarket themselves by ignoring the take-over of health care and focusing on anti-business rhetoric—an area that is totally fraudulent with them as they are the worst corporatists around. Obama, who showered billions on big banks, went to Massachusetts and attacked Brown saying the "bankers" have enough votes in Washington. Obama should know, he's their number one supporter.

Voters weren't buying it. And Obama's presence reminded them that they simply don't want a state take-over of health care. The result was that Ted Kennedy is now spinning furiously in his grave, which might explain the cold weather that has gripped the planet.

The big mistake the Republicans will make is that they will crow that Brown's win is an endorsement for their big government programs, the same error the Democrats made when voters rebelled against the GOP for inflicting Bush on the country. The truth is that even the Washington Post found that 58% of voters want smaller government. And neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are offering that—they are too enamored with the power.

The Mugwump is back and he's pissed. And I, for one, am happy to see it.

The Politics of Panic

This is supposed to be the opening video used at the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. This is a political body controlled by politicians where the "scientific process" is overriding by the politicians and bureaucrats who actually write the final reports. Each step of the way is designed to remove debate. I know some people who served as expert reviewers for the IPCC and all of them said that the material is rewritten to reflect political agendas before being presented to the public. Numerous members of the IPCC have publicly said that they are portrayed as part of the "consensus" when they are not, the false claim that all the scientists who contribute in any way are members. And, of course, there were some notable resignations by scientists who said that their own conclusions were rewritten and distorted in order to satisfy the political agenda of the governments that run the IPCC.

This video, if it is what it purports to be, shows that the IPCC is purposely using the politics of panic in order to push their very political agenda. This is fear-mongering intended to try and stampede the public into accepting the massive state controls that the Left wants in the name of climate change. It is not reason, it is not debate, it is not science. It is unmitigated propaganda meant to terrorize people.

I have no doubt that some people are driven by a pure belief in the theory that they popularize. I also have no doubt that many of the major drivers in the climate debate are politicians with very open political agendas. And the political agenda means they will fudge the science, exaggerate the science, play down the doubts, etc. The number of top warming hysterics who have openly admitted that they do that has been documented on this blog before. The more I watch the debate the less respect I have for the alarmists who seem to be getting desperate as they lose the battle for public opinion—they get more rabid and fanatical the closer they are to failure.

If they are right, and I always accept that possibility although I don't think they are, then much of the reason for their losing this debate is because they have been so rabid in their exaggerated claims. They play the fear card so often that they come across as the boy who cried wolf too many times. If the warming wolf does show up, in the terms they claim in their hysterical moments, it will be in part because they have alienated the public with their intentional fear mongering and political manipulation.

While I've always been skeptical of their claims, and most claims made by political special interest groups, my skepticism has grown the more I watch the debate. Apparently I am not alone. Rasmussen recently polled on the question of global warming and its causes. They do this every so often. I point this out, not because I think polls establish truth, as some critics of mine have claimed, but because it shows how opinion in shifting and in what direction. It says something about how the public perceives the debate.

In April 2008 47% of the public said warming was man-made and 34% said it was primarily due to natural causes. While the numbers have been up and down the trend is fairly clear. The latest poll shows that belief in human-induced warming has dropped to the lowest level since the almost monthly surveys began. It is now at 34% while those who say it is a natural phenomenon have increased to 50%.

Rasmussen also divides people by ideological content those who favor governmental control in general are called the "Political Class." These are people who like big government and think politicians are peachy. Among them the numbers who blame humans for alleged climate change are 80%. Among the group that Rasmussen calls the "political mainstream" the percentage who say that warming has natural causes is 60%.

Data, we don't need no stinking data.

Admitted the title is a paraphrase of a film quip, or more precisely, a paraphrase that combines two lines from the same film. But it seems to capture some of the attitudes at the Climate Research Unit regarding the data they used, as one of the key centers in the world, to determine whether or not their has been warming.

Raw data is collected. That data then goes through a process of adjustment where the scientist makes certain assumptions about how the data should be manipulated in order to take into account various factors, such as the "heat island" effect, changes in location of the reporting station, etc. Of course, the assumptions one makes can change the results by a considerable amount.

The raw data, however, is obviously critical if one is to verify the results. Would other scientists, using the same data sets, get the same results. Both the data and the assumptions used need to be available for that verification process to work. I personally would argue it "ain't science" until it can be replicated by others, using the same data. Of course, there is also legitimate debate regarding what assumptions were created to massage the data.

But now the Evironmental Editor of the London Sunday Times, Jonathan Leake, reports:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

...The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Thriving on dissent? Or demanding consensus?

As is widely known now, someone hacked into the computers at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. There is a major concentration of global warming gurus at East Anglia, in the UK, so this is somewhat more significant than it sounds.

Whoever did the hacking didn’t fool around with data, what they did was copy and disseminated a large quantity of documents and emails that they found. The so-far anonymous hacker did it because he thought the information was important for public appraisal of the warming scare. Openness of records, of course, is applauded by most people unless it makes them appear questionable, or contradicts their agenda. And the warming gurus are none too happy that their information is open to the public—especially since they have often gone to great lengths to hide their data from scrutiny, something that I always find sufficient to raise an eyebrow, and more than just a few questions.

A general description of the emails, from the Wall Street Journal is interesting. So I will take the luxury of quoting it at length, concentrating on what I think is of interest. And I will make a few comments along the way.

The publicly posted material includes years of correspondence among leading climate researchers, most of whom participate in the preparation of climate-change reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative summaries of global climate science that influence policy makers around the world.

Okay, so we know these are some of the top gurus of the global warming movement.

A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn't always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a "unified" view on climate change. On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to "beef up" conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a "big public splash."

If this is accurate I think it shows a highly politicized organization as opposed to a purely scientific one. That they differ with one another is science. Progress in science is made because people differ. Some great leaps in science are precisely due to one individual challenging the consensus of the day. But discussions on how “to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a ‘unified’ view” sounds rather political to me. If the goal is truth one does not hide differences of opinion but thrashes them out with open debate and discussion. I can see why a “unified” view is expedient to a political movement but not to science.

Similarly, if a scientist, or scientists, were asked “’beef up’ conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a ‘big public splash,’" that also indicates a group that was putting their political agenda ahead of science. Consider the position of Mike Hulme, who is at the University of East Anglia. Hulme was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the university, where he is a lecturer. Hulme wrote a controversial essay newspaper column in the left-wing Guardian, where he said society needed to abandon traditional science for a new kind of science that he calls “post-normal.”

His complaint was that the awareness of danger from alleged climate change “will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking” so “post-normal” science is needed instead. That kind of science, he says, will allow warming adherents to “trade (normal) truth for influence.” Trading truth for influence sounds to me, like trading science for politics. Certainly warming evangelist Al Gore has said the same thing. He claimed it was “appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentation of how dangerous it [global warming] is” in order to get the audience to his film to accept his claims. But then he is a politician and lying to scare the public is common in political circles. But is this science? Or is it politics?

Hulme says that what science produces is “provisional knowledge” that “can be modified through its interaction with society.” It is changed when “it rubs up against society.” Do the theories change? Do facts vary? Or does he mean that in a social setting politics now becomes important and we should use politics to “adjust” science to political agendas? When it comes to global warming theory, Hulme says “the stakes are high, uncertainties large and decisions urgent,” so this new kind of science has to focus on “who has the ear of policy,” in other words, who sets the political agenda.

Old, traditional science is deficient because “it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power” but that is deficient because it ignores “values, perspectives and political preferences. This requires that “we have to take science off centre stage” in order to concentrate on political preferences.

American global warming archbishop, Stephen Schneider, in a 1989 Discover magazine interview, makes it quite clear that he is pushing a political agenda. He said that politicized scientists needed to “capture the public’s imagination.” And that, “of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” Schneider seems to be saying, yet again, that there is conflict or "double ethical bind" between his science and political agenda.

What does “being effective” mean, if not politically effective? It means pushing an agenda. And Schneider recognized that in order to push a political agenda his side might have to trade some truth off for effectiveness. This is sacrificing science to politics—something they quite rabidly accuse the “skeptics” of doing. Dr. Freud might refer to this as “projection.” Dr. Richard Niolon defines projection this way:

Projection is something we all do. It is the act of taking something of ourselves and placing it outside of us, onto others; sometimes we project positive and sometimes negative aspects of ourselves. Sometimes we project things we don't want to acknowledge about ourselves, and so we turn it around and put it on others (i.e., "It's not that I made a stupid mistake, it's that you are critical of everything I do!"). Sometimes it is simply our experiences (i.e., "My father was a reasonable man when we disagreed, so if I use reason with my boss we can work out our disagreement").

The problem with projecting negative aspects of ourselves is that we still suffer under them. In the above example, instead of feeling inadequate (our true feeling) we suffer with the feeling that everyone is critical of us. While we escape feelings of inadequacy and vulnerability, we nonetheless still suffer and feel uneasy. The more energy you put into avoiding the realization that you have weaknesses, the more difficult it eventually is to face them. This is the main defense mechanism of paranoid and anti-social personalities.

In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with.

Again the politicization of science by warming scaremongers is obvious. Assuming an accurate portrayal of their emails this means that they were intentionally trying to skew the debate in one direction. This was done in two ways. One was to make sure that their own papers got published. The other was to use their influence to prevent contrary studies from seeing the light of day. If science is the pursuit of truth, if truth is a claim consistent with reality, then vigorous, open debate is required. In politics an agenda dominates and it makes sense as a political tactic, to suppress dissent. The warming advocates are acting precisely like a political, or even religious movement, not like scientists.

More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.

Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public.

We are asked to accept global warming theory on the basis of computer models making projections based on data sets. Of course, as with all such models, “garbage in, garbage out,” so the data that is input is critical to appraise the claims being made by the modelers. Yet, the gurus of warming are absolutely paranoid that other researchers will be able to scrutinize their data and methodology.

I will say that this is not “political” behavior, not at all. This is precisely how religious sects, protecting sacred dogma behave. Throughout history the religions of the world have strictly forbidden “heretics” from questioning the theology of the sect. Investigation, that didn’t conform to the “consensus” was punished, often with death. Religious thinking is directly contrary to scientific thinking. Religion, and politics to a lesser degree, fears dissent, schismatics, heretics, and so forth. Science thrives on dissent. Based on the descriptions of the private discussions of the warming advocates, they act more like the College of Cardinals meeting in the Vatican, then they act like scientists grappling to discover the truth.

Photo: The College of Cardinals, that's consensus.

Arguing with the Left: Some recent examples.

This last week I was in Los Angeles for the Atheist Alliance International meeting with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others. In general, the politics of the people in attendance was pretty much what I expected. About a quarter of the people seemed to be libertarian while most the rest defined themselves as “liberals,” in the modern sense of the word.

Dr. Michael Shermer told me that he once surveyed a large audience at James Randi’s annual event and that about a fourth of the audience identified as libertarian with one soul brave enough to claim to be a conservative. Of the “liberals” in attendance most were friendly. A few of the more extreme Leftists were not so friendly and not polite. And quite a few libertarians outed themselves during the course of the conference. But it is the arguments of the Left that I want to focus upon.

One man argued with me that the State must take care of everyone. I was pretty much unable to say anything in response since he tended to shout me down the moment I started to speak. I would say: “If you aren’t going to let me say anything then the conversation is over.” He would insist that he’d let me speak and then halfway through my first sentence start shouting again. He finally stormed off. Now and then he’d pass by me and couldn’t resist flinging an insult each time. The oddest one was he walked past and shouted to an oncoming individual, who had no part of the previous “discussion,” that: “Libertarians are just people who refuse to grow up.”

Considering how strenuously he was arguing that the State must care for us, due to our own inabilities to take care of ourselves, I found the argument a bit odd. He wanted a government babysitter but I was the one who refused to grow up! And to prove I was immature he yelled this remark loudly to a complete stranger for the sole purpose of insulting me. How mature is that?

Two different individuals, in two separate conversations, argued that America is rich because regulations make us rich. I have to admit that remark left me gobsmacked. I’ve never heard something so inane in my life. The proof was that America is today one of the richest countries in the world due to all the regulations. I asked one how he knew America is richer now than it would be in a more deregulated climate only to be told that this was a “God of the gap” argument. Actually it was a question and a rather revealing one.

I say it is revealing because he said that I couldn’t possible know that a freer economy would be more prosperous than the one we have. Yet he was arguing that he could know that a freer economy would be poorer. Supposedly our inability to know what a freer economy would be like only applies to one person in the discussion. He, on the other hand, is quite capable of projecting precisely what a freer society would be like.

While a few of the Left argued that government controls made America wealthy I ran into others who said that America is having financial problems today because it isn’t regulated enough. So we are regulated and it produces wealth but, at the same time, we are not regulated enough and that brings poverty. Apparently we are regulated and unregulated, wealthy and poor, at precisely the same time. We are better than what it was like in the past, because of regulations, while we have seen a steady decline in individual average wealth.

A variation of this argument was presented to me when it was claimed that today we are wealthier than humans were a thousand years ago. The presumption is that we had free markets for all of human history and lived in poverty. Then the benevolent state came along, regulated things, and wealth creation took off. The error is that this person assumes that I was arguing that free markets are the only necessary requirement for prosperity. I have not argued that position because I don’t believe it. Much more is needed. Economic development was extremely slow in the past, until the Age of Enlightenment. With the rise of classical liberalism, reforms were implemented and market controls were loosened. Economic growth followed. The modern regulatory craze came AFTER the West became wealthy not before.

A free market, with people who refuse to work, will not produce wealth. People have to choose to produce. Simply being free is not a sufficient cause of wealth creation. It is a necessary cause, but not a sufficient one. Trust is important in markets, so are property rights, the rule of law, equality of rights, ambition and a host of other things. I don’t actually know any libertarian who says that simply having a free market is all that is needed for people to be wealthy. Markets are important to wealth creation but libertarians are not so naive as to think that markets are the only factor in wealth creation. Consider Hernando de Soto’s work, The Mystery of Capital, as proof. DeSoto uses his book to show how property rights, or the lack thereof, impact on the ability to create wealth.

One person claimed that Africa is a “free market” continent and impoverished because of it. He refused to believe that the African continent is a heavily regulated one. He was completely unaware that trade tariffs in Africa are twice as high as those in the developed world. And when I asked him about Agricultural Marketing Boards he had no idea what they were. They force African farmers to sell products to the State at below-market rates but he didn’t know that. And apparently what he doesn’t know about, doesn’t exist.

The current World Development Report of the World Bank has a chart on tariff rates in various regions of the world on page 99. According to this chart, out of the six regions in the world with the highest tariff rates, five are in Africa. The report specifically says that “Tariffs are highest in Africa” while they are “lowest in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.” The UN also says: “Using tariff and nontariff barriers, poor countries restrict trade more than rich countries.” The World Bank also says that the flow of capital is more regulated in the poor nations than in rich nations. “Restrictions on capital flows in 2005 are lower in industrial than in developing countries and are greatest in Africa.” (p. 99) Last I heard no one was accusing the bank of being a libertarian puppet that “refuses to grow up.”

Numerous people, more than I remembered, assured me that government controlled health care is superior because nations with such care have higher life expectancy than does the United States. That life expectancy doesn’t measure health care didn’t seem to matter. And when I mentioned studies that showed the US has higher treatment rates than does Canada, and higher survival rates for cancer, than does Europe, they simply dismissed the claims as being a lie. That life expectancy measures the impact of issues, unrelated to the quality of health care—such as obesity, smoking rates, accident rates, crime rates, war, etc.,—was glossed over. See here and here. Also quoted to me was the matter of infant mortality, which is also heavily influenced by factors not related to health care.

To say the least, I didn’t find these arguments particularly overwhelming.

When everyone wants freedom.

At times you will find political figures who are willing to fight for freedom. Those, unfortunately, are rare occasions. Few individuals are willing to do this consistently. Most are, at best, sunshine libertarians —those who advocate freedom when it is safe and bright and appealing; when it has the sanction of the majority; when even the mob can applaud the virtues of liberty.

There are some trends that we can discern regarding support for freedom. And I should state that by freedom, I mean the right of the individual to control their own life, liberty and property, restricted only by the equal rights of others. This is classical liberalism, which is not the same thing that the illiberal Left promotes. And by illiberal Left I refer to such people as Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

On the Right we saw figures like Goldwater and Reagan, who were more liberal than not, and certainly more liberal than most on the Right. George Bush and the advocates of the Religious Right were part of the illiberal Right. Liberals want to expand freedom not restrict it. And there are people on both the Right and the Left who wish to do that.

In my view liberals on what is called the Left, and what is called the Right, are inconsistent liberals. They are advocates of freedom sometimes, and advocates of authoritarianism other times. These are liberals who fail to live up to their own principles.

Most politicians, however, lack principles. They are not advocates of great principles at all, just advocates of power, particularly power in their own hands. They are the people who see humanity as a great lump of clay and themselves as the God-chosen sculptors, with the vision and the right necessary to beat that clay into shape. And “beat” is the operative word when political power is wielded.

Most politicians, like most people, are of mixed premises. More importantly, they are people of contradictory premises. Your typical human holds political values that conflict with one another. They neatly compartmentalize these issues so as to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from holding conflicting values. In other words, they avoid thinking about how their own politics is a conflicting jumble of values that ultimate undermines the good values that they do hold.

Take the so-called “Tea Bag” meetings as an example. Many of these people, while shouting wildly about freedom, advocate Big Brotherism in the bedroom. They are not advocates of freedom in principle; they are advocates of their freedom, not your freedom.

That most politicians hold conflicting values of freedom is no surprise. In fact, I should not say most, I should say all. I honestly don’t know of one single prominent politician who consistently advocates freedom—not one. Some do so more than others but all apply their principles inconsistently and often, incoherently.

But there are times when most people, and most politicians, are quite libertarian, or quite liberal in the true sense of the word. When are those times? Is there a consistent pattern of activity that allows us to predict when and where someone is more likely to be libertarian? In one word: Yes.

There are two times when we know that someone will take a more libertarian position than usual. (There may be more, but there are two such occasions that I have identified and perhaps others that others would identify that I have not thought of.)

The first is what I called the gored ox issue. When an individual’s ox is the one being gored they are most likely to demand it stops. Individuals who are authors, or who like books, erotica, etc., will demand the end of censorship more than individuals who have no such interests. Farmers want the freedom to farm their land as they see best. Business owners want the right to hire the employees they think best suited for their company.

Everyone wants freedom for himself or herself. That is never the controversy. What they have problem with is freedom for others. So many authors of more erotic material may advocate hate speech regulations because they don’t write such material. Certainly the purveyors of hate typically want censorship of erotic material while demanding the absolute right to prove their own stupidity in public.

The farmer who demands the right to farm his land as he see fits may well advocate protectionist barriers to prevent the farm products of others from entering the country. The business owner who staunchly defends his own freedom of association may be quite willing to restrict your freedom of association.

Consider the misnamed book, The Conscience of a Libertarian, as an example. Author, Wayne Root, a social conservative for sure, has an entire chapter on the dangers of prohibition. Yet the chapter is not about the war on drugs, but about gambling. Mr. Root made his living convincing gamblers that they should purchase his advice—advice that many of them says is no better than average. Root’s salesmen would use high-pressure techniques to convince people to “subscribe” at high fees to Roots advice service.

A side note: I put these handicappers in the same category as many investment newsletters. When someone is making his money selling you advice on how to make money, be suspicious. If their advice were of real value then they would be getting rich, not by selling their advice, but by implementing it themselves.

The second time that we find individuals more actively promoting libertarian principles is when they are out of power. Everyone wants to deny power to his or her opponents but grab power for him or herself. Consider the perfect example of modern conservatives in the form of the Republican Party. Out of power they wail about small government.

When Big Brother Georgie was in power, over the last two terms of office, these Republicans rolled over, dropped their drawers and shouted: “Give it to me Big Boy, give it to me!” Unfortunately for us, when they got screwed, so did we. At no point did the Republicans find the guts to stand up for a single one of those “limited government” principles that they claimed to support.

The moment George Bush was consigned to the trash heap of history, and the Republicans lost control of government to the authoritarian Left, they started screaming about out-of-control government. Basically these Republicans took the government, severed the brakes completely on the downhill drive, handed the wheel to Obama and then started whining about the speed.