Honduras Leads the Way

Let's see:

Pre-election primaries held on time and without fraud, check.

National elections held on time and without fraud, check.

Score: Honduras 1, Chavez 0.

Looks like a soccer score, but the meaning is clear: Chavez, and his sycophantic Organization of American States are the big losers in their bid to oust democracy in Honduras. Fortunately, the Obama Administration came to its senses just in time to get on the band wagon of freedom in Honduras.

Now it's time to get serious about the increasing adventurism of the strongman-style governments around the world. It is no accident that every one of the trouble makers in the world today depend heavily on oil revenues to maintain their power and influence. Russia, Iran, and Venezuela all strut and preen on the world stage as if they have done something other than milk their oil revenues for world prominence.

This is easily remedied. Drill, Baby, Drill is not just a catch-phrase for the resurgence of the American economy. It is also the Achilles heel of all these faux powers. If we and the portion of the world that is still sane will flood the world with oil rather than printed money, the price of oil will plummet, leaving these paper tigers limp and gasping.

Of course, this is all a bit too simple for the best and brightest in the Obama Administration. But as Honduras has shown, free and fair elections have consequences, and our own chance at democracy-in-action is coming the fall of next year.

Click the title above to see all posts in this series.

Re: Evolution: Is this Progress?

Apropos my previous post on Climate Science, let me expand a bit more on a thread I started the first of this year.  If you will recall, I was arguing that secular scientists, especially those studying evolution, refuse to permit any argument into their discipline grounded in what I called extra-causal explanations, such as teleology, artistic concepts of beauty and mystery, or theological concepts like Divine Intervention. At the same time, their own discipline permits quasi-causal concepts like "randomness" and "probability." There is a good reason for this, but it is not the reason the secularists think. In the same way a Christian believes in a loving, active God, secularists believe that physical phenomena behave in ways that can be measured and analyzed. Their science is the development of formal rules and methodologies to investigate the physical world in conformance with this belief. As a result, the phenomena they study does, in fact, behave in ways that can be measured and analyzed, but largely due to reasons expressed in the cliche that for someone with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. Where they find phenomena that do not conform with their expectations, by and large they simply eliminate it from their studies.  For instance, in the old days, artistic categories of form and perfection were understood and utilized by philosophers, theologians, and scientists in describing and understanding the world around them. But at some point, scientists fell prey to the notion that Beauty was only in the eye of the beholder, and so they reduced physical objects to more objective criteria like shape, color, density, motion, and the like. All else was outside science's parameters, not because artistic categories were invalid or wrong, but because it just wasn't what the scientists wanted to do with the physical world. I know this sounds like a criticism of science, but I actually think it points us to the merit in excluding certain concepts from all types of science. The world is such an immensely complex thing that without rigorous conscription of a science's objects and methods, it would be simply impossible to make any progress.  It is therefore the mark of a good sphere of scientific research that it demand a set of very strictly defined phenomena, together with a methodology appropriate to the phenomena as defined.  Contemporary attempts to make progress in such mushy areas as "Cultural Studies" make this point rather well.  But on the positive side, evolutionary science is also a good example. Continue ..... The phenomena evolution seeks to study are the observed multiplicity of species. Where did all these species come from? What happened to species that have become extinct? What will happen to various species in the future? Evolutionary science investigates this and other questions with a toolbag of concepts like "survival," "fitness," "ecosystems," "randomness," and "probability," and in so doing, constrains itself to physical phenomena, per se.  As such, theological concepts like Divine Intervention are inappropriate, not because they are wrong, but because such concepts are more suited to a wider field than mere physical phenomena, a field as big and as complex as the Universe itself. To put it another way, the will of God is largely inexplicable. As a result, derivative concepts like Divine Intervention or Creationism just cannot help us to understand the concrete details of processes like evolution.  Such concepts will not yield any kind of a quantifiable answer at all, much less one that fits within anything calling itself science. It is with God and theological concepts, however, that the secular evolutionist usually goes wrong when he insists, in the name of his science, in passing judgment on such things. In so doing he oversteps the bounds of the very scientific discipline he has created. If the objects of evolutionary science are pre-defined so as to exclude God from consideration, then the evolutionary scientist can say nothing about God or Creationism or Divine Intervention without exiting his discipline. Such theological concepts are simply defined out of the scientist's vocabulary, ab initio, and he ought to stand mute on such questions - at least insofar as he tries to speak as a scientist.  Immanual Kant called such attempts as this amphibolies of reason, which result from extrapolating from one category of thought into another irrelevant sphere.  He might just as well have pointed out what the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes: "[God] has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."  Evolutionary science is not about ultimate beginnings or ends, but about physical processes in the here and now. If the scientist wants to talk about ends or beginnings, he must use other more theological language, for his discipline is not geared towards that sort of thing. But if the evolutionist may not delve into theological matters, the same is not true in reverse. The processes of evolution that our scientists discover can help us appreciate the Divine better, just as the deeper understandings of cosmological physics and quantum theory can bring us to a greater sense of awe: of God, because of what He has wrought.

Garbage In. Garbage Out

The Net is roiling with the news that mainstream climate research scientists have been corrupting the science of global warming for upwards of a decade. That's the science that has the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change in a terrible frenzy over the coming apocalypse, along with sundry Hollywood types and our great leaders in Congress. The evidence of this corruption is straightforward and damning: someone dumped a mountain of internal emails off of Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) server, catching the big-wigs of world climate research (people like Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and Thomas Wigley) discussing how to alter the data to conform with climate models, plotting to marginalize climate skeptics by freezing them out of the peer-review process, and conspiring to destroy information requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act.

Don't look for this story in the Mainstream Media. It's too busy worrying about gate-crashers at Washington parties.

As shocking as the emails are, the fact is we already knew the science community - and the peer-review process, which is its raison d'etre - was corrupt. Here's why.

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The climate debate is actually rather simple. We are sure about two things: (1) if you introduce greater concentrations of CO2 into, say, a green house, the temperature will rise; and (2) the earth's temperature has been rising for about the last 100 years or so. This establishes a plausible hypothesis that the world's temperature increase has been caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 stemming from the Industrial Revolution of the last couple of centuries.

But only a plausible hypothesis. Coincidence does not equal causation; something else is needed to eliminate other possible causes of global warming. If, for instance, it can be established that 20th Century global warming is anomalous, that is, much higher than years past, then the case for global warming as a man-caused problem becomes much stronger. This is precisely the tact of climate scientists over the past 15 years, and this is precisely where the debate is most fierce.

Which brings us to the last 1,000 years and the so-called Medieval Warm Period. 1,000 years ago the world apparently was quite warm, as evidenced by historical curiosities like a current-day icebound northern island that is called 'Greenland.'  Climate science, however, needs more than anecdotal evidence; it needs hard temperature data with which to compare current data. Modern temperature information is pretty good, especially since the advent of satellite technology, but there is nothing remotely comparable from medieval times.

So, climate scientists have come up with the notion of "proxies" for temperature. During warm periods, it is reasoned, things will grow and flourish, leaving a record behind. For instance, sedimentation layers and tree rings should be larger during warm periods. As a result, the science and methodology of deriving temperature data from the study of sedimentation and tree-rings (and a growing number of other things) has exploded over the last few decades.

Central to our story are the tree-rings in the Yamal Peninsula of Russia. It is these trees which provided the basis in the 1990's for deducing that the temperature during the Medieval Warm Period was actually much cooler than supposed, and that the subsequent temperature variations, even during the so-called 'Little Ice Age' of the 1700's, was milder than previous assumptions. The result was a graph of temperatures over the last 1,000 years that looked like a hockey stick, with 20th Century temperatures exploding upward. 

This Hockey Stick graph was a political bomb-shell, kicking off a nearly world-wide angst over the coming world apocalypse. 20th Century temperature was not only anomalous to previous centuries, it seemed to be in a class by itself. A man-made class, in fact.

Again, if the 20th Century temperature rise is indeed statistically anomalous with the preceding 800+ years, this presents powerful evidence that man's industrial activity is at least a very significant cause of global warming. Not conclusive evidence (something else might still be causing it), but certainly strong evidence.

But well before the CRU email dump, we already knew that the science behind the Hockey Stick was flawed. That is because the research was conducted, published, and peer-reviewed in gross violation of the scientific method. Normally, when a scientist publishes his research, it is accompanied with the actual data and conditions underlying his conclusions, in such detail that other scientists can duplicate his research to see if they get the same results. In the case of the Hockey Stick graph, and subsequent studies seemingly confirming the Hockey Stick, fundamental data was withheld. Specifically, the information on the precise trees used in compiling the temperature series prior to the 20th Century was not published, nor were the various computer algorithms that were used to interpret the tree-ring data made available.

The climate scientists essentially published their conclusions and as for the rest, they said, "Trust us."  In fact, they refused to divulge the deep data behind their global warming conclusions right up until they were forced to by a Congressional investigation in 2005. Since then, other scientists have discovered, among other things, that the tree-ring data was cherry-picked to produce the now infamous Hockey Stick graph.

So, the recent CRU email dump only confirms what we already knew.  The behavior of the mainstream climate scientists in withholding their data from scrutiny should have made them and their theories laughable, ab initio. Instead, they have been lauded and feted, received millions of dollars in research grants, and have driven the world to the brink of madness in the name of a Global Catastrophe, wherein grown-up educated people contemplate spending trillions of dollars and regulating freedom to near death.

And all of it, all of it, based on a monstrous scientific hoax. Man-made global warming might still be true (as any theory might be true before it is researched), but we will never know it from scientists such as these. For they are not scientists, but mere partisan ideological hacks feeding away at the public trough. These people need to get other jobs, and let the real scientists get back to work.

Re: Where's the GOP

Tut, tut, Ezra. It is not dishonest and deceitful per se to step back and let another political party shoot itself in the head. Each political season is different, and quietly permitting the political suicide of the opposition is one possible approach among many. The only relevant question is whether these are times that dictate such a strategy.

I am saying that this is not one of those times. The extreme over-reaching by the current Democrat Administration and Congress this past year has stirred up political winds that will, undoubtedly, push many Democrats out of office, even if the Republicans stand pat. But such winds as I see in America today can do more than blow against the Democrats; it can also accelerate a Republican positive agenda item: the reform of our current Healthcare system into a more competitive, lower-cost, freedom enhancing part of our economy.

All it will take are Captains of the Republican ships who are willing to unfurl the sails and catch this timely wind.

Which brings up the question: are our Captains Courageous or Queegs? We will soon know.

Senator Graham Puts on Airs

A little bit ago, Lindsey Graham co-wrote a Wall Street Journal Op/Ed with the esteemed Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, advocating for Cap and Trade legislation. We wrote about that Op/Ed here.

Yesterday, Senator Graham defended himself in an interview on the Sean Hannity radio program. In essence, he said the EPA was already empowered to regulate CO2 emissions, and it was important therefore to pass legislation insuring that such regulation would not burden small businesses and consumers with costs that would stifle economic activity and growth. He then concluded his defense, saying that he did not know to what extent Global Warming was a true man-made cataclysm, but that CO2 emissions by cars and other polluters was certainly not good and we needed to move as fast as possible to energy sources other than fossil fuels.

He talks as if the EPA is some natural, unstoppable force in the world, instead of a bureaucracy which owes its continuing existence to Congress. Why not legislate it out of existence, or if he is not willing to do that, curtail its jurisdiction over CO2? Because Senator Graham's real rationale for joining with Democrats on Cap and Trade is what he concluded with: CO2 is a pollutant, and pollutants are bad.

But, Mr. Graham, CO2 is not a pollutant. Another word for CO2 is "air." Air is not bad; unless it is hot air, in which case it can be very damaging to the political health of this Country.

Let the record show that I am in favor of eliminating all sources of hot air, including, perhaps especially including, Senators Graham and Kerry.

Re: Where's the GOP?

Chaz, in a nutshell, here are the Republican reasons for why they are doing what they are doing:

Why on earth should Republicans go on record with actual Healthcare bills? Wouldn't that leave them open to criticism on the merits? Wouldn't the Democrats and the Media literally revel in the real or imagined facts of harm and misery inflicted on the citizens of those States that had passed the Republican Healthcare measures?

As it is now, all the voters know is the evils of the Democrats' plans. Why give the Democrats an ability to tell a story about a corresponding evil of a Republican plan?

Best to stay low, and quiet, and let the enormity of the Democrats' plans for America be the only thought in the minds of the electorate.

Then, in 2010, we can pounce, and run the scoundrels from office.

For myself, I think that if this is the tack the GOP takes, then it will result only in the replacement of existing scoundrels with other scoundrels. Politicians should stand for something and be elected or not on account of that something. To try to slide into office by the back door - by simply not being an "unacceptable" Democrat - is a demeaning and deceptive strategy. Not to mention that such politicians are inherently unable to resist the lure of joining a $1+ trillion dollar spend-a-thon each year.

KSM Takes Manhattan

Bill Kristol makes a striking point about Attorney General Eric Holder's description of the upcoming trial in New York City of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of 9/11, as the "Trial of the Century."

That phrase, in colloquial usage, refers to a media fire-storm type trial that rivets the nation, often for the same reasons a train wreck commands attention. The usual result of such an incendiary spectacle is something less than a trial and more like a circus. Think "O. J. Simpson" here, and you'll get the idea.

This nicely exposes the mind-set of the Administration regarding the erstwhile war between America and its enemies. This trial is not about justice or the defense of America against an implacable foe. If it were, then the military commissions - approved by the Supreme Court and enacted into legislation by Congress, with the support of then Senator Obama - would have sufficed. This is about a public spectacle, because to this Administration, success is gaged in terms of the amount of media coverage it commands and the number of news cycles it saturates with the President's picture and rhetoric.

This is foreign policy as conducted by a Hollywood PR expert. Military commissions in Cuba? "Puhleeeze! How am I going to get this covered by anyone? Which major media outlet will send cameras to that dreary place? New York, Baby! The Big Apple is the place! We'll get 'em to preempt Oprah with this one!"

Where's the GOP?

In politics, when opportunity knocks, it is important to open the door. If that cliche doesn't thrill you, then how about this one: if you want to instruct a mule, you must first get its attention. The old joke finds a 2 x 4 to be the best method. However, if it is the mule who is knocking, then you already have its attention and can toss away the lumber. Just open the door and start instructing.

Voters are a particularly mulish lot. Most of the time, they are not paying attention. The only exceptions are the hard-line followers of both parties who are always thinking about politics. I estimate this group to be about 15% of the electorate and fairly evenly distributed between Democrats and Republicans. This means that the primary ongoing struggle for either political party is somehow to get the other 85% to pay attention long enough for it to make the sale on its policies and programs.

By their nature, Presidential elections gain a significant amount of attention from the 85%, but those times come around only once every four years. Off-year elections can have the same effect, but markedly less so, especially when there is no galvanizing political theme. This is why the party in power usually loses Congressional seats in off-years. Of the 85%, it is mostly the dissatisfied who will rouse themselves grumpily off their bark-a-loungers to vote; the satisfied are apt to stay home.

And then there are the important legislative battles in between elections. During these times, most of the 85% are comfortably hibernating from politics and could care less. George Bush's 2005 attempt to reform Social Security is a case in point. Social Security reform was one of his major policy planks, and the 2004 electoral victory had given him a sizable mandate for his second term, together with legislative majorities in Congress. However, after sweating out a particularly rancorous Presidential contest, the 85% retreated to their homes and political somnambulism. Try as he might, President Bush could not get any significant public support for his efforts, and Social Security reform fizzled, along with a good portion of the President's mandate. His Presidency never recovered.

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However, the 85% will wake up to politics sometimes, in unpredictable ways and at unpredictable times, even in the no-man's land of non-election cycle politics. As rare as these time are, it is critically important that a political party be alert to their occurrence, and act decisively.

In my opinion, we are in such a time right now. The national electorate, including a sizable portion of the 85%, is awake and listening intently to the Healthcare debate. Exactly why the 85% is paying attention is not important. The fact is that they are, and I wonder: where is the GOP? Why are Republicans not seizing this opportunity to push their agenda when a substantial portion of the electorate is listening?

I am not talking about Congressional action. Republicans have come under heavy criticism from Democrats and the national media for obstinately opposing the Democrats on Healthcare without offering any constructive alternatives. However, the GOP has put forward significant alternatives, such as Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's Healthcare legislation, only to see them vanish amidst Washington's political whirl-winds. In fact, as a distant minority in Congress, the only strategy the GOP can and should pursue in that august body is high-profile opposition to all that the Democrats represent. Nothing else will break through Democrat control of both the legislative process and the media.

But the GOP does command strong majorities in many State governments, and until the Democrats succeed in passing their National Healthcare program, the regulation of Healthcare and health insurance is largely a State responsibility. Why isn't the GOP pursuing a national campaign to reform State laws to allow interstate purchase of health insurance, reduce State insurance mandates, and otherwise increase choice and competition for consumers? A national State based campaign such as this would gain traction in the national media, especially so if it was coordinated with real legislative action in GOP dominated State legislatures. Imagine the impact on the Washington debates if the Republicans not only proposed market based solutions for Healthcare, but enacted the same!

All the polls show that the American people do not like the Democrats' reactionary New Dealism, where bigger, bloated government seems to be the answer for everything. As a result, the GOP is perfectly positioned to take control of this issue at the State level, giving the voters real-time programs and policies that will actually solve the Healthcare problem rather than make it worse.

The public is knocking at the door, looking for leadership on the Healthcare issue that will not take them down the Democrats' road. Where is the GOP? Why won't they open the door?

Probably for the same reasons that made them the minority party in the first place.

Our President, Lower than a Highness

Socialist, Marxist, Ideologue. These are the usual epithets hurled our President's way. Is it possible, however, that he is none of the above, but instead ... a Royalist? He has a curious habit of bowing to Emperors and Kings, something American's (much less American President's) are not prone to do. The LA Times has helpfully included a file photo of then Vice President Cheney bow-lessly greeting the Japan Emperor. As the Times asks, how low is this President willing to go?

Straining a Gnat

Let's count the expenses: a $787 billion Stimulus, with more contemplated; more than $1 trillion approved by the House for National Healthcare; and proposed legislation for Cap and Trade that will add trillions of dollars in expenses to the national economy.

Recently, however, our Leaders " ... expressed reservations about the potential long-term costs of expanding the war in Afghanistan." The costs? $26 billion. That's $26 billion BEFORE factoring in the savings from the wind-down of the Iraq war. Net cost after troop levels are reduced in Iraq? $0.00; that's zero, zip, nada.

Our Dear Leaders strain a gnat and swallow a camel.

Ignorance? Stupidity? No; just politics as usual, Washington style.