Er, no. One of the claims of the global warming faithful is that a "consensus" of scientists agree with it's dogma while those who disagree are branded as heretics, er, non-scientists. Looking with one's eyeballs to criticize Mann is a good way to lose funding or status in the politically correct academic community.
New Scientist did a story on the scientists who disagreed with the global warming consensus. There were about a dozen of them (and some of them have since gone with the consensus). They get a respectful hearing, when they do scientific work, present it at conferences and submit it for publication. Scientists do not normally look to the National Review for scientific critiques.
Most of the critics of global warming are not scientists. They were published prominently on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where I read them. Most of them were economists, not scientists. They didn't address the main issue, which was whether the climate (not weather) was warming as a result of human activity, and how much. They merely argued that (1) there was no man-made global warming and (2) if there was, the cost of reducing it would be greater than the benefits (using supply-side economics).
Mark Steyn is not a scientist. He is apparently a literary critic who writes in popular media about politics and culture. If he descends to insults, by comparing scientists to child molesters, it's easy to understand why scientists won't pay attention to his arguments.
It looks like the National Review has come down quite a bit since William Buckley (although I may have idealized Buckley).
You told us that you are from a Jewish family and then you start sprouting off the same old "blacks are being oppressed" tune.
Oh, come on !
Reality check.
I'm Jewish.
There was a certain amount of anti-Semitism in the U.S.
But it was nothing compared to discrimination against blacks.
Until at least 1968, black people couldn't vote in the deep south, and black people who tried to vote were frequently killed. Jews never had anything like that in the U.S. At least Jews could vote.
This is what happens when politicians say, "Why should we pay colleges money to teach sociology?"
Um, yeah, it's called "culture". The world has different cultures, and these strongly contribute to different behaviors. Of course within each culture there is a bell curve distribution of any personal attributes, but the effect of the culture can shift that curve to the left or right by a few standard deviations. If you're not good with statistics: a few standard deviations is a lot. It's quite easily measurable.
You don't seem to be very good at statistics yourself.
Let's take IQ. It was once popular for freshman psychology books to print bell-curve IQ distributions of different "races." Whites were in the middle, Jews were 5 points above, and blacks were 10 points below. Nowhere near 2 standard deviations, which is 30 points. An IQ of 70 wouldn't be enough to get through daily life without assistance.
Once you put people into the same environment, it's amazing how their abilities are equalized. After the U.S. military desegregated, there were lots of black soldiers rising through the ranks. It drove a lot of southern racists crazy to see black men becoming radar technicians rather than swinging a mop, but an electron doesn't care if you're white or black.
You know this is ridiculous, right? You're trying to paint entire ethnic groups of millions and millions of people with one, broad stroke. It is bound to fail from the beginning.
But it's so much easier to make broad, sweeping generalizations and judge people by the color of their skin.
A computer programming language, however, is completely different. While I think it's useful to learn both, this proposal seems to lump them under the same skill, and I don't think that's accurate or a good way to do it. (I have a BA in CS and an MA in linguistics, including applied/SLA, so I do have experience with both, by the way.)
That's right. Foreign languages and computer languages are both called "languages," and they each teach something useful, but they're completely different. It's like the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.
Actually, with Google Translate, foreign language TV, and foreign music on the Internet, it's easier to learn a foreign language than it ever was. I used to look up words in my dictionary and think, "Some day, we'll have a computer...."
Oh, everyone loves the narrative that Kentucky is filled with barefoot overall-wearing good ol' boys with a mason jar of moonshine on the creaky porch with a sprig of wheat coming out of the corner of their mouth
It's your own fault for coming up to New York with a banjo and picking up girls in Washington Square Park with your Kentucky accent and hillbilly stories.
There is some basis for that. The U.S. was openly trying to destroy the U.S.S.R. since its founding, with the exception of our alliance during WWII.
For example, we armed the Mujahadeen with ground-to-air missiles in Afghanistan so that they could shoot down Soviet helicopters. Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he wanted to give the Soviets "a Vietnam." Ever hear of blowback?
We were openly supporting nationalist groups within the Soviet Union, including the Chechnyans.
All during the cold war you could read the hawks openly advocating these policies, in places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I remember them arguing that once the stifling hand of socialism was lifted from the creative Russian people, they would create a free market paradise.
The final way the West contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union was to immediately recognize the coup, thereby undercutting Gorbachev, rather than supporting him. The U.S. gave substantial support to the Ukrainian separatists, for example, through the National Endowment for Democracy, by supporting candidates in elections in ways that would be illegal for foreigners in the U.S.
It's worth noting that this also affects heterosexual couples where the male half is infertile.
If the heterosexual couple was married, the husband would be responsible.
If the heterosexual couple was not married, the sperm donor would be responsible.
They could write a contract saying that the husband, not the sperm donor, would be responsible in case of divorce.
But if they divorce, and the husband can't keep up on child support, and the wife goes on welfare, the welfare department wouldn't accept that contract, and they'd go after the father, just as they did with this lesbian couple.
The only way under Kansas law that the heterosexual couple could absolve the sperm donor would be for a physician to be involved.
Intent only means something if the cops and courts decide you had an intent to harm them.
Rememeber that cops and courts are above the law, and are afforded special protections.
For example, if you stare at a cop for 5 seconds which results in them feeling intimidated, there is sufficient intent to harm the cop in this case that they may fire shots at you and then arrest your body.
How can a cop arrest your dead body?
Dead bodies don't have any rights.
Living bodies don't have many rights these days either.
If the couple is married, there is a legal presumption that the husband is the father of the child.
(And it's difficult to impossible to reverse that presumption; even when DNA testing proves that the husband isn't the father of the child, he's still responsible for child support, according to many cases.)
One problem here is that the couple wasn't married. I don't think Kansas has gay marriage. If they had married out of state, the sperm donor might have had a fighting chance of winning his case.
Then the state would be going after the lesbian non-custodial partner for child support.
Good point. But you need a good librarian to run it.
Without a librarian, all you've got is a dumpster-full of books.
Some books are better for kids to read than others, and without a librarian, they're lost.
I used to go into the Donnell Library teenager's room in Manhattan, go to the 500s, and find a book shelf of every good math and science book I read or wanted to read in high school.
It takes a librarian to create a selection like that, where any book you pick up is interesting and worth reading.
When "libraries" depend on "donations" of books other people don't want (i.e. garbage), they get best-sellers of 10 and 20 years ago, Readers' Digest collections, old inspirational books, and manuals for Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.
Over the last several decades, school librarians have been getting fired, and school libraries have been shut down because there was nobody to run them. The affluent neighborhoods have great libraries. The poor neighborhoods don't have them any more.
I do. I'm trying to explain how they're related but I despair of succeeding.
You said, "I am arguing about that there's nothing 'uncivilized' about capital punishment when someone has killed another person intentionally and maliciously."
I'm saying you can never tell whether a person has killed another person intentionally and maliciously. So we can't follow your rule (unless we're willing to kill innocent people).
You really should look at the cases of false convictions that were overturned by DNA evidence, or other strong scientific evidence, or the cases that weren't overturned where somebody was executed or sentenced to long prison terms even though they were almost certainly innocent. In the typical cases, like this one, the prosecutor said, "OMG they killed children intentionally and maliciously," and the jury fell for it. Your argument is a formula for false convictions.
The prisons, run by the Red Army, execute a prisoner, in the way that would keep the organs in best shape, and the prison directors sell the organs, like the heart and kidneys, to wealthy foreigners. The Chinese hospitals perform the transplants.
The patients often die. In a medical system where doctors are motivated by making as much money as possible, and get paid cash up front, they don't have that much concern for their patients.
The Wall Street Journal had a story about this. The Israeli embassy used to get calls all the time from a hospital telling them to pick up one of their citizens who died during transplant surgery.
The Chinese have a strong financial motivation to execute people and sell their organs. Some people think that's why they have so many executions.
Me, if I'd been in charge of business, I'd have gone straight to single-payer and put all of the disemployed Insurance paper-pushers into something more productive like counting grains of sand.
Yes, I agree. And smarter people than me agree. Insurance companies take 15 cents out of your health care premium dollar. A lot of that goes to paper-pushers. Your doctor takes another 15 cents to manage the insurance paperwork. In Canada, they don't have that 30 cents cost. That 30 cents could cover all our out-of-pocket costs.
Obama ran a $1 billion campaign. A lot of that came from the health care industry. That's the drug manufacturers, hospitals, doctors' associations.
Bill Moyers asked, did Obama get outsmarted, or is he one of them? Matt Tabi (sp?) would say he's one of them.
So one theory is that politicians are bought off by the health care industry.
Science questioned in shaken-baby conviction Jerry Mitchell, The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger 8 a.m. EST January 19, 2014
The symptoms once seen as evidence of shaken-baby syndrome -- evidence that helped put a Mississippi man on death row -- are not considered as clear-cut now as they once were.
JACKSON, Miss. -- Thousands of Americans are behind bars, convicted of shaking babies to death — and some experts now say the science that put them there is blurry.
Since 2000, at least 11 Mississippians have been convicted in such cases with two of them sitting on death row. Jeffrey Havard is one of them.
It was Feb. 21, 2002, a Thursday night in Natchez, Miss.
If you could identify and isolate all of the really bad guys, and kill just them, I could accept capital punishment. But we don't. And we can't.
If you want to execute people, it has to be fair. Our system isn't fair. In the sample of the Innocence Project, it's particularly unfair to blacks.
If you want me to agree to execute people, you have to convince me that you've met certain standards of fairness. If there is racism and corruption (and lack of funding for legal defender services, I would add), then that doesn't meet my standards of fairness.
You either accept capital punishment or you don't. If you accept capital punishment, you have to admit, "Oh, yeah, we occasionally make mistakes, we occasionally execute innocent people, especially when the defendants are poor, especially when they're black." So you accept that.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, no. One of the claims of the global warming faithful is that a "consensus" of scientists agree with it's dogma while those who disagree are branded as heretics, er, non-scientists. Looking with one's eyeballs to criticize Mann is a good way to lose funding or status in the politically correct academic community.
New Scientist did a story on the scientists who disagreed with the global warming consensus. There were about a dozen of them (and some of them have since gone with the consensus). They get a respectful hearing, when they do scientific work, present it at conferences and submit it for publication. Scientists do not normally look to the National Review for scientific critiques.
Most of the critics of global warming are not scientists. They were published prominently on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where I read them. Most of them were economists, not scientists. They didn't address the main issue, which was whether the climate (not weather) was warming as a result of human activity, and how much. They merely argued that (1) there was no man-made global warming and (2) if there was, the cost of reducing it would be greater than the benefits (using supply-side economics).
Mark Steyn is not a scientist. He is apparently a literary critic who writes in popular media about politics and culture. If he descends to insults, by comparing scientists to child molesters, it's easy to understand why scientists won't pay attention to his arguments.
It looks like the National Review has come down quite a bit since William Buckley (although I may have idealized Buckley).
When was the last time the Jews feel like they are the "mainstream" anywhere but in Israel?
So you don't think that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, feel that they're part of the American mainstream?
You told us that you are from a Jewish family and then you start sprouting off the same old "blacks are being oppressed" tune.
Oh, come on !
Reality check.
I'm Jewish.
There was a certain amount of anti-Semitism in the U.S.
But it was nothing compared to discrimination against blacks.
Until at least 1968, black people couldn't vote in the deep south, and black people who tried to vote were frequently killed. Jews never had anything like that in the U.S. At least Jews could vote.
This is what happens when politicians say, "Why should we pay colleges money to teach sociology?"
When I arrived on the shore of America I had nothing.
I didn't even speak English.
Every time I hear one of those stories I ask the sociologist's question -- what was your father's occupation?
Um, yeah, it's called "culture". The world has different cultures, and these strongly contribute to different behaviors. Of course within each culture there is a bell curve distribution of any personal attributes, but the effect of the culture can shift that curve to the left or right by a few standard deviations. If you're not good with statistics: a few standard deviations is a lot. It's quite easily measurable.
You don't seem to be very good at statistics yourself.
Let's take IQ. It was once popular for freshman psychology books to print bell-curve IQ distributions of different "races." Whites were in the middle, Jews were 5 points above, and blacks were 10 points below. Nowhere near 2 standard deviations, which is 30 points. An IQ of 70 wouldn't be enough to get through daily life without assistance.
Once you put people into the same environment, it's amazing how their abilities are equalized. After the U.S. military desegregated, there were lots of black soldiers rising through the ranks. It drove a lot of southern racists crazy to see black men becoming radar technicians rather than swinging a mop, but an electron doesn't care if you're white or black.
You know this is ridiculous, right? You're trying to paint entire ethnic groups of millions and millions of people with one, broad stroke. It is bound to fail from the beginning.
But it's so much easier to make broad, sweeping generalizations and judge people by the color of their skin.
A computer programming language, however, is completely different. While I think it's useful to learn both, this proposal seems to lump them under the same skill, and I don't think that's accurate or a good way to do it. (I have a BA in CS and an MA in linguistics, including applied/SLA, so I do have experience with both, by the way.)
That's right. Foreign languages and computer languages are both called "languages," and they each teach something useful, but they're completely different. It's like the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.
Actually, with Google Translate, foreign language TV, and foreign music on the Internet, it's easier to learn a foreign language than it ever was. I used to look up words in my dictionary and think, "Some day, we'll have a computer ...."
My girlfriend clued me in that those stories they tell about screwing sheep are strictly for the benefit of credulous city boys.
Oh, everyone loves the narrative that Kentucky is filled with barefoot overall-wearing good ol' boys with a mason jar of moonshine on the creaky porch with a sprig of wheat coming out of the corner of their mouth
It's your own fault for coming up to New York with a banjo and picking up girls in Washington Square Park with your Kentucky accent and hillbilly stories.
There is some basis for that. The U.S. was openly trying to destroy the U.S.S.R. since its founding, with the exception of our alliance during WWII.
For example, we armed the Mujahadeen with ground-to-air missiles in Afghanistan so that they could shoot down Soviet helicopters. Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he wanted to give the Soviets "a Vietnam." Ever hear of blowback?
We were openly supporting nationalist groups within the Soviet Union, including the Chechnyans.
All during the cold war you could read the hawks openly advocating these policies, in places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I remember them arguing that once the stifling hand of socialism was lifted from the creative Russian people, they would create a free market paradise.
The final way the West contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union was to immediately recognize the coup, thereby undercutting Gorbachev, rather than supporting him. The U.S. gave substantial support to the Ukrainian separatists, for example, through the National Endowment for Democracy, by supporting candidates in elections in ways that would be illegal for foreigners in the U.S.
Hope you're happy with Putin.
and no, voting 3rd party is a non-starter. don't even go there.
“I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it, than for what I don’t want and get it.”
-- Eugene V. Debs.
It's worth noting that this also affects heterosexual couples where the male half is infertile.
If the heterosexual couple was married, the husband would be responsible.
If the heterosexual couple was not married, the sperm donor would be responsible.
They could write a contract saying that the husband, not the sperm donor, would be responsible in case of divorce.
But if they divorce, and the husband can't keep up on child support, and the wife goes on welfare, the welfare department wouldn't accept that contract, and they'd go after the father, just as they did with this lesbian couple.
The only way under Kansas law that the heterosexual couple could absolve the sperm donor would be for a physician to be involved.
Intent only means something if the cops and courts decide you had an intent to harm them.
Rememeber that cops and courts are above the law, and are afforded special protections.
For example, if you stare at a cop for 5 seconds which results in them feeling intimidated, there is sufficient intent to harm the cop in this case that they may fire shots at you and then arrest your body.
How can a cop arrest your dead body?
Dead bodies don't have any rights.
Living bodies don't have many rights these days either.
If the couple is married, there is a legal presumption that the husband is the father of the child.
(And it's difficult to impossible to reverse that presumption; even when DNA testing proves that the husband isn't the father of the child, he's still responsible for child support, according to many cases.)
One problem here is that the couple wasn't married. I don't think Kansas has gay marriage. If they had married out of state, the sperm donor might have had a fighting chance of winning his case.
Then the state would be going after the lesbian non-custodial partner for child support.
Good point. But you need a good librarian to run it.
Without a librarian, all you've got is a dumpster-full of books.
Some books are better for kids to read than others, and without a librarian, they're lost.
I used to go into the Donnell Library teenager's room in Manhattan, go to the 500s, and find a book shelf of every good math and science book I read or wanted to read in high school.
It takes a librarian to create a selection like that, where any book you pick up is interesting and worth reading.
When "libraries" depend on "donations" of books other people don't want (i.e. garbage), they get best-sellers of 10 and 20 years ago, Readers' Digest collections, old inspirational books, and manuals for Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.
Over the last several decades, school librarians have been getting fired, and school libraries have been shut down because there was nobody to run them. The affluent neighborhoods have great libraries. The poor neighborhoods don't have them any more.
In contrast to some humans I can think of.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...
I do. I'm trying to explain how they're related but I despair of succeeding.
You said, "I am arguing about that there's nothing 'uncivilized' about capital punishment when someone has killed another person intentionally and maliciously."
I'm saying you can never tell whether a person has killed another person intentionally and maliciously. So we can't follow your rule (unless we're willing to kill innocent people).
You really should look at the cases of false convictions that were overturned by DNA evidence, or other strong scientific evidence, or the cases that weren't overturned where somebody was executed or sentenced to long prison terms even though they were almost certainly innocent. In the typical cases, like this one, the prosecutor said, "OMG they killed children intentionally and maliciously," and the jury fell for it. Your argument is a formula for false convictions.
That's what the Chinese do.
The prisons, run by the Red Army, execute a prisoner, in the way that would keep the organs in best shape, and the prison directors sell the organs, like the heart and kidneys, to wealthy foreigners. The Chinese hospitals perform the transplants.
The patients often die. In a medical system where doctors are motivated by making as much money as possible, and get paid cash up front, they don't have that much concern for their patients.
The Wall Street Journal had a story about this. The Israeli embassy used to get calls all the time from a hospital telling them to pick up one of their citizens who died during transplant surgery.
The Chinese have a strong financial motivation to execute people and sell their organs. Some people think that's why they have so many executions.
Works for the Chinese.
Me, if I'd been in charge of business, I'd have gone straight to single-payer and put all of the disemployed Insurance paper-pushers into something more productive like counting grains of sand.
Yes, I agree. And smarter people than me agree. Insurance companies take 15 cents out of your health care premium dollar. A lot of that goes to paper-pushers. Your doctor takes another 15 cents to manage the insurance paperwork. In Canada, they don't have that 30 cents cost. That 30 cents could cover all our out-of-pocket costs.
Obama ran a $1 billion campaign. A lot of that came from the health care industry. That's the drug manufacturers, hospitals, doctors' associations.
Bill Moyers asked, did Obama get outsmarted, or is he one of them? Matt Tabi (sp?) would say he's one of them.
So one theory is that politicians are bought off by the health care industry.
Science questioned in shaken-baby conviction
Jerry Mitchell,
The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger
8 a.m. EST January 19, 2014
The symptoms once seen as evidence of shaken-baby syndrome -- evidence that helped put a Mississippi man on death row -- are not considered as clear-cut now as they once were.
JACKSON, Miss. -- Thousands of Americans are behind bars, convicted of shaking babies to death — and some experts now say the science that put them there is blurry.
Since 2000, at least 11 Mississippians have been convicted in such cases with two of them sitting on death row. Jeffrey Havard is one of them.
It was Feb. 21, 2002, a Thursday night in Natchez, Miss.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/19/science-questioned-in-shaken-baby-conviction-/4642923/
2 more things they need -- luck and money.
Ehrlich summed up the requirements for success in research with the four G’s: Glück (luck), Geduld (patience), Geschick (skill), and Geld (money) (Ehrlich, 1913).
http://www.nature.com/jid/journal/v132/n3-2/full/jid2011475a.html
No, Obama and Bush are both hypocrites.
I didn't vote for either of them.
The relationship is this:
If you could identify and isolate all of the really bad guys, and kill just them, I could accept capital punishment. But we don't. And we can't.
If you want to execute people, it has to be fair. Our system isn't fair. In the sample of the Innocence Project, it's particularly unfair to blacks.
If you want me to agree to execute people, you have to convince me that you've met certain standards of fairness. If there is racism and corruption (and lack of funding for legal defender services, I would add), then that doesn't meet my standards of fairness.
You either accept capital punishment or you don't. If you accept capital punishment, you have to admit, "Oh, yeah, we occasionally make mistakes, we occasionally execute innocent people, especially when the defendants are poor, especially when they're black." So you accept that.
You're saying, "You kill a pregnant woman intentionally, you die." I'm saying, "How do you know you got the right guy?"
Everything you said rings hollow if it turns out you got the wrong guy. And as the Innocence Project proved, that happens pretty often.