No, Mueller's article is based on several studies, which includes one short article that was rejected for space reasons, and a previous article (December 2003) that examines McIntyre and McKittrick's original, peer-reviewed and published article. Go read the referenced web sites.
Anyone who has done real science for any length of time knows that the perr-review process is not without flaws. In this particular case, though, McIntyre and McKittrick have identified flaws in the original hockey-stick paper that have already been the subject of a major correction in Nature and have published several peer-reviewed papers on the errors in the original Mann et al paper.
Note also that Mann et al. don't seem to be able to settle on which data series they used, and refuse to make their source data and codes available to other researchers.
It's also interesting that the models of Mann et al. deny the Little Climatic Optimum, which is otherwise awfully well supported, eg, by the historical records of the Vikings in the New World and the rather clear records of conditions in Europe.
As with most things of this sort, you should read the actual sources and draw your own conclusions.
He might have been acting as you say maliciously...or he might have been foring the issue...
Well, you apparently think, fuzzily, that these are mutually distinct, which isn't encouraging, but....
Forcing what issue? For a number of purely military reasons (as I've described above) there is no military reason to even want a draft; politically, the Republican Party knows that it wouldn't be acceptable anyway; practically, by the time a draft could be reorganized, and the first recruits trained, the potential need will probably be gone.
But observe: the Democrat side introduces a "revive the draft" bill -- and "watch out, the draft is coming and those Eevil Republicans are doing it" becomes a campaign theme. (Kerry's still pushing it as late as last night.)
I'd say the circumstantial evidence for malice, even outright malevolence, is pretty good.
By the way -- I've noticed that it's a surprisingly good prediction to assume that pretty much anything the Democrats accuse the Republicans of is something they're already doing, or planning. With that in mind, it's worth noting that it's the Kerry campaign that has floated the idea of mandatory national service.
If you're going to worry about a draft, who do you want to vote for? Bush, who said explicitly "not on my watch, no way" or Kerry, who has made the revival of conscription part of his campaign?
(1) the military doesn't want a draft. Your response: the military can't turn down a draft if one is established by law.
You neglect to ask the essential questino: if the military can't use draftees, why would one be instituted?
(2) DoD doesn't want a draft either. Your response: they wouldn't propose such a thing in an election year.
True. But then, since there is no reason to imagine that the military wants one -- it doesn't fit with the way a US military works any longer -- there's no reason to imagine that someone would propose such a thing in a non-election year. You're suffering under the burden that you're proposing that in the face of uniform denials, you're having to find some reason to imagine that they could be lying. But the only evidence you have for it is a bunch of political opponents trying to sell the idea.
Might as well assert, say, that Kerry wants to force everyone in the US to marry someone of the same sex. No evidence for that? Well, that just proves it.
(3) The draft's illegal. Your response: it would be legal if it were made legal.
True enough. But then, it hasn't been passed, the law proposing it wasn't passed, and Bush has insisted he's veto such a law if it did pass.
(4) The law to provide for a new draft failed 402 to 2. You're response: there's no reason to suppose that this was a serious vote.
You're right: it wasn't a serious vote. Everyone knew it would fail, and the bill would normally have died in committee.
Until the Democrats started lying about plans for a draft, using as their evidence the very Democrat-sponsored bill they proposed.
So, to settle the question, it was brought to the floor and voted down.
(5) The military is overextended etc. Now, this might be true -- although I work with the military and follow the more "technical" open sources pretty closely, and that's not the way it's being reported there. In fact, if you follow the reports more closely, you'll find that the areas in which "insurgents" are operating are getting smaller, the "insurgent" attacks are not being very successful and are losing steam, the Iraqis are increasingly trying to get rid of the "insurgents", and if you plot the attacks on a map you find that the attacks are very very highly correlated with where Western media is found.
But let's say you were right. Then you are still ignoring the fact that a draft would not solve that problem. Modern forces can't use "cannon fodder" -- you don't do modern oeprations by throwing a couple divisions up against the line, as we did even in Viet Nam. A modern infantryman has to have about a year of specialized training to be effective, and the infantry only accounts for about 10 percent of any fighting force. Everyone else needs even more training.
What's worse, the real issues -- the ones that are leading to people being recalled from the IRR or retained past their expected release date -- are the loss of specialized training or skills, like experienced intelligence analysts or people who speak foreign languages. We could also use lots more special operators -- Seals, Green Berets, Air Commandos, and so on.
You can't draft those people.
So, what you come down to is that there's no one in authority asking for a draft, which makes sense because a draft wouldn't solve their problems.
Now, up to this point, I've assumed that you're merely ignorant or ill-informed, but let's think about the other option: that you, like Charlie Rangel, actually know these things.
Moron. You get the whole story by getting parts of the story from multiple sources. We had a cherry-picked anti-RNC story, and I suggested "get the whole story" by providing another source with a different viewpoint.
The "dolt" was actually being very clever. Crassly political, but clever
Okay, he wasn't being a dolt. He was maliciously raising fears of the Republicans doing something they don't want, in order to use his lies against them in an election.
The truth is, "soldier" is increasingly a high-tech, high-training sort of job. You can't learn it sufficiently quickly to do it in a two year draft, and you really want people to be motivated and enthusiastic anyway.
The biggest need, in any case, is special operations (Special Forces, Air Commandos, etc) people, and you just don't draft those people.
Now, Kerry has suiggested an obligatory "national service" requirement, but that wouldn't be useful for the military.
Yeah... just 'cause the military doesn't want it, the civilian DoD administration doesn't want it, it's illegal, and the law to make it legal -- which was submitted by the Democrats -- went town to defeat 402-2 including votes against even from the dolt who sponsored the bill in the first place -- that doesn't prove the Republicans aren't trying to re-establish the draft.
And you take this letter seriously.
Look -- if you're stupid enough to buy this argument, you're too fucking stupid to vote.
If you think states rights are no longer an issue, who is it, do you suppose, who will be filing suit over Yucca Flats? Who ordered the National Guard into service to handle security and cleanup post-hurricaine in Alabama. Why have Governors elected by the states, or separate state legislatures.
It may be your opinion that such things are outmoded, but I would bet that lots of people, and in particular most of us in "flyover" states, would prefer to maintain that bulwark against the tyranny of the absolute majority.
Manuel Miranda, who in February resigned under pressure from his position as nominations adviser to the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, filed the complaint in a District of Columbia federal court Friday.
The complaint also lays out the case from Miranda's point of view, denouncing Democrats for conspiring to block some conservative nominees
and criticizing the Senate judiciary chairman, Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, for supporting the probe.
(Boss) Biil Frist -----> Miranda ------> Orrin Hatch
He's not suing his boss, and he's not accusing his boss.
Then you weren't paying attention to your own headline or something, because Ashcroft isn't Miranda's boss, and the Senators who Miranda accuses of pressuring Ashcroft were on the other side, and therefore weren't Miranda's boss either.
Shall I draw you a picture?
(Senate Repub) Miranda's boss <--- Miranda -- sues -> Ashcroft
|
accuses
|
v
Senate Democrats
Got it? Miranda's not accusing his boss, and he's not suing his boss.
... that you can tell an author to RTFA for their own article.
Miranda didn't work for Ashcroft, he worked for the Legislative Branch. Remember Civics classes and the "separation of powers doctrine"? And he's not accusing his bosses, he's saying that Ashcroft gave in to public pressure from members on the other side of the aisle, ie, Democrats.
Well, that's why it's called a "compromise". Historically, the reason was that New York and Virginia had so many votes that all the other colonies wouldn't join the Constitution unless there was a counterbalance. No election scheme can avoid "disenfranchising*" some number of voters -- at worst, (0.5000 x population) -1.
Here and now, we have the problem that the entire state of Colorado has only half the population of New York City. (I used to work in the WTC -- and that one building had ten times the population of my home town.)
Without the counterbalance, New York and California could vote to move everyone out of Colorado and turn it into a buffalo preserve and we couldn't do anything about it.
There's another reason that we kind of forget having had the aberrant case of a near-perfect split last election: by having a "thresholding" effect, it's much less common for a presidential election to be really close. It is, I believe, a theorem that no election scheme can completely avoid the problems we had last time, but the chances that an election will come down to a couple of thousand disputed votes in three or four counties is damn near zero. Imagine if every election had to be settled by the Supreme Court or the House.
* quotation marks because you've hit a pet peeve: losing an election isn't the same as being "disenfranchised". To be disenfranchised is to be deprived of the right to vote -- not being deprived of having the guy you want, win.
No, it changes what some of the contested states are, but since electors are allocated proportionally to the population it makes New York and California and Florida the big prizes. States like Utah -- reliably Republican -- end up being unimportant to Democrats, because they can, at the margin, hope for only one EC vote gained or lost; New York or California become more important to either side, because a relatively small change in votes there can mean a larger number of EC votes at the margin.
Read up on the EC: it was designed from the first to serve as a balance for the smaller states against the bigger ones. This is the same reason states get two Senate seats, but proportional numbers of House seats.
Oh, by the way, it doesn't really change the amount of available pork -- that's driven more by the Congressional seats. People forget the President doesn't actually have a helluva lot of control over spending.
Cf the privatization scheme Bush came up with; the idea is to turn SS into a real investment scheme, instead of a Ponzi scam -- but means that some of the "pay as you go" revenue is lost. The Democrats have their own schemes, which depend on increasing the most regressive Federal tax.
Mathematically, there's no scheme that will work without one or the other approach, and either approach is untenable in the face of a populace assured for years that they can have whatever they want if they'll only vote for it, so it's hard to see what solution is possible.
Google a couple phrases: "panem et circusem" and "In the long run we'll all be dead."
Consider: if the superinterpreter can reduce the instruction stream of the program to one target machine instruction per program instruction, it would be able to execute as quickly as the program would have when compiled to the target. But since the interpreter has to do some amount of computation to get there, it will necesarily be slower over all.
And, of course, if the interpreter executes epsilon more than one target instruction per program instruction, it'll necessarily be slower.
If follows, therefore, that there must be some performance cost.
In a word, yes, it is too much to ask. The Electoral College was part of the series of compromises that closed the deal on the Constitution in 1787. It was one of the ways that the Constitution balances the interests of small states against big states.
It would be particularly stupid for us in Colorado to do it unilaterally, since the effect would be to make Colorado the least important state in the electoral college.
(If it's not intuitive why, think about the two cases: a very big margin, and a very tight margin. With a big nationwide margin, like Nixon vs McGovern, the EC would be a tiny bit tighter than it was -- McGovern would have gotten a small part of the EC votes of a relatively small state -- but the outcome would be the same. With a tight election, the effective probable gain from winning Colorado would be close to a single vote.)
Okay, fine. The point is that your "moral compass" is stuck, if not broken. You're also having a little trouble with literacy: if you're going to use fancy terms like "faux pa", you either ought to learn to spell them or misspell them so blatantly that it's clear you're being arch, not just a dolt.
And yes, I am "clinging" to the "anarchistic ideals" of a free society. It's your right, I suppose, to believe that a totalitarian society is better, but historically those places that have tried it haven't been very successful, and those people who urge the totalitarian approach have moral problems quite a bit worse than merely liking to see nekkid people.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Mueller's article is based on several studies, which includes one short article that was rejected for space reasons, and a previous article (December 2003) that examines McIntyre and McKittrick's original, peer-reviewed and published article. Go read the referenced web sites.
Anyone who has done real science for any length of time knows that the perr-review process is not without flaws. In this particular case, though, McIntyre and McKittrick have identified flaws in the original hockey-stick paper that have already been the subject of a major correction in Nature and have published several peer-reviewed papers on the errors in the original Mann et al paper.
Note also that Mann et al. don't seem to be able to settle on which data series they used, and refuse to make their source data and codes available to other researchers.
It's also interesting that the models of Mann et al. deny the Little Climatic Optimum, which is otherwise awfully well supported, eg, by the historical records of the Vikings in the New World and the rather clear records of conditions in Europe.
As with most things of this sort, you should read the actual sources and draw your own conclusions.
Just by the way, the Wayback machine yields the Kerry proposal for mandatory service for everybody.
If you're worried about a draft, you should be worried about Kerry and the Democrats -- they're the ones proposing a revival of the draft.
He might have been acting as you say maliciously...or he might have been foring the issue...
....
Well, you apparently think, fuzzily, that these are mutually distinct, which isn't encouraging, but
Forcing what issue? For a number of purely military reasons (as I've described above) there is no military reason to even want a draft; politically, the Republican Party knows that it wouldn't be acceptable anyway; practically, by the time a draft could be reorganized, and the first recruits trained, the potential need will probably be gone.
But observe: the Democrat side introduces a "revive the draft" bill -- and "watch out, the draft is coming and those Eevil Republicans are doing it" becomes a campaign theme. (Kerry's still pushing it as late as last night.)
I'd say the circumstantial evidence for malice, even outright malevolence, is pretty good.
By the way -- I've noticed that it's a surprisingly good prediction to assume that pretty much anything the Democrats accuse the Republicans of is something they're already doing, or planning. With that in mind, it's worth noting that it's the Kerry campaign that has floated the idea of mandatory national service.
If you're going to worry about a draft, who do you want to vote for? Bush, who said explicitly "not on my watch, no way" or Kerry, who has made the revival of conscription part of his campaign?
All right, let's take them in turn then:
(1) the military doesn't want a draft. Your response: the military can't turn down a draft if one is established by law.
You neglect to ask the essential questino: if the military can't use draftees, why would one be instituted?
(2) DoD doesn't want a draft either. Your response: they wouldn't propose such a thing in an election year.
True. But then, since there is no reason to imagine that the military wants one -- it doesn't fit with the way a US military works any longer -- there's no reason to imagine that someone would propose such a thing in a non-election year. You're suffering under the burden that you're proposing that in the face of uniform denials, you're having to find some reason to imagine that they could be lying. But the only evidence you have for it is a bunch of political opponents trying to sell the idea.
Might as well assert, say, that Kerry wants to force everyone in the US to marry someone of the same sex. No evidence for that? Well, that just proves it.
(3) The draft's illegal. Your response: it would be legal if it were made legal.
True enough. But then, it hasn't been passed, the law proposing it wasn't passed, and Bush has insisted he's veto such a law if it did pass.
(4) The law to provide for a new draft failed 402 to 2. You're response: there's no reason to suppose that this was a serious vote.
You're right: it wasn't a serious vote. Everyone knew it would fail, and the bill would normally have died in committee.
Until the Democrats started lying about plans for a draft, using as their evidence the very Democrat-sponsored bill they proposed.
So, to settle the question, it was brought to the floor and voted down.
(5) The military is overextended etc. Now, this might be true -- although I work with the military and follow the more "technical" open sources pretty closely, and that's not the way it's being reported there. In fact, if you follow the reports more closely, you'll find that the areas in which "insurgents" are operating are getting smaller, the "insurgent" attacks are not being very successful and are losing steam, the Iraqis are increasingly trying to get rid of the "insurgents", and if you plot the attacks on a map you find that the attacks are very very highly correlated with where Western media is found.
But let's say you were right. Then you are still ignoring the fact that a draft would not solve that problem. Modern forces can't use "cannon fodder" -- you don't do modern oeprations by throwing a couple divisions up against the line, as we did even in Viet Nam. A modern infantryman has to have about a year of specialized training to be effective, and the infantry only accounts for about 10 percent of any fighting force. Everyone else needs even more training.
What's worse, the real issues -- the ones that are leading to people being recalled from the IRR or retained past their expected release date -- are the loss of specialized training or skills, like experienced intelligence analysts or people who speak foreign languages. We could also use lots more special operators -- Seals, Green Berets, Air Commandos, and so on.
You can't draft those people.
So, what you come down to is that there's no one in authority asking for a draft, which makes sense because a draft wouldn't solve their problems.
Now, up to this point, I've assumed that you're merely ignorant or ill-informed, but let's think about the other option: that you, like Charlie Rangel, actually know these things.
In that case, you're lying.
Pick one, you're choice: stupid or liar?
Yeah, exactly. Although at least Ann Coulter is kinda hot.
Moron. You get the whole story by getting parts of the story from multiple sources. We had a cherry-picked anti-RNC story, and I suggested "get the whole story" by providing another source with a different viewpoint.
The "dolt" was actually being very clever. Crassly political, but clever
Okay, he wasn't being a dolt. He was maliciously raising fears of the Republicans doing something they don't want, in order to use his lies against them in an election.
Yes, I feel so much better about it now.
Yeah.
The truth is, "soldier" is increasingly a high-tech, high-training sort of job. You can't learn it sufficiently quickly to do it in a two year draft, and you really want people to be motivated and enthusiastic anyway.
The biggest need, in any case, is special operations (Special Forces, Air Commandos, etc) people, and you just don't draft those people.
Now, Kerry has suiggested an obligatory "national service" requirement, but that wouldn't be useful for the military.
Bill's got a gmail address for these reports. Send it in.
Yeah ... just 'cause the military doesn't want it, the civilian DoD administration doesn't want it, it's illegal, and the law to make it legal -- which was submitted by the Democrats -- went town to defeat 402-2 including votes against even from the dolt who sponsored the bill in the first place -- that doesn't prove the Republicans aren't trying to re-establish the draft.
And you take this letter seriously.
Look -- if you're stupid enough to buy this argument, you're too fucking stupid to vote.
Have a look at the running log of voter fraud stories.
It's even on Wikipedia.
You're thinking of "fluidics". Was a big deal for about 20 minutes.
If you think states rights are no longer an issue, who is it, do you suppose, who will be filing suit over Yucca Flats? Who ordered the National Guard into service to handle security and cleanup post-hurricaine in Alabama. Why have Governors elected by the states, or separate state legislatures.
It may be your opinion that such things are outmoded, but I would bet that lots of people, and in particular most of us in "flyover" states, would prefer to maintain that bulwark against the tyranny of the absolute majority.
Your ignorance doesn't constitute an argument.
He's not suing his boss, and he's not accusing his boss.
Shall I draw you a picture?Got it? Miranda's not accusing his boss, and he's not suing his boss.
Putz.
... that you can tell an author to RTFA for their own article.
Miranda didn't work for Ashcroft, he worked for the Legislative Branch. Remember Civics classes and the "separation of powers doctrine"? And he's not accusing his bosses, he's saying that Ashcroft gave in to public pressure from members on the other side of the aisle, ie, Democrats.
You know, I was going to make a 2nd Amendment argument about this, and thought to forebear.
But you're right.
Well, that's why it's called a "compromise". Historically, the reason was that New York and Virginia had so many votes that all the other colonies wouldn't join the Constitution unless there was a counterbalance. No election scheme can avoid "disenfranchising*" some number of voters -- at worst, (0.5000 x population) -1.
Here and now, we have the problem that the entire state of Colorado has only half the population of New York City. (I used to work in the WTC -- and that one building had ten times the population of my home town.)
Without the counterbalance, New York and California could vote to move everyone out of Colorado and turn it into a buffalo preserve and we couldn't do anything about it.
There's another reason that we kind of forget having had the aberrant case of a near-perfect split last election: by having a "thresholding" effect, it's much less common for a presidential election to be really close. It is, I believe, a theorem that no election scheme can completely avoid the problems we had last time, but the chances that an election will come down to a couple of thousand disputed votes in three or four counties is damn near zero. Imagine if every election had to be settled by the Supreme Court or the House.
* quotation marks because you've hit a pet peeve: losing an election isn't the same as being "disenfranchised". To be disenfranchised is to be deprived of the right to vote -- not being deprived of having the guy you want, win.
No, it changes what some of the contested states are, but since electors are allocated proportionally to the population it makes New York and California and Florida the big prizes. States like Utah -- reliably Republican -- end up being unimportant to Democrats, because they can, at the margin, hope for only one EC vote gained or lost; New York or California become more important to either side, because a relatively small change in votes there can mean a larger number of EC votes at the margin.
Read up on the EC: it was designed from the first to serve as a balance for the smaller states against the bigger ones. This is the same reason states get two Senate seats, but proportional numbers of House seats.
Oh, by the way, it doesn't really change the amount of available pork -- that's driven more by the Congressional seats. People forget the President doesn't actually have a helluva lot of control over spending.
Cf the privatization scheme Bush came up with; the idea is to turn SS into a real investment scheme, instead of a Ponzi scam -- but means that some of the "pay as you go" revenue is lost. The Democrats have their own schemes, which depend on increasing the most regressive Federal tax.
Mathematically, there's no scheme that will work without one or the other approach, and either approach is untenable in the face of a populace assured for years that they can have whatever they want if they'll only vote for it, so it's hard to see what solution is possible.
Google a couple phrases: "panem et circusem" and "In the long run we'll all be dead."
Consider: if the superinterpreter can reduce the instruction stream of the program to one target machine instruction per program instruction, it would be able to execute as quickly as the program would have when compiled to the target. But since the interpreter has to do some amount of computation to get there, it will necesarily be slower over all.
And, of course, if the interpreter executes epsilon more than one target instruction per program instruction, it'll necessarily be slower.
If follows, therefore, that there must be some performance cost.
In a word, yes, it is too much to ask. The Electoral College was part of the series of compromises that closed the deal on the Constitution in 1787. It was one of the ways that the Constitution balances the interests of small states against big states.
It would be particularly stupid for us in Colorado to do it unilaterally, since the effect would be to make Colorado the least important state in the electoral college.
(If it's not intuitive why, think about the two cases: a very big margin, and a very tight margin. With a big nationwide margin, like Nixon vs McGovern, the EC would be a tiny bit tighter than it was -- McGovern would have gotten a small part of the EC votes of a relatively small state -- but the outcome would be the same. With a tight election, the effective probable gain from winning Colorado would be close to a single vote.)
Okay, fine. The point is that your "moral compass" is stuck, if not broken. You're also having a little trouble with literacy: if you're going to use fancy terms like "faux pa", you either ought to learn to spell them or misspell them so blatantly that it's clear you're being arch, not just a dolt.
And yes, I am "clinging" to the "anarchistic ideals" of a free society. It's your right, I suppose, to believe that a totalitarian society is better, but historically those places that have tried it haven't been very successful, and those people who urge the totalitarian approach have moral problems quite a bit worse than merely liking to see nekkid people.
Now begone, or I shall taunt you again.