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In the Orange County Register, Alan Bock takes the opportunity to talk with Thomas Sowell about his new book, Intellectuals and Society, and other topics.
… most academics in the social sciences, people in the media (especially opinion journalists) and most teachers are intellectuals – as is Tom Sowell himself. They – we – often operate in an intellectually enclosed society in which esteem is gained from the opinions of peers rather than from any evidence that our ideas are useful in the real world, freeing them – us – from real accountability as to the validity of the ideas we espouse or generate. Tom Sowell’s serious writing stands up better than most because he assiduously appeals to and analyzes evidence in the real world to support his theories, but when you get down to it he’s an intellectual too.
…In our interview/conversation he expounded on the fact that people generally become “public intellectuals” by veering from the subjects they really know and venturing into areas where they can’t be expected to have serious knowledge. … he reminded us that Noam Chomsky’s innovations in linguistics hardly made him an expert on foreign policy, or that Paul Ehrlich’s training as an entomologist didn’t qualify him to expound on the imminence of world hunger. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when noting that being profoundly wrong hardly ever constrains public intellectuals from expounding on the next real or imagined crisis so long as they share the vision of the anointed – or from being taken seriously by their peers and admirers. …
…That observation is part and parcel of a more general concern that the United States is losing the cohesion and sense of shared values that help a country to hang together when things get rough. A community organizer’s job, he noted, is precisely to polarize people, to intensify a given group’s sense of grievance with the larger society, and he fears that Obama is not able to move beyond that ability to be a leader who unites people. …
Andrew McCarthy has a perfect illustration of Obama’s inability to see beyond the community organizer’s mindset. He writes on the woman proposed for ambassador to El Salvador.
… This is the second time she’s been proposed for an ambassadorship. The first didn’t go so well. President Clinton nominated her to be ambassador to the Dominican Republic but, as detailed on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, it turned out that she had “co-habited” with an agent of the Cuban intelligence service. In fact, a confidential U.S. intelligence memo alleged that she had been recruited to become a Cuban spy in her own right. The revelations caused her nomination to be quietly withdrawn … whereupon she reportedly refused to answer questions from the FBI (saying that since she was no longer seeking an executive branch slot, she no longer needed to cooperate in a background security check). Now, despite that debacle, and heedless of the controversies stoked by Van Jones, Kevin Jennings, et al., Obama wants to press ahead …
Unfortunately the economy is still in serious trouble, says Peter Schiff in EuroPacific Capital.
I hate to shoot down these high-flying expectations, but the economy is not improving. All that has changed is that we are now more indebted to foreign creditors, with even less to show for it. Washington’s current policies have once again deferred the fundamental, market-driven reforms needed to redirect us onto a sustainable path. Instead, through aggressive monetary and fiscal stimuli, we are trying to re-inflate a balloon that is full of holes. This was the Bush Administration’s exact response to the 2002 recession. It’s shocking how few observers note the repeating pattern, especially the fact that each crash is worse than the last. …
…Second, major investment and commercial banks are not back on their feet, but remain fundamentally insolvent. Their current business model of risk-free speculation depends upon the maintenance of government backstops, the continued availability of cheap money from the Fed, and the use of accounting gimmicks that allow them to conceal losses behind phony assumptions. …
…Finally, it is true that the GDP yardstick shows an economy returning to growth. However, as I have often repeated, this measure has deep flaws that render it almost useless for judging the soundness of an economy. Currently, the figures are merely reporting increasing indebtedness as growth. Using GDP as the main financial indicator is equivalent to judging a man’s success by the cost of his house, car, and wristwatch. Rather than gauging income, these figures merely indicate a level of spending and have nothing to do with earning power. …
In the Times, UK, Hannah Devlin, Ben Webster, Philippe Naughton report that the Copenhagen goals are melting away, and Al Gore has stirred up some controversy. We must thank Al Gore, though, because the title of his documentary is the gift that keeps on giving.
There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. …
…In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore. …
…Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. …
David Harsanyi writes about requesting information from Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The request was denied because even though the government funds the center, it is not a federal agency and therefore does not fall under the Freedom of Information Act.
…Surely the tragically uninformed among us could use some perspective on innocuous Trenberth comments like “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” or “we are [nowhere] close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter.” …
…In fact, Trenberth’s work is one reason the nation is moving toward rationed energy use via cap-and-trade legislation. His work is one reason the Environmental Protection Agency, through its endangerment findings on carbon emissions, can regulate industry by decree. It is Trenberth’s government-financed science that drives public policy across this country. Yet Trenberth has less accountability to the public than the local parks department. …
…Chris Horner, an attorney and senior fellow at CEI working on the NASA case, says of NCAR: “Without government these jobs would not exist, that is a reasonable threshold test to determine whether documents should be available to the taxpayer.”
Public confidence continues to fall on the global warming alarmism front. There are many reasons for this. But if the evidence of coming tragedy is as incontrovertible as we’re told, taxpayers certainly should not have to beg those they pay to hand it over. …
David Warren says, just wait, once global warming is globally debunked, the militant environmentalists will come up with another environmental disaster with which to extort money and power. For this reason, he calls for criminal prosecutions of the Climategate scientists.
…For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the “global warming” scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those “hacked” documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting “the right results.” This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts.
My reasoning here is that “environmentalism” at large has — like all other “progressive” movements — exploited public gullibility about motivations.
The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure, and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure, while themselves being on the take.
While I do not personally enjoy a mudfight, it is necessary to disarm these people, by taking away this public benefit of the doubt. …
In the Spectator, UK, Melanie Griffiths explicates on a David Rose article about the impact of the Climategate tricked data.
In the Mail on Sunday, David Rose has dug into the email correspondence at the heart of the East Anglia CRU ‘Climate-gate’ scandal and found that, far from being a few carelessly written messages taken out of context, they are – surprise, surprise — a game-changer. He writes correctly that they strike at the very heart of anthropogenic global warming theory by showing that the ‘evidence’ that post-industrial revolution temperatures are unprecedented is a manufactured fiction – and that at least some of these scientists, themselves at the very heart of promulgating AGW theory, knew perfectly well that the evidence did not support their claims. Here’s what Rose reports about the infamous ‘trick ‘of ‘hiding the decline’ to which the CRU director Phil Jones referred and which warmists claim has been wrenched out of context. Not so. Rose writes:
However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling. Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.
There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time. In fact, its subject was more technical – and much more significant.
It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram. It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report – the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century. …
In Reason, Jacob Sullum has decoded Obamaspeak.
“There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits…and investing in job creation and economic growth,” President Obama said last week. “This is a false choice.” During the same speech, he asked his audience to “let me just be clear” that his administration, having racked up the biggest budget deficits ever, is embracing fiscal responsibility, as reflected in his vow that “health insurance reform” will not increase the deficit “by one dime.”
For connoisseurs of Obama-speak, the address featured a trifecta, combining three of his favorite rhetorical tropes. There was the vague reference to “those who” question his agenda, the “false choice” they use to deceive the public, and the determination to “be clear” and forthright, in contrast with those dishonest naysayers. These devices are useful as signals that the president is about to mislead us.
…Here are some other things Obama has asked us to let him be clear about: “Earmarks have given legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects”; the U.S. government “has no interest in running GM”; Medicare cuts will be made “in a way that protects our senior citizens” from changes in benefits or costs; and a “public option” for health care, which would invite businesses to offload their medical costs onto taxpayers and could drive private insurers from the market, “would not impact those of you who already have insurance.” From now on, when you hear Obama speak, try replacing “let me be clear” with “let me lie to you,” and see if it makes more sense. …
Christopher Hitchens has an uplifting article about Iraq.
If the intervention in Iraq was indeed “a war for oil,” then some of that war’s more positive consequences were to be seen in Baghdad last week. The country’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, presided over an auction at which development rights for seven major oil fields were awarded in competitive bidding among several international consortia. Three features of the outcome were worthy of note. The auction was to award service contracts rather than the production-sharing agreements that the major corporations prefer. The price was set at between $1.15 and $1.90 per barrel, as opposed to the $4 that the bidders originally proposed. And American corporations were generally not the winners in an auction where consortia identified with Malaysia, Russia, and even Angola did best. (ExxonMobil and Occidental have, in previous negotiations, been awarded contacts in other Iraqi oil fields.)
Thus, the vulgar and hysterical part of the “war for oil” interpretation has been discredited: Iraq retains its autonomy, the share awarded to outsiders in development is far from exorbitant, and there is no real correlation between U.S. interests and the outcome. Except that we do have a very genuine interest in the success of this endeavor as it unfolds. If the recuperation of Iraq’s oil fields persists, and if production levels continue to rise, the country will begin to reacquire what it lost under the insane regime of Saddam Hussein, which debased the oil infrastructure and then squandered its proceeds. Current production is about 2.5 million barrels a day, which, on current projections, could rise to 7 million barrels in a relatively short time and which Shahristani, perhaps optimistically, believes could rise to 12 million barrels a day in 2016. The potential for this recovery certainly exists. Iraq has the third-largest proven reserves in the world at 115 billion barrels, and new explorations undertaken since the removal of Saddam Hussein and the lifting of sanctions suggest that even that figure could be on the low side.
What this means is that Iraq could quite soon be in a position to rival the output of Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is precisely what many of us in the regime-change camp used to point out: the huge, glittering prize of a democratic and federal Iraq situated between two parasitic theocracies and capable of challenging their oil duopoly.
If you bear this in mind, two further things also become somewhat easier to understand. The unbelievable cruelty and viciousness of the so-called “insurgency,” which daily continues to murder Iraqis in areas of the country that are not patrolled by Americans, is to a considerable extent a mercenary and reactionary movement financed from outside the country. The Sunni killers of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia draw on sources of support within Saudi Arabia, while the Shiite gangs are part of a shadow thrown by the so-called Revolutionary Guards and other paramilitary elements of the Iranian dictatorship. It is they who are shedding blood for oil and trying to prevent the recovery of a country that could challenge their patrons in more ways than one. …