A mixed bag: paradoxes, Fallen Angels, climate ironies, and more

Mail 703 Tuesday, November 29, 2011

A Perfect Climate Irony

 

Subject: cryptogon.com » Senate Bill 1867: U.S. Military Would Be Able to Indefinitely Detain American Civilians Without Charge or Trial Anywhere in the World

Jerry,

You warned us of this. I refused to heed the warning. You were right.

http://cryptogon.com/?p=26213

Jim Crawford

I understand the impulse to decide that this is war and use war tactics inside the United States; but that has severe repercussions. I don’t want to coddle traitors, but citizens do have rights, On the other hand we have carried procedural protection to pretty extreme ranges. Any expansion of the Patriot Act needs a lot of careful consideration. You don’t want to kill the republic in order to defend it.

We already have the Insurrection Act, why on Earth do we need this, too?

I’m not a big fan of the ACLU, but they’re spot-on with regards to this enormity, IMHO:

<http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/senators-demand-military-lock-american-citizens-battlefield-they-define-being>

Roland Dobbins

Education stats riddle

"It is also true that the average black student performance in Texas is higher than black student performance in Wisconsin. The average Hispanic student performance in Texas is higher than the average Hispanic student performance in Wisconsin. The average white (non-Latino) student performance in Texas is higher than the average white (non-Latino) student performance in Wisconsin. The three classes are collectively exhaustive.

These facts are true, and they are not contradictory although they may appear to be."

Well, I thought it was fairly obvious? Higher percent of Latino and/or black students in Texas compared to Wisconsin? Or it is absolutely politically incorrect to state that, while average Hispanic student performance in Texas is higher than that of Hispanic student in Wisconsin, it is lower than average white non-Latino student in Wisconsin?

But be assured – it is absolutely politically incorrect here in Israel to observe that high poverty levels among Muslim Arabs and ultra-religious Jews are somehow connected to observed empirical fact that that they usually have a lot of children and only one bread-winner in the family.

Alex Krol

Texas and Wisconsin

There are more blacks and Hispanics in Texas than in Wisconsin and they do so much worse than anglos that they bring the average down. It could be argued by the PC brigade that it is just that blacks and hispanics are the poor section of society and the poor always score worse in education so if they weren’t black they would just be the poor of Wisconsin.

Reminds me of the Scot who moved to England and after he left his acquaintances agreed he had thereby increased average IQ levels on both sides of the border. http://cdn-cf.aol.com/se/smi/0201d20638/04

Neil Craig

"a lone wolf howling in despair in the intellectual wilderness of Scots politics"

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/

Wisconsin vs Texas

Jerry,

The seeming contradiction is resolved by noting differences in demographics.

Texas has higher performance within each group, but the fact remains that there are significant differences in the performance of each group in both states. Hispanics outperform blacks and whites out perform Hispanics (and Asians outperform whites). While Texas does a better job of educating each group, Texas has a much larger population of Blacks and Hispanics which makes it appear that Texas does not doing a good job of educating.

Unfortunately; pointing out this indisputable fact will get you branded as a racist. I have often pointed out that the non-Hispanic, caucasion homicide rate in the US is comparable to most European countries. The apparent discrepancy is do to the astonishingly high homicide rate among certain minorities. Blacks account for barely one-eigth of the population but FBI stats show that the commit over half the homicides. The homicide rate by Hispanics is also severely elevated. In spite of the proliferation of guns, the homicide rate for Asians is astonishingly low.

James Crawford

Moon and Earth’s Limb

Jerry,

Another "boring" picture

<http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76534>

I’ll take as many as I can get.

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Averages

"Many a statistician has drowned whilst crossing a very wide river with an average depth of 1 foot."

mojo

…comes the Ice

My comment is nothing profound (or original), but wouldn’t it be killingly funny if anthropogenic global warming were exactly what we need to halt the descent into the next glacial maximum?

Best regards,

Robert

Indeed.

Now for the irony:

Perfect Climate Irony

Jerry, I’ve stayed away from your sites for some time, as I’m engrossed in the Great Climate Resistance movement (my neological label), and your stuff is just too damn fascinating, and distracts me.

But I happened across a nice post summarizing the issues around the IBUKU satellite results released by JAXA:

http://co2insanity.com/2011/11/15/new-satellite-data-contradicts-carbon-dioxide-climate-theory

Hard data showing the industrialized countries are CO2 sinks, undeveloped ones are sources. Totally 180° opposite of the Climate Science claims and assumptions. As usual.

The logic of "climate reparations" means, as I commented:

"A more perfect natural irony could not be conceived.

The undeveloped nations have two choices: industrialize as fast as possible, or pay huge reparations to the West.

What’s not to love?"

Heh.

Brian Hall

Obama Ditching Working Class

Jerry,

More and more it sounds like the Lords and the Lordkin verses the Kinless. Let the Burning City Burn!

http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/limbaugh-obama/2011/11/28/id/419266?s=al&promo_code=D98A-1

Jim Crawford

Nomenklatura

"One of the simplest ways to end the Depression we are entering is to abolish many of the Federal regulatory agencies and give those powers to the states."

Jerry,

I would like to hear your reasoning behind the above statement. Wouldn’t the effect be to multiply the lobbying and regulatory agencies by 50? The iron law rules as always. Or would it be that the states would then compete with each other to see who could have the fewest rules and regulations, fostering a ‘wild west’ type atmosphere for businesses of all sorts. Where would one draw the line? Un-checked polluters? Toxic waste dumps?

While I agree that lobbying and the rise of the nomenklatura on a national level has many undesirable and or unintended consequences, shouldn’t all Americans, regardless of which state they live in, live by a common set of rules?

As a Canadian, have I missed the essence of what is America? I view it as a single (great!) country, not as 50 separate countries.

gord

Gordon Crone

States would compete with each other, and there might well be conflicts between neighboring states; but what we have now is pretty well intolerable. Leaving such matters to the states won’t instantly destroy the country, and just now the regulations as they work now very well could. I suspect much of what we do by regulation could better be done with suits for damages, and that would be a lot less stifling. The current situation isn’t working. Leaving matters to the states is one way to dismantle what we have; if it has to be started over, that would probably be preferable to what we’ve built.

“There have never been any reported accidents from these kinds of devices on planes.”

<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/disruptions-fliers-must-turn-off-devices-but-its-not-clear-why/>

In reality, *nobody* actually powers off these devices – they merely ‘close’ or ‘sleep’ them. Which means that all the supposedly evil RFI from their wireless radios is in fact echoing around the cabin for the entirety of the flight (if you don’t believe me, covertly run a WiFi scanner on your phone, or just look at all the discoverable Bluetooth-enabled phones you can find via your phone’s Bluetooth discovery function). It’s simply safety theatre.

The airlines support this nonsense because they would like to have a justification for forbidding passengers from using electronic devices at all during flight, thus herding them towards using pay-per-use electronic entertainment media systems which have been installed on practically all modern airliners.

Roland Dobbins

All I really know is that no one seems to have objected to my old Zenith clamshell laptop back when laptops were rare, and the first time I took one on an airplane the stewardess was so impressed that she went and got the Captain, who insisted that I show it to him. No one told me to turn it off at any time in the flight. Then somewhere in there we started getting the message to turn the devices off. I comply, but I have never really understood what problems they cause. I suppose I can conceive of badly made devices that might be able to interfere with navigation systems, and since they can’t tell those from others – on the other hand, it’s very easy simply not to turn off an electronic device if you actually mean harm to the aircraft.

Cold fusion

Hello Jerry,

Here is a link to ‘ecat news’: http://ecatnews.com/

If you scroll down a bit, you come to a video of a presentation at

Cafe Scientifique Silicon Valley by Mike McKubre of SRI International

that you may find interesting. It is in eight segments totaling

around 102 minutes and gives the history of cold fusion

experimentation, results achieved at SRI, and some commentary about

Rossi’s eCat.

Whether cold fusion, in whatever form, ever turns out to be real,

repeatable, and commercially viable, the field is certainly not

confined to kooks, frauds, and incompetents. SRI has put at least 60

man years into it and there is a lot of other research going on in

the field in the US and in other countries around the world. Summing

up Mike’s presentation, the effect is real, it is reproducible, so

far it (except possibly for Rossi’s eCat) does not produce excess

energy in commercially exploitable form, and no one really

understands exactly what is going on inside the experiments.

Bob Ludwick

Actually the Navy continues to fund cold fusion research; the payoff is so high that even though the probabilities of it working to produce usable power are very low, the research still makes a certain amount of sense. That’s the kind of research I think governments ought to engage in, actually. Very high risk, very high payoff.

Your neighbor?

Perusing Google Earth seem to show that Ed Begley Jr.’s little wind turbine is no longer in place. Is that the case?

Best wishes to you and your family in this holiday season.

Regards,

Michael Walters

Ed took down his little wind turbine the last time he had the roof worked on. It just wasn’t cost effective, which is hardly surprising; winds strong enough to generate real power are rare in Los Angeles except in a Santa Ana season and when that happens the wind may be too strong. It was an experiment.

Ed is not naïve about all this, and he keeps good records about the cost of living off the grid, or trying to. I’m trying to get him and Niven together to do solar panels for Niven’s house: given the tax credits and subsidies it might be a good idea for Niven, who doesn’t live in the LA power district. Without the subsidies it wouldn’t be a consideration, but if you are already paying a lot in taxes, the tax credits for doing “green” can cover a great deal of the capital costs, and that changes the picture a lot. Solar works for some times and places; wind is a great deal less likely to be cost effective or even affordable.

Fallen Angels at 20.

<http://file770.com/?p=7597>

Roland Dobbins

Tory Aardvark

Jerry,

You are probably aware of this but I thought I would send this link.

http://toryaardvark.com/2011/11/17/14000-abandoned-wind-turbines-in-the-usa/

Even the most optimistic advocates project that wind turbines take decades to pay for themselves. Having the turbines abandoned because the operating costs are too high illustrates the fact that they never will economical energy sources.

Jim

It is my understanding that except for certain places in Scandinavia there are no windmill setups that have generated more usable power than it took to manufacture them. The breakeaven point is surprisingly high. Wind is good when it can do intermittent tasks: the old farm windmills used to fill animal watering troughs, and so long as the trough got refilled before it was empty, it didn’t matter when that happened, evening or dawn or night or noon. I recall when nearly every farm had one. They were safe for birds, too. Now these windmill fields are killing migrating birds and lots of bats. Ah well.

Doom and gloom – intelligence is an evolutionary dead end

It seems intelligence may well be an evolutionary dead end. And we’ll go out

with a sniffle rather than a large explosion.

Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/29/0015216/paper-on-super-flu-strain-may-be-banned-from-publication

A Dutch researcher has created a strain of H5N1 genetically engineered to be

extremely contagious. Why was he working on this? What will this mean to the

future of the human species? Will flu shots do any good?

{O.O}

Carl Sagan used to speculate that one answer to Fermi’s paradox is that when a species gets intelligent enough it wipes itself out.