The Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of Bill Buckner by beating the New York Yankees to advance to the World Series. Now, the Red Sox have broken the Curse of the Bambino by beating the St. Louis Cardinals to win the Series.
How long before the Sox win another Series? As a Yankees fan, I curse the Sox to another 86-year wait.
Get ’em next year, Yanks.
Climatology isn’t the only politically correct science. Nicholas Wade of The New York Times reports about race and genetics in “Articles Highlight Different Views on Genetic Basis of Race“:
…In articles in the current issue of the journal Nature Genetics, scientists at Howard, a center of African-American scholarship, generally favor the view that there is no biological or genetic basis for race. “Observed patterns of geographical differences in genetic information do not correspond to our notion of social identities, including ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity,’ ” writes Dr. Charles N. Rotimi, acting director of the university’s genome center.
But several other geneticists writing in the same issue of the journal say the human family tree is divided into branches that correspond to the ancestral populations of each major continent, and that these branches coincide with the popular notion of race. “The emerging picture is that populations do, generally, cluster by broad geographic regions that correspond with common racial classification (Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Americas),” say Dr. Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and Dr. Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale….
Here we have so-called scientists at Howard University trying to deny the obvious and their “peers” at other universities merely confirming it. You’d think scientists would want to do something worthwhile with their time.
Wade continues:
Two years ago Dr. Risch, a population geneticist, plunged into the long-taboo subject of race and said that these geographic patterns correlated with the popular conception of continental-based races – principally Africans, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians (a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners, and people of the Indian subcontinent).
These categories were useful in understanding the genetic roots of disease, many of which follow the same geographic pattern, Dr. Risch said. His article was provoked by editorials in medical journals suggesting there was no biological basis for race.
The articles in today’s issue of Nature Genetics represent a second round of the debate. The Howard scientists agree that there is a geographic pattern in human genetic variation but favor the approach of going directly to the underlying genetic causes of disease without taking into account any possible correlation with race….
Why is race off limits as a scientific topic? What are the “scientists” at Howard afraid of learning about their race? Where’s the shame in truth?
I will say once again that I fully understand Bush’s refusal to kow-tow to scientists (see here and here). Most Americans, unfortunately, have subscribed to a false view of science as coldly precise and unerringly accurate in its power to prescribe “wise” policies. I don’t subscribe to that view, as you’ll find by reading this and following the links.
I wrote recently about a report by Richard Muller that took a chunk out of the hockey-stick theory of global warming:
This [hockey-stick] plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago — just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide….
Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick….
This improper normalization procedure [used in the computer program] tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not….
Muller was, in the end, rather restrained in his criticism of the authors of the hockey-stick theory, namely, University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. Not so restrained is a research paper published recently in the journal Science by Professor Hans von Storch and colleagues at the Institute of Coastal Research at Geesthacht, Germany. Scientists Willie Soon and David R. Legates, writing at Tech Central Station, report:
In short, the new paper…confirms what several other climate researchers have long stipulated. The hockey stick curve — which is a mathematical construct, as opposed to actual temperature information recorded at individual locations — is problematic because it yields air temperature changes on timescales of a few decades to a century that are simply too muted to fit the phenomena of the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 800-1300) and Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1900), which are well recorded in historical documents and recognized in indirect climate data from growths of tree-rings and corals or isotopic content in ice cores and stalagmites collected around the world.
This is traditional science, with results from one group tested by others. What makes this case important, though, was explained by Von Storch in Der Spiegel:
“The Mann graph [i.e., the hockey stick of IPCC TAR] indicates that it was never warmer during the last ten thousand years than it is today. … In recent years it [the hockey stick] has been elevated to the status of truth by the UN appointed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This handicapped all that research which strives to make a realistic distinction between human influences and climate and natural variability.”
According to Soon and Legates, Von Storch calls the hockey stick “junk” or “rubbish.”
Max Borders, writing at Jujitsu Generis, says:
A viable Libertarian Party is going to have to change its ways: 1) its platform, i.e. to moderate its views; 2) it’s [sic] image, i.e. of geeks and pot-smokers; and 3) maybe even its name and brand, i.e. a name and brand sullied by 1 and 2.
Here’s a better plan. Don’t run LP candidates for office — especially not for the presidency. Throw the LP’s support to candidates who — on balance — come closest to espousing libertarian positions. Third parties — no matter how they’re packaged — just don’t have staying power, given the American electoral system. The LP’s only hope of making progress toward libertarian ideals is to “sell” its influence to the highest bidder.
In an op-ed at Yahoo! News, William F. Buckley Jr. says:
LONG LIVE OIL
Thu Oct 14,12:05 AM ET
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s reference to “greed for oil” can be passed over, and is being passed over, as routine political hyperbole. But maybe the time has come to examine the words and their meaning. This is so because “oil” is widely used as the great engine of human avarice. In years — and centuries — gone by, the devil word was “gold.” It was gold that brought out the reserves of evil in men. It ranked with and even exceeded love and sex. Oil could not, of course, go through hobgoblinization until its uses were discovered. But now it is used as the commonplace agent of evil.
What needs to be said about oil is that it IS worth fighting for. We would all agree that air and water are necessities. Without them life instantly ends. Without oil, life does not end, but life radically changes….
Only the super-rich can afford to be haughtily condescending about things like oil (evil incarnate) and the environment (to be protected regardless of the cost in jobs and GDP).
UPDATED:
Mike Brock takes out similarly minded lefties who begrudge any signs of happiness among Teresa’s “common people”:
[T]his morning, I had a discussion with somebody at a local coffee shop….
“Do you know what really bothers me?” he says, “all of these middle-class people making $40,000 a year, living out in the suburbs thinking their lives are so great. They actually think because they have a house and two cars in the driveway, that they are living on the up and up”.
“Are you aware that you are evil?” I asked him. He responded only with a blank stare.
“You resent that people have found relative happiness in their lives. You would seek to convince them that they should be depressed,” I said to him straightly.
He then announced his theory that the only reason they were happy, is because the bourgeois and corporations had brainwashed them into thinking that they were happy, when they really are not.
I’ve only recently started to pay attention to this mindset among left-wingers, but now that I’m really looking at it, I realize just how evil and shallow some people are. How can you resent somebody for finding happiness on a modest income? What the hell is wrong with these people?…
These people will only accept the happiness of others if it’s happiness in the context of what they deem to be an appropriate way of living. The fact that Joe Anybody doesn’t complain about working 8-hour days, 5-days a week, and enjoys his weekend doing home improvements and going out to dinner with his family, bothers these people deeply. They don’t want these people to be happy. They want to remind them that they live a meager lifestyle, and they are slaves to capitalism, and that they should be resentful of our society….
These people…seek only to lower the spirits [of] and bring grief [to] the average person, in order to satisfy their own personal insecurities.
Yep. Insecurity (emotional if not financial) breeds an unfounded sense of superiority.
(Thanks to Megan McArdle for the tip about Buckley’s piece, and to The Monger for the tip about Mike Brock’s post.)
Megan McArdle, guest-blogging for Instapundit, devotes a lot of bytes to Andrew Sullivan’s endorsement of Kerry. McArdle skewers Sullivan’s clumsy theory that Kerry would have to hang tough on national security:
The idea that we should trust Kerry, even if we think his previous foriegn policy instincts have all been bad, because he has nothing to gain from failing to pursue Al Qaeda, makes little sense. Surely George Bush had nothing to gain from failing to suppress the insurgency in Iraq, and yet his administration still hasn’t done so. This argument seems to fall into the partisan assumption that if Kerry fails it will be out of malice. But most people who think that Kerry isn’t the right man for the job think he will fail not because he wants to, but because he’s fundamentally wrong in some way in his national security strategy.
Similarly, it doesn’t strike me as very logical to imply that Democrats have abandoned national security issues, and then suggest electing them anyway as a way to force them to “take responsibility” for national security, any more than I would employ a drug addict in a pharmacy on the theory that this would force him to “take responsibility” for enforcing our nation’s drug laws.
But Sullivan shouldn’t be taken that seriously. He’s merely grasping at excuses for his anti-Bush stance, which is predicated on Bush’s opposition to gay marriage.
P.S. Mike Rappaport of The Right Coast seems to agree with my diagnosis of Sullivan’s real issue with Bush.
Regarding the ambush that killed about 50 Iraqi soldiers heading home after graduation from a U.S.-run training course, the AP headline blares “Allawi Blames Ambush on ‘Great Negligence’.” Whose great negligence?
…Allawi told the Iraqi National Council…that coalition forces’ negligent handling of security was responsible for Saturday’s deadly ambush along a remote highway near the Iranian border.
“It was a heinous crime where a group of National Guardsmen were targeted,” Allawi said. “There was great negligence on the part of some coalition forces.”
But there’s more to the story:
…However, in an interview with Al-Arabiya television, Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan blamed the recruits, who in their eagerness to get home decided to leave immediately after their graduation and take an unauthorized route.
“They are to blame. They graduated at 12 p.m. and could have delayed their trip,” he said. Shaalan added that neither the Defense Ministry, the Kirkush commanders nor the U.S.-run forces were to blame.
“They are the ones who chose this road that led them to this ugly result,” he said of the victims. “There might have been some people who gave information about them to hostile sides.”…
Aha! Personal responsibility evaded. Treachery abetted. Life in the Middle East.
If you think that you can jinx your favorite team by watching its games on TV, Dennis Overbye agrees with you, in “This Season, Heisenberg Wears a Red Sox Rally Cap.”
In lieu of “About Us” (with links to biographical sketches of the bloggers), the sidebar at pandragon.net has this: “Who We Be”. Is it okay for the liberal, white bloggers at pandragon.net to mock ghetto English? A libertarian or conservative blog would be considered racist for a similar lapse of taste.
Like Bill Clinton, the “boyz” at pandragon.net (and they are boys) can get away with it because “their hearts are in the right place.” Ha!
…he’d win in a landslide. That’s what Jeff Jarvis seems to be saying. Yes, and if pigs had wings…
UPDATE:
Twisted Spinster nails Jarvis:
I once remarked that reading Jeff Jarvis’s blog is like staring at a train wreck full of naked old people: appalling, but you just keep peeking between your fingers. Well. That latest post is a particularly pathetic example of the premature senility affecting the “political consciousness” of a certain age group.
Yes, reading Jarvis is like reading a high-school civics text circa 1955. Jarvis’s blog is a variation on this theme: Government holds the solution to all our problems. Our duty as citizens is to educate ourselves on the issues so that we can elect the “right” bunch of commissars to tell us how to run our lives.
I had just today removed Jarvis’s blog from my roll. I feel vindicated in doing so by Twisted Spinster‘s take on Jarvis.
(Thanks to Random Jottings for the tip.)
The liberal mindset can be summed up as “no trust, no respect, no responsibility”:
It’s a blend of superiority and condescension that seeks to suppress individuality and self-reliance in the name of “rationality” and “compassion”.
Kerry says, “The ethical test of a good society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.” True. But Kerry — as a typical liberal — equates “society” with “government”. He sees government as a parent-surrogate, upon which we depend for food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and psychological satisfaction. He has no conception of government as a “night watchman” — a neutral protector who defends us from predators so that we may advance beyond dependency and fulfill our potential.
According to an article at Wired, the Computing Technology Industry Association earlier this month asked Bush and Kerry to answer these 12 questions:
* What government training, education and certification policies can help make American technology workers more competitive in the global economy?
* What is the appropriate role of the federal and state governments regarding Internet telephony and other similar Internet applications?
* What should the federal government do to address the issue of cyber security?
* What is the appropriate role for the federal government in addressing concerns about content over the Internet?
* What should federal policy be toward protecting intellectual property on the Internet -recognizing the harmless role played by mere conduits – and facilitating the free flow of ideas based on those creations?
* What should the federal government do to encourage widespread broadband deployment to businesses and homes?
* What should the federal government’s role be in regard to protecting personal privacy on the Internet?
* What should the federal government’s role be in regard to SPAM?
* What should the federal government do to encourage innovation and the broader use of wireless services that rely on unlicensed spectrum?
* How can the federal government help small businesses better compete in the global, Internet-based economy?
* How can the federal government better encourage investment in both basic and applied research and development?
* How important is the IT industry to the growth and development of this nation?
To ask such questions suggests that the federal government should interfere in the development and use of information technology. That’s the last thing the federal government should do. If the tech industry is left to its own devices, intense competition will lead us to better, cheaper, and more secure IT. If the government gets involved, everything will be worse — with censorhip thrown in.
Ryan Lizza writes this:
It looks like the race is down to ten swing states: Florida (27 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (21 votes), Ohio (20), Wisconsin (10), Colorado (9), Iowa (7), New Mexico (5), Nevada (5), West Virginia, and New Hampshire (4). Assuming the other 40 states are out of play, Kerry has 217 electoral votes wrapped up, and Bush has 208.
Ha, ha! Reputable polls, such as Rasmussen’s, have it the other way around (Bush 220, Kerry 190).
Lizza goes on to envision a tie in the Electoral College, which would throw the election into the House of Representatives. His take:
Almost half the country still thinks Bush’s presidency is illegitimate. There probably isn’t a way for a second Bush term to seem more illegitimate in the eyes of Democrats than his first term than for this election to be decided by the House, a far more partisan and less respected institution than the Supreme Court. But it could happen.
Where did he get that bit about almost half the country thinking Bush’s presidency is illegitimate? Source, please.
And so what if the House is partisan? It’s supposed to be partisan; it’s an elective body. Why would it be illegitimate for the House to decide the election in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution? I can see the headlines in the liberal press: Bush Re-elected by House, Madison’s Scheme to Blame!
UPDATED – 10/28/04, 12:48 PM (CT):
I wasn’t the only blogger to note Lizza’s slippery (sloppy?) thinking about the election going to the House. As Lizza admits today:
LEGITIMATE POINT: Mickey Kaus is taking me to task for writing that an electoral college tie decided in Bush’s favor by the House of Representatives would be seen as more illegitimate to Democrats than Bush’s first term. Just to make it clear, I don’t think it would be illegitimate–just as I don’t think Bush’s first term was–but I was saying that Democrats would see it that way.
But Mickey is right. It’s silly to argue that the result of a process carefully spelled out in the Constitution could be construed as illegitimate. And, thinking it over, I imagine most Democrats would accept such a result–as long as Bush also wins the popular vote. What I should have said is that if the race ends in an electoral college tie and a popular vote victory for Kerry, then a House-decided win for Bush would be seen as illegitimate by many Democrats, who would argue that the House thwarted the will of the majority. But I admit that what I wrote, which was unfortunately quoted in The Washington Post, was sort of dopey….
I heartily agree with Lizza that what he wrote was dopey. He’s right, however, that Dems would see a Bush victory in the House as illegitimate — which says a lot about the Dems and their willingness to subvert the Constitution when they don’t get what they want.
Holden at First Draft writes:
An anonymous commenter tipped me to a rumor that my hometown paper, the Austin American-Statesman, is planning to endorse Bush this weekend.
Frankly, I’m shocked. The Statesman‘s editorial page has been quite critical of Bush lately, and they’ve been endorsing several democrats in local races such as Mark Strama and Kelly White for state representatives over DeLay-whores Jack Stick and Todd Baxter. But this is no time to take anything for granted.
Make your views known. Anon suggests contacting publisher Mike Laosa: mlaosa@statesman.com or calling the paper at (512) 445-3500.
You might also try editorial page editor Arnold Garcia (512)445-3667 or sending an e-mail to editors@statesman.com.
Act now, espicially those of you in the Austin area.
Gee whiz! Can lefties be so deluded as to think that a newspaper’s endorsement makes a dime’s worth of difference to voters? Bush will take the electoral votes of Texas regardless of anything the Statesman or any other Texas newspaper has to say about the election.
My advice to First Draft fans: Don’t waste your time by calling or writing the Statesman. In fact, don’t waste your time by going to the polls on Nov. 2.
UPDATED
Eschaton is atwitter (scandalized? horrified?) at the possibility that the NRA is funding Stolen Honor, the anti-Kerry film about to be aired by Sinclair Broadcasting. I guess that makes Stolen Honor especially unworthy of consideration. Anything associated with the NRA must, by definition, be EVIL!!!
To top it off, Sinclair Broadcasting is exercising its First Amendment right in airing Stolen Honor, and the chairman of the FCC has said that the FCC won’t intervene to stifle Sinclair.
Frustrating days for the left.
UPDATE
Sinclair has backed down, in the face of legal and political pressure. Another example of legislation by litigation. It stinks.
But remember this, lefties, what goes around comes around.
UPDATED
Gene Healy points approvingly to an article in Cato’s Regulation magazine about the risks of terrorism. According to Healy, the author of the article (one John Mueller)
collects the known knowns and the known unknowns about how much sleep we ought to be losing about dying in a terrorist attack. Mueller’s answer: not much. And we ought to spend more time worrying about the risks of overreaction.
Healy then quotes Mueller:
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts….
Although there have been many deadly terrorist incidents in the world since 2001, all (thus far, at least) have relied on conventional methods and have not remotely challenged September 11 quantitatively. If, as some purported experts repeatedly claim, chemical and biological attacks are so easy and attractive to terrorists, it is impressive that none have so far been used in Israel (where four times as many people die from automobile accidents as from terrorism)….
Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads–rural interstate highways–one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles….
Why do we “seem” to be relatively safe from terrorism? Might it have something to do with diligent counter-terrorist activities since 9/11 — both here and abroad — such as rounding up a lot of illegal aliens and holding them indefinitely?
Does the record of domestic safety from terrorism since 9/11 mean that we’re out of the woods? By no means. Eight years elapsed between the first and second attacks on the World Trade Center. We made the mistake of letting down our guard after the first attack, which is why the second attack was successful — and catastrophic. Who knows what will happen next? Recent history proves that it’s idiotic to say that something is unlikely to happen because it hasn’t happened yet — which is precisely what Mueller is trying to say.
It’s similarly idiotic to compare the risk of terrorism to such activities as driving a car or flying on a schedule airlines. Terrorism isn’t a substitute for those activities — it’s an independent, unrelated act. Terrorism isn’t an accident with a fairly predictable probability of occurring. It’s a deliberate act committed by implacable enemies, against whom we must be on guard at all times. Being on guard isn’t hysteria — as Mueller would have it — it’s prudence.
If I were still the managing editor of Regulation, I would have resigned rather than abet the publication of Mueller’s fatuous analysis.
UPDATE:
Tom W. Bell at Agoraphilia has more to say; for example:
…Suppose that because devastating tornados strike your hometown only rarely, your $500,000 house faces a 1/5,000,000 chance of destruction by high winds each year. Although you could prevent that threat by extraordinary measures, such as building a concrete box around your house, you rationally calculate that you should spend no more than a dime a year on tornado protection ($500,000/5,000,000). Suppose further that your hometown faces a 1/5,000,000 chance each year of being devastated by a nomadic warrior tribe. Unlike tornados, however, nomads respond to incentives. Following one such raid, you might happily pay more than a dime towards your town’s Marauding Hoard Smackdown fund. You calculate that the temporary expense of chasing down and punishing the nomads will teach them a hard lesson, convincing them to take your town off their “to sack” list. The risk of further such attacks will thereafter drop, repaying your defense investment with future security….
I’m truly surprised that Peter VanDoren, the editor of Regulation, let Mueller’s shoddy analysis slip into the pages of his journal.
…by killing some trees? That might be the implication of this post by FuturePundit:
A number of factors have combined to increase volatile organic compounds (VOCs) air pollution from trees faster than VOC pollution from humans has declined….
The three major contributing factors are the natural reversion of abandoned farm land to forested land, the invasion of sweetgum trees, and the growth of large forests of pine trees for lumber….
What to do? Technology can provide the answer: plants used for biomass and trees grown for lumber need to be genetically reengineered to be less polluting. If better engineering designs can make cars less polluting then why can’t better engineering clean up trees and other natural polluters as well?…
There’s lots more, with links to the scientific sources.
The Red Sox have done something no other baseball team has ever done. By beating the Yankees last night, the Red Sox erased a 3-0 deficit to win a post-season series. More importantly for the Sox, by advancing to the World Series for the first time since 1986 they have broken the Curse of Bill Buckner.
Now, can the Sox win the Series and break the Curse of the Bambino? Stay tuned to your TV — but do it with the sound muted. The annoying Tim McCarver and the inane Al Leiter make for unbearable listening.
P.S. I’m a Yankees fan, but that comes second to being a baseball fan. I rejoice in the Red Sox’ display of skill and tenacity. Their unprecedented rally to win the American League Championship Series of 2004 ranks among the few greatest baseball “miracles” of all time.
Stuart Benjamin, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy, endorses Kerry: “The bottom line, in my view, is that people who believe in the old Republican credo of limited government had better vote for John Kerry.” The problem is that he cites Doug Bandow, whose “conservative” credentials I’ve discussed here and here, and some Cato Institute papers about spending patterns under various administrations, which I’ve debunked here and here. The bottom line: Benjamin’s argument rests on weak foundations.
Maimon Schwarzschild at The Right Coast sees through Benjamin:
…Stuart Benjamin, over at the Volokh conspiracy, posts that he is “disenchanted” by the Bush administration, and urges believers in “limited government” to vote for Kerry. Stuart’s post implies throughout that he is a small-government conservative disappointed, no, shocked at Bush profligacy.
As someone who knows and loves Stuart — he is one of those people that, if you know him, you are fond of him — I never, ever, for a moment doubted that he would support the Democratic nominee. Stuart is well within the academic political orthodoxy when the chips are anywhere near down. He would no more endorse Bush than most of his academic colleagues would. Stuart is very smart and a very good writer, and very good company too, and he was no doubt recruited to the Volokh Conspiracy in large part for those reasons, but he also provides leftish balance at an otherwise mostly rightward-leaning blog. The idea that Stuart is a typical Republican who, after sleepless nights and agonising reappraisal, has decided that supporting Kerry is the conservative thing do — and, therefore, that patriotic and reflective conservatives should join him and do likewise: well, how shall I put this? there is a spin element here….
Politics and Prosperity 