Whispers in the airstreams

One of the more significant facets of an intellectually dishonest debate is that it tends to set aside reality. Issues of significant concern become whitewashed as minor episodes become made equivalent to major episodes as if there is no difference. The current debate on torture illustrates this. The imperialism of Russia in its invasion of Georgia could be another.

For torture, the examples center on the obsession with the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (Wikipedia) and the effort to ‘prove’ that the U.S. is violating human rights or otherwise being evil. A contrast for perspective is pointed out at NRO linking to a video about Real Torture.

We obsess over whether or not waterboarding is torture and a common matter of state policy while we ignore what regimes like Iran do as a regular treatment of prisoners. Remember those videos from the previous Iraq regime where handcuffed prisoners were tossed off the roof of multi story buildings?

A convenient target is a lazy man’s choice. It is easy to find fault and attack a target that is willing to listen and will try to accommodate complaints and where the problems are primarily at the surface of the culture. It is entirely another to go after the severe cases where the problem is embedded deep within the culture and the state will deny or even censure any complaint about its behavior.

One of the problems of trying to use server side software like this blog is that it becomes a soldier in an ongoing war. This blog was attacked by hackers and that resulted in Google blacklisting the blog.

This sort of warfare is being used by some as a means of entertainment; by others for commercial gain, or as a means of waging actual war as in the current Georgia conflict.

For this blog, it meant that it was time to clean up old stuff, get the URL updated so it made more sense, and check through the database to try to find any improperly inserted code.

So you may need to re-establish your user account and change your links. Welcome to the war as collateral damage.

Little Green Footballs reports on a Stealth Creationist Play Shot Down in California. The issue is about a religion oriented school demanding that their students be accepted to the University of California despite not meeting UC academic requirements.

It is one thing to choose your own way and make your own decisions. It is yet another to force someone else to agree with you.

It is entirely reasonable to choose their schooling. It is also entirely reasonable for schools to establish their entrance qualifications and standards. In this case, these two concepts have collided. The student choosing religious studies has tried for force colleges to accept that as scientific study. It appears that, this time at least, that was held as unreasonable.

Your choices have consequences.

The WaPo editorializes about offshore drilling myths and propagates a few in bashing a few. It appears that some are vehemently opposed to finding new sources of energy - oil based energy, that is. They go so far in rationalizing their view as to create a world that is a bit different from that we actually live in.

The Wapo takes after an ad that asserts that drilling for more oil is pointless because there is so little to get, that the current leases are not being used, and that drilling is dangerous. All three of these arguments are debunked.

Then they assert “The strongest argument against drilling is that it could distract the country from a pursuit of alternative sources of energy.” and bash the current administration. This is perhaps the biggest myth of all. It is a myth that has been tested for decades and yet persists despite a uniform failure of results.

Much of the debate about drilling for oil misses the basic issue of property rights and how government limits them. It then ignores the fact that the purchases of the present are often guided by perceptions of what the future will hold. The third point misses the fact that safety is something purchased and we have spent many fortunes in the pursuit of safety - so much so that there is good reason for concern about the risk versus benefit of such expense.

Finally, on the alternative, anything but oil (or nuclear), fantasy: simple mathematics should be enough to provide pause for thought. These alternative sources are alternative because they have a low power density and are often quite variable in availability. They are power sources rather than an energy supply like oil.

For example, to build a solar power plant equivalent to a modern gigawatt standard plant, you’d need to cover many square miles of country side with fabricated materials and then figure out how to store energy to provide power during night and other times of solar obstruction. That is why the solar plant cost is so high. The fact that the environmental costs of the plant construction and the covering of many square miles is seldom discussed is an indicator that non-rational factors are in play.

The big issue, though, is the balance between freedom and governmental restrictions. If you own land, you still can’t drill or put up a refinery or build a nuclear power plant on it without massive expense and significant risk of bureaucratic walls that limit how you can use your land. Perhaps these restrictions need to be examined.

StarDestroyer.net is an interesting examination of science and engineering in science fiction. The page on Common Sci-Fi Myths has a section about the role of a formal education and how you can often detect its absence. Those who try to fake it tend to make mistakes on extremely basic physics concepts, analyze scientific treatises from a literary mindset, or assume that every idea with isn’t strictly impossible must be the truth.

This particular type of misunderstanding coupled with hubris often seems to be the source of contentious discussions on public forums, for example. The difference between power and energy is often behind many problems in discussing ‘alternative’ energy. It is also a factor in discussing RV batteries. Force, acceleration, and work often get involved in discussions about weight ratings or braking.

Sci-Fi problems with science and engineering can provide a good foil for gauging our own ability to critically use a good knowledge for making decisions about how and what we do in our own lives.

US News and World Report has several current stories that illustrate the problem with aggregate measures. These are attempts to pull something ‘newsworthy’ out of an average. Anytime you see news based on an average - a single number or comparison representing a large group - you should put on your skeptics hat and start looking at the underlying statistics. Statistics provides a number of means to qualify and understand averages because large groups can be quite different yet have some similar numbers like their averages.

The first example is Girls as Good as Boys at Math. This is related to the recent idea that Title IX ideas should be applied to science faculties as well as sports participants in schools. What the news stories don’t tell you is that, although the average of math capability by gender is essentially the same, the distributions are not. The distribution for boys is flatter and that means it is more spread out. You’ll find fewer boys in the middle, near the average, than girls and more at each end than girls. This means that when you start selected by either the very math gifted or the very math dumb you are going to find more boys there than girls. But the average is the same!

Are Americans Really Getting Poorer? has the problem of trying to track an average over time and choosing what to use as a reference point. This particular issue also has the problem of defining wealth and poverty, which isn’t as simple as it seems because that has to be a weighed collection of concepts and measures in itself.

Dude, Where’s My Recession? The Series gets into the ongoing observation about how economic measures and public perceptions are not well correlated to each other. The economic indicators are attempts to aggregate many measures of economic activity. The news and public perceptions, on the other hand, are determined by a selected sample whose selection criteria often place the sample towards one end of the distribution.

All of these issues - gender differences, wealth distribution, economic strength - are hot topics. None are simple. If decisions must be made it will probably be the case that a careful consideration of the distribution and not just the average should be accomodated.

Brad describes what he has learned about how to read a book.

All deliberate action is prefixed by an idea. Books provide a rich source of intellectual leverage. Knowing how to read is one of the most important skills you can learn on your path to personal growth.

If you want a book to have the most impact on your brain, slow down your reading, think about it, take notes, and act immediately on what you read.

Ultimately, every growth-related book is a 30-day challenge in disguise, limited only by your creativity and willingness to transform thought into action. You’ll know the quality of your reading habits not by how many books you can claim to have read, but by how many of the good things in your life can be traced back to a spot on your bookshelf.

LinuxLinks has a nice list of what they call the Best Free Linux Software. It provides an index that links to a more complete description. Most are available in the Medibuntu repositories. Note that this area is fraught with proprietary software, copyright restrictions, and licensing hassles. In Windows, even recording off-air can get you recordings you can not put on DVD or play on other machines. With Linux, many just bypass these content protection schemes and the warnings and cautions that are often provided with the Linux software.

Some of the LinuxLinks mentions are:

MPlayer, Ogle, VLC, and xine as players for video content. MythTV is perhaps the most complex and complete video recorders and three others are mentioned. Avidemux is a video editor that makes it easy to remove commercials and otherwise tweak your video files. DeVeDe is a very nice way to prepare a DVD from video files.

One category of software that isn’t included is that of DVD rippers. K9Copy is a good example.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to build your own video library the way you want it. Your biggest problem is probably going to be figuring out what works best for you and how to get the most out of it.

The price of oil has its factors. The price of gasoline has its own set. The two are not as directly connected as is sometimes presumed. They do not track with each other directly.

There is a common set of factors the influence price of gasoline and crude oil. A large part of that set is political. That means that the price is a social choice about what should be bought. An example of this is described in an IDB editorial Plugging Up The Pipeline.

There hasn’t been a new oil refinery built in the U.S. since 1976, in part because of actions like those of the NRDC. The environmental lobby, which went off the rails decades ago, has resisted almost every attempt to create more energy from fossil fuels.

This is countered by those opposing new facilities asserting that there is no need for them; that the supply of gasoline is keeping up with demand without new facilities. That is a shallow and circular argument.

America has so far paid a small price for the radical environmentalism that grew out of a rational movement in the 1960s. The costs will eventually be deeply painful, though, if lawmakers and the courts continue to give these groups license to shut down needed energy advancements.

This ideology has been sitting on the lid of human yearning, a desire of the little people for a more comfortable life. So far its cost has been no big deal and easily hidden in the noise of daily life. The recent burst in commodity prices and cost of fuel may make it more visible for what it is.

T. Boone Pickens’ latest energy plan is an indicator of this visibility even though it is just a rehash of old ideas and wishful thinking.

Soon enough reality will become too much to ignore. Energy, power, fuel, and our dependence upon them have no simple solutions but will require a balance in technologies and in the financial, economic, and environmental costs that we choose to pay for a lifestyle we prefer.

Cool off on health scares by Glenn Swogger Jr. describes a problem.

The problem is a pervasive unease and anxiety that feeds upon itself and searches for danger, at which point reason, along with common sense and skepticism, tend to be tossed aside.

He cites five possible sources that include rapid social change, complex problems, and increased awareness.

Fear has its price. It exerts its negative effects through paralyzing our capacities for judgment and consideration of alternatives. … Another all too common side effect of fear - one that makes it difficult to discuss problems - is the impulse to regard others as potential foes.

The point is illustrated in the very first comment. That attempts to dismiss Dr. Swogger because he is a trustee of an organization that receives funding from the food industry. That is a taint by implication and not by fact. It is an illustration of fear creating dishonesty. Rather than address the points at issue, attack the messenger.

It seems that many want to believe in fears to such an extent that they create them. Often this creation is based on a kernel of truth exaggerated to such an extent the kernel gets lost. Sometimes the creation is out of whole cloth.

The fact is that suspicion often supersedes a proper skepticism. When that happens, the search for truth becomes a search for comfort and that often does not lead to good outcomes.

There has been mention of the need for an anchor in disparate essays recently. Both involve culture and society.

Anthony Dick wrote in Constitutional Torture, Standard judicial malpractice at NRO:

One of the central purposes of a written constitution is to bind future generations to certain fixed standards and principles of justice that stay constant in the face of shifting winds. In order for this system to function, provisions such as the Eighth Amendment must have some fixed substance that exists independently of changing social attitudes. If nine out of ten Americans woke up tomorrow believing that we should start drawing-and-quartering jaywalkers, the meaning of the Eight Amendment would not suddenly “evolve” to facilitate the new consensus. The text and meaning of the Constitution prohibit such cruelty today, and will prohibit it tomorrow.

Then there is Mark Roberts about some difficulties in the Presbyterian Church.

A grown up church interacts responsibly with the world in which it lives, yet without buying into that world’s latest fads and fancies. It responds to the community in which it has been sent by God, but without merely echoing that community’s values. A mature church takes seriously the cultural trends of its milieu, but always weighs these trends in the scales of God’s truth. Such a church is relevant, but not pandering as it responds to its neighbors.

On the contrary, a church of spiritual infants rides the wave of the moment, celebrating its apparent relevance while rushing toward the rocks of its destruction. It abandons God’s timeless truth in favor of timeliness. It chases after whatever is hot, whatever is fashionable, whatever promises not to offend. It models itself after social institutions, arguing that the church should imitate the ways of business, or government, or the media. The immature church is rudderless, moving all over the place, yet never getting anywhere.

Two of the fundamental institutions of our society, the church and the courts, are noted as causing worry about their abandonment of fundamental guiding principles and their shifting in the winds of popular culture. The Bible? The Constitution? Mean what they say? Say what they mean? Appropriate guidance for today?

It appears that some think the anchor is shifting as we are buffeted in the winds of human desires.

It’s the ranchers versus the environmentalists working through government agencies this time. The Washington Times Commentary describes the Huffman case.

Wayne and Jean Hage bought a 7,000 acre Nevada ranch, made some improvements for cattle, and encountered harassment and lawsuit from the government. “Mr. Hage filed a lawsuit in 1991 claiming his property rights had been taken without just compensation in contravention of the Fifth Amendment takings clause.”

There is no mystery why the nation’s leading environmental groups weighed in against the Hages. They find property rights and productive use of the land anathema to their antidevelopment, preservationist agenda. But shouldn’t we expect better of our government?

“It is a fundamental duty of government to protect, rather than to destroy, personal property,” wrote Court of Claims Judge Loren Smith. For good measure, Judge Smith quoted John Locke who wrote that “[w]henever the legislators endeavor to take away, and Destroy the Property of the People … they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are there upon absolved from any further obedience.”

Seventeen years to judgment is a lifetime fighting for a fundamental right. It is an example of how ideological battles can be fought with a strategy of attrition. You may spend a lifetime trying to establish your claim to your own property if some group is able to swing the government to its view that their ideologies have more right to it than you do.

Kenneth Anderson describes a tactic being implemented by the lawfare brigade at the Pajamas Media:

one way is never to announce an actual policy yourself, something that might in fact be implemented, with measurable results, for better or worse. Better, instead, to force the executive to return to the Court over and over again, and then each time play the spoiler, sending the political branches back to the drawing board, sorrowfully, regretfully, so to avoid responsibility if anything untoward actually happens. … It is hard to resist the conclusion that the real point of this game is to force the executive publicly to dance to the Court’s changing music.

The idea is that of taking the offensive but never being clear about your goals so you cannot be held to account for whether or not you achieve them. It is always easier to criticize and condemn than to create and define. In this case, the offensive means declaring the ‘other side’ as being wrong but not defining what is right. Whatever the ‘other side’ does can be declared wrong and that cannot be contested because there is no clear definition of what is right.

In the Boumediene case the SCOTUS declared the methods it earlier instigated as ‘wrong’ but left open exactly what it would consider proper. That way, anything done could be subject to further examination and criticism.

That is a core tactic of the lawfare brigade - argue but do not define standards or policy or referent. Keep the argument going so you can impugn and denigrate the ‘opposition’ rather than construct a solid basis for judgment.

Sid Schwab illustrates just how disagreeable disagreement can be. He is trying to deal with his own feelings and perhaps should take a careful look at his own post.

The derision. And the take-no-prisoners attitude — the downright hatred, so it often seems — toward “liberals,” suffused throughout.

…

But reading some ER blogs, unlike any other category in the healthosphere, is like listening to Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. It’s a polemicist’s playground.

…

I consider George Bush the worst president we’ve ever had (and no, Mr. Bush, history will not vindicate you).

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it’s just that the rightward ER docs blog, and the leftward ones go home and tie-dye.

The issue is one of judgment versus opinion. All too often it seems that those who do not see things as they would are perceived to not only disagree but to be wrong or, even worse, criminal. Groups are created and bad behavior assigned to everyone in the group.

Here, the use of polemic implies a negative yet the entire post fits the definition of the word. The choice of people to label with polemicists as an epithet is indicative of significant ignorance of the actual behavior of those people. Seldom do you see the health blogs engage in polemics such as in Dr. Schwab’s own entry and the commentators he cites, while definitely engaging in polemic discourse, do not engage in the sort of dishonesty and detachment from reality he illustrates.

Dr. Schwab sees hatred but does not illustrate what he sees as such. His perception of the prosecution of “liberals” does not fit any rational observation and, as such, indicates that his own perceptions may be suffering some bias from his feelings about things. If there is any hatred to be seen, look no farther than his comments about the President. The pulling in of prognostication about history is quite indicative that emotion is at work and not rational thinking.

What you have here is not a “I disagree” but rather the expression of disagreement as a judgment. This is a confrontational approach that indicates a closed mind driven by emotion. It is an approach that does not indicate a high level of intellectual integrity.

The lawfare brigade of the 5th column is prompted to explain the value of its latest victory. Epstein Etc. About Boumediene is a good resource for information about the ‘explanations’,

One key that appears is that of the identity of the prisoners. Some seem to think the military prisoners are not individuals captured in combat with US military personnel but rather citizens swept up off the street - sometimes even US streets. The idea is that, since the military prisoners are not combatants they should be treated as civilians, therefore the Boumediene decision was correct. This presumption needs to be exposed and qualified but those activies are often not undertaken when they would not support desired outcomes.

Another key is the acceptance of a military justice system as separate and independent of the civilian justice system. This is the idea that the military has its own areas of jurisdiction and its own identity and its own methods.

A third key issue is the separation of powers in the US Constitution. This one gets to the core of the lawfare brigade’s tactics. It is only by erasing lines of authority and responsibilities that controls can be established to achieve strategic objectives. The implications of this activity are subtle and need careful consideration by the ultimate authority.

For any entity to maintain its health and vigor, it must be able to discriminate between self and other. In the bloodstream white blood cells detect what is not ’self’ and attack it so removing invading disease. Cancer is a case where the body is less able to determine what is self and what is not. If the cancer is not removed, it will grow and invade and cause death.

There have been two high profile court cases recently where the social body has refused to discriminate between self and other. One is a California case that set aside the will of the people as expressed in referendum and law to allow a new definition of marriage. The other is the Boumediene case at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Chief Justice Roberts said this about the now-unconstitutional Detainee Treatment Act (“DTA”):

“The majority rests its decision on abstract and hypothetical concerns. (The Supreme Court Wins, America Loses by Henry Mark Holzer, FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, June 13, 2008)

In other words, the words sound comforting and oh-so-nice in their appeal to the sensibilities. They have psychological comfort. They do not deal with the reality on the ground and they hide some things that seem rather ugly.

One of those ugly things is the assertion of the supremacy of the judiciary over the legislative and executive. The Boumediene case sets aside two acts of Congress as well as the precedent of the court and centuries of common practice. The judgment sets the Federal court as above the other branches and as the sole determiner of what the law is or must be. It did so in a matter that clouds the distinction between the US citizen and any other person.

The self to be identified in this case is that of the society. To date, the law has recognized the distinction through delimiters of territory, citizenship, and state of conflict in its view of apprehended persons. The immigration debate has focused on the loss of citizenship as a matter of interest. The Boumediene case attacks the use of territory or state of conflict as matters of interest. The result is that it becomes more and more difficult, in a legal sense, to determine who is a part of the self of society and who is not. The court has reduced that means by which we can determine what belongs and what does not. That is why the decision was narrowly decided and has particularly strong dissent.

TechDirt describes an example of modern battle technique in a look Inside Craigslist’s Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers???????? ????? ????????. The strategy is the destruction of value. The tactic is obfuscation. The goal is often no more than just the thrill of battle and a perverse enjoyment of the suffering of others. The collateral damage is the value of the links we have to communicate common needs.

One of the messages that needs to be heard in all of the advertisements trying to loan you money is that there are a lot of investors trying to find a return on their wealth. There is a giant global pool of money (GGPM) looking for a good investment. Get Rich Slowly will get you up to speed on this describing The Giant Pool of Money: Anatomy of the Subprime Mortgage Mess.

In the early 2000s, there were $70,000,000,000,000 ($70 trillion) of global capital looking for low-risk, high-return investments. This giant pool of money discovered the U.S. mortgage market, which drove demand, which led to relaxed rules, which led to a boom in subprime lending. And here we are today.
…
Why did the crisis occur? Because all along the financial chain — from bankers to brokers to borrowers to investors — people deluded themselves. They thought they could throw out the old rules of money. They thought they could cut corners to make a quick buck.

The old family value was to purchase a house one could afford and then build up equity in that home until retirement. If career advances provided for being able to pay more for housing, you might upgrade the house. You did not depend upon inflation of the house value to help you with your cash flow. You made sure you could handle your lifestyle cash flow needs with career income.

The new family value, for some, is to buy more house than one can really afford by taking advantage of the GGPM and an expectation of gains in the house value. As the gains occurred, refinancing and home equity loans were used to supplement a lifestyle more extravagant than the career income would otherwise allowed. Building equity was sacrificed for lifestyle. That worked as long as the house value continued to appreciate at a good rate.

That GGPM seeking a secure and high rate of return investment ‘bought’ into some people’s dreams. Those dreams were for housing they could not really afford. The result was in reducing the number of people per household and also in the luxury of the housing for those people owning houses. Eventually the investments started seeking actual cash returns and when that occurred, the ability provide it was found not to exist for many who overextended their risks.

So now we have a market adjustment that provides the media the opportunity to highlight the misery and misfortune of a few plus the business losses of those who helped them get into that position. It’s a two’fer for the doom and gloom propagandists! Be sure to see through the hype, provide appropriate reference, and avoid being mislead yourself.

Categorization comes after recognition of existence. Frank Gaffney describes four categories of fifth columnists against the GWOT in Shielding official leakers. The subject is the “Free Flow of Information Act (FFIA) of 2007″ (S. 2035) perhaps better known as the “media shield” law. “It would be more accurate to call it the Leaker and Other Enemies Shield Act.”

It uses the rubric of openness and freedom of the press to rationalize its barriers to prosecuting the divulging of information that government would rather not be paraded on headlines.

In short, the Free Flow of Information Act is not about freedom of the press. It is about freeing government officials of their legal responsibilities and enabling those who would do us all harm — whether intentionally or in the name of “the people’s right to know.”

You cannot conduct any sort of successful operation against criminals, terrorists, or other enemies if you broadcast the details and intent first. This proposed bill is another example of pushing the line between the need for accountability of government action and the, sometimes competing, need for governmental effectiveness. The effort is particularly hypocritical when it is attempting to protect leaks that have impaired effectiveness so that the lack of effectiveness could then be used as a political weapon.

Paranoia and suspicion can only go so far before they become an illness. The US government structure was formed as a balance between the reality of human frailty and the need for effective governance. It may be that the paranoia and suspicion that motivates bills such as S2035 may be getting a bit too far.