Barry Ritholtz wonders aboout Seeking the Truth — Or Obscuring It?. He lists three reasons for seeking this sort of Truth.

1) intellectual interest: “So few people seem to understand what objective reality is that it is a rarified space to even get near, much less inhabit.”

2) professional: “Fund managers whose universe deviate from reality eventually come to major losses, under-performance, and professional ruin.”

3) political: “we live in a society where decision-making takes place with less and less reverence for the Truth, with terrible consequences.”

One of the surprising things this blog has taught me about Reality is how long it takes to go viral. There are entrenched interests opposed to the truth, and they release their grip on their subjective fantasies very, very slowly.

Barry wonders “Are you a truth seeker, or a truth obscurer?” That is a question about intellectual integrity. It is a question one must always use to qualify communications from others.

There has been a long standing observation that there is pay inequity in the workforce by gender. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report says that “In 2009, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median weekly earnings of $657, or about 80 percent of the $819 median for their male counterparts.” Carpe Diem takes a look at this and wonders about the use of the term “counterparts” and asks Would 2,000 Female Deaths Be Worth It for Pay Equity?

The point made is that, in 2009, fatal occupational injuries showed that “there were more than 13 job-related deaths for men in 2009 for woman who died in a job-related accident.”

The huge male-female occupational death gap, which has persisted over many decades, has surprisingly received very little attention as one important factor that could explain some of the 80% female-male pay gap. To achieve greater female-male pay equity there would most likely have to be an increase in the number of women in higher-paying, but higher-risk occupations. That outcome will certainly reduce the gender pay gap, but it would come at a cost—significantly more fatal occupational deaths and injuries for women.

There is a gender bias in the workforce. Average pay is only one indicator. Occupational deaths are another. Those who look at the issue will find many more factors at play. It is the market at work. Those who do not like market results have been choosing just one factor that supports their desires to try to support governmental action to try to force the market into their preferences. That is likely not an honest approach towards opinion.

Topix CEO Chris Tolles says it’s “Pissed off people, not illegality, is the issue to watch,” TechCrunch carries the story When Attorneys General Attack.

This is going to happen more – The States’ Attorneys General are the place that complaints about your company will probably end up. This is especially true if you host a social or community based site where people can post things that others may dislike. And, there’s no downside to attacking a company based in California for these guys (MyScape, Facebook, Craigslist have all been targets in the past couple of years). Taking complaints from your citizenry and turning them into political capital is simply too good an opportunity for these guys to pass up.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition – Unlike most other people in business who will attempt to reach out to you to get what they want, and use the threat of going public as a tool, our experience is that the offices of the Attorneys’ General seem to be most happy communicating via press conference, without any sort of preliminaries. This is primarily a political exercise, and you’re dealing with people who are very empowered to make life difficult for you.

Consumer protection is a valid concern for the AG. Care is needed to keep that concern from going viral. As consumers are more plugged in to international commercial networks, the opportunities for misunderstandings and complaint grows. Talking to the press first rather than trying to resolve things directly with the source of the itch is saying that politics has priority over solution. That is prosecutorial misconduct.

The net neutrality thing keeps pinging the awareness as the FCC continues its efforts to expand its authority to include the I’net as well as the airwaves. DSLreports wonders If We Had Competition, We Might Not Need Neutrality Rules and figures “we may not be getting either.”

While it sounds nice to mandate that network service providers should treat everyone and every type of traffic the same, it is also appealing to think that businesses should be able to do what they want with their property. The rationale used for promoting net neutrality regulation is the idea that network services are a monopoly or near so and therefore need regulation much like the telephone monopoly of fifty years ago. There are two difficulties with this position. One is that there is no demonstrated problem that is to be solved by net neutrality type regulation. The other is that the monopoly does not exist, despite the presumption of the report and in some of its comments.

Most households in urban or suburban areas have the choice between the cable TV company, the telephone company, the various cell phone companies, or even some specialized wifi companies to gain access to the I’net. That is the front end competition. The backbone or infrastructure competition is not quite so visible but, again, there are a number of companies providing long haul service. These often cater to large business and use agreements to help increase bandwidth utilization. The central switches, whether for I’net routing or access to the telephone network are already quite regulated.

There is an argument against net neutrality that must be considered as well. Some sorts of I’net traffic are time sensitive. These include such things streaming video or telephony services. If they cannot be given non-neutral priority, then someone’s download of a new software distribution might well interrupt a voice conversation or make for choppy movie viewing.

A key about this topic is in the response to the news that Google and Verizon were talking to the FCC about net neutrality. Additional observations besides the colluding big corporations include the lack of caring for the end user and other such ‘big corp vs little guy’ themes. That implies an emotional rather than rational basis to the conflicts.

UPDATE: CNet has a good rundown by Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer – Just say no to Ma Bell-era Net neutrality regulation – that provides some good background on this issue.

When a science oriented blog takes up things like “Leave no trace of your electronic correspondence” it makes one wonder. This might be a response to the CRU email message release but, in any case, it goes away from basic values of science research. The topic might bring to mind the famous missing minutes in the Nixon White House tapes.

The essay suggests that letters “were like mini-contracts” and voice conversations were not. That is a question as verbal contracts are just as valid as written ones. The difference is that written ones have more certainty and less confusion.

Now whatever you have to say to someone, you can rest assured that your correspondence will never come back to bite you.

Gullibility is also at issue here. Whenever someone makes a lock, someone else figures out how to defeat it. Thinking you can buy confidentiality as a magic bullet is a mistake that has been made many times over the years. The best way to avoid having communications “come back to bite you” is to never engage in communications that are dishonest or despicable.

Of course, as has been seen with some political figures, there are those who will create things for you in order to try to make them bite. That’s another issue.

The RGJ highlights a problem with permits in rationalizing its lawsuit to dig dirt on the governor. They do a ‘fact finding’ report on the question Is loss of privacy the price of a concealed weapon?.

The claim that the information on the permit includes Social Security numbers, relatives and health information is bogus. Yes, that information is on the application for the permit, but the application isn’t on the permit itself.

One has to wonder about an 11 page application with four pages to be filled out properly in order to be able to obtain permission to exercise a Constitutional right. The RGJ says the application itself is protected and only the permit is public record. That is somewhat like the sex offender database. Now you can not only find out if your neighbor is a sex offender, you can also find out if he carries a gun. For some, it seems, these are equally dangerous threats.

Or, as the newspaper illustrates, having this sort of data in the public record also provides ammunition for political slandering.

The community is much bigger than it used to be. Public records are much easier to access and search than ever before. The misuse and lack of responsibility in using the data available may be a rising problem.

Marriage is about defending women

That’s the opinion of Sam Schulman in Gay marriage: Why Judge Walker got Proposition 8 ruling wrong

Modern marriage is only the least worst version of marriage that has emerged from all this – but it is still necessary for women. What protects women, ultimately, is that marriage laws and customs confer upon her independence something extra – dignity, protection, sacredness – that others must respect. And if this quality can be bestowed upon anyone, even those not in intersexual relationships – it reduces, even dissolves its force.

This is interesting in light of the judge’s view that men and women are equal. What Schulman’s argument brings to the table is the matter of rape as a special crime as well as the problems of false accusations of rape. Those crimes would not exist if the thesis of the judge were correct.

Just recently, an Arizona judge turned the vote of the people on its head in regard to immigration law. Now a U.S. District Court judge had done the same regarding the use of a label. John McCormack describes the situation in Federal Judge: U.S. Constitution Guarantees Right to Same-Sex Marriage. The ruling is such that it could be used to support incest, polygamy, and who knows what other kinds of ‘consensual relationships’ that could be invented.

The courts are on one front, the executive branch is on another. WWS describes how Texas declares War on the EPA.

official response from Bryan Shaw, head of the TCEQ (the State regulatory body) and Greg Abbott, the Texas Attorney General, to Lisa Jackson and the EPA.

http://www.globalwarming.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/epa-texas-letter.pdf

I have *never* read an official government document that is this bitter and contemptuous of the Federal level – I never thought I would! This is damn close to a new Declaration of Independance.

Who is in charge here? It might be worth some worry if these shenanigans frustrate the people sufficiently. The Tea Part is only a first rather mild response. What may follows should be a concern.

VDH has a must read. The topic is illegal immigration and the point is the matter of identity.

We are in revolutionary times when the law is a malleable thing, its validity predicated only on its perceived social utility at any given moment.

This is how nations are lost.

He points out how “historical grievances have made enforcement of the law rather debatable, given that sovereignty, national borders, and the notion of a definable America altogether are “problematic.”” That provides a contrast to the peace at the Canadian border as being due, in part, to Canadians not harboring resentment about the location of their border with the U.S.

The great paradox is described. This is the contradiction between people who escape from one country to seek refuge in another and then try to recreate that from which they found it necessary to seek refuge.

Then there’s Palin’s take comparing the Arizona governor’s stance to the President’s on illegal immigration. That provides another potential boon for T-shirt sales with slogans. It illustrates that there are many who do not want to lose their nation in the manner Hanson warns about.

When is it education and when is it training? The problem of defining a proper schooling for a medical doctors came up in a story about one med school that allowed some of its students to bypass pre-med university courses in the hard sciences. David Gorski has a good discussion of the implications in “Hard science” and medical school

What bothers me about Muller and Kase’s thesis is, as I have said before, the way that it seems to view science as an obstacle to getting into medical school and becoming a doctor, as opposed to being a necessary prerequisite to being able to put the flood of information taught in medical school into context. The humanistic part of medicine is very important to being an effective, but if those humanistic elements are not also wedded to a firm understanding of the science of clinical practice, we risk producing a generation of physicians who are very good at holding their patients’ hands and offering encouragement to them but not so good at actually treating their medical problems.

One way to look at this is that med schools are regressing to an equivalence with chiropractic schools in eliminating calculus and hard science as prerequisites. That reinforces Gorski’s fear about the spread of alternative medicine and the abandonment of science in developing effective therapies.

Science informs what is good medicine, and physicians should have a sufficient grounding in the scientific method to be able to recognize what is and is not good scientific and clinical evidence for a therapy.

One of the problems is that of training versus education. It takes training to acquire the skills a physician must have yet it takes education for them to evaluate to extend and extrapolate and evaluate those skills and the reasons for them. Training is easy to teach and to test and those are very attractive attributes. Education is a matter of values and viewpoints and ways of understanding that make it more difficult to teach and to test. The question for medicine, as well as for many other professions, is that of a proper balance.

The ScienceBlogs network has suffered a loss of authors. The immediate stimulus was their running a PepsiCo Food Frontiers nutrition blog. That offended other bloggers sense of superiority in independence from crass commercial things. Virginia Heffernan describes the mess.

But the bloggers’ eek-a-mouse posturing wasn’t the most striking part of the affair. Instead, it was the weird vindictiveness of many of the most prominent blogs. The stilted and seething tone of some of the defection posts sent me into the ScienceBlogs archives, where I expected to find original insights into science by writers who stress that they are part of, in the blogger Dave Munger’s words, “the most influential science blogging network in the world.” And while I found interesting stuff here and there, I also discovered that ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink.
…
Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap.

The blog network was flying under false colors. Like much of the climate alarmism ‘science,’ its components were ideological and not scientific. When someone with a financial stake in the content started to participate it was too much for the ideologues. The result is a revealing of the hubris and arrogance of people who insist on living where the light of reality is quite dim.

There is a push for accountability that motivates the need for easily measured and valued results. In education it is the problem of teacher pay for performance. In science, it is the matter of government funded research.

The idea is very attractive as nobody wants to pay for results they can’t see. The problem is that attractive ideas may simplify complex situations and that can create problems. Bob Carter hits it in The phenomena of disinvitation and the brotherhood of silence as a stimulus behind much of the climate research bias.

It is also part of a much wider pattern of science degradation that has developed since the 1980s. The change has been caused in part by the insistence of politicians that taxpayers’ money must be used in support of scientific research that is “useful” or “in the national interest”.

In other words, climate alarmists need to provide some socially relevant measurable outcome in order to maintain the research grant funding. Any questions concerning their science attacks this resource and must be countered. That is what leads to pathological behaviors to demean, isolate, and impugn those who don’t get with the program. It is a matter of survival, after all.

Warmest on record! Cheaper than nuclear! Professor says, science says, report affirms, — headlines like these seem popular. More than anything else, they illustrate a gullibility based on a seductive affirmation of a desire rather than a truthful report of reality. Rod Adams describes a case in Gullible Reporting By New York Times On the Cost of Solar Electricity Versus Nuclear Electricity.

The paper is seductively titled Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy. The paper’s cover has a dramatic and colorful graph that shows ever increasing costs for nuclear and ever decreasing costs for solar.

Everyone wants free energy, or at least energy that has no environmental impact. Sometimes that desire gets a bit out of hand. This was just one example.

Ted Nugent says It is us. The people are looking for the easy way out whether that way is to let the government do it or to just vote for whatever sounds good. The results repeat history and they are not good. Those who do question the authorities have a tough row to hoe.

I have been damned as being a radical extremist my entire adult life for simply standing up and relentlessly promoting and celebrating self-evident truth, logic and common sense. The devil brigade acting upon the Saul Alinsky deception playbook has made its mark by lying, cheating and attacking with the very hate that it accuses everybody else of harboring. With an overall complicit media to bullhorn the brigade’s agenda, a nation of sheep has taken the pill and swallowed it whole.

Those who don’t think that there is a difference, those who are looking for personal benefit from government, those who don’t seem to mind a lack of integrity – it is us – they are the ones who will wonder what happened (and continue to try to blame it on someone else).

The Leading Blog describes 7 Signs You Might Be In Denial. The focus is on leaders who need an accurate assessment of a situation in order to make good business decisions. Here are some indications that your decision making may not have an accurate assessment as a basis.

1) you think you know all you need to know

2) you don’t make it a point to listen to understand other sides of the issues truthfully

3) your thinking is short term

4) you trash talk those who dismiss competitors and people with irritating questions

5) you relabel actions rather than change them

6) you don’t tell the truth

7) you deny denial is a problem you may have

You can find many of these behaviors in the dialog about current issues such as racism, climate change, creationism, vaccinations, immigration and more. A key to keep in mind when you think you see denial behavior is to consider it a mirror because what you see first is often your own self.

Judge Bolton has roiled the politics in her injunction against parts of Arizona’s immigration law. Andy McCarthy has a synopsis of the rationales used at the corner. A key is the idea that it isn’t federal law but rather enforcement practice and policy that preempt state’s rights. Bolton provides some other interesting ideas such as the requirement for aliens to carry, and show on demand, their green cards as being anti-American. Such lack of integrity is judicial activism and will feed the wrong fires.

Also on the matter of state’s rights is the number of states giving them away. Arnold Ahlert describes it as The United Cities of America. There are now six states that have decided the votes of their citizens and their presence as a state are to be subjugated to popular vote in Presidential elections. It may feel good to have your state in the winner’s column in such elections but there are issues that the electoral college was created to solve that are being ignored.

Then there’s how governmental funding works as When Funding Battles Trump Mission. This example is one where the noisy interests flavor how governmental entities adjust their mission in order to better rationalize their need for funds. Whether it is the Forest Service jumping on the climate change bandwagon, the space agency going for Muslim self esteem, or the whole issue of climate research funding itself, government shows that the votes that count are not always the votes at the ballot box.

With attack ads that cite Angle as “dangerous,” there is another message: that of fear of change. It is like an unintentional double entendre where the current administration’s “hope and change” becomes something to fear if real change is suggested. Angle is suggesting real change and Reid’s message is an appeal to the status guo.

Marc Thiessen describes Harry Reid’s strategy, and Sharron Angle’s path to victory:

Reid needs to drive as many voters as he can away from Angle and toward these alternatives. He plans to do this in two ways. The fake Tea Party attacks are designed to siphon off as many conservative and libertarian votes as possible — and in an election that could be decided by a few hundred votes, even a small number of defections on the right could be devastating. Meanwhile, Reid intends to push moderates into the “none of the above” category by portraying Angle as “a full-time resident of the paranoid alternate universe.”

It is not likely that this resistance to change illustrated by fear mongering attack ads is an effective public strategy. That makes it a reasonable approach for Reid. Thiessen says Angle is biding her time, developing her plan, and doing what she can to minimize gaffs that can be used as ammunition against her. That was a month ago. Robert Cost says Sharron Angle Can Smile today and describes the response.

To fight back against the growing tide of criticism, Angle has made a $330,000 television buy this week to air her first series of positive ads, beginning with the spot below. In the ad, Angle talks about “liberty and freedom” and about the problem of the debt and deficits. “That’s why you and I have an opportunity right now to change the direction of our country,” she says, before ending the spot with a grin. Unlike her first ad, with its network-drama gloom music, the new ad does not even mention Reid.

Reid has now been caught in two major deceptive campaign tactics, the web site theft and the fake Tea Party attacks. He has gone negative with ads to leverage fear of change to castigate his opponent. Angle provides voters an alternative to this method of doing business. There has been a lot of words that say they want it. The question is whether the votes will support this desire.

Two examples in the headlines illustrate the use of ad hominmem in debate about important issues: Climate Change: Personal Attacks Continue Instead Of Dealing With The Science and New Emails: Journalists Coordinated Defense Of Obama, Calling For Accusations Of Racism Against Conservatives.

The degree to which those in official climate science are incapable is illustrated by the reaction. The answer is in the reaction the whitewash has triggered; an orchestrated attack on the skeptics, those who dare to perform science by proving the hypothesis wrong, to ask questions or demand debate. Why? The obvious answer is because the public was increasingly skeptical as evidence accumulated that the hypothesis was wrong.

A lot of effort is going into attacking those who question the preferred meme. In Great Britain it appears that it might be made criminal to question anthropogenic global warming.

The racism assertions have come to the fore because of the NAACP labeling the Tea Party racists despite its not being a nationally organized group and despite lack of evidence. That is only the most recent episode in a rather long history of such labeling. Recent revelations show that prominent journalists were discussing using the tactic of labeling those not in line with their views as racist as a means to protect the President from the antics of the minister of his church.

These efforts are not going into answering the questions raised or other constructive effort. Labels such as racism can be useful if they reflect a fundamental truth by bundling a clear set of behaviors that do reflect underlying values and beliefs. They are false and deceitful if used to distract or impugn without proper basis. In order to determine if there is a proper basis takes some effort and that effort may require confronting personal preferences often avoided by insisting there is an equivalence between sides or minimizing differences or exaggerating fringes. That brings the matter of integrity to a personal basis.

The latest ‘car out of control’ scare has resulted in yet another investigation that can’t support the allegations. From the looks of it, the ‘unintended acceleration cases that blamed Toyota occurred without any brakes applied and the throttle fully depressed – i.e. driver error.

So too, Broadband Performance Maybe Not So Bad After All reports Dr. Dobb’s journal.

The FCC provides the example in its effort to take over control of the I’net. It had reported that US broadband connections were half or less of advertised speed. A recently released MIT Internet Traffic Analysis Study (MITAS) suggests otherwise.

In each case that the study examined, the underestimation of the access networks’ speed had a different cause. The study that the FCC relied upon, for instance, analyzed data for broadband subscribers with different “tiers of service”… they assumed that the subscription tier could be inferred from the maximum measured rate. The MITAS researchers show that, in fact, the subscribers in lower tiers sometimes ended up getting higher data rates than they had paid for. In the study cited by the FCC, exceptionally good service for a low tier may have been misclassified as exceptionally bad service for a higher tier.

As with climate research, there is a pattern of bias that seems to fit ideologically oriented goals. Skepticism is warranted.

The Las Vegas Review Journal has been asking questions and the answers indicate that Going green not cheap for NV Energy.

everyone acknowledges what the contracts show: Green power costs more than its fossil fuel-generated counterparts. Just how much more has been the question. Based on NV Energy’s filings, wind, geothermal and waste heat-recapturing come closest to current power-purchasing prices, while solar projects cost the most.

Experience has provided one answer to the ‘how much?’ question. Proposals to meet legislative requirements is providing another.

New filings from the company show that it plans to pay 8.6 cents to 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour to buy electricity from seven renewable-power projects included in the 20-year integrated-resource proposal it has pending before the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada.

That price runs two to four times higher than the 4 cents or so per kilowatt hour that the utility paid over the past 18 months for its wholesale power, which comes mostly from natural-gas generation.

This information is about only one part of the cost equation, the part a citizen pays for energy directly. They don’t include the government subsidies that are paid via taxes, for instance.

What is also becoming clear is that the benefit of these costs is not as clear as the burden. There are generic rationalizations about ‘saving the environment’ and sometimes even specific measures (like CO2) that are conveyed with implied impact. The reality is, though, that energy rates are multiples of what a free market could provide and that additional cost of energy over free market costs does not have any clear benefit being purchased.