The question:

references to particular ethnic or religious groups as “viruses” or “cancers” in need of extirpation are socially unacceptable, triggering immediate thoughts of genocide and mass murder.

Why, then, should it be acceptable to refer to all humanity in this fashion? Does widening the circle of eliminationist rhetoric somehow make it better?

Professor Reynolds wonders Who is responsible for Warmabomber’s violent agenda? and if it is related to the the currently stylish description “eliminationist rhetoric.”

There seems to be a lot of folks out there who think mankind is a cancer, a virus, or a disease that infests the planet. That opinion oozes out in discussion, in speech, and, sometimes, in action. Some actions are fairly benign while others are not.

The environmental movement needs to bring its hate-filled rhetoric under control, before it’s too late. There are too many potential James Lees out there, and some of them may be more competent than Lee was. Don’t encourage them through over the top rhetoric.

I would say “it’s for the children,” but I’m afraid they’d hear “the children” as “the filthy human babies.

Environmentalism is not the only issue. There are many where the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not are being subject to moral equivalence. Every freedom comes with a responsibility. When that responsibility is abused then freedoms are lost. If responsibilities are not reinforced, then tragic consequences may result. The problem facing society is how to discriminate between hate mongering and its ilk and responsible political dialog. Whether it is climate warming or same sex marriages or race or religion, the evidence seems to indicate an intolerable tolerance and that creates stresses likely to cause fractures.

Many complain that jobs are being taken from U.S. citizens by cheap foreign illegal labor. It is a political hot potato and a new report adds fuel to the fire. Bruce Krasting says it’s Social Security Trust Fund’s Labor Day Bombshell.

SS has been collecting money from illegal aliens for years. They will keep the money they have collected and they will not pay out any benefits (except fraud) in the future. So this money is “free”. I have often wondered how big the numbers on this are. Now we know. The numbers are enormous. Without the Free Money coming in from illegal aliens SS would look much different than we “think” it does.

The illegal alien workforce may be contributing as much as 13.5% of the Social Security taxes. Most reporting about the status of Social Security have assumed that all who contribute will receive benefits. When there is such a large amount that will not, as of now, have to be paid to its contributors, it means that those reports have significantly overstated the liabilities versus the benefits.

In some respects this is nice because it is ‘free’ money for the government program. Krasting points out that this sort of thing is also political hay that appears to be used to support questionable positions.

The Administration will use the Goss revelation to prove to the American people that illegal workers have made a major contribution to the US economy via the taxes they paid to SS. This will be done to blunt the growing tide of ire among those who actually live here.

But what’s wrong with ‘free’ money? There is, of course, the dishonesty involved in taxing some folks with a false promise, even if they made false representation about who they were. Much more important though, is in how Social Security security is viewed and considered.

I will say that this is a sea change event for how we look at SS. All prior analysis and all future expectations must now be revisited. I assure you that the results after excluding the illegal taxes will be will prove to be a major blow to the solvency of the Fund.

Things just aren’t as simple as they seem, sometimes. This source of Social Security funds is also not the only questionable source. There is also the interest rates on the Treasury bonds behind the funds that is worth some consideration. When you get to mangling the books, all sorts of interesting things can happen.

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.

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.

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.
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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.

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.

Robert Schlesinger provides an insight into why ‘professional’ journalism in the old school is suffering. He looks at what he calls The Palin Effect and the Death of Political Journalism.

Hating the media is trendy, especially when the Internet allows anyone to become a pundit. Too often, people confuse reporting with transcription. But journalism isn’t stenography. It involves probing, context, nonsense detection and, sometimes, pointed interaction which can be so easily avoided on Twitter and Facebook. … You may not like political reporters, but you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

There are some things to note. One is that he takes after Governor Palin. “Since her sudden departure from office, the former half-term governor of Alaska has managed a political feat that is audacious and a bit startling.” Look at the emphasis being used as in the words “sudden,” “half term,” and “startling.” Then there is the reference to Fox News with a bit of snark. When Sharon Angle is added as a second example, the indications of inordinate bias raise significant question about the integrity of the essay.

Another meme provided is that of avoiding serious questions as if reporters are necessary for this. The assertions and implications ignore the idea that the questioning by reporters has been judged inane or inappropriate by much of their market. It also ignores the ‘tea party’ town hall phenomena where many representatives have been faced with direct accountability to the voters. Many of these representatives were caught surprised at the town hall meetings because their reference was the ‘professional’ media who questions were sympathetic and not probing.

The death of any journalism is not the subject to be reported nor is it competing avenues of communication. It is in the integrity and quality of the journalists. As has been recently discussed about Walter Cronkite’s role in the Vietnam war and as seen in Dan Rather’s TANG fabrications, even the top tier in professional journalism is suffering.

Technology’s disasters share long trail of hubris says Borenstein. Climategate and the Need For Greater Scientific Openness is the story at Slashdot to see a disaster in action.

One is an example of the other.

The ‘technology disaster’ being considered isn’t, of course, climate change but rather about those bit evil, greedy, careless oil companies and the idea that “Unfortunately, safety costs money, so it’s usually not a priority.”

The common thread – which the new presidential oil spill commission will be looking for – often is technological arrogance and hubris. It’s the belief by those in charge that they’re the experts, that they know what they’re doing is safe. Add to that the human weaknesses of avoidance, greed and sloppiness, say academics who study disasters.

Those human weaknesses are given example in the climate brouhaha.

The Guardian follows up on the recent news that CRU climate scientists were cleared of scientific misconduct with an article that focuses on how the controversy could have been avoided, and public trust retained, had the scientists made more of an effort to be open about their research.

Much of that controversy centers on the messages about “hide the decline” and ‘We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?’

Engineering disasters happen because there is sometimes overreach in trying to build something new. It is a matter of estimating what is not known and missing the estimates. The arrogance, greed, and ignorance of human costs is not in the engineering realm but rather by those who purchase the design, cut corners building it due to buyer pressures, or use what is built outside of its design realm. That contrasts to climate research where the pressure is to obtain public grant funding by pleasing the political constituency.

Reality has a way of defeating hubris. Those who actually build things and stake their reputation on the result are humbled by reality, sometimes to suicide, That is engineering, not research. It is researchers who can pontificate about how great their efforts are until someone starts wondering about how that research fits reality. That is much of the story of the climate scandal. The researchers showed hubris in avoiding questions and in squashing unpleasant dissent. The efforts to maintain this hubris, the whitewash reports by friends and colleagues, are raising more questions than they answer in an attempt to maintain the self image.

What PhysOrg illustrates is also hubris. It is in the focus on the “disaster” side of learning and blaming that on a hubris that could better be seen if the author looked in the mirror, the one that shows him and the climate scandal researchers and much of the academic community standing in plain view in the reflection.

Why does government keep getting bigger and more obnoxious? Make a simple law, hire a bureaucrat to implement, and that invests the bureaucrat with the need to keep busy so he looks for how to apply his hammer to anything he thinks might be a nail. Culberson: FCC Can’t Regulate the Internet describes one of the more egregious examples currently in play.

The FCC cannot regulate the Internet without clear and unambiguous statutory authority from Congress, which it does not have. But instead of coming to Congress and asking for it, the FCC lawyered up and attempted to bend the rules to its liking.

Note the use of lawfare to seek goals rather than appropriate political process.

Rep. Culberson notes that there does need to be someone like the FCC to go after cybercrime. What is not described is that the FCC efforts are towards social enforcements such as broadband access that have nothing to do with child pornography, fraud, or libel. That is another indicator of misplaced priorities. It is towards goals that are for redistribution of assets rather than a protection of assets. That is another trend that seems to correlate well with the living, breathing, and growing bureaucracy and government.

The pressure to obtain income to match state government spending has legislatures demonstrating significant creativity. That money has to come from the masses but how it is collected needs to avoid notice if at all possible. Sometimes people do notice. Nevada recently passed a law to raise funds that has generated some notice. Fact Checker: Registration tax triples on 9-year-old vehicles describes a case.

The increase in sales tax and the tax on vehicle registration are both regressive taxes. Those who spend most of their money on supplies and have older vehicles are going to feel the taxes more than those who spend their money on services and have newer vehicles.

Incremental sales tax increases often fly under the radar as they will be hidden in the noise of nominal price fluctuations. The key for legislatures is the slow and sure approach. Once you get people used to paying the tax and get the infrastructure set up to collect it, you can make occasional small increases over the years that are sized to avoid notice. Since it such a broad tax, a small increase can generate significant revenue. The impact of that tax on economic activity is difficult to pin down so arguments against it are difficult.

The vehicle registration tax could also be incremental but the legislature may have overstepped on this one. As in the RGJ column, owners of older vehicles may have seen a threefold increase in their annual fee. That tends to cause one to sit up and take notice. “Officials hoped that it would bring in expected revenue of $94 million. … as of the end of May, the DMV had transferred about $46 million this fiscal year to the General Fund.”

These taxes plus another few taxes and fees, especially on small businesses, were “expected to raise $781 million in taxes to help fill the state’s $3 billion revenue shortfall.” That’s only a quarter of the needed money which means a significant squeeze. What is the legislature to do to close the gap? Their constituents demand services yet the money to provide those services is not there. And this is only for the state. Local and federal levels face a similar squeeze. The natural tendency is to just raise taxes. This is like a novice entrepreneur deciding to raise the price of his merchandise to increase income. That natural tendency has been shown to be questionable. Raise the price, or the tax rate, above a certain point and it will reduce sales to the point that overall income decreases. Make it too low and and the profit margin reduces to an inefficient level. The challenge both for the entrepreneur and for the state is to set their prices or tax rates to just the right place so as to maximize healthy activity and optimize revenue. That is not as easy a task as it sounds.

It is when you can’t tell what they are going to do that they become dangerous. The July 4 camping weekend provided a case in point.

In the camping business, July 4 is the busiest day of the year. This year, on July 3, I got a call from one of my managers saying that the County health department had tested 20 ground squirrels in the area and found one with the plague. … in the past, we have usually been required to post warnings in the area giving safety tips to campers to avoid these animals, what to do if one is bitten, etc. At the same time, we then begin a program of poisoning all the lairs we can find. … This time the health department marched out and closed the campground on July 4 weekend, kicking out campers from all 70 sites.
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It is hard to imagine that, given the whole year to test, they just suddenly happened to find a problem at one of the busiest sites in the LA area on the busiest weekend of the year, particularly since they simultaneously changed their mitigation approach from notification to closure.

Well, it made a splash. A lot of families had to change their plans for a vacation weekend and a management company had a lot of unexpected work to do. But that is what happens when there is a lack of accountability and pressures to communicate. Like threating to reduce fire and police services in a budget crunch, propaganda comes in many forms.

“Armed with knowledge about California’s three public-union heavyweights, one can start to understand how the state found itself in its nightmarish fiscal situation.” Certainly, employees desire better wages and benefits and that is a proper market pressure. The problem comes in when the distance between employer and employee becomes larger and more obtuse as then the responsibility for decisions becomes less clear. Create a situation where both only meet via representatives and you have a recipe for disaster. Unions and elected representatives make the case. Steven Malanga describes how public-sector unions broke California with a history lesson.

The rise of the white-collar CTA provides a good example of a fundamental political shift that took place everywhere in the labor movement. In the aftermath of World War II, at the height of its influence, organized labor was dominated by private workers; as a result, union members were often culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. But as government workers have come to dominate the movement, it has moved left. By the mid-nineties, the CTA was supporting causes well beyond its purview as a collective bargaining agent for teachers.

The lesson is one of feedback and checks and balances in governance. Diligence of the citizenry is one component that has been lacking else the unions would not have their political clout. The ‘running out of other people’s money’ is another but one that tells you all others have failed. The challenge for California and many other governments from municipal to national is to take heed of the need to make corrections before they repeat what has happened to the Soviet Union and other socialist oriented states.

Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists is the tale of a student from the 1970s who found that many of the prophets of doom were false prophets. Things just didn’t turn out the way that the doomsayers feared

Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal. Check it out – the data is clear.

The problem is that when you question the doomsayer, whether it be regarding human caused climate change or other doom and gloom, the response is not rational nor honest.

Like others who have tried to draw attention to improving living standards – notably Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg – I am beginning to be subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification by the pessimists. They distort my argument, impugn my motives and attack me for saying things I never said. They say I think the world is perfect when I could not be clearer that I advocate progress precisely because we should be ambitious to put right so much that is still wrong. They say that I am a conservative, when it is the reactionary mistrust of change that I am attacking. They say that I am defending the rich, when it is the enrichment of the poor that I argue for. They say that I am complacent, when the opposite is true. I knew this would happen, and I take it as a back-handed compliment, but the ferocity is still startling. They are desperate to shut down the debate rather than have it.

Sound familiar? What is surprising is that the phenomena goes way back, it is a common facet of human civilization. With modern values and communications, skepticism and transparency tend to put pressure on the veracity of these prophets of doom. That pressure creates a strain which seems to show as a more strident expression.