Boneheaded Stupidity

Some unkind lefties (including “one of my co-bloggers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2008/10/nation-of-whine.html) were a little dismissive towards “this post”:http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-much-of-financial-crisis-is.html by ‘Dr. Helen,’ blogger and Instaspouse of Professor Glenn Reynolds.

Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn’t the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode? The timing of the current financial crisis seems too planned and calculating to be just a coincidence. Polls show that people’s number one concern right now is the economy and that for the most part, voters believe Democrats are somewhat more likely to help with the economy. Could it be that the liberal media and those in Congress, knowing that, is blaring the bad economic news from the rooftops in order to manipulate voters into voting for a Democrat? If so, it won’t be the first time.

But now “Barbara Ehrenreich”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/588.html (via “Cosma”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/588.html ) has let the cat out of the bag and it’s _even worse_ than Dr. Helen suspected.
[click to continue…]

I’ve done the tallying and the results are below the fold, in reverse order.
[click to continue…]

As Kieran notes in comments below, the comments thread to Tyler Cowen’s (perfectly reasonable) “Krugman post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/paul-krugman-wi.html is pretty hilarious. But given Krugman’s place of pride in the wingnut demonology, I’m sure that this is only a mere scraping of what’s out there on the Internets today. It furthermore occurs to me that someone (i.e. Me) should do a comments thread to collate and conserve the _very bestest_ blogposts and comments on the Vast Nobel Prize Conspiracy. My “opening bid”:http://volokh.com/posts/1223906449.shtml#459727, from ‘derut’ at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Excellent. He was a pseudo Nobel prize. That he deserves. As his politics is pseudoscientific. Great. Now I can applaude. I am sure many of you have watched him on cable networks. Has anyone else noticed he seems a little off. He speaks like a mouse and his beady eyes have a strange stare. He looks like if someone droped a glass he would scream.

It’s the spellings of ‘applaude’ and ‘droped’ that give it that special something. Anyone able to top that?

Update: “Kathy G.”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/warmest-congrat.html had this idea before I did.

Man, if I were Al Franken, I’d put this up as a commercial straight with no commentary. (Okay, maybe cut down to 1:00 or :30.) (via Ezra).

Via “David Levine”:http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=1253, it appears that George Mason University is “being sued”:http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/09/17/Reuters_Says_George_Mason_University_Is_Handing_Out_Its_Proprietary_Software.htm for over 10 million dollars by the owner of EndNote (which happens to be Thomson-Reuters).

The complaint states, “Dr. Daniel J. Cohen, Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History, and the director of GMU’s Center for History and New Media, developed Zotero, which is a freely distributable, open-source software based research tool that allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources, including citations, and freely share the results with others.” The Center for History and New Media release “a new beta version of Zotero to the general public” on July 8. Reuters adds, “A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert – in direct violation of the License Agreement – Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.”

Now, I’m obviously not an intellectual property lawyer (fwiw the “Wikipedia article”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering on reverse engineering, which may or may not be reliable but is certainly more reliable than me, suggests that suits over interoperability are of dubious legal merit). But I am an academic, and thus part of EndNote’s core end-user market. And I say that, regardless or not of whether it’s legal, this is a bullshit move on Thomson-Reuters’ part. There are a lot of academics out there who have used EndNote in the past and created styles for the journals that they submit to etc. EndNote’s owners are clearly worried that these academics will be tempted to move their styles from EndNote to a software package which in my view (and I’ve used both) is clearly superior. This is a no-brainer. There is _no significant innovation or value-added_ to EndNote’s specific file format. Nor is there reason to believe (given the existence of Zotero) that protecting this file format and EndNote’s purported intellectual property rights over it will encourage innovation in this particular marketplace. On the broad social merits, Reuters’ attempted shakedown is indefensible.

Nor is this as trivial an issue for academics as it might seem. As Scott has “suggested”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/26/mclemee “in the”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/26/zoteromania/ “past”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/12/archival-zotero-fication-or-possibly-vice-versa/#more-6498 Zotero and projects like it are at the heart of an effort to bring something like the semantic web to academia. Zotero combines bibliographical database management with social tagging and other fun stuff – it is gradually becoming a platform through which academics can share metadata and other interesting things with each other. Which means that this battle is likely to have long term consequences in determining whether or not new forms of academic collaboration are likely to be controlled by academics themselves, or take place through some kind of commercially controlled intermediation, with all the forms of stupidity that are likely to go along with that.

For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex client already). If I taught any classes where Thomson printed relevant textbooks, I would be strongly inclined not to use these texts either. I encourage you to do the same (and, if you’re so minded, to suggest other possible ways of making it clear to Reuters that this kind of behaviour is intolerable in the comments). People have argued that the music industry has screwed up badly by suing its customers – whether that’s true or not, makers of academic bibliography software should be told that suing universities for what appear to be entirely legitimate actions is not likely to do their reputations any good.

NB- post corrected shortly after publication for bone-headed error.

As currently proposed this bailout seems like an almost comically bad idea. I encourage all our US readers to get on the phone to their representatives and start bitching Monday morning. I am also very interested to hear what knowledgeable people such as our own dsquared think.

“Scott”:http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/08/verily.html at his other place blogs about the latest McCain video (which is so staggeringly bad at achieving its purported aims that it doesn’t make sense _except_ as a dogwhistle video).

[click to continue…]

Kevin Drum “links to”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_07/014163.php an unusually stupid (by which I mean ‘unusually stupid, even by the standards of the Corner’) post by Byron York on Obama’s Berlin speech.

It’s a small passage from Obama’s Berlin speech, but this formulation, common in some circles, grates on some ears, like mine:

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

Yes, the victims were from all over the globe — places like Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and Manhattan, and Queens, and Staten Island, and New Jersey — all over. And most were Americans, weren’t they?

I knew when I read this that I’d seen the same sentiment expressed in a speech by Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. And indeed, Google confirms that “it is so”:http://useu.usmission.gov/Dossiers/Data_Privacy/May1407_Chertoff_EP.asp.

Homeland Security’s Chertoff Addresses European Parliament Committee on Data Transfer, Privacy May 14, 2007

…Today’s terrorists fund their operations internationally. They recruit members, they train, they plan and they carry out attacks by exploiting the gaps in the seams in our international systems. The attack of September 11th was a clear illustration of this. The plot was hatched in Central Asia, the recruits came from Saudi Arabia, the training occurred in Afghanistan, the planning occurred here in Europe, and the attack culminated, of course, in the United States with citizens from many countries including many countries represented here lost in the World Trade Center.

I’m eagerly looking forward to Byron’s follow-up post on the dubious sentiments common among ‘some circles’ of senior Bush officials, Chertoff’s shameful failure to mention that most of those killed were American, und (to use the mots justes) so weiter. Byron?

Via Jim Lindgren at Volokh, some article from the Rocky Mountain News about Al Gore’s recent call for the U.S. to be fully running on renewable energy within a decade. The piece itself is hackery (though it does deftly compare Gore to Chairman Mao) but contains the following gem:

Stanley Lewandowski, the general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, is one of the few utility officials willing to suggest that the prophet of global warming is strutting about like an emperor without his clothes. “Al Gore’s statement of obtaining 100 percent of our power from renewables in 10 years has as much a chance of happening as the sun shining 24 hours a day,” Lewandowski quipped. “It’s nonsense.”

Excellent.

Steve Fuller gets “a good kicking”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2290401,00.html from the excellent Steven Poole:

bq. … Fuller happily adopts ID’s rhetorical tactics: speaking of biologists’ “faith”; forgetting to mention (or merely being ignorant of) the wealth of evidence for evolution in modern biology that wasn’t available to Darwin himself; and even muttering about the “vicissitudes” of fossil-dating, thus generously holding the door open for young-Earth creationists, too. The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to “action at a distance”, except that the distance is in time rather than space. It’s intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.

(Hat tip: SO)

“Duncan Black”:http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_07_06_archive.html#858626388020530189 links to Amity Shlaes at the Washington Post “telling us”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102543.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 that Americans _are too_ whiners. As he says, having people like Shlaes and Gramm mouthing off is a public service in a general election (if only McCain would nominate David Bernstein as a senior surrogate, my happiness would be complete). But talk of Shlaes reminds me of her notorious 2005 “FT column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/73ac2964-50fa-11dd-b751-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

It is early to be getting partisan about New Orleans. …Iraq has not caused the US to botch Katrina – either the preparation or response. On the contrary, the fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilised for disaster has saved lives.

the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early. Nearly two days before Katrina hit New Orleans, the president made millions available to Louisiana by declaring the state an official disaster area. In a press conference on Sunday morning, he instructed the country to listen for any alerts – and warned straightforwardly that he could not “stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf coast communities”. On Sunday too, Alabama and Mississippi received access to cash when they in turn were declared disaster areas. Citizens of New Orleans with special needs were instructed to go to the Superdome.

Very shortly after writing this appalling piece of hackery, Ms. Shlaes ceased to be a columnist at the _Financial Times._¹ I don’t think that it’s _at all_ unwarranted to surmise that the column and Ms. Shlaes’ rapid departure were connected.

So we may possibly have some idea of what it would take to get a columnist fired at the FT. I’d be interested to know what it would take to get a persistent vendor of mendacious and malignant tripe such as, say, Charles Krauthammer, fired from the _Washington Post_? By the man’s own admission, his credibility is problematic. A few months ago, we passed the fifth anniversary of his “statement”:http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp that

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Indeed.

¹ A “search”:http://search.ft.com/search?sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=%22amity+shlaes%22&aje=true by date suggests that Shlaes produced one more column (which tried to blame the Katrina shambles on the Evils of Federalism, directly contradicting what she had said the previous week), a piece for the wealth section, and a book review over the next couple of weeks, and was then gone forever.

On the basis of not paying particularly close attention but listening to what Australian friends had to say, I’d formed a generally positive impression of Australian PM Kevin Rudd. Now I see that Rudd has been stupid enough to “weigh”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7492579.stm into “a controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23979363-601,00.html about the artistic depiction of child nudity with the following comment:

bq. “Frankly, I can’t stand this stuff …. We’re talking about the innocence of little children here. A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way.”

I can’t wait for the Australian government’s prosposals for banning the appearance of child actors in soap operas and TV advertising on similar “couldn’t consent to thus being depicted” grounds!

The image in question can be seen “here”:http://www.artmonthly.org.au/ . (Perfectly safe for work in my opinion, but what do I know.) Chillingly, “Officials have said they will review the magazine’s public funding.” Of course there may be questions about whether art magazines should be publicly funded at all, but if they are to be, then this seems an crazy reason to withdraw the case.

(Incidentally, a relative of mine works with someone who was on the front cover of Led Zeppelin’s _Houses of the Holy_, no doubt the Australian Childhood Foundation would have been up in arms about that too on the grounds of possible “psychological effects in later years” — there don’t seem to be any.)

For a long time, I’ve used the term “delusionist” rather than “sceptic” to describe those who reject mainstream science on global warming. In general, the term “sceptic” is inappropriate for members of this group, since their position is hardly ever based on a willingness to look sceptically at evidence without reliance on a preconceived views. Rather the dominant characteristic is wishful thinking based on perceived political implications. The gullibility with which so many delusionists parrot the latest talking points (“Hockey stick broken!”, “Global warming on Mars”, Warming stopped in 1998″ and so on) is clearly incompatible with any kind of scepticism.

Given the volume of evidence that has accumulated on the issue, only an adherent of some very strong form of scepticism could reasonably remain undecided. Such a sceptic has now appeared in the form of Adam Shand, an Australian program on global warming “it’s only an assumption” that summer is warmer than winter. I imagine he gets great prices on ski holidays, by going in January.*

Of course, once you’ve gone this far in scepticism, why not go the whole hog? Radical scepticism provides the perfect argument for rejecting action to mitigate global warming – if we have no reason to believe in the existence of the external world, then trashing it can’t be a problem, can it?

* Northern hemisphere readers can make the necessary adjustments.

This “column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f24b5eda-45eb-11dd-9009-0000779fd2ac.html from Wolfgang Munchau is a keeper. “Challenged”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2008/06/expulsion-from-europe/ by Gideon Rachman last week to reveal the theory under which he believed that the Irish could be kicked out of the EU for having had the impertinence to vote ‘No’ a couple of weeks ago, Munchau obliges:

My own hunch is that they will try to find a way to enforce the Lisbon treaty without the non-ratifiers. As a first step, they will try to offer the No-sayers a quit-and-rejoin deal. It would be the least divisive option of all, but unfortunately, it may also be one of the least realistic. … … In Ireland’s case it may require a referendum to get out and another one to get back in. … If this is not possible, there are several other options involving varying degrees of involuntary separation. For example, everybody would formally remain inside the EU on the basis of the Nice treaty, but the ratifiers would organise their areas of co-operation outside the EU and its institutions – on foreign policy, immigration, economic governance, maybe even on energy and the environment. … There is, of course, the ultimate threat; not a trial separation, but permanent divorce. The Lisbon ratifiers formally leave the EU, and re-group under a new rival organisation. In reality, this is not so much an option, but the thing you do when you have run out of options, the strategic choice of last resort. Like a nuclear bomb, it is a useful device to be used in an emergency, not something you plan for.

[click to continue…]