Patterico's Pontifications

11/22/2011

Climategate II: Like Jaws II or The Wrath of Khan?

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 11:19 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing.  Follow me by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

I can’t post on this in detail right now, but there has been a new dump of apparently real emails taken from various Global Warm-mongers.

Of course a reasonable question can be raised about whether they are genuine, but I think the evidence Watts Up With That? has gathered is getting reasonably strong.  It mainly amounts to dogs not barking when you would expect them to, but I am provisionally convinced.

Expect the next spin to be “but these are stolen!”  Which is irrelevant.  We are not the police who are forbidden from considering ill-gotten evidence.  As long as the method of obtaining the evidence doesn’t compromise its veracity, it doesn’t matter.

Next expect people to try to claim it is not saying what it plainly says.  Mind you, sometimes I think there is truth to that.  Like the word “trick” in the infamous phrase “nature trick” may very well have been used to describe a way of fooling the computer into doing what you wanted it to, rather than an attempt to deceive any human being.  But you can’t explain away the phrase “hide the decline.”  There should not be any hiding of anything in science.

And related, people will say that it doesn’t really reveal very much.  Which means we all need to dig in and see what it does reveal.

So time will tell whether this will be a good sequel (Superman II) or a bad one (Superman III and IV).  In the meantime pull up with a bag of popcorn and enjoy the fireworks.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

The Art of the Possible

Filed under: General — Karl @ 10:31 am



[Posted by Karl]

At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait asks, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?“, while David Frum asks, “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?”  After accounting for the bias inherent in putting up Frum to write about the right, a common theme emerges, i.e., movement ideologues are almost invariably disappointed by the failure of the parties to sufficiently enshrine their respective ideologies in policy (Note: I’m not using ideologue as a pejorative, but to distinguish movement-types from basic partisans).  This happens for a variety of reasons, from petty corruption to the checks built into our Constitution.

This is the basic backdrop against which my recent back-and-forth with Ramesh Ponnuru occurred.  He and I are in basic agreement that Republican losses in 2006 and 2008 had much less to do with the GOP being insufficiently conservative than with the  deteriorating popularity of invading Iraq and the deteriorating economy (underscored by the Wall Street panic of ’08).  We disagree over whether a different policy emphasis would matter much.  Ponnuru’s examples tended to be drawn from 2000 and 2004 — very close elections in which many factors may be argued to have mattered.  In 2012, the economy is likely to be so dominant an issue that second-tier issues are unlikely to be decisive.

I suspect we may also disagree about the degree to which Ponnuru would be disappointed if the GOP took his advice on wage stagnation and policy appeals to the middle class.   (more…)

The Most Amazing Wedding Photo Ever?

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 5:58 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing.  Follow me by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

That’s what Piper Weiss asks about this picture:

And honestly, no, it is not all that awesome, but the story behind it is pretty harrowing:

Minutes before they were to walk down the aisle, Michael and Nancy Rogers got some bad news: there was massive fire in the lodge where they were about to wed.

“We came out and the place was in flames. It was indescribable really,” the groom told The Canadian Star. The fire is believed to have started in the basement of the 83-year-old hotel, while bride and groom were getting ready in a nearby cabin on the resort property.

(more…)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0563 secs.