Things I don’t understand ||

Just a note to myself about the urban myth that lemmings commit suicide when their population outstrips the food supply.

False

Incredibly, in the Disney film that showed this alleged mass suicide, it turns out that the lemmings were thrown off the cliff by members of the film crew.

Compare and contrast Wikipedia’s biographies of famous people with those done by professionals.

Today’s biography: Campaigning journalist Paul Foot, as written up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Foot, Paul Mackintosh (1937–2004), journalist, was born on 8 November 1937 in Haifa, Palestine, the son of Hugh Mackintosh Foot (1907–1990), later Baron Caradon, governor of Jamaica and Cyprus, and at the time an administrative officer in the Palestinian government, and his wife, (Florence) Sylvia (d. 1985), daughter of Arthur White Millar Tod, director of the Steam Navigation Company of Baghdad. The Foots were a famous west-country family deeply rooted in radical Liberal tradition; Paul’s grandfather Isaac Foot was a Liberal MP and Methodist. Three of Foot’s uncles were politicians. Michael Foot became leader of the Labour Party, Dingle Foot was solicitor-general under Harold Wilson, and John Foot was a Liberal life peer (as Baron Foot). Paul was educated at Shrewsbury School, which was to provide the founding spirits of the satirical magazine Private Eye, Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton, and Foot’s lifelong friend Richard Ingrams. ‘At Shrewsbury I was on Ingrams’ coat tails’, recalled Foot, who freely admitted to hero worship (Thompson, 43–4). National service followed and when, in 1958, at the end of his stint as a subaltern, he went to University College, Oxford, to read jurisprudence the first person he came across was Ingrams.

In the late 1950s Oxford University’s premier magazine, Isis, had been taken over by the ‘new left’ under the editorship of Dennis Potter, later to become one of Britain’s most accomplished television playwrights. Foot, who had not yet made the journey from his family’s traditional Liberal beliefs to the far left, invited him to speak to the University Liberal Club, of which he was president. Potter’s speech was remarkable for the observation that when he saw a Rolls-Royce he spat at it (Ingrams, My Friend Footy, 22). Foot’s radical juices began to race and, together with Ingrams, they took over Parson’s Pleasure magazine. It did not last long and was reborn, with the help of Rushton, Booker, and John Wells, as Mesopotamia. This was the embryonic Private Eye. Foot went on to be a short-lived editor of Isis but the magazine was banned by the university proctors after he introduced critical reviews of lectures. He attacked the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and resigned when Isis’s owners decided to apologize. In his last term he became president of the Oxford Union, where he honed his considerable oratorical powers, as well as fulfilling half his father’s bidding, contained in a telegram that greeted his arrival in Oxford: ‘Get a first and be president of the Union’ (ibid., 12). A life of protest and campaigning against injustice and intolerance had begun.

Now compare with Wikipedia’s biography of Paul Foot :

Paul Mackintosh Foot (8 November 1937 in Palestine – 18 July 2004 at Stansted Airport) was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He was the son of Hugh Foot (who was the last Governor of Cyprus and, as Lord Caradon, was the UK Ambassador at the United Nations from 1964 to 1970). He was the nephew of Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party, and was educated at Shrewsbury School and at University College, Oxford.

Education

Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and several other friends who would later become involved in Private Eye.

Anthony Chenevix-Trench was his Housemaster at Shrewsbury between 1950 and 1955, a time when corporal punishment in all schools was commonplace. In adult life, Foot exposed the ritual beatings that Chevenix-Trench had given. As Nick Cohen wrote in Foot’s obituary in The Observer:

“

Even by the standards of England’s public schools, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, his housemaster at Shrewsbury, was a flagellomaniac. Foot recalled: ‘He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn’t. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant’s trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt.[1]

”

Exposing him in Private Eye was one of Foot’s happiest days in journalism. He received hundreds of congratulatory letters from the child abuser’s old pupils, many of whom were then prominent in British life.

After his national service in Jamaica, Foot was reunited with Ingrams at Oxford and wrote for Isis, one of the student publications at the University.

Read both biographies and then tell me which is the better, fuller account with more information about the person, a better writing style and which one is filled with trivia.

Time to read: 15 minutes.

GO!

Just a note about something I enjoyed reading.

From Slate magazine

Just as you were slammed as a Japan-basher, you’ve been called a denialist (and worse) for your climate-change views. Do you think that stands as another example of how the media stifle debate?

The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity. I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It’s truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons—often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There’s plenty of zealotry to go around. And it’s hardly new in human history.

The media might stand as a corrective, cool and a bit detached, showing by example how to approach information and controversy. Instead, the media has clearly caught the fever of our intolerant times. Formerly, news people would never openly state their allegiance; young reporters understood it was poor form, and a senior person would carry the caution born of the experience that at least some of what one believes in the course of one’s life turns out to be wrong. But it’s a new era. Now, media reporters are proud to pound the table and declare their advocacy. Since so few of them have any training in science, they don’t really know what they are pounding about, when it comes to global warming. They couldn’t tell you even in general terms how the global mean temperature is calculated, for example. But it doesn’t matter anyway. They just want to declare they believe what “everyone” believes. Who values such a news source?

I want a news service that tells me what no one knows, but is true nonetheless. That’s what I would value.

Second, the media narrows the expression of viewpoints to an extraordinary degree. We’ve already discussed the small population of talking heads on cable shows. At the same time, the interest aroused by figures like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul occurred because, in my view, the American public had never heard people talk that way. Similarly, the Rev. Wright is espousing views that are hardly rare, but people react with shock and awe. People should take it as a sign that something is wrong—the media isn’t giving them the full story. By a long shot.

I always enjoy reading Michael Crichton when he talks about current events or culture. I find his novels latterly, to be ever more contrived in plot and character that they’re nearly unreadable.

I enjoyed immensely “The Andromeda Strain” and one he wrote under a pseudonym called “A Case of Need” (which is about abortion). “Jurassic Park” was also, incredibly, better than the film.

But latterly his thrillers seem much less interesting than his marginal notes or epilogues. I just wish he’d write or collect a book of his essays.

I received this in the mailbox from Encyclopedia Britannica

___________________________________________________________

A Sample of Encyclopædia Britannica’s Distinguished Contributors

Sigmund Freud The term psychoanalysis does not appear (or at least is not indexed) in the Encyclopædia Britannica until well into the 20th century. The first treatment of psychoanalysis as a subject unto itself appeared in the Thirteenth Edition, written by leading authority Sigmund Freud. Read “Psychoanalysis” by Sigmund Freud

Harry Houdini Even a superficial reading of “Conjuring” by American magician Harry Houdini conveys the inescapable conclusion that the magician’s view of the topic was focused on two matters. The first was the debunking of the then-fashionable spiritualists; the second was the greatness of Houdini. Read “Conjuring” by Harry Houdini

Lillian Gish The contribution of silent film star Lillian Gish appeared in 1929. By the time it was replaced in 1939, Hollywood was in full swing and exposition of this sort probably sounded somewhat quaint. Read “Motion Pictures: A Universal Language” by Lillian Gish

T.E. Lawrence For the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote on the subject of guerrilla warfare. The element of personal experience that pervades the article is unusual in an encyclopedia but must have been the chief reason this particular author was sought out. Read “Guerilla” by T.E. Lawrence

Marie Curie Marie Curie, who was twice awarded the Nobel Prize, contributed this article on radium to the Thirteenth Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. Writing in the third person, she modestly described her involvement in a discovery that would have a significant influence on subsequent research in nuclear physics and chemistry. Read “Radium” by Marie Curie | Watch a video documentary on Marie Curie

Orville Wright This fraternal biography may well be unique in the history of Britannica. It appeared in the first printing of the Fourteenth Edition (1929). It was revised several times, first in 1950, two years after Orville’s death, and the last time in 1969 by Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, who subsequently wrote the biography of both brothers that appeared in the Fifteenth Edition (1974). The first mention of the Wright brothers in Britannica was in the Twelfth Edition (1922). Read “Wilbur Wright” by Orville Wright | Watch a video documentary on the Wright Brothers

_________________________________________________________

Can you imagine Sigmund Freud writing and defending Psychoanalysis on Wikipedia? Or Orville Wright being allowed to control a biography of his brother without Wikipediots screaming about “Conflict of Interest” and WP:OWN?

Me neither.

Perhaps we’d even have Slimvirgin (aka Sarah McEwan aka Linda Mack) accusing Orville of multiple violations of WP:NPOV and not writing in Good Faith…it might even have been fun to put Marie Curie in front of the ArbCom.

This is one of a number of posts dealing with the fundamental concepts explored by Nigel Lawson in a previous post.

Organic food, so beloved of eco-conscious mums at the behest of their propagandized children, is heading for a big crash as household budgets are squeezed. This article from James Delingpole is one of a number of articles I’ve noticed recently that fail to tilt at the green windmills and simply tell the real economics of food like it is

Despite the claims of bodies like the Soil Association, there has never exactly been a mountain of evidence that organic food is any better for you - or indeed for the world.

That famous research “proving” that organic milk was richer in Omega-3 than the ordinary stuff, for example, turned out to be skewed. It compared the produce of an organic herd lovingly outdoor-reared in lush pastureland, with the produce from non-organic cows (non-organic? They’re still ruddy animals, aren’t they?) which had been kept mostly indoors and fed on dry food.

Nor is it clear that organic saves the environment. A biochemist at Edinburgh University, Anthony Trewavas, has shown that organic uses more energy per tonne of food produced because the yields are lower. Also, because it requires more land - roughly twice as much as conventionally grown food - it means there is less available to be left unfarmed for biodiversity.

As for the oft-cited claim that organic food stops you ingesting tons of deadly cancer-causing pesticides - this got short shrift from Sir John Krebs of the Food Standards Agency. He wrote in Nature magazine: “A single cup of coffee contains natural carcinogens equal to at least a year’s worth of carcinogenic synthetic residues in the diet.”

Quite. But who is going to believe mere scientists saying something that is palpably true? John Krebs must have links to an evil capitalist plot somehow (you know, the Usual Suspects).

So if organic food isn’t saving Junior from carcinogens, or the world from soil erosion and eco-Armageddon, what is it for?

Good Question:

… the organic craze was never really about hard science or pragmatism. It was about nostalgia for an idealised rural past where man lived in harmony with nature. As the American author Michael Pollan put it in his investigation of the US food industry, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, organic “gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for a safe food, but for a connection to the earth”

Its about deeply held religious beliefs about the righteousness of a simpler life, and its held by people who have never lived such a life and would run a country marathon from it if they tried it for more than a week. Especially the soccer moms of the middle classes who think that growing your own herbs is a part of saving the planet.

This is the followup to the earlier article about ABC’s extraordinary “Planet Slayer” propaganda for kids.

Apparently a Liberal senator is none too pleased with ABC’s fascinating exploding pig carbon calculator:

THE ABC has been forced to justify portraying the average Australian as an exploding greenhouse pig with slime oozing out of its mouth.

Managing director Mark Scott also found himself defending claims that Geraldine Doogue was a grovelling sycophant and Professor Schpinkee’s diagnosis on when to die, as senators grilled him over the ABC’s perceived bias during budget estimates.

Victorian Liberal senator Mitch Fifield was outraged by an ABC science website, Planet Slayer, which he said demonised loggers, meat eaters and farmers who grew GM crops.

The website also features Professor Schpinkee’s greenhouse calculator, which assesses how users’ carbon dioxide production compares to the “Average Aussie greenhouse pig” and estimates at what age the user should die so they don’t use more than their fair share of resources. Too many emissions, caused by gas-guzzling cars, big houses and racked-up plane miles, causes a cartoon pig to blow up.

“Sure, there’s a bit of inner goth in all of us, but this may be taking things too far,” Senator Fifield said.

Mr Scott said the website was deliberately irreverent and was designed to appeal to children. But he said the ABC would look at the content on the site.

That’s a relief. The crisis is over now that ABC are looking at the content.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get in touch with my “inner goth” - I never realised I had one.

As if by magic, Nigel Lawson has his thesis immediately proven by John Vidal, Environment Editor at the extremely pro-AGW “The Guardian” with this piece:

Billions of pounds are being wasted in paying industries in developing countries to reduce climate change emissions, according to two analyses of the UN’s carbon offsetting programme.

Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN’s main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

No, really?

A working paper from two senior Stanford University academics examined more than 3,000 projects applying for or already granted up to $10bn of credits from the UN’s CDM funds over the next four years, and concluded that the majority should not be considered for assistance. “They would be built anyway,” says David Victor, law professor at the Californian university. “It looks like between one and two thirds of all the total CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts.”

Governments consider that CDM is vital to reducing global emissions under the terms of the Kyoto treaty. To earn credits under the mechanism, emission reductions must be in addition to those that would have taken place without the project. But critics argue this “additionality” is impossible to prove and open to abuse. The Stanford paper, by Victor and his colleague Michael Wara, found that nearly every new hydro, wind and natural gas-fired plant expected to be built in China in the next four years is applying for CDM credits, even though it is Chinese policy to encourage these industries.

“Traders are finding ways of gaining credits that they would never have had before. You will never know accurately, but rich countries are clearly overpaying by a massive amount,” said Victor.

Of course, those billions come from Western taxpayers like you and me. Unsurprisingly, developers of such projects as wind energy farms and hydroelectric schemes applying for emissions credits that can be sold, which in theory would help fund building, but they’ve already been funded by conventional means anyway, so the money goes straight into the developers’ pockets.

Happy now?

So Lawson’s observation that one of the key characteristics of bubbles is roguery has already been demonstrated by the UN’s own scheme being ransacked by businessman wanting to double their profits through the CDM.

How long before the general public realises that its been had?

This is the first of a series of articles on the impending demise of the Great Green Engine into the buffers of economic reality. Nigel Lawson (now Lord Lawson of Blaby), former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, calls time on the Green Bubble:

At the heart of the credit crunch now afflicting the global economy is the bursting of a great housing bubble throughout much of the developed world. Bubbles are, of course, as old as capitalism itself. Many of us in England recall learning at school of the great South Sea bubble of the early 18th century. But they seem to be coming more frequently nowadays. The housing bubble has burst only a decade or so after the Internet and tech-stock bubble. So we may not need to wait all that long to see the next one. And the most likely candidate is a green bubble, fueled by climate-change alarmism and government subsidies.

The twin elements of a bubble are euphoria and roguery, with the proportions varying from case to case. The coming green bubble, which is already attracting large amounts of venture capital and government money, displays both.

In the purely financial world, the business opportunity is in carbon trading, of which there are two forms. The first is the batch of global mechanisms set up under the Kyoto agreement and administered by the U.N., of which the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is the most important. If a country with a Kyoto target finds it too difficult or costly to reduce its CO2 emissions, it can instead buy “certified emission reductions” from developing countries (which have no such targets). “Certified” means the U.N. has to be satisfied that the reduction would not have occurred anyway and that it has not been offset by increased emissions elsewhere (if, say, it has been achieved by a factory closing down). But the system is impossible to police, and media investigations have revealed that many CDM projects are distinctly dubious.

Of course, when money gets tight, taxpayers get really miffed when huge amounts of tax receipts end up in the trousers of the rich executives of energy companies for trading in these ridiculous illiquid assets. That’s why there will be no successor to Kyoto - because its already been demonstrated that cap-and-trade is a financial black hole which will swallow up any and all tax revenues used to “prime the pump” of this green shibboleth.

In the wider business world the burgeoning opportunity is seen as investment in renewable energy, for which massive government subsidies are available. The front runners tend to be biofuels for transport and wind power for electricity generation. The E.U. is still committed to increasing the use of biofuels, but it has belatedly been recognized that large-scale production of crops for fuel rather than for food is a major cause of the surge in food prices that is causing severe hardship in much of the developing world. Moreover, approximately as much carbon-based energy is used in the production of most biofuels as is saved by their use.

Wind power is little better. Hopelessly uneconomic on any substantial scale, since it requires a conventional power back-up for when the wind stops blowing, forests of wind turbines are rightly regarded in most countries as an environmental monstrosity.

But the main reasons why this is a bubble are more fundamental. Emissions trading has a future only if the Kyoto agreement, which runs out in 2012, is succeeded by an even more far-reaching and rigorous global accord. It is now clear this is not going to happen. And in today’s harsher economic climate, governments are more likely to look for ways to scale back subsidies for renewable energy than to boost them. Nor are voters likely to be willing to pay the larger energy bills that “green” policies demand.

No, of course not. When the budgets start to get tight, fewer people are going to be concerned about future generations if they can see themselves get poorer while the rest of the world, especially India and China, get wealthier.

There may well be a green business opportunity. But my advice to would-be investors is this: make sure you get out before the bubble bursts.

And it is a bubble. Its collapse will happen when the first major European politician gets his or her mandate from an election to refuse to sign up to the sucessor to the Kyoto Protocol, whatever the European Commission says. Then those emissions credits will be worthless - and some people will be ruined.

Pat Frank on the behaviour of climate scientists:

As an experimental scientist, I could never ethically hold back the parts of a valid data set that disconfirm my own published results. Cherry-picking what part of some results to publish and what part to withhold so as to promote a particular ouutcome is the deepest betrayal possible of scientific ethics, with the possible exception of outright wholesale fabrication. And really, conscious and tendentious data pruning is to fabricate a result, and really to withhold a valid part of the data is to also fabricate the data set.

That said, what you have discovered and experienced on the part of these scientists is not “prima donna” behavior. I’ve known prima donnas in science, and I don’t know one that has systematically and consciously gated data to publish only stuff that confirms a pre-desired result. To do so is to falsify.

The fault in climate science is widespread. The social outlook in climate science has shifted so far into insanity that in context it seems ethically OK to these people to cherry-pick what to publish, and to withhold disconfirming results. The other half of the offense is that institutional bodies have failed to enforce their own rules meant to prevent exactly such behavior. But institutions are really just people sitting at desks, and it’s clear that many of these people share the same skewed social outlook.

This trend in outlook is, in science, an example of the sort of social trajectory brilliantly described by Hannah Arendt in her treatise on the banality of evil. When social context alone defines normalcy, then ordinary behavior can slide into insanity without anyone noticing. This is what’s happened in climate science.

Those scientists who have a strongly internalized set of ethics have withstood the trend and remained sane. The rest have tipped over the edge. This is the reason, I think, that so many can behave with apparently complete sincerity. They are legitimately sincere and from the perspective inside that social context, they have done everything right.

Their behavior is a lesson for us all in the real value of objective standards. If we didn’t have them, there’s be no judging the legitimacy of subjective judgments. But we do have them, and they unambiguously validate your case.

That’s what gets me about the global warming debate - why do the scientists involved have to behave in such a disreputable manner, when if the evidence was really on their side they would open the books, the methods and invite all and sundry to check the calculations?

This takes my breath away - see if the assumptions of this “model” are not an affront to science or even logic.

In Australia, the programme “Planet Slayer” is a popular children’s show on ABC. It appears to be thinly disguised environmentalist propaganda and that “Greenhouse Calculator” took my breath away.

For some reason the less money you spent in a year, the greater the carbon footprint. Does anyone know why?

An Aussie lawyer blogger put it this way

What an evil, evil little application! Just imagine that some impressionable child comes along to the website and finds out that his family should have “died” at the age of 4.3. That is just despicable. It actually reminds me of an incident which occurred when I was 6 years old, involving a Religious Education teacher telling me that my parents were going to hell because they were heathens. (Incidentally, being a logical type, I worked out if she was right, I’d rather be in Hell with Mum and Dad, but if she was wrong, who cares, so either way, I may as well reject her religion with impunity).

These are the kinds of things which just should not be put to a kid. Or to anyone really. The notion of calculating that someone should die because they consume too much carbon is immoral and revolting in the extreme.

Incredible.

By the way, I died at 5.3 years - or at least the pig did. Apparently this means that my share of the carbon pie (this being a zero-sum game) meant that I could only consume at my current rate for 5.3 years before I would “run out”.

If I was a peasant in the third world by comparison, I could live forever!