Nov 04 2009

Hardly enough people for a decent party

Category: environment,Group-think — harmonicminer @ 9:08 am

Some people think there are just too many of us, and are telling us to do Family Planning to Save the Planet?

What’s the best way to save the planet? Don’t have kids, say researchers from Oregon State University.

“Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle,” the report states.

Hmm. I suppose I’m OK with people who believe this being the ones doing the family planning.

The myth of over-population is exploded here.  But even the pessimists now accept that the world’s population will peak at around 9 billion at mid-century or so, and then begin a slow, steady decline.  Runaway population growth is no more a given than runaway global warming.

The worst thing is for people in developed nations to reduce their own numbers by reducing fertility, though exactly that is happening.  Yet, it is people in such nations who are the only ones likely to follow the benighted advice of the population doomsayers.  The maintenance of the technical and professional base that is required to feed and serve a large world population is crucial, and that technical and professional base will not be coming from the third world, even though third world population growth rates are higher.

At bottom, fear of greater human numbers is evidence of a kind of misanthropically misguided, myopic ideology that values worms, exotic rats, unusual trees and interesting insects more than it values humanity.  The earth is plenty big enough to hold and feed 10 billion people, the most we are ever likely to have. 

What’s more likely is that in about 70 years, real estate prices will start to drop as demand falls from the peak.  My great-grandkids will probably be able to pick up a mansion in sunny Wichita for a song….  right next to the super-farms that will have been feeding the world for decades.

Of course, people will have higher heating bills, due to the gradual onset of another ice age.

Aug 13 2009

“Commitment to Diversity” now a requirement?

Category: diversity,freedom,Group-think,higher education — harmonicminer @ 9:37 am

Victory for Freedom of Conscience at Grand Valley State University: Music Department Axes Political Litmus Test

Grand Valley State University (GVSU) has promised to remove “demonstrated commitment to the principles of diversity” from the stated job requirements for prospective faculty seeking appointment to GVSU’s Department of Music. The department will restate its requirements in terms of relevant experience, not vaguely worded personal commitments regarding a controversial political issue. The change, which came after FIRE asked GVSU to restore freedom of conscience on its campus, is a fresh reminder to public universities that they cannot require prospective faculty to demonstrate personal commitment to “the principles of diversity,” any more than they can require a commitment to “patriotism,” “objectivism,” or “communalism.”

This is exactly right, of course.

Yet, even with this result at GVSU, a great many college and universities insist on clauses like this in job announcements, contracts, evaluative mechanisms, syllabi, etc. Diversity is the new green mud. When all the other monkeys in the cage are rubbing themselves with green mud, you’d better start scooping it up yourself.  Monkeys caught not wearing green mud will be disciplined.

Since diversity is so thoroughly associated with the Left, such clauses amount to a demand that all viable candidates must be Leftists, or pretend to be.

Aug 03 2009

Big Brother in your computer

Category: freedom,government,Group-think — harmonicminer @ 8:53 am

May 30 2009

An age now fading

Category: diversity,economy,environment,government,Group-think,Obama,race,racism,society — harmonicminer @ 9:04 am

Reflections On an Age Now Fading… Read it all.

On matter of race, one detects beneath the therapeutic calls for inclusiveness, an unfortunate renewal of identity politics with a new harder edge-we saw that in the campaign with the slips about reparations and oppression studies, the clingers speech, Rev. Wright, and the ‘typical white person’ put down. Then with Eric Holder’s blast about Americans as “cowards” and now with the Supreme Court nominee’s somewhat derogatory remarks about the proverbial white male judge. We are not hearing praise of the melting pot ideal of intermarriage, assimilation, or integration-even if such elites in their private lives do not predicate their daily regimens in terms of racialism. I spent 21 years in a university in which quite affluent elites sought any multicultural patina possible for an edge in professional advancement and general leverage–the hyphenated name, the addition of the accent mark on the name, the non-American accentuation, occasional ethnic dress, the relabeling of one as a designated minority who otherwise had not previously emphasized race, etc.—that would suggest they were not part of the popular capitalist culture-supposedly centered on the white male-around them. Yet I left sensing the industry of race was doomed, due to the power of popular culture, the unworkable labyrinth of racial identification due to intermarriage, the laughable contradictions (the jet-black immigrant from India got no favored treatment, the light-skinned Costa Rican name Jorge piggy-backed onto the Mexican-American experience), the son of the Mexican father who used his name Gomez was authentic, the son of the Mexican mother who carried his non-Mexican father’s name Wilson was not. And on and on with this ridiculous neo-Confederate practice of adjudicating percentages of race to the sixteenth, and drops of targeted minority blood—a racist enterprise to the core. The only constant? The white male was fair game. It mattered little that more women were graduating than men, that under the racial spoils system we were beginning to see white males in less percentages than those found in the general population at the university; instead, it was sort of OK to trash, as in the manner of Sotomayor’s comment, the proverbial white male, as if we are collectively ashamed of everyone from the Wright Brothers to Lincoln to John Wayne to JFK.

When so close an observer of history and modern life as Victor Davis Hanson is this pessimistic, I feel the need to go see an escapist movie or something.

Read his entire article. Then go get a massage or a pedicure and try not to think about it.

May 03 2009

Putting a smiley face on carbon taxes

Category: environment,funny but sad,global warming,Group-think,media,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:26 am

As most of us know, half the battle is controlling the terms of the debate. And sometimes, it seems, if you want to sell something that few are buying, you need to consult a thesaurus.

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

“Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group’s study.

Are Americans really this stupid?

Well, yes.  They elected Obama hoping for unspecified change.  Any old direction will do, it would seem.  They bought Clinton’s “contributions” for taxes, radical feminism’s “pro-choice” for anti-unborn child and pro-abortion, “gun control” for “guns for criminals only”, and “hate speech” for telling the truth, or at least exercising your First Amendment right to speak your mind.

One of the best ways to lie is just to pretend not to hear anyone who’s telling the truth, and keep right on as if they never spoke.  That’s exactly what’s happening in our national conversation, as the Left rules all the media but talk radio, and is gunning for that, too.  So “global warming” has morphed into “climate change” and “carbon taxes” is going to be “anti-pollution fees”, and so on.

In the meantime, if you had to bet, the smart money is that the earth is cooling, overall.  And the smarter money knows that even if it isn’t, the change is very gradual, probably has little to do with human activity, and it isn’t even clear that it will be a bad thing.

And by the way:  there were polar bears around when the earth was so warm that Greenland was verdant farm land, with nary a glacier in sight.  (That’s why it’s called GREENLAND.)   Somehow, the bears survived.

I suspect they will again.

Oct 21 2008

A Nation Of Whiners And Believers

Category: election 2008,Group-think,Obama — amuzikman @ 11:05 pm

On July 10, Phil Gramm, former Senator and economic advisor to John McCain said we have become a “nation of whiners”. This, in reference to our economy at the time, was a statement immediately pounced upon by Obama and just as quickly denounced by McCain.

Obviously things have changed with the recent crisis in the financial markets, the causes of which have, and will continue to be much-discussed. Our economy is not what it was in July. But the essential truth of Mr. Gramm’s statement remains. I think his comment was a moment of rare, undiluted truth, spoken I suppose, by someone who should have known better – a career politician.

Continue reading “A Nation Of Whiners And Believers”

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Sep 20 2008

If you doubt the validity of affirmative action, you must be a racist

Category: affirmative action,diversity,education,Group-think,higher education,multi-cultural,politics — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

As usual, anyone who tries to scientifically study the actual effect of affirmative action is accused of racist motives.

In his 19 years as a law professor at UCLA, Richard Sander has pondered a nagging question: Does affirmative action help or hinder black people who want to become lawyers?

Two years ago, he published research suggesting that racial preferences at law firms might be responsible for black lawyers’ high rate of attrition and difficulty making partner. He hypothesized that, in the interest of promoting diversity, law firms sometimes hire black lawyers that are under-qualified, and that when there is a “credentials gap” between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often fail.

The research stirred debate throughout the legal community, and Sander said he was surprised at the vehemence with which people attacked his motives. A former Vista volunteer, fair-housing activist and campaigner for Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, Sander insisted he was simply trying to examine an important question.

Now the law professor has waded into another controversy. Sander says his goal this time is to examine whether law schools set up many affirmative action beneficiaries for failure by admitting them into rigorous academic environments in which they are ill-prepared to compete. He proposes to study almost 30 years of data on California Bar Association exam-takers. In the end, he hopes to explain why, as reported in a Law School Admission Council study in the 1990s, blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try.

Continue reading “If you doubt the validity of affirmative action, you must be a racist”

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Sep 11 2008

Libertarians vs. conservatives on the role of the presidency

Category: Bush,Congress,constitution,freedom,Group-think,legislation,liberty,politics,White House — harmonicminer @ 9:02 am

I love it when the libertarians and conservatives square off and start punching. It’s always instructive, and is a good tonic for those who believe “the right” is monolithic.

Claremont Institute fellow Michael M. Uhlmann has a dismissive review of The Cult of the Presidency in the current issue of National Review: “It’s Not Just the Executive,” September 15, 2008. (Here it is if you get NR Digital, otherwise it’s available in the print edition). It seems to me that the review largely consists of inaccurate characterizations, unsupported assertions, and non sequiturs. But hey, I’m the author, and understandably biased, so check it out and judge for yourself.

Uhlmann writes that “The bulk of Healy’s book is devoted to various sins, offenses and negligences of the Bush administration.” That’s a bizarre statement, given that the book has nine chapters and an introduction, and only three of those chapters cover GWB’s tenure. In fact, the “bulk of the book” is devoted to demonstrating that, as I write in Chapter Two, “the problems of the modern presidency did not begin when George W. Bush emerged victorious from 2000’s seemingly interminable Battle of the Chads” and that–despite what some on the Left seem to believe–those problems will not vanish in January 2009 when he heads back to the ranch to cut brush.

Read it all.

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Sep 10 2008

The Left suddenly notices ideological “scholarship”

Category: global warming,Group-think,science — sardonicwhiner @ 9:37 am

Some academics are expressing concern that a new Pentagon initiative to fund social science research that will be helpful for our military could be corrupted by the ideological presuppositions of the military.

The Pentagon is funding academic research to better understand the attraction of terrorism and violent groups in the Middle East — among other things. But some scholars are concerned the military is only interested in funding research that reinforces its world view. We discuss the complex relationship between the Pentagon and academia.

Say it isn’t so! You mean we can’t trust all those global warming studies that were funded by government agencies, the UN and other NGOs in order to find evidence of global warming? Who would ever have guessed that the agenda of the researcher could creep into the results of the research?

OK, it’s time to just start over. What we need is not just double blind research studies; we need double blind funding of research. If no one knows what research is being funded by which agency, and if no one knows who is funding their own research, and if the people doing the research have no idea who decided which research should be funded, then the agendas of the funders, the approvers and the researchers should be eliminated from the results.

What we need is a giant game of research funding “spin the bottle”. The funders of research will just hurl money into a huge common pot of research funds, the research approvers will initiate a giant lottery system that’s so complex that even they can’t understand it (harder to cheat that way) and the researchers won’t know whom they are trying to please, so they’ll just do their best work, we hope.

Of course, we won’t be willing to actually believe anyone’s research results until someone duplicates them… and given the lottery system of funding and approval, it may be awhile before anyone duplicates anything done by anyone else. Oh well…. science demands sacrifices of us all. I’m willing to wait for the gold.

Personally, I am shocked and appalled to learn that the funders and approvers of research studies have any influence on the outcomes. It shakes my faith in science. I wonder if we should reconsider leeches in medical care….

Or, maybe the Left just wants us to think that only research studies funded by the Pentagon are tainted by their origin, but all others are golden in their investigative purity.

Sure. I believe that.

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Sep 07 2008

More political “science”

Category: Al Gore,environment,global warming,Group-think,science — harmonicminer @ 9:16 am

Powerline has a nice summary of the latest attempt of the political “scientists” to convince us that every single weather phenomenon is caused by “climate change”, the meaningless term whose usage has replaced “global warming” in many quarters, due to the inconvenient truth that the warmest year of the last 100 was 1934, and the second warmest was 1998.

Here’s more information on the very serious and eminent scientists who demur to the group think, politically inspired conclusions of the eco-panic Left.

As always, you have to read the fine print in the studies to learn the truth, and you have to ignore the summary and conclusions that make it into the press.  Powerline has a nice deconstruction of the latest.

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