Barrel Strength

The Dark Lord has sent out us this fascinating assemblage of facts and analysis pertaining to energy consumption, global warming, and related matters. It is written by Prof. David MacKay of the physics department of Cambridge University.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf

It is a book, freely available on the Internet, called “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air”.  No one should be discussing energy policy without reference to it.

Of course he uses too many equations and he is something of a green, but that should only increase your respect for his factual inquiry.

Today’s Drudge Report headline states “SHOCK CLAIM: NO ICE AT NORTH POLE THIS SUMMER“. This is illustrated with the following photograph of sunset at the North Pole.

This photograph is a well known fake, but then, this is quite appropriate in this case.

There are mornings when you feel the judiciaryneed to be taken out and given a sensitivity course, not in the sensitivity to every whiner group, no, but to an idea of what judges should never tamper with.

A little humility about the extent of their competence, about the extent to which they can never substitute their opinions for those of others. I know it goes against the entire thrust of legal training since the Constitution Act of 1982, but that is the point. Leonard Cohen predicted “there won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure any more” in his song, The Future, and he foretold the truth. What he could not tell was the role of the judiciary in politicizing the length of every yardstick.

I cite two recent examples of judicial overreach: the Quebec judge who overruled the father of a 12 year old, who was grounded, and the Manitoba judge who overuled the medical opinion that a man was brain dead, and in the process caused three physicians to resign from the Grace Hospital.

In the Quebec case, the father had grounded the daughter for disobedience about going on the Internet.

“Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday [June 20th] that denying the girl permission to go on the school trip was an excessive punishment. The girl’s lawyer, Lucie Fortin, said, “She’s becoming a big girl” and described the school trip as “a unique event in her life”, the Globe and Mail reported. In arguing the case, Fortin cited Sections 159 and 604 of the Quebec Civil Code, which allow minors in some circumstances to initiate court proceedings relating to the exercise of parental authority. Section 159 is used in “extreme circumstances”, such as cases of parental negligence.

“The father’s lawyer, Kim Beaudoin said that her client is “stunned by this situation. He feels like he’s lost his daughter”. He is appealing the court’s decision.”

Bravo! Judge Tessier, you are in line for a spanking from the Appeal Court.

On the Manitoba situation, the Post asks the right questions:

“Beyond judges acting with urgency, there is the unresolved question of whether court compulsion of health care workers is just. At the moment, the highest value in medical bioethics is individual autonomy and consequent respect for individual decision-making. That value was brought into doubt when the Manitoba judge questioned the physicians’ medical expertise and, at the same time, required that they continue to exercise it in violation of their professional and personal ethics. Should physicians and other health care professionals be required to choose between hurting a patient by ineffective medical treatment, and a possible jail sentence for being in contempt of court?”

Though I do not hold with a general legalized right of physicians to kill patients, they make decisions which result in the cessation of artificial support for life, nearly every day in some cases. They pull the plugs, and the equipment moves on the next person requiring care. If collectively they do this every day, should we not legalize it? Permit me some moral ambiguity here. Doctors make medical decisions, and medically you are meat, a physical being, not a spiritual one. When that meat is no longer self-sustaining, you have entered the domain of medical decision-making.  They have other people whose lives could be sustained by the attention and equipment they are spending on your parent’s comatose body. Whenever a judge deals with these matters as if it there were a right to be kept alive, they forget the costs imposed on everyone else whose fathers and mothers lie dying for the want of attention going to your parent’s soon-to-be corpse. Life may be sacred, but not to physciansin their medical capacity. They deal in death, and deathis the natural outcome of life. We have no right to the indefinite avoidance of our appointment with our Maker, particularly if that avoidance is medically useless, and a burden on the still-living in need of care.

Judges need to restrict the tendency to extend rights where rights can have no bearing, and state decision-making where the state has no comeptence.

The judiciary reminds me of a scene in Amadeus, where Mozart is infuriated that he has to submit samples of his work to a committee of Italians to get the job of music teacher to the Emperor’s niece.

VON STRACK
Mozart, you are not the only composer in Vienna.

MOZART
No, but I’m the best.

VON STRACK
A little modesty would suit you better.

A judiciary filled, at the very best,  with Salieris, Quantzes, and Telemanns, and many thinking themselves Mozarts, whose judgments are cutting-edge advances of human rights. Spare us!

I would rather be governed by 100 people chosen randomly from the telephone book than by the Canadian judiciary. I mean it. Or by the semi-random group of people assembled in the House of Commons. Hey! Parliamentary supremacy. What a concept!

 And I write this as Mozart’s finale to the Symphony #41, the Jupiter, is playing. I know the difference between talent and pretention, and so do most Canadians.

When I find the National Post getting soft I turn to the Financial Post for the really conservative market-oriented view. Its castigations of the global warming con job have been a source of amusement and great comfort. By contrast, its views on telecommunications have been economically illiterate.

The Financial Post’s  (or its lead editorialist Terence Corcoran’s) view of telecommunications has been: we have enough competition now to deregulate. Two competitors in the general area, cable and telephone, are enough, and three is a sufficient cause to leave the market alone. No attention needs to be paid to the market conditions in a particular place; it is sufficient that competitors exist in the same urban area, regardless of whether your building is served by one or two carriers. Mandated sharing of facilities, where the big incumbents must share facilities with ISPs, is just “telecom trotskyism”, in the glorious invective of Terrence Corcoran.

Thus it was with interest I read “Abolish the Canadian rail monopoly” by François Tougas in today’s Financial Post. Tougas is a senior lawyer at Lang Michener and an adjunct professor of competition policy at the UBC Faculty of Law – not a likely candidate for Trotskyism.

Tougas says:
“The best way to regulate a natural monopoly is to introduce competition by allowing others (a “guest” railway, in this case) to access the track infrastructure of the incumbent (the “host” railway) to vie for the business. Modern economies already do this with other network industries like telecom, cable and electricity and gas distribution.”

But where barriers to entry are “tremendously high”, says Tougas, railways are able to carry on free from competition. Where you cannot build a rival rail-line, the existing regulatory remedies available to captive shippers are insufficient. There is no market. Tougas recommends “running rights” – the right to pass your traffic over the lines of another railroad, using someone else’s railcars, and paying them a regulated rate for the privilege. Otherwise there occurs an unjust transfer of wealth from industries to carriers.

There is no difference in principle between “running rights” in the railway case and “access to underlying facilities” in telecommunications. Why then does the Financial Post rail at Professor Michael Geist (and by extension, all the companies which benefit from sharing of underlying facilities, such as MTS-Allstream) as Trotskyites, and Professor Tougas gets a free pass?

Are ideas made acceptable by their content, or by their provenance? Is what is good for natural resource producers in Flin Flon bad for businesses in Markham and Pierrefonds? Should the telephone companies and other carriers take a part of the profits of all electronic transactions, because they can? But railroads should not? One is tempted to think that the reason why different positions are taken by the Financial Post on the identical issue is that we can visualize railroads; we do not really have a precise mental image of networks.

For a further treatment of Terence Corcoran’s sadly mistaken views on intellectual property, see the comment by the economist Joseph Potvin on digital rights management.

Muammar “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution” al-Gaddafi, gives a ringing endorsement to Obama’s presidential bid.

“There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama.

All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency….

We are still hoping that this black man will take pride in his African and Islamic identity, and in his faith, and that [he will know] that he has rights in America, and that he will change America from evil to good, and that America will establish relations that will serve it well with other peoples, especially the Arabs.”

This endorsement preceded endorsements from Kim Jong-Il and Fidel Castro.

A 2.5 acre island of Forvik, which is formally known as Forewick Holm and is part of the Shetland Islands in the North Sea, has declared independence on June 21st, 2008. Mr. Stuart Hill, the sole-resident of the island, has posted the declaration on his website and states that he wants the territory to be a crown dependency like the Channel Islands, with an economy in which “There will be no income tax, VAT (value added tax), council tax, corporation tax, or any of the other taxes instituted by the British government”.

The basis of the independence is the historical fact noted in the aforementioned declaration, viz. “the only powers granted to King James III of Scotland in 1469, when he accepted these islands as security in the matter of payment of a marriage dowry, were those of trustee. His Majesty was holding them in trust until they were redeemed by King Christian of Denmark and Norway or his successors. Part of his obligation was to preserve the existing language and laws.”

Those interested in obtaining citizenship to the islands can find more information here.

Those of us who follow the debate about global warming, as if it were a debate and not a settled dogma, track the following questions:

1) is it occurring?

2) How much is man engendering?

3) How important is it to solve, and how readily is it solved, relative to all other ecological/disease/development problems?

Roughly speaking, here is what my readings have told me.

1) The earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age, roughly 15,000 years ago (with an extensive break for a micro ice age they call the Younger Dryas from 12-10,000 years ago). Warming may be accelerating in recent centuries. Contrariwise, it has been much warmer in the distant past, and vastly colder in the distant past. We have not yet attained the height of the previous interglacial warming period, when freshwater ponds stood near the Arctic Ocean, which are now called pingoes.

If the recent (last million years) past is any guide, we are currently in the last few millennia before the onset of the next ice age. We have been through 18 ice ages the last million years, with gradually increasing extremes of cold occurring as the ice age has progressed. All of human history, from the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, has occurred in the latest interglacial.

More recently, global warming appears to have stopped as of the year 2000, but I don’t read too much into this one way or another, since any general trend in the earth’s climate less than a few hundred years long is generally of no enduring significance. Nevertheless, global warming and cooling can happen suddenly, so that we can be plunged back into an ice age in less than a decade. I cannot reconcile these two statements without recourse to longer explanations than you have time to read.

2) Not much. Having read as much geological history as I have, the claims of many scientists that we are tipping the world over into a heat death strike me as vastly implausible. I also notice that geologists, who are accustomed to dealing with a thousand years as the shortest possible time-span they reckon in, tend to have a distinctly different view of climate than climate scientists, who track weather over time, and deal, in essence, with air, not rock.

3) I side with Bjorn Lomborg that if we had a hundered major global problems to solve, such as malaria, clean drinking water, education for girls etc, global warming would be last on the list in terms of cost-effectiveness of solving. Cold kills more people than heat, every winter, year in, year out.

Now today’s sermon is about the meaning of science. The philosophy of science is that it is only provisionally true. It must frame propositions that can be disproved. If it cannot generate propositions that can be disproved, it is not science. Hence the Wolfgang Pauli insult than some things “are not even wrong” – cannot generate propositions whose truth can be measured against results.

It was intersting to read in the National Post yesterday (”Overheated Claims”) an article by Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, citing two US climate scientists, Claudia Tebaldi and Reto Knutti, the following passage, quoted twice:

“It is important to note that climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes. Our confidence must therefore come from other sources”

Would you please read that again and tell me where that confidence should come from? If observed changes over decades fail to track predictions, over decades, then where is our conficence in climate modelling to come from? The operations of the Holy Spirit?

As Pielke observes:
“The IPCC issues predictions for 20-30-year periods in the futiure, and updates them every 6-7 years, so in practice its current predictive capanbilities can never be measured against real world data.”

In short, if you read the words carefully, they are saying that climate predictions are not science, because not falsifiable. This is exactly the thrust of the scientific objection to Intelligent Design.

Hence you will understand my increasing belief that Climate Science has reached the stage of being voodoo for white people. Not just metaphorically, but now, as we cast aside the last links to falsifiability, to pure magical thinking.

Obama told a news conference today that “… I think there is an executive order out on Osama bin Laden’s head and if I’m president, and we have the opportunity to capture him, we may not be able to capture him alive… What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he’s engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism,”

He might want to recall the troubles that bedeviled previous attempts to capture bin Laden, during the Clinton administration, with the help of the full force of the US law. On MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews”, Michael Scheuer, a former CIA terrorism analyst shared the following:

“When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard.”

One hopes that a better tape has been manufactured and better seating is available since the last attempt.

Rocco DiPippo in an excellent article bares the Left. A must read.

Obama’s latest campaign statements are of acute interest where he states:

“Barack Obama is warning supporters that the general election fight between him and John McCain may get ugly, but the Illinois senator is vowing not to back down.‘If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,’ Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.”

Have the latest polling shown that he is in trouble in the inner cities, which has that led him to cater to his base and issue statements that will ingratiate him to them?  He is certainly speaking their language and this is the kind of talk that they can personally relate to.

h/t Gateway Pundit

In 2004 Obama ruled out running on a national ticket in 2008 because he lacked experience.

[youtube 5BnLozS-TnM]

So what changed?

Update, June 12, 2008

h/t Obama’s Gaffes

Jimmy Carter on Obama in 2007: “I just don’t think he has got yet the proven substance or experience to be the President.”

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The modern era in the US federal energy policy began in 1973 with OPEC oil embargo. Other than blaming, in no particular order, oil companies, speculators or OPEC, where does US stand with the implementation of the energy policy over a protracted period?

All your correspondent can see is restriction on drilling in places such as Alaska and Louisiana, steps to sue OPEC and increased taxes on oil companies. How this leads to increase in the supply of oil is a mystery. Of course there is also the solution proposed in the video below by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), who was named in 2005 and 2006 as one of the “most corrupt” members of congress by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to nationalize the oil companies.

[youtube PUaY3LhJ-IQ]

Given the bipartisan consensus that a energy policy is required, it is disconcerting that nothing has happened over an extended period. With all the roadblocks and intransigence for the energy policy, one has to ask what hope is there for formulating a broadly accepted consensus for the War on Terror? Bush is derided as a lone wolf but what were and are the options?

Those who fondly recall and point to the bipartisan consensus during the Cold War might want to recall the following statement by Dukakis’ running mate, Congressman Lloyd Bentsen, that shows how different the Democrats were back then: “I propose the president of the United States advise the commander of the North Korean troops to withdraw his forces beyond the 38th parallel within one week or use that week to evacuate civilians from a specified list of North Korean cities that will be subjected to atomic attack by the United States Air Force.”

The world grows grimmer by the day. First the cherished Scottish history is relegated to the trash heap. And if that isn’t painful enough, the beloved scotch itself has been upstaged by the Japanese.

The Nikka distillery in Japan has taken an interesting turn with single cask malt whiskey called Yoichi. Their website describes it as follows.

“It is purely bottled from one barrel without mixing whiskies from other barrels or water…. Each barrel has its own flavor because of the difference in material and condition, kinds of trees for barrels, the sizes and times the barrels are used, how to barn and so on.”

It certainly brings a variety to a single malt brand instead of drinking the same-old . The Japanese efforts in whisky making haven’t gone unrewarded, as earlier this year the Yoichi 20-years old became “the first variety produced outside Scotland to win the coveted single malt award in an international competition run by Whisky Magazine, the main industry publication… The decision to give the top prize to Yoichi followed a blind tasting of more than 200 of the world’s finest varieties by a panel of 16 of the world’s leading whisky experts.”

Perhaps it is a case of minding the dreaded EU legislated carbon emissions, as article goes on to state that the “Traditional distilling apparatus such as coal-fired pot stills, used widely in Japan but rarely seen in Scotland, was also praised for producing a superior dram.”

So the EU will soon be receiving messengers from the Pakistani government who will demand that freedom of speech be restricted so as to avoid an onslaught of terrrorist attacks. Thankfully there is already a good script in place for the reply:

[youtube -qR0Uke2XNI]

But I doubt that the Eurowusses will be up to the task.