Authoritations

The more I think about...well, everything, the more overwhelming becomes the realization that it's all of a piece: a single process operating to create unambiguous battle lines so the serious shooting can begin.

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Allow me to start by citing an exceptionally insightful piece from Ace of Spades. Please read it all. The conclusion is what lit my boiler this fine morning. Set it aside; we'll come back to it soon enough.

Virtually everyone is touched at some point by the arrogance of an expert. I have to saw one in half about once a month, but for a reason tangential to Ace's analysis: their readiness to assert "expertise" in fields other than their own. Arthur Herzog skewered this tendency in his 1973 classic The B.S. Factor:

The thirst for answers in a difficult world has brought about the rise of Anything (or Everything) Authorities. The Anything Authority is one whose credentials in one field are taken as valid for others -- sometimes many others....

The trouble with an Anything Authority is not that he takes a position or works for a cause, but that he seldom seems to apply the same standards of research and documentation to the field in which he is not an expert as he would to his own....

Psychiatrists are a special breed of Anything Authorities because their field is anything (or almost) in the first place....

When an Anything Authority becomes successful, he joins the Permanent Rotating Panel Show and appears on television programs, which pay him....the Anything Authority must never be stuck for an answer. Glibness helps, and so does the fact that many emcees do not know the hard questions to ask.

If the above passage has you thinking of Fox News regular Dr. Charles Krauthammer, you're not alone.

The progression is plain:

1. Acquisition of a credential of some kind, often an academic one.
2. Practice in one's field.
3. Acquisition of notoriety in consequence of some publicized event.
4. Interest in one's thinking from persons other than one's fellow specialists.
5. Increasing boldness, in part due to sustained attention from laymen and journalists.
6. Ascent to Anything Authority status.
7. Television gigs and book tours.

The strong relationship between the Anything Authority and major figures in national politics follows automatically.

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It might not be perfectly obvious (a break from tradition here at Liberty's Torch), but any man who bids for a high political office must present himself to the public as a sort of Anything Authority: i.e., one who "has the answers" to a wide range of questions concerning the issues most prominent in political discourse. As distasteful as it sounds, arrogance is therefore a qualification for office. He who lacks the glibness and certitude required will be dismissed by a large fraction of the voting public. Seldom does the less glib, less arrogant of two candidates prevail in an electoral showdown.

And of course, that glibness and arrogance carries over to one's tenure in office. Here's a perfectly lovely example from Andrew Cuomo, currently the governor of New York:

You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.

…You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

If they’re moderate Republicans like in the Senate right now, who control the Senate — moderate Republicans have a place in their state. George Pataki was governor of this state as a moderate Republican; but not what you’re hearing from them on the far right.”

Yes, you read it correctly: Cuomo, a Democrat, has taken it upon himself to tell the Republican Party of New York whom it may and may not have as members. Indeed, he's told those of us New Yorkers who disagree with him that we don't belong in "his" state! We once heard this sort of thing from Big Daddy Mario, who also treated the state as his personal fiefdom. Clearly, the apple fell very close to the tree.

What's ultimately most important is the reflexive acceptance of this sort of pol-speak: Cuomo II, whose background before attaining public office is notably lacking in any sort of accomplishment, has not been backhanded across the chops for his arrogance by any figure of note on the Right. In part, that's out of distaste for the possibility of reprisal, but in equal or greater part it's because the practice of presenting oneself as an unquestionable Anything Authority has become established for officials at the gubernatorial level and above.

The "expert" no longer needs to have demonstrated "expertise" of any sort; all he needs to do is win an election.

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The practice of promoting themselves as Anything Authorities compels politicians to become vengeful toward anyone who suggests that there are flaws in their reasoning, evidence, candor, or veracity:

After Benghazi on 9/11/2012, the Obama administration tried very hard to discourage Fox News Channel from reporting on it. The effort was obstruction – pure and simple.

They tried to prevent the truth from coming out and the Administration tried just about everything to discourage Fox from investigating and reporting.

All the American people wanted, and all I ever wanted, was just the facts – why did 4 Americans die? What happened?

Please read the entire article. Greta Van Susteren, an accomplished and painfully thorough journalist, is one of the very few persons anywhere in the media who has aggressively prosecuted the investigation of the Benghazi attack. The Obama Administration perceived -- correctly -- that her efforts were a danger to their "narrative." Administration operatives did everything possible within the law to inhibit her and her staffers from continuing onward. Given the viciousness the Obamunists have displayed to date, the mind recoils from what might have happened to her and hers, were the United States not steeped in a tradition of press freedom that reaches back to John Peter Zenger.

Be warned: Pressure has mounted, always from the Left, to classify ever more varieties of expression as "hate speech," and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The Democrats want to study "Internet hate speech," no doubt with an eye toward making it legally actionable as a "proximate cause" for violence. Such an effort will inevitably expand to embrace reportage and opinion writing that dissents from the "official line."

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Let's return to the conclusion of Ace's essay:

Laymen know that "all professions are a conspiracy against the laity."

And laymen also know something else: In a democracy, the common citizen must decided upon the course of the nation, whether the citizenry is right or wrong about it.

The layman resents the never-ending agitation for a "democracy" in which all important decisions are made by a Council of Experts (generally government bureaucrats and academic gadflies with their own very serious bias issues) and then simply announced to the public.

In all these ways, the layman suspects he is being bullied into taking a position he does not favor by the invocation of the word "expert," and not just bullied-- often, he feels like he is being straight-up conned.

I actually do respect knowledge and expertise. And I do think it is a lamentable thing that this nation now holds such things in lesser respect than they once did.

But the self-declared experts must also take some of the blame for this state of affairs.

You only get to lie to someone so many times before he stops listening to you entirely.

And you don't need to be an expert to know that.

Exactly. It is in the nature of expertise that it must admit to both its fallibility and its limits. The "expert" who postures as though he cannot be wrong will sooner or later come to grief -- often by the actions of competitors in his field. When an "expert" assumes the mantle of an Anything Authority, his need to protect his reputation as such climbs to the heights. The pinnacle is occupied by public officials: Anything Authorities who become political authorities. At that altitude, their pose of unbounded expertise, if not shielded by credible threats of vengeance, self-ruptures almost immediately. It only takes one egregious mistake, and most officials make that many in their oaths of office.

The rest is an exercise for the reader.

With Its Credibility Already In Tatters

...MSNBC decides to "double down" on its worst PR loss of 2013:

THOMAS ROBERTS: Well as we look at that, because look at this, the Duck Commander company itself, it's worth a reported $400 million through the sale of duck calls, other items that they produce. We've got 11.8 million viewers tuning in for the premiere of season 4 Ladd. So this family earned $200,000 per episode that season and they represent and they speak to a large swath of the country. Primarily the stereotype almost that you just pointed out. But how do you try to combat that? Because, obviously they're within their rights to go ahead and do this. This is all legal.

LADD EVERITT: Well, look, I mean I think the Robertson family is banking on being able to market firearms, you know, by issuing some of these very extreme political comments and hoping that it appeals to basically a swath of far right-wing Americans that they assume are their main customer base. I'm hoping that backfires. When you poll gun owners in this country, the fact is that the overwhelming majority of them are very moderate in their views. And I think many of them will not embrace the type of, you know, misogynist, racist, anti-gay comments that Phil Robertson is making. And my hope here is that this strategy, if it is indeed a strategy, will backfire on them.

What's the undercurrent-thesis behind this otherwise inexplicable tirade?

• Guns are evil.
• Those who sell them are Merchants of Death who must be opposed.
• The Duck Dynasty folks will soon use their marketing muscle to sell guns.
• Whoopee! They really are a bunch of evil backwoods bigots straight out of Deliverance! Can we get some shots photos of them buggering trespassers?

Does anyone actually watch MSNBC, or are there just a lot of unwatched sets piled up in a basement somewhere, tuned to the channel in an attempt to fool the ratings agencies?

There Is No Defense

Occasionally, a Gentle Reader will write to ask why I haven't yet written on some topic of current interest, and whether I plan to address it in the foreseeable future. Such notes are flattering, as they imply that my correspondent values my take on such things. I try not to disappoint such persons by dismissing the subject of their interest as outside my sphere of concern or expertise, even if that's exactly the way I view it. But now and then, a recent event that's elicited copious commentary from other sources will lie on my thoughts for some time before a pattern emerges that allows me to write something about it that strikes me as worth anyone's reading time.

The Washington Navy Yard massacre is one such event.

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Aaron Alexis, the gunman who ended the lives of twelve innocents a few days ago, was insane -- psychotic; delusional; unpredictably violent. Because he had never come sufficiently "into the system" for constraining such persons, he was able to acquire a pump shotgun and access to the Washington Navy Yard, and express his psychosis with flying lead. Twelve persons died before a policeman could end Alexis's own life with a round from an AR-15, currently America's most popular rifle.

And of course, the gun controllers and their Main Stream Media sycophants immediately revived their campaign against "assault weapons," by which they meant the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

Lunacy? Of course. The gun controllers have always been lunatics. As some wag said, every time some sort of atrocity is committed with a firearm, the politicians try to take the guns away from everyone who didn't do it. Nothing could possibly make less sense, right?

Wrong. We're looking squarely at the political disease that best characterizes America today: agendaism.

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Agendaism is an ideology, but not one of the sort with which most persons are familiar. It consists of two parts:

• A firm and unchanging agenda: i.e., a set of goals to be pursued thought political mechanisms;
• A collection of context-specific tactics oriented toward achieving that agenda.

The overarching principle of agendaism is that with the right tactics, the right publicity, and the right "slant," an event can be made to serve any agenda whatsoever, as long as the tactics are properly fitted to the event.

There are numerous agendaists in public life today. Broadly speaking, any politically active person, whether he's a public official or a private citizen, who is indissolubly attached to his agenda, such that neither reason nor evidence could possibly sway him from it, is an agendaist. Some, of course, are more effective than others, but the defining characteristic is that unbreakable attachment to a set of unchanging political goals.

Why would anyone be so fixated on a specific set of goals, even in the teeth of contrary reasoning and evidence? Unclear. Perhaps the only answer available is Aristotelian: action to advance those goals is what makes him happy, or what he thinks will make him happy. Always remember The Algorithm:

1. Select a technique that you think will get you what you think you want.
2. Will this technique require you to lose body parts, go to jail, or burn in Hell?
   1. If so, return to step 1.
   2. If not, proceed to step 3.
3. Do a little of it.
4. Are you at your goal, approaching it, or receding from it?
   1. If at your goal, stop.
   2. If approaching, return to step 3.
   3. If receding, return to step 1.

...and bear in mind that "what you think you want" is not covered by the above; it's beyond all rational investigation.

Gun control is an important item on many agendaists' agendas. Never mind that criminals are the least likely persons on Earth to comply with a gun ban or gun registration law. Never mind that removing weapons from the hands of the peaceable and law-abiding cannot possibly bring about a reduction in violent crimes or crimes against property. Never mind that disarming a man renders him helpless before an armed predator. A gun-control agendaist seeks to disarm us peones because he thinks it will make him happy to have done so. You cannot persuade him otherwise.

Agendaists are like that.

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I swiped the title of this piece from a Theodore Sturgeon short story. In the story, an unidentified spacecraft has entered the Solar System and has begun randomly and lethally attacking population centers and other spacecraft. Nothing seems able to stop it. It appears unwilling to communicate. Solar System authorities have one untried weapon: The Death, a radiation field that liquefies living tissue, against which there is no defense. However, its use has been forbidden since its one and only employment in war. After a great deal of bickering, the supreme council decides to authorize its use against the invader...and finds that it has no effect. Pandemonium ensues.

Ultimately, it's discovered that the invader craft is unmanned. At one time it possessed a living (nonhuman) crew, but that crew was killed by its enemies, by using The Death. However, its builders had arranged that the craft should fly on, wreaking death and destruction even once its crew had been eliminated, as an Ultimate Revenge against their supremely vicious blood enemies. They had anticipated that those enemies would succeed in exterminating their entire species, and were determined to strike at them even from beyond the grave.

As the protagonist of Sturgeon's story says in its last paragraph, "There is a defense against The Death. You can't kill a dead man."

Let that sink in for a moment or two.

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One of our current subjects of public debate is how best to "prevent" outbreaks of mass murder such as those of Theodore Kaczynski, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Jared Loughner, Nidal Malik Hassan, Anders Breivik, Adam Lanza, Aaron Alexis, and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Note that none of the approaches suggested or tried have had perfect success, for a simple reason.

The reason? You can't deter a man who has already decided that the loss of his life is a worthwhile price to pay for what he wants. If there is such a man in your society, and if he decides that what he wants is to kill a lot of people, sooner or later he'll try to do so, even knowing that it will cost him his life.

Some years ago, I wrote on this subject in a more political context:

Conflict-resolution analysts have always based their approaches on the classic, game-theoretic approaches pioneered by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. These men, themselves mighty geniuses, built atop the economic understandings of David Ricardo and Vilfredo Pareto. The thinking of Ricardo, Pareto, and the rest of the scholium of classical economics took its founding insights from the father of all rational economic reasoning, Adam Smith.

From Smith to the great thinkers of RAND and Hudson, we can trace an unbroken chain of calm, reasoned analysis, all of which rested on a silent, indispensable postulate: For any given thing a contestant in a contest might want, there is a maximum price he'd be willing to pay, and no more.

Seems unassailable, doesn't it? The contrary proposition would be that there's someone willing to pay an infinite amount for some good. That would imply that he'd be willing to sacrifice his life, the lives of all his loved ones and friends, and everything else he could manipulate, to achieve some desideratum. Insane! Who would be left to enjoy whatever it was he had purchased?

Before Black Tuesday, no one would have entertained the notion.

Somewhere in my time closet, I have a button that says, "If you're willing to die, you can do anything." Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but it points up an unpleasant truth. The sacrifice of one's own life, which has been called "the ultimate price," will buy a lot of things that are available for no other currency. Yet the willingness to make that sacrifice contradicts the unspoken assumption of classical economics. It renders conventional methods of valuation, and the reasoning by which we use them, impotent.

The line of thought derived from Smith, whose fullest flowering arrived with Thomas Schelling, cannot cope with decisions that incorporate a willingness to pay an unbounded price.

You cannot deter a man willing to pay for what he wants with his life and all else that matters to him. Indeed, in a just society -- i.e., one that doesn't attempt to coerce or punish by inflicting harm on innocent uninvolved persons -- you cannot even deter a man who's merely willing to die. You can stop him by killing him; that's all. But there is no defense against him, if by "defense" we mean a shield for those he would like to harm. In a practical sense, he's already dead.

Some psychotics and sociopaths are detected in time to block their access to weapons. Some, like Aaron Alexis, are not. The ones that slip through the holes in the web will eventually take lives. There is no defense against them.

We cannot defend against them. But we can prepare for them: we can be ready to kill them when they decide to strike. It's not ideal; some innocent persons will undoubtedly die before we can stop them. But it's the best we can do -- and it's the ultimate argument for an armed populace.

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If we look at the agendaist through the lens above, it appears that his absolute, unbreachable fidelity to his agenda renders him just as impossible to deter as any psychotic killer. There's no price he'd accept to back away from his agenda. He'll act on it unless and until he's stopped -- and stopping him is always a temporary thing.

(For the purposes of this discussion, allow me to omit consideration of "stopping" an agendaist by killing him. That's illegal in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as attractive an approach as it might sometimes seem.)

If there is no defense against the agendaist, then we must be prepared to stop him. This is a bit more difficult than simply carrying a gun. Remember: he does not respond to argument or evidence. In the usual case, neither will others who buy into his agenda, for he won't attempt to gain adherents through reason or evidence. To stop him, he must be neutralized by other means.

"Other means" require that we either threaten what he values apart from his agenda sufficiently to silence him, or find a way to undercut his appeal to those he seeks to persuade. The former isn't a reliable approach; it's subject to heavy political counterfire. The latter sounds unappealing, even slanderous...but many an agendaist will put the weapon into our hands by his own actions, for he is willing to sacrifice any and every other consideration, including moral and ethical ones, to the furtherance of his agenda.

Consider the case of Barack Hussein Obama, an agendaist of the first water. This man was stoppable. He had enough unsavory associations and murky antecedents that the McCain / Palin ticket could have (and should have) walked over him. Obama's patronage of Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Bill Ayres should have been sufficient. Yet the McCain strategists explicitly excluded the use of Obama's associations and antecedents, and thus doomed their campaign to failure. Mitt Romney committed much the same mistake in his 2012 bid for the presidency.

Rather than replaying the errors of that campaign, I will ask: Are we in the Right able to learn from our mistakes, or will we advance other candidates as lily-livered as McCain and Romney?

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Agendaism, in case it's not immediately obvious, is a disease of the Left. We in the Right pride ourselves on being alive to good reasoning and pertinent evidence, and let's pledge that it will always be so. Despite that, we've allowed agendaists to permeate the federal government, and no few state and local governments, as if we were afraid to use the weapons at hand. An agendaist in public office will exploit every means and opportunity at his disposal, and will create them if none are immediately available.

Against an agendaist in the Oval Office, there really is no defense.

It's time for freedom lovers to cease worrying about "descending to their level" and take off the gloves. No more wimpy candidates; no more white-gloved distaste for publicly dissecting our opponents' misdeeds and failings. The Republic can't tolerate much more from the agendaists. It will take the rarest and most difficult form of courage -- moral courage, the courage of our convictions -- to stop them.

The Power Of Silence

The Fascists cannot argue, so they kill. -- Victor Marguerite

A little tactical musing today, I think.

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One of the most striking things I've noticed, in studying the tactics of the Left, is how averse they are to actual argument. Anything but a bald proclamation of their positions is anathema to them. Reasoning? None. Response to objections, counter-contentions, and criticism? Slander, vilification, assaults on motives...whatever the leftist believes will end the exchange then and there.

I've come to believe that leftists generally are aware that:

• They have no arguments consistent with logic or the evidence of history;
• We're on to them in any case.

The typical leftist mouthpiece might enjoy slinging epithets at conservatives, but from a tactical point of view, that's a secondary consideration at most. What he wants is for his claims to go unchallenged. When he replies to a conservative in foul-mouthed and calumnious fashion, he's mainly concerned with preemptively silencing further argument. As the Left's claims cannot withstand either reason or evidence, this is his paramount concern.

The tactic has served the Left well. Deploying a counter-tactic has become vital.

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In recent years, we have seen an explosion of violent and intimidating public action from leftists; "street politics," if you will, designed to make others fear that opposing them would be deleterious to one's well-being. Surely smashing store windows, menacing the homes of private figures they want to demonize, and issuing death threats and implications thereof constitute no valid argument of the sort Socrates would approve. But this is merely an illustration of the Victor Marguerite quote at the top of this article.

One way or another, the Left is determined to have the political field entirely to itself. We ought to have known that from the phenomenon of the "one-party State" that appears near to inevitable for a nation that's allowed itself to be taken over by the Left. Exceptions to the pattern are quite rare.

When it comes to Leftist violence and intimidation, the only possible response is in kind: fearlessly and aware of the potential consequences for life and limb. As it turns out, when confronted by equal, equally resolute force, the Left tends to strike its tents and slink away, in the time-honored fashion of bullies throughout history. So the response in kind is less risky than it first appears...if it's deployed early enough to forestall the Left's attainment of a dominant position.

As for opposing the Left rhetorically, in somber awareness of its proclivity for slander and vilification, it's time for an entirely new approach.

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The only possible responses to personal slanders, demonizations, imputations of low motives, and so forth are denial and reciprocation. Neither of these has proved useful to the Right. We need an alternative that averts that path: an approach that "takes the bat out of their hands."

To achieve that end, we must deny ourselves our traditional response to Leftists' claims and demands. We must refrain from arguing with them.

Why argue with one who's unable to argue? Why dignify his representations by answering them seriously, if all that would do is give him the opportunity to call you a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, an oppressor, a tool of the moneyed interests, or any other insult his shriveled brain can produce? You may be quite sure of his inclination to do so; honest leftists willing to confront evidence and logic are as rare as blizzards at the Equator. So why identify yourself to him as a target for abuse?

If the leftist's contentions are ridiculous, why not allow them to stand unanswered, exposed to the scrutiny of whoever might attend to him? In other words, why not trust your fellow citizens' intelligence and hard sense?

After all, if your fellow citizens are unintelligent and hard-sense-deprived, your arguments, no matter how well-turned or eloquent, will have no positive effect on them. But if they possess the capacity to see through the Left's obfuscations and appeals to envy, they can and will do so. They'll go looking for a sensible alternative...and they'll find you.

Atop that, Americans tend to be respectful of those who respect them. Leftism is a single, centuries-long confidence game that uses the appeal of envy and devil theories to attract allegiants. Once an American realizes he's being conned, he develops a resistance to it against which further attempts to deceive him will shatter.

In that view, the Right's weapon of choice, already at hand, is silence.

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Barack Hussein Obama and his lieutenants have made many claims about "obstructionism" and "attempts to return to the failed policies of the past." An unfortunate number of persons have attempted to answer those charges, to approximately no avail. Why answer them, when the sole reply would be more of the same, with additional slanders and imputations of evil motives?

In the aftermath of the Zimmerman trial, race-hustlers such as Al Sharpton, Ben Jealous, and Julian Bond have made extravagant claims about "open season on young black men." Once again, to reply merely invites more vilification. Why answer them, when their statements are so plainly nonsense, both as matters of law and as assessments of the state of American race relations?

In the most laughable of the easily identified cases, various gender-war feminists have accused the Right of a "war on women," because of our desire to limit their "reproductive rights" -- i.e., their "rights" to kill viable-but-unborn children and to have their slutteries financed from the public till. Any response other than a derisive chuckle and a shake of the head imbues such charges with a dignity they don't deserve. Why answer them, when anyone with three functioning brain cells would dismiss them without a second thought?

We have feared to allow the Left's accusations and representations to go unanswered. That fear was based on the assumption that our fellow citizens would infer that an unanswered attack must be true. It's time to jettison that assumption, especially as it implies a lack of respect for the very persons we hope to win to our way of thinking.

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I once asked the brilliant cartoonist Chris Muir, who delights us daily at Day By Day, how he deals with attacks from the Left. He answered at once that he ignores them and continues on. "A response is what they want," he said in amplification. "Why give it to them?"

Why, indeed?

You're Getting Colder!

Today at Forbes, we have an excellent article by Peter Ferrara on the recently confirmed trend toward global cooling. The data, the correlations, and the grudging concessions by various powerhouses of global-warming alarmism leave no doubt that that house of cards, which always stood upon a shaky foundation of closely held temperature data and dubious computer simulations, has utterly collapsed.

But then, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) was always a political cudgel rather than a serious scientific hypothesis. It was designed to chivvy the semi-free peoples of the West into surrendering what remains of our freedoms, in the name of "combating global warming." That's why whenever one of CAGW's advocates got his face in front of a camera, he'd trumpet repeatedly that "the science is settled," when there was no science at all behind the warmistas' claims.

Back at Eternity Road, I summarized the clinching arguments against the CAGW hypothesis as a scientific contention:

1. A thesis that can't predict is no thesis at all.

A genuine scientist will tell you that knowledge is confirmed by a chain of successful predictions. It's not enough to get it right just once -- that is, to perform a single experiment, get the expected results, and claim that one's hypothesis is verified on that basis alone. Your thesis must be tested repeatedly, by multiple agencies, in objectively reproducible settings, without a single failure of prediction.

Successful predictions by the warmistas, including every "scientist" who's ever signed onto the proposition: NONE.

2. If the data is kept secret, it isn't science.

Warmista "scientists" have repeatedly refused to release their raw data, or to define the mechanisms by which that data was captured, or to commit themselves to an error bar around their measurements. In a handful of cases, these "researchers" have admitted that they can't produce their raw data -- that it's somehow been lost. This is "the dog ate my homework" masquerading as scientific procedure.

It wouldn't fly for Michael Bellesiles, and it won't fly for the warmistas.

3. Heterogeneity in the data.

Heterogeneous data sets are incapable of proving anything.

Two data sets can be unsuitable for combination for a variety of reasons. One such reason is wide variation in the measuring techniques and instruments used. If temperatures were measured in recent years by thermometers placed in locations X with uncertainties E₀, while the measurements from earlier years came from thermometers placed in greatly different locations Y, or with greatly different uncertainties E₁, there is no statistically valid way to use them as inputs to a single computation.

The warmistas' data sets are so heterogeneous that they don't dare to describe them accurately. Deep-past temperature "measurements" are inferred from tree rings. The more recent past "measurements" come from several thousand thermometers of unknown quality. Immediate-past temperature data comes from a much smaller number of thermometers of better quality, but which are nowhere near the sites of earlier measurements, and in a great many cases are situated in or near heat islands such as cities or airports.

To suggest that data that heterogeneous can be made into a basis for long-range inference is to trade in fantasy. It's about like predicting the average and distribution of human foot sizes based on their comparison to a human thumb -- and in every individual case, to some new person's thumb.

4. Deliberate omission of contributing factors.

In part, this hearkens back to the heterogeneous-data-set problem, but it also addresses the deliberate omission of explanatory factors such as solar input. The Earth's energy influx is not constant, because the Sun is not constant. The Sun's output varies by about 4% from its mean, and is also influenced by sunspots and other anomalies in the photosphere. Such variations are neither predictable nor easily accounted for in predictions of Earth climate conditions. But the warmistas refuse to accept that solar input can have a significant effect on global climate.

Also, with the recent increase of sea-bottom exploration and activity, particularly in the Arctic Circle, there have been a number of releases of methane gas from ocean-floor concentrations of disturbed decayed matter. The overall size of these releases is unknown, as facilities for measuring them have only become available very recently. However, since methane is itself a "greenhouse gas," and more potent in that connection than CO₂, these releases introduce additional uncertainty into all studies of heat-trapping by atmospheric gases.

5. Tendentious computer simulations.

A simulation of conditions that cannot be produced deliberately, which is the sort of simulation on which the warmistas rely, can only demonstrate what would come of those conditions if the assumptions and mechanisms built into the simulation were correct. Therefore, it can only be used as an argument for a given hypothesis if:

• All the initial conditions required by the simulation come to pass simultaneously;
• No extra contributors, or factors that would disturb measurements, are introduced by Mother Nature;
• The outcome reached by Nature matches that produced by the simulation.

To this point, those three requirements have never been satisfied -- the warmistas' simulations have yet to attain any standing for climate-change prediction.

6. The importance of deceit and motivation.

Many of the best known warmista "scientists" have been caught red-handed lying about their data, their techniques for "adjusting" it, and the reproducibility of their measurements. Additionally, as the East Anglia CRU documents make plain, these persons are not averse to using bullying tactics to deny dissenters a public voice. As the warmistas are the beneficiaries of large amounts of government funding that would come to a halt if their hypotheses were conclusively refuted, they have powerful reasons to shout down those who disagree. As their opponents have far smaller resources -- no access to public treasuries -- they are fatally hobbled in any contest of volume, despite their considerable numbers and eminence.

That's as thorough a destruction of the CAGW hypothesis as a scientific contention as was possible at that time (February, 2010). The warmistas never improved their methods, their claims, or their ability to predict. Neither did they ever allow that any sort or quantity of evidence could cross-cut their claims. In short, they insisted that we accept CAGW on faith -- faith in them.

Any who invested their faith in the warmistas are now on notice that they've been conned.

The whole episode stands as a lesson to the credulous and the gullible. When the Main Stream Media's drums began to pound out the CAGW march, we should have been especially skeptical, in the best sense of that word: unwilling to commit in the absence of extensive evidence and successful predictions confirmed by multiple disinterested reviewers. Journalists love a "crisis," and the CAGW hypothesis provided them with one they could hardly resist. But journalism is not science, not even at its very best. It's merely a service of variable quality, vended to an audience in the hope of making money. Its claims must always be assessed in that light, especially when it aligns itself with persons and institutions screaming for totalitarian power over every kind and degree of human action.

The Thin End Of The Wedge

If you're not familiar with the name Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, he's the "filmmaker" who produced the YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims," on which the Obama Administration blamed the riots in Cairo and the lethal assault on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. He was arrested by the FBI and incarcerated for "parole violations" immediately afterward, and remains in jail to this day.

Columnist Rich Lowry has produced the ideal denunciation of this miscarriage of justice:

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

Alone among all the nations of the world, the United States of America has this statement in its chartering document:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have extended that statement to apply to all forms of expression and have imposed it upon state and local governments as well as on our federal Congress. So what's Nakoula Nakoula doing in jail?

The "filmmaker" has been lambasted from many directions as a lowlife, a slanderer, an incompetent, and so forth. So what? He's as entitled to the protections of the First Amendment as anyone else within American jurisdiction. But he's not enjoying any such protections at the moment.

Some years ago, dissident historian David Irving came out as a Holocaust denier: that is, one who disputes the generally accepted history of the Nazi slaughters of European Jews. The German government prosecuted Irving for his dissent, which he dared to express in several publications, and eventually succeeded in penalizing him for it with a substantial fine. Similarly, the French government successfully prosecuted academic Robert Faurisson for Holocaust denial. Such things have never occurred in the United States...until Nakoula Nakoula.

We have a few rather prominent Holocaust deniers here in the U.S. Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton come to mind at once.

Make no mistake: Irving and Faurisson are sons-of-bitches. (Yes, so are Farrakhan and Sharpton.) I'd cross the street to avoid them. I'd never endorse their odious views. Nor do I consider Nakoula Nakoula an icon of truth or fine filmmaking. But what did these men do that deserved criminal prosecution or punishment?

Does the "shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" exception apply to videos or other odious publications?

The judges on the post-World War II Nuremberg tribunals thought so. They sentenced Julius Streicher, editor-publisher of the Nazi rag Der Sturmer, to death by hanging, even though he'd never laid a finger on anyone. Their rationale was that by advocating and approving the Nazi regime's activities, he'd made himself culpable in their atrocities against Europe's Jews, much as one who commissions an assassin-for-hire is culpable in any homicides that ensue.

The rationale strikes me as thin. Nearly all Americans would agree that Streicher was a vile person of odious beliefs, but when you put the proposition to us in the abstract:

Should an individual be criminally liable for advocating or approving atrocious deeds?
How about for an opinion offensive to some recognized group or demographic?
How about for saying something the government would prefer not be said?

...we're likely to think it over a while, no matter how we answer.

We have a tangential situation developing today, illuminated by a man with whom I disagree about virtually everything:

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don't seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is what you mention, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That's an Obama initiative and it's a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn't gain anything from it – he doesn't get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don't even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of "material assistance to terror" to speech.

The case in question was a law group that was giving legal advice to groups on the terrorist list, which in itself has no moral or legal justification; it's an abomination. But if you look at the way it's been used, it becomes even more abhorrent (Nelson Mandela was on it until a couple of years ago.) And the wording of the colloquy is broad enough that it could very well mean that if, say, you meet with someone in a terrorist group and advise them to turn to nonviolent means, then that's material assistance to terrorism. I've met with people who are on the list and will continue to do so, and Obama wants to criminalize that, which is a plain attack on freedom of speech. I just don't understand why he's doing it.

(Courtesy of Bayou Renaissance Man)

Chomsky, while he's no beacon of freedom, occasionally says something respectable, though one might have to swallow hard to admit it. A few years ago, he came out in defense of the above-mentioned Robert Faurisson, not because he agreed with Faurisson, but because he thinks that a government should claim the power to "define historical truth and punish deviations from it" is fascism, plain and simple. I find that I must agree.

Defending the rights of sons-of-bitches is one of the hardest things to do...and one of the most important, because that's where a would-be tyrant always plants the thin end of the wedge.

Think it over -- and remember Martin Niemoller as you ponder it.

Knowledge, Faith, And Zealotry

Mark Butterworth's piece just below got me thinking about the difficulties involved in distinguishing claims of knowledge from statements of opinion, such that we can distinguish what may be known from what can only be believed or disbelieved. It's a good topic for a quiet Monday morning, all of whose "news" seems to be about the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner.

As with so many other questions over which men dispute, the key to the puzzle is linguistic: the accurate and appropriate use of words.

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Whenever we claim knowledge, we must provide all the following:

1. A compact yet definite statement of what we claim to know;
2. A sufficiently well-defined context to which our knowledge applies;
3. One or more predictions, whether explicit or implicit, that flow from our knowledge.

The first of these should require no explanation. No one can get by with a statement such as "I know everything." Knowledge must be expressed in definite statements that address real-world conditions and the events that occur within them.

The second requirement is actually a consequence of the first. A definite statement is a statement that addresses specific real-world conditions, not some completely unbounded, context-free domain. That's what it means to define, which is merely the English version of the Latin word "to limit."

The third requirement is also integral to any claim of knowledge: it must be testable, and the only possible test is prediction. Given the required context, do the predictions implied by the claim come true? If so, the claim becomes credible; if not, it can and must be dismissed.

Let's look at a couple of statements of knowledge as exercises. First up:

The sum of even numbers will be an even number.

We could test this one all day, creating column after column of even numbers and adding them up. We would never arrive at an odd sum, except by error. Indeed, as everything it refers to is an abstract object within a completely defined and enclosed artificial system, this statement is provable under the laws of that system (mathematics). It constitutes positive knowledge.

Our second trial will be more interesting:

An unsupported object will fall toward the Earth's center.

Hmmm. This one is very weakly supplied with specifics. What sort of "object?" And from where do we start? If a cloud of helium is chosen for our test object, the statement will fail. If we suspend a piece of pumice in water, the pumice will float, for yet another failure. Yet many other cases -- i.e., heavier-than-air objects left unsupported within Earth's atmosphere -- yield the predicted results. So the context for this statement must be refined, at the minimum, to embrace only those objects in those conditions.

Our third trial is the most important of all:

God notes each sparrow that falls.

This statement is not testable, for two reasons above all others:

• We have no agreed-upon identity for God;
• Even the most common conceptions of God put His actions outside verification.

Because the statement is not testable, the person who makes it is barred from claiming knowledge, regardless of how fervently he believes it.

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The three test cases above are examples of three sorts of human conviction:

• Mathematics;
• Science;
• Faith.

Mathematical knowledge -- i.e., a statement pertinent solely to objects within a well-defined formal system -- is the only sort that can be proved conclusively. This is possible specifically because such systems are completely abstract. Though they are sometimes applied to real-world conditions and events, they are capable of being divorced from external reality and manipulated in isolation. Thus, mathematical knowledge is atemporal.

Scientific knowledge -- i.e., a statement pertinent to objects in the physical realm, which have properties that are separable from any abstractions uttered about them -- cannot be proved conclusively, because the range of test cases for any such statement is infinite. However, a claim of scientific knowledge can be disproved: all it takes is one test case that fails to produce the predicted consequences. A series of hundreds or thousands of successfully tested predictions does not prove the claim; it merely allows us to build up confidence in it. Scientific knowledge, being about things that happen in observable reality, is inherently temporal.

Articles of faith are untestable propositions. They involve inherently undelimitable contexts, or contexts within which human powers of observation are nil. Thus, they can neither be proved nor disproved. They ought not to be classified as claims of knowledge...which does not render them uninteresting or irrelevant to the real world.

People don't argue about propositions in mathematics. Scientists sometimes argue over their conflicting claims, but once those claims become testable and are tested, argument will yield to experimental results. The propositional domain that occasions the most argument, despite the inherent impossibility of proving or disproving anything therein, is that of faith.

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He who takes up a cause of any sort will naturally be concerned to spread the underlying convictions to as many other persons as he can. But the convictions behind a cause have a particular place in the partition of claims: nearly all of them are articles of faith.

Convictions about politics and economics are especially important in this regard. The contexts within which statements about these things are made are seldom perfectly well defined. Worse, they're seldom perfectly reproducible. These difficulties make it effectively impossible to prove or disprove such statements. We who have strong political or economic convictions must never imagine that those convictions are permanently beyond disproof. That makes it impossible to argue conclusively that those who reject them are wrong.

Here we come to the distinction between the advocate and the zealot.

He who argues for a proposition beyond proof and disproof can only demonstrate its logical coherence and cite examples of where it has had beneficial effects. He cannot eliminate all doubt about it without providing that perfect definition of context mentioned above. Worse, even causally clear statements about politics or economics can be challenged with a one-word rejoinder: "When?" Politico-economic predictions seldom come with time thresholds -- i.e., the specific time after the stimulus is applied that the predicted effects will manifest -- which frees the skeptic to retain his skepticism about how much we really know.

The advocate will concede all this. He'll be aware of the nature of knowledge and the difficulty of predictions that involve inherently uncontrollable contexts. The zealot will not. He will insist that he's absolutely right despite all counter-arguments. In his frustration, he's likely to resort to distasteful non-arguments, including attacks upon the intelligence and character of those who reject his thesis.

The zealot's error is mistaking faith for knowledge.

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Many Gentle Readers will bridle at the above. We all have faith in certain propositions. Persons who are engaged in political or economic discourse are likely to be passionate about their particular faiths. But no degree of confidence in an idea, or emotional attachment to it, can transform faith into knowledge.

The central irony therein is that we who champion conservative, pro-freedom politico-economic ideas -- limited government, free markets, private arms rights, well-controlled borders, the privacy of the family, the sanctity of unborn life, and so forth -- are, on balance at least, far less likely to behave as zealots than those who oppose us. Leftists' inability to argue persuasively for their propositions evokes far more bad behavior from them than our spokesmen normally exhibit. There may be sin on both sides, but that doesn't mean the ledger of such things is balanced.

As Robert M. Pirsig noted in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, no one organizes marches or defames opponents over assertions that the Sun will rise in the east tomorrow. The moral in that observation should be impossible to miss.