Category Archives: Propaganda

Full Blame for Monstrous Aggression On Putin

14 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by in Foreign Policy, Propaganda

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One would think condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would be easy for anyone who cares about human rights. This action and the threats he’s made against the West are the work of a psychotic. Yet there are some who place the ultimate blame for his behavior on the West and on NATO in particular. These reactions range from “This is all our fault” to “He’s evil, but we should not have provoked him”. Other reactions are much wilder, such as “We’re hiding something in Ukraine” to “We orchestrated this whole thing.” I am a small-government classical liberal, and no one trusts government power less than I do. However, I certainly place more trust in Western governments than in Russia’s authoritarian regime. If the West deserves any blame here, it’s because we made it easy for Putin.

Authoritarian Longings

For certain Western conservatives who’ve developed a man-crush on the “strong leader” Putin, the first thing you should understand is that he is an inveterate gangster and thug. Brute force fascism has always defined his approach to governance and foreign policy. That’s how this so-called “genius” came to power: three Russian apartment buildings were bombed in 1999, an act believed to have been instigated by the Russian Federal Security Service, of which he was head. Putin blamed Chechen rebels, prompting an attack on Chechnya that led to his ascendency.

Even among more moderate voices we hear statements like this:

“Russia has an existential interest in keeping NATO away from his border.”

Existential? “His” border? NATO may have expanded to include members from Eastern Europe, but that didn’t change its basic defensive posture nor the Putin regime’s expansionist goals. Objectively, it might have been more in Russia’s existential interest to be less belligerent and avoid the kind of rogue-state trap it’s now sprung on itself.

There are a few so-called leading intellectuals in the West who have condemned NATO eastward expansion as the root cause of Russia’s vengeful mind set, such as George Kennan and John Mearsheimer. However, Russian scholar Stephan Kotkin says they have it all backwards:

“The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had nato not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before nato existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

I would even go further. I would say that nato expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today.”

Former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen agrees with that assessment, noting several early attempts at outreach to Russia:

“Russia is not a victim. We have reached out to Russia several times during history…. First, we approved the NATO Russia Founding Act in 1997…. Next time, it was in 2002, we reached out once again, established something very special, namely the NATO-Russia Council. And in 2010, we decided at a NATO-Russia summit that we would develop a strategic partnership between Russia and NATO.”

Nazis At the Kremlin

Putin contends that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified”, which is bizarre given the large Jewish population of Ukraine and its representation in leadership. Putin’s claim is also complete projection, as Melanie Willis has written:

“It is in fact Putin himself who has unleashed neo-Nazism on Ukraine using the Wagner Group. This is a private army of mercenaries financed by pro-Kremlin oligarchs. It’s led by Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence officer sporting Waffen-SS tattoos who allegedly named his outfit after Hitler’s favourite composer.

Far-right extremists comprise the core of this group, which has committed horrific atrocities across Africa, the Middle East and Ukraine as a front for Russian imperial policy. …

The Russian Imperial Movement, which has fought in Ukraine, was designated a terrorist organisation by the US in 2020 for training and funding neo-Nazi terrorists across the world in its military camps, which operate under the Russian security services’ eye.”

Love Letters To Soviet Monsters

As if to emphasize his bona fides as a vicious authoritarian, Putin lionizes the failed Soviet empire, as if to forgive the horrors perpetrated by the communists: millions of lives lost to the engineered Ukrainian famine of the Holodomer genocide in the 1930s, the widespread raping of Russian, Polish, German women by members of the Red Army at the end of World War II, the millions confined to concentration camps over the entire Soviet era, and the repression, murder, or exile of many others. And this is to say nothing of the long economic nightmare inflicted by communist central planners, including the denial of property rights to ordinary people in the USSR and its satellite states.

Also recall that Putin’s army has made a practice of bombing civilian targets in separate conflicts starting with Chechnya in 1999, Georgia in 2008, and Syria in 2015. Cluster bombs and thermobaric weapons were used against residential areas in all three of these actions, the first two of which were Russian invasions of sovereign nations, and the third was on behalf of the Bashar Assad regime. It’s no surprise that we’re now seeing atrocities committed at Putin’s behest in Ukraine, and it could get far worse.

NATO: Not All About Russia

Another thing to understand: NATO’s original and ongoing purpose goes far beyond simply defending against Soviet and now Russian aggression. Claire Berlinski has a good post on this subject. She quotes “A Short History of NATO”:

“In fact, the Alliance’s creation was part of a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration.”

Much of Europe was reduced to rubble after World War II, with many millions of soldiers and civilians dead. Homelessness and hunger were everywhere. Berlinski points to outbreaks of “militant nationalism” that plagued Europe in the wake of earlier crises.

“The enormity of the destruction transferred the responsibility for preserving Western civilization to the United States. …

Americans who resent Europeans for being reluctant to militarize and for placing so much importance on political integration should remember that this is the world we created. We insisted upon this. Europe had no choice. It’s very strange for Americans suddenly to view the United States’ greatest military and foreign policy achievement as a failure. It was the United States’ plan for Europe to focus on economic growth rather than maintaining large conventional armies …”

Indeed, this point was lost on Donald Trump. There is no question that European states should pay up to their commitments to NATO, and today more balance in those commitments is probably well-advised. However, as Berlinski notes, even when the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR dissolved, NATO’s role in ensuring European stability was still paramount. One might even say it ultimately required NATO expansion to the Eastern European states. And no, Russia was never promised that NATO would not expand to the east. That is a complete myth promoted by Putin and the Russian misinformation apparatus.

The rise of Russian belligerence over the past two decades meant that all three components of NATO’s original mission remained relevant. And through all that, NATO’s posture has remained defensive, not offensive. Yet many in the West have fallen for a continuing barrage of Russian propaganda and misinformation that the U.S. should withdraw from the alliance. On that, Berlinski says,

“It’s an idea very much like unilateral nuclear disarmament.”

The West Did Not Impede Putin

As a staunch Russian nationalist, Putin has always been butt-hurt about the fall of the USSR. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking he hasn’t been coddled to a significant degree by the West, even as he grew bolder in his provocations and bullying. I already discussed NATO’s attempts to reach out to Putin before 2010. This article recounts, from a series of tweets by Kyle Becker, the subsequent course of affairs. Becker notes the following:

  • As Secretary of State under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton approved the Uranium One deal giving Russia 20% of U.S. reserves.
  • In early 2010, the new START treaty left Russia with huge tactical nuclear advantages, and the agreement had very weak enforcement mechanisms.
  • Obama’s incredible hot-mic moment in 2012 caught him promising “more flexibility” to the Russians on ballistic missile defense after the November election.
  • The 2014 takeover of the Crimean Parliament and the subsequent rigged referendum to leave Ukraine was met with ineffective sanctions.
  • Missiles fired by pro-Russian forces took down a Malaysian Airlines flight over the Dunbas region in 2014. Earlier, Obama had denied Ukraine access to equipment that would have defended against anti-aircraft fire, and might have prevented the tragedy.

Even more recently, Joe Biden in January practically issued a pass to Russia on action against Ukraine: “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…” Well then! Townhall’s Matt Vespa says:

“Russia is invading because they’ve been getting away with using brute force for years, coupled with an eight-year administration in the United States that did all it could to weaken everyone around them. Obama did nothing when Crimea was seized. He did nothing when Russians established themselves in the Middle East… For a solid decade, the use of force has worked, and Biden being Obama’s former VP, he sees a continuation of that weakness. Putin was right in that regard, gaming out the West’s response to a senile U.S. president. What he did not expect was the tenacity of the Ukrainian resistance.”

The Biolabs Pretext

What about those biolabs in the Ukraine? Putin’s propaganda machine went into high gear to characterize the labs as threats of biological warfare on Russia’s border. Many Western populists and conservatives thought this seemed like a rational pretext for Putin’s actions, but without a shred of proof. We really don’t know what’s happening there, but biolabs are not exactly uncommon, and the vast preponderance of biological and virological research is benign. The mere existence of those facilities is certainly not synonymous with “bio-weapons” research, as many have taken for granted. And, of course, a biolab in the West is likely to be engaged in bio-defense research as well. You can be sure, however, that Putin has contemplated the use of bio-weapons against Ukraine.

Conclusion

Vladimir Putin has made ominous threats against NATO countries, but if he didn’t have a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons he’d be merely a bad actor from a low-tier industrial society, and without the clout to frighten the entire world. His belligerence is long-standing and quite out-of-hand, and it is unlikely to stop with Ukraine should he succeed in crushing it. That seems to be his intent. NATO and the West did not do anything to justify Putin’s conspiratorial fantasies. In fact, the West coddled Putin for far too long, to our detriment and to the horror of the Ukrainian people.

I’m trying to maintain some optimism that Putin’s miscalculations in this invasion will eventually lead to Russian defeat. At the very least, it may be impossible for his occupying forces to maintain control without disastrous consequences to them. That might eventually lead to a withdrawal, much as it did in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Western leaders still hope to find an “off-ramp” for Putin allowing him to save face and perhaps settle for small gains in the separatist regions. If so, I won’t be surprised to see repeat offenses from Putin in the future, either in Ukraine or elsewhere.

Parents and Taxpayers Confront Rogue Educrats

14 Thursday Oct 2021

Posted by in Critical Race Theory, Education, Propaganda, Uncategorized

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This Norman Rockwell painting is called “Freedom of Speech”. It depicts a Vermont dairy farmer speaking his mind at a school board meeting, and no, he is not a “domestic terrorist”! (A recent piece by Selina Zito reminded me of this painting.) Today, parents of schoolchildren have a very special reason to be upset: the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) as part of the regular curriculum. A better name for this vapid “theory” might be “critical race theology”, because it is no “theory” at all: it is a set of “woke” accusations leveled against “out groups” designated by leftists: whites, straights, men, and sometimes groups like Jews and Asians. Many people of color are just as dismayed as those among CRT’s targets because its wrongheaded and corrosive nature is so plain. CRT is itself straightforwardly racist.

Taxpayers have a place in this debate as well, at both the K-12 and public university levels. However, their role in funding the indoctrination taking place in public schools has been neglected in the story of the revolt against CRT.

The Parent Trap

Many parents have taken strong action in response to the CRT onslaught. Some have quietly removed their children from public schools, while others have chosen to register their objections with school officials, often at school board meetings. Also, there has been some success at the ballot box by dissident school board candidates. This is grass roots participatory democracy in action, local and vocal. Certainly parents have a greater stake in their childrens’ education than anyone (except the kids themselves). They have a right to know what’s being taught and to provide critical feedback to schools.

School officials, teachers unions, and CRT teacher-enthusiasts are not likely to be straightforward about whether CRT is actually taught, however. This link might help you see through the gaslighting to which we’ve all been subjected. This article discusses various political avenues for fighting CRT in the schools. And here’s a “tool kit” that might be helpful.

Garland’s Effrontery

To top it all off, recently we’ve witnessed an act of fascist authoritarianism by the U.S. Attorney General that, by all appearances, involves a conspiracy between the Biden Administration, top officials at the Department of Justice, and the National School Boards Association (NSBA). AG Merrick Garland’s memorandum of October 4 announced a “partnership among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.“ He did not provide actual evidence of threats against school boards or personnel, however. Yet Garland is willing to treat interested parents as if they are domestic terrorists! His memorandum is a thinly veiled warning to anyone having the temerity to confront school authorities on issues like CRT, as well as school mask mandates (which are ineffective, unnecessary, and detrimental to learning, socialization, and the psychological well being of children). Furthermore, we now know of an obvious conflict of interest: Garland’s daughter is married to the cofounder of Panorama Education, which sells training materials for teachers of CRT.

While Garland’s attempt to undercut free speech might chill the willingness of some parents to speak out against CRT in the schools, many refuse to back down. The following is an excerpt from a letter to the NSBA written on behalf of 427,000 parent-members of 21 organizations:

“Our organizations unequivocally oppose violence and find it deeply troubling that you imply otherwise about concerned citizens who care deeply about their community’s children – and who are concerned by the direction that America’s schools have taken.

  • Citizens are angry that school boards and school officials around the country are restricting access to public meetings, limiting public comment, and in some cases conducting business via text messages in violation of state open meetings laws.
  • They are angry that schools are charging them thousands of dollars in public records requests to view curriculum and training materials that impact their children and that should be open to the public by default.
  • They are angry that pandemic-related learning losses have compounded the already-low reading, writing, and math proficiency rates in America’s schools.
  • They are angry that rather than focusing on declining student achievement, large numbers of districts have chosen to fund, often with hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money, “social justice” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs with finite resources.”

Insularity At the Board

I’ll be surprised if Garland’s memorandum doesn’t inspire many parents to push harder against CRT in their local schools. However, getting in front of school boards is not always easy, thanks to restricted access for public comment. Here’s an example of the draconian reaction by school authorities in their effort to silence parents, from Orange County, CA. In my own local school district in Missouri, making a short comment at a board meeting first requires submission of a request detailing the subject or question you wish to address to the board. Not only can they simply ignore your request, but it also gives them an opportunity to “circle the wagons” in advance, as it were, even calling upon various “friends of the board” to attend en masse.

The leftists who support CRT fight dirty, as this article notes:

“Nicole Solas, a mother who has complained about her school board, has been harassed and even sued by the authorities. Go ahead, ‘arrest me,’ she said on Twitter. ‘They wanted to publicly humiliate me,’ she said. ‘They paid a PR firm to call me a racist in the national media. So they really wanted to ostracize me from my community.’”

The anger of parents toward this bankrupt philosophy in our schools, and its belligerent proponents, is well justified. Parents obviously have the biggest stake in this controversy. My kids are grown, but I’m angry too, in part because the once-fine education offered by our school district has digressed to brutish proselytization about victimhood, its supposed perpetrators, and the emphasis on the Left’s version of “social justice”. I’m also angry as a taxpayer. While the student population might shrink as decent families abandon the brainwashing camps in favor of private schools or home schooling, does anyone expect the tax bill to decline commensurately? At all? School taxes should be a ripe area for activism, because lots of people don’t want to pay for this shit!

Our Taxes, Our Schools?

Opponents of CRT won a victory of sorts this summer when the U.S. Department of Education amended a proposal that would have prioritized CRT initiatives in awarding grant money.

“The Department of Education withdrew ‘the requirement that grantees incorporate curriculum and instruction based on or similar to the 1619 Project or the works of Ibram X. Kendi.’”

Hooray for that. And in August, the U.S. Senate passed a “STOP CRT” amendment to the otherwise misbegotten $3.5 trillion “social infrastructure” bill. The amendment would ban the use of federal funds for teaching CRT in schools. Of course, that the federal government has any role in funding local schools, and in shaping their curricula, is itself regrettable.

At the state level, many Republican office-holders seem unaware of the use of state resources for CRT in schools, as this piece about Indiana demonstrates. Perhaps they’ve been cowed, and are reluctant to comment for fear of being called racists by CRT proponents. Registering strong displeasure with state legislators regarding the onslaught of CRT is something all within our opposition should be doing.

Local taxes still account for most school funding. There’s obviously no way to get around school district bond servicing. Most ballot initiatives on school taxes appear at the behest of the school districts themselves, and generally those go in only one direction: up! General funding may be subject to reduction via ballot initiative, but petitions are usually necessary, and apparently those have been few and far between. A more promising avenue for wresting control over school funding are school voucher programs, whereby school funds (either state or local dollars) follow the student rather than remaining under the control of monopoly school districts. School choice is expanding across a number of states, having been given a boost by the pandemic. CRT might prove to be an additional impetus in some states. But parents should be careful: some private schools are just as brazen as public schools when it comes to peddling CRT. And there is the danger that vouchers, one day, will bring unwelcome government curriculum mandates.

Joining Arms

The widespread adoption of critical theology in public schools (and universities) is not only a corruption of education: it is institutional roguery and a misappropriation of taxpayer funds for political indoctrination. This is aggravated by the unresponsiveness of many school boards, administrators, and teachers. Parents have good cause to be infuriated, and so do taxpayers. They are natural allies in this struggle to win back our educational institutions.

On Bended Knee To the Intolerant Few of

01 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by in Identity Politics, Politics, Propaganda

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The U.S. Constitution was intended, among other things, to avoid a hazard common to purely democratic systems: a tyranny of the majority. Now, however, we’re threatened by a phenomenon that might have sounded absurd to the founding fathers: a tyranny of the minority. Hassan Nicholas Taleb describes how small, intolerant minorities can dominate the terms under which the rest of a society plays. Taleb discusses a few cases in point from the historical record. Some of these are fairly benign, like the evolution of certain dietary conventions, but the larger implications for a free society are grim. His discussion appears here, but it is actually a chapter of his book, “Skin In the Game”.

In a way, these phenomena are often “squeaky-wheel-gets-oiled” situations, but there’s more to it. Much depends on the cost of allowing an uncompromising minority to have its way. So, for example, the food and beverages we consume are usually kosher, but not many people notice the circled “U” on the label, and they don’t know the difference. That’s relatively low cost. In other cases, people are cowed into believing they’ve been insufficiently sensitive to the grievances of small groups, but they do not fully appreciate the cost (and futility) of proving their compassion. From Taleb:

“How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas.

The same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia stories.

Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.”

Taleb’s point runs counter to the theory that most forms of governance, either legal or cultural, work best when they reflect broad, prior consensus. He insists, however, that people are often willing to placate the most uncompromising parties. In a tolerant, liberal society, there is a certain willingness to give ground when grievances have a whiff of legitimacy. That’s well and good, but a liberal society may be plagued by the existence of enough saps who just want to get along with more poisonous elements. And those poor saps will find a way to defend their position and become useful idiots.

The intolerant and intransigent minorities get the ball rolling with various grievances. Right or wrong, there are many disparate groups with perceived social or economic grievances. Their determination plays out in agitation of various kinds, sometimes rhetorical and sometimes violent. One way or another, and with the assistance of certain institutions, the grievances (and potential policies to deal with them) may be integrated into the political views of a larger set of sympathetic listeners. To the extent the aggrieved can find common ground with other aggrieved groups, the movement grows.

Some institutions are likely to be more naturally sympathetic to claims of victimhood, such as academia and the press. These institutions are, in a real sense, “grievance aggregators”, along with community organizers of various kinds, and they are capable of accelerating the fire. Then, grievances have a way of becoming enshrined as permanent talking points, all earnest efforts at mitigation aside. Appeasement seems only to invite more demands.

Today, there is a special intransigence on social media that is difficult for many if not most well-meaning individuals to stand up against. You must be “woke” or face social and economic repercussions. The intolerant minority can adopt a number of tactics to gain cooperation. These are often intimations of bad faith including racism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or “bad-think” and “denialism” of any sort. Apparently these are all ripe targets. This potential ostracization gives rise to fear on the part of those who might otherwise think and speak independently.

All this goes for businesses as well, which are only too eager to avoid litigation or offending any and all “stakeholders”, an ever-growing class increasingly unrelated to the firm’s trade. As institutions, many large corporations have fallen well into the fold of wokeness. They attempt to virtue signal to consumers, workers, government, and the “community” in a bid to stay out front. That sets the stage for repercussions in the lives and careers of workers who might fear doxing by an intransigent minority. Just go along with the demands and you’ll be fine. In a version of Stockholm Syndrome, some of the intimidated will convince themselves to adopt the cloak of woke righteousness and signal their virtue! Be a hero! More useful idiots.

And so the intolerant minority wins. Or, a coalition of intolerant minorities and their sympathizers win. Taleb again:

“Clearly can democracy –by definition the majority — tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: ‘Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?’ Let’s go one step further, ‘Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?’

We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world.

So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. It is not permissible to use ‘American values’ or ‘Western principles’ in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.”

This article by Steve McCann struck a chord with me because it describes a culmination of the forces of intolerance: McCann draws a tight comparison between the tactics of the Left, who attempt to represent themselves as champions of the aggrieved, and German National Socialists in the 1920s and 30s. Here is the shared playbook:

  • Exploit racial division;
  • Censor your enemies;
  • Unleash a flood of propaganda and fake news;
  • Exploit class envy;
  • Incite street riots;
  • Exploit events (the Reichstag fire vs. the Capitol “riot”) to legislate one-party rule (the Enabling Act of 1934 vs. HR 1).

This has very much to do with the acceptance of pseudo-realities and outright lies about the state of social affairs, some of which become institutionalized (e.g., “systemic racism”, “follow the science”, “sustainability”, “fair trade”, “disparate impact”, “infrastructure plan”, Modern Monetary Theory, and the meaning of “liberalism”). Individuals frame their lot in relation to a “perfect” society, a utopianism that can’t ever be fully satisfied. “Failure” will always be blamed on elements of the status quo, like capitalism and anyone perceived to benefit from it (except perhaps for those “privileged” agitating against it).

Taleb’s observation that intolerant minorities tend to “win” might be easier to swallow now than it might have been a few years ago. It’s certainly a warning to anyone who might take comfort in thinking our present dysfunction will be fixed when a sensible majority gets good and fed up. They might be unhappy, but most tend to lack sufficient determination to avoid getting cowed by intolerant minorities. Suicide of the West indeed!

Imprecision and Unsettled Science

21 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Global Warming, Propaganda

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Last week I mentioned some of the inherent upward biases in the earth’s more recent surface temperature record. Measuring a “global” air temperature at the surface is an enormously complex task, requiring the aggregation of measurements taken using different methods and instruments (land stations, buoys, water buckets, ship water intakes, different kinds of thermometers) at points that are unevenly distributed across latitudes, longitudes, altitudes, and environments (sea, forest, mountain, and urban). Those measurements must be extrapolated to surrounding areas that are usually large and environmentally diverse. The task is made all the more difficult by the changing representation of measurements taken at these points, and changes in the environments at those points over time (e.g., urbanization). The spatial distribution of reports may change systematically and unsystematically with the time of day (especially onboard ships at sea).

The precision with which anything can be measured depends on the instrument used. Beyond that, there is often natural variation in the thing being measured. Some thermometers are better than others, and the quality of these instruments has varied tremendously over the roughly 165-year history of recorded land temperatures. The temperature itself at any location is subject to variation as the air shifts, but temperature readings are like snapshots taken at points in time, and may not be representative of areas nearby. In fact, the number of land weather stations used in constructing global temperatures has declined drastically since the 1970s, which implies an increasing error in approximating temperatures within each expanding area of coverage.

The point is that a statistical range of variation exists around each temperature measurement, and there is additional error introduced by vagaries of the aggregation process. David Henderson and Charles Hooper discuss the handling of temperature measurement errors in aggregation and in discussions of climate change. The upward trend in the “global” surface temperature between 1856 and 2004 was about 0.8° C, but a 95% confidence interval around that change is ±0.98° C. (I believe that is probably small given the sketchiness of the early records.) In other words, from a statistical perspective, one cannot reject the hypothesis that the global surface temperature was unchanged for the full period.

Henderson and Hooper make some other salient points related to the negligible energy impulse from carbon forcings relative to the massive impact of variations in solar energy and the uncertainty around the behavior of cloud formation. It’s little wonder that climate models relying on a carbon-forcing impact have erred so widely and consistently.

In addition to reinforcing the difficulty of measuring surface temperatures and modeling the climate, the implication of the Henderson and Hooper article is that policy should not be guided by measurements and models subject to so much uncertainty and such minor impulses or “signals”. The sheer cost of abating carbon emissions is huge, though some alternative means of doing so are better than others. Costs increase as the degree of abatement increases (or replacement of low-carbon alternatives), and I suspect that the incremental benefit decreases. Strict limits on carbon emissions reduce economic output. On a broad scale, that would impose a sacrifice of economic development and incomes in the non-industrialized world, not to mention low-income minorities in the developed world. One well-known estimate by William Nordhaus involved a 90% reduction in world carbon emissions by 2050. He calculated a total long-run cost of between $17 trillion and $22 trillion. Annually, the cost was about 3.5% of world GDP. The climate model Nordhaus used suggested that the reduction in global temperatures would be between 1.3º and 1.6º C, but in view of the foregoing, that range is highly speculative and likely to be an extreme exaggeration. And note the small width of the “confidence interval”. That range is not at all a confidence interval in the usual sense; it is a “stab” at the uncertainty in a forecast of something many years hence.  Nordhaus could not possibly have considered all sources of uncertainty in arriving at that range of temperature change, least of all the errors in measuring global temperature to begin with.

Climate change activists would do well to spend their Earth Day educating themselves about the facts of surface temperature measurement. Their usual prescription is to extract resources and coercively deny future economic gains in exchange for steps that might or might not solve a problem they insist is severe. The realities are that the “global temperature” is itself subject to great uncertainty, and its long-term trend over the historical record cannot be distinguished statistically from zero. In terms of impacting the climate, natural forces are much more powerful than carbon forcings. And the models on which activists depend are so rudimentary, and so error prone and biased historically, that taking your money to solve the problem implied by their forecasts is utter foolishness.

Fake News and Fake Virtue

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Free Speech, Propaganda

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hillary-clinton-tells-the-truth

Suddenly, since the election, “fake news” has become all the rage. Not that it’s a new phenomenon. All of us have come across it on social media. Most of us think we know it when we see it, and the recent election probably sensitized a great many of us to its cheap seduction. Some of it is satire, some is sincerely-held conspiracy theory, some is cooked-up, milli-penny click bait, and some of it is intended to drive an agenda.

Those forms of “fake news” are only the most obvious. I believe, for example, that the dangers of positively fake news are no greater than those posed by omission or demotion of news. It was rather obvious during the recent election campaign that news networks often ignored important stories that did not favor their own points of view. And since the death of the tyrant Fidel Castro, we’ve heard pronouncements that he was a “great leader” from a variety of sources who should know better; we’ve heard very little from them about his oppressive and murderous regime.

News as reported, and not reported, is often manipulated or mischaracterized to suit particular agendas. Reporters have their sources, and sources usually have agendas and stratagems in mind, which include rewarding reporters to get the coverage they desire. The manipulation even extends to news about science: grant-hungry and media-savvy members of the scientific community, and the pop-science community, know how to leverage it to their advantage.

Given the universal human capacity for bias, Roger Simon asks, only half in jest, whether all news is fake news. You can rely on so-called fact-checkers in an attempt to verify stories you find suspicious, but choose your fact checkers wisely because they are no better than the biases they bring to their duties. Let’s face it: facts are not always as clear-cut as we’d like. Simon makes his advisory on bias in reporting in the context of Mark Zuckerberg’s new-found passion to identify “fake news” and purveyors of “fake news”, and potentially to ban them from Facebook. No doubt his concern stems from accusations from angry Hillary Clinton supporters that Facebook failed to control the flow of “fake news” during the presidential campaign. He wants users to “flag” fake stories, but he knows that won’t always yield definitive conclusions. Simon quotes the Wall Street Journal:

“Facebook is turning to outside groups for help in fact-checking… It is also exploring a product that would label stories as false if they have been flagged as such by third-parties or users, and then show warnings to users who read or share the articles.

‘The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,’ [Zuckerberg] wrote. ‘We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible.’“

Well, that’s a relief! But what kind of chilling effect might be inflicted when the fact priests assign their marks? And what kind of fact-check/flagging escalation might be engendered among users? In the end, users and third-party “authorities” have biases. You can’t take any proscriptive action that will please them all. Better for hosts to keep their fingers off the scale, avoid censorship, and let users please themselves!

Zuckerberg should know better than to think that “facts” are always easily discerned, that “fake” news is solely the province of crank blogs and flakey “new media” organizations, or that “fake news” has any political affiliation. Consider the following examples offered by A. Barton Hinkle at Reason.com:

“The [New York] Times’ record for disseminating agitprop dates back at least to the early 1930s, when Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for his reporting that denied the existence of famines in Soviet Russia—during a period when millions were dying of starvation.

More recently, The Times has given the nation the Jayson Blair fabrications—which it followed up with the infamous 2004 story, ‘Memos on Bush Are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says.’ It followed that up four years later with a story implying that GOP presidential candidate John McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist. (The lobbyist sued, and reached a settlement with the paper.)

Over the years other pillars of the media also have fallen on their faces. NBC News had to confess that it rigged GM trucks with incendiary devices for an explosive Dateline segment. The Washington Post gave up a Pulitzer after learning that Janet Cooke’s reporting about an 8-year-old heroin addict was false. In 1998 the Cincinnati Enquirer renounced its own series alleging dark doings by the Chiquita banana company. That same year, CNN retracted its story alleging ‘that the U.S. military used nerve gas in a mission to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War.’ The San Jose Mercury News had to denounce its own series alleging that the CIA was to blame for the crack cocaine epidemic. Rolling Stone just got hit with a big libel judgment for its now-retracted story about a rape at U.Va. And so on.“

Retractions are good, of course, but they aren’t always forthcoming, and they often receive little notice after the big splash of an initial report. The damage cannot be fully undone. Yet no one proposes to censor “the paper of record” or, with the exception of Fox News, the major television networks.

Edward Morrissey, writing at The Week, notes that the Trump election represented such a total breakdown in the accepted political wisdom that the identification of scapegoats was inevitable:

“Over the past week, the consensus Unified Theory from the media is this: Blame fake news. This explanation started with BuzzFeed’s analysis of Facebook over the past three months, which claimed that the top 20 best-performing ‘fake news’ articles got more engagement than the top 20 ‘mainstream news’ stories. …

There are also serious problems with the evidence BuzzFeed presents. As Timothy Carney points out at the Washington Examiner, the “real news” that Silverman uses for comparison are, in many cases, opinion pieces from liberal columnists. The top ‘real’ stories — which BuzzFeed presented in a graphic to compare against the top ‘fake’ stories — consist of four anti-Trump opinion pieces and a racy exposé of Melania Trump’s nude modeling from two decades ago.“

In Reason, Scott Shackford considers a proposed list of “fake news” sources compiled by a communications professor. Shackford says:

“… [Professor] Zimdars’ list is awful. It includes not just fake or parody sites; it includes sites with heavily ideological slants like Breitbart, LewRockwell.com, Liberty Unyielding, and Red State. These are not “fake news” sites. They are blogs that—much like Reason—have a mix of opinion and news content designed to advance a particular point of view. Red State has linked to pieces from Reason on multiple occasions, and years ago I wrote a guest commentary for Breitbart attempting to make a conservative case to support gay marriage recognition.“

Warren Meyer rightfully identifies the “fake news” outrage as an exercise in idealogical speech suppression, much like the left’s cavalier use of the term “hate speech”:

“The reason it is such a dangerous term for free speech is that there is no useful definition of hate speech, meaning that in practice it often comes to mean, ‘confrontational speech that I disagree with.’“

Worries about “fake” news are one thing, but perhaps we should be just as concerned about the “scourge of dumb news“, and the way it often supplants emphasis on more serious developments. Did the fracas over the Hamilton cast’s treatment of Mike Pence distract the media, and the public, from stories about Donald Trump’s potential conflicts of interest around the globe, which broke at about the same time? Here are some other examples of “dumb” news offered by Noah Rothman, the author of the last link:

“Colin Kaepernick, the Black Lives Matter movement, college-age adults devolving into their childlike selves, or pretentious celebrities politicizing otherwise apolitical events; for the right, these and other similar stories masquerade as and suffice for intellectual stimulation and political engagement. The left is similarly plagued by mock controversies. The faces printed on American currency notes, minority representation in film adaptations of comic books, and astrophysicists insensitive enough to announce feats of human engineering while wearing shirts with cartoon depictions of scantily clad women on them. This isn’t politics but, for many, it’s close enough.“

Okay, so what? We all choose news sources we prefer or discern to be reliable, interesting, or entertaining, and that’s wonderful. No one should presume to question the degree to which news and entertainment ought to intersect. I do not want protection from “fake news”, “dumb news”, or any news source that I prefer, least of all from the government. After all, if there is any entity that might wish to “control the narrative” it’s the government, or anyone who stands to gain from it’s power to coerce.