Well, besides the fact that I have two other interesting ideas in the hopper, this notion occurred to me and I thought I’d get it down before I forget.

This question is admittedly in the context of the BP/Gulf spill, but I want (on the outset) to make it clear that I am making no allegation here. I have no factual basis or even hearsay reports which would back up my question. But … the problem is, is that if my question has merit, there wouldn’t be would there?

Let me begin with a legal question about liability. 

Say I’m doing a particular activity, and am following the legal restrictions and regulations regarding that practice. But, what I don’t realize is that by following the legal regulations disaster is inevitable. That is I’m in a catch-22 situation, if I fail to do as required I break the law, if I do follow the law then a disaster occurs. Suppose “not doing” this thing is not really feasible. As an aside, I might mention it is for this reason that I think that regulatory approval should indemnify a company which follows said regulations from liability. 

But my question here doesn’t hinge on legal question but political ones. If the disaster that occurs turns out to loom large on the public stage then an investigation is undoubtedly going to follow. This investigation is going to closely tied with those same people and parts of the government which put the regulations in place which both led to the disaster and which were the responsibility of that same said part/party of the government.

So, here’s the question: How likely is the government culpability going to come out investigation? Will that side of it get a fair hearing? And furthermore, is it necessarily in the interest of the injured party to blame the government regulator when their livelihood depends on a working relationship with that same party? 

Consider the BP/Gulf disaster directly here. BP and all the Gulf oil contractors and drillers are required to use government provided survey and risk models in their business. How and what manner of safety devices are regulated by law, you can’t use something different or better, e.g., you have to use the mandated “cutoff valves” as specified. So it seems a big culprit in this story will be, as in the Challenger disaster, a failure in government run QC/QA practices. At the same time, I’m guessing it’s not in BPs interest in the long run to fight to have the blame correctly assigned with the feds as they (and everyone in their industry) has to work with the feds to get anything done. So, the government (especially in our semi-continual election season) will not want to be blamed. BP will not fight getting blamed. So, even if BP/Deepwater ultimately is not the true culprit here, they will in fact be made the fall guys. 

You know racism is seriously on the decline when the New York Times is left to complain about the insufficient diversity of third base coaches in baseball.

Highly-placed Muslims around the word are coming out against the mosque near Ground Zero.  In fact, there is apparently a widespread belief among Muslims that opposing any mosque construction is a sin, so we’re probably not hearing as much opposition as it out there.

For the purposes of the November campaign, Democrats won’t be trying to sell ObamaCare as a cost savings.  Rather, they’re going to try to sell it as an improvement to health care, never mind the cost.  Oh, and that cost?  Paid for by the wealthy, so don’t worry.  Like they have an unlimited supply of cash to finance this administration’s unprecedented red-ink-o-rama.  The link has loads of claims in a recent presentation and how they just don’t pass "Common Sense 101".  One of the slides says that the Dems will work to improve the bill.  For cryin’ out loud, it just passed!  Why wasn’t it improved before passing it, if the improvements are so obvious?

New unemployment claims rose by 500,000…unexpectedly!  We’ve tried it the Democrats way for over a year now, and the stimulus just ain’t stimulating anything.  But their solution to failed plans is more of the same.  Prepare for more unexpectedness in the months to come.

Chuck Asay says it best, in pictures.  (Click for a larger version.)

Good morning. So … my eldest daughter gets her drivers permit today. Tempus fugit, eh?

1. Iraq.
2. One man’s speculation on Mr Obama’s religious belief.
3. One might note that this “confusion” is self-inflicted. 
4. Diplomacy and US relations.
5. Have you given?
6. On freedom.
7. 19 years later.
8. Culture of corruption.
9. Stupid liberal tricks … noted.
10. Religious freedoms?
11. On the value of a woman.
12. Two visions.

The scientific method is taught and portrayed as a dispassionate rational dialectic between theory and experiment. Theories are propose, data is collected which forces refinement of theory and that continues. Occasionally, ala Mr Kuhn, a revolution occurs in which a major paradigm shift takes over and a radically new theory becomes ascendant. 

Alas, this has little to no relation to what actually occurs within science. Scientists are not dispassionate men judging between different competing theories analyzing experimental data to that end. They are instead emotional advocates of a particular theory which they espouse a theory which they find, well, beautiful (for a variety of reasons). Now, the reason we have success and progress in science is that the training and process of learning their particular specialty has programmed their emotional responses to align their aesthetic principles with the rigors of their discipline. 

to be continued … 

Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic:

[E]ven as crime has fallen, the sentences served by criminals have grown, thanks in large part to mandatory minimums and draconian three-strikes rules—politically popular measures that have shown little deterrent effect but have left the prison system overflowing with inmates.

So, we’ve been incarcerating more criminals, sentences are longer, and hence crime has fallen.  That’s a good thing, right?

Not according to Wood, who’s article starts with this sentence:

Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure.

OK, so, um, I’m confused.  What measure other than the crime rate is a better measure?

Good morning.

1. We had some discussions of teachers … and pay. It doesn’t seem to me they not highly paid.
2. More on St. Nicholas in the context of the Cordoba mosque.
3. A car that says “I am a geek” in all caps. Or is it a nerd?
4. A defense of theology from an outsider.
5. A photo contest.
6. Cold war -> Hot War?
7. More Muslims against “the” mosque.
8. Hockey stick and climate … and you can follow links to the original paper, in which I thought one of the unfortunate (for climate scientists) is the remark that little to no contributions have been garnered from the statistical academic community w.r.t. this matter.
9. Have kids.
10. To get up to speed on Austrian economics.
11. Noting the ephemeral future of the gay population. 

While recently I pointed to a remark that we shouldn’t believe things we hear just because we didn’t know that thing before. But … 

I heard that in Egypt during Ramadan, the month-long fast, Egyptians eat three times more than when the fast isn’t present. The explanation had to do with how Ramadan is observed. The Ramadan fast is from dawn to dusk, nothing is eaten during that time. However, after nightfall the fast is broken. And typically during the month of Ramadan people either are or entertain guests and make a feast of it. So much so that the average consumption is far greater during the fast, than afterwards.

I thought that odd. 

Didn’t the Beatles offer that one should never eat on an empty stomach?

Anthony Watts calls attention to a new study on the famed/infamous "hockey stick" graph purporting to show a huge uptick in global temperatures in the 20th century.

There is a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue. According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann.

Proxies are things like tree rings and ice core measurements, rather than actual thermometer readings.  From the paper’s abstract:

We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.

The first sentence says essentially that proxy data does not predict future temperatures any better than picking temperature numbers at random. 

Wow.

I imagine this study will get a good looking-over by those on both sides of the issue, but if it stands scrutiny it would be a huge blow to the anthropogenic global warming theory.  Stay tuned.

First there was the "morning after" pill, and now there’s the "five mornings after" pill.

The Food and Drug Administration approved a controversial new form of emergency contraception Friday that can prevent a pregnancy as many as five days after sex.

The decision to allow the sale of the pill, which will be marketed under the brand name "ella," was welcomed by family-planning proponents as a crucial new option to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But critics condemned the decision, arguing that it was misleading to approve ella as a contraceptive because the drug could also be used to induce an abortion.

Ella can cut the chances of becoming pregnant by about two-thirds for at least 120 hours after a contraceptive failure or unprotected sex, studies have shown. The only other emergency contraceptive on the market, the so-called morning-after pill sold as Plan B, is significantly less effective, becomes less effectual with each passing day and will not work after 72 hours.

Supporters and opponents both said the decision marked the clearest evidence of a shift in the influence of political ideology at the FDA. The last time the FDA considered an emergency contraceptive — making Plan B available without a prescription — the decision was mired in controversy amid similar concerns voiced by antiabortion activists. After repeated delays, Plan B was approved for sale to women 17 and older without a prescription.

We are being desensitized to the cheapening of life.  Abortion is significant surgery, but we can reduce it to the size of a pill.  The culture of death, and those peddling sex without consequences make a further advancement.

Good morning.

1. Stupid union tricks.
2. On the Mosque kerfuffle, our President leads the way, and his leadership has an effect, commentary from an Arabic media figure,  and a representative of the left wing media response. 
3. I have a question for those who offer that zoning should be blind to particularities of faith? What then of St. Nicholas (the Greek Orthodox church) which was an pre-existing church prior to 9/11 but which was damaged. The Greek diocese offered plans to rebuild the church but was rebuffed with the note that the height of their church should not be higher than the buildings planned for the Trade Center memorial. Oddly enough the plans for the Mosque in question are also higher than the buildings planned. It seems to me the left in their responses has a definite religious bias in their stance.
4. Statistics and preschool(ers).
5. Rockets and your toilet, two things you wouldn’t normally associate.
6. In praise of Mr Ryan.
7. Mr Geithner, on housing. Oddly enough what he said is just about exactly the same thing I wrote on Fan/Fred and their effect on the recession.
8. The Fed and the failure of monetary policy.
9. How not to do conservation.
10. Obama and the M1 Garand.

[I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

 #2.  Billy Graham. The Godfather  b. 1918 

Billy Graham has been the best known and most admired evangelical Christian in the world for decades. Through his early flamboyance, his clear and public Gospel preaching, his non-partisan access to the powerful, his move beyond fundamentalism, and his life of personal and ministry integrity, Billy Graham set the standard not only for evangelistic fidelity, but also as a figure admired all over the world, by believers and unbelievers alike.

While most would recognize Graham as the most visible and influential evangelical of the modern era, his shaping of the movement came primarily in the mid-20^th century. Together with Carl Henry and Harold J. Ockenga, Billy Graham was a 1950’s bridge from fundamentalist separatism to evangelical engagement. Henry rallied evangelicals to engage politics, academia, and other cultural spheres with The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947. He delivered a stinging rebuke to fundamentalists who had withdrawn from these public arenas. Billy Graham delivered the decisive break between evangelicals and fundamentalists in 1957. Graham turned down invitations to preach in New York City under the sponsorship of fundamentalist churches before accepting one from the liberal Protestant Council. [1]

Graham’s actions were strategic, not careless:

“For years, Billy Graham was lambasted for inviting theological liberals — as well as people unpopular in the Evangelical South, like Martin Luther King, Jr. — to his crusades. He invariably responded that the attendees were endorsing his cause, not the other way around. Graham knew that he would alienate some co-believers, but they were people he was happy to alienate. He was in the business of leading evangelicalism back into the American mainstream by distinguishing it from hard-core fundamentalism, one of whose most irritating characteristics was “second-degree separation,” a philosophy of ostracizing other Christians simply for dealing with people considered less spiritually pure. Graham’s national reputation flourished while that of his opponents suffered.” [2]

To guard his personal life, Graham famously had a policy that he would never be alone with a woman, other than his wife Ruth. This has come to be known as the Billy Graham Rule. Rev. Rick Warren and NFL quarterback Kurt Warner have claimed to follow the rule. Warner wrote in his book that he first applied the Billy Graham Rule in his marriage by not driving the babysitter home alone.

Graham has been a spiritual adviser to twelve United States presidents, from Harry Truman to Barack Obama (some, such as Richard Nixon, more than others). He is number seven on Gallup’s list of admired people in the 20th century.[3] It is said that Graham has preached in person to more people around the world than any other preacher in history. As of 2008, Graham’s lifetime audience, including radio and television broadcasts, topped 2.2 billion. More than 2.5 million people have come forward at his crusades to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.

Although Graham has had little involvement in activities beyond his own for many years, his early accomplishments, his commitment to the singular cause of evangelism, and his long life (he has outlived most of his contemporaries and his wife, Ruth) have made him the face of evangelicals for more than a generation. Although now retired and nearly immobilized by Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, he remains the iconic figure of the movement.

 [2] TIME, Dec. 1, 2006

 [3] http://www.pollingreport.com/20th.htm

Under the state-run health plan in Massachusetts, emergency room usage has gone up, the costs to the state and to patients has gone up, and many doctors are now refusing new patient that are only covered by the state plan.  In addition, business is booming for brokers that help other firms dump their current plan for the state-run one.  "Keep your current plan"?  Not likely.

As Bruce McQuain of Q&O notes, this epic is coming to a government near you.

MassCare is almost identical to ObamaCare – many of the same people who authored it were instrumental in putting the federal monstrosity together.  Reviewing the above 4 items, I’d say they’re 0 for 4 in their promises.  The sad thing is we had this example at a state level there to study and as usual, the media wasn’t able to manage the comparison during the weeks of hype surrounding the bill before its passage.

This is you life on ObamaCare.  More money, fewer choices, less care.

That’s what happens when the gullible buy into the “something for nothing” political promises of a pack of charlatans and snake oil salesmen.

None of this should be news, especially if the media had been doing its job, but Democrats will simply, once again, come up with excuses why it won’t happen this time, and, when it fails on cue to deliver the promises they made, will convince their blind followers that indeed what we wind up with is "better" than if they’d done nothing.

I’ve seen this movie before, and it always ends badly.

Good morning.

1. Radical Islam and malaria and an argument from analogy.
2. I liked the 2nd poster.
3. Guns from the left.
4. And two from the right in response to Mr Obama’s twin statements on the Mosque near ground zero, here and here.
5. Beauty and the bike-shop.
6. Yes, that’s right “web polls” are less accurate than professional opinion polls, which for themselves are as valuable as a bucket of spit.
7. Work and the bike.
8. A little religious freedom comes to Turkey.
9. Vaccinations.
10. Talking about quantum gravity.
11. Higher education.
12. On Mr Hitchens.

Recently I was asked my opinion on anthropogenic global warming. In the ensuing discussion, there was criticism of my rejection of “the majority opinion of ‘experts'” as a good or valid method to base my position. Having rejected that, I was asked by what means, if not the majority of experts, would I personal espouse as how to base your belief or understanding of the truth behind a matter which is in contention. In the following, first I lay out a number of different methods that people use to form opinions, next I briefly describe the two methods I try to follow.  Read the rest of this entry

That’s what happens when I take a Friday vacation day.

Democrats are in a struggle with Republicans to see who can repeal portions of ObamaCare first.  And now that Harry Reid has actually read the bill, he’s finally realized that this is going to hurt the hospitals in his state more than it’s going to help them.  As much as Democrats complained about the delays in getting the thing passed, you’d think they’d have read it by the time it did.

Put Obama in the Oval Office, and he’ll repair our standing with the world…or so went the campaign thought.  A poll of Arab public opinion, supposedly an area where Bush had destroyed our credibility, shows that little had changed.  In fact, some indicators are even worse than under the eeevil Bush.

A very interesting article suggesting that Evangelical Churches are the new “Mainline” Christian churches, and that the traditionally “mainline” denominations, as they have become more liberal, shrink and thus have less influence on society (spiritually speaking).  A very good interview of Rodney Stark, who’s been following this a long time.

I’ve been asked, regarding the Tea Partier’s wish to reduce government spending, why now?  Why not during Bush or Clinton or even Reagan.  I keep saying that the spending going on now is unprecedented, and Bruce McQuain explains some of the reasons and ramifications of this spend-fest.

How’s that stimulus stimulating the economy?  Not so well, actually.

The “classy” Left, taking its usual name-calling tact against the Tea Party.  And lest you dismiss this as some loner in a basement, it’s got huge funding partners.

And finally, a study in religious tolerance from Chuck Asay.  (Click for a larger image.)