Unintended Consequences, Volume 3,400,521

Many thanks to Anthony for sending me this item. It seems that ethanol is causing even more problems in the real world. As opposed to the do something right now world.

Today's Opinionjournal Political Diary (subscription only) has a fantastic John Fund item on political pandering to ethanol interests. Here's a taste:

The force-feeding of ethanol has now created its own national security and food security problems. Corn prices have nearly doubled, leading to huge increases in the price of tortillas in Mexico and a resulting increase in illegal immigration. Livestock owners can't afford to feed their animals. Food and drink manufacturers are struggling to buy corn and corn syrup. Environmentalists complain that ethanol is crowding out land set aside for conservation and wildlife programs. International aid groups lament that the U.S. is cutting back its charitable food giving because of the shortage of corn. Meanwhile, the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff the U.S. imposes on imported ethanol creates trade tensions with Brazil and other nations and blocks development of an international market in biofuels that really would help U.S. energy security.

Fund goes on to chide all of the serious presidential candidates in both parties who continue to pander to ethanol interests in Iowa.

Yes, and he should chide them. In fact, he should be screaming at them. It has never been easier to rape the planet than it is right now. The true believers damn the "big oil" interests while cheerfully shoveling money at the "big corn" interests. The earth is in trouble as a result. Less and less wildlife habitat, skyrocketing food prices, less food for the real starving in the world - and a lot of sanctimonious bloviation from the Al Gore acolytes and the pandering politicians. Dumb is dumb, folks. We are being forced into really, really bad choices by the loudest screechers in the political spectrum. They don't care who or what gets hurt - up to and including the entire planet - so long as they get their way.

They have a hell of a paving operation going on. Six lanes straight to hell.

categories Energy, Environment, Insanity | Gaius Tuesday, 9 October , 2007 | comments Comments Off

The DragonSpies Are Coming!

Oh no! Run away! The Washington Post reports that people at anti-war rallies are reporting being bugged. Or rather, being watched by bugs. Or something.

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies — an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

There are some really fascinating examples of some of the various projects going on at a number of labs on micro flying robots. The article is worth a read just for that. Gadget freaks will get a kick out of some of them. The real problem with things like this is simple - power. The amount of energy they can carry in whatever form is limited and so, therefore, are their range and effectiveness. That is going to be, I suspect, the real limiting factor in really using things like this. There will be uses - the development efforts show that there is serious attention being paid the the potential usefulness of such devices. But we really want to assure our friends on the left that there is nothing to fear. You are not being watched. These are not the 'droids you are looking for.

(Sweetness and Light has a rather telling photo - not taken by bugcam - of Ms. Alarcon the "witness" to this event. Spree is also watching.)

categories Animals, Insanity, Machines | Gaius | comments Comments (4)

Cascading Into Serfdom

An interesting article in the New York Times today about the "Cascade Effect" on scientific consensus. Specifically, the article is dealing with the theory - pushed as stone-tablet fact for generations - that a high fat diet caused heart disease and a host of other problems. It turns out that the facts are quite different after the pseudo-science is stripped away.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

As the article goes on to explain, the "fat causes heart disease" meme is just not true. It is not confirmed by scientific tests. But that did not stop the media and the politicians from beating holy heck out of any expert who happened to point that out. Sound like something else that is going on today? I've been pointing things like this out for a while. Look at ulcers. For generations doctors recommended treating ulcers by drinking milk. That, of course, is actually one of the worst possible things you can do.

So how much cascade thinking is going on in scientific and political circles right now? Think global warming. Draconian solutions are all the rage. Crippling economies is touted as the way to go. Simply deciding to build a large number of nuclear power plants would solve the emissions concerns that so many people profess to have these days.

UPDATE: Sissy Willis has a good post up about this: "There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion"

categories Energy, Environment | Gaius | comments Comments (6)

An Inconvenient List Of Materially False Statements

Noel Sheppard over at Newsbusters got his hands on the specific list of eleven falsehoods in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth as determined by a British court. (Earlier posts here and here.) The specifics were listed on this website, that of the political party Stewart Dimmock, the plaintiff in the suit, belongs to.

  • The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming.  The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
  • The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years.  The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
  • The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming.  The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
  • The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming.  The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
  • The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice.  It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
  • The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
  • The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching.  The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
  • The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously.  The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
  • The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
  • The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
  • The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand.  The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Those points have to be brought specifically to the attention of any students who view the film in British schools. As Noel observes, however:

In the end, a climate change skeptic in the States must hope that an American truck driver files such a lawsuit here so that a U.S. judge can make similar determinations.

Of course, even if one could find such an impartial jurist, our media wouldn't find it newsworthy, would they?

But at least people who read more widely than just what the MSM spoon feeds now have access to a legally binding court decision that prove that Al Gore conveniently tells lies to make his points.

categories Environment, Junk Science, Left Wing, Legal | Gaius | comments Comments (7)

The Million Pound Dollar Bank Note

I'm afraid this item is not as amusing as the Mark Twain short story The Million Pound Bank Note, but then, it isn't fiction. An unidentified man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania actually tried to pass a $1,000,000 bill in a supermarket. When the store manager confiscated the phony bill, the man flew into a rage.

The man slammed an electronic funds-transfer machine into the counter and reached for a scanner gun, police said.

Police arrested the man, who was not carrying identification and has refused to give his name to authorities. He is being held in the Allegheny County Jail.

Since 1969, the $100 bill is the largest note in circulation.

Well, so much for the reaction of people today as opposed to the ones in Twain's fictional London:

The proprietor took a look, gave a low, eloquent whistle, then made a dive for the pile of rejected clothing, and began to snatch it this way and that, talking all the time excitedly, and as if to himself:
     "Sell an eccentric millionaire such an unspeakable suit as that! Tod's a fool - a born fool. Always doing something like this. Drives every millionaire away from this place, because he can't tell a millionaire from a tramp, and never could. Ah, here's the thing I am after. Please get those things off, sir, and throw them in the fire. Do me the favor to put on this shirt and this suit; it's just the thing, the very thing - plain, rich, modest, and just ducally nobby; made to order for a foreign prince - you may know him, sir, his Serene Highness the Hospodar of Halifax; had to leave it with us and take a mourning-suit because his mother was going to die - which she didn't. But that's all right; we can't always have things the way we - that is, the way they - there! trousers all right, they fit you to a charm, sir; now the waistcoat; aha, right again! now the coat - Lord! look at that, now! Perfect - the whole thing! I never saw such a triumph in all my experience."

Ah, progress.

categories Criminal Masterminds | Gaius | comments Comments Off

Finding The Torrent

Some divers from Alaska have made an important find, the wreck of the sailing bark Torrent, south of the Kenai Peninsula. The wreck dates from 1868 when tidal currents slammed the ship into a reef. On board were the first contingent of US troops sent to Alaska after its purchase from Russia. All 155 people on board were rescued, but the ship has remained lost until the team found it last year.

"It's a very significant find because it's right after the purchase, during the transition from Russian to American authority," said Judy Bittner, a state historic preservation officer. "It's the very beginning of federal presence in Alaska and the establishment of order."

About 20 sailors and 15 of the soldiers wives and children were also on board.

A four-man dive team led by Steve Lloyd, owner of Anchorage's largest independent book store, found remnants of the wreckage in July. Until last week, they kept the discovery secret at the request of state officials, who wanted more time to document the site before any looters arrive.

"The actual depth of wreck site is still classified by state authorities," Lloyd said. "We have by no means found everything."

An array of objects, from guns, cannons, shoes and plates, are hidden beneath the broad leaves of giant kelp beds or concealed in caverns and crevices among massive boulders, Lloyd said.

"It's like walking through a field of tall grass and undergrowth looking for a baseball that you've lost," Lloyd said.

The Federal government has a database of shipwrecks in Alaskan waters here. Steve Lloyd has a website as well, with a lot of pictures and video of the find. (Warning, it appears to be running very slowly right now, probably due to heavy load generated by the linked AP article. The slide show will only play with Internet Explorer.)

categories History | Gaius | comments Comments Off

A Black And White World

Iapetus, one of Saturn's moons has long baffled scientists. It is distinctly black and white with a clearly defined dark leading edge facing the direction of its orbit and a very bright white trailing side. NASA/JPL scientists now believe they may have a handle on why this oddity is happening. They are describing a runaway process that transports water vapor from the warmer dark side to the frigid cold side.

NASA scientists are on the trail of Iapetus' mysterious dark side, which seems to be home to a bizarre "runaway" process that is transporting vaporized water ice from the dark areas to the white areas of the Saturnian moon.

This "thermal segregation" model may explain many details of the moon's strange and dramatically two-toned appearance, which have been revealed exquisitely in images collected during a recent close flyby of Iapetus by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.