¡Por una Venezuela libre!

Few things are more irritating than foreigners with ill-informed opinions about one's homeland's domestic policy, for example, Europeans who look down their noses at Americans for not being sufficiently socialist, despite our better overall outcomes.

I'll risk hypocrisy in congratulating the people of Venezuela for standing up to socialist tyrant Hugo Chavez, overcoming the usual threats of reprisals to reject the constitutional amendments that would expand his control of the economy and make him President for Life.

Sorry Hugo, 51% of your people decided to have no bananas today. On the bright side, this means that in just a few years, you can retire to the paradise known as Cuba.

The Sokal'd "climate skeptics" show their true colors.

For a while I've maintained that:

• Most climate skeptics are convinced that Man's activities are causing global waming.
  
• "Skeptic" is not a mere synonym for "doubter"; most of those who fancy themselves to be "climate skeptics" are not approaching the topic in a skeptical fashion.
  
• Of that number, many are merely parroting each other, without critically evaluating the arguments.
  

Like Schumpeter's enemies of capitalism, the "climate skeptics", or denialists, already know the verdict against the theory of anthropogenic global warming: what changes is the indictment. First the earth is not, in fact, warming, then the warming is a Milkanovitch cycle, or of solar origin, or a rebound from the (nonexistent) worldwide Little Ice Age. Climate models are not to be trusted, because they don't fit the data with an R^2 value of zero, because they don't predict next week's weather, because they're missing this feedback or that. Uncertainty means that a 5% chance becomes categorical doubt. We've all seen the game played before: it's foolishness, the scientific illiterates being willingly defrauded by the scientific illiterate, court-room flim-flam thrown up against physics, convincing to people who can't tell the difference.

At much risk to his reputation, Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey admitted that his approach has been less than honest. Bailey "hoped that the scientific evidence would lead to the conclusion that global warming would not be much of a problem, so that humanity could avoid the messy and highly politicized process of deciding what to do about it," (emphasis mine), and he let that hope cloud his judgement, to the point where he totally discounted computer simulations (how else can we tell what climatological theories predict?), instead of approaching the scientific question with a frank attitude and an open mind.

The boiler rooms, 'blogs, and talk-radio shows chugged on long after Bailey's admission, but they've been relatively quiet for the past month, having been caught with their pants down. Rush Limbaugh, Neil Craig and hundreds of other 'bloggers, and even Reason Magazine, promoted patent nonsense as a damning argument against the theory of anthropogenic global warming. The journal, "Journal of Geoclimatic Studies", was fake, its home university, Okinawa University, doesn't exist, moreover, there is no Department of Climatology at the University of Arizona. I work in the building that houses the closest thing, the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and I can tell you that there's no Dan Klein, either.

If that wasn't enough to alert the authors to the hoax, the text of the paper itself is a dead giveaway. Like Alan Sokal's foray into "cultural studies", it's nonsense interspersed with passages to flatter the prejudices of the targets. In this case, that means symbols strung together meaninglessly in place of formulas, and technolalia--for example, "concretised diachronic invariance"--that would make a Star Trek writer blush. The graphs are smooth curves where they should be of data points and error bars, and their scales are hilarious; just what does a sine curve mean on a semilog plot? A comparison between benthic bacterial mass and temperature is clearly the same hand-drawn squiggle translated and drawn on a different color on the same plot. Strong correlation, indeed! This was no subtle hoax and the denialists can't say they were tricked; the authors went out of their way to make the paper look bogus!

It was already doubtful that the denialists read scientific papers, and even more so that they read them critically. The discussion section, with its firm rebuttal of AGW, its gratuitous scare quotes around "consensus" and its portrayal of scientists as cowering in fear of funding agencies, was enough. We're left to conclude either that the denialists don't bother to check arguments for scientific merit (plausible, since they repeat debunked claims over and over) or that they can't distinguish between science and nonsense.

Regardless, they're on their heels. Score one for the Good Guys. Can we get to talking about solutions?

This happens all the time, and it usually doesn't make the papers.

Gunmen break into homes, demanding pot, sometimes murdering the occupants. Worse still, fighting back is a virtual death sentence.

Usually these goons wear bulletproof vests and blue shirts with yellow letters spelling out DEA. Sometimes they're anti-social characters from that same gang that harasses, intimidates, and even threatens to make up charges on the spot.

Today in Tucson, it may have been another group, although it's hard to tell from the story. Expect a manhunt; the government hates competition!

How to bring down an airliner II

I didn't try bringing a boxful on board today, but it may be possible to smuggle explosive or poison-gas precursors onboard using bouillon cubes, without requiring the participation of a dozen others as in the full bladder scheme.

The only major terrorist bombing of an airliner was carried out using a full pound of plastic explosive, set off by a barometric fuse, hidden in a fully functional tape deck. Accordingly, the TSA makes us take off our belts and shoes, regards breast milk with high suspicion, and forbids carrying on full bottles of contact-lens cleaner. If we were thinking of bringing explosive or poison precursors onboard as shampoo and conditioner, perhaps to be mixed on the suicide attackers head, it's not going to work. Gel colloids that can be squished out of a tube are out, but firmer gels that look like they're made from salt, hydrogenated oil, and autolyzed yeast extract may just make they cut; they seem solid to most people.

Barring that, bring on something that appears solid, with the chemicals micro-encapsulated inside (like scratch-and-sniff stickers). A plastic cube, a cell-phone case, a foam pillow, all could be insidious when combined with the complementary glass of water or when thrown in the toilet.

In order to keep us safe, TSA is going to have to rule out carry-ons altogether. Banning one phase of matter isn't enough; two others, and an infinite array of colloids, remain.

Those familiar with Frank Herbert's Dune may be worrying even more; not only can liquids be concealed in solids, but gases can perhaps be hidden in tissue. Prepare to get your teeth pulled if you want to fly!

Confusion or bias?

Hostility to foreign trade and worry about trade defecits is cited by Bryan Caplan in his Myth of the Rational Voter as evidence of the "anti-foreign bias". While I don't doubt that such a bias exists, I'm not convinced that this particular case can't be explained at least in part as mere confusion.

Many of today's voters came of age when the Bretton Woods system was still in place, thus in a time when the balance of payments was a serious political issue, and not something that would be smoothed out by the invisible hand of the market. Surely some of them--including commentators--haven't realized that trade defecits are nothing to worry about, and they've perhaps passed their concern down to a younger generation, which worries about trade defecits simply because they don't understand but see other people are worried. Could part of many of the biases cateogrized by Caplan be accounted for by a sort of instinctual, ignorance-driven groupthink, as opposed to innate statist preference?

Is David Horowitz hypersensitive about campus bias?

Education gadfly David Horowitz takes issue in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education with the assertion, contained in the American Association of University Professors's Freedom in the Classroom report, that "It is not indoctrination for professors to expect students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline."

That's so in fields like physics, chemistry, or climatology, but as Horowitz recognizes, it's not cleanly applicable to the humanities and social sciences. The AAUP goes on to say that "Students must remain free to question generally accepted beliefs if they can do so, in the words of the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and
Academic Tenure, using "a scholar's method and . . . in a scholar's spirit.""

This is ignored by Horowitz, who goes on to find the former statement "deeply troubling", bringing up Women's Studies as an example of what can go wrong and concluding that

If, as the AAUP contends, the assumptions of a certain discipline provide the criteria for what is academically "true," then intelligent-design advocates have only to establish a field of intelligent-design studies in order to teach their theories as truth — and astrologers, Republicans, or communists likewise. Indeed, if the attitude now enshrined in the new AAUP report should become an academic standard, it will spell the end of the modern research university as we know it.

Bombast! Applying the principles of the AAUP report, one must conclude that disciplines such as Women's Studies, based neither on the scientist's concept of truth nor the analytic philosopher's, have no place at the Academy. Disciplines founded on ideology meet the AAUP's narrow criterion for indoctrination

Indoctrination occurs only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them.

That Women's Studies and most other "studies" departments ought to be liquidated, their faculty merged into legitimate academic departments like sociology, history, and philosophy and judged by those disciplines' more rigorous standards, is a conclusion surely unpalatable to many; there is an unspoken gentlemans' agreement between academic departments that they not attack or interfere with each other. Accordingly, the AAUP report does not explicitly recommend shutting down problem departments.

One who follows Horowitz's work gets the impression that he takes primary issue with the faculty's pronounced leftist tendency. (The report on which the Inside Higher Education article is based relies on self-reporting and the archaic, often ridiculous "liberal-conservative" dimension, but its results give at least a crude impression of the faculty's political tendencies.) As usual, he's missing the heart of the problem. This isn't so much about student freedom as it is about the intellectual integrity of the academy when faced with organized third-rate scholars. As astutely noted by Jacques Barzun, ideologues don't do scholarship, they merely lay a sieve on a problem and see what comes through. We need to quit being "nice" to such sham-scholars, even if they have PhDs and even if they flatter our prejudices. Austrians don't belong in economics departments, Randist Objectivists have no place in academic philosophy, feminist or Marxist critics aren't really critics at all, and Women's Studies needs to die.

Cobden Press

I missed the announcement, but found out this morning in a sort of roundabout way that Cobden Press, which in the past brought hard-to-find books of interest to libertarians, ranging from von Mises's Liberalism to Tuccille's It usually begins with Ayn Rand back into print.

In its new incarnation, it is actively seeking original work.