Quotulatiousness

December 4, 2009

Debunking the porn-violence link

Filed under: Randomness, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

After giving up all hope of finding “uncontaminated” study subjects, a Quebec researcher concludes that the long standing claim that viewing pornography leads to violence and sexual crimes doesn’t appear to be true:

Lajeunesse, unable to find any smut-free young chaps, carried out a detailed study on 20 students who admitted having a fondness for filth. It seems that 90 per cent of all porn is viewed on the internet nowadays, at least in French Canada. Unsurprisingly single chaps watch spend about four times as much time looking at porn as those in committed relationships.

“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality. In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional,” reports Lajeunesse.

“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship … Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy … men don’t want their partner to look like a porn star,” he adds.

The study was funded by Canada’s Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur la Violence Familiale et la Violence Faite aux Femmes (CRI-VIFF, or the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women). However Lajeunesse firmly rejected the idea that goggling over naughty pics, vids etc leads men to mistreat the ladies they encounter in real life.

Amusingly, while putting this post up, my iTunes playlist offered up Rough Trade’s “Crimes of Passion”.

PayPal detects phishing attempt . . . from PayPal

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

You know those bogus emails you get pretending to be from PayPal, including poisoned links? If you’re the conscientious type, you forward them on to the anti-phishing folks at PayPal, right? You’ll usually get a response saying something like You’re right, it does look suspicious:

Banks and financial institutions are fond of lecturing customers about the perils of phishing emails, the bogus messages that attempt to trick marks into handing over their login credentials to fraudulent sites. Yet many undo this good work by sending out emails themselves that invite users to click on a link and log into their account rather than going a safer route and telling users to use bookmarked versions of their site.

The problems of the former approach are neatly illustrated by a blog posting by Randy Abrams, a former Microsoft staffer who is now director of technical education at anti-virus firm Eset. Abrams complained about the inclusion of a link in an email from PayPal as it looked rather too much like a phishing email.

I’ve noticed a number of rather more sophisticated phishing attempts in the last couple of weeks, which makes this PayPal error all the more dangerous . . . because it lowers peoples’ wariness about other legitimate-seeming messages.

Don’t bother your pretty little heads about all this “science” stuff

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:20

The non-scientists among us (that’s you and you and you and . . .) should just take a pill, sit back, and stop trying to understand the science:

And history repeats itself with climate change. We tell you people of the imminent dangers from the earth warming, and what do you do? You mock us. You question our motives. People who can’t even convert Fahrenheit to Celsius try and tell us we did the science wrong. Now emails have leaked from the Climate Research Unit that apparently show that scientists were fixing the data and trying to suppress the scientific research of dissenters, and you people demand answers from us. I have one thing to say to that. How dare you!

You do not understand the first thing about climate research. Man-made global warming is settled science. Disaster is imminent. We know this. It is a fact. We don’t waste time on studies that say otherwise, the same way we don’t waste time on studies that assert that the earth is flat. We are very smart people, and when we say something is so, you should just accept it.

So you think what is in those emails is important? Well, what exactly do you know? Do you see the white lab coats we wear? That color symbolizes pure science. Were someone like you to wear one, within five minutes it would be stained with neon orange powdered cheese and wet with drool from you trying to comprehend the data sets people like me look at every day.

December 3, 2009

The hidden damage from Climategate

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Daniel Henninger correctly identifies the worst result of Climategate . . . not the still-ongoing debate about AGW, but the damage to science as a whole due to the unethical, unscientific, and (in some cases) illegal activities of the CRU:

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because “science” said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

The would-be green tyrants will recover from Climategate, but the rest of the scientific community will suffer for their sins. Malpractice and deliberate deceit in one area will continue to taint genuine scientists for years to come.

December 2, 2009

QotD: Thought

Filed under: Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:20

[Thoughts are] like cavalry charges in battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Alfred North Whitehead

Tiger’s beat(ing)

Filed under: Media, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:03

I don’t follow professional golf, so what little I knew of Tiger Woods was what the sportscasters managed to get in before I switched channels. I did think that he was an amazing golfer, and that he seemed to be well on his way to becoming the greatest golfer of his time (possibly of all time, depending on the measurement). So the sudden upheaval in his private life came as rather a surprise. According to Charles P. Pierce, there’s lots more surprises likely to be coming:

I can’t say I’m surprised — either by the allegations or by what’s ensued since Friday’s wreck. Back in 1997, one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger’s People at the International Management Group visibly got the vapors if you even implied anything about it. However, from that moment on, the marketing cocoon around him became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. The perfect marriage with the perfect kids slipped so easily into the narrative it seemed he’d been born married.

Anything dissonant was dealt with quickly and mercilessly. Tiger’s caddy, an otherwise unemployable thug named Steve Williams, regularly harassed any spectator whom Williams thought might eventually harsh his man’s mellow. The IMG handlers differed from Williams only in that they were slightly more polite. The golfing press became aware that stories about Tiger’s temper, say, or about his ties to unsavory corporate grifters, would mean the end of access to the only golfer in the world who matters. There is a quick way to tell now which journalists have made this devil’s bargain and which ones haven’t — the ones insisting that this “accident” is somehow “not a story” are the sopranos in the chorus.

But the more impenetrable Tiger’s cocoon was, the more fragile it became. It was increasingly vulnerable to anything that happened that was out of the control of the people who built and sustained it, and the events of last week certainly qualify. Now he’s got one of those major Media Things on his hands, and there is nothing that he, nor IMG, nor the clinging sponsors, nor anyone else can do about it. He is going to be everyone’s breakfast for the foreseeable future. (Among his many headaches, there is absolutely no way that the Enquirer quits on this story. See Edwards, John.) And he’s going to be some kind of punch line for the most of the rest of his public career. There is some historical irony in all that, and not just for myself.

H/T to Matt Welch for the link.

Thought for tension-reduction for air travellers

Filed under: Middle East, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:43

Just think how therapeutic it would be for air travellers, having had to go through the Security Theatre production of shoe removal to, in some small way, pay back the man who brought it to them? Place life-sized statues of Richard Reid at the clearance point for all airport security lines. You’d have the opportunity to embrace an old Iraqi custom of using shoes to show your lack of respect . . . and they’d already be off your feet, ready for deployment.

Defining Obamanomics

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Timothy P. Carney gathers up the tea leaves and provides a useful definition of Obama’s economic philosophy, Obamanomics:

Although robust corporate-government collusion was hardly invented by the current administration, the U.S. has not seen such a consistent practitioner of corporatism in more than half a century. It’s fitting then to name this Big Business-Big Government practice Obamanomics.

Make no mistake — President Bush’s Wall Street bailout was probably America’s biggest dose of corporate socialism since World War II. But President Obama has seen Bush’s $700 billion and raised him another couple trillion — and counting.

The Laws of Obamanomics

Underlying Obamanomics are some basic economic facts and political realities. These are the Four Laws of Obamanomics, paired below with some of the lobbying strategies that exploit these laws.

1) During a legislative debate, whichever business has the best lobbyists is most likely to win the most favorable small print. Similarly, once a bill has passed, the business with the best lawyers and lobbyists will best be able to craft the regulations and learn how to game them. A big business, counting on this fact while lobbying for more government spending or control, is employing The Inside Game.

2) Regulation adds to overhead, and higher overhead crowds out smaller competitors and prevents startups from entering the industry. When corporations, knowing this, lobby for more regulation of their industry, I call this the Overhead Smash.

3) Bigger companies are often saddled by inertia, meaning robust competition is a threat. Adopting regulations that stultify the economy is the equivalent of raising the basketball hoop to twenty feet at half-time: it protects the lead of whichever team is ahead. When Big Business seeks to stultify the economy to hold back smaller competitors, I call it Gumming the Works.

4) Government regulation grants an air of legitimacy to businesses, boosting consumer confidence, often beyond what is warranted. This is The Confidence Game.

The Bush administration was one of the least libertarian in US history, but Barack Obama’s track record so far almost makes me nostalgic for Bush. Almost.

For deep greens, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Liberty — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:46

The headline says “Green movement in danger of crippling economy“, as if that isn’t part and parcel of hardcore Green philosophy:

A senior Tory attacked the “fixation” of the green movement with imposing ever tougher targets for reducing carbon emissions as having potentially “crippling” costs for the economy.

David Davis, an ex-shadow cabinet member and former party leadership challenger, said the UK was already facing a £55bn long-term price tag for its current policies and warned of a public backlash if more unpopular “green” measures were imposed.

His comments are likely to be seen as a direct challenge to the approach of David Cameron, who has made his commitment to tackling climate change a symbol of the way he has changed the party.

It’s certainly not true of all environmentalists, but it is a common trait among the most deeply committed. If reducing humanity’s impact on the environment is good, then eliminating it is better (and therefore eliminating humanity would be best). Few of them would be willing to state it quite that baldly, but it’s clearly a key factor in their belief system.

Why fearing global cooling makes more sense

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:28

With all the recent worries about the Earth warming up, it needs to be pointed out that rising temperatures may be bad but falling temperatures would undoubtedly be much worse:

When the environment is an evolutionary system that is based on adaption and survival of the fittest them how do you define damage? In terms of toxins/poisons its easy to do but in terms of temperature change then life has always adapted to it and either survived or perished depending depending on the ability to relocate. There is also the argument that if you help a species, make it easier then, like man you make them weaker. We are much less physiologically able to adapt than we have ever been because the comforts of our technologies have meant many of our evolutionary traits for survival are not being used. A variation in temperature could cause a change in habitats for many species. For some it will be a reduction of habitat and others an increase in habitat. Historically speaking there is no evidence that any warm period wiped out the earth or life on it. Rather the warm periods of the earth are when life has flourished on earth, vegetation has proliferated and habitats have increased. Whilst much has been made in global warming alarmism about cuddly polar bears becoming extinct (in fact polar bear numbers have increased fivefold), there has been little mention of all the species that would extend and increase their habits further poleward as the earth warmed and thus proliferate. Man likewise has been called a child of the tropics, look at how all our houses are heated to tropical temperatures and again history shows us during the warm periods civilizations flourish as does food supply.

However when we look at the cold this is quite a different story. The cold decimates nearly all life on earth as habitats are restricted, growing seasons reduce, vegetation is covered in snow and civilisations perish — history has given us ample examples of this. If we simply look at a microcosm of nature we see that animals living in cold areas often have to hibernate, their bodies adapted to the lack of food for a large part of the year. This is what the cold is all about.

Scotland may eliminate “double jeopardy”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:19

As England and Wales have already gotten rid of this ancient relic of former times, which prevented multiple prosecutions of a suspect for the same crime, Scotland is also considering getting rid of this encumbrance on state prosecution:

The centuries-old law preventing someone acquitted of a crime from being tried again in a Scottish court could be abolished.

But a review of the rule by the Scottish Law Commission also said any change in the law should not be imposed on cases retrospectively.

Of course, our noble prosecutors would never take advantage of this change to harass or punish anyone:

Patrick Layden, QC, lead commissioner on the review, said he believed the basic principles behind double jeopardy should remain.

He said it was up to parliament to decide whether or not retrials could be held in serious cases where strong new evidence became available after the accused was acquitted.

I understand the urge to change the law — it is frustrating to see a criminal get away with a crime due to insufficient evidence being available when the case goes to court. The BBC article specifically mentions a case where this seems to have happened, and quotes family members of the victims about their disappointment and anger over the acquittal.

That being said, I still think it’s a bad idea to allow the state to serially prosecute someone until they get a favourable result. The power and resource imbalance between a government and an individual provides far too much opportunity for the stronger party to eventually succeed — and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be correct about the actual guilt of the person being prosecuted (and we’ve certainly seen more faulty prosecutions lately as DNA evidence becomes easier and cheaper to evaluate).

December 1, 2009

Most ringing endorsement Stephen Harper has ever received

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:33

I never knew Harper had it in him:

This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

That’s George Monbiot, known to his enemies as “The Great Moonbat”, stumping for wavering Tory voters to rally to Harper’s side. I realize he doesn’t intend it to be read that way, but for Alberta, the tar sand project is their biggest economic project for this century, and any criticism is taken as an attack on their economic future.

QotD: Nomenclature, 2.0

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:28

Paused over lunch to roll through the Deadpool on TechCrunch, reading about expired internet companies. Been a while. Most had to do with “social media,” and most got millions of dollars to produce a novel way where X could connect Y with P using Z, and then: profit! The names of these companies makes me weep:

Zopo, Lefora, Meetro, Ning, Sinopio, CapaZoo, Joox, Foonz.

These are not businesses. These are characters in a pre-school TV show. I have a tough time imagining a hard-nosed venture capitalist saying Well, it’s an interesting idea you have, and on behalf of my group, we’re willing to invest $12 million in Shagafumoo.

James Lileks, Bleat, 2009-12-01

“Global warming is like pornography for Big Government addicts”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

The mainstream media is still doing a great job of ignoring or minimizing the potential impact of the CRU data leak. Doctor Zero contrasts the gullibility (or worse) of the political classes with the wariness of business people:

Few recent events have illustrated the ineptitude, and political agenda, of the mainstream media more dramatically than “Climagate.” The revelation of email correspondence from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, documenting various attempts to suppress data and manipulate scientific “consensus” with thuggish tactics, confirms what critics of the global-warming movement have always maintained: it has a lot more to do with money and politics than science. In fact, the global-warming movement is essentially the opposite of science — the manipulation and destruction of empirical data to support a theory whose accuracy was decided in advance.

[. . .]

An objective media would respond to this blockbuster news story with front-page headlines and “special report” television treatment. By now, the authors of the incriminating Climate Research Unit emails would be infamous around the world. Top operators of the global warming racket, such as Al Gore, would be hiding in their mansions, afraid to face the mob of angry reporters gathered outside. Liberals love to accuse big corporations of manufacturing crises and taking advantage of consumers with false product information and deceptive advertising. Here is the paramount example of those offenses, on a scale that would widen the eyes of the greatest titans of industry. If a private corporation had conducted a scam as vast, and as destructive to the prosperity of nations — and the aspirations of the working poor…

… but no private corporation could do anything like this, could they? The global warming scam is the kind of crime that only Big Government can mastermind.

Private industry makes plenty of mistakes, but the global warming scam is defined by its utter contempt for costs and benefits — the laws of gravity that hold businesses in orbit around the free market. The global warming cult maintains that no chances can be taken — we must ignore all reservations and contrary evidence, and proceed as if the worst possible outcomes are inevitable, unless we take drastic action. We have to take this action immediately — not even the slightest delay is acceptable. Members of the global warming cult provide constantly shifting dates for environmental doomsday, painting dire pictures of coastal cities becoming aquariums after the polar ice caps melt.

US Army bows to the inevitable

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:23

With more than one in ten of the troops deployed to Afghanistan being female, the US Army had been trying desperately to prevent healthy young soldiers doing what healthy young soldiers are often most interested in. The army has finally acknowledged that their King Canute imitation wasn’t realistic, given human nature:

Last year, the U.S. Army in Afghanistan has removed the prohibition on sex between male and female soldiers. There are 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and about ten percent of them are female. So far this year, about fifteen percent of these female troops have had pregnancy tests, and a few percent of the female troops have gone home because they were pregnant.

Since the 1990s, the army has been big on clean living (or whatever you want to call it) in combat zones. No booze, no sex and not cavorting (you know what that means) with the locals. But with most of the troops in combat zones being young and single, things happened. Some couples got caught. Commanders got tired of having to punish (usually with an Article 15, which is just short of a court martial) troops for “unauthorized fornication.” So now it is, if not authorized, not likely to get you punished (aside from the occasional unexpected pregnancy).

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