Quotulatiousness

August 1, 2012

It’s not congressional gridlock: it’s abdication of responsibility

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:23

We’ve all seen journalists refer to the situation in the US congress as being “gridlocked”: the Democrats and Republicans just can’t manage to get along at all, leaving the system constipated and unable to function. Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy in The Hill point out that this is letting the members of congress off far too lightly:

Many observers and participants — including the entire GOP and Democratic leadership — are quick to cry gridlock and to blame inaction on some new awful hyper-partisan or ideological era.

But there isn’t gridlock, which usually results from Democrats and Republicans sharing power and clashing over alternative positions. Gridlock slows things down — almost always a good thing — but it doesn’t stop serious legislation from happening. Welfare reform, balanced budgets, defense cuts and capital-gains tax rate cuts in the 1990s were all the product of gridlock that slowly gave way to consensus.

And today’s Congress is more than happy to pass legislation when it suits members’ interests. In just the past few months, for instance, the ostensibly gridlocked Congress reauthorized the Export-Import Bank program that gives money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods; extended sharply reduced rates for government-subsidized student loans; re-upped the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airline service to rural communities; and voted against ending the 1705 loan-guarantee program that gave rise to green-tech boondoggles such as Solyndra and Abound. None of these were party-line votes — all enjoyed hearty support from both Democrats and Republicans.

[. . .]

What we’re actually witnessing — and have been for years now — is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for performing the most basic responsibilities of government. Despite the fiscal crisis that Washington knows will occur if it fails to deal with unsustainable spending and debt, it hasn’t managed to produce a federal budget in more than three years.

Badminton in the headlines, but not in a good way

Filed under: Britain, China, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

It’s not a sport that generally attracts a lot of attention during the Olympics, but several Badminton players are accused of deliberately losing games to secure better match-ups in the elimination round:

China’s Olympic sports delegation has begun an investigation into allegations two badminton players “deliberately lost” their match, state media say.

Doubles players Yu Yang and Wang Xiaoli are among eight players charged by the Badminton World Federation (BWF) with “not using one’s best efforts to win”.

Four players from South Korea and two from Indonesia have also been charged.

Some of the players said they were saving energy. Reports say they wanted to lose to secure an easier draw.

It may not be a technical violation of the rules to “take it easy” in a non-critical game, but it does sound as if these particular players didn’t even bother to make it look like they were competing.

The match between the top-seeded Chinese duo and South Koreans Jung Kyung-eun and Kim Ha-na came under scrutiny after the longest rally in their game lasted four shots.

Match referee Thorsten Berg came on court at one point to warn the players, who also appeared to make deliberate errors.

Both pairs were already through to the quarter-finals.

The Chinese duo lost, meaning — Xinhua noted — that if both Chinese pairs continue to do well, they will not meet until the final.

Update: The IOC Badminton World Federation (BWF) brings out the ban hammer:

EIGHT female badminton players have been sent home from the Olympics, disqualified by the sport’s world federation after throwing matches in a case condemned by London Games boss Sebastian Coe as “depressing” and “unacceptable”.

A disciplinary hearing held this morning, which Australia’s badminton coach made a submission to, found that four players from South Korea, two from Indonesia and the competition’s top seeds from China deliberately tried to lose their qualifying matches in an attempt to manipulate their draws.

The four sets of doubles teams were charged after matches on Tuesday littered with basic errors. Accused by badminton’s international governing body of “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport”, they were ultimately found guilty of trying to lose with the motive of improving their positions for the knockout stages.

The spectators who attended the matches on Tuesday night will not be offered refunds by the London organizers, according to the BBC:

Update, the second: I couldn’t find any actual footage of the match in question until CTV posted it (not embeddable, unfortunately). It’s amazingly bad. The audience absolutely deserve a full refund.

Climate science as religion, complete with confession and absolution

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

In sp!ked, Rob Lyons explains why the “climate skeptic” credentials of Professor Richard A Muller don’t quite add up, and helpfully provides a guide to the larger skeptic community:

There has been much rejoicing among eco-commentators. Leo Hickman in the Guardian declared: ‘So, that’s it then. The climate wars are over. Climate sceptics have accepted the main tenets of climate science — that the world is warming and that humans are largely to blame — and we can all now get on to debating the real issue at hand: what, if anything, do we do about it?’ However, Hickman had to add ‘If only’. Apparently, while Muller is the right kind of sceptic, some pesky critics just won’t accept the ‘facts’. ‘The power of his findings lay in the journey he has undertaken to arrive at his conclusions’, suggests Hickman, but clearly some people don’t get it.

It sounds like a powerful argument: someone who has publicly taken a position for a few years, before putting up his hands and effectively saying: ‘You know what? I was wrong, and my fellow travellers were wrong, and we should just fall into line with the mainstream view.’ The conversion analogy is a good one. Here, instead of the unbeliever falling at the preacher’s feet and accepting Jesus into their lives, no longer able to resist the power of the Lord, we have the sceptic allowing the IPCC to drive out the devil of climate-change denial from within his soul.

Except, like many a modern faith healer’s performance, there’s something dodgy about this widespread interpretation. For starters, Muller was hardly what you would call a climate-change sceptic. By and large, he has been very accepting of the IPCC’s view of the problem of climate change. His claim to being a sceptic seems to relate to his acceptance that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, which was the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report and suggested that current temperatures are unprecedented, was simply the product of some sloppy science.

In spite of the media attempts to blacken the reputations of everyone who fails to fall into line with the IPCC’s orthodoxy, there are many different strains of disagreement with the official line:

But to a certain extent, this is all a false debate. There is no either/or. The leading climate sceptics all accept that humans have had some influence on the world’s climate. The argument is about how much human influence there is and what should be done about it.

Alarmists would argue that greenhouse-gas emissions are threatening to cook the planet and ultimately threaten humanity’s survival. At the very least, they see devastating destruction arising from global warming. For them, the only answer is the rapid decarbonisation of the world economy. Since the world is currently reliant on carbon-based fuels, this could mean an end to the drive for economic growth and the reorganisation of the economy and global politics. Anyone who disagrees is a ‘denier’. Some alarmists seriously suggest that debate should end now and anyone who continues to question the ‘consensus’ should be punished.

A few individuals aside, most climate sceptics think the world is moderately warmer than before, that humans have had some effect, but that most of the variation is natural and not particularly worrisome. Another band of sceptics — those who might be called ‘policy sceptics’, like Bjorn Lomborg and Roger Pielke Jr — broadly accept the IPCC’s view of temperature change and its causes. However, they think that the answer lies in devoting resources to technological development in the short term rather than a costly and probably futile attempt to decarbonise the world overnight. But even such policy disagreement is too much for the alarmists, who regularly pillory Lomborg in particular, yet it gets dressed up as ‘scientific fact’.

JourneyQuest S2E4: Spry Little Bugger

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Powered by WordPress