Quotulatiousness

May 8, 2014

Weighty injustice

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:30

Scott Greenfield discusses something most of us have never given any though to:

In a New York Times op-ed. former AUSA turned Minnesota lawprof Mark Osler did a mitzvah by explaining the game played in drug sentencing. After noting some of the problems recently raised about mandatory minimums, the pardon game and absurdly long Guidelines sentences, he goes on:

    Unfortunately, none of this addresses a very basic underlying problem: We continue to use the weight of narcotics as a proxy for the culpability of an individual defendant, despite this policy’s utter failure. If a kingpin imports 15 kilograms of cocaine into the country and pays a trucker $400 to carry it, they both face the same potential sentence. That’s because the laws peg minimum and maximum sentences to the weight of the drugs at issue rather than to the actual role and responsibility of the defendant. It’s a lousy system, and one that has produced unjust sentences for too many low-level offenders, created racial disparities and crowded our prisons.

[…]

But when a person is prosecuted based upon an arbitrary distinction, that he carried a certain number of grams of dope (because we can all distinguish between the weight of 7 grams and 8, right?) it should reflect a significant difference in crime and sentence.

[Radley Balko] goes on to discuss a related, but separate, issue, that drug weight is aggregate rather than pure. In other words, ten kilos of cocaine can contain 9 kilos of baby laxative, cut as it’s called in the trade, and only one of active narcotic, but it’s still ten kilos for the purpose of charging and sentence. This is a policy decision, that the purity of the drug is not considered, even though it tells a great deal about where the defendant is on the food chain of drugs. The higher the purity, the higher on the food chain, as drugs get “stepped on,” or diluted, at each level down the chain.

This applies even with less applicable concepts, such as marijuana, where the weight of stalks and stems of seized marijuana plants can be included in aggregate weight even though they are useless as drugs. The message is, you pay by the pound, regardless. It simplified the police and prosecutorial function, even as it undermines any doctrinal justification for the charge and sentence.

George Orwell was a socialist, despite what many right-wingers piously believe

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

I’m not sure how you could characterize the great George Orwell as anything other than a socialist, unless you’ve never actually read any of his works:

Orwell's press card portrait, 1943

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

One wonders whether the confusion stems from what [Krystal Ball] thinks she knows about Orwell’s politics? Contrary to the devout wishes of many conservatives, it remains an indisputable fact that George Orwell was a socialist. He was not “confused” about his politics. He was not a “capitalist in waiting.” He was not merely “living in another time.” He was a socialist, and he believed that, “wholeheartedly applied as a world system,” socialism could solve humanity’s problem. By contrast, he was wholly appalled by capitalism, which he described as a “racket” and which he believed led inexorably to “dole queues, the scramble for markets and war.” Abandoning a comfortable upbringing that had included an education at Eton and a stint as an imperial policeman in Burma, Orwell not only went out into the streets to discover how the other half lived but went so far as to risk his life for the cause, fighting for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. (He was shot by a sniper, but survived.)

When the Right seized upon 1984 (which his publisher quipped to his irritation might be worth “a cool million votes to the Conservative party”), Orwell reacted with controlled anger, explaining in a letter that was published in Life magazine that,

    my novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labor party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism.

So far, so clear.

And yet, admirably, he never lost his independence of mind, writing in the very next line of his explanation that,

    I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.

This fear came to preoccupy him — and to the exclusion of almost everything else. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936,” he explained in Why I Write, “has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”

How he understood it was changing by the day. “Collectivism,” he warned in a 1944 book review, “leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war.” More important, perhaps, he admitted that this might always be so, suggesting that “there is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.” Like Wilde before him, he held that freedom of the intellect to be indispensable. The question: Could socialism accommodate it?

It is de rigeur these days to cast Orwell as being merely an anti-totalitarian socialist — a “democratic socialist,” if you will — and, in doing so to parrot the graduate student’s favorite assurance that, because Marxism has never been tried in any sufficiently developed country, its critics are condemning merely its “excesses.” Certainly, Orwell did not believe that the Soviet Union was in any meaningful way a “socialist” state: “Nothing,” he charged, “has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.” But, dearly as he hoped it could be realized, he also never quite managed to convince himself that his form of socialism was possible either — let alone that it could coexist with the English liberties he so sharply championed. For Orwell, it was not simply a matter of distinguishing between the “good” and “bad” Left, but worrying whether the former would lead always to the latter — a concern that the British literary classes, which indulged Stalin’s horrors to an unimaginable degree, did little to assuage.

Minnesota Vikings’ 2014 draft needs

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:00

Last year, in my annual pre-draft post, I admitted once again that I have no real idea who Minnesota will select, as I don’t follow college football. I’ve been reading the fan sites’ schizophrenic swerving back and forth among the various quarterbacks (this week, Bridgewater is hot garbage, but Bortles is the bomb: last week, Manziel was the man and Bortles was nowhere, etc.), as quarterback is the most obvious long-term need for the team (likely with their first round pick, although trading back to stockpile additional picks is another alternative).

While I don’t have much of a clue about who will be drafted, I do know that the team has certain positional needs that have not yet been addressed in free agency. The Vikings made some good acquisitions during the free agency feeding frenzy, with Linval Joseph at nose tackle and Captain Munnerlyn at cornerback filling two of the biggest deficiencies in 2013. Here are the top positions that should be addressed during the draft (in my opinion, anyway):

  • Quarterback. The Vikings have the 8th pick in the first round and given the depth of the talent this year thanks to a record number of college juniors who have declared themselves eligible for the draft, the talent pool is both broad and deep. There are three quarterbacks who have received the most attention in the run-up to the draft and one or more of them may be on the board when the Vikings are on the clock. They’ve got Matt Cassel under contract for 2014 and 2015 and Christian Ponder still has a year left on his rookie deal: the team chose not to exercise their fifth-year option on Ponder’s contract. I had assumed the team was hoping to trade Ponder for a draft pick this year, which might mean spending two draft picks on quarterbacks, one early and one late. However, in a press conference on Tuesday, Rick Spielman specifically ruled out trading Ponder either before or during the draft (and we’re free to believe him or not). Several bloggers are predicting the team will use the #8 pick on a defensive player and attempt to trade back into the bottom of the first round to take a quarterback (so they get the fifth-year option on his rookie contract).
  • Middle Linebacker. I was surprised to see the Vikings re-sign Jasper Brinkley after he spent a year with Arizona. He’s good against the run, but not very good at all defending the pass. Others on the roster include fan favourite Audie Cole (he of the back-to-back pick-sixes in preseason play as a rookie), and Michael Mauti (who had three ACL tears in his college career). However, the middle linebacker may not be as important to the new defensive scheme as it was in the Tampa-2 variant the Vikings ran last year — or the responsibilities are changed enough that defending receivers isn’t a priority.
  • Safety. Harrison Smith suffered a turf toe injury last year which kept him off the field for half the season, and the team struggled with filling the gap. Andrew Sendejo improved over the season, but drafting a safety to strengthen the passing defence would be a good move.
  • Cornerback. Xavier Rhodes made great strides in his rookie season and should be a fixture on the Vikings defence for several years if he continues to develop. New free agent signing Captain Munnerlyn may fill the role Antoine Winfield did so well: outside corner in base, then switching to slot corner in nickel coverage. Josh Robinson had a truly awful year in 2013, but he was playing in the slot and had reportedly never played that position in college. Drafting an outside corner makes a lot of sense for the Vikings, and it’s another position with good depth this year.
  • Running Back. Adrian Peterson is still the best running back in the game, but he’s getting to the point in his career where the vast majority of running backs start to decline. The Vikings had the luxury of a high-quality backup in Toby Gerhart, but he departed in free agency to get a chance to be a starter. With the new coaching staff, the Vikings are likely to de-emphasize the running game, so it’s unlikely the team would spend a high draft pick at this position, but a mid-round selection would make a great deal of sense.
  • Offensive Guard. The offensive line is one of the strengths of the team, but an upgrade might be in order at the left guard position. Charlie Johnson got a two-year contract to come back, but finding a rookie to be his understudy or even to replace him as a starter would make the line even better than it already is.
  • Tight End. The expensive John Carlson experiment came to a close after injuries kept Carlson off the field far too much and the team didn’t get much production for their big money investment as a result. Kyle Rudolph is very good and still improving, and Rhett Ellison does a good job of imitating Jim Kleinsasser as the big blocking tight end/H-back. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the Vikings invest a mid-to-late-round pick on a pass-catching tight end to pair with Rudolph.

Not on my list of priorities but a position that’s suddenly being discussed over the last few days is defensive tackle (specifically Pitt’s Aaron Donald). This might just be a side-effect of the extra two weeks of speculation caused by pushing the draft back into May, or it might indicate that the Vikings have their doubts about last year’s first rounder Sharif Floyd. Floyd played behind Kevin Williams and didn’t seem to have as much impact as you might hope for a first-round selection. While I don’t see the team spending another high pick on that position with so many other areas to address, I guess it should be considered as a possibility. I’d think trading back for more picks would be a much more likely outcome, however.

At 1500ESPN, Andrew Krammer lists the Vikings’ needs on offense and defence.

This all assumes that the Vikings stick with their current allocation of draft picks (eight, including an extra they got in the Percy Harvin trade from Seattle). There’s a strong sense that the Vikings might trade down to amass more picks in later rounds — Rick Spielman didn’t get the nickname “Trader Rick” for nothing. If they do want to move down in the first round, John Holler covered some of the possibilities (including positions I don’t think are worth a first round pick for the Vikings).

QotD: Raising consciousness

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:50

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.

Doris Lessing, “Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer”, New York Times, 1992-06-26 (reprinted 2007-10-13)

May 7, 2014

“I’ve been an oncologist for 20 years, and I have never, ever seen anything like this.”

Filed under: Business, Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:30

In Forbes, Matthew Herper looks at how Novartis is transforming itself in an attempt to conquer cancer:

“I’ve been an oncologist for 20 years,” says Grupp, “and I have never, ever seen anything like this.” Emily has become the poster child for a radical new treatment that Novartis, the third-biggest drug company on the Forbes Global 2000, is making one of the top priorities in its $9.9 billion research and development budget.

“I’ve told the team that resources are not an issue. Speed is the issue,” says Novartis Chief Executive Joseph Jimenez, 54. “I want to hear what it takes to run this phase III trial and to get this to market. You’re talking about patients who are about to die. The pain of having to turn patients away is such that we are going as fast as we can and not letting resources get in the way.”

A successful trial would prove a milestone in the fight against the demon that has plagued living things since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Coupled with the exploding capabilities of DNA-sequencing machines that can unlock the genetic code, recent drugs have delivered stunning results in lung cancer, melanoma and other deadly tumors, sometimes making them disappear entirely – albeit temporarily. Just last year the Food & Drug Administration approved nine targeted cancer drugs. It’s big business, too. According to data provider IMS Health, spending on oncology drugs was $91 billion last year, triple what it was in 2003.

But the developments at Penn point, tantalizingly, to something more, something that would rank among the great milestones in the history of mankind: a true cure. Of 25 children and 5 adults with Emily’s disease, ALL, 27 had a complete remission, in which cancer becomes undetectable. “It’s a stunning breakthrough,” says Sally Church, of drug development advisor Icarus Consultants. Says Crystal Mackall, who is developing similar treatments at the National Cancer Institute: “It really is a revolution. This is going to open the door for all sorts of cell-based and gene therapy for all kinds of disease because it’s going to demonstrate that it’s economically viable.”

H/T to Megan McArdle for the link.

Peak inequality in England – about 200 years ago

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

An interesting article that starts and ends talking about Thomas Piketty’s new book, but in the middle goes a long way to explain what happened to English aristocracy over the last few hundred years:

Extravagances like the stately homes of England made economic sense before the 19th century because the relative wages of servants and construction workers mostly fell from 1500 to 1800 as the supply of English workers slowly recovered in size from the Black Death of the 1340s.

But, outside of economic theory, the rich have often tended to get poorer, especially when they spend more than they make. It’s a common theme in English literature (Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust) and television (Downton Abbey). For instance, by the time of Winston Churchill’s birth in 1874, the English ultra-rich weren’t getting richer.

[…]

The long agricultural depression of 1873-1896 meant the great houses of England began falling apart. Wings had to be shut as servants found higher paying jobs in factories. Repairs could not be paid for.

The usual solutions were to first auction off the art collection, then marry American heiresses, as in Downton Abbey, where Countess Cora, played by Elizabeth McGovern, is from the Chicago Levinsons. Winston’s mother Jenny was from the Jeromes of Wall Street.

[…]

Servants had steadily become more expensive in England. One reason was the increase in jobs elsewhere in a modernizing economy. On Downton Abbey, to illustrate, a maid applies for a job in town as a secretary, which is a much better post.

A forgotten reason, though, was that the massive emigration from the British Isles reduced the supply of workers and thus raised their wages. While Tony Blair’s Labor Government liked to claim that Britain had always been a nation of immigrants, it was in truth a nation of emigrants. Today, there are perhaps two or even three times as many people descended from the British Isles living in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina as there are in Britain and Ireland. Without all that outflow, wages in Britain would be lower and land prices astronomical.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

David Harsanyi – The climate change debate is over

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

At The Federalist, David Harsanyi says the debate is over and the environmentalists have lost:

The truth is that even if Americans believed that scientists had seer-like abilities and the models were accurate, they would still be hesitant to embrace 19th century technology because they simply can’t afford it. Though I suspect most people instinctively understand that the environment has gotten better by almost every measure over the past 40 years, climate change activists ignore the massive benefits of carbon emitting fuels and technology that helps us become more productive and increasingly efficient.

Now, you can try and guilt trip everyone into compliance. You can batter them with distressing hypothetical scenarios. You can “educate” them on the issue from kindergarten onward, you can mainstream an array of Luddite ideas, you can browbeat society so they never utter a word of skepticism, but we still want to drive our cars everywhere. This is probably why over-the-top warnings and preposterous analogies have hit peak levels of absurdity.

And that’s saying something. Dr. John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, who was on media call for the National Climate Assessment release, once predicted global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020 and that sea levels would rise by 13 feet by the end of the century (not to mention, he co-authored a book with Paul Ehrlich in which he explained that “population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution…”). Malthusians never admit they’re wrong, they simply push the apocalypse out a couple of decades. I just don’t think people believe them anymore.

Yes, when asked, Americans perfunctorily tell pollsters that climate change matters to them. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 40 percent of Americans believe that climate change is a major threat. A Gallup poll survey found that around third of Americans personally worry about climate change. But when they’re not asked specifically about global warming, voters never bring the topic up. They’re most important concerns are the economy, jobs and debt. Though there is always strong support for the abstract idea of environmental regulation and “clean energy,” but when it comes some concrete policy it is nearly always unpopular. Few people want to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline. Few people support new emissions regulations. And I doubt another scaremongery study will change that reality.

“[T]he embarrassingly dumb pseudo-issue of ‘thick’ versus ‘thin’ libertarianism”

Filed under: Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:03

L. Neil Smith has been off working on a pair of novels, so he only recently heard about “thick” and “thin” libertarianism. He’s underwhelmed:

One item that has broken through my self-imposed “cone of silence” is the embarrassingly dumb pseudo-issue of “thick” versus “thin” libertarianism. It’s an idea almost as stupid as “right” versus “left” libertarianism.

Read and understand this: a libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatever; nor will a proper libertarian advocate the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else.

Individuals who act consistently with this principle are genuine libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

I call it the “Zero Aggression Principle”. Tell me: where’s the “right” and “left” to that? You’re either libertarian or you’re not. Period.

If I understand the pushers of this new conceptoid, they believe — and insist — there must be more to libertarianism than the Zero Aggression Principle, that we must incorporate into the movement and its underlying philosophy concerns that properly belong to creatures who have dirtied the word “liberal” so badly they now call themselves “progressives”.

Since I first became a conscious libertarian, 52 years ago (when you get to be my age, time flies whether you’re having fun or not), and certainly since the founding of the Libertarian Party, a decade later, there have always been individuals attempting to redefine libertarianism — usually downward—to suit their own prejudices and purposes.

[…]

I have always thought, and I believe that history backs me up in this, that it was a serious mistake to try to establish an Objectivist aesthetic. Aesthetics are purely arbitrary, a matter of whatever we’ve become accustomed to. Look at the way the idealized feminine form has changed (driven, some say, by the economics of feast and famine) from the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens to the images of Lesley “Twiggy” Lawson. Or, over a much shorter span, from Jayne Mansfield to Mia Farrow.

The purveyors of “thick” libertarianism are making a mistake as obvious and pathetically foolish as Rand’s. They want to take a 987 Porsche Boxter — the sleek, slim Zero Aggression Principle — glue cardboard shoeboxes, empty coffee cans, and dead cats on it at random, and herald it as something new and wonderful. But new and wonderful it ain’t.

It’s the same old crap.

A short term for “thick” libertarians is “liberals”.

QotD: Firefly‘s Kaylee

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

When I first auditioned for Firefly, I read the breakdown of the characters and the one that caught my eye was River. I read it and I thought, “Oh that sounds meaty, I like that.” There was a lot of crying and hysteria and every actor wants to do that. But then I read Kaylee, and they said, “Well actually Joss wants to see you for Kaylee,” and I thought “Oh,” because it said “chubby” on the breakdown, and I’m not chubby, and I didn’t know if they meant ‘Hollywood chubby’ or what. So I put myself on tape and kind of forgot about it, and then a few weeks later I got the call and I flew down to meet Joss, and he told me flat out. He said, “You know I need this character to be full of life, and by full of life I mean she has to look like she enjoys life. She has to look like she eats a burger now and then, and drinks a few beers once in a while.” He didn’t want her to be a typical size zero actress, which I understand. I’m naturally this way. I was a little taken aback because I’m really into yoga, and I like to stay healthy. But I loved the role so much it wasn’t like I was going to say no. So I just stuffed my face for about three weeks, and got to eat lots of mayonnaise. I got to eat doughnuts every morning and I felt so sick because I was so full all the time, but I had to keep eating like that to keep the weight on. It was interesting. My husband loved it — guys apparently like a little weight on women! It was awesome.

Jewel Staite, speaking onstage at the “Fusion” convention, 2004.

May 6, 2014

Reset the Net on June 5th

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

At Wired, Kim Zetter talks about an initiative to reclaim (some measure of) privacy on the internet:

A coalition of nearly two-dozen tech companies and civil liberties groups is launching a new fight against mass internet surveillance, hoping to battle the NSA in much the same way online campaigners pushed back on bad piracy legislation in 2012.

The new coalition, organized by Fight for the Future, is planning a Reset the Net day of action on June 5, the anniversary of the date the first Edward Snowden story broke detailing the government’s PRISM program, based on documents leaked by the former NSA contractor.

“Government spies have a weakness: they can hack anybody, but they can’t hack everybody,” the organizers behind the Reset the Net movement say in their video (above). “Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes, mistakes we can fix.”

To that end, the groups are calling on developers to add at least one NSA resistant feature to mobile apps, and on websites to add security features like SSL (Secure Socket Layer), HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security), and Perfect Forward Secrecy to better secure the communication of users and thwart government man-in-the-middle attacks.

Rick Wakeman on the best financial advice he ever received

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Lorraine McBride talks to Rick Wakeman about his career.

Has there ever been a time when you worried how you were going to pay the bills?

Yes, there have always been times like that. In the late Sixties, when I played at the Top Rank ballroom, being an organist meant carting my organ around to sessions, which cost two thirds of my earnings, on top of running a car, which was when I learnt the word “expenses”.

My rent cost £8 a week and I can remember being really short. In 1970, I was up in London looking for session work and Marc Bolan who was a great mate, gave me a session for Get It On. All I had to do was a glissando on the piano. I said to him afterwards, “You could have done that,” and he replied, “Well, you want your rent money don’t you?” Tough times, but when I joined Yes, I went from £18 a week to £50 a week.

Yes made a fortune, what did you spend it on?

We were all told to go out and buy a nice house, which was an eye-opener because I’d only known a two-up, two-down and a Ford Anglia. Suddenly we were talking five-bed, des-res. I remember looking around one house for sale in Gerrards Cross and the lady said, “This is the breakfast room.” I said: “What, just for breakfast?” because it was just a different world.

Lots of rock stars get ripped off, did you learn any tough lessons?

Yes, everybody in the business did. One thing you start to learn, usually too late, is that being top of the tree doesn’t last forever. You drop down a few branches and find your position but you set yourself a lifestyle that requires “top of the tree” earnings to pay for it. Then of course, you have the unexpected events like a divorce of which I’ve had three.

Suddenly you grow up very quickly and certainly when a problem hits, you back-pedal to try and work out how to sort it out. I was lucky. I had a very good accountant who helped tremendously and I learnt to listen but it took a long time. It probably wasn’t until the turn of the millennium when I found myself in yet another divorce, when the situation seems unbelievable, you really start to listen.

[…]

What’s been your best financial move?

Undoubtedly listening to David Bowie who said: “Be your own man and don’t listen to people who don’t know a hatchet from a crotchet and try to fulfil their own ideas through you because they haven’t got any.” I wanted to do Journey to the Centre of the Earth with an orchestra but there wasn’t enough money from the record company. I ended up mortgaging my house, selling everything I owned. I begged, borrowed and stole to do it. But the record company didn’t want it and I faced losing everything because I was so heavily in debt.

Eventually my record company in America loved it, insisted it was released and it sold 15 million copies and that really taught me to be my own man. Spending money I didn’t have was simply my best financial decision because if I hadn’t done it, 40 years on, I wouldn’t be doing my shows now.

What is Canada’s interest in Ukraine?

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

In the Globe and Mail, J.L. Granatstein spells out why the situation in Ukraine deserves the attention of the Canadian government:

Canada has no direct economic or political interest in Ukraine. Canadians of Ukrainian descent surely do, but Canada’s national interests cannot and should not be determined by components of our multicultural society. Our national interests are, first and foremost, the protection of our people, territory, and national unity, co-operation with our great neighbour and economic growth and well-being.

But there is another precept in any list of Canadian national interests – co-operation with our allies in the defence and advancement of freedom and democracy. Canadians have fought wars for that principle in the past, and more than 100,000 Canadians have died for it. The Russian threat to Ukraine surely is a challenge to this Canadian national interest.

Nothing here suggests that Ukraine is a perfect democracy threatened by an expansionist Russia. The Kiev government has been a badly run kleptocracy, corrupt, and incompetent, as the pathetic present state of its military suggests. The toppling of the regime of Viktor Yanukovych was a populist, largely democratic revolt, led by democratic forces but with a sprinkling of far right nationalist groups. The presence of these quasi-fascist and anti-Semitic elements provided the Vladimir Putin government in Moscow with the pretext it needed to rescue Crimea from the clutches of anti-Russia forces and to claim, as it backs pro-Moscow elements in eastern Ukraine, that it is supporting the legitimacy of the Yanukovych government.

[…]

The Canadian government has not received much praise for its tough-talking stance. Though tepidly supported by the Opposition parties, Ottawa’s position has widely been seen as pandering to the large Ukrainian-Canadian vote, and many on the left and right have attacked the ultra-nationalist tilt of the “democratic” groups in Ukraine or called for isolationism to be the only proper Canadian stance. Their strictures may even be correct, and certainly none can deny that the Harper government plays domestic ethnic politics with skill.

But there remains that Canadian national interest in supporting freedom. Ukraine is no democracy but it might become one; it deserves the opportunity to find its place as part of the European Union, as a neutral state trading both east and west, or even as a federation with its eastern provinces leaning to Russia. But whatever the choice, that ought to be made by Ukrainians, not by Moscow’s agitators. The Canadian political response, while not exactly measured in its decibel count, has been appropriate, and so too are the Canadian and allied military moves. Mr. Putin has behaved like the KGB thug he was and remains, and the caution sign needed to be displayed lest he look beyond Ukraine.

Climate change and positive effects

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:30

Matt Ridley explains that according to the experts, it’s believed that ongoing climate change actually provides net benefits for most of this century:

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.

At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.

There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today — and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies [PDF] of the effects of future climate trends.

To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3˚C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8˚C of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century — if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensis, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it’s a long way off.

[…]

You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.

The hidden epidemic of rape on campus

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:34

I recently saw a claim that nearly one in five US women attending university are subject to rape or sexual assault during their academic careers. If the situation is that dangerous, why haven’t the universities and campus police done something to crack down on this crime wave? That’s because it’s not actually true: only by merging a whole range of unwelcome or unwanted contacts (or even post facto “regrets”) in with genuine criminal activity do we get to a number close to 20% of the female student population. This is not in any way to minimize the seriousness of actual rape, but conflating everything from “microaggressions” through sexual harassment all the way to sexual assault in the same category is a terrible way to help those who are the actual victims of crime. In Time, Cathy Young discusses the recent White House report on campus sexual assault:

The administration’s effort, which made headlines last week with a report by the White House task force on campus sexual assault and new Department of Education guidelines, has an indisputably noble goal. Unfortunately, it is marred by flaws, including alarmist statistics, fuzzy definitions and a polarizing ideology of presumed guilt.

One of the foundations of this crusade is the staggering claim that one in five female students are sexually assaulted while in college. This figure comes from the 2005-2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study [PDF], which, as Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler has noted, was conducted at just two schools, with a fairly low response rate. Moreover, the survey’s data for “drug- and/or alcohol-enabled sexual assault” (about 70% of the incidents in the study) lump together unconsciousness or incapacitation with intoxication that may cloud one’s judgment and affect consent. Notably, despite widespread sexual assault awareness programs, two-thirds of the college women whom the study counted as victims of drug- or alcohol-enabled rape did not think they were raped, and few felt they had suffered psychological harm.

University of Michigan economist Mark Perry also points out that, if you take police records from university campuses and factor in the White House estimate that only about 12% of campus sexual offenses are reported, you don’t get anywhere near a one-in-five victimization rate over the course of a woman’s college attendance — more like 1 in 20 or 1 in 30.

May 5, 2014

“[C]onservatives are psychopaths. Science proves it!”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Robert Tracinski on the recent habit of attributing psychopathy to political enemies (by carefully editing the actual symptoms of typical psychopaths):

Years ago, I read an excellent book on the psychology of the career criminal. In the introduction, the author cautions readers against “medical students’ disease”: the tendency of first-year med students to suddenly notice that they have symptoms that are superficially similar to those of the strange diseases they’re studying. Similarly, he warned, as you read about the psychology of criminals, you might notice — in your most self-critical moments — that you have a few superficially similar traits. But unless you’re actually sticking up liquor stores, this does not mean you are a criminal.

Ah, but how much easier it is — how much more delicious — to use these superficial similarities to impute a criminal psychology, not to yourself, but to your enemies.

That is the upshot of an article that is just slightly crazier than your average piece at Salon, which cherry picks a few tendentious psychological studies to claim that conservatives are psychopaths. Science proves it!

This is just cashing in on a rather sloppy, poorly thought out trend toward studies of “psychopathy” which claim to find evidence of it everywhere, particularly among those stock Hollywood villains: wealthy and successful businessmen. They do so by means of exactly the method we just described: describing the characteristics of a psychopath in such vague terms that practically everyone can be said to bear some superficial resemblance, so therefore we’re all just a little bit psychopathic, on a sliding scale. Despite the fact that most of us aren’t actually, you know, doing anything psychopathic.

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