finknottle

McCains was also breached.

Interesing article, but not a history at all. It is a collection of episodes intended to titillate. It tells you nothing of the laws, regulations, and safeguards that were in place as far back at the 19th century, nor the degree to which they worked, failed, or were ignored. Just some cases of political abuse. By analogy, a piece on politically directed actions of the IRS - from Capone to whatever - would not be a history of taxation in this country.

Who is they - the companies or the government? Is there an explicit law that the companies broke?

No, 'unfair advantage' was the spin the media put on her remarks - she was just stating the fact of the advantage. In the same breadth, she said that she herself would never have been nominated as VP had she not been a woman. It stretches the imagination to suggest that you would imply the advantage was unfair while at the same time making the same point about your own accomplishments.

Possible dynamics that would allow one to conclude that there is so much inertia behind the shift that it is already too late have been speculated upon ad naseuem. For you do say that it could never happen, just to get out of the question, is pure intellectual dishonesty. It is tempting to think that you too dumb to imagine a scenario for yourself, and that you are simply too dumb to understand how different local warming and cooling periods can be driven by different factors, some short term and some long term. But that's not it. You're simply intellectually dishonest.

And anything you screw up at first is not worth trying to get right. Now I understand how you made it through school. Should we abandon modern medicine? Seems to me there were plenty of examples before it where the cures were worse than the problems. And lets put it another way. Let us suppose for arguments sake that you are do not deny climate change, but are a 'we need more study' advocate. Suppose 10 years from now we conclude to your satisfaction that it is here and irreversible - even the overnight disappearance of civilization will not reverse the new patterns or bring back todays conveyors. Would you still advocate man not trying his hand at fixing the problem?

Even if true, it misses the point. His jab only illustrates the underlying view that 'we should only act if GW can be proved to be man-made.' If it were true, it would still be bad, even if it were natural. Heightened volcanism is argued to be the cause of several of the earths many mass extinctions. If we were to have the bad luck to have a dozen major eruptions within a few years, and atmospheric patterns shifted as a result, I'm sure it will make us all feel better knowing that man isn't to blame.

Living among criminals or Republicans makes you turn to God?

Ok, I found my own numbers. Wikopedia - who normally I'd be as wary of as I would the annual best places to live lists - has what seems to be solidly referenced statistics linked to the FBI reports 2005-06. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States Looking at violent crime per 100,000 among the ten largest cities, we have 1,408 Philadelphia 1,316 Dallas, TX 1,218 Chicago 1,146 Houston, TX 1,107 LA 757 San Francisco 709 Seattle 687 NYC 662 Phoenix 635 San Antonio, TX 529 San Diego 372 San Jose They say that overall Houston is the most dangerous, but it's not clear to me what they are measuring - probably they are factoring in property crime. For states, based on Justice stats from 2004 the number of crimes (violent, property, etc) per 100,000 is given as 5,845 Arizona 5,289 South Carolina 5,193 Washington 5,048 Louisana 5,047 Hawaii 5,035 Texas 5,002 Tennessee 4,930 Oregon 4,891 Florida 4,885 New Mexico : 2,640 New York (#43!) : 1,676 New Hampshire There is also an interesting discussion about the degree to which crime correlates (or doesn't) to income. I would argue that the correlations with religiousity and/or being a Red state are at least as strong.

You're right - in fact, Texas barely makes it at all. I was relying on a reference that was either dated or untrue (rtying to figure out which right now).

I assume you mean that it's the atheists who have the morals and the religious lawyers who do not. Ask yourself this: is the population of prisons more or less likely to be religious than the country as a whole? Why do cities in the most religious areas of the country dispoportionately lead the nation in crime, while those in the least religious areas tend to be safer? Why are 70% of the top 10 high-crime states Red states, and 60% of the low-crime states Blue? Why are 3 of the 5 most dangerous cities in the country in the deeply religious state of Texas? You might want to re-examine the relationship between whether a person chooses to live morally and why they do so.

On a related note, we've all heard about the controversies over promoting actively evangelicalism at the Air Force Academy and seperately at the Coast Guard Academy. I read a piece in the Post yesterday that the Catholic and Jewish chaplains were filing suit at the NIH over discrimination in favor of the evangelicals and an anti-catholic and anti-sematic bias.

No, the controversy had been bubbling along for some time, and the link just mentions the tip of the ice berg. If I remember correctly, beyond the promotion and raise issue there were questions about double-billing by drawing her regular salary and drawing a salary at where she was detailed. For those who are interested, she received $61,000 in raises *after* she was detailed to state, drawing a paycheck of $194k from the Bank. That alone is ~25% more than Condi Rice makes, it was reported in the Post. I thought I also read recently that there were questions raised about a previous posting, but I can't find the article (in the Wash Post, about 3 days ago). Finally, the issue first became public in the Post with the release of the minutes of a staff all-hands, or maybe a memo to the bank staff (my memory is shaky) addressing the controversy and dating a month ago, which means disgruntlement had been brewing internally considerably longer. FYI - Wolf's has two other aides drawing in the 250k range. I'm not sure how this is done, since the government used to have a salary pecking order: President > Senate > House > ... > Federal Employees (ironically, part of the reason federal employees hate when politicians vote down raises. It has a trickle effect.) *** EDIT - my mistake. Of course World Bank employees are not federal employees.

No! You are criticizing science on the basis of findings from the seventies, and it is disingenous to associate them with the current global warming research. They were making a pattern-based prediction about natural geologic processes, looking 500+ years out, and based on the patterns of the past million years. They were *not* looking at the weather of the last 50 years. Your claims to the contrary, the climate did follow a clear pattern of ice ages separated by warm periods each lasting about 8,000 years - we are about 10,000 years into the current one. There is not a single scientist that denies the historical pattern, outside of creationists. And even they would concede that the trickster laid down some pretty convincing false evidence.

So you are saying that if you discover that temperature has followed a sine curve for a million years, and we are at the peak, then your prediction that the temperature will go down is groundless and a monumental failure? Your hindsight reasoning reminds me of the liberals who want Clinton - based on what she knows now - to say that her support for the war - based on what she knew then - was a mistake. If all the evidence points towards Saddam trying to develop WMD, you vote accordingly, and that turns out not to be the case, does that invalidate your reasoning? No. If you are approaching it scientifically then the same assumptions should lead to the same inference. Whether the assumptions are valid or sufficient is a different question. That is simply logic.

Then I don't think you understand me. I'm only finding fault with the idea behind the counter-example. I am not arguing that they are good at predicting weather, only that an inability to predict short-term events in a given subject doesn't neccessarily make impossible long-term projections. I can't predict the day to day swings of individual stocks, but I'm on pretty safe ground predicting what the Dow will do if you lower interest rates, all things being equal.

It may or may not be. Most people agree that the short-term data points to an unexpected warming and an acceleration of the trend. If you believe it's man made, you point to deforestation, carbon, etc. If you don't, you point to the plethora of natural alternatives.

Who predicts an ice age? Serious question - I'd like to read it.

I'm really tired of how this is constantly brought up, and wonder if it is the same people each time. The work in the seventies were based on the emerging understanding of the earths long-term trends. They realized that (1) for the past two million years the earth was swinging between glacial periods and warm periods, and (2) within that cycle we were in a warm period that had gone on about as long as the longest. Ergo, if the pattern holds, we should swing back into a glacial period within the next 1,000 years at most. There is *nothing wrong* with this reasoning, as long as you bother to understand the basis. It is based on a past pattern, and implicitely assumes both that the pattern will hold and that there are no extranous forces. If I watch a clock march towards midnight and predict that in a few minutes it will read 12:01, only Silver&Red would stop the clock and use it to discredit the scientific method.

I do believe it is compelling, but that's not my point - this isn't fertile ground for a discussion of global warming. Rather, I'm making a technical point about your example. In chaotic systems individual behavior may be impossible to predict, but the collective behavior quite predictable. Think gas dynamics, or Brownian motion.

The insurance industry has no ability to predict individual death accurately, which seems to occur several thousand times a day, but they do a pretty good job in the aggregate.

And even if it did - so what? I've got news for Cheney: it is the job of an intelligence service to meet with people. Maybe they wanted inside info, maybe they wanted to recruit the guy. That's what they do.

Once again we are caught up in a logical morass of irreducible complexity, which in itself is proof of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for only His noodley tendrils could have could have convoluted this thread so.

Correct, except the part about Jesus teachings. I think if you examine the gospel of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with an open mind, you will find their teachings more enlightening and their history more plausible. Read it, and find grace with the enlightening caress of His noodlely appendages. (But I'd advise you to stay away from the teachings of the Reformed Church, as they reject the doctrine of Pirate Regalia, whose consistency with the findings of modern science is IMO the cornerstone of the proof of the FSG's existence.)

It isn't supposed to. Faith allows one to say 'I don't understand this, so understanding must be impossible. It must be the doing of the Flying Spagetti Monster, who with a touch of his noodley appendages brought about all things ineffable.' See gaps in the fossil record, the functioning of certain biological mechanisms, and the Big Bang.