The Benghazi…

The New Neo Posted on by

…timeline.

Do enough people care?

I’ve noticed that the Benghazi debacle has spawned a few articles critical of Obama in papers like the Times and the WaPo. I think their willingness to be a bit hard on Obama over this (although never as critical as they should be) is that they realize it’s safe—that most people just don’t care about this stuff.

I hope I’m wrong, but my guess is that if you were to poll 100 of your friends (other than politics-obsessed blog readers, that is) on this incident and its aftermath, you’d find a lot of “huh?” responses about anything but the very broadest notions—such that there were some riots somewhere, an ambassador of ours was killed, and it was about some anti-Muslim video.

I’m in a very cynical frame of mind today.

Is America played out?

The New Neo Posted on by

Who would have thought that yesterday’s bagelhead thread would generate some pretty deep reflections? But here are some from commenter “Wolla Dalbo”:

This brings up the issue of just how do you motivate various groups of people, nations, races – the Japanese and much of Europe, for instance – when a critical mass of people in each one of these groupings have apparently given in to a hedonistic, decadent, self-absorbed, energy and will-sapping, world-weary, ennui…

Has these races, people’s, and nation’s time to shuffle off the stage of History just come? Are they just “played out”?

How do you re-ignite, make deeply meaningful, and central to everyone’s lives again a spirit, a world-view, whole systems of behavior and expectations that have apparently come to the end of their existence, have just finally become exhausted and devoid of meaning and energy?

This ties in with something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Bear with me, because it’ll take a bit of time for me to make the connection clear. But it relates to what Wolla (can I call you “Wolla”?) is saying about Japan, although I’m talking about America instead.

This election isn’t going well for Romney, and at the moment it’s looking up for Obama, especially in the swing states. We can spin the polls and criticize their design all we want (and there’s much to criticize), but the trend is not at all reassuring. I’ve discussed many of the reasons I think this is happening (here, for example)—chief among them the extraordinary bias of the MSM, which has increased to a degree that would almost be comical if it weren’t so effective.

That word “effective” is the key: why is Obama ahead despite his truly abysmal record? Why have the American people fallen prey to such blatant propaganda?

The answer, of course, is complex, and this essay won’t be able to do more than touch on a few ideas. But I have long seen it as a failure of the educational system, in particular the failure to teach critical thinking. It’s also a failure of attention; very few people take it all seriously enough to read in depth and learn for themselves, rather than to just scan headlines and be swayed by sound bites.

But surely some of that’s just human nature. Something else must have changed. Is it that the bias of the MSM has increased? Certainly it has if you’re comparing it to the 50s, but probably not if you’re comparing it to some earlier eras, when newspapers were very upfront and blatant about their biases. But perhaps it was that very forthrightness that may have saved the population from the sort of thing we’re seeing now, because at least those biased newspapers didn’t hold themselves out as occupying some Olympian height of neutrality, so that people could discern the spin better. Plus, the left-right bias of the press as a whole was not so monolithically skewed leftward.

But I think one of the most important “something else’s” that’s different is what Wolla was referring to in the quote I highlighted above. Wolla was talking about Japan and Europe, but he could just as easily have been talking about the US. No, we are not a race in the physiological sense, and not a people like the Japanese or the French or the Germans. But we are a nation with an ethos and a culture that has been unique in the world, one that we used to be proud to impart to each generation that comes along, and to all immigrants who reached our shores.

That is no longer the case. And Obama considers that a feature, not a bug. This has nothing to do with his race, and not much to do with controversies about his place of birth, either, although the latter issue is a metaphoric expression of concern about his relative lack of feel for the American ethos and culture.

And by “culture” I most certainly don’t mean popular trends or fads. I mean such deeply held beliefs as personal responsibility, patriotism, a sense of American exceptionalism in the world, and the feeling that immigrants need to adapt to our culture and language rather than clinging to their own. As Wolla asked:

How do you re-ignite, make deeply meaningful, and central to everyone’s lives again a spirit, a world-view, whole systems of behavior and expectations that have apparently come to the end of their existence, have just finally become exhausted and devoid of meaning and energy?

Obama is a symptom of that exhaustion, not a cause—although his second term is likely to exacerbate the process.

One of those trends…

The New Neo Posted on by

…you may find it hard to understand: the bagel-head.

It’s all the rage in Japan, where it seems that bagels (the real ones) have become quite popular. One picture is worth many words:

This lovely visage is the result of saline injections coupled with pressing the thumb afterwards into the center of the forehead to create the “hole.” The effect only lasts for 16-24 hours until the saline is absorbed, but it’s quite adorable, don’t you think?

Of course, you could also get a similar look by falling flat on your face, as I did. And it would last a lot longer, too; take it from me.

Lest you imagine that this sort of strangeness is limited to the youth of Japan, just think of all the piercings and tattooings you see regularly in this country, and how extreme they’ve gotten. It’s a race to outdo each other in outrageousness, although the Japanese just might be going for the gold.

I’ve already explored the ubiquitous nature of the human desire to not let well enough alone in regard to the body. There seems to be a deep need on the part of many to torture and push it to the limit with novel ways to enhance what’s thought of as beauty, to wit: foot-binding, lip plates, neck rings, corsets, padding, higher and higher heels, and tattoos and piercings of the wildest variety.

Compared to that, a 24-hour bagelhead doesn’t seem so bad.

[Hat tip: Althouse.]

Ahmadinejad at the UN

The New Neo Posted on by

Despite the title, I’m not going to spend much time on Ahmadinejad’s speech. It’s the usual stuff.

I am happy to report, however, that the Obama administration is giving the right signals on this particular occasion, at least. The US delegation is boycotting the speech, and has issued the following statement (I know; words are cheap), which can’t be called mealy-mouthed:

Over the past couple of days, we’ve seen Mr. Ahmadinejad once again use his trip to the U.N. not to address the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people but to instead spout paranoid theories and repulsive slurs against Israel.

So, what else is new? Not much.

Tired of polls?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, I’m not.

Not quite, anyway. Here’s a good catch by Datechguy. He notes that Morning Joe, etc. “are doing their victory dance” based on some new Quinnipiac polls showing Obama way ahead in both Florida and Ohio.

He next alerts us to this Hugh Hewitt interview from August of 2012 with Peter Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac. It explains a lot. You may or may not believe this is the way polls are conducted, and you may or may not believe Peter Brown. But from my earlier research I think this is what’s going on with at least some of the pollsters, and I actually think Quinnipiac is probably among them.

Hewitt begins by asking the reasoning behind Quinnipiac’s models that show large Democratic percentages such as 8 or 9 per cent:

PB: Well, what is important to understand is that the way Quinnipiac and most other major polls do their sampling is we do not wait for party ID. We ask voters, or the people we interview, do they consider themselves a Democrat, a Republican, an independent or a member of a minor party. And that’s different than asking them what their party registration is. What you’re comparing it to is party registration. In other words, when someone starts as a voter, they have the opportunity of, in most states, of being a Republican, a Democrat, or a member of a minor party or unaffiliated…

HH: Now what I don’t understand this, so educate me on it, if Democrats only had a three point advantage in Florida in the final turnout measurement in 2008, but in your poll they have a nine point turnout advantage, why is that not a source of skepticism for people?

PB: Well, I mean, clearly there will be some people who are skeptics. This is how we’ve always done our polls. Our record is very good in terms of accuracy. Again, remember, we’re asking people what they consider themselves at the time we call them.

HH: But I don’t know how that goes to the issue, Peter, so help me. I’m not being argumentative, I really want to know. Why would guys run a poll with nine percent more Democrats than Republicans when that percentage advantage, I mean, if you’re trying to tell people how the state is going to go, I don’t think this is particularly helpful, because you’ve oversampled Democrats, right?

PB: But we didn’t set out to oversample Democrats. We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen. Because it’s a presidential year, it’s not a particularly heavy screen.

HH: And so if, in fact, you had gotten a hundred Democrats out of a hundred respondents that answered, would you think that poll was reliable?

PB: Probably not at 100 out of 100.

HH: Okay, so if it was 75 out of 100”¦

PB: Well, I mean”¦

HH: I mean, when does it become unreliable? You know you’ve just put your foot on the slope, so I’m going to push you down it. When does it become unreliable?

PB: Like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it.

HH: Well, a lot of us look at a nine point advantage in Florida, and we say we know that to be the polling equivalent of pornography. Why am I wrong?

PB: Because what we found when we made the actual calls is this kind of party ID.

HH: Do you expect Democrats, this is a different question, do you, Peter Brown, expect Democrats to have a nine point registration advantage when the polls close on November 6th in Florida?

PB: Well, first, you don’t mean registration.

HH: I mean, yeah, turnout.

PB: Do I think”¦I think it is probably unlikely.

HH: And so what value is this poll if in fact it doesn’t weight for the turnout that’s going to be approximated?

PB: Well, you’ll have to judge that. I mean, you know, our record is very good. You know, we do independent polling. We use random digit dial. We use human beings to make our calls. We call cell phones as well as land lines. We follow the protocol that is the professional standard.

HH: As we say, that might be the case, but I don’t know it’s responsive to my question. My question is, should we trust this as an accurate predictor of what will happen? You’ve already told me there”¦

PB: It’s an accurate predictor of what would happen is the election were today.

HH: But that’s, again, I don’t believe that, because today, Democrats wouldn’t turn out by a nine point advantage. I don’t think anyone believes today, if you held the election today, do you think Democrats would turn out nine percentage points higher than Republicans?

PB: If the election were today, yeah. What we found is obviously a large Democratic advantage.

HH: I mean, you really think that’s true? I mean, as a professional, you believe that Democrats have a nine point turnout advantage in Florida?

PB: Our record has been very good. You know, Hugh, I”¦

HH: That’s not responsive. It’s just a question. Do you personally, Peter, believe that Democrats enjoy a nine point turnout advantage right now?

PB: What I believe is what we found.

HH: Geez, I just, and an eight point in Ohio? I’m from Ohio. Democrats haven’t had an eight point advantage in Ohio since before the Civil War. I mean, that just never happens, but Peter, I appreciate your coming on. I’m not persuaded that Quinnipiac Polls haven’t hurt themselves today, but I appreciate your willingness to come on and talk about it.

To understand this you have to understand the concept of random sampling (that is, unless you think it’s all a pro-Democratic plot by pollsters, in which case that’s all you have to understand). If sampling is truly random, then the percentage of Democrats answering the poll (and who say they plan to vote) will accurately reflect the percentage of Democrats who would actually be voting if the election were held that day. To adjust for wild skews (for example, if the sample ended up being 75% Democrats), the pollsters could use something called “stratified sampling” to adjust for the problem.

I believe that’s correct, anyway. But I’m not a pollster, nor do I play one on TV.

By the way, here’s Gallup’s polling method:

The findings from Gallup’s U.S. surveys are based on the organization’s standard national telephone samples, consisting of directory-assisted random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone samples using a proportionate, stratified sampling design.

From what Brown says, Quinnipiac doesn’t stratify its polls unless there’s a huge red flag staring them in the face. But Gallup does. Its accuracy would depend on what parameters it uses for stratification, and how well they reflect reality.

Obama and the Middle East and the Times

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Times gently chides Obama on his Middle East policy. For them, that’s the equivalent of a hit piece.

Among the nuggets contained in the article, there’s a phone conversation on Feb 1, 2011, in which Obama told Mubarak he had to step down. Mubaraks’s answer:

“You don’t understand this part of the world…You’re young.”

The rest of the Times piece goes on to detail just how right Mubarak was about Obama’s lack of understanding. But I think Mubarak was being too kind. It’s not Obama’s youth that caused his actions; he ain’t that young, anyway. And although it may be true that Obama doesn’t understand that part of the world, it also may be true that he understands it quite well and has a different intention than most people think—the old “fool vs. knave” argument that we’ve had so many times on this blog.

After the phone call, Obama publicly called for Mubarak’s resignation. Here’s what the Times has to say about that [emphasis mine]:

With those words, Mr. Obama upended three decades of American relations with its most stalwart ally in the Arab world, putting the weight of the United States squarely on the side of the Arab street.

It was a risky move by the American president, flying in the face of advice from elders on his staff at the State Department and at the Pentagon, who had spent decades nursing the autocratic ”” but staunchly pro-American ”” Egyptian government.

Many decades of bipartisan nursing, I might add. Out the window (or under the bus).

It’s one thing to overturn the regime of Saddam Hussein. He was no ally, and he was a much more bloodthirsty tyrant than Mubarak, both internally within Iraq itself and in terms of his relations with neighboring countries. But with the overthrow of ally Mubarak, Obama out-neoconned the neocons, throwing his (and our) lot in with the Arab street, and almost certainly with the Islamists.

Then there’s this:

Nineteen months later, Mr. Obama was at the State Department consoling some of the very officials he had overruled.

I’m sure they were comforted marvelous much.

Again with the narcissism [emphasis mine]:

Speaking privately to grieving State Department workers, the president tried to make sense of the unfolding events. He talked about how he had been a child abroad, taught to appreciate American diplomats who risked their lives for their country.

The Times refers to “hard lessons” Obama has learned since becoming president:

…[B]old words and support for democratic aspirations are not enough to engender good will in this region, especially not when hampered by America’s own national security interests.

I wonder whether Obama has actually learned those lessons. But the Times ignores that fact that, if he indeed ever thought that “bold words and support for democratic aspirations” would be “enough to engender good will in this region,” then he was dangerously naive and stunningly stupid.

But perhaps he is/was just that naive and just that stupid. I wrote about that possibility back in June of 2009:

Does Obama himself actually believe his speech caused the people of Iran to protest the elections and to demonstrate for their freedom? I don’t know. But if he does, it would fit in with something I’ve noticed before, both in Obama and on the Left in general: their elevation of the power of words over acts. After all, it’s worked that way for Obama his whole life so far. (see this for a discussion of why wordsmiths tend to go ga-ga over Obama).

When the Right, in trying to figure Obama out, says “watch what he does, not what he says,” they’re using a principle that seems self-evident. But it’s not that way for liberals and the Left, who are often far more interested in declarations of intent, in eloquence rather than achievement. If a person has the right goals in mind, if a person sounds like a good person, that’s the most important thing. And if liberals and the soft Left (the hard Left is quite different) are moved so mightily by words and speeches, they tend to conclude that everyone in the world shares that tendency.

But back to the Times article. Here’s another Obama failing it points out:

To some, the stark difference between the outcomes in Cairo and Bahrain illustrates something else, too: his impatience with old-fashioned back-room diplomacy, and his corresponding failure to build close personal relationships with foreign leaders that can, especially in the Middle East, help the White House to influence decisions made abroad.

Another revelation from the article is that Obama’s support for the Arab street in Tunisia and Egypt stemmed from his chagrin over his lack of support for the protesters in Iran. Earth to Obama: Iran is not an ally of ours, but Egypt was (even Obama seems to notice the “was” part). That’s why supporting the toppling of the government of Iran is not the same as supporting the toppling of Egypt’s leader.

Again, it’s very hard to imagine Obama doesn’t already know this. Fool or knave?

And again, again, again with the narcissism:

Mr. Obama felt keenly, one aide said, the need for the United States, and for he himself, to stand as a moral example. “He knows that the protesters want to hear from the American president, but not just any American president,” a senior aide to Mr. Obama said. “They want to hear from this American president.” In other words, they wanted to hear from the first black president of the United States, a symbol of the possibility of change.

One of the many things Obama does not seem to know about Egypt is that there is quite a bit of anti-black racism there:

Dark-skinned Egyptian President Anwar Sadat faced insults of not looking “Egyptian enough” and “Nasser’s black poodle.” An Egyptian Nubian soccer player Mahmoud Abdel Razek stopped playing football due to racist slurs by rival Egyptian fans during a game.

According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Black African immigrants to Egypt often face physical violence and verbal abuse at the hands of the general public and law enforcement officials. refugee from Sudan are especially targeted, with racial slurs like “oonga boonga” and “samara” (meaning “black”) constituting the most typical insults

The Times article goes on to give Obama credit, at least, for prescience in knowing that the Arab street would win in Egypt and Mubarak would lose. It doesn’t seem to occur to them, however, that Obama’s “prescience” might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. When he withdrew support for Mubarak and publicly abandoned him, calling for his resignation, Obama almost certainly substantially weakened Mubarak’s position.

More:

…[I]n the following weeks, Mr. Obama fell silent. Away from the public eye, he was coming under assault from leaders in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, even Israel. Angry at the treatment of Mr. Mubarak, which officials from the Gulf states feared could forecast their own abandonment, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates drew a line in the sand. Some American and Arab diplomats say that response could have been avoided if Mr. Obama had worked quietly to ease Mr. Mubarak out, rather than going public.

Ya think?

There’s much, much more. But I’ll just close with this, because it counters Obama’s overwhelming narcissism rather effectively:

The tensions between Mr. Obama and the Gulf states, both American and Arab diplomats say, derive from an Obama character trait: he has not built many personal relationships with foreign leaders. “He’s not good with personal relationships; that’s not what interests him,” said one United States diplomat. “But in the Middle East, those relationships are essential. The lack of them deprives D.C. of the ability to influence leadership decisions.”

Arab officials echo that sentiment, describing Mr. Obama as a cool, cerebral man who discounts the importance of personal chemistry in politics. “You can’t fix these problems by remote control,” said one Arab diplomat with long experience in Washington. “He doesn’t have friends who are world leaders. He doesn’t believe in patting anybody on the back, nicknames.

“You can’t accomplish what you want to accomplish” with such an impersonal style, the diplomat said.

I said I’d close with that. But I’m going to go against my word and add one more thing. The Times article ends with a quote from a former assistant secretary of state named Jeffrey Feltman, who said:

…“[T]he event I find politically most disturbing is the attack on Embassy Tunis.” Angry protesters breached the grounds of the American diplomatic compound there last week ”” in a country previously known for its moderation and secularism ”” despite Mr. Obama’s early support for the democracy movement there. “That really shakes me out of complacency about what I thought I knew.”

I am puzzled. Looking at Feltman’s biography, I see that he’s an accomplished Middle East hand who’s served under both Democrats and Republicans. Could he really be so surprised about the forces we are up against, and their potential power even in moderate Arab and/or Islamic nations?

One thing that seems to be the case, though, is that recent events in Egypt and elsewhere in the region seem to have “really shaken” the NY Times out of its own complacency about Obama’s Middle East policy. For the moment, anyway.

Way too little, way too late.

And speaking of polls…

The New Neo Posted on by

…which we were—

Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Yes, it’s a very important state, and stands an excellent chance of being so again this year. The WaPo crows that Obama is ahead in that state by 8 points among likely voters, with a 7+ Democratic sample.

Remember that Obama won that state by about 4% in 2008. Does it seem likely that he’s doubled his lead from that year? Especially when exit polls in 2010 suggested a +1 Republican advantage, and a Gallup poll of 2012 voter IDs in Ohio indicates only +1 Democrats?

You can also find a poll that directly contradicts the WaPo poll, for what it’s worth. I have no idea about the relative reliability of either pollster, but I certainly know the bias of the WaPo in general. On the other hand, the results of a recent Gravis Marketing/Capital Correspondent Ohio poll (with a 10+ Democratic sample, yet!) show a very different picture: a race that’s virtually tied, and has been for the entire month of September. Note also the large number of “undecideds” in that poll: 10% (pretty stable at that level for the whole month). If the poll is accurate, the Ohio election will be decided on how they end up breaking.

And before you excoriate those 10% by asking how on earth anyone can still be undecided at this point, let me just say that I suspect many of them are people who distrust the MSM, are tired of Obama, and yet feel they don’t know Romney all that well. They may even be waiting for the debates to get a better look at him. Remember the debates?

Pity the poor pollsters

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, the title is meant to be sarcastic.

But only somewhat. Whatever you think of pollsters’ motives—are they trying to get it right, or are they skewing results to influence public opinion?—they do have quite the challenge in predicting voter turnout by party.

If they’re presenting rigged polls, how much Democratic turnout is just right? How much is too much? And at the end of the day, don’t they care about their own reputations for accuracy, and how they will suffer if they present biased polls that fail to predict the result? Or is it okay because they’re trying to create a certain result (hardly a foolproof proposition, that)?

But for those pollsters who are trying to get it right, what model should they use for their turnout predictions? 2008 or 2010? That is the question. And furthermore, even if pollsters ask respondents how likely they are to vote, and then see what relative percentages of Democrats and Republicans say they are likely and then weight the poll results accordingly, does this represent reality when they’re getting only a 10% response rate? Isn’t it quite possible that the responders already represent a skewed sample that’s likely to differ from the population as a whole on the question of motivation to vote?

Here are some sobering figures on response rates:

Note that even compared to a few years ago it’s significantly worse. What does this mean? It’s not just the result of the inclusion of cell phone users, either:

The most recent decline results partly from the inclusion of cellphone numbers in its samples in order to reach the rapidly growing number of American adults who have a mobile phone but lack landline telephone service. But the Pew Research landline response rates have also fallen (from 25 percent in 2007 to 10 percent this year) and are now only slightly higher than the response rates currently achieved with cellphones (7 percent).

For what it’s worth, my guess would be that cell phone users would tend to be younger and therefore more likely to be Obama voters, and so their slight under-representation could mean a slight underestimate of the Obama vote (or the Ron Paul vote). But far more important is the more general question of whether the responders represent a random group, or whether they differ from non-responders in significant ways, and if so what those ways might be.

I challenge anyone to come up with an answer, because you can’t ask the non-responders. They are, by definition, not talking.

The technical term for the problem is non-response bias. Here’s a discussion of the phenomenon as it relates to surveys of all kinds, and the following describes some ways to try to control for it:

Suppose again that additional demographic or database variables are available for all members of the targeted sample group. These variables are used to create sub-groups containing respondents and non-respondents. Weights are then calculated based on the proportions in each sub-group and applied to the respondents to reflect the total sample population. Comparisons on key variables are then observed between the unadjusted and weighting-class adjusted respondents. If clear differences are detected, then non-response bias is assumed to be at fault and the weighting-class adjustments are used as they provide results with less bias. Poststratification is another technique similar to weighting-class adjustment, except that the procedure uses population counts instead of the total sample counts. The downside to these techniques is that they assume that the differences between respondents and non-respondents are captured in the subgroups, and that there is no rule of thumb for comparing adjustments to determine which to use.

As I said, pity the poor pollsters.

Once again let me say that I’m not assuming that all, or even most, pollsters are trying for that sort of accuracy. My point is that the ones that are attempting to get it right face a formidable task. Of course, they knew that when they went into the field. But back then, the response rates were so much better that non-response bias wasn’t considered such a big deal. Now that it’s grown, there’s a much bigger chance that it represents a very big deal.

Many people in the blogosphere focus on the dilemma of party proportion as vitally important. And there’s no question that it is. But that’s an easier problem to see; after all, one can view (for the most part) the party affiliation each pollster uses, even if it’s nearly impossible to tell if those proportions would be correct for this voting year (I might also mention that there’s the problem of people calling themselves “independents” but who really are disaffected former members of a party who vote pretty reliably with that party nonetheless). Non-response rate bias is much more hidden, unknown, and probably more difficult to control.

I don’t know if I’m especially typical of anything, so the following represents a sample of one. But I’m an older person who has only a cellphone, my motivation to vote is at the highest level (would crawl over broken glass etc. etc.), and I probably would not answer a pollster.

Not that I’ve ever been asked.

[ADDENDUM: Ed Morrissey weighs in on polls and party affiliation.]

Ahmedinejad…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the statesman, getting ready to address the UN General Assembly:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday disregarded a U.N. warning to avoid incendiary rhetoric and declared ahead of the annual General Assembly session that Israel has no roots in the Middle East and would be “eliminated.”…

On Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with Ahmadinejad and warned him of the dangers of incendiary rhetoric in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad did not heed the warning.

Ahmadinejad alluded to his previous rejection of Israel’s right to exist. “Iran has been around for the last seven, 10 thousand years. They (the Israelis) have been occupying those territories for the last 60 to 70 years, with the support and force of the Westerners. They have no roots there in history,” he said, speaking to reporters through an interpreter…

“We do believe that they have found themselves at a dead end and they are seeking new adventures in order to escape this dead end. Iran will not be damaged with foreign bombs,” Ahmadinejad said, referring to Israel.

“We don’t even count them as any part of any equation for Iran. During a historical phase, they represent minimal disturbances that come into the picture and are then eliminated,” Ahmadinejad added.

In 2005, Ahmadinejad called Israel a “tumor” and echoed the words of the former Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, by saying that Israel should be wiped off the map.

The article contains some unintentional humor, particularly Ban Ki-moon’s warning against incendiary rhetoric.

Another interesting point is that Wednesday, the day Ahmadinejad is scheduled to give his non-incendiary speech to the General Assembly, is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It is probably the most important and somber holiday of the entire Jewish religion, beginning (as all Jewish holidays do) on the evening before. But the bulk of the holiday is Wednesday.

I very much doubt that Ahmadinejad is unaware of that fact (see this).

In other news, there’s “noise” to ignore, as Obama speaks out of both sides of his mouth:

In an interview to air tonight on CBS’s 60 Minutes, President Barack Obama will refer to Israel’s concern over Iran’s march toward a nuclear program as “noise.”

“When it comes to our national security decisions — any pressure that I feel is simply to do what’s right for the American people. And I am going to block out — any noise that’s out there,” Obama says, according to AFP…

“When it comes to our national security decisions””any pressure that I feel is simply to do what’s right for the American people. And I am going to block out””any noise that’s out there. Now I feel an obligation, not pressure but obligation, to make sure that we’re in close consultation with the Israelis””on these issues. Because it affects them deeply. They’re one of our closest allies in the region. And we’ve got an Iranian regime that has said horrible things that directly threaten Israel’s existence.”…

AFP also reports that Obama will say that “he understands and agrees with Netanyahu’s insistence that Iran not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons as this would threaten both countries, the world in general, and kick off an arms race.”

But, as the article points out, Obama will not be meeting with Netanyahu this week during the United Nations General Assembly.

I will say one thing for Obama: this Iran/Israel business is an incredibly difficult problem, with no easy solutions. Perhaps even no solutions at all. But Obama has approached it in one of the worst possible ways, by communicating weakness, indecision, and extremely tepid support (or none at all) for Israel, “one of our closest allies in the region.”

Not-so-close encounters

The New Neo Posted on by

An interesting bit of trivia:

While at Eton, Eric Blair (future pen name, George Orwell) “was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley.”

England’s a small place, isn’t it?

That wasn’t Orwell and Huxley’s only exchange. Huxley wrote to Orwell on the occasion of the publication of his masterwork 1984:

…congratulating him on “how fine and how profoundly important the book is”. In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

It might not be “infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis” that are the main tools, but I think Huxley had the basic principle down pretty well. There’s room for more than one kind of tyranny in the world.

Windpower woes

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Instapundit]

Wind power sounds like a wonderful thing, a renewable resource that’s clean and available and could help wean us off our dependence on fossil fuels from sketchy foreign countries. All that’s needed is the will to do it, and to fight the efforts of Big Oil and/or Big Coal and/or Big Evil Fill-In-the-Blanks to block it.

That’s the story, anyway. But when one looks at reality, there are a few problems with the widespread use of wind power, as the starry-eyed advocates of its use in Europe are discovering:

Germany is being horribly caught out by precisely the same delusion about renewable energy that our own [British] politicians have fallen for. Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind speeds and sunlight constantly vary. They are taken in by the wind industry’s trick of vastly exaggerating the usefulness of wind farms by talking in terms of their “capacity”, hiding the fact that their actual output will waver between 100 per cent of capacity and zero. In Britain it averages around 25 per cent; in Germany it is lower, just 17 per cent.

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise ”“ as Germany is discovering ”“ two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind)…

Thanks to a flood of subsidies unleashed by Angela Merkel’s government, renewable capacity has risen still further (solar, for instance, by 43 per cent). This makes it so difficult to keep the grid balanced that it is permanently at risk of power failures. (When the power to one Hamburg aluminium factory failed recently, for only a fraction of a second, it shut down the plant, causing serious damage.) Energy-intensive industries are having to install their own generators, or are looking to leave Germany altogether.

The law of unintended consequences has not been suspended to accommodate good intentions.

The article goes on to state:

…[A] mighty battle is now developing in Germany between green fantasists and practical realists. Because renewable energy must by law have priority in supplying the grid, the owners of conventional power stations, finding they have to run plants unprofitably, are so angry that they are threatening to close many of them down. The government response, astonishingly, has been to propose a new law forcing them to continue running their plants at a loss.

Sound familiar? Sound a bit like our very own president? As I wrote in November of 2008 [please read the whole thing]:

Rather than banning new coal plants de jure, [Obama] plans to drive them out of business de facto, because the environmental requirements of his policies would be so stringent that new plants would be unable to comply and the penalties for noncompliance would be catastrophic. In other words,, any new plants would have to pay penalties so Draconian that they would be bankrupted””and the listener is left to wonder whether even older plants might be required to retrofit in order to comply, and be forced out of business as well.

Obama’s plan is that market forces would dictate that, as new coal production would become impossible, people would be forced to quickly fill in for the lack of power by developing the wonderfully clean alternative sources of energy that he is so sure would be available if only the will were there.

Having Obama as president is a little like playing Whac-a-Mole. Each terrible policy and each new crisis distracts us momentarily (or longer) from the others. But in a second Obama term, expect him to focus on trying to get the US to follow down Europe’s energy path in this respect—except I very much doubt he’ll share their reluctant acceptance of nuclear power.

[NOTE: I referenced Europe’s “reluctant acceptance of nuclear power,” but when I looked it up just now I found that Europe has been shying away from nuclear power lately [emphasis mine]:

Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its reactors and pledged to close the rest by 2022. The Italians have voted overwhelmingly to keep their country non-nuclear. Switzerland and Spain have banned the construction of new reactors. Belgium is considering phasing out its nuclear plants, perhaps as early as 2015. Although France is frequently heralded as a nuclear commercial model for the world, and nuclear power was supported by Nicolas Sarkozy, President-Elect Frané§ois Hollande has proposed cutting nuclear power’s electricity contribution by more than a third by 2025.

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann expects anti-nuclear petition drives to start in at least six European Union countries in 2012 in an effort to have the EU abandon nuclear power.

So we see that the coverage of the Fukushima incident has borne the desired fruit (if you’re interested in what I wrote about Fukushima around the time it was happening, see this).

So, was Fukushima a “disaster”? Let’s take a look at the facts:

Major news source reporting at least 2 TEPCO employees confirmed dead [at the plant] from “disaster conditions” following the earthquake. “The two workers, aged 21 and 24, sustained multiple external injuries and were believed to have died from blood loss, TEPCO said. Their bodies were decontaminated as radiation has been spewing from the plant for three weeks.

45 patients were reported dead after the evacuation of a hospital in Futaba due to lack of food, water and medical care as evacuation was delayed by three days.

The Associated Press reported that fourteen senior citizens died after being moved from their hospital which was in the Fukushima plant evacuation zone.

On 14 April 2011, it was reported that the oldest resident of Iitate, a 102-year-old, committed suicide rather than to leave following the announcement of his village’s evacuation.

According to the Japanese Government, over 160,000 people in the general population were screened in March 2011 for radiation exposure and no case was found which affects health. Thirty workers conducting operations at the plant had exposure levels greater than 100 mSv.

In April 2011, the United States Department of Energy published projections of the radiation risks over the next year for people living in the neighborhood of the plant. Potential exposure could exceed 20 mSv/year (2 rems/year) in some areas up to 50 kilometers from the plant. That is the level at which relocation would be considered in the USA, and it is a level that could cause roughly one extra cancer case in 500 young adults. Natural radiation levels are higher in some part of the world than the projected level mentioned above, and about 4 people out of 10 can be expected to develop cancer without exposure to radiation. Further, the radiation exposure resulting from the accident for most people living in Fukushima is so small compared to background radiation that it may be impossible to find statistically significant evidence of increases in cancer.

That will not stop them from trying.

As I wrote shortly after the Fukushima incident, the definition of “disaster” has become quite strategic lately:

But what is the definition of a disaster these days? Surely, by any reasonable measure, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami qualify as an enormous disaster. The death toll will run into tens of thousands and perhaps even a hundred thousand or so before the work of rescue and discovery is over [the actual toll was 15,870 deaths, 6,114 injured, and 2,814 people missing], and the rebuilding will take years and eat up enormous amounts of money. The psychological toll on Japan is hard to overestimate, although the people are remarkably resilient. But in an instant, whole villages were wiped away, and the shock must be profound. It’s frightening even to view it from afar, reduced to a small computer or TV image.

But what of the nuclear power plant problems? That is a projected disaster, a feared and dreaded one. The word “meltdown” is another that’s constantly used in news stories as a likely possibility, and it conjures up images of something cataclysmic. The specter of Chernobyl is raised again and again, even though that plant’s design was profoundly different in critical ways.

As for Chernobyl itself—well, even that larger nuclear disaster wasn’t quite as it’s been portrayed:

Chernobyl was by far the worst accident in the history of nuclear plants, but the initial incident claimed 57 lives. This is tragic and horrible, but not usually the sort of thing that enters into “disaster” territory, if sheer numbers are the measure.

But what of its residual long-term effects? The main Wiki article on the subject notes, “Estimates of the total number of deaths attributable to the accident vary enormously, from possibly 4,000 to close to a million.” That would certainly constitute a disaster—but are those figures correct?

They do not appear to be. Chernobyl is not only a word that strikes fear into the heart, but it is one of the most-studied environmental incidents ever in terms of its possible effects. The following is what UNSCEAR, the United Nations Scientific Committee of the Effects of Atomic Radiation, has learned over the twenty-five years since Chernobyl occurred:

Among the residents of Belaruss 09, the Russian Federation and Ukraine there had been, up to 2002, about 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases are to be expected during the next decades. Notwithstanding problems associated with screening, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The risk of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to its short latency time, does not appear to be elevated. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.

Wiki also notes that “thyroid cancer is generally treatable. With proper treatment, the five-year survival rate of thyroid cancer is 96%, and 92% after 30 years.” This is not to make light of the stress of having a child thus diagnosed, but in general we can say that the number of additional deaths beyond the original 57 that could be attributable to Chernobyl is small. We can be fairly certain of this because there has been no lack of effort to find them, and no dearth of studies that would be likely to have detected them if they had existed.

But such reports have not eradicated the idea that Chernobyl was a dreadful disaster that caused an enormous number of deaths. For example, Greenpeace jumped into the arena, speculating so wildly based on suspect and non-peer-reviewed studies that even Gregory Hé¤rtl, a spokesman for WHO, “expressed concern that the conclusions were motivated by ideology.”

There is little doubt that the accident had a negative effect on the flora and fauna in the area. But again, it was less than in the popular imagination.

Speaking of imagination: paradoxically, that is what has been responsible for a fair amount of harm. Not only has fear of nuclear power reduced our willingness to build nuclear power plants and continued the world’s dependency on imported oil from the Middle East and all its attendant woes, but this fear may have had an indirectly deleterious effect on the emotional health of the population around Chernobyl:

It also concluded that a greater risk than the long-term effects of radiation exposure is the risk to mental health of exaggerated fears about the effects of radiation:

“The designation of the affected population as “victims” rather than “survivors” has led them to perceive themselves as helpless, weak and lacking control over their future. This, in turn, has led either to over cautious behavior and exaggerated health concerns, or to reckless conduct, such as consumption of mushrooms, berries and game from areas still designated as highly contaminated, overuse of alcohol and tobacco, and unprotected promiscuous sexual activity.”

That is not to say that Chernobyl was nothing. It was most definitely something: a frightening event that shone a light on a large number of mistakes (especially in Soviet power plants) that needed to be righted, and a tragedy from which people and the environment suffered and many lives were lost.

But “disaster” is a word that has been too freely used. It is not exactly clear how best to define disaster—whether by number of deaths, amount of property destroyed, human suffering, environmental damage, or some complex combination of all or some of them. But on the worldwide scale of events, an argument could be made that Chernobyl only qualifies as a major disaster in its lasting legacy of hyper-fear bestowed by those who exaggerated its effects in order to further their own political ends.

Their efforts have been quite successful, I might add. Interview a bunch of your friends and ask them how many people have died as a result of Chernobyl, and see what they say.]