The CRU documents: when science becomes politicized, we all suffer

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been clear for quite some time that the AGW controversy has morphed from a scientific to a religious war—although in this case, it’s the AGW scientists who are the “religious” fanatics. That sort of situation cannot help but spell trouble.

Now, with the public revelation of a raft of previously private CRU documents from the University of East Anglia (UEA), we know that, in their quasi-religious fervor, these scientists may have purposely skewed data, an act which would run counter to the heart of the scientific method to which they supposedly devoted their lives. And apparently, several august scientific journals (such as Nature, one of the most prestigious science publications of them all) trusted them enough to allow them to jealously guard their raw data from prying eyes and prevent the sort of peer-review fact-checking that ought to have occurred as a matter of course.

If true, these acts would constitute a profound betrayal—not only of science, but of us all. The foundation of science, as well as our trust in it, rests on the idea that facts are sacred, and that they come before theories. If the facts don’t fit, you must acquit. In science, there is no principle of allowing lies in the service of “a higher truth.” There can only be truth.

This, of course, is an ideal, and we live in the real world, where scientists are people too. But they should be continually on guard to make sure they follow the ideal as best they can, despite constant temptations to act differently. Politicized science has a long history—in modern times, particularly in Soviet Russia, which the Western world is coming more and more to resemble. That the UEA scientists fell prey to it, especially in the current climate of religious fervor about AGW, is really no surprise. Nor will it be a surprise if the majority of AGW enthusiasts (including the MSM) continue to ignore the inconvenient truth that the science behind AGW has become exceedingly suspect.

[ADDENDUM: How the MSM is covering the scandal (hat tip: commenter “J.J.”).]

Walpin firing update

The New Neo Posted on by

Byron York continues on the Walpin case, even if hardly anyone else is paying attention (something the Obama administration is banking on).

York writes that, just a few hours after Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa had presented a report on their investigation into the Walpin firing, the White House released previously-withheld documents germane to the case. No doubt the timing is a mere coincidence.

Here is some of what is disclosed in the new information:

The new documents support the Republican investigators’ conclusion that the White House’s explanation for Walpin’s dismissal — that it came after the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps, unanimously decided that Walpin must go — was in fact a public story cobbled together after Walpin was fired, not before…

Pressed for the reason Walpin was fired, Eisen told House and Senate aides that the White House conducted an “extensive review” of complaints about Walpin’s performance before deciding to dismiss him. According to the new report, Eisen told Congress that “his investigation into the merits of removing Gerald Walpin involved contacting members of the Corporation for National and Community Service [CNCS] board to confirm the existence of a ‘consensus’ in favor of removal.” But Republican investigators later discovered that during that “extensive review,” the White House did not even seek the views of the corporation’s board — the very people whose “consensus” purportedly led to Walpin’s firing.

It goes on. But to anyone who’s been paying attention to this particular story, or to the actions of the Obama administration in general, none of it should come as a surprise.

At the risk of redundancy, let me just ask: can you imagine what the headlines would have been had Bush done this?

[NOTE: As for the Grassley/Issa report, it goes into some new details on the allegations against Johnson that IG Walpin was investigating when fired. It indicates that:

…Walpin was in fact fired because of the dispute over St. Hope and concludes that the White House “orchestrated an after-the-fact smear campaign to justify” Walpin’s dismissal.

The report says the [newly revealed] allegations of sexual misconduct and a cover-up “provide important context for Walpin’s insistence that the St. Hope matter should not have been settled without further inquiry.” In light of those allegations, the report says, complaints that Walpin was being too aggressive seem unfounded. “The content of the referral tends to undermine any notion that the [inspector general’s] investigation was driven by inappropriate motives on the part of Walpin,” the report says. “Rather, it appears to have been driven by non-political, career investigators simply following the facts.”

Obama and his Chicago friends: continuing to demonstrate the Chicago Way of doing the government’s business.]

Palin Derangement Sydrome: who else can they hate?

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though Sarah Palin is out of office and has been for some time, she continues to call forth a deep and almost primal rage in her opponents. But why bother with her now, especially if she’s so finished, so washed up, so transparently and manifestly unfit for any position of power?

Some say it’s because the Left is scared of her appeal. I suppose that’s part of it for some of them. But I think that most on the Left sincerely believe they’ve destroyed her, made her a laughing stock, and are now dancing on her grave. So again: why bother?

So I have another theory to explain the rage, and that is this: they don’t have Bush to kick around any more.

Bashing him was good for a while—a long while. But as the distance grows between now and then, between the Obama administration and the end of the Bush administration, it gets harder and harder to stoke the fire of the Two Minutes’ Hate against him.

But Palin? That’s another story. Although BDS lasted most of eight full years and change, and only kept building and building to a crescendo, Palin Derangement Syndrome only began in late August of 2008. Then, after the November 2008 election (barely two months later), she pretty much dropped out of sight. There really hasn’t been nearly enough time to fully vent the accumulated bile and spleen.

There was a small revival of Palin focus at the time of her resignation from the Alaska governorship, an act that put her back in the spotlight. Now comes the book tour. Palin is voluntarily seeking out publicity in conjunction with it, so she is thrusting herself into the public eye all over again, just as the energy of BDS is beginning to fade.

Bush’s post-presidential public appearances have been few and far between, Likewise his statements on policy, or on Obama, or on much of anything else. Jousting with him right now is like fighting a phantom. But liberals and the Left have gotten into the habit of vicious hatred, and they need their fix. The rage is out there and requires a target, and Palin has conveniently emerged from relative obscurity at just the right time and place.

In a nutshell, BDS has morphed into PDS, just in the nick of time.

Obama the betrayer

The New Neo Posted on by

Elizabeth Drew reports that many inside-the-Beltway Obama supporters are angry that Greg Craig was tossed under the bus by this administration, with Obama’s tacit approval and acquiescence while others did the dirty work.

It’s a curiously naive article. The sentence that interested me most in that regard was this:

Yes, we knew, or should have, during the campaign that the supposed idealist Obama had a bit of the Chicago cut-throat in him, but there was little sign that he could be as brutal and heedless of loyalty as he was in the Craig affair.

Query to Elizabeth Drew and whomever else might have thought of Obama that way: ever hear of Alice Palmer? Because if you hadn’t, you failed to complete the initial assignment of your homework on your hero. And if you had, you could not have avoided the immediate realization that Obama’s very first political act had been to brutally double-cross his earliest booster and mentor, and to do it as cold-bloodedly and ruthlessly as any Chicago pol—or mobster.

Here’s what Obama did to Alice Palmer. The lengthy article was first published in the Chicago Tribune on April 3, 2007, and it describes events that occurred (and were common knowledge in Chicago) in 1995-1996. So Drew, Craig and the rest: what’s your excuse?

Read the whole article, if you haven’t before. Actually, read it even if you have already read it before, because now that you’ve seen Obama in operation as president, you’ll recognize character traits of his that we’ve become more and more familiar with over time. Elizabeth Drew, Greg Craig (an early and ardent Obama supporter; see this), and anyone else who ever thought that Obama was anything but a cutthroat Chicago pol from the very start would have done well to have read it before they threw their weight behind him, and before his election:

Here are some excerpts (again, I ask you to read the whole thing, because these excerpts merely scratch the surface of what happened). And remember, this was Barack Obama’s maiden voyage, his very first run for political office:

Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.

But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.

A close examination of Obama’s first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.

One of the candidates he eliminated, long-shot contender Gha-is Askia, now says that Obama’s petition challenges belied his image as a champion of the little guy and crusader for voter rights.

“Why say you’re for a new tomorrow, then do old-style Chicago politics to remove legitimate candidates?” Askia said. “He talks about honor and democracy, but what honor is there in getting rid of every other candidate so you can run scot-free? Why not let the people decide?”…

Asked whether the district’s primary voters were well-served by having only one candidate, Obama smiled and said: “I think they ended up with a very good state senator.”…

Palmer served the district in the Illinois Senate for much of the 1990s. Decades earlier, she was working as a community organizer in the area when Obama was growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia. She risked her safe seat to run for Congress and touted Obama as a suitable successor, according to news accounts and interviews.

But when Palmer got clobbered in that November 1995 special congressional race, her supporters asked Obama to fold his campaign so she could easily retain her state Senate seat.

Obama not only refused to step aside, he filed challenges that nullified Palmer’s hastily gathered nominating petitions, forcing her to withdraw.

“I liked Alice Palmer a lot. I thought she was a good public servant,” Obama said. “It was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently.”

His choice divided veteran Chicago political activists.

“There was friction about the decision he made,” said City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus Timuel Black, who tried to negotiate with Obama on Palmer’s behalf. “There were deep disagreements.”

Had Palmer survived the petition challenge, Obama would have faced the daunting task of taking on an incumbent senator. Palmer’s elimination marked the first of several fortuitous political moments in Obama’s electoral success: He won the 2004 primary and general elections for U.S. Senate after tough challengers imploded when their messy divorce files were unsealed.

Obama contended that in the case of the 1996 race, in which he routed token opposition in the general election, he was ready to compete in the primary if necessary.

“We actually ran a terrific campaign up until the point we knew that we weren’t going to have to appear on the ballot with anybody,” Obama said. “I mean, we had prepared for it. We had raised money. We had tons of volunteers. There was enormous enthusiasm.”

And he defended his use of ballot maneuvers: “If you can win, you should win and get to work doing the people’s business.”

And here he is now, doing the people’s business once more. Ain’t it wonderful?

Climatology and AGW: who are the hoaxers, who the hoaxed?

The New Neo Posted on by

It is way too early to know whether the just-released emails and other papers purporting to be from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) are real or fake.

If real, they represent a sort of Pentagon Papers-ish revelation, exposing the prominent AGW scientists involved to possible charges of any or all of the following:

…[c]onspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

If fake, they would constitute an anti-AGW hoax of major proportions.

The facts that the files are so voluminous, and that Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed that files there have been hacked into, seem to point more towards the authenticity of the information. But it’s very early yet in this developing story, and we must be careful. Parts may be fake and parts real, and things may not be quite what they seem.

[NOTE: More from Ed Morrissey, who predicts (perhaps correctly) that even if the emails are real, the MSM spin will be that they were wrongly hacked. Wonder if those same people would emphasize that Daniel Ellsberg violated his oath of secrecy when he disclosed the Pentagon Papers to the press? Of course, the Pentagon Papers didn’t actually mean what the press said they did, anyway. Perhaps that will end up being true for the Hadley information as well—both sides of the AGW controversy are very politicized, and that’s one of the reasons it’s been so difficult to wade through the science and attempt to come with the truth.

More here and here.]

Al Megrahi: the terrorist who didn’t die

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, how time flies. It seems it was only yesterday that Lockerbie terrorist Al Megrahi was released by Scottish authorities on compassionate grounds and sent home to Libya to die.

It may seem only yesterday, but in fact it’s been three months—exactly. And three months, you may recall, was the amount of time Al Megrahi had left to live, in the best estimates of his Scottish doctors. But it should come as no surprise whatsoever that Al Megrahi is still alive.

I’m not asking that Al Megrahi die. I’m merely asking that he be returned to prison, where he belongs—and where he should have stayed in the first place, even if the three months’ prediction had been correct. I’m joined in this position by none other than New York’s Senator Charles Schumer, who says he’s written a letter to Gordon Brown asking for Al Megrahi’s immediate return to prison.

A spokeswoman for Scottish Justice Minister Kenny Macaskill gave this answer:

For Megrahi to be recalled, he would need to breech one or more conditions of his license. Not dying withing three months is not one of those conditions.

Here’s the best report I could find on Al Megrahi’s medical progress since leaving the UK three months ago. It seems that after his hero’s welcome he entered a Tripoli hospital, where the Libyans somehow found a more effective way to treat his cancer than the Scottish medical system could offer:

[Al Megrahi] entered [a] Tripoli hospital to undergo an aggressive chemotherapy programme just days after Libyans celebrated his triumphal return.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime publicly declared its hope that “a miracle from God” would preserve his life…Under the terms of the medical parole arrangement made with the Scottish government, Megrahi was supposed to communicate with officials weekly via a videolink installed in his family home.

Megrahi has now been sent back to the family’s villa in central Tripoli where a police guard keeps unauthorised visitors at bay. The family has been ordered to sever contacts with journalists.

Here’s an article whereby we learn some background; “only prisoners with three months or less to survive are eligible for release on compassionate grounds.” No doubt it’s a complete coincidence that Al Megrahi was found to have about three months to live, that he was then released, and that he’s still alive three months later.

The only real question seems to be: were the Scottish and/or other UK authorities played by al Megrahi, or were they in cahoots with him in order to get rid of him?

Obama: fool or knave?

The New Neo Posted on by

As Obama goes from weakness to weakness instead of strength to strength, the question keeps popping up: is he fool or knave? In other words: is he merely ignorant and incompetent, or is his course of action cleverly and intentionally designed to weaken this country, undermine its economy, and grow his own power?

For a while, “fool” was the leader. But the “knave” camp has been building for quite some time now.

Of course, the two attributes are not mutually exclusive. It’s a big tent; there’s room for both.

And if you want to be philosophical about it, that may not be such a bad thing. If we must have a knave as president, he may as well be a fool as well. That way he’s more likely to be unsuccessful at accomplishing his goals.

Beginning Saturday, at a Senate far from you: health care disaster in the making?

The New Neo Posted on by

On Satuday, the the Senate will vote on whether to move Reidcare forward by cutting off further debate on the issue. Senate Republican Tom Coburn, who had promised to read the entire bill into the record before such a vote, has relented and decided that it’s more important that everybody get home way before Thanksgiving.

We wouldn’t want Senators and their aides to have to fight the holiday traffic like the rest of us, would we? And debate? I hear it’s highly overrated. At any rate, it’s becoming a thing of the past.

Let the wild rumpus begin!

Lindsey Graham gives Eric Holder a lesson in the law

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a very different Lindsey Graham from the one we’re used to. This Lindsey Graham is sharp and articulate, charged with righteous outrage at Eric Holder and Barack Obama’s unjustifiable decision to try KSM in a civilian criminal proceeding.

Heck, Holder doesn’t even really make an attempt to justify it. Even if you didn’t think much of Holder before, it remains shocking to see how extraordinarily little he appears to have thought about the legal issues involved. He has no answer for Graham, and he seems to sense early on in the questioning that he’s caught in a trap, and can find no way out.

It’s almost painful to watch as Holder stutters his way through the interrogation. This is the Attorney General of the United States?

After watching this, I became curious to learn more about Graham’s own background. He is acting like a lawyer here, and a good one at that. When I read his Wiki entry, it all made sense. It turns out that Graham just happens to have the perfect background to speak knowledgeably on this issue [emphasis mine]:

Graham graduated from the University of South Carolina with a B.A. in Psychology in 1977 and from the University of South Carolina School of Law with a J.D. in 1981. Upon graduating, Graham was sent to Europe as a military prosecutor, and eventually entered private practice as a lawyer.

Graham decided to join the United States Air Force in 1982, and served on active duty until 1988. Following his departure he stayed in the military, joining the South Carolina Air National Guard and the U.S. Air Force Reserves. During the Gulf War, he was recalled to active duty, serving as a Judge Advocate at McEntire Air National Guard Station in Eastover, South Carolina, where he helped brief departing pilots on the laws of war.

In 2004, Graham received a promotion to Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves at a White House ceremony officiated by President George W. Bush. Graham served in Iraq as a reservist on active duty for short periods during April and two weeks in August 2007, where he worked on detainee and rule-of-law issues. He also served in Afghanistan during the August 2009 Senate recess.

No wonder Graham cleaned Holder’s clock.

[NOTE: Attorney General Holder reminded me of nothing so much as one of the faltering and poorly prepared law students sweating it out under Professor Kingsfield’s Socratic method in “The Paper Chase:”

Finally, a New York Times article I can recommend—with gusto

The New Neo Posted on by

Thanksgiving’s coming, and if you’re like me you try to get an invite somewhere else. But sometimes, yes, the cooking falls to you and yours.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing—but again, if you’re like me, it can be a stressful thing. There’s just so much to do on that day that it’s possible to be too worn out to fully enjoy it when the guests actually arrive.

But it’s the NY Times to the rescue, with 101 head starts on the day, dishes you can make ahead of time and serve with the obligatory turkey. The article is helpfully divided into sections for relishes and chutneys, soups, stuffing and grains, vegetables (a particular challenge for making ahead, I’ve found, and nicely handled by the Times), salads, breads and crackers, and the one that’s ordinarily no challenge at all and for which we usually need no help—dessert.

Thank you, NY Times. There, I’ve said it. You may not ever see those words emanate again from this source.