Greedy Umbrellas

I have to run very quickly to the airport, but I just wanted to say how angry I am about the growing sizes of umbrellas.

There I am, walking Manhattan's streets in pouring, freezing rain, only to be bumped on all sides by these absolutely huge umbrellas that may as well be mobile igloos. You've seen them -- they're wide enough for three people and they sort of loop down and they have layers, because God forbid anybody get even the slightest wet these days.

Now, this sort of behavior may be fine in the suburbs or, you know, places that have space, but in New York City? Further evidence of the decline of our civilization, really.

Happy holidays!

European Muslims Under The Microscope

This month, I saw two positive reviews of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, which offers a rather inflammatory take on the implications of Muslim immigration in the Old World. Since I'd rather read reviews than books, I was happy to come across Laila Lalami's fleshed-out examination of the work, which withers under her empirical criticism. An example:

Caldwell also suggests that Muslims are far more likely to commit violence against women. Under the heading "Virginity and violence," he writes that "there were forty-five [honor killings] in Germany alone in the first half of the decade." Since the argument here is that Muslims are more inclined to commit homicides against women in the context of "some trespass against sexual propriety," it would have been helpful if Caldwell had included, for the sake of contrast, the number of ethnic German women killed in incidents of domestic violence, as well as numbers for an entirely distinct and recent immigrant group, such as Eastern Europeans...

The label "honor killing" makes violence against women and girls sound like an exotic import rather than the pernicious and all-too-frequent reality that it is. Caldwell doesn't mention that domestic violence has been treated as a criminal problem in Europe thanks to the work of European feminists in the 1960s and '70s, and that now European Muslim feminists are working to create a similar zero-tolerance level about honor killings. Encouragingly, a recent Gallup study found that Muslims in Paris, Berlin and London disapproved of honor killings and crimes of passion about as much as the general French, German and British populations.

The full thing is worth a read.

Kill the Bill!

No, I’m not talking about the health insurance industry giveaway care reform bill. I’m referring to the PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act of 2009, a bill that seeks to extend the Bush administration’s PATRIOT Act.

The following is a summary from a section of the bill, which has, by the way, passed a Senate Committee vote:

Section 3 -

Amends FISA to revise requirements for applications for access to business records in counterterrorism investigations to require an applicant to present a statement of facts and circumstances relied upon to justify the applicant's belief that the records sought are relevant to an investigation. Repeals the presumption in favor of the government that an application for records is relevant to an investigation. Imposes similar requirements for access to circulation records or patron lists of a library and for orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices (devices for recording incoming and outgoing telephone numbers). Defines and requires "minimization procedures" for minimizing the retention and dissemination of information obtained from such records and devices [emphasis mine].

That the presumption was ever in favor of an accuser -- the government in this case -- seems antithetical to what I know about Constitutional rights. After all, isn’t our legal system predicated on the notion that we’re innocent until proven guilty?

So this bill places more restrictions on how the federal government can secretly search you. I’m left scratching my head: is that a good thing? Is it a step in the right direction?

Communist spy in the State Department sentenced to life

This is pretty incredible:

A State Department employee (and part-time professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS program) plead guilty to spying for Cuba for the last 30 years. I think this story actually broke a while ago, but I'm linking to this article just because it's interesting to get more of the details (such as his traveling to Cuba for dinner with Fidel, and his constant preparations to sail his yacht to Cuba if he was found out).

Very Tom Clancy-ish story. (Whatever happened to hanging traitors, btw?)

Looking at the cost of Obamacare (via the latest CBO report).

Deficit-reducing it is not:

Reid 2.0: It’s Still a Budget Buster [James C. Capretta]


The Obama White House and its congressional allies have tried all year to push their various bills through to passage by truncating the time between introduction and a decisive vote to the bare minimum. They figure the only way to get something passed is to minimize public review and scrutiny of whatever their latest idea is to engineer American health care from Washington, D.C.

To date, that tactic hasn’t worked out so well. In July, House Democrats tried to unveil a bill on the 14th for a planned vote on the 31st. A firestorm erupted, however, pushing back the vote into November. In the Senate, meanwhile, a series of self-imposed deadlines have been missed as Democratic pronouncements of inevitability have bumped up against the reality of steadfast and growing public opposition.

Nonetheless, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is running the same play again today, and very possibly with different results. He unveiled the latest version of his reform legislation this morning, filled to the brim with outrageous payoffs to buy the votes of holdout Senators. Virtually no one else has seen the bill before today, much less had a chance to give it the scrutiny it deserves. And certainly the public has not had a chance to weigh in. No matter. Senator Reid has simultaneously set in motion the procedures necessary to force a vote on his new health-care plan in a matter of hours, not weeks.

And yet, despite the unprecedented effort to short-circuit public review and input, it is likely that this latest version of the Reid plan will be just as unpopular as the previous one, and for many of the same basic reasons.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the amended Reid plan would reduce the federal budget deficit by $132 billion over the period 2010 to 2019, but that is a mirage.

For starters, as CBO notes, the bill presumes that Medicare fees for physician services will get cut by more than 20 percent in 2011, and then stay at the reduced level indefinitely. There is strong bipartisan opposition to such cuts. Fixing that problem alone will cost more than $200 billion over a decade, pushing the Reid plan from the black and into a deep red.

Then there are the numerous budget gimmicks and implausible spending reductions. The plan’s taxes and spending cuts kick in right away, while the entitlement expansion doesn’t start in earnest until 2014, and even then the real spending doesn’t begin until 2015. According to CBO, from 2010 to 2014, the bill would cut the federal budget deficit by $124 billion. From that point on, it’s essentially deficit neutral — but that’s only because of unrealistic assumptions about tax and Medicare savings provisions. By 2019, the entitlement expansions to cover more people with insurance will cost nearly $200 billion per year, and grow every year thereafter at a rate of 8 percent. CBO says that, on paper, the tax increases and Medicare cuts will more than keep up, but, in reality, they won’t. The so-called tax on high cost insurance plans applies to policies with premiums exceeding certain thresholds (for instance, $23,000 for family coverage). But those thresholds would be indexed at rates that are less than health-care inflation — forever. And so, over time, more and more plans, and their enrollees, would bump up against it until virtually the entire U.S. population is enrolled in insurance that is considered “high cost.”

Similarly, the Medicare cuts assume that hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies and others can survive with a permanent annual cut in their payment rates for presumed productivity gains. Medicare’s chief actuary has already signaled that this reduction could push one in five hospitals into insolvency, thus forcing them out of the Medicare program.

What’s more, the benefit promises are sure to expand well beyond what CBO has assumed. There are 127 million people living in households with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line, but CBO assumes that only 18 million of them will get the new subsidized insurance under the Reid plan by 2015 because of rules that make most workers ineligible for assistance. But, if enacted, employers would find ways to push more workers into subsidized arrangements, and Congress would loosen the rules to make more people eligible. Costs would grow much faster than CBO currently projects. In addition, the Reid plan continues to include a new entitlement program for long-term care that every actuary who has looked at it says is a financial disaster waiting to happen. If passed, it would only be a matter of time before another federal bailout would be necessary.

It is now plain as day that the Reid plan has evolved into nothing more than a massive entitlement expansion, which subsidizes more people into an unreformed system with soaring costs. Several Senate Democrats claim to be strong fiscal conservatives. Their votes on the Reid legislation will provide conclusive evidence whether that’s true or not.

Krauthammer reflects on his 25 year career...

Thought this was an enjoyable read.

Moving Terrorists from Gitmo to...Illinois?

Think they'll publicly announce this policy? Or just hope no one notices?

Who wants to take bets that after they are moved, before too long we'll find that legal maneuvering, claims of unlawful imprisonment and supposed deprivation of rights will all lead to the release of some of the immates into the United States?

Democrats Health Care plans and the upcoming 'Death Spiral'?

You may have seen this report for the Office of the Actuary of the Health and Human Services Department states, but I hadn't seen it mentioned on any of the big networks...

A new report from government economic analysts at the Health and Human Services Department found that the nation's $2.5 trillion annual health care tab won't shrink under the Democratic blueprint that senators are debating. Instead, it would grow somewhat more rapidly than if Congress does nothing.

More troubling was the report's assessment that the Democrats' plan to squeeze Medicare for $493 billion over 10 years in savings relies on specific policy changes that "may be unrealistic" and could lead to cuts in services. The Medicare savings are expected to cover about half the nearly $1 trillion, 10-year cost of expanding coverage to the uninsured.

In still more bad news, the report starkly warned that a new long-term care insurance plan included in the legislation could "face a significant risk of failure" because it would attract people in poor health, leading to higher and higher premiums, and eventually triggering an "insurance death spiral."

(Via the AP)

Branding Jewish Goods in Britain?

What to make of this?

Some commentators suggest that this is akin to the German practices of labeling Jews and "Jewish" stores. I'm not sure one need not draw direct parallels to the later stages of what the "Jude" stars of Nazi Germany represented. But if I'm not mistaken, in Germany those too started out as a mechanism for the public to identify Jews and Jewish goods so they could choose to not do business with them on the grounds that they did not agree with purported Jewish political/societal practices. In other words, there are similarities, but at this point it's not quite the same thing. (So far?)

All in all, this strikes me as really misguided by the British and something of a disturbing idea for a supposedly classically liberal nation to suggest as policy (being as how it's based on ethnic grounds and not on national definitions). But I'd be interested to see if there are Britons who would choose to expand this practice to all Jewish goods from Israel if they find that their action doesn't result in enough of an impact. (Besides the strains of radical muslims in Britain, I mean).

The real implications of federal spending

I wasn't planning on my weekly linking to Mark Steyn's piece, as more than usual it's one that is probably only appealing to those already of his mindset (in this case, about the vapidity of Obama's rhetoric). That said, I did enjoy it as I'm wont to do when reading Mr. Steyn.

But I wanted to post this exerpt, which I think is excellent. Please forgive my repetitiveness in doing so.

"America has its Herman van Rumpoys, too. Harry Reid is really the Harry van Reidpoy of Congress. Very few people know who he is or what he does. But, while Obama continues on his stately progress from one 4,000-word dirge to the next, Reid’s beavering away advancing the cause of van Rumpoy–scale statism. The news this week that the well-connected Democrat pollster, Mark Penn, received $6 million of “stimulus” money to “preserve” three jobs in his public-relations firm to work on a promotional campaign for the switch from analog to digital TV is a perfect snapshot of Big Government. In the great sucking maw of the federal treasury, $6 million isn’t even a rounding error. But it comes from real people — from you and anybody you know who still makes the mistake of working for a living; and, if it had been left in your pockets, you’d have spent it in the real world, at a local business or in expanding your own, and maybe some way down the road it would have created some genuine jobs. Instead, it got funneled to a Democrat pitchman to preserve three non-jobs on a phony quasi-governmental PR campaign. Big Government does that every minute of the day. When Mom’n’Pop Cola of Dead Skunk Junction gets gobbled up by Coke, there are economies of scale. When real economic activity gets annexed by state and then federal government, there are no economies of scale. In fact, the very concept of “scale” disappears, so that tossing 6 million bucks away to “preserve” three already-existing positions isn’t even worth complaining about.


At his jobs summit, Obama seemed, rhetorically, to show some understanding of this. But that’s where his speechifying has outlived its welcome. When it’s tough and realistic (we need to be fiscally responsible; there are times when you have to go to war in your national interest; etc.), it bears no relation to any of the legislation. And, when it’s vapid and utopian, it looks absurd next to Harry Reid, Barney Frank & Co’s sleazy opportunism. For those of us who oppose the shriveling of liberty in both Washington and Copenhagen, a windy drone who won’t sit down keeps the spotlight on the racket. Once more from the top, Barack!"

Because I know how much Berchmans treasures it...

Here's Mark Steyn's latest criticism of President Obama's foreign policy...or lack thereof. I enjoyed it.

The Political Spectrum Scrambled In Europe

I highly recommend Ian Buruma's piece in the latest New Yorker about Dutch attitudes and debates about Muslim immigration. A curious trans-Atlantic political alliance has forged itself, as conservatives in America find common ground with many Dutch liberals who worry that incoming immigrants may not tolerate the host country's tolerant attitudes toward homosexuals, prostitution, pornography and drug use. Here's a provocative paragraph:

"This fear is why forty per cent of Dutch voters are said to agree with the views of Geert Wilders, the right-wing provocateur with dyed blond hair, whose Freedom Party defines itself largely by its antagonism to Islam. He would like to ban the Koran, stop Muslim immigration, force women in Muslim head scarves to pay an extra tax (for "pollution of the public space"), and expect Dutch Muslims with criminal records. As he said in a speech sponsored by the Hudson Institute, 'There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the ifnal stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West."

I disagree about the threat, as well as with all of Wilders' solutions. But I'm extremely interested to see the political spectrum scrambled here and there. I think Dinesh D'Souza wrote a book -- widely panned on release -- that argued American conservatives would find much common ground with many observant Muslims, who typically believe in the same "family values" they profess. So far, he's the only person on the Right I've seen who notes that if there is a clash going on -- God, I hate Samuel Huntington! -- it's between the secular and the religious, not between Islam and the West. Many right-wing commentators prefer instead to dismiss Islam itself as another Fifth Column, disguised and protected by a conspiracy of "political correctness" that dare not offend. (This all while they fervently subscribe to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghanistan strategy that requires us to win over millions of, um, Muslims.)

Stanley Fish -- once D'Souza's sparring parter in a series of illuminating debates -- has made similar noises as D'Souza does from the left. His argument is complicated, and I doubt I can do it justice, but it goes like this: liberalism -- the classical one, with a big L -- doesn't exist as the neutral philosophy it hopes to be. Instead, a series of ideological assumptions underline all its tenets. Yes, you have the right to exercise religion, but not if that means you want to study prayer in public schools, or -- in Wilders' case -- if you want to wear a head scarf in public. What we're seeing with these debates -- can Muslims emigrate to Netherlands without having to watch government-sponsored training seminars showing male couples kiss? -- is the return of Religion Wars. All this in a country that along ago shoved faith off the boat.

But I think we all miss an opportunity when we latch onto religion as the major 'problem' to be addressed. There are plenty of Catholics in this country, for instance, who support a woman's right to choose and still revere the Holy Trinity. Some would say that they were not true Catholics at all (Fish included), but I think most people live somewhere in this gray area, forever negotiating tradition with modern life and personal and cultural forces.

I think that's the case with many Muslims. There's a great moment in the New Yorker piece where one Dutch artist complains that the whole immigration debate has forced religion to the fore, subsuming other parts of her identity (namely, her profession):

Funda Mujde, an actress, cabaret artist, and columnist for a popular Dutch tabloid, was born in Turkey in 1961, and came to Amsterdam as a child. She told me how she was treated in her adopted country: "First, I was a foreigner, an alien. Then, after 9/11, I was suddenly a Muslim. I used to be known as a Turkish cabaret artist. After the row over the Dutch cartoons, I became 'that Muslim cabaret artist.'"

So, it seems to me like most sides in this debate have things the wrong way. Conservatives should look a largely religious observant demographic as a potential boon and ally. Liberals should re-frame the debate away from religion and instead focus on issues of unemployment and forge wide alliances that address concerns that may be more important to Muslims than their religion.

My two cents, anyway.

Why the CRU is misinforming about the "Harry" Readme...

Berchmans posted below (in comments) the response by CRU to the "HARRY_Readme.txt" file that I referenced earlier:

HARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the documentation, metadata and databases associated with the legacy CRU TS 2.1 product, which is not the same as the HadCRUT data (see Mitchell and Jones, 2003 for details). The CSU TS 3.0 is available now (via ClimateExplorer for instance), and so presumably the database problems got fixed. Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be.

In other words, they are suggesting two things: One that CRU TS 2.1 is not connected to later data. And two, that CSU TS 3.0 has fixed the problems of earlier data sets. These claims are not supported by an examination of the emails and files that were discoved, it seems to me.

See here for example, which is from  the 15,000 or so lines in the Harry_read_me text:

"So, you release a dataset that people have been clamouring for, and the buggers only start


using it! And finding problems. For instance:





Hi Tim (good start! -ed)



I realise you are likely to be very busy at the moment, but we have come across something in

the CRU TS 3.0 data set which I hope you can help out with.



We have been looking at the monthly precipitation totals over southern Africa (Angola, to be

precise), and have found some rather large differences between precipitation as specified in

the TS 2.1 data set, and the new TS 3.0 version. Specifically, April 1967 for the cell 12.75

south, 16.25 east, the monthly total in the TS 2.1 data set is 251mm, whereas in TS 3.0 it is

476mm. The anomaly does not only appear in this cell, but also in a number of neighbouring

cells. This is quite a large difference, and the new TS 3.0 value doesn't entirely tie in

with what we might have expected from the station-based precip data we have for this area.

Would it be possible for you could have a quick look into this issue?



Many thanks,



Daniel.



--------------------------------------------------------

Dr Daniel Kingston

Post Doctoral Research Associate

Department of Geography

University College London

Gower Street

London

WC1E 6BT

UK

Email d.kingston@ucl.ac.uk

Tel. +44 (0)20 7679 0510





Well, it's a good question! And it took over two weeks to answer. I wrote angola.m, which

pretty much established that three local stations had been augmented for 3.0, and that

April 1967 was anomalously wet. Lots of non-reporting stations (ie too few years to form

normals) also had high values. As part of this, I also wrote angola3.m, which added two

rather interesting plots: the climatology, and the output from the Fortran gridder I'd just

completed. This raised a couple of points of interest:



1. The 2.10 output doesn't look like the climatology, despite there being no stations in

the area. It ought to have simply relaxed to the clim, instead it's wetter.



2. The gridder output is lower than 3.0, and much lower than the stations!



I asked Tim and Phil about 1., they couldn't give a definitive opinion. As for 2., their

guesses were correct, I needed to mod the distance weighting. As usual, see gridder.sandpit

for the full info.

To my reading, this suggests a couple of things: 1) Clearly they hadn't corrected the problems in CRU TS 3.0 either. And secondly, if 2.10 wasn't connected to 3.0, why would they examine 2.10 for clarification on the data included in 3.0?

It's worth noting as well that the HARRY_read_me.txt file was still being edited/added to after CRU 3.0 was released. Why? Because (to use the words of the code expert I linked to earlier):

They keep trying to match the results that came from v2.10 because it was made public with v3.0. The only problem with that is the catalog of errors that have been found in the 2.10 code, the databases, etc.




So now they're going back and doing **** to make it look right....

Rather than acknowledge that 3.0 had issues, they decided it was better to try and erase the problems in version 2.10 so that the provenance of 3.0 couldn't be questioned.

China's influence on academia...

As you guys probably know, China is one of my major interest areas. As such, I enjoyed this short essay on Chinese attempts to influence American academics.

Linked inside the article is the latest report from the US Economic and Security Review Commission (a bipartisan commission of experts who monitor all things China). Broken down by topic, it highlights trends in Chinese activity and its implications for American interests.

Howard Dean discusses modern Democrat philosophy

Howard Dean on capitalism vs. socialism, the "permanent campaign," and more.

(via Drudge)