Some people seem not to have noticed that the civil war was fought over "union" and whether citizens were citizens of the federal government as well as the states, as well as the slavery question. So they are fantasizing.

I'd prefer it not to take a quarter of the population to settle the question.

UPDATE: Decimal point error. That's two point five percent, not twenty five percent. Still not good: today's population would make that over seven and a half million.

For its public database, the British government wants the DNA of everybody -- including tourists. Think of it as a new spot on the entrance form. For those who want the short version, I was alerted by this comment from Pearce, who brought up the disturbing question:

"Everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention -- and no other purpose."

"For no other purpose". Why, are there other purposes that the judge knows about?

As it turns out, we already know what the British Government does with DNA databases: it sells them to large private companies which then run amok figuring out who they can tell. Admittedly, the article was from some obscure paper called the Guardian, that the Senior Judge might not have read.

Why else might we object to it? Well, as it turns out, it encourages the already poorly run police forces and prosecutors to take shortcuts:

In fact, we have an example, easily findable, showing that DNA analysis can be spectacularly wrong:

What is also to be expected from a thorough trawl of this mammoth database would be around 100 billion attempts to match crime scenes with potential suspects, resulting in over two thousand false cold hits. More if the labs are capable of making mistakes.

The first false cold hit from a database trawl to be recognised in the UK was in 1999, though it did not become public knowledge until the following year after a UK forensic scientist addressed the USDOJ Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence.

A man with advanced Parkinsons disease who could not drive an automobile or dress himself unaided was linked to a burglary which had occured 200 miles from his home. In spite of protestations of innocence and alibi evidence police arrested him because the DNA profiles matched and 'so it had to be him'. It was several months before 10-point DNA tests were done on samples from the suspect and the crime scene. The results exonerated him.

He gained his freedom and a brief note from the prosecutor saying that charges were being dropped because "there was not enough evidence to provide a realistic chance of conviction". He still awaits an official apology. Or even an admission of error.

Read the article carefully: you'll know why it's a good idea to look for actual evidence, and treat DNA as confirmatory, rather than probative.

Fortunately, the article quoting this lunatic senior judge also contains quotes from others indicating that even though they don't know why there is a problem, they sense there might be. I must be the only one who reads the Guardian out there, or who has a memory, or they would start at the same place I did: what is government becomes corporate.

If you're the New York Times, you write about what you think will influence your readers in a particular direction. You send people out to the battlefield, but keep them in hotels and hire local stringers who accept the idea that they can use this as their outlet for any complaints they have about the Americans. And if it looks like you're winning, for goodness' sake, don't report it. After all, this worked in Viet Nam. Why shouldn't it work now? Besides, you have hack journalists all over the world who will back you up on the assertion that this is good journalism.

Have I mentioned that journalism schools, like schools of education, would better serve the country if they were converted into nursing homes for the elderly and infirm?

As the Tigerhawk reminds us, the CIA has decided that spying on those plotting to hurt us is too much work, so they've decided their mission is bureaucratic infighting, instead. We have seen their disregard for the rules of classification when it suits them to release something that can be spun as damaging to George Bush, and the extraordinary insouciance they display when their frequent failures are trotted out (most recent example: see George Tenet).

It's amazing to me that these people are still there.

And still unable to read. Much less, as it turns out, follow caselaw

You'd think they would call Congress, which can change the tax law by a vote. But no. That would be too simple. So they ignore tax law, get caught and jailed, get caught and the judge has pity on them as illiterate hicks, or whatever, and think they're getting something done. Yet if they decided to advocate for the fair tax or some other scheme with the same energy, they might accomplish someething.

For goodness' sake, Wikipedia has articles on the constitutional objections and those who have trouble with the statute. It is, I suppose, fitting that many of these same people finally end up with a generalized conspiracy argument.

From the Dictionary for the Politically Correct:

Judgmentalism - The capacity to form moral judgments, this being the principal quality that gives human beings an advantage over orangutans, who after all are a good deal stronger. Nonetheless, judgmentalism is a bad thing, because the formation of judgments implies that one might correctly conclude that some ways of behaving are better than others. See "tolerance." The upshot is that only "non-judgmentalism" is an acceptable outlook on life -- with the caveat that non-judgmentalism is subject to cancellation without notice when the subject is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales, anyone invovled with the imprisonment of terrorists at Guantanamo, and of course the Duke lacrosse team.

Read the whole thing: then catch the original post., where we learn another key word:

Tolerance - Tolerance is the mind-set that requires you to assume that every way of living is as good as every other way of living. Thus, if a woman has X number of kids by Y number of men, none of whom she troubled herself to get to know all that well, much less marry, we must accept this in the name of "tolerance" of a "non-traditional lifestyle." (Indeed, we are required not merely to tolerate it but foot the bill). If you are rude enough to point out that the kids who come into the world this way are much more likely to be poorly educated, not to mention abused by the next boyfriend, you are "intolerant." In bygone days, "tolerance" had a different meaning, to wit, an open attitude of good faith toward socially benevolent behavior and beliefs even if different from your own, but that view is now held principally by old fogies.

In response to the ridiculous idea that random numbers can be owned, one site has decided to do something about it: claim ownership to a lot of such numbers, in exactly the same way, and then give ownership to the person requesting the number.

And in return, 4E 15 F4 A5 63 8D 97 84 F5 A1 1C B5 92 48 39 AB is, by the same logic that illiterates in the movie industry use, is mine, Mine, MINE!!!(evil laugh here):

First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the rest.

Now all I need to do is hit the jackpot: if AACS generates the same random number to replace their old, disclosed one, and I sue the hell out of them, and, under the diseased logic of the DCMA, I win. Sounds good to me. Or, I could just hope someone mysteriously posts it.

That's the theme running through this article and this one, by "Spengler" in the Asia Times. Of the two, the second is by far the most direct, so I will begin with the first.

Spengler notes that abstract "non-figurative" art was one of the innovations of Modernism, along with atonal music: and he points out that music, where everyone really does have a sense of taste, has condemned the works of poseurs like Arnold Schoenberg to being played only in front of captive audiences. (Doubtless, it would be a war crime to play such pieces in Guantanamo).

Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but reluctant to live under communism.

When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist's chair. You cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow, rather than admiring it at a safe distance.

The second article, however, goes on to respond to those who said "I do, too, like Modern Art!"

You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. In fact, you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren't one of them. By insisting that you are not creative, you think I am saying that you are not important. I do not mean that, but will have to return to the topic later.

You have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor, rather than the god of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself.

While not likely a way to win new friends and influence people, still a useful reminder.

One of the most famous is Williams Greider, whose current article brings up the same fallacies as his old book.

The case for free trade, for unilaterally dropping all tariffs, is easy to state, if famously difficult to understand: it's the first theorem in economics that requires mental work to understand.

Just to refresh your memory: comparative advantageworks like this:

Two nations, individuals, or states can gain by trade if each produces the goods for which it has a comparative advantage. Hibernia has a comparative advantage over Freedonia if the cost of producing widgets in Hibernia, relative to the cost of producing other goods in Hibernia is lower than the cost of producing widgets in Freedonia relative to the cost of producing other widgets in Freedonia

Pay attention to the bold print. Comparative advantage says something about the cost of producing different goods in the LOCAL ECONOMY in each place relative to the production of other goods in the LOCAL ECONOMY. That's why you should read the article under "easy to state" above very closely, and play with it for a while. Most people who make mistakes in international trade, like Greider, continue to say that it is a matter of comparing the absolute cost of making a widget in one economy versus the absolute cost of making a widget in the other economy. Note that if you made that comparison the basis, there would be NO BUSINESS OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER in Southern California: it's cheaper almost every place else in the United States, to say nothing of other countries. Yet there is business here, and people of such astonishing wealth that paying a million dollars for a house is not at all uncommon. The absolute advantage is elsewhere for everything: yet people do well here. Mr. Greider has much to ponder before he reiterates his mistake again.

Not, as demonstrated, that he will learn from his mistake. Evidently he likes making this mistake, despite being called on it before.

So art ironically comments that people didn't applaud American troops at the liberation of Iraq.

Ironically, the painter as well as the poster at Boing Boing seems to have missed the news.

They did applaud. They did bring flowers. They did celebrate.

I've figured out the advantage of being sophisticated. It means that since all cultures are worthy of respect, you don't learn about any of them and what might be different. Since people's best interest would be to act as described in the New York Times, you don't read any other paper. Since any point of view other than your own is evil, you don't bother to learn why it is wrong: it's a moral fault for those who hold it, and you are "pure". In other words, the advantage of being sophisticated is that you're ignorant, and you like it that way.

Turns out to be harder for the stock & bond companies: they lie about them.

Comparing two snapshots of the historical I/B/E/S database of research analyst stock recommendations, taken in 2002 and 2004 but each covering the same time period 1993-2002, we identify 54,729 ex post changes (out of 280,463 observations), including alterations of recommendation levels, additions and deletions of records, and removal of analyst names. The changes appear non-random across brokerage firms, analysts, and tickers, and have a significant impact on the overall distribution of recommendations across stocks and within individual stocks and brokerage firms. They also affect trading signal classifications, back-testing inferences, track records of individual analysts, and models of analysts' career outcomes in the three years following the changes.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

The first response to Clifford is that it treats domains differently without foundation, and that an application of its principles across domains indicates its falsity. In other words, "It is wrong to believe on insufficient evidence" fails as a principle because of insufficient evidence, swallowing itself almost as neatly as "Everything is relative" and other self-destroying propositions. The closest you get to such a duty is "It is imprudent to ignore evidence relevant to your actions".

But frankly, I prefer the simple response of Siris:

7. Of only one virtue that has ever been proposed is it really the case that it is a virtue of belief: it is called faith, and discussion of faith as such might be considered to belong to the ethics of belief. But it is difficult to talk about faith as such, being much more easy to talk of coming into faith; so any discussion of the ethics of belief would be rare, if it exists at all. And faith as a virtue is a theological virtue: it is not wholly in the power of the believer. And so perhaps here we have moved from ethics into something else.

8. Much of what is called "ethics of belief" is legitimate. It is legitimate to investigate the duties of investigation. It is legitimate to investigate when we should and should not trust authority. It is legitimate to investigate where inference must end and supposition begin. It is legitimate to investigate all such related things. But, while they are conducive to a healthy reason, to call them "ethics of belief" is a misnomer. They are each something different, and none of them are really an ethics of belief.

9. For believing or not believing, as such, no one can be condemned, but only for such failings as obstinacy and presumption.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: And for my interlocutor who points out Dutch Book Arguments, implying that one should avoid them, I'd point out two things: first, Pascal's wager has been around for some time, and second, that oddsmakers are comfortable making book on people's subjective probability without a publicly verifiable outcome suggests that he fails to appreciate their position. In other words, you can't hedge this bet.

There are people who oppose vouchers and school choice.

We call them "Elitists".

Well, we are in Lent, the season of the year when TIME Magazine hunts down yet another crackpot to allege that Christianity was based on a tissue of lies.

I used to worry about articles like this and wonder if they were true. I don't any more: I've watched allegation after allegation about the falsity of Christian doctrine and origins disproved, and I no longer look for the latest idiotic example as "something that has to be dealt with."

This is called "learning from experience" -- in the case of TIME and Newsweek, it's learning that they will seek out particular stories to try and get discussed and bought, and declining to be part of the crowd of fools who believe that they are worth disproving. I have lived long enough to know that whatever the latest archeological find that is alleged to upset the applecart, it will be studied, understood, and properly assimilated into the narrative that exists now soon enough, and that the lies, distortions, and posturings of the ignorant are just so much hot air: and despite all the hot air, I still don't believe in global warming.

UPDATE: The claim is based on even less than usual. And what do you know, taking it apart is basically child's play.

FURTHER UPDATE: But this does make a good moment to analyze the media's stupidity:

1. Headline Contradicted by Actual Article. Headlines of most of the articles about this subject stated that Mr. Cameron had found a box with Jesus' bones in it. However, the actual articles tell us that there were no bones inside after all, and we don't have samples of Jesus' DNA. Headline Contradicted by Actual Article is either an editorial oversight or an intentional misleading of the public to draw attention to an otherwise lame article. In this case, however, the article wasn't just lame, it was inflammatory because of its close relation to our next type of bogus media article.

2. Ad Masquerading as Actual Article. Several hundred publications ran this article, so it's not likely that anyone was paid off for placement. But this isn't a news article – it's a commercial. Most articles tell us that the "startling" claim about Jesus will be examined in-depth in a documentary Cameron produced. And they helpfully remind us what channel it's on and what time to watch. That's an ad in my book.

It's really simple. Even a non-scientist knows that the ONLY weapons science has for better understanding are reason and a commitment to truth.

So when they lie, or when they draw illogical conclusions, we should scorn their entreaties: for they are not speaking as scientists, but as politicians, who routinely lie to advance their point.

“Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilisation of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more.

“The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years....

rapidly melting glaciers: like this?
destabilization of major ice sheets: like this?
increases in extreme weather: like this?
rising sea level: like this?
shifts in species ranges like this?


So, what is the appropriate reaction to the American Association for the Advancement of Science?

Can we get a "yeah, right!"?

I'll take you seriously when you take science seriously. As an alternative, you could work on existing, rather than hypothetical, problems.

Sounds fair to me.

That was the bumper sticker, without the addendum, that was so widely derided as I was growing up.

Sadly, of course, it is quite true:

We have, post-Dunblane, what are said to be the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns - either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe - with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.


Gun laws affect only the law-abiding. To think that they affect the criminals as well is to mistake legislation for sorcery of the "I said the spell and it happened" variety (in other words, it is the default viewpoint of most legislators and rulemakers).

Thanks to Erudito, I have a reference to this article, which, when paired with This interview and this article start me on the path of understanding the implications of this post.

And you thought weblogs were about trivial things, where you could hit a link and understand it all!

OK, you didn't. But I have. This is somewhat like the opposite: how to work at understanding your reasoning (both moral and logical).

The best you can do, even with your own behavior, is to try to piece together hypotheses about the hidden motives at work based on what the person actually does, situated in the context of things you know are generally true of why people might want to do those things.

Which leads precisely to that problem I highlight in the prior post: if we applied to ourselves the standards we use to judge others, would we like ourselves very much?

Why should we, under any circumstances, be "neutral" between Palestinian goals and Israeli goals?

Palestinian goals are despicable. Death is not a noble goal. It is not dignified. It is not meaningful. Blood spilled on ground is not "sweet". These are lies. And they are lies at the heart of this culture.

Can someone say, "Dysfunctional" here?

It always amazes me that people who think of themselves as hard-headed skeptics are so gullible.


They have the picture in their head of what they think should be true, and then go out to confirm it. In this case, going into the section of the bookshop with religious myths and deciding that one of them is the "official" version, as promoted by the people who fit the pictures in their heads.

Yet, sadly, this is a kind of mistake we are all prone to make That and overconfidence.

Begin by realizing it was told by a guy who doesn't particularly have any reason to tell you something. He's talking to his editor.

Have a conversation. Get out your pen, and start to scribble on the paper.

Ask some questions. Here's a common list:

(1) What kind (genre) of journalism is it?

(2) What kind of occurrence or event produced the news story?

(3) Why is this story in the paper?

(4) Was this event created in order to get coverage?

(5) What is the writer's background? (if none is given, assume none)

(6) Is there obvious bias on the part of the writer of the article (or the writer of the headline)?

(7) Is it possible to verify the information in the article? (Are there other papers covering it? What do they say?)

(8) What sources are used in the newspaper article? Are some apparently made up?

(9) What kind of play is given to the story?

(10) What is omitted or left out?

(11) How is the event framed? Is there a "larger story" we are supposed to infer? If so, did this story distort the reporting?

(12) What are the "latent" values being transmitted by the news articles?

Like many people my age, I have seen the newspapers cover events that I have been part of: I have never been able to think that they did a good job when I know about the event myself. That same thought should be applied to their coverage of other events. I have particularly come to recognize that words used to characterize people are rarely useful, and are usually actively misleading: "conservative" "liberal" "fundamentalist" come to mind as words which are almost invariably misapplied or used to conceal, rather than reveal, the truth. Some newspapers recognize, at least implicitly, that they are losing readers, (sometimes noticing it), and want to make a joke of it. A few of us notice that certain papers will report well, and switch to them.

Finally, for those interested in evaluating the reasoning of an article or editorial, I recommend this.

The state of the union is a disaster.

Check it out.

Then worry about the mindset that accepts what is going on as an adequate reflection.

Even the unreliable sources are starting to notice that the campaign finance reforms -- the '70's version -- don't age well (just like the boomers whose thought they reflect).

Of course, the new reforms won't do much better.

After September 11th, after we had had our heads hit, many of us awoke to the fact that there was already a war on: a war against us, coducted by people who had published their positions widely.

Sure, there have been those unable to grasp this fact:they are still unable to grasp it. This is the kind of thing that led a friend of mine to say, "Let's elect a democratic president next time, and see whether reality strikes." It's a strategy.

Most of these people are engaging in "displacement" -- attacking a scapegoat they can reach rather than acknowledge that the threat to them comes from elsewhere. George Bush, Mexican immigrants, Christianists -- these are all threats to people who don't want to admit that they are the minor, everyday noise of the nation, not people with guns who want to kill us. It's an amusing strategy, but not worth paying attention to.

New blog: Overcoming Bias appears to be off to a great start, on the cognitive difficulties and inherent biases to assimilating new information.

Tip of the hat to Arnold Kling

Hubert Humphrey reminds me of the total disaster in Europe: the May '68 general strike, and the inability to reason it revealed in what was thought of as "young people" or "the young generation".

Favorite examples? From Wikipedia:

Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui.
(We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.)

On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera.
(We will claim nothing, we will ask for nothing. We will take, we will occupy.)

Le bonheur est une idée neuve.
(Happiness is a new idea.)

I think I've proved my point.