ShrinkWrapped

What Will They Think of Next?

The entire edifice of Anthropogenic Global warming is unraveling with amazing speed.  Watts Up With That? has been posing multiple posts daily which document fraudulent behavior by the IPCC and its minions.  Simon at Classical Values offers a nice summary of the metastasizing scandals thus far, and ends with a question:

A Disaster Of Biblical Proportions

The UN's IPCC has just taken a few more torpedoes below the water line.

Well it turns out that the WWF [World Wildlife Fund] is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC's rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they've violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri's watch.

A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.

Here's an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF and cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC AR4 report:

I'm not going to reprise the long list. You can find it at the links provided.

...

... they knew it was bad and did nothing. You know, that is not the only fraud uncovered. We may now be in possession of tens of them. So far. In fact it is looking like the whole IPCC enterprise is a fraud. And that doesn't even get to the bottom of the CO₂ emissions trading fraud.

[Among the scandals are those mounting around Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the now embattled head of the IPCC.  Almost all of their dire predictions are coming undone and his financial improprieties and conflicts of interest are receiving attention in the foreign press, though you wouldn't know this from the American MSM, as far as I can determine.]

Simon's conclusion and question:

The good news is that the whole fraud is unraveling. It will be interesting to see what the Watermelons try next.

It looks increasingly likely that the entire AGW scam represents a serendipitous cooptation of some immature science by the international left.  (Hence the derivation of Simon's visual pun.)  After the fall of the USSR, communism and socialism were held in disrepute.  Among other problems for the left was that in every instance it failed to raise the living standards of those who were its nominal beneficiaries.  However, those who support collectivism and leverage envy and hated of those who are successful for their own aggrandizement, were not about to give up on their dreams of dismantling capitalism simply because they had lost the Cold War.  AGW was a perfect fit.  It threatened disaster at some indeterminate future, a disaster that could only be avoided by crippling the world's most developed economies; all directed by those who were uniquely equipped to "save the planet."  It was based on a belief structure that leveraged faith in the new religion of Gaiaism and thus had an already prepared population of worshippers who would fully adopt the dogma and be immune to countervailing data.  As a bonus, it offered the kinds of virtuous self regard that has been a traditional motivator for those who suffered significant guilt over their good fortune to be born and live in materially successful societies.  The international left were quite clear, if not terribly overt, about their desire to use AGW as a weapon to diminish the power of the wealthy nations and transfer large amounts of wealth to the poor (with the wealth first passing through the fingers of the international elites.)  The game is up now on AGW and those who desire above all to create the promised Utopia on earth that only they can envision and produce, must now look to other means by which to introduce such "necessities" as world governance, greater wealth transfers, and enhanced power to the elites.

As it happens, reader/commenter Expat sent me a link yesterday that offers a likely candidate for what's next:

Tax and Spend: U.N.'s Rx for New World Medical Order

A member of a World Health Organization (WHO) panel of experts that is pondering new global taxes on e-mails, alcohol, tobacco, airline travel and consumer bank transactions, has charged that she was given only selective information at group meetings, that deliberations were rushed and that group was "manipulated" by the international pharmaceuticals industry.

All of her charges were strongly denied by the head of WHO's Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing (EWG), a 25-member panel of medical experts, academics and health care bureaucrats which is due to present a 98-page report in Geneva on Monday, after 14 months of deliberations on "new and innovative sources of funding" to reshape the global medical industry.

...

The executive summary first revealed the possibility of a multibillion-dollar "indirect consumer tax" as one means of financing an epic shift of drug-making research, development and manufacturing capabilities to the developing world that is the central aim of WHO's fund-raising strategy.

Fox News has obtained a copy of the full EWG report, Research and Development: Coordination and Financing, in advance of its publication Monday, which lays out in greater detail the working group's proposals for fund-raising. These include not only indirect consumer taxes but also greater donations by wealthy governments as a percentage of gross domestic product, voluntary individual payments tied to such things as individual mobile phone use, health care lotteries, new commitments from charitable and philanthropic organizations, and the possible diversion of current philanthropic giving from developed-world causes into developing world health care.

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The tempest created by Lopez Montano's accusations is liable to fade quickly as people around the world — especially Americans, who are far and away the world's biggest funders of medical research and development — absorb the variety of the EWG's revenue ideas and the full extent of WHO's ambitions to reshape the international health care industry in favor of research and development for the "neglected" diseases of developing countries.

The full EWG report lays out in some detail a battery of other possible consumer taxes on citizens of rich countries for such things as alcohol and tobacco use, weapons sales, and airline travel, to create a burgeoning medical R&D industry spread across the developing world.

Click here for the full report.

...

After itemizing all those potential sources of new money, however, the report suggests that only a "balance" of options be selected, which it projects would amount — again, conservatively — to about $4.6 billion a year. That would "nearly triple current research and development funding for neglected diseases in developing countries."

How would all the money be channeled? Mainly, it appears, through institutions that in many of cases have close ties with WHO.

The report that will be released Monday suggests that a global blossoming of developing-world research networks, many of which appear to be rapidly sprouting up in tandem with WHO's efforts to create new ways of financing them, could be "coordinated" via an "effective global health governance structure" by WHO itself — an organization whose 34-member executive board is made up largely of non-elected health bureaucrats from around the world.

...

Not by coincidence, new health research networks like ANDI cropped up in 2008 — at about the same time that WHO's legislative World Heath Assembly adopted a global strategy and plan of action that mandated the organization, as the EWG report puts it, to "play a strategic, central role in the relations between public health and innovation and intellectual property."

Among other things, that meant driving the global health-care agenda "to promote a new approach to innovation and access to medicines, which would encourage needs-driven rather than market-driven research." [Empahsis mine-SW] The aim: "to target diseases that disproportionately affect people in developing countries."

Just for clarity, a UN panel is suggesting raising global taxes to fund a new regimen of of "needs-driven" rather than market -driven research, ie centrally planned versus the much messier, and uncontrolled, decentralized research.  Nowhere in the report is there any mention of the fact that the various poor health outcomes so prominently mentioned, the source of the WHO concerns, are primarily caused by poverty, which is primarily caused by poor governance and the lack of market economies in the developing world. 

To no one's surprise, Lopez Montano's accusations were not related to the dishonesty and misunderstanding evinced in the WHO report but to the fact that the report did not go far enough in attacking the intellectual property rights of the large corporations.

Perhaps what is so remarkable is that at a time when smaller and smaller groups of people and individuals have become more and more empowered by our technology (just ask Scott Brown and Martha Coakley) those who desire nothing more than to exert power and control over everyone are left grasping at straws.  The President appears to be "doubling down" on his current course (which is all about increasing the size and power of the federal government) and the UN doesn't appear to have noticed yet that AGW is no longer working as anticipated.

It is worth pondering what comes next for them because people who believe it is their right to control the rest of us (and to live off of our earnings) will never disappear; they are part of the mosaic that makes up human nature.  As we become more empowered (Tea Party, anyone?) and increasingly realize that we are gaining, moment by moment, increased control over our own lives (although with the current economic straits it probably doesn't feel that way for many) the power of the current and traditional elites to tell us what is best for us can only continue to erode.  The struggle for freedom and power between those elites and the rest of us will be determinative for the early years of the 21st century.

Societal Regression Watch

From Terror and Societal Regression:

After a national trauma, there are a number of signs of "large group" regression.  (I will not here go into some of the characteristics of what constitutes a large group; it relates to elements that I have referred to in the past as our tribal nature; see also here.)  The panel chair, Vamik Volkan, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and founder of the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, described 14 major symptoms of large-group regression:

...

9) Reactivation of a "chosen trauma" whereby a large group unconsciously "chooses" to make a shared mental representation of an event that caused it terrible losses, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization....Slobodan Milosevic exemplified this phenomenon in his reactivation of the shared memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the Serbian hero, Prince Lazar, was killed. [Emphasis added-SW]

There has been a great deal already written about the difficult to understand decision of the Obama administration to bring Khalid Sheik Mohamed to New York for trial within eyesight of the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.  Andy McCarthy has made the point that by bringing KSM to trial in a criminal proceeding, the Obama administration can effectively put the Bush administration on trial without taking respoonsibility for their behavior.  The Bush administration's dirty laundry (renditions, secret prisons, enhanced interrogations) can be put on trial, names can be leaked via discovery, and a host of untoward events can cause great pleasure to the left and great distress to those who were involved in protecting us for the last 8 years. 

James Taranto, quoted by Glenn Reynolds notes:

“You have to wonder if the Obama administration and its supporters bothered to think through the implications of their decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohamed and four other enemy combatants as civilians. An immediate effect, and one that will only be strengthened by an actual trial or trials, is to bring 9/11 back into the public consciousness. That can’t be good for President Obama. . . . When appellate courts decide questions of law, they set precedents for future cases. If they make allowances for the exigencies of the war on terror in order to uphold convictions of KSM and his associates, it could end up diminishing the rights of ordinary criminal defendants. That’s why the smart civil-libertarian position is to oppose trying terrorists as civilians.”

It would not be unusual for the unintended consequences to far outweigh the intended.  If the administration believes this will simply be a showcase for the wonders of our legal system and that the political effects will be helpful to them or at least minimally harmful, they may end up surprised.

However, whatever the conscious motivations of Obama and Holder, et al, the unconscious ramifications may be even more powerful, more long lasting, and deeper. 

John Opie pointedly notes the juxtaposition of trial and empty space:  [Emphasis mine-SW]

WTC as Metaphor...

I've commented on the absurd situation surrounding the rebuilding of the WTC before.

And yes, it was a comment to a post by Bret Stephens at the WSJ.

He's remindedonce again that there has been, functionally, no progress there, and that indeed there are multiple ways of viewing the WTC at this point in time.

It's where what effectively amounts to a show trial is now scheduled to be turned into a media circus.

It's where literally thousands of people are waiting for closure and rebirth.

It's also where petty scrabbling and pathetically disgusting incompetence has led to no reconstruction.

... what I really want to talk about here is the WTC as metaphor: a metaphor for how screwed up things really are.

After eight years in which the views and interests of, inter alia, the Port Authority, NYPD, MTA and EPA, the several governors of New York and New Jersey, lease-holder Larry Silverstein, various star architects, the insurance companies, contractors, unions and lawyers, the families of the bereaved, their self-appointed spokespersons, the residents of lower Manhattan and, yes, even the fish of the Hudson river have all been duly consulted and considered, this is what we've got: a site of mourning turned into a symbol of defiance turned into a metaphor of American incompetence—of things not going forward. It is, in short, the story of our decade.

....

Think of it this way: as long as the WTC is not rebuilt, things will not get better. There is a malaise here, a sickness unto the heart, the ritual self-loathing of what once was the great liberal tradition in the United States, poisoned by greed and corruption from within and deliberately targeted for subversion from outside.

Rebuild the WTC. Rebuild it now.

The empty hole where the WTC used to stand is a symbol of American impotence.  9/11 was traumatic not just because of the terrible personal losses of those who lost loved ones that day.  What makes a loss traumatic is the helpless rage evoked by the victimization.  America was rendered helpless on that terrible day and all who watched the planes fly repeatedly into the twin towers and saw those poor doomed souls falling to their deaths, who watched those towers come down, felt the helplessness deep in their emotional cores.  When George W. Bush, in his finest moment, stood on top of the pile of rubble and announced we were coming, it was a necessary turn from mourning to action, psychologically necessary even if the action taken was poorly executed. 

We have now returned to a pre-9/11 passivity in our National Defense.  (I am not here discussing any actual details of how our defensive posture may have changed or whether or not our military is carrying the fight to our enemies but of the atmospherics, the zeitgeist, which is much more significant at the moment.)  By returning KSM to the scene of the crime (rather than dealing with him in a military tribunal that would mete out justice, an active position, versus the enforced passivity of the legal forum) the Obama administration is reawakening the trauma.  When the vast majority of people are opposed to treating KSM with the kids gloves required in our legal system and their wishes are ignored, the sense of powerlessness returns.  Just as the abused child is secondarily traumatized by the parents refusal to listen, those who were traumatized by 9/11 can be re-traumatized by our "parents" refusal to listen.  But where a traumatized child is forced to remain passive, the once traumatized American people may well not remain passive.  The Tea party movement is an expression of the adaptive defense of turning passive into active.  The movement can only grow with each new insult.

Obama and those who share his pre-9/11 mindset (of a wishful fantasy world) would continue to reinforce the trauma and maintain us as a humiliated, helplessly people.  They have unconsciously "chosen the trauma" and moved well down the pathway to a regressed state.  There is a connection between the still vacant hole in the ground and a President who appears to be constitutionally incapable of exercising leadership and taking action.  (Impotence is not a problem in the Academy or the Senate but in the Executive it is disastrous.)  We are facing a genuine test of whether our society will continue to regress or if the people, that amorphous mass who define the zeitgeist in America, can refuse to allow the pervasive state of helplessness and trauma to persist.

Addendum: David Brooks, who is paid to have a sense of the zeitgeist, is in tune with my post today; note the tone of resignation and near despair as he compares our sense of the future and China's sense of its future:

The Nation of Futurity

The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.

China, where President Obama is visiting, invites a certain sort of reverie. It is natural, looking over the construction cranes, to think about the flow of history over decades, not just day to day. And it becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future-centered orientation and how much this rankles.

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.

The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.

It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. The most pragmatic guide for that remains Michael Porter’s essay in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of Business Week.

As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon.

Apes and Angels

In January I offered my take on The 10,000 Year Explosion and called it a most A Most Dangerous Book.  I suggested that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending had fired an early salvo in a battle that is going to reshape or destroy our culture, and probably our world, in the next 20-30 years (the time frame is mine.)   The book does not aim to solve the "Nature vs Nurture" conundrum but presents evidence from the field of population genetics to support their theory that, contrary to conventional wisdom in evolution and sociology, evolution has been speeding up in the last 10,000 years rather than remaining static.  As more and more evidence accrues elucidating the influence of genetics on behavior and population abilities, a clash is inevitable between science and political correctness.  I commented:

In Race, Ethnicity, and the Genetic Time Bomb I discussed the coming collision between the accumulating body of scientific data regarding human evolution and differentiation, and the PC shibboleth that all men and all populations are exactly equivalent.  The corollary to this assumption has become conventional wisdom, ie that any differences in outcome between populations can only be the result of discrimination by the powerful against the weak.  Various iterations of this assumption have become so deeply ingrained in science and society that it is considered a career destroyer to publicly question the idea. 

I cautioned in that post that as the science accumulates, the demarcation between scientific investigation and social transgression would become increasingly difficult to maintain.  Simply asserting that a minority group may have different levels of ability can mean academic death.  Now, more than ever before, the legacy of Darwin, supported by evolutionary biology, is bringing political (ideological and religious)  shibboleths into stark question.  Both the left and the right have exhibited an unconscious splitting in their relationship to Darwin's monumental achievement and this is the field of interest of Apes or Angels, by Neil Troost.  This slim, readable volume could well be considered a companion piece to Cochran and Harpending's book.  Dr. Troost unflinchingly examines the distortions of both left and right that interfere with an understanding of the meaning of Darwin's theory and the implications of our growing knowledge of evolutionary biology that is putting flesh onto the skeleton of evolution.  

In his introduction, he describes the conflictual relationship of both left and right to Darwin and his implications:

While we can thank Darwin for identifying our family tree and disabusing us of our wishful thinking, we are less certain of his revelations of human diversity.  As modern genetics increasingly supports Darwin's observations on human variability, the West is embroiled in a political war over the interpretation and meaning of these findings.  Secular humanism, set adrift from Christianity in part because of Darwin, now opposes the facts of human inequality first pointed out in 1871 by the great naturalist.  As in Galileo's day, science is under siege for discovering uncomfortable truths.  Pope's are no longer the enemy, but doctrinaire liberals within the scientific community are!  Darwin, the immortal hero of science, gave us ideas that offend both sides in the culture wars.  Liberals generally accept evolution and make it a foundation of their materialism, but they despise the idea that human races might be unequal.  Conservative Christians hate the idea of evolution without god, but, until recently, they accepted biological inequality without debate.  To understand who we are we must have the courage to follow Darwin's route to human nature, clearing the brush of superstition and myth while recognizing that  our common humanity may not be enough to overcome the problems of extreme diversity.  Struggle and strife, part of the basis of evolution, may well be ineradicable.

Dr. Troost spends the first part of the book reviewing Darwin's theories and some of the implications of his findings.  He has a habit of asking obvious but dangerous questions:

(p. 30)  Belief in inequality is not racist if we are talking about biological facts.  Darwin was against slavery but accepted inequality.  If I see a Kenyan runner and runners from Italy or Belgium, I am not a racist if I "stereotype" Kenyans by predicting victory in a marathon based upon race and nationality.  This is simply scientific generalization based upon evidence.  Racism is either a false generalization used denigratingly or the use of a true generalization to suppress or punish people.  One can believe in the fact of inequality and treat people as individuals, knowing that group differences are statistical.  As Steven Pinker put it: "equality refers to fair treatment and not human biology."

Sadly, a significant proportion of the population will take offence at his statements and accuse him of racism for merely acknowledging reality.  At the same time Dr. Troost offers ample ammunition for the religious right to attack.  He has little tolerance for Supernaturalism.

(p. 106) Evolution does produce increased diversity, complexity, amount, and scope of life.  Is this the work of a divine agency?  Since such an agency is unnecessary for evolutionary purposes, it is illogical that a purposeless process would result in process.

Between the Cosmologists who can theorize that the universe evolved out of nothing (quantum fluctuations in the vacuum) and evolutionary biologists, it is clear that a plausible, scientifically consistent explanation can encompass our origins and development without the necessity of a deity.  Faith in G-d must be maintained, if at all, in contradistinction to science.  (Whether religion has instrumental utility is another and longer discussion altogether, barely touched upon by Dr. Troost.)

If Darwin erodes the philosophical underpinnings of religion, leaving the religious right adrift, the greater danger going forward is that work in evolutionary biology will erode the philosophical underpinnings of the liberal ideal, leaving the left adrift.

As we understand how genes and genetic controls respond to environmental effects, we will be able to approach the answers to explosive questions, such as:

What is "g", the measure of general intelligence often described by IQ?  What genes encode for what proteins that lead to more efficient nerve conduction, more complex neural networks, and the resulting advantages in mentation and better problem solving that are the core biological substrate of intelligence?

At that point, the finding that certain genes are over-represented in some populations and under-represented in other populations is going to create problems that  our society, crippled by PC imposed elective mutism in relation to such subjects, will have great difficulty metabolizing; synthesizing our knowledge in ways which do not threaten social cohesion and amity will only be possible if we can talk about forbidden topics in a candid manner.

For the last 100 years we have known that there are persistent, reliable differences in IQ between groups and for the last 50 years there has been a mountain of material published attempting to deny the implications of such distinctions.  Dr. Troost's contribution is useful in illuminating just how heavily the scientific data weighs in one direction.

The Paradox of Liberalism in War Time

Liberals believe that a system works best when it appeals to the better qualities of human nature while Conservatives believe that society works best when the worst tendencies in human beings are constrained. As a result, Liberals tend to see themselves as more caring and compassionate than Conservatives, who they often see as cruel and unfeeling. This has been captured by the aphorism that Liberals think Conservatives are "evil" while Conservatives think Liberals are wrong.  I admire the liberal impulse to seek,, and expect, the best in everybody, and most of the time, my trust is rewarded. The problem for Liberalism is that by living as if their philosophy was not only better, but was true, we have effectively made international relations much more risky and made international disaster much more likely.

Two weeks ago Scott Johnson at Powerline wrote about an article in the current Claremont Review of Books that sought to understand why Israel has been losing the war with the Palestinians while having an overwhelming military advantage.  Joseph Tartakovsky's review of Stephanie Gutmann’s The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy is Pictures worth a thousand lives.  He suggests that there are three main reasons the Israelis have lost the media war: