Month: January 2010

war

Torture the underpants bomber

Fifty eight percent of those polled favor “aggressive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding”  for Umar Farouk. He should be asked who gave him the bomb, and where they gave him the bomb.  We should then kill everyone in the general vicinity of where the bomb came from.  Not because we cannot afford to lose a few planes and a few passengers every now and then, but because we cannot afford …

economics

Unemployment

Officially, unemployment has fallen to the curiously round number of ten percent. Are you feeling more prosperous? Yes, strange to report, zero hedge observes that the money paid to the unemployed has risen substantially, and risen a lot in the last two months. While there are officially nine and half million unemployed, there appear to be fourteen million receiving unemployment benefits. Funny thing that.

global warming

No twentieth century warming 3

Hadcrut temperatures are fraudulent, for the Climategate files reveals that no one knows how they were constructed. The Air vent attempts an honest reconstruction: Of course, this reconstruction can only be as good as the data it rests on, which we now know from the Climategate documents directory to be poor.  I argue we should throw out all dubious data – which likely means we should rely on proxy indications …

global warming

The scientific method

When science becomes a priesthood, it is no longer science. Reference to authority is unscientific, indeed antiscientific, a rejection of the principles of science.  One must appeal to evidence, not authority.  What authority says is not scientific evidence. Independent replication is evidence. If people all over the world have  made observations for the last 100 years about  temperature, I can’t replicate them; but other people at the time could replicate …