History is hard

History's always been a story as much of blundering into easily foreseen mistakes as it's been of progress or the steady advance of civilization. Duh. But this understanding doesn't make it any easier to live with the daily reality of idiocy red in tooth and claw .... and applauded by multitudes!

Some of us are over-educated for our own good, of course. Self created statistical outliers perhaps who, Cassandra-like, have seen (or read :) it all before and could tell anyone who cared to ask just what the outcome of most scenarios would most likely be. Ignored of course by those with the will and the power to effect change.

Thought without action, action without thought; it's the human comedy and the Gods LOL

Lomborg is dishonest

Chris and Crooked Timber discuss the merits of a carbon tax, in response to another article by Bjorn Lomborg in the Telegraph. As Frankis notes at Crooked Timber:

Lomborg misrepresents the opinions of the economists he quotes. The ones who sat on his “Copenhagen Consensus” panel really said:

“The panel recognised that global warming must be addressed, but agreed that approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive. The experts expressed an interest in an alternative, proposed in one of the opponent papers, that envisaged a carbon tax much lower in the first years of implementation than the figures called for in the challenge paper, rising gradually in later years. Such a proposal however was not examined in detail in the presentations put to the panel, and so was not ranked. The panel urged increased funding for research into more affordable carbon-abatement technologies.”

Lomborg writes in the Telegraph as though options beyond Kyoto, such as a carbon tax, were put to and considered by the panel (he writes “In fact, the panel called these ventures – including Kyoto – “bad projects”) when in reality the panel regretted that it could not look at other greenhouse mitigation ventures, and clearly believed that consideration of a carbon tax was the opposite of a “bad” idea.

Lomborg is in political science, not economics or environmental science, and I’d call “dishonest” his abuse of the findings of a panel of economists put together by himself.

For a political scientist it's also notable that Lomborg, rabbiting away about what might be done with US$150b toward addressing world problems such as "... clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to every single person in the world ..." doesn't manage to note the dollar cost so far of the United States' invasion of Iraq (approx US$150-200b already), nor make any comment on the non-dollar cost, in human suffering, of the US' reckless and immoral invasion of Iraq.

Lomborg's shallow thoughts would all be very comforting to a US administration that a) rabidly opposes any action to slow emissions of greenhouse gases of which b) it is by far the world's single greatest emitter, at a time when c) the US is also killing and maiming its way through the Middle East (current stop Iraq). Lomborg might as well be on the payroll of big, blundering, business-as-usual Team USA!

Good times

What's the world coming to when a judge of the US federal circuit proves himself to be sufficiently intellectually absurd that a Medium Lobster can render his most carefully considered utterances fit only for derision, pity or lampooning, in what was probably around twenty minutes of lobster time and a few brief lines? [Answer follows!]

So we don't know what the world is coming to but things like a 2nd Shrub administration in the US, the ascendancy of complete prats and wingnut poseurs in the blogosphere, safe tenure for silly old duffers like Judge Richard Posner on the US' highest courts ..... clearly, the times look good for cartoonists and comedians. Hurray!

Update
Kieran at Crooked Timber ignites a slightly more academic debate on the merits of Posner's latest and deepest.

US vote fraud

Two blogs and Conspiracy Planet, to date, are running with this story of electronic vote rigging in the USA dating back to before the 2000 election. The story has added urgency given that one man, Raymond Lemme, is dead, and this affidavit signed by a computer programmer suggests strongly that foul play is likely to have been the cause.