Global Warming and Solar Heating

Who do you believe?  Today there were two articles on the relation between solar radiance and global warming.  In the American Thinker D. Bruce Merrifield writes that the global climate is driven by a variety of solar variations and that CO2 and methane concentrations are a product of heating and cooling rather than a cause of it.

The current 100 year solar radiation cycle may now have reached its peak, and irradiation intensity has been observed to be declining. This might account for the very recent net cessation of emission of green house gases into the atmosphere starting about 1988, in spite of increasing generation of anthropomorphically-sourced industrial-based green house gases.

But in The Daily Telegraph Roger Highfield writes that Professor Lockwood and associates report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society  A that “the sun is not responsible for recent global warming.”

The study found that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor by a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays.

Actually the argument is not whether the recent global warming is a result of anthropogenic-forcing, but whether we should do anything about it. 

The argument of scientists like Merrifield is that the earth’s climate has experienced huge fluctuations in the past, probably due to solar variations, and that the current warming is nothing to get excited about.

The position of global warming enthusiasts is that the warming over the last century is mainly anthropogenic and that a continuation of the warming is a danger to the planet. 

The End of the Newspaper Columnist

About twelve years ago, according to columnist Bruce Bartlett, a pal called him up and suggested he write a column for the Detroit News. He agreed, and eventually the column got syndicated. 

But now Bartlett is hanging it up. No more columns, thank you; there’s more money and more editorial control in writing books.  In fact, he reckons, “the demand for traditional column writing has pretty much dried up[.]”

We all know the reason.  Newspapers are declining and they just don’t have the money for columnists any more.  There’s too much competition from the amateurs on the internet.  Editors would rather pick up the bland pablum that comes at “no additional cost from the New York Times and Washington Post news services.”

You can’t argue with that.

But don’t despair.  Bartlett thinks

there will always be a market for quality commentary, however, and some day someone will figure out a better way to make money from it.

But in the mean time the market stinks.

British Conservatives Issue Plan To Fight Social Breakdown

It’s called Breakthrough Britain and it has been billed as the most important document on social welfare in Britain since the Beveridge Report of 1944 that set the agenda for the post World War II welfare state.

The idea behind the report is fairly simple, according to George Jones.  It says that: 

It is time to stand up for marriage and send out a signal that it is good for society

Breakthrough Britain is organized around five social pathologies that are tearing the social fabric apart with one section of the report dedicated to each pathology.

1. Family Breakdown
2. Economic Dependency
3. Educational Failure
4. Addiction
5. Serious Personal Debt

Breakthrough Britain proposes to end the penalizing of marriage in the tax code; it will require single mothers to enter part-time work once the youngest child reaches five, and full-time work once the youngest child reaches 11.  It will increase taxes on alcohol and use the monies to fund addiction programs. 

The final section of the report looks at the “Third Sector,” voluntary associations and charities that help the poor.  Charitable giving in Britain is half that of the United States, and it is concentrated in the large charities.  A number of proposals are suggested to strengthen associations.

Above all, Breakthrough Britain proposes to re-establish marriage as the central beneficial institution in society.  For it is a matter of empirical fact that children are safer when living with their married mother and father.  Much safer.

But, reports the lefty BBC, “Labour said the proposals would "discriminate" against some families.”

Yes.  I think that is the idea, to discriminate against the kind of families that empirical evidence shows are dangerous to women and children.  And men too.

Keeper of the Tower Lives in France

Is this what Britain has come to?  The chap who keeps an eye on the crown jewels in the Tower of London lives in north-western France.  Brittany, to be exact.

And why would Major General Keith Cima live in France?  It starts with the basics: “less traffic, less crowding, affordable housing.”  Then there is the matter of the schools.

Our younger children go to school there and learn as we did: facts, focus, lots of tests, plenty of homework. And if they do not do well enough, they repeat a year, which is a great incentive to work hard.

Yes.  It seems almost surreal to imagine a school system like that.  The French are so old-fashioned. And there’s more.

The medical system is superb, and operates off a mixed system of state provision, pay-as-you-use and modest insurance premiums. Appointments are on time, and the IT works. There appear to be no waiting lists; a consultant [specialist] gets his diary out and asks when the operation would be convenient. Even a casualty department on a Saturday night in a city is free-flowing (good, as my thumb had just lost a debate with a circular saw). My dentist apologetically presented me with a bill for £30 [$60] the other week for a capped tooth[.]

You read of more and more Brits moving to France.  They don’t seem to be quite as frank about their reasons as the major general.

But it seems to be that things actually work in France.  It must be the Cartesian rationalism.  And we thought that the French were finished, suffering from terminal euro-sclerosis.

Now The Lawyers are Upset

The Brits are just waking up to the idea that lawyers are miserable.  Apparently 25 percent of them want to leave the profession, according to Sathnam Sanghera.  But of course this is nothing compared to lawyer misery in the United States.  Here, 40 percent of lawyers want to leave the profession.  In fact, lawyer misery has become an industry. 

[T]here are now almost more books, articles and websites dedicated to the subject of legal despair than there are American lawyers. Which is saying something, given that the USA has more lawyers than people.

Ho, ho.  Those Brits must have their little joke.  But why are the lawyers so miserable?  Sanghera lists the reasons.

1. The long hours.
2. The misery of someone so intelligent doing such mind-numbing work.
3. The “yawning gap” between the ideal of law and the reality.
4. The toll of being “competitive, aggressive, judgmental, analytical, adversarial, emotionally detached, paranoid of being sued and, worst of all, pessimistic.”
5. “The vortex of hatred.”  Apparently lawyers hate each other, hate their clients and the clients hate them right back.
6. The self-inflicted misery.  After all, you don’t have to destroy yourself, but in the competitive world of high-stakes lawyering, people do it all the time.

Hold on a minute.  What is so different about lawyers?  Doesn’t everyone suffer in a high-stakes career where you are dealing with ruthless competitors all the time and confronted by the fact that all work, even the most creative, is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration?

Maybe it’s just that lawyers are pushy enough to demand attention.  They demand that we witness their misery.  Other people manage to live their lives of quiet desperation without calling attention to themselves.

But lawyers are different.

The Underclass As Residue of Social Mobility

Most of us like to write about the underclass as a failure of the welfare state.  Underclass unemployment, crime, and social pathology are all the consequence of anesthetizing poor people with subsidies  and rewarding failure.  But Matthew Parris has a different idea about the underclass, at least in Britain.  He sees it as the residue left in the “sink estates” [public housing] after everyone else has left for the suburbs.  Says he:

And I wonder too whether, perverse as this may sound, the plight of the poorest in modern Britain is a result of, rather than a reproach to, social mobility.

You see, back in the old days of class, the classes lived separate and looked after their own.  The rich found nice little billets for the rich idiots and the deserving poor looked after the “undeserving poor” out of class solidarity.

But with the advent of the meritocratic society everyone is sorted not by origin, class, or caste, but by results.  Winners go with winners; winners marry winners.  And losers get stuck with the losers.

People with any drive, capable and motivated people, can find their natural level in our less classbound society. They move on, and up[.]

And the losers get left behind.

Tell that to Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom, and see where it gets you.

The Real David Halberstam

For what seems like forever we have been taught to celebrate David Halberstam as the intrepid journalist who blew the lid off the Vietnam War.  He wrote about how The Best and the Brightest betrayed the United States in their fumbling little war in Vietnam.

Actually, it wasn’t like that at all, according to Mark Moyar, author of an expose about Halberstam, Triumph Forsaken.  It was Halberstam and his buddies in Saigon who committed the central blunder of the war.  It was they who agitated to get Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem removed. 

[T]hey had a low opinion of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and decided that he would need to be removed if the war was to be won.

So they briefed their pals in the US government and told them that Diem was no good.

Most of the information they passed on was false or misleading, owing in part to their heavy reliance on a Reuters stringer named Pham Xuan An who was actually a secret Communist agent. The journalists convinced Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to accept their reports in place of much more accurate reports from the CIA and the U.S. military, which led Lodge to urge South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup.

Unfortunately, the removal of Diem screwed things up.  His assassination created a power vacuum and a purging of Diem loyalists.

After Diem’s assassination, the South Vietnamese fared very poorly in their war against the Communists, which was why the U.S. eventually had to send half a million troops to South Vietnam.

So Halberstam and his pals had to do a bit of coverup.  They developed the story that things were going to hell in Vietnam before the Diem assassination.

Based on a few faulty pieces of evidence, they contended that the South Vietnamese war effort had crumbled before Diem’s overthrow, not after it. No one of influence succeeded in pointing out that these men’s own articles in 1963 contradicted this claim.

It is a tragedy that David Halberstam should have lost his life in an auto accident.  But if Moyar’s story is true it is outrageous that Halberstam attempted in such a disgraceful way to influence US policy in Vietnam.  And it is tragic that he succeeded.  It is criminal that he then proceeded to cover up his manipulations and succeeded.

What happened to the journalistic passion for the truth?