bicycle by HSB-Cartoon

Well, the new “green”-tinged City Council has wasted no time in trotting out its first major boondoggle. Last Monday the Council voted 5-2 for a resolution directing city staff to attend a workshop to be conducted by an outfit called the “Complete Streets Coalition” — a Washington, DC-based lobbying group devoted to rebuilding America’s urban streets to conform to greenie notions of transportation propriety. The bureaucrats are also directed to find ways to integrate “complete streets” dogmas into City street planning. That means, of course, revamping streets to accommodate pedestrians, bicycles, and transit, and to discourage use of the hated automobile.

“Complete streets” is but the latest euphemism for this element of the greenie “Smart Growth” agenda. Previous neologisms included “traffic calming” and “boulevarding.” All really mean, of course, that streets are reconfigured to hasten retreat to the preindustrial, tribal Nirvana that tickles the greenie imagination, except that these neo-primitives eschew animal-powered conveyances also. What it means for motorists is more congestion and more time-consuming travel.

Now, public streets should indeed be configured to accommodate as many modes of transportation as the traveling public appears to use. No one would object to adding bike or transit lanes to a street if the existing right-of-way could accommodate them without reducing the capacity of the street to carry automobile traffic, as long as the latter is the mode preferred by the majority of users, as it is in Spokane (90+% of all urban trips are by automobile).

Here is a test the traffic engineers can apply after enduring the brainwashing session the Council has instructed them to attend. We can call this the “Contrarian Criterion.” For any street proposed for reconfiguration as a “complete street,” conduct a traffic mode survey over the entire course of a year (to capture seasonal variations), and determine which modes travelers upon that street are using — pedestrian, bicycle, transit, auto, etc. Then determine what portion of the right-of-way would be required to accommodate each mode according to accepted design standards — for bike lanes, transit lanes, or wider sidewalks. If the use fraction does not equal or exceed the required ROW fraction, that use is removed from the configuration plan. The street will remain “incomplete.”

But what if, say, bicyclists make up 10% of the traffic on a given street, and a bike lane would require 10% or less of the ROW, but adding a regulation bike lane would require a reduction in the number of regulation traffic lanes? Well, obviously, we do not cater to a minority at the expense of the majority. So we also adopt the rule: when the ROW cannot accommodate all uses, the dominant uses have priority.

You can be sure that the greenie zealots on the Council will have no use for the Contrarian Criterion. Far from considering themselves public servants, bound to accommodate the demonstrated preferences of the citizens when designing and operating public facilities, the zealots imagine themselves to be, instead, the public’s masters — “leaders” possessed of superior wisdom and purer motives, whose role is to drag their stubborn and unenlightened charges into the Utopia they fantasize, kicking and screaming if necessary. Megalomania has always been a peculiar affliction of politicians.

The current street improvement bond, which expires in 2014, does not provide for the shenanigans envisioned by the greenie zealots. But you can be sure they will try their best to insert their agenda into the next levy presented to voters. We need to be sure that renewal includes the Contrarian Criterion.

Scene from Night of the Living Dead

New entry in the Encyclopedia of Political Nonsense.

Social Justice. The Left’s preferred euphemism for material equality and its chief moral rationale for wealth redistribution.

As with many leftist neologisms, “social justice” attempts to appropriate a term with favorable connotations, such as “justice,” and use it to refer to something else, in the hope that unwitting audiences will transfer the favorable connotations of the co-opted term to the new referent. The new referent is always some tenet or goal of leftist ideology.

The new referent in this case is material equality. Leftists, being uniformly beguiled by the Organic Fallacy, assume without question that any differences in wealth, health, happiness, or other aspects of well-being to be found among individuals in a society are “unfair.” Then, following the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls, they equate “justice” with “fairness.” Hence inequalities of the types mentioned become “unjust.”

“Social justice,” then, in the leftist lexicon, is material equality among persons in a social setting.

Justice has, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with equality. Indeed, it presumes inequality. Justice, as commonly understood, consists in securing to each person what he or she is due. Per Merriam-Webster, “impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.” In common shorthand, “justice” means, “getting what you deserve.” Justice is thus served when the innocent defendant is acquitted and released, and the guilty defendant convicted and punished, or when the student who turns in the best essay gets an “A” and the student who failed to complete the assignment, or plagiarized from someone else, gets an “F.”

The concept of justice presumes that in any context where the term might apply, that there will be some persons who deserve rewards or praise, and others who do not deserve them. It rejects any presumption of equality by its very meaning.

Leftists will often counter this by conceding that justice has to do with deserts, but then claim that everyone “deserves” certain things “because they are human,” or perhaps because they are “members of society” (this is the assumption underlying the leftist concept of “human rights” — another term expropriated by the Left and re-defined to make it consistent with the leftist worldview).

But that move, of course, perverts the term “deserves.” “Deserves” is a moral concept, and moral concepts apply to actions. One deserves a reward, praise, a blue ribbon, etc., when one acts in some meritorious way. Some action on the agent’s part is presumed and required; one cannot “deserve” something merely by virtue of one’s status, or, indeed, by virtue of any factor over which one has no control. If one may “deserve” something merely by existing, the term ceases to have any use or meaning (and certainly no moral content).

Being human entails that one deserves — that one is entitled to — absolutely nothing [see note at end]. Athletes who compete in the Olympics are not awarded gold medals because they are human; they are awarded for winning their events. Teachers do not award gold stars to all their 3rd graders for being human, but to the student who aced her spelling test. Oscars are not handed out to every producer in Hollywood because they are members of society, but to the one who produced the best picture of the year. Likewise, one deserves a house when one has built a house; he deserves food when he has raised or hunted down some food; he deserves a color teevee when he has made one. Or when he has acquired those things in exchange for some good or service he has given to those who produced them.

That does not mean, of course, that being human counts for nothing. Being human guarantees that one will arrive in the world with substantial assets and advantages — a versatile, built-in means of locomotion; two agile hands which allow one to play Beethoven sonatas on a piano, carve tigers on a grain of rice, perform ophthalmic surgery, or grow food and build houses; and a brain which would be the envy of all other creatures on Earth, were they capable of envy. Humans possess tools for creating material wealth and otherwise securing and enhancing their well-being no other creature can imagine.

Humans, alas, are capable of envy, and of devising strategies for mimimizing their own investments of time and effort. They are also capable of contriving convoluted rationalizations for those strategies. And so many of them, rather than employing the wonderful tools with which Nature has endowed them — none of which they can be said to deserve — turn to parasitism or predation; they prefer to seize the products of others’ hands and brains on the ground that they “deserve” them “because they are human.” Like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, they lurch along in tenacious pursuit of their vital, productive fellows, arms outstretched in hopes of picking a pocket, muttering “social justice, social justice.”

Like the zombies, the term “social justice” is overdue for burial.

NOTE: One may hear it claimed that everyone at least deserves recognition and respect for one’s status as a moral agent, merely by being one. But this is a mistake. One deserves that recognition and respect by virtue of acting like a moral agent, i.e, by reciprocally respecting others’ similar status (by not violating their rights).

image © msnbc.com

“You may not know it,” says MSNBC’s Brian Williams, “but you own some gold mines — actually, the public land where gold, silver, and uranium are dug out of the Earth.”

That sets the stage for a segment in the network’s “Fleecing of America” series, this one lamenting the 1872 Mining Law and the fact that it does not require miners to pay royalties to the government for the ores they extract.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/ns/nightly_news#35883250

Well, in fact, you don’t “own” any gold mines. Nor do you “own” the land upon which those mines (like those in our own Silver Valley) are located. At least, not in the usual sense of the term. Nor does the US government — it has sovereignty over them, usually acquired by treaty, but does not, and never has, “owned” them. They were acquired, in fact, precisely in order to make them available to citizens willing to explore them, settle upon them, and make them productive. Most of them are, in fact, now owned by the mining companies which operate them, because the law allowed claims to be patented — transformed into deeds — once someone had made them productive. The Homestead Acts were based on the same premise.

Western lands were not acquired to provide free lunches for couch potatoes who had invested nothing in them — no money, no time, and no effort. But of course, that is exactly what the free lunch lobby, and the congresscritters who pander to them, are seeking — another windfall for their mooching constituents, at the expense of those who produce the wealth they hope to plunder.

“You may be wondering about now,” says Williams, “what you have to show for all this.”

Well, about as much as you have invested. Want some gold? Get off your duff and go prospecting.

“Volunteers will gather signatures starting Tuesday to put a levy before voters in August to establish a Children’s Investment Fund. The money would be used to support early childhood learning, abuse and neglect prevention and treatment programs, mentoring programs and before- and after-school activities.”

Collectivized child-rearing, a la Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, has, of course, always been a priority goal of the Left. After all, one can’t properly program the kids for their assigned roles in Utopia if their upbringing is under the control of unreformed, individualistic, obstructionist parents, most of whom are political heathens.

To be sure, there will be a fair number of parents receptive to this plan. Anything to get those annoying rug rats out of their hair a couple years earlier. One does not turn down a free lunch.

“Four to six hours a day of free childcare? Heck yeah – sign me up. Thanks, taxpayers.”

But responsible voters will peruse the latest study of Head Start — the now-ubiquitous federal “early education” boondoggle created in the 60’s as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty — before financing this new experiment in leftist social engineering.

The study, released last month by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, compared 5000 kids randomly assigned to a Head Start program or a control group. They were divided into two cohorts, consisting of 4-year-olds and 3-year-olds. The two groups in each cohort were compared on a number of scales in two categories — “cognitive impacts” and “social-emotional impacts.”

Some findings:

Among the 4-year-olds,

♦ Upon completing kindergarten (one year after completing the Head Start program) the HS group showed no differences from the control group on any measure tested, in either the “cognitive” or “social-emotional” categories.

♦ Upon completing first grade, the HS kids showed a small improvement (9%) in “receptive vocabulary.” There were no differences on 21 other “cognitive” skills measured.

♦ In the “social-emotional” category, the HS kids did worse than the control group on three measures: “withdrawn behavior,” “shy-socially reticent,” and “problems with teacher interaction.” On the other 17 measures in this category there were no differences from the control group.

Results among the 3-year-old cohort (some of whom had 2 years of HS programming, some only one) were comparable: slight differences on 3 of the 42 scales at end of kindergarten or 1st grade, no differences on the other 39 (the 3-year-old HS kids actually did worse on the math scale than the control kids after completing kindergarten).

These non-results cost taxpayers $7000 per kid per year.

But, hey, who cares? Think of it as a “jobs bill” for bureaucrats, bored do-gooders, and teachers’ unions.

The study is here.

One series of emails from the “Climategate” CRU email release which has drawn some attention is this one between Phil Jones of CRU et al and Swedish climate researcher Wibjorn Karlen. It concerns the temperature trends in the Nordic countries shown in IPCC AR4. Karlen asks Jones and Trenberth for the data upon which the IPCC graph is based, since the data from the official NORDKLIM climate data network shows no such trend.

That discrepancy has prompted a flurry of mini-investigations by bloggers and their commenters around the world into similar discrepancies involving temperatures in their local areas — which they are finding all over the place.

The discrepancies arise between the “raw” temperature data recorded by weather stations and the “adjusted” figures reported by the various agencies which collect and analyze them — primarily the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in the US and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. Both organizations obtain most of their land temperature data, however, from a single source — the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) which is operated by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) at Arizona State University. NCDC is a branch of NOAA — although the manager of the GHCN appears to be an employee of NASA.

Not wanting to miss a ride on this bandwagon, I took a quick look at adjusted v. unadjusted temperature trends for GHCN stations in the Spokane area. This image shows all stations within 1 geographic degree of Spokane which have records back to at least 1910. Blue lines are unadjusted, red lines adjusted temps, per GHCN. The bottom right panel shows the Spokane temp trend reported by GISS.

You’ll notice that every one of the stations shows a downward adjustment for temperatures prior to 1965 or so (this “pivot point” varies somewhat from station to station). E.g., for Pullman, there is a downward adjustment of about 0.7C prior to 1954, then an upward adjustment of about 0.2C a couple years later. For Ritzville, temps before 1965 are adjusted downward about 0.6C. And so on.

Everyone agrees that some adjustments are necessary to compute long-term trends. That is because stations are moved, newer instruments replace older ones, the times of day when readings are taken change. For Spokane, for example, there is a large downward adjustment — about 0.8C — for temps earlier than 1946. This one is probably legitimate, as the official station was moved from downtown Spokane to Geiger Field. Then there was a smaller downward adjustment, about 0.1C, in 1979.

What is curious, though, is that these adjustments seem to disproportionately either raise recent temps or reduce older ones, thereby creating or enhancing a long-term upward trend not apparent in the raw data. You would expect the adjustments over all stations in the network to be rather random, with roughly equal numbers of upward and downward adjustments.

The data collaters — GISS and CRU — do their own adjustments. Notice the two bottom panels. The GHCN plot even after their adjustment shows no obvious trend. But the GISS plot sure does.

Anyone who wishes to check other areas can get the GHCN plots here, and the GISS versions here.

The Hadley Center is one of the world’s foremost climate research centers (it produces the HADCRUT temperature database, used by all climate researchers) and is one of the loudest Chicken Littles of climate catastrophism.

While it will be days before the significance of these files can be established, they are certain to embarass, if not discredit, their authors — if they prove to be authentic, which has not yet been established. In some exchanges Hadley researchers discuss ways to prevent critics of AGW from being published; in others they appear to discuss methods of altering data to better fit their theories.

While not yet vetted, what has been published so far has the ring of authenticity. Moreover, the very volume of the material argues against a scam — few con artists would have the knowledge, time or patience to hoke up 135 MB of phony correspondence and papers.

An early look at the contents can be found here.

“No amount of Libertarian Ayn Randian rhetoric about the long defeated concept of “enumerated powers” as why this country can’t have universal health care is going to convince any intelligent citizens.”

I asked how the doctrine of enumerated powers had been “defeated,” to which he responded,

“By SCOTUS ruling. Step into the current century, Luddite.”

Well, it’s not terribly clear what “defeating” a constitutional provision requires, or whether the Supreme Court has a power to “defeat” any of them, given that word is not mentioned in the Constitution. But per common understanding, to “defeat” someone or something implies rendering that thing or person inoperative or impotent.  The US Constitution does provide a means for achieving that result with respect to its various provisions — the amendment process. Of course, there has been no amendment repealing the enumerated powers doctrine. But this poster clearly thinks the Supreme Court is empowered to repeal it on its own.

So I asked him which other provisions of the Constitution he believed the Court possessed a power to “defeat.” I posed the following fictional ruling for his (and your) consideration. Comments are welcome.

————————

The petitioners in the present case are charged with violations of the Defense of Democracy and Orderly Debate Act of 2012 (DDODA), by distributing leaflets, posting essays and comments on various Internet sites, and organizing rallies in opposition to the Human Rights Enforcement Act (HREA) then under deliberation in Congress. Defendants moved the trial court to dismiss the charges on grounds that the First Amendment protects their right to free speech and peaceable assembly. That court denied the motion; the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the denial.

The Defense of Democracy and Orderly Debate Act attempts to ensure that public debate of enacted or proposed legislation proceeds in an orderly, civil manner, and does not thwart or hamper the ability of the government to enact or enforce legislation which it has reason to believe reflects the will of the public. The government contends that the actions of the petitioners complained of in the indictment provoked public opposition to the HREA and to the government generally, interfered with Congressional consideration of the bill and delayed action thereon, and has inspired widespread defiance of several of the Act’s provisions since its passage. As authorized by the DDODA, the government issued cease-and-desist orders to the defendants herein and to several other persons, ordering them to halt distribution of the the objectionable leaflets, remove specific postings from various Internet servers, and barred them from gathering in groups larger than two persons “for the purpose of inciting public sentiment hostile to the bills herein referenced.” The orders also advised the recipients that continued violations of DDODA would result in fines of $5000, or imprisonment for 5 years, or both, for each specific count in violation. While many of the enjoinees complied with those orders, the petitioners publicly refused, and per their own admission not only continued but “redoubled” their violations of the order.

We have held in a number of previous cases that the provisions of the Constitution are subject to a balancing test. We have also held that acts of Congress must be presumed to be constitutional if they are reasonably related to one or more of the powers granted to Congress by the Constitution, and have a “rational basis:” if the record includes evidence and findings that the measures proposed are likely to accomplish the Constitutional purposes at which they aim.

Clearly, a measure to expand and enforce human rights, such as the HREA, which requires all landlords, merchants, providers of professional services, self-employed artists and craftsmen, and others, to adopt means-tested pricing for their goods and services in accordance with a discount schedule prepared annually by the Office of Management and Budget, and which forbids any provider of an “essential good or service” as defined in the Act to refuse to provide such “essential good or service” to any person on grounds of inability to pay, is reasonably related to the Congress’s Constitutional power to provide for the general welfare.

In addition to legislation reasonably related to the the powers granted to Congress, the Constitition also authorizes Congress to enact any measure “necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” We hold that the DDODA, which aims in part to prevent delays and deter obstructions to enactment of Constitutional legislation which can result from concerted, widespread, intemperate (and often disorderly and even violent) public opposition thereto, which opposition can also undermine compliance with the legislation once it has passed and even arouse public emnity toward the government in general, is a necessary and proper measure for assuring that the legislation in question can be enacted and enforced.

This Court does not take petitioners’ invocation of the First Amendment lightly. We have always held that the rights of free speech, press, religion, and assembly are to be accorded the highest level of judicial protection, and that legislation credibly alleged to infringe those rights requires the most diligent scrutiny by this Court.

No one can argue, however, that protection of First Amendment rights is the only obligation of government. The First Amendment cannot be construed so broadly (or so narrowly, depending upon one’s point of view), that it frustrates other important functions of government. The aims of the First Amendment must therefore be balanced in each case against those other important governmental aims. One of those latter is surely to provide for the general welfare; another is to enact the wishes of the public in law. We know of no way to weigh those competing objectives except by measuring their relative importance to the public. The government has placed evidence in the record that the HREA enjoys the support of between 60 and 75 percent of registered voters, depending upon the poll and the time it was conducted. Petitioners do not challenge those poll results.

The First Amendment’s phrase “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech” can only be understood to mean, “Congress shall make no law unreasonably abridging the freedom of speech.” We hold today that a law necessary and proper to the attainment of a permissible governmental objective, which objective clearly reflects the desires of a majority of the public, cannot be deemed unreasonable.

The judgments of the courts below are AFFIRMED.

“I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.

Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.”

Entire essay here.

Spencer,  who is currently a Principle Researcher at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), is former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and remains the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Within NASA, he is climate-Cassandra James Hansen’s arch-nemesis. Spencer is the guy responsible for developing the technology for deriving atmospheric temperatures from satellite data. The UAH temperature series are standard atmospheric temperature datasets used by all climate scientists.

]]> http://www.freespokane.net/?feed=rss2&p=215 0 http://www.freespokane.net/?p=210 http://www.freespokane.net/?p=210#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:05:28 +0000 Contrarian http://www.freespokane.net/?p=210 Although I’m not one to whine about “media bias” — newspapers and other media being private enterprises entitled by the First Amendment to express the “bias” of their choice — it is dismaying when they do so by distorting, omitting, or manufacturing the underlying facts of the story, or by allowing a source or informant to do so. When they do so deliberately, it reveals a lack of professional integrity. When they do so by inadvertence, it reveals a lack of professional competence.

In other words, slant the story any way you please, but do try to get the facts right.

I suspect inadvertence, or perhaps just editorial laziness — was responsible for the Spokesman-Review’s October 21 story entitled, “Report says cost of living higher in state’s poor neighborhoods.”

“Poor people may feel like they never get a break, but it’s worse than that, according to a study of low-income families in Washington. They are getting gouged,” wrote reporter Kevin Graman.

The story is laced with such phrases as “the findings,” “the state study . . . revealed price disparities,” “the report . . . details how the poor pay more for goods and services,” and so on — language intended to convey an impression that a rigorous scientific investigation had unearthed some damning new evidence of injustices which demand immediate remedies.

The “study” in question was, of course, nothing of the kind. It is, instead, a classic example of a pseudo-study, manufactured to create pseudo-news which advances its authors’ political agenda.

A pseudo-study is a political rant or a pitch for a free lunch dressed up in scientific-sounding language. Most of them are cranked out by leftist “advocacy groups” — nonprofits whose politicking is largely funded by taxpayers, on the pretext that they provide “services” for the poor, i.e., “poverty pimps” (local ACORNS). The studies are “pseudo” because they fail to satisfy even the minimum requirements for a scientific study; most of them don’t even pretend to do so. They are the political equivalent of vaporware.

The cited “study,” apparently hoked up by a coalition of these groups from around the state, purports to “find” that the poor pay more for food, transportation, housing, and financial services than the non-poor. What is the basis for these “findings?” Well, some of these groups’ clients reported that they thought they paid more (anecdotal evidence), or the tract’s authors deduced that they did based on some responses to a questionnaire completed by some of their clients — and on their own assumptions, of course.

The “report” declares, “Our focus groups and community survey found that people struggling to make ends meet pay a higher price for the same goods and services.” The pseudo-study is here. In fact, there is not a shred of evidence in this “study” to support that conclusion.

In order to make such a claim, and justify describing it as a “finding” from a “study,” you need to:

♦ Randomly select a sample group from among the population with incomes below the poverty level;

♦ Randomly select a control group from among the non-poor population;

♦ Compare prices paid for the same goods (same brand names, same size packages, same makes, models, and condition of automobiles, etc.), using objective evidence (e.g., itemized cash register receipts, bills of sale);

♦ Identify factors which might account for any disparity which may be found, and perform a regression analysis to see which of them are most predictive. If the poor are paying more “for the same goods and services,” is it because grocers are practicing price discrimination? Or is it perhaps because more of the poor prefer to purchase from the 7-11 on the corner, rather than walk 3 blocks to Safeway? Do they pay more for transportation because they are being gouged by auto dealers, or because their driving records place them in a high-risk insurance pool? Are they paying more for credit because of redlining, or because, due to their employment and credit histories, they cannot obtain credit with mainstream lenders and must rely on payday loans and finance companies?

Needless to say, this “study” did none of these things. There was no scientific sampling, no control group, no attempt to standardize the goods and services purchased or quantify the cost differences (if any) between the two groups, and no attempt to identify the factors which might account for any disparities found. Indeed, the study does not cite a single quantified example of a cost disparity in any of the goods categories mentioned, much much less explain why it exists. Its flacks are quite emphatic, however, that more subsidies, more free lunches, and more extorion of businesses are needed to remedy this intolerable injustice.

While it is not at all clear that any poor people have been “gouged,” it is quite clear that the Spokesman-Review got snookered.

And your cat, too.

They calculate that feeding your spaniel requires 0.84 hectares (about 2 acres) of land annually. By comparison, sufficient biofuel to build and drive your Land Cruiser 6200 miles could be produced on only 0.41 hectare.  Your cat’s carbon footprint is about the same as a Volkswagen Golf’s.

“Professor Vale says the title of the book is meant to shock, but the couple, who do not have a cat or dog, believe the reintroduction of non-carnivorous pets into urban areas would help slow down global warming.”

Full story here.

Hmm. If I ate Grandma, could I maybe keep my Winnebago?