Paul M. Jones

Seriously: What difference does it make? Just for low-stakes starters, there's a guy in California who was put in jail basically because the Obama administration said his stupid, irrelevant video trailer for "The Innocence of Muslims" was to blame for anti-Americanism in Libya and beyond. President Obama went to the United Nations and bitch-slapped free expression in front of a global audience on the premise that "Innocence" was the cause of the attack on Benghazi. Our own U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, took to the talk shows to peddle a line that was either wilfully misleading or simply totally wrong (Rice was the admin's point person in early appearances about Benghazi partly because, as Clinton explained yesterday, she doesn't like doing Sunday morning shows!).

Contra Clinton, it makes a great deal of difference because understanding how this all happened is the first step to making sure it doesn't happen over and over and over again.

via 3 Incredibly Outrageous Evasions by Hillary Clinton About Benghazi - Hit & Run : Reason.com.

The Economist also brings us big news on the “settled science” of climate change. A new study has found soot to be twice as bad for climate as was previously thought, making it the second most damaging greenhouse agent after CO2. This is actually good news for two reasons.

First, soot is easier to control than CO2, and targeting that kind of pollution provides lots of benefits that have nothing to do with climate change: it’s a dangerous pollutant and a health threat on its own. Second, controlling soot will seriously slow the speed of climate change. One of the study’s authors told the Economist that fully addressing the soot problem would strip half a degree from potential warming, buying politicians and scientists more time to make informed decisions.

This is where we’ve been for some time: the global approach to reducing CO2 emissions is a dead end, and while the overall science about the climate seems well established, there are some significant fiddly bits that haven’t yet been worked out. There may be more surprises like soot in the works, some good, some bad, but in any case the details, the timing, and the consequences of climate change are less clear than the overall arc, and the case for particular policies is often significantly weaker than the overall case that climate change is under way.

via The Economist Gives Up on Global Climate Treaties | Via Meadia.

Driving is a liberating technology, and we ought to recognize this, especially as we approach Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

Let’s think back to 1955, when African Americans stayed off segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala. During the year-long boycott, 325 private cars, some owned by African Americans, some by whites, some by churches, picked up people at 42 sites around the town.

Police harassed the drivers -- Martin Luther King Jr. was stopped for speeding (30 in a 25-mph zone) about 30 times -- but oppressing people in private cars is harder than oppressing them in public buses.

The boycott was successful, in part because of King’s fiery rhetoric, but also because of car ownership.

via The Volokh Conspiracy » Martin Luther King and automobility.

When the Affordable Care Act passed in early 2010, many in academia--faculty and students alike--cheered on. But now that its provisions are going into effect, some of these same people are learning firsthand that Obamacare has some nasty side effects.

A new piece in the Wall Street Journal reports that many colleges are cutting back on the number of hours worked by adjunct professors, in order to avoid new requirements that they provide healthcare to anyone working over 30 hours per week. This is terrible news for a lot of people; 70 percent of professors work as adjuncts and many will now have to cope with a major pay cut just as requirements that they buy their own health insurance go into effect.

via Universities Bludgeon Adjuncts With Obamacare Loophole | Via Meadia.

The U.S. could become the largest producer of oil this year, seven years earlier than expected, a recently published BP report predicts. In less than 20 years, it will be 99 percent self-sufficient in net energy. ...

Prior to the BP report, it was thought that the U.S. would lead oil production only by 2020. The fact that we’re already there is a reflection of the rapid pace of the shale energy boom.

We are now speeding into the arms of a world that has a lot going for it compared to the old one. The American economy could soon be sitting pretty on a heap of new energy industry jobs and on the new revenues that will inevitably flow from natural gas exports.

It's unlike me to be optimistic. However, this does sound good. Via US Could Be Top Oil Producer This Year | Via Meadia.

The average G-type star shows a variability in energy output of around 4%. Our sun is a typical G-type star, yet its observed variability in our brief historical sample is only 1/40th of this. When or if the Sun returns to more typical variation in energy output, this will dwarf any other climate concerns.

The emergence of science as a not wholly superstitious and corrupt enterprise is slowly awakening our species to these external dangers. As the brilliant t-shirt says, an asteroid is nature's way of asking how your space program is doing. If we are lucky we might have time to build a robust, hardened planetary and extraplanetary hypercivilization able to surmount these challenges. Such a hypercivilization would have to be immeasurably richer and more scientifically advanced to prevent, say, the next Yellowstone supereruption or buffer a 2% drop in the Sun's energy output. (Indeed, ice ages are the real climate-based ecological disasters and civilization-enders -- think Europe and North America under a mile of ice). Whether we know it or not, we are in a race to forge such a hypercivilization before these blows fall. If these threats seem too distant, low probability, or fantastical to belong to the "real" world, then let them serve as stand-ins for the much larger number of more immediately dire problems whose solutions also depend on rapid progress in science and technology.

Via "2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?" at Edge.org.There's no direct link to the essay I've quoted; search for the essay title "Unfriendly Physics, Monsters From The Id, And Self-Organizing Collective Delusions" on that page.

[T]here is a general wariness and nervousness about the return of the old dream of armed intervention. Above all because we realise that humanitarian interventionism offers us no political way to judge who it is we are helping in Libya - and thus what the real consequences of our actions might be.

Even if one's instincts are to help those fighting Gadaffi, it is no longer enough just to see it as a struggle of goodies against baddies. For it is precisely that simplification that has led to unreal fantasies about who we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fantasies that persist today, and which our leaders still cling to - because they give the illusion that we are in control.

via BBC - Blogs - Adam Curtis - GOODIES AND BADDIES.

“The Klan would drive through our neighborhood shooting at us, shooting into our homes,” recalled Hicks, 66, who grew up in Bogalusa, La., and has been a civil rights activist in the District for more than 35 years. “The black men in the community wouldn’t stand for it. You shoot at us, we shoot back at you. I’m convinced that without our guns, my family and many other black people would not be alive today.”

via On MLK holiday, walking for civil rights and the Second Amendment - The Washington Post.

What science is it that assures you that government officials will, in such situations, act impartially and for the public good rather than politically and for special-interest groups?  What objective and established proof, or even plausible hypothesis, have you that the very same knowledge, free-rider, and transaction-cost problems that promote the negative externality to begin with do not also operate – or operate with even greater force – to distort decision-making by government officials?  I believe that history and science reveal that the answer to both questions in typical situations is “none.”

via More Scientific Than Thou.

The ONLY thing that can validate your art and thus you is OTHER PEOPLE.  And if your art sucks (which it certainly does) then it's not art, and is nothing more than a child in an adult's body forcing crap on the rest of us.

Here's a good way to tell if your art sucks and if you are indeed not an artist:

Is your "work" subsidized in any way by the government?

If it is, then your art sucks.  The reason why is that your art is SO BAD that it requires the government to FORCIBLY TAKE MONEY FROM OTHER PEOPLE to buy it.  Nobody willingly buys it because it's that bad.  But to spare your worthless feelings, politicians will (for the cost of a vote) make other people waste a percentage of their precious and finite lives to pay the taxes to pay for your veritable crap that you call "art."

Emphasis mine. Via Captain Capitalism: Hey Art Majors, You Suck!.

P.S.: "now's the point in time you rehearse your 'you don't understand art' BS and condescend me about being 'ignorant' about art and having a close-minded view of your 'field.'"