CapitalistImperialistPig

From Arianna Huffington today: This week, Justice Alito offered up the refined, Supreme Court version of Joe Wilson's "You Lie!"; OK, Arianna is in the business of sensational journalism, but in my book there is a huge gap between Wilson's "You lie" and Alioto's "that's not so." The difference is between a deliberate insult and a possibly quite respectful diagreement on facts or their interpretation. Alioto was still out of order - as out of order as an administration official would be saying or mouthing the same thing in a Supreme Court hearing. The sentiment was appropriate but the occasion was not. He, like heckler at the Supreme Court, should have been summarily ejected. Wilson, on the other hand, deserved more drastic punishment.

I watched ABC's This Week today, with Barbara Walters hosting. She asked fairly good questions of new Senator Scott Brown, but didn't follow up on his evasions. So far pretty much same-old, same-old. The round table discussion was a revelation though. It was by far the best that I have seen on any news show. The cast of characters was mostly familiar: Paul Krugman, Ariana Huffington and Old Sourpuss George Will, but they brought in a ringer - Roger Ailes, chairman and creator of Fox News. Walters was unobtrusive, forgoing the usual chair at the focus, and interupted only occasionally and always to good effect. To my shock, Ailes was one of the most even handed and consistently intelligent commentators. Even more surprising, there was some real give and take among the panel, almost unheard of in the Stephanopoulis regime. I have never previously been a fan of Barbara Walters, but maybe I now am. She has to deserve most of the credit for the improvement.

Debate is a good way to learn things, especially if Socrates is your teacher. Debating experts on their own subject is usually unreasonable though - a more humble approach is usually called for. The direct challenge tends to waste their time and yours. I have been known to make exceptions for economists and other social scientists, though. Social scientists generally tend to write about subjects with which we all have some practical experience and social scientists tend to make prescriptions for the way governments should operate. Economics in particular purports to prescribe a lot of things that affect the share of the economy each of us can obtain. It has long been observed that republics have the unfortunate tendency to evolve into first oligarchies and ultimately dictatorships. The usual way for this to happen is that a group of the wealthy uses their wealth to control the state and the state to funnel wealth to them. Under such circumstance, there is good reason to believe that ec...

I don't want to pretend to be an authority on general relativity, though I have studied it a little. The following thoughts represent my current understanding of one issue that seems to come up when the so-called paradoxes of special relativity are discussed. There is a persistent myth that General Relativity is necessary to deal with accelerated reference frames. I even remember hearing that from one of my professors as an undergraduate. It's come up in discussion of the Ehrenfest Paradox below. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler (in Gravitation ), demolish the myth as follows: ...special relativity was developed precisely to predict the physics of accelerated objects-e.g. the radiation from an accelerated charge. Even the fantastic accelerations... of 28 g of a neutron in a nucleus... The basis of the myth is somewhat obvious: special relativity treats inertial reference frames as "special" while general relativity purports to treat all reference frames on an equal bas...

One of the surest clues to phony science is the bad faith effort. It's possible that some among the mainstream climate community have gotten carried away from time to time or hyped certain facts more than they deserved, but the record of the climate sceptics consists of one bad faith effort after another. No sooner does one phony argument get shot down than they invent another. Eli, that most excellent climate Rabett, has now assembled evidence of yet another, this time featuring our old buddy Roger Pielke Sr. and friends .

One of my frustrations with the climate science community has been a certain dodginess about the sources of short term climate variability - stuff like the more or less static behavior of global temperature over the past dozen years. So it was a big relief for me when Real Climate succeeded that stupid and defensive The IPCC is not infallible (shock!) headline with a new article on the recent paper by Solomon et. al. (I'm not so impressed by their headline for it either, but...). Susan Solomon is a chemist and no newcomer to making important discoveries in atmospheric science. She was one of the first to unravel the connection between clorofluorocarbons and the ozone hole. Her teams discovery this time is revealing the role that stratospheric water plays in regulating the atmospheric temperature. Water doesn't get to the stratosphere easily - it condenses out at lower levels - but the tiny amount that does get there keeps a significant amount of heat in. The stratosphere ...

The Pres was in total command in his meeting with the Republican Caucus . No doubt the most severely deluded saw it a little differently, but I think the Republicans were throwing him their best stuff and he was pounding into deep left field. He is not the smoothest of speakers, but he was clearly in command of the facts, and he called out his questioners on their more egregious distortions. I expect that most Americans didn't get a glimpse of it but he really should try to set up occasions to have more of these. He does need to simplify his rhetoric even more, and while that meeting was not the place for it, turn up the heat.