Bloodthirsty Liberal

Was I this arrogant and ignorant when I was a liberal?

Uh…BTL, hate to tell ya, but who says you still aren’t?

Yesterday Salon’s Michael Lind indulged in some bizarrely over-the-top left-wing triumphalism:

Social conservatives are fighting a losing battle–not against a global secular humanist conspiracy, but against the social consequences of the pill, the automobile and the Internet. Short of reversing the industrial revolution, emptying the cities and restoring agrarian society, after the manner of Pol Pot’s communists in Cambodia in the 1970s, the best hope for social conservatives is to retreat to minority enclaves like those of the Amish. On self-created reservations they can raise their children as they see fit, segregated from mainstream culture and visited, perhaps, by morally liberal tourists nostalgic for an older, simpler way of life. And if their fertility is higher than that of the morally liberal majority, they can hope to take over America by strength of numbers–in 500 or a thousand years.

So, “social conservatives”, whatever that means to any of us, are either the Amish or the Khmer Rouge. Yeah, I get those two confused all the time.

Almost as unfortunate as the mean-spirited tone of this lurid fantasy is its timing. Today Gallup has a new poll that calls into question Lind’s smug supposition about the amoral majority:

The 41% of Americans who now identify themselves as “pro-choice” is down from 47% last July and is one percentage point below the previous record low in Gallup trends, recorded in May 2009. Fifty percent now call themselves “pro-life,” one point shy of the record high, also from May 2009.

In addition, “half of Americans, 51%, consider abortion morally wrong and 38% say it is morally acceptable.” Views on the legality of abortion are difficult to discern from the poll, which shows 52% think abortion should be “legal under certain circumstances”–a formulation that includes a wide range of degrees of restrictiveness.

Lind contends that “social conservatism has been undermined by technological progress, which has increased the opportunities for freedom in matters of sex and censorship while raising the costs of enforcing traditional norms.” There is truth to this, but the process started about three centuries earlier than Lind seems to think it did. “From the later seventeenth century onwards there developed new attitudes towards privacy and publicity, new ways of shaping public opinion, and a new openness about sexual affairs,” observes Faramerz Dabhoiwala in his new book, “The Origins of Sex.”

But technology cuts both ways as does morality. In the case of abortion, for instance, advances in prenatal technology have made it harder to deny that the procedure involves destroying a human life. That may account for the shift noted by Gallup.

That’s the point, libs. When I was a young liberal, footloose and fancy free, I supported abortion without any limits or controls. G’ahead, gals, abort away! It was the only position to take to get any action from the type of young women who were likely to give me any, and what did I care? I had already been born.

Then I had kids. Which only makes me biased, of course. Nothing like experiencing the miracles of pregnancy and childbirth (albeit secondhand) to disqualify one from having opinions on the subjects.

But you know what really made me change my mind on abortion?

SCIENCE:

What we so casually discard and dismiss as a parasite looks a lot more like something we take to the park on Saturday mornings and push on the swing.

I still support abortion—with limits—because I can’t dismiss the right of a woman to choose. But that’s an emotional stance. My rational, scientific side can’t deny that abortion tilts more toward infanticide than it does toward civil liberties. Sorry, but sometimes science sucks.

Just ask the victims of the Khmer Rouge if you don’t believe me. Right, fellas?

The nerve of Israel—thinking it knows best!

India is considering the possibility of integrating Israeli technologies in a national initiative to clean the Ganges River. For this purpose, engineers, researchers and representatives form water technology companies will visit Israel next week.

Over the past two months, the Indian government has been promoting a large scale endeavor to clean the Ganges River, which is considered holy in Hinduism.

Due to the river’s importance as a fresh water source for as well as a ritual site, and considering that the river has become a source of infection and disease, the Indian government treats this initiative very seriously.

Recently, the Indian government decided to invite leading Israeli water technology companies to take part in the efforts to clean the river.

Next, you’ll tell me that Israeli doctors flew to Haiti after the earthquake and… oh that’s right, they did.

Scientists want to know the secret of his health and longevity

Is President Shimon Peres the eighth wonder of the world?

Does he have a special gene that enables him to work at a pace that would tire out men half his age?

That is the question that the Galilee Genetics Analysis Laboratories is looking to answer.

When Peres visited GGA, in Katzrin, in the course of a tour of the Golan Heights on Monday, he was pleasantly surprised when his hosts suggested they conduct a DNA test on him to learn if there really is such thing as a ‘Shimon Peres gene’ and to study its properties.
…
Even his political opponents marvel at the president’s mental and physical stamina as he traipses around the world and across the country, delivering speeches and off-the-cuff remarks, holding media conferences, keeping up with Facebook and Google, delving into brain research, keeping up with local and world news – all this and more a few months shy of his 88th birthday.

And it turns out that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically inclined to longevity.

They’re trying to figure out how it works and if it can somehow be used to help other groups.

- Aggie

Looks like it’s not just penguins’ feet that are happy, if you receive my meaning (nudge-nudge, wink-wink):

It started with some pickled herring, then one thing led to another.

Scientists counting emperor penguins from space have found twice as many of the birds in Antarctica as expected.

The discovery is reassuring for a species seen as under threat from global warming and will provide researchers with a benchmark for monitoring the giants of the penguin world in years to come.

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“It’s good news,” team leader Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey said in an interview. “It gives us a bit more confidence not only that there are lots of emperor penguins out there but that we can actually keep track of them as well.”

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Scientists are concerned that emperor penguins will be badly affected by climate change, since they form large colonies on the sea-ice, which is fragile and vulnerable to earlier spring warming. Their more northerly colonies are particularly at risk.

Come on, scientists, you’re smart girls and boys. Put two and two together (or one and one, as the penguins have been doing). Global temperatures have been rising (except when they haven’t), penguins are proliferating like… well like polar bears.

Pardon my sexism, but Mother Nature is really a very silly woman. If she had half a brain in her head, she would put the penguins with the polar bears so the swelling population of the latter could feast off the swelling population of the former. Instead, they share the same ecosystem—just on the other side of the world from each other. Plan much?

Does humankind have to think of everything?

Where do I go to get my hive back?

A common pesticide used increasingly in recent years for crops such as corn and soybeans is the probable culprit in the destruction of honeybee colonies around the world, a study released Thursday by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health has found.

The researchers said they found convincing evidence of the link between the pesticide known as imidacloprid and honeybees abandoning their hives, or colony collapse disorder, which they say began occurring in 2006 on a scale and scope never seen before in the history of the beekeeping industry.

Bees pollinate about one-third of crops in the United States, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and livestock feed. A widespread loss of bees could be devastating to the nation’s agriculture.

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“It apparently doesn’t take much of the pesticide to affect the bees,’’ Lu said. “Our experiment included pesticide amounts below what is normally present in the environment.’’

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But officials at Bayer, the German chemical and pharmaceutical company that produces more of the pesticide than any other company in the world, said that the study was flawed and that its findings should be disregarded.

They said imidacloprid is used only on a small amount of the nation’s crops, although they could not provide specific figures, and argued the doses used in Lu’s study were excessive.

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“The outcome of the study is overwhelming, and I think that outweighs the small sample size,’’ Lu said.

Benbrook, the Organic Center chief scientist, said the study builds on similar findings about the potential dangers of imidacloprid. “This adds an important piece of the puzzle, confirming another important pathway through which bees are getting exposed to these insecticides,’’ he said. “The experimental design is very sound, and the findings are dramatic.’’

He pointed out that bans of the pesticide in parts of France and Italy since 2009 have substantially reduced colony collapse disorder there.

“This isn’t just an issue for bees,’’ Benbrook said. “People, especially children, consume a lot of high-fructose corn syrup. The presence of any pesticides in high fructose corn syrup should be a concern for the general public.’’

I didn’t see Global Warming mentioned anywhere in the piece. What’s up with that?

Crazy.

A leading geneticist at Soroka University Medical Center and Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba appeared in Qatar on the Doha Debates TV program over the weekend that was dedicated to the subject of consanguinity – inbreeding by first cousins that causes genetic disorders in the Arab population.

Prof. Ohad Birk, head of Soroka’s genetic institute and of the Morris Kahn Laboratory of Human Genetics at the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev, was invited to appear as a leading expert on the phenomenon, which medical experts and some Arab leaders are trying to prevent due to the human suffering involved. The program was broadcast by the BBC World News several times over the weekend.

The Doha Debates program, hosted by Tim Sebastian, deals with two sides of a controversial issue. Sebastian previously hosted the prize-winning interview show Hard Talk.

The debate show is broadcast from the capital of Qatar to some 400 million viewers around the world, with participation by the BBC and leading Arab networks. It tackles many issues, but especially those that interest the Arab world.

Birk, who was presented as an Israeli geneticist, noted that he was initially worried about traveling to the Persian Gulf Arab state north of Saudi Arabia, but that his concerns evaporated as he was treated very warmly by the production staff and by the live audience from various Arab countries who filled the hall. At the end of the debate, 80 percent of those present voted in favor of discouraging inbreeding by close relatives.

Is it so hard to know whether the bulk of the Arab population are people who have simply been poorly educated and misled by their governments, or it they truly buy into all the nonsense that we read about regularly.

- Aggie

Maybe not a miracle, but pretty [bleeping] cool [hat tip Yerushalimey]:

Military troops around the world, no matter where they are instated, know that even with the best training, personnel and arms, they cannot survive battle if they are lacking one vital thing: water.

Among the concerns of military heads is to ensure water sources are always available, even in the most arid of places.

One Israeli company took up the challenge to ensure water can be readily available, anywhere and at any time, by extracting it from the most common of things: air.

Water-Gen, based in Rishon LeZion, Israel, specializes in water generation and water treatment technologies integrated with tactical military vehicles and ground units. Their technology extracts water from the ambient air humidity, and turns it into drinking water.

Initially, the system filters the air so that water can be extracted and accommodated in containers. Then, it is cooled and purified into drinking water. This water can be served from a tap within the system or inside the cabin.

According to the Water-Gen, the device, which can be fitted onto vehicles, produces 10-20 gallons (40-80 liters) of pure drinking water a day, even in harsh weather and field conditions. The system, which is operated by solar or electric energy, is designed to meet military needs and standards, the company adds.

The company has wide-scale pending patents for the systems and technology. In 2011, it completed a three-week experiment with US Army ground units (Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment), in which its systems provided the soldiers drinking water throughout the drills.

Ha! Suck on that!

I love the name of the website, nocamels.com. It’s all about Israeli technology and innovation.

Pretty, pretty cool (ignore the pun):

Filmed for the first time, the icy “finger of death” is an unprecedented look at nature’s beauty — seen at it’s devastating worst.

Called a brinicle (or brine icicle), cameramen Hugh Miller and Doug Anderson used a time-lapse camera to capture this awe-inspiring event beneath the Antarctic ice shelf for the upcoming Discovery Channel special series, Frozen Planet.

“We were just blown away by how beautiful they were,” producer Kathryn Jeffs told FoxNews.com. Jeffs was in Antarctica with Miller and Anderson to capture the unique event. “We were exceptionally excited and we knew we had something that had never been filmed before, never been seen before. No one has really seen the formation of a brinicle.”

This magnificent yet terrifying phenomenon is caused by brine, or naturally occurring salt water, which tends to be denser than the surrounding seawater and has a lower freezing point. When super cold brine trickles down, the warmer seawater surrounds the cyclone with a brittle layer of ice.

When I hear the phrase “icy finger of death”, I think of Kathleen Sibelius’ thumb pointing down in reference to a case before her imperial death panel. But this is pretty scary too.

Global warm-mongers prove their case the old-fashioned way: through deceit and theft.

Prominent climate scientist Peter H. Gleick relied on deceit and subterfuge to solicit a cache of sensitive internal documents from conservative think tank The Heartland Institute before leaking them to the press — a fresh scandal that further darkens the highly charged debate on planetary climate change.

Gleick — an internationally recognized hydroclimatologist and author of the respected annual report “The World’s Water” — said he received an anonymous document in the mail that tipped him off to what he described as Heartland’s efforts to muddy public understanding of climate science and policy. He released the documents to expose their work “to cast doubt on climate science.”

In his blog on the Huffington Post, Gleick publicly confessed to deceitful tactics that he described as a serious ethical slip.

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“My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate …

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Heartland Institute president Joseph L. Bast blasted Gleick’s confession and actions, which he said put lives at risk and violated individual privacies.

“Gleick’s crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety,” Bast wrote in a statement posted Monday night to the group’s website.

The documents consist of climate policy statements, fundraising documents, board meeting notifications and even tax filings — as well as a memo titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy.” That memo, apparently the anonymous document that inspired Gleick to take action, describes plans to create an anti-global warming science campaign for grade schools that will “dissuad[e] teachers from teaching science.”

The Heartland Institute calls it a forgery — and Bast says he believes Gleick may have written it.

“Gleick also claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source,” Bast said. “This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.”

To summarize, the warm-mongers hide data harmful to their cause; they steal and leak data (and personal information) they think is beneficial to their cause (but is not); they forge data harmful to their adversaries—and then accuse their adversaries of attacking climate science.

Liberals are like zombies. Once infected, even trained scientists only want to eat your brains.

Or dissenting climate scientists:

[A]n important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. When predictions fail, we say the theory is “falsified” and we should look for the reasons for the failure. Shown in the nearby graph is the measured annual temperature of the earth since 1989, just before the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also shown are the projections of the likely increase of temperature, as published in the Summaries of each of the four IPCC reports, the first in the year 1990 and the last in the year 2007.

These projections were based on IPCC computer models of how increased atmospheric CO2 should warm the earth. Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.

From the graph it appears that the projections exaggerate, substantially, the response of the earth’s temperature to CO2 which increased by about 11% from 1989 through 2011. Furthermore, when one examines the historical temperature record throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the data strongly suggest a much lower CO2 effect than almost all models calculate.

The Trenberth letter tells us that “computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean.” The ARGO system of diving buoys is providing increasingly reliable data on the temperature of the upper layers of the ocean, where much of any heat from global warming must reside. But much like the surface temperature shown in the graph, the heat content of the upper layers of the world’s oceans is not increasing nearly as fast as IPCC models predict, perhaps not increasing at all. Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of “missing heat” hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?

Let me interject here that while I am not an esteemed climatologist, this would be the first time I’ve ever heard of heat sinking. I suppose salinity and other factors influence density, but except for deep sea vents spewing lava and scalding water across the ocean floor, why would the ocean depths be hotter?

Trenberth et al. tell us that the managements of major national academies of science have said that “the science is clear, the world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible.” Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.

One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody’s word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don’t fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.

There’s a lot more, but I want to make two points. When confronted with well argued, even scientifically valid evidence that their theory is leaky, global warmongers just stomp their little feet and scream louder that the science is “settled” and “everyone agrees”—when clearly that’s not so. I’ve already forgotten my second point (which is why I washed out as an esteemed climatologist), but I think it was something about the momentum swinging the other way. More scientists are citing more science disputing Al Gore’s vision of the world.

Ant that is a Very Good Thing.