Bell Back In Jail

That poor little victim of prosecutorial injustice, Mychal Bell, (you remember him, the guy down in Jena who cold cocked a classmate and then he and his friends stood around kicking the unconscious boy in the head) is back in jail.

JENA, La. - A teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy is back in jail after a judge sentenced him on charges that were pending before the attack that put him in the national spotlight, his attorney said Thursday.

Mychal Bell, who along with five other black teenagers had been accused of beating a white classmate, went to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing, said Carol Powell Lexing, one of Bell's attorneys.

Instead, after a six-hour hearing, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. sentenced him to 18 months on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

He had been hit with those charges before the Dec. 4 attack on classmate Justin Barker.

"He's locked up again," Marcus Jones said of his 17-year-old son. "No bail has been set or nothing. He's a young man who's been thrown in jail again and again, and he just has to take it."

Read it here.

Think about it, this kid is only seventeen and already he's been in jail time and again. He has been in front of judges over and over. If you want to try to reignite the civil rights movement, you are going to have to come up with a better martyr than this creep.

The Bush Economic Miracle Continues

Larry Kudlow has the figures:

Attention all shoppers: Stocks are at an all-time high. Goldilocks lives. The economy could grow by 3 percent in Q3 after growing nearly 4 percent in Q2. Moreover, a highly competitive America is exporting at a 13 percent annual rate, including a 24 percent export gain to China, a 25 percent increase to South America, and a 15 percent export rise to Europe.

Meanwhile, at lower tax rates, the growing economy threw off $2.6 trillion of tax revenues, bringing the FY 2007 budget deficit to only 1.2 percent of GDP or $163 billion. Tax collections for 2007 are roughly $550 billion above the prior FY 2000 peak.

Even spending in 2007 was held to 2.8 percent growth, with domestic spending less entitlement and security actually falling by nearly 6 percent from last year.

So I’d like to thank all you pessimists out there. Your wall of worry is actually driving stocks higher. You have been completely wrong. To quote former Sen. Fred Thompson (who quoted me during the Republican debate), it’s still “the greatest story never told.”

Read it here.

And in another matter regarding the Bush legacy, Bartle Bull writing in the Prospect argues that the war in Iraq is already won. We have defeated the Baathist insurgency, we have defeated al Qaeda, and the Shiite militias are abandoning military actions for political maneuvering. What remains is more on the order of Iraqi police work than American war.

With most Sunni factions now seeking a deal, the big questions in Iraq have been resolved positively. The country remains one, it has embraced democracy and avoided all-out civil war. What violence remains is largely local and criminal.

Sounds like a win to me.

Read the whole thing here.

Understanding Scientific Consensus

The NYT has an interesting article on a recent scientific consensus that was wrong in nearly all of its particulars.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

This idea of a "cascade" is important because it explains a lot of what is going on in contemporary science.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better.... If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

Read the whole thing here.

The article goes on to show the formation of the consensus, the ostracism of dissenting scientists, and the disastrous public policies based upon the false consensus, all of which is extremely reminiscent of what is happening today in environmental science and the global warming debate. We should remember that "science" is conducted by human beings with all the weakness and fallibility that entails, and that credentialed "experts" are often disastrously wrong. With that in mind we should recognize that expert opinion is a weak and shifting base on which to construct public policy.

Intangible Wealth

The World Bank recently undertook a major study into the wealth of nations -- the question of why some nations prosper and others don't. There is a rich literature on this subject that I intend to summarize someday here and there is a lively, and often acrimonious, debate among historians and economists as to just what factors drive development.

The World Bank study contributed an important piece of information to the debate. It showed that the same institutional factors applied in different cultural contexts produce different results. To put it simply, a Mexican worker who works in the United States is five times more productive than he would be doing exactly the same work in Mexico. In short, culture counts. In fact it counts far more than anything else.

The World Bank economists found:

If one simply adds up the current value of a country's natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there's no way that can account for that country's level of income.

The rest is the result of "intangible" factors—such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, "Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."

A commentary in Reason explains the implication of this finding:

The bottom line: "Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity."

What the World Bank economists have brilliantly done is quantify the intangible value of education and social institutions.

Read it here.

This places a number of disturbing recent trends in a new and unsettling context.

As Michael Barone points [here] our our academic institutions are more interested in indoctrinating students than in educating them.

Robert Putnam has charted the decline of trust in the American culture, not just mistrust of our public institutions, but also of each other. [here and here]

Vast portions of the permanent government, not just the intelligence services, are largely dysfunctional.

Anyone who reads the paper or watches TV understands the decline of our political institutions. Polling by the Gallup organization shows that the public has little or no trust in nearly all of our national institutions [here].

The courts have seriously eroded property rights in recent decades. [here]

Investors, not just in the U.S.] are increasingly losing faith in our financial institutions. [here]

I could go on and on, and you can probably add several more points just off the top of your head.
The key observation is that every one of our major organizing institutions -- political, cultural, religious, economic, educational..., all of them, is or is widely perceived as being thoroughly corrupt.

This is a very serious problem because our continued existence as a functioning society depends upon mutual trust, and that trust is rapidly disappearing.

Who to blame? The media, tenured radicals, corrupt politicians and other public figures, overweening government, lawyers, the list goes on and on and so will the debate. What is more important is that we begin to seek ways to overcome the adversarial approach we bring to all aspects of our public discourse and to identify areas of common concern and agreement. But in a time when we cannot even agree on matters of national security, is such a concord possible?

I sincerely hope so, but fear not.

This is Outrageous

For some time now it has been apparent that the American intelligence community has been incapable of keeping a secret, unless of course that secret is evidence of gross incompetence or nearly criminal behavior by intelligence personnel themselves. Everything else, no matter its importance to national security, is simply a tool to be implemented in support of various political, ideological or institutional agendas. Time and again vital information has been leaked in order to advance individual careers, agency agendas, or political causes. As a result not only the Bush administration but the nation's security as a whole has been severely damaged.

Now comes news of a particularly egregious leak that has once again imperiled us all.

The New York Sun reports:

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden's first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda's internal security division that the organization's Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised.

[T]he intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America's Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda's internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America's intelligence community saw. "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."

This is either incompetence that verges on the criminal or it is treason. Either way the leakers must be traced, identified, and apprehended. I don't care who the culprit is, Chertoff, Cheney, or some malicious VIP. This kind of thing is intolerable. Heads must roll.

UPDATE:

The WaPo is reporting that the leak came from an administration source. It should not be difficult to figure out who. The information, generated by a private company, was originally revealed to two officials. Within twenty minutes the intelligence services had the information. Within a matter of hours it was a matter of public record.

Everyone apparently knows who these high ranking officials are. They should by now be "formerly high-ranking officials" busy at home writing tell-all books and making appearances on cable TV. It makes no difference that the information was generated by a private rather than a public source -- this stuff should have been kept secret.

Heads must roll. But, unfortunately, they won't.

Outrageous.

UPDATE:

The responsible official has been identified. He was Deputy Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael Leiter. He received the video and apparently passed the information on immediately to various intelligence organizations. The leak apparently came from within the intelligence community. A former spook explains:

[The private company] made a fateful mistake by trusting an intelligence community that leaks like a sieve and is always looking for plausible cover to protect its own collection efforts. By providing the video to the government, she gave the spooks a chance to claim victory, without affecting the sources and methods that likely yielded the tape. Readers will note that various government spokesmen never confirmed that Ms. Katz and her firm were the first to discover the video. It's a given that the intel community was already aware of the production, and looking for a way to publicize their "coup" without compromising its collection techniques.

....

[B]e careful entrusting proprietary information to intel and security bureaucrats, who will gladly use private data to cover their own work, even if it means compromising your sources in the process.

Read the whole thing here.

So it was most likely the intelligence bureaucrats after all, not the administration, who were the source of the leak. The WaPo again got it wrong in a way that would undermine the administration. No surprise there.

More Good News

Amir Taheri notes the latest setback for al Qaeda.

UNKNOWN gunmen murdered Muhammad Gul Aghasi - one of the key "theologians" of al Qaeda - at a mosque in northern Syria last month. Candidates for the fiery preacher's killing include rivals within his own radical group, agents of the Americans - and his Syrian hosts. Whatever the truth, this is bad news for the already ailing al Qaeda.

....

Al Qaeda had hoped that the U.S. Congress would hand it a victory in Iraq by forcing the Bush administration to withdraw American forces before the Iraqis were ready to defend themselves. But that hope vanished last month when it became clear that the United States will retain its military presence in Iraq for at least another year.

Al Qaeda took another hit last week when Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti and the most prestigious cleric in the kingdom, issued a fatwa against "traveling abroad for the purpose of jihad." Hours after the fatwa was issued, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hailed it as a "major step toward defeating al Qaeda in Iraq."

Inside Iraq itself, a new force of more than 30,000 volunteers is getting ready to battle al Qaeda in the two predominantly Arab Sunni provinces of Anbar and Ninveh. Many of the volunteers are young men who had previously fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq. They decided to switch sides when Arab Sunni religious and tribal leaders realized that al Qaeda was merely using Iraq as a battlefield in its own war against the United States.

Even before Aghasi was gunned down, the flow of jihadists going to Iraq via Syria had slowed down. According to Iraqi official estimates, the number of foreign jihadists entering between January and July was down by almost 50 percent compared to the same period in 2006. This is, perhaps, one reason why the al Qaeda cyberspace is now full of desperate calls for more jihadists for Iraq. Despite the setbacks it has suffered, al Qaeda still sees Iraq as a make-or-break moment for its dream of world conquest.

Read it here.

Taheri notes that over time al Qaeda's reputation, which was at its peak right after 9/11, has fallen. Allies have drifted away or turned on them, casualties have mounted, fewer recruits are coming in. Organizationally al Qaeda has devolved from a coherent structure, to franchising, to freelance groups operating without any central direction. All in all it seems that the Bush administration's plan of not only destroying al Qaeda, but discrediting it, is working very well.

Lonborg Talks Sense

Bjorn Lonborg has a nice, rational piece on global warming in today's WaPo.

A few things that the media stories don't mention.

All eyes are on Greenland's melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.

Curiously, something that's rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat -- perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

[Emphasis mine]

What is more, global warming might even save lives.

The IPCC tells us two things: If we focus on economic development and ignore global warming, we're likely to see a 13-inch rise in sea levels by 2100. If we focus instead on environmental concerns and, for instance, adopt the hefty cuts in carbon emissions many environmental groups promote, this could reduce the rise by about five inches. But cutting emissions comes at a cost: Everybody would be poorer in 2100. With less money around to protect land from the sea, cutting carbon emissions would mean that more dry land would be lost, especially in vulnerable regions such as Micronesia, Tuvalu, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

As sea levels rise, so will temperatures. It seems logical to expect more heat waves and therefore more deaths. But though this fact gets much less billing, rising temperatures will also reduce the number of cold spells. This is important because research shows that the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change's health effects, global warming will actually save lives. It's estimated that by 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. But at the same time, 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold.

But..., but..., but what about Kyoto?

with its drastic emissions cuts, [the Kyoto Protocol] is not a sensible way to stop people from dying in future heat waves. At a much lower cost, urban designers and politicians could lower temperatures more effectively by planting trees, adding water features and reducing the amount of asphalt in at-risk cities. Estimates show that this could reduce the peak temperatures in cities by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Instead of the current hyperbolic confrontation between catastrophists and deniers Lonborg urges:

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn't ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

Horray! Good advice, but will it be heeded? Not likely.

Read Lonborg's entire piece here.

Gee, I Wonder Why?

Gallup reports:

PRINCETON, NJ -- Republicans in America today remain deeply distrustful of the national news media -- in sharp contrast to Democrats, who have a great deal more trust in the media's accuracy. Overall, less than half of Americans, regardless of partisanship, have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media. Nearly half of Americans -- including over three-quarters of Republicans -- perceive the media as too liberal while fewer than one in five say the media are too conservative.

Read it here.

Maybe this has something to do with it.

As CNN's Howard Kurtz accurately pointed out on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," few media outlets seemed at all interested in giving much attention to the great news out of Iraq last week regarding September's sharp decline in casualties.

To Kurtz's obvious frustration, his guests - Robin Wright of the Washington Post and Barbara Starr of CNN - both supported the press burying this extremely positive announcement.

I kid you not.

Read it here.

The Hollywood War

Hollywood is currently churning out a seemingly endless stream of anti-war, anti-Bush films. Andrew Breitbart [conservative heterosexual] and David Ehrenstein [gay liberal] argue about the meaning of it all in the Los Angeles Times. Read their complete dialog here.

Lies Of the Left -- More on Wilson/Plame

The Hill reports:

Columnist Robert Novak said Saturday Ambassador Joe Wilson did not forcefully object to the naming of his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, when Novak spoke to him prior to the publication of a column that sparked a federal investigation and sent White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to jail.

“He was not terribly exercised about it,” Novak said.

Instead, Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war. Wilson also stressed that his wife went by his last name, Wilson, rather than Plame, Novak said.

....

“It was an off-hand remark to a question I asked in an interview I requested,” Novak said. “This was not a conspiracy in the federal government to go after Valerie Plame Wilson.”

Emphasis mine.

Read it here.

I know this is old news, but we should never let this thing drop. It is a perfect example of the outrageous deceit employed by opponents of this administration.

This is Really Embarrassing

ABC reports:

The US intelligence services and the State Department screwed up "big time" in recent months.

In early July the Israeli government presented the U.S. with satellite imagery proving that Syria was developing a nuclear weapons capacity. It came as a shock to US intelligence which had not picked up on the facility's existence. Then action to take out the facility was delayed for months by US State Department objections voiced by Sec. of St. Condoleeza Rice. Finally Israel struck and destroyed the facility without US approval.

Read about it here.

The Bush Economic Miracle Continues

Well now, the Bush economy just keeps chugging along despite all the attempts on the part of critics to portray it as a disaster.

Bloomberg reports:

U.S. employment accelerated in September and revised figures for August showed an unexpected gain, easing recession concerns and making the Federal Reserve less likely to cut interest rates again.

Payrolls grew by 110,000 after an 89,000 increase in the previous month, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The change to the August figure wiped out what had been the first decline in four years, a drop that spurred predictions the six-year expansion would come to end amid the credit-market rout.

Treasury notes fell as traders speculated that the central bank, which reduced borrowing costs by half a point on Sept. 18, will resist lowering them at the next meeting. Analysts said more jobs and rising wages will help consumers weather falling home prices, sustaining the spending that accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy.

``It certainly doesn't look like an economy that's losing momentum,'' said John Ryding, chief U.S. economist at Bear Stearns Cos. in New York. `

Read it here.

No it doesn't, but with a chance to put a Democrat in the White House, don't count on seeing many headlines highlighting Bush's economic successes in the MSM.

Thanks Senator Specter

Steven Milloy notes that the new global warming legislation proposed by Sens. Specter and Bingaman will cost more than a trillion dollars in its first ten years and untold trillions after that while accomplishing next to nothing. Thanks senators, you are living up to our expectations.

Faugh!

Read it here.

Serenity sequel?

Will there be a Serenity sequel? We certainly hope so! A rumor is going around that Joss Whedon is planning one and Universal is willing.

I can't wait!

A Day on Hawk Mountain

"She Who Must Not Be Named" spent most of yesterday gallivanting around New York City. I headed up to Hawk Mountain. Here's some of what I saw.

A kettle of vultures


Hazy day at Donat's



Getting up-close and personal with a vulture



Birdwatcher



Another Turkey Vulture checking me out. What do they know that I don't? Do I look that bad?


Here's what I came to see. A sharpie hurtles by.



Osprey in a hurry.

Zimbabwe Update

Zimbabwe, Mad Bobby Mugabe's personal little racist, Maoist hell on earth, has now run out of bread. The Guardian reports:

Zimbabwe's bakeries have shut and supermarkets have warned there will be no bread for the foreseeable future as the government admitted that wheat production had collapsed following the seizure of white-owned farms.

The agricultural ministry announcement that the wheat harvest is only about a third of what is required, and that imports are held up by lack of hard currency, came as a deadline passed today for the last white farmers to leave their land or face prosecution for trespass.

Every time you think things just can't get worse, they do. Such are the fruits of anti-colonial ideological fervor. And the horror is, it is the poor people of Zimbabwe, not the hated Westerners, who pay the price.

Read about it here.

Mugabe is so monstrous that even the Chinese won't have anything to do with him. But he has made a new friend.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, whose countries were once designated "outposts of tyranny" by the U.S. administration, met Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly and called for developing nations to unite against Western "domination."

Iranian state media said the two leaders discussed "the need for unity of the developing states against…U.S. and British neocolonialism." The Iranian report said President Mugabe lashed out at what he described as “the unilateralist approach and misuse of the U.N. Security Council by the bullying powers.”

Read it here.

The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet

Last night "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I went with some friends to see the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet," arguably the finest chamber ensemble in the world. It was an impressive performance. They started with three short pieces by Jacques Ibert, moved on to works by Milhaud, Taffanel, and Sam Barber, then finished with the delightful "Quintet #1 in E Major" by Jean Francaix which left me chuckling as we wended our way back to the car for the trip home.

It was a lovely evening with some lovely people. We must do it again soon.

Oh, yeah, "She" informs me that we will, she's already made all the arrangements.

Bill Clinton's Selective Memory

From the WSJ:

Clinton says "We didn't have the terror threat" in 1992. Yet by the time he was elected, the following acts had already occurred:

• The November 1979 invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the holding of hostages, who were not released until Inauguration Day 1981.
  
  
• Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241.
  
  
• The holding of American hostages, and murder of some, in Beirut throughout the 1980s.
  
  
• The 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait.
  
  
• The 1985 bombing of a Madrid restaurant frequented by American soldiers.
  
  
• The 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA flight 847 and murder of a U.S. Navy flier on board.
  
  
• The 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, in which an American passenger was murdered.
  
  
• The 1986 bombing of TWA flight 840, which killed four Americans.
  
  
• The 1986 bombing of a disco in Berlin, which prompted a retaliatory strike on Libyan targets.
  
  
• The 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270.

Clinton had been in office barely a month when terrorists first tried to destroy the World Trade Center, killing six. His term saw the following attacks on American interests overseas:

• The 1995 car bombing of U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five servicemen.
  
  
• The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, killing 19 Americans.
  
  
• The 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224.
  
  
• The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, less than a month before the election of Mr. Clinton's successor, killing 17 American sailors.

Then of course came 9/11, less than eight months after Mr. Clinton left office. How can anyone, looking back in 2007, claim "we didn't have the terror threat" in 1992?

It would be accurate to say that we, meaning most Americans, didn't understand the gravity of the terror threat back then. But this points to an inconvenient truth about Mr. Clinton--namely that this failure of understanding continued throughout his presidency.

Read it here.

Back in those naive days of the Twentieth Century we were horrified by George Orwell's suggestion that history was infinitely malleable -- that the powers that be could simply ignore manifest truth and create a counter-factual history to suit their own designs. Well, today all we have is spin ["contested" history], and in the hands of a master manipulator like Bill Clinton, it is completely divorced from reality.

Your Brains..., They Want Your Brains

For you afficionados, The Projection Booth is running a zombie blog-a-thon. Thirty-one days of zombie obsession on display.

Here's the intro. Go here for his links to zombie madness.

More Good News From Iraq You Probably Haven't Heard

Oxblog takes a look on the figures that Iraq Body Count [an anti-war activist group] has been sitting on. Why not publicize the information? Because they show that the surge is having a huge positive effect in Iraq, that not only Sunni but Shiite attacks on civilians are down, that suicide bombings spiked in the few days before Gen. Petraeus testified before Congress [an obvious attempt to influence American public opinion] and a host of other inconvenient facts.

Read the whole analysis here.