Those Darn Skeptics And Their Communications Professionals

Posted on by

“All right, boys,” began James Hansen, “Listen up. Climate contrarians are winning the argument with the public over global warming.

“This is so even though climate science itself is becoming ever clearer in showing that the earth is in increasing danger from rising temperatures.

“Why? I’ll tell you: the skeptics have sneaked behind our back and have employed your actual communications professionals to put forward their vile message that we—even we!—are too sure of ourselves.

“We’re losing because we genuine scientists are just barely competent at communicating with the public and don’t have the wherewithal to do it.

“So let’s summarize our media contacts and see where we stand. Then we can formulate a plan of attack. Agreed?

“We have the paper of record, the New York Times, especially Krugman who properly calls anybody who disagrees with the science a traitor that should be strung up.

“The Washington Post is on our side, of course. The LA Times and those Chicago papers can always be counted on for a pro-warming view. Plus, there lots of the medium-sized papers that take their led from their betters.

“And don’t forget England, where we at least have The Guardian and The Independent and so on. Pro-consensus views are always found there.

“We have the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, as is only proper. And that’s just the English-speaking world. Le Monde is magnificent. Asahi Shimbum toes the line, as do The Times of India and Korea’s The Joongang Ilbo. Heck, even Bild follows us a lot of the time.

Let’s face it: we have fighting our cause the major papers in every capitol, English-speaking or not. Am I right?”

New York Post“Right boss,” said G., his ever-faithful sidekick. “We have them all except for the New York Post and The Daily Mail. What about the blogs?”

“Huffington, naturally. Daily KOS, Salon, and several other of the largest always do what’s expected of them. And I’d never forget your own valiant efforts, nor those of hundreds, even thousands of other blogs who preach the word of doom.

But, sadly, those vile skeptics have blogs, too. All are born out of ignorance or are the results of the pens of hired communications professionals—they get their funding from energy companies, you know.”

“Only fools read those blogs, boss,” ventured G. “Why not talk about what really counts—television.”

“TV? Why, we have NBC, CSB, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and all the government-funded PBS affiliates.”

“CNN?” asked G.?

“Right: CNN is a solid. But we musn’t forget HBO and Bill Maher. And these are just the stations in the USA. Looking abroad we find all the channels of the BBC, ABC in Australia, Al Jazeera, France 5 (and maybe the other four, too), Germany’s EarthTV and the Deutsche Welle.

Then there’s the All-Nippon News Network‎ and NHK in Japan, CBC in Canada, RAI in Italy, and so forth.

Once more, we can count as allies nearly every major television and cable outlet in every country except China.”

“Oh, how I hate Fox and Sky News!” G. shook his fist at his invisible enemies.

“True, G. Those backward networks are more evidence of the pernicious influence of communications professionals. The only explanation of the success of these media outlets is that these recalcitrant, wayward broadcasters is that they employ communications professionals whereas the other networks do not.”

“They must be stopped!” G. was trembling with rage.

“Before we get to that, let me remind us of the magazines on the side of the consensus.”

“No need, boss,” said G., anxious to show off his knowledge. “We all know about Time, Newsweek, The Nation, The New Republic, Scientific American, New York Review of Books, Mother Jones and the many others in the US, plus the several major publications in every civilized country. Plus, we own Hollywood. What I really want to know about are the politicians, the source of real power.”

“That’s easy. We have the Democrats and, believe it or not, even a few Republicans in the USA. We have Labour in the UK, the Greens, the Left, and Christians of various stripes in Germany, the Greens, Left, and Liberal in France, all of the EU hierarchy, the Greens and Liberals of Canada, Brazil is ours. Then there’s the Greens, Labor, and even the Liberal in Australia. That enlightened country even, thank the Powers, voted in a new carbon tax!

I could go on, but any fair counting shows at least half, and in many countries most, of the politicians support our cause, or at least say they do publicly.”

“What’s the bottom line, boss?”

“It’s obvious! We must address the glaring discrepancy in media access, which weighs so heavily in the favor of our enemies. We must pass a law banning the use of communications professionals!”

Parts of this post were prepared with the assistance of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe, a public relations firm based in New York City.

What Are The Chances Of War With China?

Posted on by

By the year 2012, or 2017, or 2022, what are the chances China’s military engages US forces?

Difficult question. But one which is better than asking the title question—because nobody goes to war anymore, we just have “conflicts.”

Your author does not pretend to have a definitive answer to the question. Instead, I have a small collection of evidence which appears probative. This is only a sampling. See the DOD report on China’s military for more information.

Any number of casus belli are possible, the main being Taiwan declaring itself what it is, i.e. de facto independent. Contretemps with India are more than a possibility. Already, there have been several clashes of Indian and Chinese naval forces. And then there is Japan which, though somewhat anemic militarily speaking, has, or probably has, the full backing of the U.S.A, but which also has a peculiar relationship with China. There is no love between these nations.

I think the chance that China engages anyone but the US is high, increasing as time progresses. The chance of direct US involvement is small, but the chance of indirect involvement quite high. This might be nothing more than parking a carrier in the Taiwan Straight, with that country’s permission, of course.

  • Taiwan’s presidential election is just three months off. In the lead is incumbent Ma from the KMT, a party when leans on reconciliation with China. His opponent is Tsai Ing-wen (whose first name is literally “English language”) is of the DPP, a party which is pro-independence.
  • China’s military builds apace. They have a new aircraft carrier, bought other vessels from Russia, new subs (albeit diesel), aircraft, are developing a stealth fighter (which they, surely coincidentally, first tested when old Joey Biden paid a visit to that country), have “begun operational deployment of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile system”, have “117,702 males of military service age available for conscription each year,” etc., etc. Of these increases, Admiral Mike Mullen stated, “I have moved from being curious to being genuinely concerned.”
  • China has had several brushes with Japan, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, some merely for the sake of antagonism, others over disputed boundaries on water and land. Most of the new missiles she is building are pointed at Taiwan. China claims it owns the water right up the shore of the Philippines. “[I]n late July, a Chinese ship attempted to intercept an Indian warship, the INS Airavat, off the Vietnamese coast…India has stepped up its defense ties with Vietnam, winning access to naval ports while helping Hanoi ready a new fleet of submarines.”

    • Chinese sea claims

  • The Chinese Communist Party-run (and written) Global Times “called” on Beijing “to declare war on Vietnam and the Philippines” when those countries defended their own waters. The paper did so in an op-ed entitled, “A good time to take military action in the South China Sea.” Quote: “Do not worry about small-scale wars; it is the best way to release the potential of war. Play a few small battles and big battles can be avoided.”
  • In a public document Hu Jintao listed as first priority protecting and shoring up the ruling regime. Social harmony came in at number three. But in that line, an American Idol-type show called Super Girl was yanked from TV because State censors found the show “subversive because the audience voting too closely represented Western-style democracy.”
  • China owns over $1.5 Trillion in Treasury Bills—which we would not, if attacked, feel compelled to pay back. The country will need this money when its real estate bubble pops, as they always do. That bubble swells: there are an entire empty cities of unoccupied spanking new buildings.
  • Patriotism is on the rise in China, where the citizenship, with plenty of good reasons and some bad, still smart from the drubbing they took in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the “century of humiliation” as they call it. Every theater in the country was made to turn all screens dark except for showings of Beginning of the Great Revival, a hagiography of Mao as an idealistic young man in love, the time before his syphilitic whoring and dispassionate murdering began in earnest. Reports are that the movie was liked.
  • China is building Azmat class fast attack craft for Pakistan. These craft are “equipped with advanced weaponry and sensors, including the C802A surface-to-surface missile, and [have] stealth features.” Pakistan will use these weapons to attain “peace, stability and prosperity in the region.”
  • China continues its business with Iran where the “volume of China’s imports of Iranian crude rose about 50 percent in the first seven months of 2011.” Hillary is on it and has “stressed the need for continued Chinese restraint in investing in Iran’s energy sector.”
  • The Obama administration was cowed by Chinese We-Won’t-Like-You-Anymore threats when it decided to not sell Taiwan new F-16s, which would have replaced that country’s aging wing of (crash prone) F-5s. In Obama’s favor, there is a widespread belief, or at least rumor, that Chinese spies are filthy in Taiwan’s military. A Taiwanese military-written white paper tacitly admits this. Some say that selling Taiwan arms is like awarding China blueprints. Taiwan is countering Chinese missiles with its own “Wan Chien” or “Ten Thousand Swords” missile system.
  • The US military is shrinking. “[T]he U.S Navy needs 328 ships compared to the current 284…the U.S. Air Force will have a tactical aircraft shortfall of an astounding 800 planes in the next few years. The Navy and Marine Corps are projecting a 200-fighter shortfall in the same time period.”

Update I neglected to add China’s ever-growing and blatant use of hacking.

Occupy Wall Street — Guest Post by William James Briggs

Posted on by

W.J. Briggs is your host’s number one son. He ventured among the perpetually dissatisfied yesterday and files this report.

A man poured a small bag of marijuana into half of an old clam shell. Casually, he picked out the stems and threw them on the pavement. He was sitting beside “The Altar of Peace” which, a few weeks ago, was just a tree in Wall Street’s Liberty Square Park. Now it’s the official meeting place for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

I watched the man sort through his marijuana while the people around him busied themselves with protesting. To my immediate right there was a youth in an army uniform. He held up a sign that read, “Bradley Manning is Still in Jail.” To our left there were two older women having a conversation about Fracking. Behind us random protesters were yelling and chanting. They wanted to end corporate greed. Occupy Wall Street

On either side of the calm marijuana sifter, there was an anxious teenager. They were looking forward to a smoke. My staring was interrupted. A thin, pale, man in a tie-dye shirt tapped me on the shoulder.

“Have you seen my donation bucket?” he asked.

Behind his oval glasses his eyes had a distant, frenzied, look. Before I could respond a large, shirtless, gentlemen approached us.

“I’ve seen your donation bucket,” the shirtless man said.

The pale man looked delighted and threw his hands together. “Where is it?” he asked.

The shirtless man looked over his shoulder at his snickering friends. They were lying on dirty sleeping bags and picking at a plate of stewed carrots that the Occupy Wall Street kitchen had provided for lunch.

“I don’t know where your bucket is!” The shirtless man said and laughed. His friends started to crack up and exchange high-fives.

The thin man looked confused. “My bucket is black,” he said looking hurt, “there’s some white tape on it. Have you seen it? Have you seen my bucket?”

Quietly I stepped away and started walking east. I passed a sign that read, “The Gaiian mind is not a metaphor. It is a bio-spiritual phenomenon.” Below the sign a woman with overalls was showing a kid how to make noise by hitting a stick against a turned-over metal trash can. They were trying to add to the clamor of the nearby drum circle. Next to them another sign read, “No negative energy in this area.” I moved on.

The Occupy Wall Street protests started as an idea in mid July. Now, the “leaderless” movement has over 500,000 on-line supporters, raised over 40,000 dollars, and has spread across America. A large flat-screen TV connected to a laptop on the south side of the park advertises these facts. The screen also displays a live Twitter feed. A person called Olivia in Mexico wrote, “Let’s try to be humane.”

On the east end of the park there’s a red metal sculpture that looks like a tripod. It serves as the event space for the protesters. Under the tripod there were about thirty small children squirming around and trying to listen to a brown-haired woman.

“There’s contradictory information about Christopher Columbus,” she screamed with a knowing smirk on her face.

The adults surrounding the children shouted, “There’s contradictory information about Christopher Columbus.”

It’s a call-and-response technique the protesters use to make sure a speaker can be heard. They aren’t allowed amplifying equipment so they yell each other’s statements in unison. The children looked confused and pulled at their clothes and played with the loose gravel on the ground.

Alongside the tripod there’s another meeting going on. An olive-skinned girl gets up, her smile is beautiful and her skin looks clean. She yells, “They want us to be disorganized.”

The crowd around her echoes, “They want us to be disorganized.”

The young beauty clears her throat and shouts, “They want us to be dirty.”

She continues with similar statements and eventually reclaims her seat on the pavement. A young man takes center stage and repeats her message with different words but he manages to add more emotion. His face gets red and the veins in his neck bulge. The beauty looks at the man with wide eyes. It’s obvious they’re in love.

A grizzly, tattooed, man in a denim vest barrels into the center of attention. Around his arm a patch reads, “Street Medic.”

“If you have a drug addiction,” he booms, “Come see me and we’ll share our resources with you.” The group laughs, he smiles, and then walks into the crowd followed by a decent applause.

Someone screams out “Mic-check.” And the group roars back, “Mic-check.” The protesters are testing their call and response system and filling the silence until the next volunteer gets up to speak.

I wandered again and was handed a pamphlet called, “Anarchist Basics.” With nothing better to do, I flipped through its pages. The pamphlet helps teach Anarchists to do things like “organize a festive community-orientated event like a street party without going through the parks department.” And to “decorate buildings with revolutionary slogans.”

My reading is interrupted by a Chinese man who’s built like a bull-dog. He’s raging through the park screaming and waving his arms.

“You wanna get verbal with me?” he yelled at a middle-aged woman who’s following him around trying to apologize. He was just thrown out of a protest meeting.

“They don’t want to hear different opinions!” he shouted to anyone who bothered to listen. “All they want to do is mic-check!”

Across the park a group of people screamed, “Mic-check.”

Two protesters, self-appointed sanitation workers, clutched brooms and watched the tirade with derision. “He’s always such a d—.” One of them said. “Yeah, he’s an as——.” The other one said.

“Drugs and drinking, is that going to help Wall Street?” The Chinese man screamed.

A well dressed reporter noticed the crowd the Chinese man was attracting. He walked over with his camera man and introduced himself. The reporter got his assistant to strap a small microphone under the Chinese man’s Ralph Laruen polo and asked him a question.

The Chinese man calmed down, flexed his muscles, and looked into the camera.

“They have all these meetings here and on three separate occasions they’ve called me ‘disruptive.’” He said glowering at the camera. The reporter nodded in rehearsed understanding.

I decided to leave. I didn’t discover what the Occupy Wall Street protest was about, but I did see a lot of people try real hard to define why it is they feel so disenchanted with life, with the government, and with the economy.

But the anger, the drugs, the bad food, the dirty sleeping bags, and the chanting, made it hard for anyone to find words, let alone the right ones.

As I left I saw a protester wearing a camouflage shirt on Broadway practicing different mediation poses. He was intently watching his dim reflection in a McDonald’s window.

His name tag said “Aver” and he tired to stand on one foot with his arms extended upward. He stumbled and shook his hands with frustration. He tried again, but this time he held his hands together in prayer.

The Curse Of The Mouse: Apple vs. PC vs. Command Line

Posted on by

I hate, loathe, and abominate the mouse. Nay, not the wee sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie that I chase with a hockey stick (a hard-to-find, left-handed Easton) each winter through my Manhattan apartment, putting a panic in his breastie; a creature which at least provides me with some honest exercise.

I can’t abide that contraption attached to the computer which must be gripped to navigate a cursor round a computer screen, a move which necessitates removing one’s hands from the keyboard and removing it to a misshapen blob, interrupting the flow of work. The mouse

This bizarre maneuver requires the fine muscle control akin to the skill of a drafter, just to place the cursor over the few pixels that make up the word “File.” Then one must click those pixels, scoot the mouse down to another set of pixels and click again. Then more moving and clicking. And then all more still.

Why? To open some document, probably Word, where one will begin to fret over font and typeface and style and tabs and everything else that used to be the domain of the typesetter. All this minutia is so fascinating that people often forget the actual words are more important than their display. WYSIWYG, all right. Word documents are the ugliest in creation.

Your author spends his days writing code and words, tasks which are anti-mouse. Statistical software that requires a mouse to work would cause all analysis to proceed at the pace of an abacus. Imagine having to point and click and point and click and on an on each time one wanted to redo an analysis! The mind boggles.

The mouse also promotes sore wrists. I used to have a permanent ache until I gave it up and switched to typing.

Before the complaint arises, let me admit, gracefully, that the mouse is just the thing in the absence of a pen that can write on the screen. If graphics are your game, then some method must exist for you to interact with the screen. The mouse is singularly ill adapted for this purpose, but it is, as the saying goes, better than nothing. And recall that most people, of course, are not using their computers for drawing.

Never mind all that: Apple’s great innovation was to force people to use its own proprietary, expensive mouse (a creature that this corporation did not invent, much to its credit). Apple’s actual invention was to remove utility from the Microsoft mouse, decreasing the number of buttons from two or three to just one. So now, with just one button, one could do less (but pay more), unless one also placed their hands on the keyboard in a peculiar fashion, much like a concert pianist rehashing some Liszt knuckle-breaker, to mimic the absence of the missing buttons. What a workout!

How much better, then, to remove the necessity of the mouse altogether? If one wants to delete a file with a mouse, the number of actions required are numerous. Much navigating, pointing, and clicking. No simple task. What if, instead, instead of all this forced labor one wrote, “rm file”? This is the beauty of the command line.

You object: “Oh, but you have to memorize that ‘rm’ means remove, and that taxes the little grey cells.” True, but why is this memorization different than knowing the myriad steps involved deleting a file with a mouse? I’ll take your silence as an agreement.

Macs now offer the Linux-like command line, incidentally (didn’t you know?). PCs have a command line, but it is anemic, and Microsoft is always threatening to eliminate it.

I recall the first Macintosh (I’m that old). All those slick “icons”, moving status bars, pictures—what a treat! But I had to agree with Jerry Pournelle that the “Mac was a wonderful operating system attached to a toy computer. ” (A comment that put him on Steve Jobs’s, may he rest in peace, everlasting S-list.) A very expensive toy, at that. And unless one was an Apple adept, it was painful to use one. The mouse was, admittedly, fun at first. It is now a pain.

Microsoft PCs were then “Get a cup of coffee” computers, meaning that when one started the boot process, one could go to the coffee bar, there to linger, only to return to find the machine was still loading “Personal Settings.” The early Macs booted up all right, but were “get a coffee” machines for every task. This is one big reason why the PCs took an early lead are (still) found on the business desks. The mouse on these machines could be used, but it could often be eliminated. New versions of Windows are more Mac-like, which means the mouse is once again a necessity.

The religious devotion of a certain population segment with their Macs is wondrous to behold. Yet thinking about the mouse, especially on Macs, it is useful to recall that the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley.

Update The original Mac ran hot because it had no fan—”Steve Jobs insisted on that.”