Nationalism Vs. Patriotism, Shiffrin, Poverty Stats and the SSI

This month is Transgender Awareness Month at the VA.

"A free society is better today than a corrupt and totalitarian one. But one hundred years from now, the difference in human welfare and other relevant values will prove far more pronounced." This observation from Cowen is important: Like compounding interest, freedom's benefits grow exponentially with time.


Wise financial advice:
http://simplyrich.com/seven-steps-to-financial-peace-of-mind/

Orwell wrote that nationalism was ‘the worst enemy of peace.’ We are hearing now from the Europeans that nationalism--particularly American nationalism--is a great threat to us all. It is strange that this concern should be coming from the Europeans, the people who virtually invented nationalism. And it seems to imply a misunderstanding of it. Nationalism is sometimes benign, sometimes dangerous, but is always organizing, xenophobic and foreword looking. It has a motive. But what the Europeans usually complain of--at least in Americans--is closer to patriotism. Patriotism is pride in one's country and its heritage, respect for how your country was formed or has behaved. It has no opinion about others and is motiveless.
Perhaps this misunderstanding explains the terrible problems the Europeans have had with nationalism in the past. And, perhaps, the confusing view the Europeans have of America where the Americans are accused of both nationalism and disinterest in world affairs. And the European reaction to America reminds one of another important dichotomy: The distinction between jealousy and envy. Envy is "unhappiness over the success of others."

Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people this question in 2013: Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years?
Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.

Mikaela Shiffrin capped the best year of her career by setting yet another milestone Saturday, overtaking one of her childhood idols to become the most successful female slalom skier in the 52-year history of the World Cup.

In the last race of 2018, the American added her 36th victory. Shiffrin previously shared the record with Austria's Marlies Raich, who, competing as Marlies Schild, won 35 times before retiring in 2014.

By winning Saturday, Shiffrin also became the first skier, male or female, to win 15 World Cup races in a single calendar year, moving one victory past men's overall champion Marcel Hirscher of Austria, who has won 14 times in 2018.

The Egyptians have really savage security.
Egyptian security forces have killed 40 "suspected militants" in three separate incidents in North Sinai and Giza, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday, a day after a bombing on a Vietnamese tourist bus in Giza killed four people.
The bombing, less than 4 km from the pyramids, on the outskirts of Cairo, is the first deadly attack against foreign tourists in Egypt for more than a year and comes as the tourism sector, a vital source of foreign currency, recovers from a sharp drop in visitor numbers since the country's 2011 uprising.

Hogmanay

Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year, a mixture of ancient traditions and, possibly, a more modern reaction to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has a number of characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a readying for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.

Sunday/Holy Family

Today is the feast of The Holy Family, one of those feasts that are so Catholic; it is not a feast of an event, it is from "The Feasts of Ideas." The gospel involves the astonishing loss of the young child by his parents on a trip back from Jerusalem, something that would be a felony nowadays. He is found teaching the teachers and seems curiously dismissive of his parents' anxiety, as if just outside of empathy, looking in.

This is Thom Gunn's "Jesus and His Mother:"

My only son, more God's than mine,

Stay in this garden ripe with pears.

The yielding of their substance wears

A modest and contented shine:

And when they weep in age, not brine

But lazy syrup are their tears.

"I am my own and not my own."

He seemed much like another man,

That silent foreigner who trod

Outside my door with lily rod:

How could I know what I began

Meeting the eyes more furious than

The eyes of Joseph, those of God?

I was my own and not my own.

And who are these twelve labouring men?

I do not understand your words:

I taught you speech, we named the birds,

You marked their big migrations then

Like any child. So turn again

To silence from the place of crowds.

"I am my own and not my own."

Why are you sullen when I speak?

Here are your tools, the saw and knife

And hammer on your bench. Your life

Is measured here in week and week

Planed as the furniture you make,

And I will teach you like a wife

To be my own and all my own.

Who like an arrogant wind blown

Where he pleases, does without content?

Yet I remember how you went

To speak with scholars in furred gown.

I hear an outcry in the town;

Who carries this dark instrument?

"One all his own and not his own."

Treading the green and nimble sward,

I stare at a strange shadow thrown.

Are you the boy I bore alone,

No doctor near to cut the cord?

I cannot reach to call you Lord,

Answer me as my only son.

"I am my own and not my own."

Government Transfers, Saudis, and Trump's Syria Withdrawal

The one certainty in the vast and in-chartable morass of Middle Eastern conflict is that the Sunni Saudi regime supports and exports a violent form of fundamentalism called "Wahhabism." Exact numbers are not known, but it is thought that more than $100 billion have been spent on exporting fanatical Wahhabism to various much poorer Muslim nations worldwide over the past three decades. It might well be twice that number. By comparison, the Soviets spent about $7 billion spreading communism worldwide in the 70 years from 1921 and 1991. “....donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” Secretary of State Hilary Clinton wrote in a memo. “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.” And it’s not just the Saudis: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are also implicated in the memo.
So what is our motive for supporting them in their anti-Shia war in Yemen?

Sullivan  hates Trump but wants out of Syria:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-establishment-will-never-say-no-to-a-war.html

From Dwight Lee’s encyclopedia entry on “Redistribution:”
"....most government transfers are not from the rich to the poor. Instead, government takes from the relatively unorganized (e.g., consumers and general taxpayers) and gives to the relatively organized (groups politically organized around common interests, such as the elderly, sugar farmers, and steel producers). The most important factor in determining the pattern of redistribution appears to be political influence, not poverty. Of the $1.07 trillion in federal transfers in 2000, only about 29 percent, or $312 billion, was means tested (earmarked for the poor). The other 71 percent—about $758 billion in 2000—was distributed with little attention to need."

A Christmas Story

A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"
Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob connected. He knocked out the extremely popular Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sports writer later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Markle, Art and EVs

My Place in History:
According to the Genealogy Radio Show presenter, genealogist Lorna Moloney, Megan Markle  is connected to Galway native Mary McCague, who was born to William McCague and Brigid Galaher in October, 1829.
Publishing the details on Irish Clans and Surnames, Moloney believes that McCague moved overseas with her husband Thomas Bird and raised her children for a spell in Malta.
Researchers got this information from her daughter Hattie Bird's marriage records in Massachusetts. Hattie Bird was a sister to Mary Bird - the direct ancestor of Meghan Markle.
Hattie was born in 1866 on the Island of Malta to Thomas Bird and Mary McCague.
McCague is actually a surname which is derived from Irish kings, according to Adrian Martyn, en expert and writer on Galway tribes, who researched the McCague surname.
According to Adrian, the surname McCague derives from MacThaidhg or Mac Thaidhg, meaning "son of Tadhg".
Now widespread as a surname in the province of Ulster, Tadhg was the brother of Connor O'Conor, King of Connacht.
Kings. And Markle has ended up where she--and all the McCague descendants--should be.

Art:
One of the signals of decline is when art neither celebrates nor teaches.
In 2011, a lifelike German sculpture depicting a policewoman squatting and urinating — even the puddle is sculpted — received an award from a prestigious German foundation, the Leinemann Foundation for Fine Art.
In 2013, the Orange County Museum of Art in California placed a huge 28-foot sculpture of a dog outside the museum, where it periodically urinates a yellow fluid onto a museum wall.
In 2016, one of the most prestigious art museums in the world, the Guggenheim in New York, featured a pure-gold working toilet bowl, which visitors were invited to use. The name of the exhibit was “America” — so one could literally relieve oneself on America.
The Philadelphia Orchestra recently featured the premiere of Philadelphia Voices. In the fifth movement, titled “My House Is Full of Black People,” the black teen narrator chants the following lines: “The county is full of black people/ All wanting to be heard/ While old white men draw lines on maps/ To shut all of them up.” Later in the movement, he yells, “If you would all just f—ing listen!”

EVs:
From a biased American Petroleum Institute report that created the spin but not the numbers:
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that two-thirds of households that buy EVs have annual income in excess of $100,000, nearly twice the nationwide average (see chart above). The result is the tax credit becomes a subsidy for the rich. Households in this income bracket also are more likely to have multiple vehicles, so the EV serves a niche of their transportation needs and is a luxury. The obvious question, then, is whether U.S. taxpayers should be subsidizing the affluent.

Yes, Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted every year until the Sun went out of business in 1949. 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

The Elusive Butterfly Of Equality

A graph encouraging Equal Opportunity Fatality Day:

Sunday/Visitation

Today is the feast of the Visitation, where Mary goes to meet Elizabeth.

"Mary set out
and traveled to the hill country in haste
to a town of Judah,
where she entered the house of Zechariah
and greeted Elizabeth."

In haste? Was she desperate to prove the angel of the Annunciation right, desperate to prove she had not gone mad?


The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.
Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?
What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?
(The Mother of God by Yeats)

We Are the World

Overall, the US produced 24.3% of world GDP in 2017, with only about 4.3% of the world’s population. Three of America’s states (California, Texas and New York) – as separate countries – would have ranked in the world’s top 11 largest economies last year. Together, those three US states produced nearly $6.0 trillion in economic output last year, and as a separate country would have ranked as the world’s third-largest economy and ahead of No. 4 Japan ($4.8 trillion) by more than $1 trillion.

Rattling the World

Senator Lindsey Graham said President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria “rattled the world.”  Is this the same world that is constantly complaining about the American military adventures everywhere?

Trump wrote, “Why are we fighting for our enemy, Syria, by staying killing ISIS for them, Russia, Iran & other locals? Time to focus on our Country bring our youth back home where they belong!”

U.S. lawmakers said the decision leaves Syria’s future in the hands of Russia and Iran, allies of President Bashar al-Assad whose intervention averted his potential defeat in a conflict that started more than seven years ago.

Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the decision helped Iran and Russia and undermined Israel. And he said the decision to abandon the Kurds who fought alongside U.S. troops would have global implications.

The Kurds think this will let the Turks in.

France's foreign ministry said: "In the coming weeks, France will endeavor to ensure the security of all U.S. partners, including the Syrian Democratic Forces," a ministry spokesperson said in a media briefing Thursday. "The United States must take the protection of the populations of northeastern Syria and the stability of this area into consideration in order to avoid any further humanitarian tragedies and any return by the terrorists."

The WashPo called it a "betrayal" and wrote those "who joined the SDF feel a sense of “shame” at having aligned with a power that is now abandoning them..."

How can this be? Does this mean that after all the criticism the Americans were doing some good there? And will this be worse than Obama's widely acclaimed withdrawal from Iraq?

Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence,

From the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, by Jefferson, but removed from the final draft. It is an attack upon the King and his direct and indirect participation in the slave trade. The idea that slavery was a British institution that the Americans inadvertently inherited, like a bad gene, was common at the time and many saw it not as a question of freedom or morality but one of management.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred
rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended
him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to
incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of
Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be
bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative
attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that
this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now
exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that
liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom
he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against
the lives of another....

Algernon Sidney

“This hand, enemy to tyrants, by the sword
seeks peace under liberty.”-- Algernon Sidney

Involved in some of the same anti-monarchical causes as John Locke,
Algernon Sidney was caught up in the conspiracy to oust King Charles II. He was
beheaded on December 7, 1683, a martyr to the English Whig cause.
Fifteen years after his death, his Discourses Concerning Government
was published. A hero to John Adams and widely read in the American
colonies, some of his writings sound like Madison.
Sidney famously inscribed the following in the Visitor’s Book at
the University of Copenhagen: “This hand, enemy to tyrants, by the sword
seeks peace under liberty.” This inscription later inspired the state motto
of Massachusetts.

In Discourses Concerning Government he attacks the absurdity of the rights of kings and the inheritance of those rights:

"And we may justly conclude that God having never given the whole world to be governed
by one man, not prescribed any rule for the division of it; nor declared
where the right of dividing or subdividing that which every man has should
terminate; we may safely affirm that the whole is forever left to the will and
discretion of man: We may enter into, form, and continue in greater or lesser
societies, as best pleases ourselves: The right of paternity as to dominion is at
an end, and no more remains, but the love, veneration, and obedience, which
proceeding from a due sense of the benefits of birth and education, have their
root in gratitude, and are esteemed sacred and inviolable by all that are sober
and virtuous. And as ’tis impossible to transfer these benefits by inheritance,
so ’tis impossible to transfer the rights arising from them."

And the danger of applying qualities to leaders that are not common to men:

"And as ’tis folly to suppose that princes will always be wise, just and good,
when we know that few have been able alone to bear the weight of a government,
or to resist the temptations to ill, that accompany an unlimited power, it
would be madness to presume they will for the future be free from infirmities
and vices...."

Diversity and its Champions

From a  study written by Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) on discrimination in the Public Services:

"What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage of recruitment does not appear to assist in promoting diversity in hiring. In fact, in the trial we found that overall, APS [Australian Public Service] officers generally discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates."

Their conclusion:

"This suggests that the APS has been successful to some degree in efforts to promote awareness and support for diversity among senior staff."

Would that have been your conclusion?

The Millennial Success Sequence

Among today's young adults, the "success sequence" is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in "The Millennial Success Sequence" published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins of the Urban Institute and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nation's largest generation, have found that only 3% who follow this sequence are poor. And you have only a 5% chance of ever living in poverty.

A comparably stunning 55% of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25% of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox millennials who put "marriage before the baby carriage" have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes and have never been in poverty. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third.

One problem today, Wilcox says, is the "soul-mate model of marriage," a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a family. Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms. And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice, preferring "ecumenical niceness" to being judgmental.

(from Will)

Sunday/Soldiers

In today's gospel, people ask John the Baptist, "What are we to do?" The basic question.

Generally, the answer is "share." But then some specifics are asked: What does the tax collector do?  (Don't steal.) Then, the soldier. What should the soldier do? “Do not practice extortion,
do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”

What? Not "lay down your arms?" Not "turn your weapons into plowshares?" Instead they are told to be honest and fair.

That is, they are not told to be--or expected to be--un-human.

 

Alzheimer's and Research

A lot is known about the molecules involved in Alzheimer’s disease and the genes that increase its risk, but less is known about how it affects the brain as a system. It was known that in later stages of the disease, when sticky amyloid plaques have already built up in the brain, the brain’s gamma waves lose their strength. Gamma waves ripple across the brain about 40 times per second and appear when the brain is doing attentive work, such as forming memories or solving problems.

Looking for new ideas addressing Alzheimer’s and dementia, MIT formed the Aging Brain Initiative, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches.

Recordings of neural signals in the mice performed by co-first author Annabelle Singer showed weak gamma signals compared to mice without the disease. “The first thing we asked when we saw that was, what happens if you bring gamma back?” says  MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Picower Professor of Neuroscience.

They stimulated  neurons in the hippocampus, the seat of memory in the brain, to respond to laser light, with light passed through fibers implanted in the brain, testing different rates of flickering. When the light flickered at 40 flashes a second, the stimulated cells responded and induced gamma waves in the brain.

What they found was that gamma oscillations change the behavior of immune cells called microglia, which are responsible for clearing proteins such as amyloid. These cells increase in number with increased gamma strength and become bigger and more active. “This experiment really paid off,” says Tsai.

Ed Boyden’s team used their engineering expertise to fashion a control- lable flickering LED. Tsai’s team studied the effects of the strobe on the visual cortex. “At this point, the project had become very multidisciplinary,” says Tsai.

The intervention not only halved amyloid levels in mice with early stage Alzheimer’s—it also reduced plaques that form in later stages. This finding, which was published along with the team’s other results in Nature in December 2016, makes the intervention potentially relevant for humans. Alzheimer’s symptoms typically do not appear until after plaques have formed. “Most human patients will have plaques in their brains already,” says Tsai.

(from Elizabeth Dougherty writing in Spectrum)

So, maybe light flashing at 40/seconds might be good for you. At other speeds is it bad for you? Are some workplace lights harming us? Are the Notrth Koreans developing flashing lights to make us stupid?

Margin of Disease

Long-term follow-up results from the phase III Prostate Cancer Intervention Versus Observation Trial (PIVOT) indicated that radical prostatectomy does not significantly reduce all-cause or prostate cancer mortality compared with observation through nearly 20 years, according to findings presented at the 2017 American Urological Association Annual Meeting. The results demonstrated that there was not a statistically significant difference in all-cause mortality between patients who received surgery and those who were kept under observation (P = .06).

However, prostate cancer mortality did vary based on tumor characteristics. Prostate cancer mortality was observed in 4.8% of low-risk patients, 12.2% of intermediate-risk patients, and 15.9% of high-risk patients.

This is a very difficult problem but this study raises insightful questions. Much of medicine is aimed at the margins of disease, that is those people whose disease is on the periphery of the generality. Many illnesses with relatively good general long term results have, in a certain percentage, significant risk. Medicine tends to treat the general group for that specific, small risk. As cost increase, look to this caution as an area for bureaucrats to attack.

Dawkins and The Tender Gene

Richard Dawkins taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. He writes on evolution and is part of the new atheism that is evangelical. He thinks all religious people are idiots and rather than go his own confident way, he engages theists and confronts them.

He is a missionary,  the Jehovah's Witness of atheism. 

His most famous books are probably The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene.

He once stated, "An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf." Dawkins says that even moderate religious people "make the world safe for extremists." He would be classified as a leftist: He is a supporter of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats in Britain.

He is an equal opportunity scoffer. Here he is on Islam:

"I have criticised the appalling misogyny and homophobia of Islam, I have criticised the murdering of apostates for no crime other than their disbelief. ... Muslims themselves are the prime victims of the oppressive cruelties of Islamism."

Dawkins was scheduled to speak at an event with KPFA radio in Berkeley, California — until the local leftists realized that Dawkins had said some critical things about Islam. This is interesting because his anti-Christian sentiments are quite well known but apparently do not disqualify him from speaking at Berkeley. The station canceled the event, citing his "abusive speech." It explained: "We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn't know he had offended and hurt — in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech."

CO2, Model Estimates and Observed Temperatures

Only one in 2500 molecules in air is CO2.
 
The theory of catastrophic man-made global warming is actually a two part theory.  In part one, which is essentially greenhouse gas theory, a doubling of CO2 warms the Earth by a bit over 1 degree Celsius.  But there is a second part of the theory, a theory that is entirely unrelated to greenhouse gas theory.  That theory states that the Earth's climate systems are dominated by positive feedbacks which multiply the initial warming from CO2 by 3- 5 times or more.

These feedback systems are both positive and negative, are complex and, of course, difficult to analyze as controlled experiments on gigantic unwieldy subjects the size of the world are all the more unreliable when the elements are not completely known or understood. And science is an evolving beast. So medical science for years treated peptic ulcer disease as a neurologically mediated gastric secretion illness --often treated with massive surgical attacks--when it was actually an infection cured with five days of tetracycline. (I should note in passing that those erroneous scientists, who included Cushing himself, were not pulled from their homes or their graves and abused by indignant truth-seeking Peptic Ulcer Enthusiasts. People are simply too invested in results anymore and too little interested in process.)

And ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually started to rise only after temperatures had begun to climb. There is uncertainty about the timings, partly because the air trapped in the cores is younger than the ice, but it appears the lags might sometimes have been 800 years or more. That is hard to square with the warming lobby but there are speculations as to why that could be reasonable and not invalidate the CO2 thesis.

Both the satellite and surface temperature records show warming since 1980. For all that some skeptics may want to criticize the authors of the surface temperature databases, and there indeed some grounds for criticism, these issues should not distract us from the basic fact that in every temperature record we have (including other technologies like radiosonde balloons), we see recent warming.
In terms of magnitude, the two indices do not show the same amount of warming -- since 1980 the satellite temperature record shows about 30% less warming than does  the surface temperature record for the same period. 
  

The surface temperature record shows only about half the warming, and the satellite record shows only about a third the warming, that Hansen predicted.   There is no justification for saying that recent warming rates have been higher than expected or forecast -- in fact, the exact opposite has been true. And the notion that it is accelerating, essential to the warming thesis, has been absent in the last 17 years.

Remember that balloon and atmospheric readings are relatively new and have no long term correlations to compare. Remember also that many surface sites have been influenced by changes in local population densities, a difficult curve in the collection technique to evaluate. Most importantly, remember that disagreements in results and/or opinions are heretical only in religious disputes, in science they are only fuel for discussion aimed at long-term resolution by well meaning thinkers.

This is a graph of the IPCC's predicted temperature changes from different times over the last few years and, within it, the actual, observed temperature ranges:

  

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) was published in 2001, following the First Assessment Report (FAR) in 1990, and the Second Assessment Report (SAR) in 1995. AR4 is the Fourth Assessment.

It may be that human beings are destroying their world. That question should be taken seriously. Using observations that create models to predict the future, when wrong, should be taken seriously too.