Having stolen the family heirlooms, robbed the vault,  emptied the bank accounts, and stripped the house, the thieves have declared a post-theft society….

How can there be thieves, if  theft no longer exists?

Having played race against race, religion against religion, group against group, the victors have declared a post-racial society.

How can there be racists, if race no longer exists?

Check the wiki entry for climategate.

Notice that editing is now blocked until the end middle of the month, which means for the whole period in which Copenhagen convenes, this entry will be the popular take on Climategate and will set the parameters of what can be debated and how:

Type in “climate gate and wiki” into google and you get an entry titled

“Climatic Research Unit email hacking incident”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident

Then check the revision history

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident&action=history

(Update, Dec 9, 11.20 PM) I notice that this has become considerably longer than when I saw it this morning December 9. A number of the revisions appear to have taken place since I posted, and hopefully address the issues I commented on  here).

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Editing of this article by new or unregistered users is currently disabled until December 23, 2009.
See the protection policy and protection log for more details. If you cannot edit this article and you wish to make a change, you can request an edit, discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.

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Update: December 9, 11: 23

Notice the change in the notice on top of the page.

It now has the following added:

This article may be inaccurate in or unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2009)

This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page.

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Here is the link to the log of the change in protection level on this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=protect&page=Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident

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Now look at the article itself:

Note the distortions:

1. The title focuses on the email “hacking” and calls it an “incident.”  — trivializing the affair and placing a misleading emphasis on the outing rather than on the scientific crimes revealed.

2. The article doesn´t mention that there is good evidence to show that the emails were outed because of stonewalling of a freedom of information act (foia) request (correction: foia requests) that no  personal messages were taken, and that the emails and data were originally sent to media outlets like the BBC, which refused to publish them.

In other words, this was clearly a responsible attempt at whistle-blowing not a malicious hack.

3. The scientists who committed the wrong-doing are quoted extensively, while scores of independent scientists who have criticized the research manipulation are not quoted.

4. The wrong-doers and the comments from media sources and experts who support climate change are given far more prominence than the actual substance of wrong-doing.

5. The main critics quoted are people whom the culpable scientists had previously tried to trash. This makes it look as if the only people objecting to the cooking of data are people who were in personal conflict with the data-cookers anyway. It becomes a question of “he said, she said.”

6. Lengthy exculpatory statements by the guilty scientists are prominent. Testimony of scores of disinterested scientists and journalists who have reacted negatively to the revelations have been ignored.

“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.” — G. K. Chesterton.

Ah, the masters of the universe….always so quick to protect their own hides…

This, from Bloomberg (Dec. 4):

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.”

Meanwhile, CEO Lloyd Blankfein´s on talking terms with God, and assures us he´s only going about his father´s business….

No profiles in courage here.

Just to bring in a little perspective: These are multimillionaires, who work and live in the best part of town, who have immense political clout, who are probably tall males, if the profile typical of a high-flying Wall Streeter is anything to go by.

I used to teach at a school in the inner city for a few years, trudging home sometimes well past ten at night, often with music equipment in hand. I started carrying mace only at the end. I never had my wallet picked or a purse snatched. Once, a couple of panhandlers acted aggressively toward me. I returned the favor and they backed off. Another time, at 2 AM, near a bus-station, a teen girl “broke bad” with a razor blade. Two young men came over and warned me to get away so I wouldn´t be hurt. Twice, walking through a ghetto, I´ve had young teenagers carry my bags and give me directions, without my asking.

The only time I was robbed was in an affluent neighborhood, where someone picked my pocket. Later there were the brokers, the lawyers, and the rest to add to my bitter experience and teach me the semi-criminal nature of the upper echelons of our society.  This upper level is not “smart,” as Bethany McLean seems to suggest in her strange piece on Goldman Sachs in Vanity Fair . Call it by its proper name. It is corrupt. Deeply so.

And its corruption is commonplace.

The monstrous size of the crimes committed reflects not the size of the men who commited them but the monstrosity of the ideology of which they are, in some sense, the greatest victims….

More evidence that the V Tech shooting involved a lot of negligence on the part of school officials:

“Some Virginia Tech officials warned their own families and the president’s office was locked down well before a campus-wide alert was issued in the 2007 slayings of 32 people, according to a revised state report that details new fumbles in the response to the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

One student survived several hours after being shot without anyone notifying her family until she had died, said the updated report, released Friday.

At least two officials with a crisis response team called their family members after the first shootings at a dorm and about 90 minutes before the all-campus alert was issued at 9:26 a.m.. The president’s office was locked down at 8:52 a.m. and two academic buildings were also shut down before the general alert.”

Wow. That was quick. Thwack. Gold got its sunny little head lopped off (for now)…just after it had peeped over $1225 ..and this morning fell to the sub $1180´s level (>$50 decline), apparently on the jobs report, which shows jobs decreased by 11, 000 in November, considerably less than the 30,000 predicted in the most optimistic forecast. That signals a quicker end to the recession and the likelihood that Bernanke will raise interest rates, which in turn is dollar positive.

The dollar index is over 75 now and looking good.

“The data point to a transition in the economy from a deep recession to a modest recovery,” said William Sullivan, chief economist, JVB Financial Group in Florida.

“This will encourage the Fed to be more vocal about an exit strategy from their highly accommodative posture.”

A look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Report for November 2009 (non-farm payrolls) shows that most of the jobs were added in temporary employment and in health care – which is very inflected by government spending and programs.

That means in the rest of the economy, the real economy, the situation isn´t better at all.

And when you go through the rest of the numbers, that´s the case. Indeed, some numbers are significantly worse.

"The number of long-term unemployed
(those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The
percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by
2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent.

Over at GFT Forex, Kathy Lien also expresses some suspicion about the numbers, implying that they might be due for a revision in the future and contrasting them with the Consumer Confidence numbers and the employment part of the ISM reports.

But traders, probably looking for a reason to sell gold at such overbought prices, took the improvement in temp employment as a sign of better things to come, translated that into a possible interest rate hike, and jumped out of stocks and gold.

Which suggests that the move up in gold was not so much a result of perception of it as a safe-haven as perception of it as a currency and a vehicle of speculation.

And the moral of this story is a lot of what´s going on is not the market. It´s not supply and demand. It´s more like smoke and mirrors..

From Business Insider:

“This morning, this message popped up on Bloomberg:

“MARKET NEWS SAYS ‘RUMORS’ ARE JAPAN MAY TELL OF PLANNED SALE”

Said sale in question is rumored to be a U.S. Treasury sell off by the Japanese government.

Adding fuel to the fire is the U.S. and the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed conducted a reverse repo (repurchase) test that could help with the Japanese UST sale.

On the other hand, this wouldn’t seem to jibe with reports that the country’s main concern is the rising yen. If anything, you’d think they’d be snapping up more treasuries. So something is amiss.

The Houston Chronicle reports Japan could be selling off as much as $100 billion worth of treasuries.”

My Comment:

Well, nothing does jive these days.  And the reason nothing does is because half of what´s done in public is done for motives and with a trajectory invisible to the public eye.

And yet the press reports these events without any context or history as perfectly transparent events….

I´ll be back with whatever I can dig up. I don´t understand reverse repos…

Tyler Cowen seems to be getting a tad confused in his moral reasoning, as he tries to shove the poop back up the fear-mongerers  who fatally compromised science, genuine environmentalism, and genuine conservation:

“Good vs. evil thinking causes us to lower our value of a person’s opinion, or dismiss it altogether, if we find out that person has behaved badly.  We no longer wish to affiliate with those people and furthermore we feel epistemically justified in dismissing them.

Sometimes this tendency will lead us to intellectual mistakes.

Take Climategate.  One response is: 1. “These people behaved dishonorably.  I will lower my trust in their opinions.”
Another response, not entirely out of the ballpark, is: 2. “These people behaved dishonorably.  They must have thought this issue was really important, worth risking their scientific reputations for.  I will revise upward my estimate of the seriousness of the problem.”
I am not saying that #2 is correct, I am only saying that #2 deserves more than p = 0.  Yet I have not seen anyone raise the possibility of #2.  It very much goes against the grain of good vs. evil thinking:  Who thinks in terms of: “They are evil, therefore they are more likely to be right.”

My Comment

This is so idiotic confused

(in the spirit of Humble Libertarian´s post, I want to start ratcheting down any stridency on my own part, before expecting others to)

I can´t believe I´m reading it.

I don´t believe the very intelligent Professor Cowen wrote it.

Let´s see. Point by point.

1. Hitler did several rather evil things…would Cowen be happy if we tried to take another look at Hitler, because, gee, we´re all counterintuitive an’ all..

Of course, see what happens when anyone dares to make the morally far saner argument that although Hitler did many evil things, he might have been right about some other things…say, like vegetarianism. The howls of neo-Nazism would drive him from respectable (and unrespectable) society forever.

But it´s quite OK for a liberal to argue from the morally insane position that because Hitler did many evil things, he was therefore right.

I can only imagine what would have happened if someone from the south had ever said that….or someone from the third world….or any other benighted place where our superiors haven´t already planted the flag of moral imperialism (I coined that one just now)….

It never occurs to the supercilious center-liberals (I´m not sure the positions taken by Cowen or Powell are really libertarian) that their lectures admonitions are best directed at themselves.

2. Cowen calls Austrian theory a religion, when it´s not even a theory. It´s a set of principles that can be applied quite broadly to arrive at very different conclusions, even conclusions diametrically opposed to many positions that Austrians actually hold.

3. He uses the phrase ¨good versus evil thinking” — which seems to be a reference to Glenn Greenwald´s book on Bush and how good versus evil thinking got his administration into trouble. As a matter of fact, I made that analysis of Bush´s reasoning in my first book (“The Language of Empire”) as well as in an article, “The Pharisee´s Fire Sermon” (Dissident Voice), …and I can assure you that “good versus evil” thinking permeates every aspect of American thought…from Christian fundamentalism to liberalism universalism. Lew Rockwell has the least of it.

And one of the underlying reasons for why this kind of polarised thinking is pervasive is a very simple one.

Citizens in an imperial state can get away with it.

In no other corner of the world is there a state with so much space in its back yard, so many armaments to back up its lightest word and so much clout to twist every arm that can be twisted to get reality to bend to its own solipsistic vision of how things should be.

Mr. Cowen has mistaken an imperial problem pervasive in the US for a local ideological problem.
Only one of a number of errrors.

Here´s more of Cowen´s cogitations via EconomicPolicyJournal.com:

“Cowen began his comments, and almost immediately differentiated between what he called “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He said that like Palmer, he fell into the “realistic” camp.

During the Q&A, I asked Cowen to amplify on the differences between what he deemed “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He pointed to a view on immigration and “too much” conspiracy theory that he claimed the “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarians” held. He said they were moving toward the extreme right wing Republican camp. He contrasted this with what he called realistic-secular libertarianism. He said he expected that a full split between the two camps will occur.”

Outside the right-wing Islamophobe militarati, the place where you´ll see the most “good-versus-evil” thinking is not Lew Rockwell (where you can find even liberal-left thinkers like Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf). It´s the liberal-left center.

And that split that´s coming up between LRC and secular libertarianism?

Baloney.

Lew Rockwell has plenty of atheist and secular libertarians. I happen to be a secularist and a Christian agnostic. Both the Christianity and the agnoticism are important to me. Equally. If Cowen can´t get his head around a position like that and lumps it in together with some loony farfetched idea he has about “Austrian religion” that really is his problem, not LRC´s.

Actually, the only split that´s coming up is the split of libertarian progressives and sensible environmentalists…from the left…and into the Ron Paul camp..which is also, much more prosaically, the just-the-facts, ma´am camp.

Cowen:

He then told me I could google, Austrian theory and financial crisis, and half the results would be “religious Austrians.”

Nice try at scare-mongering.

This is simply scare-mongering.

The real ayatollahs of thought are Olympian liberal-leftists who believe that anyone who argues against any of their most precious sacred cows — subsidized illegal immigration, thought police, the immaculate purity of the government on 9-11, the imminent end of planet earth on account of Republicans, and a host of other dim-bulb positions — must automatically be a wicked, greedy racist.

Economist, audit thine own intellectual books before trashing anyone else´s.

And for more juicy tomatoes flung at the good professor by fellow libs, read this .