"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right."
---Robert Park
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MentalBlocks
Throwing Mental Blocks at Glass Constructions
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Tuesday, June 17, 2003
From the Wasthington Post:
Beers's resignation surprised Washington, but what he did next was even more astounding. Eight weeks after leaving the Bush White House, he volunteered as national security adviser for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a Democratic candidate for president, in a campaign to oust his former boss. All of which points to a question: What does this intelligence insider know?
His key complaint about the Bush administration's strategy for combatting Islamo-fascism seems to be this:
...Beers [says] that the administration is "underestimating the enemy." It has failed to address the root causes of terror, he said. "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged and generally underfunded."
Which I think is strictly a matter of opinion. The president has very clearly articulated that his strategy is to bring more liberal government and economic development to the Middle East, in the expectation that this will dry up the complaints that enable the Islamo-fascists. It's a perfectly valid thing to argue that this isn't the right strategy, or that they are not executing it properly, but to imply that the administration simply isn't addressing the long term is either a blatant falsehood or willful ignorance on the part of a man who simply doesn't like Bush's politics.
3:01 PM
A good fisking of a lame anti-gun "study".
2:10 PM
Volokh has a really interesting post on atmospheric science as relates to global warming. The elephant in the room, it would seem, is the sooty fuel sources burned in the developing world, and the fact that the earth is not heating up as fast as the "greenhouse gas" models indicate it should be. My gut reaction to the issue is to think that when all is said and done, whatever problems there actually are will be mostly solved by getting Asia moved to cleaner fuel sources. I know I don't have any real proof of that, but then that puts me one step ahead of the "atmospheric scientists", now doesn't it?
The last Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) didn't really consider the role of black carbon aerosols (ie. soot) in the atmosphere (the atmosphere is an incredibly complex thing). Yet half the world burns wood and dung for fuel and heat, producing vast amounts of soot -- the Asian "brown cloud" is just one example of its effects. Research into the effects of soot is strongly suggesting that it warms the atmosphere. A recent study from James Hansen, one of the founders of the global warming theory, estimates that black aerosols are responsible for much of the warming trend to date, which has been far less than the greenhouse theory suggests.
By way of Chicago Boyz.
9:56 AM
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