Month: December 2009

Today on the Dish we continued to bring together perspectives on the Afghan escalation. Joe Klein investigated the speed of the surge, Packer and Frum looked at the style of the speech, Balko bemoaned the success of bin Laden, Jake Tapper delved into the psyche of Gates, McArdle mulled over the war tax, a reader joined her, another reader praised Obama's lack of fear, and another interpreted his core intent. Also, we received an impassioned email from Kandahar.

In the ongoing Climategate saga, Popular Mechanics caught us up, we took a look at the coding used for the data, and Andrew bolstered a leading scientist's call for a carbon tax. In the fallout of the New York vote, David Link looked at the dearth of debate from the winning side, a courageous senator articulated the case for equality, another backed her up, and Andrew and Hot Air gazed at the terrain ahead. Next up: New Jersey.

In other assorted coverage, we spotlighted a gay Ugandan blogger, Netanyahu reassured the settlers of coming expansion, another Palin story seemed on shaky ground, tea-partiers set off another hathos alert, and James Lipton offered his creepiness to a phone company.

In home news, the first batch of Window View books shipped out today. However, you can still buy one in time for Christmas at the limited price of $16.25. Speaking of windows, we posted another particularly great one today. And speaking of successful print ventures, the Atlantic is on a roll.

— C.B.

 Felix Salmon has a counter-intuitive thought:

[W]hen you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer.

Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue.

The government’s interests, then, are naturally aligned with those of the plutocrats — and when that happens, the chances of change naturally drop to zero.

(Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)

Ambinder takes on today's job summit:

[T]he White House does not seem to believe that (a) anything sensible to meaningfully reduce the unemployment rate can be proposed, completed and paid for — and executed — by next November. Nothing, in any event, that wouldn't jeopardize recovery in the long-term. This frustrates people in the party to no end, as well it might.

But it's responsible governance. What a refreshing change. Not that Obama will get any credit for it from the right.

A reader writes:

I suggest that the war tax be put on gas. The primary reason we are in a war with either Afghanistan or Iraq is that our economy is dependent on oil from that region. We would not have had the troops in or near Saudi Arabia that so offended bin Laden had it not been for oil. I recommend that the tax float, depending on the cost of oil, to gradually raise the price so that we are not giving the economy sticker shock, but we are making sustainable energy more worth investing in.

I don't agree with McArdle's idea that the tax should sunset when we "only" have 20 advisers overseas. Bush ran these wars for nearly 8 years without budgeting for their cost at all. I suggest that the tax sunset when the wars have been paid for in toto, including the ongoing & long-term cost of the veterans benefits. Where are all the tea partiers who worry about the bill that their grandchildren will be paying for the stimulus?

I also recommend that we finance a re-engineering of the military readiness plan to eliminate the use of contractors or at least cut them back considerably, that we deny any current or future president the right to use the military reserves for more than 1 year without activating a draft, and that women become eligible for a draft. I understand a president requires flexibility to use the military in an emergency, but an 8 year war stopped being an emergency a long time ago and should have been planned for.  If the American people do not feel invested enough in a war to sustain a draft, then it's not our fight.

Jake Tapper has a very smart take on how it has affected the Af-Pak decision.

Karen Tumulty provides a health care reform update:

When Obama began his push for reform, he asked Congress to create an independent commission to regulate Medicare costs. Medicare, which spends more than $450 billion a year, is such a huge health care player that any changes it makes can lead the way for reforms in the private market. As originally envisioned, the new agency would essentially take over Congress's current authority to set Medicare payment rates for hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other health care providers. It would use a process like the military-base-closing commission, whose recommendations automatically go into effect unless Congress votes to block them.

As it turns out, however, lawmakers are reluctant to cede the power to steer extra money to hospitals in their own districts, and the House rejected the commission idea outright. While the Senate bill does contain a version of the commission, it has become weaker at every turn in the process.

Ezra Klein has more on the subject.

Here's what Palin writes in "Going Rogue" about the Alaska governor's debate in 2006 on the subject of abortion:

It wasn't the last time I'd find that there's no better training ground for politics than motherhood. At one point during the general election, motherhood became the focus of a unique line of questioning. In my responses to a series of debate questions on abortion, I remained consistent and sincere, explaining how personal and sensitive the issue is and that good people can disagree. But the debate moderator decided to personalize his hypotheticals with a series of "What if…" questions.

He asked: "If a woman were, say, raped…" "…I would choose life." "If your daughter were pregnant…" "Again, I would choose life." "If your teenage daughter got pregnant…" "I'd counsel a young parent to choose life…consider adoption," I answered. I calmly repeated my answer to all of his "what-ifs,", then looked pointedly to my right and my left, to one opponent, then the other. Then I returned to the moderator and said, "I'm confident you'll be asking the other candidates these same questions, right?"

Of course, he didn't."

Well like many other claims Palin makes, this one is checkable against the objective reality. Did the debate occur as she says? Was she subjected to a "unique line of questioning"? Did the moderator ask only Palin personal questions about abortion and her own kids? There's enough technical wiggle room here to leave it out of the direct odd lies series. But you may disagree:

A reader writes:

As someone who worked as an experimental physicist for more than 15 years, I have to take issue with your reader's characterization of the data as a "hopeless mess."  Data sets acquired by different groups at different times with (presumably) different instrumentation and methodologies will have different formats and systematic biases.  It's necessary to correct for these if the aggregate is to be properly understood.  This process is often painstaking and "messy."  But it doesn't indicate a problem with the code.

The readme file that your reader points to looks to me like a detailed set of procedural notes being kept by a person eyeball-deep in this difficult, often frustrating work.  Scanning it, my initial impression is that this person was approaching the problem with a great deal of integrity.  That said, I agree that avoiding bias when reducing data is a very tricky problem.  In fact, I think that it is by far the most difficult thing that experimentalists do.  Good scientists never stop worrying about bias and, as Feynman points out, they are not always successful in avoiding it.  But over time, as experiments are repeated and hypotheses are tested in new contexts, scientific communities reach a consensus — until a result comes along that overturns it.  By the way, there is no better way to establish your reputation as a scientist than overturning a consensus.  It's true that it's not easily done, but any scientist would be thrilled to do it.

Another reader adds:

One of the big problems I've been seeing in the commentary surrounding climategate is a fundamental lack of understanding of the culture of scientists and software developers.  I saw the post you made earlier talking about the readme files that came out of climate gate.  I am a software developer and this looks like the same kind of thing that every software developer on any kind of large scale project deals with.

It definitely looks like the incoming data files were a total mess, but that's pretty standard in any kind of massive collection of data that's done with poorly defined standards in a large distributed fashion.  The commentary there walks through what had to be done to turn that data into something coherent, and was clearly written for other computer systems people to look at.  The random comments about how things were done and how dumb that was is routine in the culture of computer programmers.  So if you looked at this without that perspective it can look somewhat nefarious, but the reality is that's how the world of software development works.

I've seen similar commentary made about the e-mails discussing how "tricks" were used by scientists.  However, if you talk to an actual scientist, talking about a "trick" is just the lingo.  That's just casual ways of talking about some algorithm or methodology you used.  I will grant that in science, it is a risk that you come out with the result you want rather than the result you should get.  However, that's why you have rigorous peer review processes, to create a somewhat competitive environment to weed out other people's bad assumptions.

Sure much of this looks sketchy to an outsider, but I guarantee you that if you dug through the e-mails of any large organization in a similar manner you'd find all manner of seemingly sketchy things.  It's a side effect of the casual language we use in e-mails and assumptions of the context that goes into them.  That doesn't mean they were hiding something, it just means they were doing their job like everybody else in this world.

Yet another reader:

Where's the quote from the text file suggesting that temperature data was made up at all; let alone made up to conform with expectations?  A cursory reading suggests that this is the section your reader is reference: "What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no 'supposed', I can make it up. So I have."  What is Harry talking about here?  He's not talking about making up temperature data!  He's talking about cases where a single weather station has a gap in the data available for it.  What should he do with the data in that situation, since their analysis requires continuous data?  Harry lays out three options: treat the data as contiguous, throw out more recent data, or treat the data as coming from two separate stations at the same location.  It's not pretty, but it's not making things up.

Is there any actual evidence that the data in the CRU database was massaged to match expectations of warming?  I haven't seen any and your reader doesn't point to any.  As a scientist, I'll be the first to say that neither myself nor any scientist I know can claim to be strictly objective, but that doesn't mean we make up data.  It's the one thing you don't do, and there are very, very few cases of conspiracies amongst scientists to do so (there are several examples of individual scientists doing so, however).

What's interesting about the Millikan experiment is that Millikan originally massaged the data to make it look more precise.  The original measurement was somewhat fraudulent.  Analysis has shown that Mendel committed similar crimes in his work on heredity.  More here. Making up or massaging data is fundamentally different from assuming that data conforming to the status quo is correct.

A Chimpanzee plays in it's new home at Taronga Zoo on December 2, 2009 in Sydney, Australia. By Cameron Spencer/Getty Images.

Another critical marriage equality vote could occur as early as next week.