Margaret Atwood's "fictional drivel"

Barbara Kay nails it! She concludes:

The Handmaid's Tale is a nasty, anti-American trifecta of bigotry: a cheap thrust at men, conservatives and religious Christians.

... merely a tale told by a feminist, and like so many other such heavy-handed ideological screeds, it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Exactly! The Handmaid's Tale was set in the country least likely to implement her dystopian "vision". And worse, po-mo feminists like Atwood have been shamefully silent when women in certain Muslim societies like Saudia Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban are actually treated as breeder chattel.

Saint O's address

"We Have Nothing to Fear But Fear-mongering Itself

Remarks of President Barack Obama — Address to Joint Session of CongressTuesday, February 24th, 2009 Slightly condensed version (by Alan Reynolds):

You don’t need to hear another list of statistics to know that our economy is in crisis. The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. But I also know that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. And our goal is to quicken the day when we re-start lending to the American people and American business and end this crisis once and for all. And to respond to an economic crisis that is global in scope, we are working with the nations of the G-20 to restore confidence in our financial system. And to ensure that a crisis of this magnitude never happens again, I ask Congress to move quickly on legislation that will finally reform our outdated regulatory system. My budget . . . reflects the stark reality of what we’ve inherited — a trillion dollar deficit, a financial crisis, and a costly recession. With the deficit we inherited [and] the cost of the crisis we face . . . it has never been more important to ensure that as our economy recovers, we do what it takes to bring this deficit down. There will be no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis that has severely weakened our financial system. And if we do — if we come together and lift this nation from the depths of this crisis . . . then someday years from now our children can tell their children that this was the time when we performed, in the words that are carved into this very chamber, "something worthy to be remembered." "

Lies, damned lies and ‘peer-reviewed’ research

Ross McKitrick and Bruce D. McCullough summarize the results of their paper on the need for proper due diligence in verifying research used as a basis for "public policy" (a.k.a. "pissing away giant wads of other people’s money"):

Empirical research in what are commonly called "peer-reviewed" academic journals is often used as the basis for public policy decisions, in part because people think that "peer-review" involves checking the accuracy of the research.

...Academic journals rarely, if ever, check data and calculations for accuracy during the review process, nor do they claim to.

... But the other dirty secret of academic research is that the data and computational methods are so seldom disclosed that independent examination and replication has become nearly impossible for most published research.

... Our report also explores numerous examples from other academic disciplines, such as medicine, history, environmental science and forestry, in which prominent or policy-relevant research was shielded from independent scrutiny by withholding data and/or computer code.

....One striking example in the context of the current U.S. housing meltdown concerns a 1992 study by economists at the Boston Federal Reserve, published in the prestigious American Economic Review, that purported to show statistically significant evidence of racial discrimination in U.S. mortgage lending practices.

Based on this study, federal regulations were rushed into place that forced banks to loosen lending standards and threatened them with severe financial penalties for failure to correct the alleged discrimination.

... It took nearly six years, and a Freedom of Information Act request, for independent economists to discover coding errors in the data that invalidated the original conclusions. But by this time the new lending rules were in place that ultimately contributed to the buildup of bad mortgage debt now ravaging the U.S. financial system.

In conclusion:

... Academics rightly insist on the freedom to do their research without public or political interference. But when that research influences policy, the public has a right to demand independent verification. Researchers might want to influence policy but if they plan to keep their data and computer code to themselves, they should keep their results to themselves too.

See also.

Another bad week for climate alarmists

From the Telegraph:

It was another bad week for the "warmists", now more desperate than ever to whip up alarm over an overheating planet. It began last weekend with the BBC leading its bulletins on the news that a "leading climate scientist" in America, Professor Chris Field, had warned that "the severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed".

... The puzzle as to why the BBC should make this the main news of the day only deepened when it emerged that Prof Field was not a climate scientist at all but an evolutionary biologist.

... followed on Sunday by yet another outburst from the most extreme of all the scientists crying wolf on global warming, Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

... "Coal-fired power plants are factories of death," wrote Hansen, "the trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains". This deliberate echo of the trains carrying Jews to Nazi death camps recalled how the more extreme warmists like to equate sceptics on climate change with "Holocaust deniers".

And on and on ...

I hate leftist Chicano academics

The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre’s definition of "hate speech" :

We identified four types of speech that, through negative statements, create a climate of hate and prejudice: (1) false facts, (2) flawed argumentation, (3) divisive language, and (4) dehumanizing metaphors.

Glen Reynolds:

A RATHER EXPANSIVE DEFINITION OF "HATE SPEECH" ... Well, really it’s pretty much the same old definition: "Speech I don’t like."

And from the comments at Eugene Volokh’s blog:

One of the most remarkable aspects of the paper's position in my view is that it describes vigorous disagreement, mockery, and condemnation of government policy and leaders as hate speech. One might ask whether much of the left's political discourse over the past eight years doesn't fall within this category...

Libs are, by definition, incapable of "hate speech" because libs are incapable of hate. They crap strawberries and puke sunshine, and ride around on unicorns instead of filthy SUVs. All their actions and ideas are of the purest motives. Only conservatives and the unwashed masses use hate speech, because they're not libs.

[via]

Britain’s creeping Islamisation

Melanie Phillips opines on the dhimmi Archbishop of Canterbury’s latest idiocy and a prominent but equally stupid Brit lawyer’s hero worship of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as evidence of Britain’s remorseless drift into Islamic dark ages.

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Poll - Obama vs. Harper

Leadership? More like: Who is recklessly pissing away the most money?

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