Podcasts

Stephen C. Meyer vs. Chris Mooney on the Michael Medved radio show

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Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (Ph.D from Cambridge) takes on Chris Mooney (B.A. in English) on the scientific method. This is commercial-free.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Topics:

  • science and public policy, e.g. – global warming as science
  • what is the definition of science?
  • can scientific ideas be questioned by those who disagree with the consensus?
  • should we allow scientists to debate scientific questions?
  • is name-calling an adequate response to intelligent design?
  • is it OK to be skeptical of scientific consensus?
  • can a person with a BA in English be a “science journalist”?
  • can a person with multiple degrees in science be a “scientific illiterate”?
  • is evolution testable? is it falsifiable? can it be criticized at all?
  • what about the Altenberg 16? are the “science-deniers” because they doubt Darwinism?
  • are scientific theories open to being revised based on new evidence?
  • what about the hundreds of credentialed scientists who dissent from evolution?
  • what about solar cycles – isn’t that the cause of global warming?
  • isn’t Al Gore making billions from the myth of global warming?
  • what about documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth”? Is that science?
  • Should science journalists report both sides of scientific disputes?
  • Should public schools teach the controversy surrounding scientific issues?

My impression of Mooney is that he never took a single high school course in math or science. English? Is that even something that you can get a degree in? Seriously? English? Shouldn’t “science correspondents” have some qualifications

News

Department of Justice won’t purge dead or ineligible voters from roll

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From Pajamas Media. (H/T ECM and Foxfier)

Excerpt:

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.

Jaws dropped around the room.

It is one thing to silently adopt a lawless policy of refusing to enforce a provision of federal law designed to bring integrity to elections. It is quite another to announce the lawlessness to a room full of people who have sworn an oath to fairly enforce the law.

And:

Are there problems with list integrity? Yes, but that’s a story for another article. Even worse than not bringing cases, the Holder Justice Department has dismissed a case against Missouri that the previous administration had started. In many places in Missouri, there are more voters than humans with a heartbeat old enough to vote. Instead of fully litigating the case to a favorable outcome, the DOJ made it go away, nicely, quietly, completely. Sound familiar?

The blame-Bush instincts of this administration will no doubt lead to talk about all the cases the Bush DOJ didn’t bring to open up public welfare agencies to voter registration. Good luck. I’d suggest citizens go online and see the Section 7 NVRA, or “Motor Voter,” cases that were commenced under the Bush administration. Bush brought voter registration cases under Motor Voter against Arizona and Illinois.

This is in addition to dropping the voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panthers, in spite of the video evidence against them. And this story probably isn’t going to be covered by the mainstream media, either.

News

Why Canada’s response to the recession saved more jobs

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Here’s an amazing post from Ed Morrisey of Hot Air. (H/T Muddling)

Excerpt:

Barack Obama likes to tell people that we should thank him for his interventionist economic policies, and that without them, unemployment would be much worse in the US than it is now.  For instance, he told Racine that without his economic stimulus, we’d be at 12, 13, even 15% — even though Racine itself is at 14.2% unemployment.  D’oh! Otherwise, this looks like a classic Churchill conundrum.  Had the UK elected Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1936 and he fought Hitler early, forcing him from power, would Churchill have gotten credit for saving Western civilization?  Or would he have been seen as a war monger, without the context of tens of millions of dead people in World War II?

Actually, we can test the hypothesis in this case, at least to some extent.  The financial collapse also battered our northern neighbor, Canada, although not quite to the same extent it did us.  (Canada has more conservative banking and lending policies, which shielded them from the worst of the problems.)  Instead of using a blizzard of government spending to correct a downturn in unemployment, Canada tightened its belt and rode it out.

So how do the two compare?

Here’s Canada’s employment chart from their Statistics Canada web site – it shows how many thousands of people are employed.

Source: Statistics Canada
Source: Statistics Canada

Where’s the recession? There is no recession in Canada.

And they say:

Employment rose by 93,000 in June, pushing the unemployment rate down 0.2 percentage points to 7.9%. This is the first time the rate has been below the 8% mark since January 2009.

Employment has been on an upward trend since July 2009, increasing by 403,000 (+2.4%). These gains offset nearly all the employment losses observed during the labour market downturn which began in the fall of 2008. The June unemployment rate, however, remained well above the October 2008 rate of 6.2%, due to a large increase in the number of people in the labour force over this period.

Yeah – they actually delivered the sub-8% unemployment rate that Obama promised and failed to deliver. And Ed hazards a guess as to why that may be.

He writes:

For those who have trouble recognizing it, that’s what a recovery looks like.  Canada’s job creation really has gone in the right direction, not simply plateaued at the nadir of the curve.  Maybe Canada’s private sector has been hiring because it doesn’t have to worry about the price signals of the massive government interventions created by the Obama administration that the US private sector has to deal with.

We talked before about how businesses fear “bold experimentation” in economic policy from an interventionist government. That’s the kind of thing that causes depressions, by the way.

Canada’s unemployment rate started off HIGHER than ours, and it is not LOWER than ours. How can that be? Their economy is dependent on us! Well, they didn’t act to “stimulate” the economy with massive government spending, and they’ve been signing free trade deals with everybody and their mother in order to diversify their trading so that we don’t take them down with us. And it’s working. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is an F.A. Hayek conservative, not a J.M. Keynes liberal. He doesn’t believe in deficit spending.

Ah, the benefits of electing an economist to run your country, instead of a demagogue community organizer who sues banks and wants to “spread the wealth”.