Probably the most devastating take-down yet of the economist and leftist news columnist I have ever read. The man's credibility is in total ruins. The stuff at the end about the housing bubble is the killer. Read the whole thing.

…the value of a scientific theory is judged by its power to predict – not in the sense of “psychic” predictions headlined in supermarket tabloids, but in the sense of predicting further experimental results. One failed prediction is enough to torpedo a theory. Success with every prediction, on the other hand, means only that it has survived everything thrown at it thus far. So, if evolution is valid, the newer discoveries made since its inception ought to be consistent with it. Apart from some haggling among specialists over relatively minor details, this has turned out to be overwhelmingly the case. Darwin and others predicted the essential properties of inherited generic units, even though genes and chromosomes were unknown at that time. From evolutionary theory, DNAs from different species should exhibit a branching pattern that reflects the same time sequence of divergence as it is deduced by other methods; they do. The primitive metabolic chemistry of ancestral organisms should be discernible in today’s organic cells; it is. There shouldn’t be much difference in the genetic code inherited by all organisms; there isn’t. And so it goes.”

“And of the predictive power of creationism? Can it predict which band in a series of tree rings should indicate the same age as a given mix of carbon isotopes? Or the tidal record that ought to be found written into fossil corals by the moon’s orbital motion of several hundred million years ago? Does it have anything to say about the composition of the early atmosphere and the kinds of minerals that would be formed as a consequence – their chemical nature, where they should be located, and at what depths we should expect to find them today? Can creationism, in fact, give a hint of any future finding? Not a one. It operates with hindsight only. Because of its built-in unfalsifiability it can cobble together an explanation of anything at all – but only after the fact as established by other means. As a method of prediction it is sterile.”

James P. Hogan, Minds, Machines and Evolution, in the chapter, “The Revealed Word of God, pages 174 and 175. Hogan wrote good SF and non-fiction, although this Wikipedia entry (treat with some care), suggests he also was a Holocaust denier, which is a bit like finding out that your close friend is selling hard drugs to teenagers. He died in July this year.

As some may know, I wrote a while back about what I saw as an unconvincing attempt by the UK journalist Christopher Booker to play the victim card and assume that advocates of AGW scepticism and intelligent design proponents (i.e., creationists), were both equally victims of intolerance from the scientific community. But actually, as one commenter – I think it was Counting Cats at his own blog – pointed out, there is more in common between AGW alarmists, with their almost religious approach, and creationists.

The reason why I keep returning to this topic is that for all that I am unbudgeable on tolerance for all manner of views, barking mad or eminently sane, the point is that if we are going to be able to resist some of the more oppressive demands of AGW alarmists, it pays not to ally ourselves with what I regard as seriously flawed ideas, such as creationism. It is the sort of thing that will be seized upon by the AGW alarmists, in their quest to treat any dissent as examples of bad science. Just sayin'.

I am reading a review of this book (thank you Instapundit), about Stalin and Hitler and their many and mutually supportive crimes, and I came upon a fact that was very surprising to me:

About as many people died in the German bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as in the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.

Here in Britain we remember, those of us who are the remembering sort, Winston Churchill's metaphor-mangling talk of winds and whirlwinds, sewing and reaping. Relatively mild bombing of British cities by the Luftwaffe was followed later in the war by truly horrific bombing of German cities by the RAF.

But that original wind, in other parts of Europe, was windier than I had realised.

LATER: And here's another little fact that pulled me up short:

In just a few days in 1941, the Nazis shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all their concentration camps.

Although, I am not clear whether that is inmates in camps at that time, or inmates in camps over the whole period. The former, I think. Either way, it is hideous. Not sure I want to read the entire book. I already get the general idea.

When in my teens, in the 1960s, I wondered what rules were best for governing the world, and the nations in the world. Comparisons like this (featured by Tim Worstall at the ASI blog today, he having come upon it here) helped me to decide:

As Tim Worstall notes:

[T]he countries are matched as to rough starting point before the communist armies marched, matched roughly as to culture and so on, and yet after that series of communist experiments we see the same result everywhere.

Exactly. It was the matching of like (to start with) with like that was most telling. And before 1990, we also had the damning comparison between East and West Germany (very near to my English home) to contemplate.

So, said contemporaries who were drawing more nearly opposite conclusions, you want sweatshops like they have in South East Asia? With growing confidence, I learned to say: yes. If people in South East Asia now have sweatshops, that's a pity. They must be very poor. But how will shutting down those sweatshops make them any less poor? You're saying poor with hope of escape is worse than poor with no hope at all. That sounds downright wicked to me.

That time proved me, and all who argued as I did, right was one of the big reasons for communism collapsing where it did collapse, and trying to insert capitalism into itself where it did not.

Some libertarians now live in dread of a time when such comparisons will no longer be possible, because the entire world will be equally stagnant, and nobody except them will be able to see this. Some people are determined to be miserable.

El socialismo es contra la prosperidad.

- Instapundit flags up an aspect of the Tea Party that doesn't fit the one party media narrative.

[Ken Loach sees his] "...role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing..."

Soooo...when Ken Loach makes a movie about Islam?

- Commenter Lucklucky

Ken Loach made a good film in 1969. I gather he has made other films since. A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership, for instance, and something about a Glaswegian alcoholic.

My opinion of Loach as a human being was decided when I read this:

In Kes, probably Loach's best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.

Loach felt that the ordinary moral rules against causing someone (particularly a child) intense suffering through a cruel deception did not apply so long as his deception was carried out in the service of his art. The old Independent article I linked to above goes on:

Surprise and integrity are thus at the core of Loach's purpose in life - as well as having a poke at authority whenever the opportunity arises.

His "pokes at authority" seem not to be incompatible with a not-very-surprising yearning to wiggle his way to a bit more power himself, the power, at least, to "do something" about all these people watching what they want instead of what is good for them. And him. And his friends. Here he is in yesterday's Guardian:

We could start by treating cinemas like we treat theatres. They could be owned, as they are in many cases, by the municipalities, and programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.

It is not quite clear from the article whether Loach is proposing that these municipal cinemas programmed by people who care should wholly replace the commercial cinemas and films that nobody cares about, except the millions who pay to watch them. Since he is a member of the Socialist Workers' Party, which describes itself as a revolutionary anti-capitalist party, it is reasonable to assume that would be his ultimate goal. He continues,

Those of us who work in television and film have a role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing, not to be part of the establishment. We need to keep our independence.

Not that having you and your protegés decide what films the taxpayer will have available in the cinema he pays for would make you part of the establishment, or in any way compromise your independence, of course.

Quangos and the rest are instruments of government. To get rid of them, you have to get rid of their functions.

- EU Referendum

In the UK edition of Wired magazine is an article on the use of environmental markets in which, for instance, property developers or industrial users of water pay others, such as owners of wetlands or somesuch, if they want to make a development. The way the article is written gives the impression - at least in my eyes - of this being a great example of how capitalism and the Greens can work together. I am not so sure.

For instance, take the idea of "banks" of wetlands. Typically, what happens is that a government, such as the US one acting under legislation, will decree that there can be no net loss of wetland in given geographical area A, so if any area of wetland is destroyed, then the destroyers must offset this by paying to create another area of wetland somewhere. I immediately see a problem here: someone in authority has decreed that whatever happens to be the area of wetland at the time the new system is introduced is the area that must be maintained ad infinitum; but why not say that the area should be twice as big, or three times, or four times, or half as big? Also, the supposed "market" for such development permit trading depends on the existence of government regulations of certain areas, like wetlands, which might clearly go against the property rights of the folk who have owned those wetlands in the past and might have wanted to turn them into golf courses or whatever.

To be fair, though, the article does address the fact that property rights or markets of some sort represent a smarter way of addressing issues such as conservation, pollution and so on than traditional "lets just ban it" approaches used in the past. The article contains a great example of how the French mineral water industry did a deal with farmers over the latters' use of fertilizer and pesticides in order to protect the water and keep the farmers happy. That is the kind of market transaction that works, and probably could have worked without government getting involved. My worry, though, is that a lot of such artificial markets in things such as environmental resources can become prey to corruption and mission creep of all kinds. Nigel Lawson, for instance, wrote dammingly about carbon trading in his recent book on the global warming controversy.

Victor Davis Hanson homes in on one of the big themes of the forthcoming USA elections, which is just how many of the candidates are not life long politicians, but people who have got seriously stuck into doing other things. Not stuck in to other things so as to have a better story to tell when they eventually make that first dash for political office that they all along had planned, but seriously stuck into other things as in seriously stuck in, as in it not occurring to them that they would ever be running for any political office:

[A] rare American - war hero, author, West Point instructor, retired colonel, conservative - Chris Gibson is running neck and neck in New York’s 20th Congressional District. I don’t get involved in political races per se; but I met Chris during his one-year stay at Stanford, and found him a rare Renaissance figure - yet another of these idealistic first-time candidates without a political resume who are entering the fray to save this country. I think pundits have not appreciated the fact that this is not quite a red/blue, Republican versus Democratic race, but a historic election in which many of the Republican candidates are first-time politicians, beholden to no one, and not part of the Republican establishment.

Not having a "political resume" seems to be just what the voters are now looking for. Every time the regular politicians accuse one of these political amateurs of having said or done something amateurish, the above impression, of not being a regular politician, is reinforced.

I get the feeling that the present political class in the USA contains hardly anyone who could mend a roof or build a car or program a computer or fly a helicopter, but that in among the next bunch, there will be quite a few who can do such things. There will be more "life skills" (think of the Harrison Ford character in Six Days and Seven Nights) in American politics than there are now.

Not that I think this matters very much. The crucial thing is: will these people have the right political ideas and do the right political things? You can do something very well but then come an almighty cropper when you switch careers, just as you can be undone by a mere promotion out of what you did well to telling others how to do what you did well. If this next generation of US politicians, many of whom are now professional-at-other-things, prove to be as amateurish in a bad way as the present lot of politicians, then they won't last long as politicians, and heaven help America.

I see on Guido Fawkes that arch-Europhile Denis MacShane is to be investigated by the police. He has had the Labour Whip withdrawn.

To give him credit, he did once call Hugo Chavez a "ranting, populist demagogue". On the other hand he was once Minister of State for Europe.

This article gives a sample of his thought.

Commenters are requested to bear in mind the principle that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yes, even a man who said:

In 2004, a major step forward was taken with the creation of a European arrest warrant

Whatever pious comments George Osborne, UK finance minister, or David Cameron might make about encouraging savings for the long term and less reliance on borrowing, blah, blah, blah, this sort of policy, assuming it is true, shows that this government does not give a rat's arse about encouraging savings. Coupled with the new top tax rate of 50 per cent, reduced tax-free allowances and other adjustments, the enterprising class of those who work to build up pension pots for themselves just got a serious setback.

At a time when there is so much talk about a pensions "time-bomb", this sort of announcement is also disheartening since it sends out the message that pension schemes are a contrick. My own managing director at the firm at which I am now a small partner does not bother with pensions and intends to rely on his own business/properties to pay for his old age. When announcements like this come out, who is to say he is really wrong?

Tim Congdon has thrown his hat in the ring to become the next leader of UKIP and that means UKIP could possibly end up with a leader whom I dislike even more than David Cameron (hard to believe, eh?).

I have disliked Tim Congdon long before I knew who David Cameron was. I remember him at a conference long ago - his reply to my suggestion that lending should be from real savings, and that governments should not subsidize or bailout banks (via such methods as the Bank of England lending them money) was to suggest that I supported a ban on overseas trade that (he stated) the Ming dynasty in China had imposed.

"Paul only you could hold a grudge over something like this" - not if the man had changed his opinions, but he has not (it is still corporate welfare all the way with him). Nor has he changed his manner - he does not debate, he just claims that foes do not understand banking.

If he means do not understand how to get paid lots of money for being an apologist for subsidies to the banks then he is right - although "understand" is not the correct word.

Rand Simberg makes a subtly profound little point, in an email to Instapundit, as reported by Instapundit in an addendum to this posting, which links to a piece about newspapers that provide a spew of complicated reasons for not printing stuff that Muslims might be offended by, omitting only the real reason, which is that they're scared.

"So who are the ‘Islamophobes’ again?"

The point being that the Islamophobes are clearly not those who publicly defy Islam's threats and attacks and who just go ahead and publicly criticise it anyway and publicly mock it anyway. Where's the "phobia" in that? No, the phobia - the fear - is being shown by those who refrain from such criticism and such mockery, because they are afraid, and are afraid even to admit that they are afraid (because that too might be interpreted as an implied criticism of the thuggishness of that which they are refraining from criticising or mocking).

Although I have long been irritated by the suggestion that to fear Islam is in any way irrational, I had truly never thought of this particular point. Next time you dare to criticise Islam for being, oh, I don't know, evil, or something along those lines, and somebody says you are an Islamophobe, say: "Well, yes, I am a little bit scared of Islam because it is indeed scary. But you are even more scared of it, so scared that you dare not admit the truth of what I am saying. You are even more of an Islamophobe than I am."

This is a meme that deserves to get around.

With apologies to all those who had worked this particular thing out years ago.

The European Union has paid out vast sums since 2001 to improve Sicily's infrastructure. What has Sicily to show for it? Nothing. No, less than nothing:

€700 million to improve the water supply? In 2000, the water supply was "stop-and-flow" for 33% of Sicilian households, now 38.7% have water worries. Incentives to entice off-season tourists? Cost €400 million, enough to buy up an airline. And yet the ranks of those thankless tourists haven't swelled, but petered out: from 1.2% in 2000 to 1.1% in 2007. And as to the €300 million invested in alternative energy projects great and small: it's true, there isn't a single hillock without its windmill now, but Sicilian output is stuck at 5% of total consumption, as against an average 9.1% for Southern Italy as a whole.

The quote is from a translation of an article in the Italian daily La Stampa and I found it via Jim Miller On Politics. Jim Miller himself comments:

And we should recognize that the best money of all to waste — from the point of view of a pork-barrel politician — is someone else's money. There would have been less wasted in Sicily if the money had come from Italy, rather than the whole European Union, and even less wasted if the money had come from the places where it was spent.

The European Union, corrupt as it is, is on average less corrupt than Sicily. Idealistic Sicilians possibly hoped that getting their state largesse via the EU would result in less theft and waste. A vain hope, as Mr Miller or Professor Friedman could have told them.

Today's Times has the headline:

Allies at odds over death of hostage in bungled rescue

The story is behind a paywall. It does not matter. I am only interested in the headline and whoever wrote it.

Do these people have any idea at all of what life-or-death fighting is actually like? I do not demand that they have actually done any before writing about it; little would ever be reported about war if that were the test. But they could at least have read a few memoirs, or talked to their grandfathers. Reading about the Dieppe Raid might put things in perspective.

Hint: it is not like planning a dinner party. With that sort of thing if you make a careful list of Things To Do and do them all in good time you generally can be reasonably confident that it will work out OK and if it does not work out OK, say the soufflé does not rise or the wine was too sweet, it probably was because someone bungled.

Military small group operations - by which I mean small group killings of people who can also kill you - are not like that. They always hang on a knife edge. The most skilled soldiers in the world frequently die young and frequently fail. A hand is a fraction of a second too slow on the trigger - a human mind is a fraction of a second slower than another, hostile, human mind to make sense of the confusion - and a comrade dies, or a hostage dies, and a lifetime of agonized mental replaying of that moment of failure begins.

Six hours later a headline writer in an office far away expresses his displeasure.

As I noted yesterday, Scaled Composities carried out the SpaceShipTwo drop test. Rand Simberg linked to their video.

She really looks lovely in flight and the pilot really did grease it in. I can tell from the closeup of the touchdown that the pilot had a bit of crosswind component and it did not cause any problems at all.

I have been busy travelling lately, so not much opportunity to post much on the site at the moment, but I could not resist this.