Not our kind of science

The Telegraph has very credible evidence that the scientific journals Nature and Science are censoring certain views on global warming.

It all started when...

Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view [that global warming is happening and is caused by humans], while none directly dissented from it.

Dr Oreskes's study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser.

But that kind of slam dunk sends up red flags to serious academics. Nothing has that kind of consensus. So...

Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University [...] decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents - and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

And he's not alone:

Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.

If these journals are biased about something so straightforward as summarizing conclusions of studies, what should we expect from them on something less objective?

The World Is Flat

A must-read review of Tom Friedman's new book in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review . Sweet spot:

The metaphor of a flat world, used by Friedman to describe the next phase of globalization, is ingenious. It came to him after hearing an Indian software executive explain how the world's economic playing field was being leveled. For a variety of reasons, what economists call ''barriers to entry'' are being destroyed; today an individual or company anywhere can collaborate or compete globally. Bill Gates explains the meaning of this transformation best. Thirty years ago, he tells Friedman, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater there. ''Now,'' Gates says, ''I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.''

Speaking of Africa

OxBlog citing this in WaPo asks why Charles Taylor (the African killer, not the Canadian philosopher) isn't on our terrorist list. Good question.

Movie pick

Went to see The Interpreter and was surprised to see how much it's about Africa. The context is a combination of Congo/Zaire, Zimbabwe and half a dozen other liberation-turned-tyrannical governments. Really well-acted and interesting story. But more than that, it embodies the angst of those of us who love the continent and can't come up with a simple way to help.

His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American relates a study that demonstrates that "gender" may not be just cultural:

The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the 'masculine' toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

More than that, day-old babies respond differently based on their sex.

Reading stuff like this makes you less intelligent

Text messaging, AIMing and other forms of incessant communication are a distraction according to The Scotsman's summary of a new study. Sweet spot:

CONSTANT text messaging and e-mailing causes a reduction in mental capability equivalent to the loss of ten IQ points, according to research.

Tapping away on a mobile phone or computer keypad or checking messages on a handheld gadget temporarily reduces the performance of the brain, according to the study into the effects of "infomania".

Stop reading this now, while you still can!

Paradoxes of teen sex

David Brooks offers argument that teens are less sexually active than we think:

When you actually look at the intimate life of America's youth, you find this heterodoxical pattern: people can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. There are Ivy League sex columnists who don't want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed Maxim readers terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he's really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter.

Read it all. Tom Wolfe certainly has a different take in his latest, which I'm reading. Safe bet that there's more to be said here on both sides.

Stop the (Guttenberg) presses!

The Independent reports on a breakthrough in technology that is unlocking some unreadable Greek manuscripts:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.

Then this:

They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

A less-than-firm grasp on the doctrine of scriptural transmission and canonicity. But fascinating, all the same.

No kidding

The Globalization Institute has a book report with a no-brainer conclusion:

The Shackled Continent is an important book. Written by Robert Guest, Africa Editor of The Economist, it provides an illuminating account of why Africa is so poor. His conclusion is that sub-Saharan Africa is poor because it is shackled by poor government. Guest has spent six years reporting from Africa, and fills the book with accounts of what he has witnessed.

Guest argues for "fair aid, free trade". He explains how aid has often been wasted on arms, to provide luxuries for the ruling elite, and to be put away in Swiss bank accounts. African leaders sometimes call for a "Marshall Plan" to help Africa like the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But, as Guest explains, Africa has already received the equivalent of six Marshall Plans, and yet is still poor.

Told ya

says Victor Davis Hanson to Scowcroft, Brzezinski, and Albright.

Protest in Shanghai

Ian Hamet thinks the leadership is scapegoating Japan: "I think someone in Beijing, someone who is all too familiar with both The Prince and The Art of War, has been working to divert frustration to a more acceptable target."

The evangelical pope?

Evangelical historian Mark Noll assesses the ways in which John Paul II did and did not bring evangelicals and Catholics closer.

Number Two?

Peter Drucker gives his take on the direction of the world economy in The National Interest. The U.S. will be strong for a long time, but is not the single dominant economy any more.

Drucker sees four world economies emergin: a world economy of information; of money; of multinationals (one no longer dominated by American enterprises); and a mercantilist world economy of goods, services and trade.

Information:

In the long run, the most important implication is probably the impact of information on mentality and awareness. It creates new affinities and new communities. The woman student in Shanghai who taps into the Internet remains Chinese, but she sees herself at the same time as a member of a worldwide, non-national "information society." ....

Money

The next major economic crisis will most probably be a crisis of the U.S. dollar in the world economy....

The government deficit is therefore being financed almost in its entirety by foreign investments in the United States, mostly in government securities like short-term treasury notes and medium-term bonds. The Japanese are converting most, if not all, of their trade surplus with the United States into dollar-denominated U.S. government securities and have thus become the largest U.S. creditor....

This, needless to say, is an unstable and volatile system. It would collapse if the foreign holders of U.S. government securities (above all, the Japanese) were for whatever reason (such as a crash in their own economy) to dump their holdings of U.S. government securities....

Multinationals:

There were 7,258 multinational companies worldwide in 1969. Thirty-one years later, in 2000, the number had increased ninefold to more than 63,000. By that year, multinationals accounted for 80 percent of the world's industrial production....

American-based multinationals are only a fraction--and a diminishing one--of all multinationals. Only 185 of the world's 500 largest multinationals--fewer than 40 percent--are headquartered in the United States (the European Union has 126, Japan 108). And multinationals are growing much faster outside the United States, especially in Japan, Mexico, and lately, Brazil....

The New Mercantilism

The modern state was invented by the French political philosopher Jean Bodin in his 1576 book Six Livres de la Republique. He invented the state for one purpose only: to generate the cash needed to pay the soldiers defending France against a Spanish army financed by silver from the New World--the first standing army since the Romans' more than a thousand years earlier....

However discredited as economic theory, mercantilism, not Adam Smith's free trade, thus became the policy and practice of governments virtually everywhere....

But mercantilism is increasingly becoming the policy of "blocs" rather than of individual nation-states. These blocs--with the European Union the most structured one, and the U.S.-dominated NAFTA trying to embrace the entire Western Hemisphere (or at least North and Central America)--are becoming the integrating units of the new world economy. Each bloc is trying to establish free trade internally and to abolish within the bloc all hurdles, restrictions and impediments, first to the movement of goods and money and ultimately to the movement of people. The United States, for instance, has proposed extending NAFTA to embrace all of Central America.

At the same time, each bloc is becoming more protectionist against the outside....

For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world's foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation.

.... it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two.

This has important repercussions for all sorts of American organizations paying American workers in U.S. dollars.

A more exciting, animated you

Real-time virtual animation now allows a "second-life" in a virtual world. As if I need a whole new dimension in which to deal with my pathologies.

The next Pope matters to all of us

as George Wiegel, official biographer of John Paul II points out, to Catholics, friends of Catholics, enemies of Christianity, and the politically involved for any other reason.

Voltaire would be spinning in his grave at the thought of the papacy as a defender of the "rights of man;" and I rather doubt that Huxley imagined the papacy as a counterweight to the evolution of the brave new world. Yet precisely such hopes-- and fears--may be found throughout the world today, in this twenty-seventh year of the pontificate of John Paul II.

He sees three big issues the next pope will face, as indicated by present discussions among the College of Cardinals:

The first of these is the virtual collapse of Christianity in its historic heartland--western Europe. The second great issue is the Church's response to the multi-faceted challenge posed by the rise of militant Islam. And the third involves the questions posed by the biotech revolution.

Read the whole thing to see how he develops these.

God and Caesar in China

China now has the world�s second-largest evangelical Christian population, second only to the United States. A new book, God and Caesar in China examines China's religion policy, the history and growth of Catholic and Protestant churches in China, and the implications of church-state friction for relations between the United States and China, concluding with recommendations for U.S. policy. Contributors include Daniel H. Bays (Calvin College), Mickey Spiegel (Human Rights Watch), Chan Kim-kwong (Hong Kong Christian Council), Jean-Paul Wiest (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Richard Madsen (University of California, San Diego), Xu Yihua (Fudan University), and Liu Peng (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).

Generation Y embraces choice, redefines religion

A recent study summarized in the Washington Times finds "that 23 percent of Generation Y, like Generation X, do not identify with a religious denomination or don't believe in God. This is more than twice the number of nonbelievers among baby boomers...."

The good news is that the survey paints a composite picture of a generation who are seekers far more than they are drifters – a world away from their portrayal as stereotypical automatons we so often imagine as receiving their values directly from Paris Hilton or Justin Timberlake’s PR spokesperson. They are actively considering questions of identity, community, and meaning – negotiating how important their religious identities will ultimately be – but doing so with their own friends, in their own homes, and in their own ways.

Well, sorta good news, maybe.

In the gay guerilla wars...

Andrew Sullivan can't clock a week without a rant about the equal rights of gays to wed. But to add a datum to an understanding of what "marriage" means for him, consider his treatment of the Terri Schiavo case. He can whale on conservatives. He can declare, "Those of us who have long worried that unleashing religious fundamentalism into the bloodstream of American politics would lead to disaster can only feel that our fears have now come true."

But he has nothing but admiration for Michael Schiavo. No suspicion that Mr. Schiavo may not be suitably qualified as a "husband" when he is living with another woman, mother to two of his children. The actual commitments of a marriage are irrelevant to Andrew. It's all about the using any means and any line of argumentation necessary. Let the courts decide.

Unless your conclusions are better served by leaving the question to those closest to the person:

If limited government means anything, it means leaving decisions like this as close to the person as possible.

Unless leaving the decisions to the closest persons by any moral standard--Terri's parents, who never abandonned their role, wanted to care for her--do not serve your conclusions.

Unless your conclusions are better served by leaving the question to state government:

And if the American principle of federalism means anything, it means that the local state's courts are the only relevant instruments to deal with such a tragedy.

Unless... some other gymnastic line of reasoning serves your interests.

Terri Schiavo's case was rare and certainly no precedent...right?

Well, maybe just one more time.

Outside looking in

Jerry Bowyer comments:

Terri Schiavo died for one simple and tragic reason: The wrong people are in charge of our cultural and judicial institutions. Servants of the culture of death were inside the courthouse wearing robes and making decisions or carrying notebooks and writing the coverage. Servants of the culture of life were outside the courthouse carrying placards and kneeling in prayer. If their positions had been reversed, Terri would be living, breathing and receiving much-needed therapy. Terri died because, for the most part, we're activists and for the most part they're leaders. We are morally informed activists, dedicated to truth and life, but of limited judicial and public relations competence. They are extremely skilled in lawand media, and barbaric in moral code.

Jesus told the Parable of the Unjust Steward to teach the lesson that,'...the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.' What was true in that generation is also true in ours, so either we smarten up, or our cultural drift deepens and more innocents will die horribly.

Overstated, but not by much.