Friday Bird Impression

Someone over on twitter posted this picture of a Sri Lankan frogmouth (originating here), and it's just glorious.

It's not just the plumage. It's not just my weakness for animals with other animals in their names.  It's how absolutely perfectly this bird has captured the facial expression Richard Dawkins would pull if you mentioned you'd met a Muslim and they were perfectly lovely.

The Weak Spot Is The Blowhole

Getting together for a grand hootenanny, or massing for war?

As I have said many times, humanity's dominance of the world's islands and coastlines will last only as long as it take octopi to start working together, or for dolphins to figure out you can use kelp to choke their hominid aggressors.





(I suspect those elbow squid are going to be involved somehow, too. They already look like regular squid inside mechanised war-suits.  The fact they're staking out deep-water oil-wells is surely no coincidence.  Can't construct undersea armoured divisions without precious dinosaur juice!)

Paul The Octopus Has Nothing On Me

Just quickly throwing this out there under the heading of "Thank Cthulhu I don't live in Louisiana". When you're not having your city torn out from under you by a hurricane, shot dead for the crime of wanting food whilst black, or dying in an overcrowded hospital because there's no money to keep anyone but the rich alive any more, you're finding stuff in your drinking water which will literally eat your brain:

The water in St. John Parish is safe to drink, said the CDC, but special care should be taken not to allow it to go up the nose, which is the route the parasite takes to infect the brain. Once inside the brain, the amoebas cause primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), which is almost invariably fatal.

I've no idea who, if anyone, is to blame for this hideous gribbly showing up in the first place.  But I absolutely guarantee you two things. First, there will be a non-trivial number of state Republicans who will argue increased governmental surveillance of drinking water to stop people getting their heads melted will constitute "Federalism run amok".  Second, there will be a non-trivial number of Republican voters on the internet who will argue that since no-one deliberately snorts drinking water up their noses, this is a non-issue that will simply rid us of obvious idiots.

There is simply no bottom with these people.

(h/t to Elon James White over at Balloon Juice.)

(I Pray For) A Lack Of Will

I've worked this beat before, but it's been a few years, I have new readers now, and anyways it's nice to take some time out every now and again to note what a fucking idiot George Will is, especially when we can use it to segue into what fucking idiots climate change deniers are.

Obviously everything Will says or has said or presumably ever will say on the subject of global warming is utterly vacuous and would embarrass even the most intellectually incurious nine-year-old were they to be picked up on it.  I guess nothing here quite matches his 2009 insistence that because 1980 was the hottest year on record, there had been no global warming in three decades [1]. I guess that by his own logic, the fact that his hilarious and  piteous ignorance peaked in 2009 means Will hasn't been a calamitous failure on every level when discussing climate science in the last five years. Which is nice for him, but for those of us not paid to make the world a worse place through smug self-immolation, I think we can consider the point proved.

So what's he up to this time, this worthless anti-science hack who can't even be bothered to bring his worthless schmuck A-game any more?

“If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don’t question its orthodoxy.”

This - and I mention it because Will is bound to get on his high horse about it again soon enough - is why people laugh in conservatives' faces when they complain progressives treat them like idiots.  Yes, the federal government gives more money to climate scientists than do, say, petroleum companies. The annual bill to feed federal workers grossly outweighs that spent by the seven US restaurants with three Michelin stars, too, but if you think people interested in expensive ingredients should be chowing down at school canteens in central Baltimore, you're a fucking idiot.

You would hope a man so obviously and embarrassingly devoted to US conservative orthodoxy would understand higher paying jobs are both more rare and more tempting, but this is an opportunity to stick it to the Feds, so fuck it. [2]

But then, as always, Will is nothing if not a perfect microcosm of his tribe's political thought in general. There are two types of self-proclaimed "climate sceptic".  The first is at least approximately tolerable; they can be discerned as those who resolutely refuse to believe either side has yet made their case well enough. They're wrong, and in many cases they're wrong because they haven't bothered to actually listen to each side for long enough to slap together an informed opinion, but hey: there's plenty of issues in the world about which I know nothing and haven't attempted to correct the fact.  It wouldn't hurt for some of those people to be a little less smug and dismissive when confessing their ignorance, but at a basic level I'm uncomfortable telling others who might be outside my privileged position of having easy access to information (and, quite frankly, the kind of brain that can assimilate and weigh that information correctly) that they have a moral duty to read up on the kinds of things I think should be read up on. It's aggravating that their position is basically a licence to do nothing about climate change (every time they read an article saying everything is doomed, they can read another saying it's all a big fuss, then commend themselves for being so even-handed whilst they drive their 4x$ to the steakhouse), but there it is.

That's not Will, though, nor Krauthammer neither. They are not and never have been sceptics.  Sceptics require a greater level of proof before they believe something.  Will and Krauthammer requires absolutely no proof at all before they believe something, as long as they want to believe it.  They're as credulous as those people that still somehow mean the Nigerian prince email scam still seems to be worth pursuing.  It's just that their credulity makes them money rather than causing them to lose it.  Which is nice work if you can get it, I suppose (though I'm sure the Fed spends much more money on fact-spinning than does FOX News, so clearly Will must think he's made a terrible mistake somewhere in his career), but being covered in money for being a chump doesn't make your inherent chumpery any less obvious.  You can't spell "useful fucking idiot" without "fucking idiot".

Which is why the label "deniers" fits them like a studded ball-gag. No argument is too weak, no factoid too implausible, no equivalence so obviously false for these people to swallow faster than Chris Christie would a jam doughnut sprinkled with proof he masterminded the GW Bridge scandal.
Scepticism is about checking others are right.  Denialism is about desperately hoping others are right so that you don't have to change your opinions or behaviour. Scepticism is how science brought us every innovation for the last six hundred years. Denialism is how scientists got thrown in dungeons for asking whether the dude in the priest's robes really knew all that much about astronomy.

Scepticism, properly exercised scepticism that faces of against orthodoxy rather than simply avoiding it, is brave. Denialism is cowardly. And the fact that you can get rich through weaponising cowardice might actually be a stronger reason to believe mankind is ultimately doomed than any amount of evidence for climate change might be.

Just kidding. It's climate change that will screw us.  I know this because I bothered to check. 

[1] Except 1998 and 2002-2007, but who's counting?

[2] Were I dealing with anyone else, I'd point out his argument is logically indistinguishable from the argument that most of the world's resources are held by non-white people, and hence being white is a profound disadvantage. The problem, of course, is that not only am I concerned that might not actually be true - splendid work Europe, really - but that neither Will nor Krauthammer would have any problem with the idea that it's super-tough to be white and why is everyone always so mean to them?

Things We Should've Learned From WE3

I utterly adore this article (h/t Jane Carnall).  Cats might be smarter than dogs, but no-one can tell because they're such colossal arseholes they defy analysis.

I know more than a few academics who have the same problem, of course. I wonder how many studies have been performed on them have had to be abandoned because the test subjects were just too unbearably prickish to allow the experiment to continue and/or immediately attempted to seize control of the experiment to further their own lunatic theories.

Cats and academics both make for terrible people.

(It's interesting that they've shown dogs understand finger-pointing, though.  None of the canids my parents have brought home have ever managed that.  Mind you, old English sheepdogs can be painfully obtuse animals, so our anecdotal evidence should be viewed with caution).

Turned To Jelly

This time next week

Well, this is embarrassing. After years of insisting the human world could survive whilst the octopuses were too busy fighting amongst themselves to take us on (this will be the subject of my first screenplay; Uwe Boll has expressed an interest. Presumably), it turns out that it’s actually the jellyfish that are going to punch our clock, evolutionarily speaking. The only thing that can stop them is, apparently, larger and more toothsome jellyfish, which sounds like a plan with an obvious and problematic endpoint.

I suppose I should get at least partial credit for figuring all those vertebrae cluttering up dry land were only a fad, at least. I should also note that when we were in Scotland in June the locals were discussing how the standard jellyfish horde had failed to arrive this year. People’s response to this tiny anecdotal data point can tell you a lot about them, actually:

Climate change denier: there is no jellyfish problem; scientists just want more money to invent unnecessary and dangerous jelly dissolving weapons.

Cynic: there is no situation in this world so bad it won’t get work.

Statistician: why are you bothering me with this frivolity?

Indisputably correct: the jellyfish didn’t come to Scotland because they’re massing to attack.

(h/t Erik Loomis)

Bachman's Turning Overdrive

Via the utterly irreplaceable Charlie Pierce, this video is spectacularly childish but also about as funny as something can be when it focuses on the upcoming destruction of human civilisation.



Some of the comments below the video are just as hilarious:

"They would take over the free world with this hoax if everyone was as gullible as their converts."

"They didn't have the consensus to back Global Cooling so they literally just changed the name."

"Would you care to explain what caused the end of the ice age and melting of glaciers? No man, no power plants, no autos, etc."

"If you reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, what will take its place? Something must and you're just hoping it is good."

Every day it becomes more clear to me that our planet is nothing but a sitcom for other, less insane sentients to watch in fits of hysterics. 'Sit down and be quiet, podlings!  "Earth vs Earthlings" is about to start, and this is Sweeps Week, so they're bound to obliterate some low-lying Pacific islands at the very least!'

Trek Nitpicking Nitpicking

This, I accept, is a pretty good distillation of all the problems with Star Trek Into Darkness.  Some I noticed at the time, some I realised during later rumination, and some I hadn't noticed until now.

All that said, can we knock this nonsense off, please?

(Minor spoilers from the first few minutes of the film follow)

Dog Bites Man (But Was Aiming For Bacon Butty)

Via Balloon Juice, important new research has been revealed to the public in the field of studying doggies:

The dogs that are most bonded to their owners turn out to be most likely to observe their owner in order to steal food.

This reminds me of something an old colleague of mine - a Russian mathematician, with all that implies - used to say: "This is not only obvious, it is possible to prove."

Or, as someone once put it:

Four Animals, Twenty-One Legs

It's been an interesting fortnight for water-based critters. Current Biology published an analysis of DNA from two whales that beached in New Zealand in 2010, announcing they are a new species; the only known whale species never to have been seen alive.  The closest we can get is to something with a similar skeletal structure, the ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, which is also almost (though not quite) entirely unobserved whilst alive:

No matter how often it happens, I never get over the thrill of being reminded just how much life exists in the sea about we know almost or entirely nothing.  I mean, what is this shit?

Or this?

Or this?

Oh, wait.  That's not a deep-sea-dwelling perversion of the natural order. That's a frog messed up by flatworms and reprogrammed to have eight legs. Nice.  And apparently it's our fault.

I guess it's nice to know that as we catalogue more and more of the species the Earth produced for us, we don't need to worry about running out of things to engage our curiosity. We can just mutate the everliving fuck out the most common of animals, and play around with them for a while.

Good Morning, Citizen

Good to know the Italians are taking lessons from Friend Computer's approach to law enforcement. Remember, citizens! Mistakes are treason! Failure to report treason is treason!

Actually, somehow L'Aquila has managed to be an even more dangerous and capricious place to work than Alpha Complex, since even the Computer never to my knowledge had people executed for reporting treason   in writing instead of shouting at press conferences.

You Maniacs! You Blew It Up

So much for human civilisation, people: the cyber-cockroaches have arrived.

I'm genuinely too scared to even scroll down that link (h/t Eliza, if that's the right way to note her contribution to my nightmares), so who the fuck knows who did this and why they thought it was a good idea.  Do we really need to create cockroaches that might be harder to kill?  Even the Cthulhu Mythos, that weeping goitre of a universe in which man only survives so long as nothing notices him, suggests that the future is bright for hideous beetles, at least until the cone-monsters come a-callin'.

Mark my words, we're twenty years from being forced to clean the cyborg cockroaches' mechantannae in their underground cities while they plan to colonise the dankest regions of the Milky Way.  Twenty years, tops.

On the other hand, at least we can call them "cockborgs", so it's not like there's absolutely no upside.

What Will Be Born, And What Has Already Died

A few quick comments on Ross Douthat's latest piece.  First, the obligatory cheap shot, which I wouldn't make if if he didn't leave himself open to it as often as he does: this is not a man who should feel comfortable criticising others as "privileged have-mores with an obvious incentive to invent spurious theories to justify their own position".  This in an article arguing that liberals are going to bring back social Darwinism with all our Godless science, no less.

Secondly, consider the meat of Douthat's argument: some people who championed eugenics in the 1920s were liberals.  The idea became morally repulsive after WWII, and provably unhelpful a few decades later.  But that doesn't mean we've abandoned the idea!

Yes, Ross.  Yes, it does.  Dredging up the spectre of a past long since dead is pointless, a way of distracting readers from the fact that you're actual argument regarding the here and now is nothing more than "it's theoretically possible we'll find ourselves atop what might be a slippery slope, maybe".  At heart, it's no different from those recent painfully dumb articles about how Republicans are the real party of civil rights, because they were better on the subject until the 1960s, and should be taken no more seriously than all those the jokes about Germany's recent economic strong-arming being their closest alternative to invading France.

There's another of Douthat's most common themes in here, a tendency to think the worst of science.  He admits that the eugenics of 80 years ago didn't understand how intelligence is linked to genetics (or rather, they thought it was linked in ways it it isn't), but it doesn't occur to him to make the obvious link: it's through scientific advancement that we worked all that out.  Exploits like mapping the human genome are what has made the concept of social Darwinism medically counter-productive in addition to morally abhorrent. 

That means those who might champion the idea no longer need to merely switch off their basic humanity, they need to ignore the data as well.  Perhaps more than a handful of people still exist.  Perhaps, some are even liberals, though I can't for the life of me imagine the tangled thought processes that would take to justify.  But the same research that makes it increasingly unlikely that anyone would sensibly want to try such a thing would also make it theoretically (as oppose to economically) feasible to try it, and that's all Douthat can think about.

In some ways, this is a more disappointing article than usual from Douthat, because his final point - should we feel comfortable about aborting foetuses with serious life-long but not life-threatening genetic conditions - is worthy of discussion. Contra Douthat, that's not really a consideration which depends on one's feelings regarding the nature of a foetus; if you're pro-life, the answer is clear.  It's only a thorny issue for those of us who are pro-choice: does supporting a woman's right to say "I do not want to have this baby" extend to supporting them saying "I will only have this baby if..."

Like I said, it's a conversation worth having.  Douthat either can't or doesn't want to go there, though, so he's reduced to arguing that voluntarily deciding whether to have a baby given certain conditions is kind of like forcing people who are more likely to generate such a baby to undergo sterilisation.  Like those evil liberals once wanted to do.  Or something.

One last point.  It would be hard to pin Douthat down on this, because the man has an insufferable habit of pretending to be arguing from a secular perspective until actual secularists slap him down, when he suddenly claims to be writing for Christians after all, but there is one question I'd dearly like to ask him: what are the secular grounds for not allowing siblings to marry?

Right now, of course, incest is illegal. A lot of reasons are given for this, but as far as I can tell, they break down into social points and medical points, and almost invariably involve the resulting children.  The former are frequently persuasive as to why it's not a good idea (two parents who had the same upbringing don't have the necessary spread of experience, social ostracism, confusing family reunions), but many of the specific arguments can also be aimed at single parents and same sex (or even mixed race) marriages, which makes it hard to believe they're strong enough to justify a blanket ban.

The genetic argument seems to me to have far more force; there's an increased risk of all sorts of unpleasant conditions that a child borne of siblings can have.  But if Ross is against the idea of medical tests to determine the genetic structure of a baby, shouldn't he be in favour of allowing siblings - at least those separated at an early age and being reunited as adults - to get married? 

That's the problem with bright-line positions like the one Douthat is knocking around here.  Sooner or later you find something that's on the wrong side of it.  The problem with Douthat himself, of course, is that this sort of realisation always leads to another horribly tortuous spiel of sophistry in an attempt to paint the line somewhere slightly different, rather than facing up to the fact that the bright line never existed, and never can.

Uncivil Wars

It's already been recalled due to the massive (and entirely predictable and warranted) outcry, but Kate Sheppard thought it worth a little time to talk about the American Heartland's latest billboard:

As I say, a lot of people were pissed as hell about this.  Quite a few other people seem to be mainly amused that anyone could be so stupid as to have conceived of this as an ad campaign - the national multi-million-dollar equivalent of the drunk guy at a party shouting "You know who else was a vegetarian? Motherfucking Hitler!"

Sheppard's take on all this is interesting, and ties into something I've been thinking about for a while: how does something as pointlessly offensive and stupid come out the same offices that just a few months ago was complaining that those who accept the existence of global warming don't want to have a respectful and honest debate on the issues.

The fact that places like Heartland are disgracefully hypocritical isn't particularly surprising, of course.  But these constant calls to "civility" - which you'll find in almost any political or cultural debate of any real degree of contention - should always be considered in the wider context.  There's no doubt that sometimes it's necessary to tell people to sit down, stop shouting, and take a few deep breaths.  That's not what Heartland (or David Brooks, or George Will, or the late David Broder, or...) is aiming for.

The "incivility" approach is just one more arrow in the quiver of those people who don't actually want - or realise they can't afford - to actually craft a coherent and robust argument.  It's one of a great number of lazy debating techniques that together form what I call "minimum-effort arguing."  The commentator knows what they want to say, then chooses the fastest way of getting there in a way that isn't obviously stupid to just about everyone.  If that means stating their opponents are too loud and aggressive (or even worse, "shrill") to talk to, that's what they'll use.  If that means suggesting there isn't really a problem here at all, or that both sides are pretty much in agreement, they'll stick that in instead.

If those can't quite get them to the finish post, they'll try the next easiest approach.  George Will demonstrated this in epic style a couple of years ago, when he argued that because 1998 was the hottest year on record, there couldn't have been global warming since then.  This isn't just an obviously stupid statement, it's an obviously stupid statement that, were you to slightly re-jig it and play it back to him, Will wouldn't buy for a second.  If you told him Babe Ruth's home-run record proved every new batting technique since the '30s has been a waste of time, he'd laugh you out of the room.

But the objective isn't to craft a position using logical planks that they'd consider firm in all circumstances.  Just as when they complain their opponents are being too mean, the only aim is to put as little effort as possible into dealing with an argument they want to avoid, but don't want to look like they're avoiding.  Sometimes it's a Catch-22 like "civility" (Catch-22 because any argument that can't be dismissed as uncivil can be taken as evidence that the topic of discussion can't be all that important), and sometimes it's pretending that scientific concepts as advanced as variance don't exist.  Sometimes it's to point out the opponent has an ideological bias, as though that alone means the arguments being put forward can't be valid.  Sometimes, you get someone like Ross Douthat, who's at least clever enough to ensure his arguments are locally sound, and only fall apart when you compare them over, say, a whole book.

But it all comes from the same place, a desire to justify what one believes - or more often, what one is selling - using the quickest method you can expect the rubes to swallow.  The fact that these people keep pushing this crap isn't remotely surprising (which isn't to say we should stop pushing against it), but the willingness of people to internalise this endless wave of ad hominem crap is a shame they must bear for themselves.

PS: someone should really write up an online Heartland Billboard Generator, like someone did with the Tory election ads last year.  Think of the fun we could have with history's greatest monsters:

Taking The... Redux

I see dogs and urine are once again in the news (clearly this is a combination with potential).  This time round, it's because the study of doggy wee has led to breakthroughs in the understanding of human kidney behaviour, which in turn has helped out with regard to type 2 diabetes.

Much as I love our canine companions, of course, can I just mention how depressing it is to realise the nine months I've spent trying to smash a huge data set into shape so as to detect the effects of new diabetes treatments has turned out to have been less use than a dog pissing into a bottle?

Research fellows: for when no dog is available, or none of those nearby fancy emptying their bladders.

Doctors Can Be Frauds And Supervillains

Kevin Drum has a very interesting post up right now on the upward trend of retracted papers in the biomedical community and, more importantly, the rise of papers retracted due to fabricated results.  Whether this means more results are being fabricated, or just that scrutiny has intensified, I don't know.  Indeed, Drum's suggestion that it's time to "clear house", as it were, might already be happening: one would assume such an effort would lead to a large retraction spike in any case.

Either way, though, it all makes for interesting reading (I've lifted the relevant chart and stuck it to the right).  All that said, I think the most interesting part of it is the fact that this investigation was run by Doctors Ferric Fang and Arcturo Casadevall.  If those two names showed up in a comic book, I'd be pissed off about how little effort had gone into hiding the fact they were clearly evil.  I can only presume Ferric Fang is fighting fraud in the academic community only because he can't fight Wolverine over possession of the adamantium bonding process.

Hot Air

Good news for climate change truth-seekers: wind farms increase global warming!  And all it took for the facts to emerge was a single brave scientist, and some of the words in his report.  Don't look at all the words, though! That just confuses the issue!  Look at some of the words.  A few of the words.  One or two of the words.  And maybe change some of the others.

Then you'll see the perfectly obvious!  Global warming, which isn't happening, or at least certainly isn't being caused by people, is happening right now, because of people we don't like!  We were right all along!  This proves climate change is bullshit, just like thalidomide proved that pregnancy is actually really easy.  It's now clear GW is all a big hoax, except for this one tiny part which is definitely real because it'll piss off the hippy left! 

Repeat after me: people don't cause climate change, liberals do.  Even though climate change isn't real.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

"Retreat To The Upper Levels!"

There's a lot to enrage about this Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that CO2's role in global warming - and specifically our own output - is in fact exaggerated, but it's all stuff we've seen before.  Deliberate misrepresentation and misinterpretation?  Check.  Accusations by oil company executives that those arguing for global warming have too much money at stake to be trustworthy?  Uh huh.  The conflation of uncertainty in predicting values with uncertainty in predicting trends?  Naturally. Using a piece in a newspaper with a circulation of two point fucking one million to compare themselves to Soviet researchers who were "disappeared" to prevent their research being promulgated?  Yep, that's in there too. [1]

I must confess, however, that I'm grimly amused by the balls on these people.  First we got "There's no evidence the world is warming, and everyone claiming otherwise is lying to you!".  Then it became "It's just possible the Earth is warming, but there's no evidence human activity is contributing to the trend, and everyone claiming otherwise is shilling for money!".

Now, apparently, we've reached a new stage: "It seems the Earth is warming - though everyone else lied about how fast it would warm up - and it seems humanity's actions might be part of the reason why.  But there's no evidence that our contribution is anything like as big as all that, and everyone claiming otherwise is involved in a vast international conspiracy to increase taxes for some reason!"

Lesser minds might have flagged at this point, and wearily admitted that it's just about possible that the accumulation of ever more evidence might once again force them to silently move the goalposts to ensure their lies continue to have the veneer of plausibility conclude they're wrong on this occasion as well, or at least that those on the other side of the issue might at least be arguing in good faith, rather than reading Solzhenitsyn and jotting down ideas.

But, heh: that's exactly the sort of thinking that doesn't get you thrown in a Siberian gulag, and that's not the sort of concession to the enemy those with a selfless dedication to revealing the truth in exchange for money are prepared to make!

[1] Interestingly, Think Progress notes that the WSJ was sent a letter by proponents of the other side of this little fracas, and the paper didn't think it was worth printing.  Now, I don't get to decide what does and doesn't deserve to be printed in the Wall Street Journal - though, really, it's hard to see how I, or a concussed dugong, could do worse than its own staff these days - but one might have hoped that someone involved in this piece at some point might have wanted to reconsider their Soviet gulag analogy.  Whatever one's personal feelings about the USSR in general, I'd think we can all agree that had a scientist received a letter from Director Lysenko saying "knock this shit off", they were unlikely to have gotten away with burning the pages in public and releasing a press release calling him a prick.


"Maybe I'll run another piece on how the phone-hacking scandal
has turned Rupert Murdoch into a helpless victim..."

Bring Back National Service (Or Possibly Fur Coats)

Sodding leopards!  They're stealing our cameras now!  I'm sure the tree-hugging eco-maniac types are crying tears of joy into their vegan lasagnas that there's an "unusually high" density of snow leopards in these mountains, but the disgraceful behaviour of their children demonstrate why: it's a big cat council estate.

Well, that or it's a staging area for the upcoming invasion.  Depends if those cubs are uncontrollable snipes flogging hot goods in exchange for cat-nip, or a highly trained paramilitary youth movement helping to fund the leopard war effort. 

If our government starts flogging Harriers to Tajikistan, we'll know what's happened.

Update:  Dammit, now they're trying to blame the oranges!  Link should be fixed now.

Progressive Dementia

George Will is not a good writer.  He is a hack; a man who uses every ounce of the intelligence he has (or had) to disguise shameful lies as reasonable points.  He is a man who claimed there was no global warming in the '00s, because the hottest year on record was in the '90s.  You know, like how black musicians aren't increasingly being listened to and enjoyed by white people, because no single album has outsold Thriller, and that came out in '82. 

Not only is he a poor commentator and a mendacious charlatan, though, he's also horrifyingly dismissive of people who do not share his opinions, or his lack of journalistic standards.  On top of all of that, he has a stupid face, as though Bill Gates were constantly meloncholy and also an owl.

All of this has been true for a while (and indeed mentioned here more than once). So why am I going back to this particular well?  Because of this:

For the indefinite future, a specter is haunting progressivism, the specter of abundance. Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because progressives believe that only government’s energy should flow unimpeded, they crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing — by them — that produces ever-more-minute government supervision of Americans’ behavior. 

Imagine what a horror 2011 was for progressives as Americans began to comprehend their stunning abundance of fossil fuels — beyond their two centuries’ supply of coal. Progressives responded with attempts to impede development of the vast, proven reserves of natural gas and oil here and in Canada. They bent the willowy Obama to delay approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from Canadian tar sands; they raised environmental objections to new techniques for extracting gas and “tight” oil from shale formations.

An all-purpose rationale for rationing in its many permutations has been the progressives’ preferred apocalypse, the fear of climate change.

Following this outburst, I can longer bring myself to believe that Will is merely a peddler of low-grade bullshit.  He can only be completely, irreversibly out of his fucking tree.  That last line, admittedly, is Will's bog-standard outrageous lies: the Keystone XL pipeline was campaigned against because it would risk the extinction of several endangered species, and the principle objections to the new extraction techniques are that a) we haven't had time to ensure they're safe for nearby people, and b) they seem to have a nasty habit of poisoning surrounding water supplies.  The discerning reader might also ask why, if the US has two centuries of coal reserves remaining, it really needs a massive oil pipeline from Canada, when Will's children and his childrens' children can play safe and free under the harmless coke clouds belching forth from Middle America until the twenty-third century.

The rest of it, though, is just the ravings of an id that's collapsed under the weight of its own suppressed shame.  Decades of ignoring and misrepresenting his political and philosophical opponents have left Will unable to even comprehend the letters, symbols and sounds that issue forth from the hated hippies. Instead, he's concocted an amazing conspiracy theory in which we're so obsessed with the idea of making life harder for everyone - including ourselves - we've put together the Biggest of all Lies.

Here's my question, though: if we really had forged a massive deception in the fires of Mount Doom ivory towers of the intelligentsia, with the specific aim of hobbling the march of civilisation, why would we choose a scenario entirely at odds with the richest people and countries in the world?  Why not come up with something aimed to strike against the unwashed and downtrodden?  Like, I don't know, the idea that organised labour isn't a necessary counterbalance to management, but a con trick designed to stifle innovation through the application of Big Government?

If in November Republicans capture the Senate... only weakness of Republican will can prevent, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Labor Relations Board from being unconstrained instruments of presidential decrees. 

See?  That's how you make shit up in order to force other people to live the way you think they should!