Bajoobahead #6: Cal Thomas

Cal Thomas apparently has a problem with gays serving in the military. Money quote:

The place to start is whether citizens of this country, through their elected representatives and the military leaders named by them, have a right to determine what type of service members best serve the interests, safety and security of the United States. I contend we do. The military should not be a test lab. Pressure is building to put female sailors on submarines, along with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, presumably. That many heterosexuals find homosexual behavior immoral and not conducive to unit cohesion is of no concern to the social wrecking crew.

Wow, how wrong is this? First of all, homosexuality does not hurt unit cohesion. A survey of military personnel, either currently active or recent veterans, shows that, of those who were certain they served with a gay or lesbian, 64% said it had no effect on unit morale. Of those who weren't, a plurality (49%) said it would have no impact on them personally. 73% said they were comfortable around gays and lesbians.

Even if a minority of heterosexual soldiers disapprove of gays serving, that doesn't mean that they could not do their jobs professionally serving with gays. That's also not a good reason to prevent homosexuals from serving openly. I'm sure several white soldiers would have disapproved of serving with blacks in 1948. I'm sure several compared Executive Order 9981 to treating the military as a "test lab," as it came six years before Brown v. Board and a full fifteen years before "I have a dream." I'm sure people argued that it would effect "our ability to fight and defend the country," but it didn't seem to impinge on our ability to drive the communists out of South Korea two years later.

Thomas does have one good point: We should be able to decide which people are best fit to serve in the military. But homosexuality should not be such a disqualification. Especially when 58 Arabic linguists, along with 11,000 other service members, have been discharged since Don't Ask Don't Tell came into effect. Especially when some estimate that DADT's repeal could spur up to 41,000 to enlist.

Don't Ask Don't Tell is not only morally wrong, it's a strategic blunder. And an op-ed that relies on hypotheticals that fly in the face of facts and history should not prevent us from repealing it.

Even Smart People Can Be Stupid

So I was reading The Bent, a quarterly publication by Tau Beta Pi, like a good enginerd, and one of the letters made my blood boil. It was written by Pierre R. Latour, who worked on the Apollo Program, and was part of the back-and-forth on global warming that's been raging for nine issues. Let's go through some of it:

1. Earth's temperature is a property of a distributed, dynamic chemical process control system. A thermostat reduces variations about a desired set point by feedback manipulation of significant energy flows.

This letter was written by an engineer to an audience of engineers, and even though I'm an engineer, I don't know what he just said. Maybe it's because I'm the wrong type of engineer (civil, not chemical like Mr. Latour) or maybe it's because I'm still a lowly undergrad. Either way, this paragraph doesn't actually say anything, and merely serves to make Mr. Latour sound smart.

2. Earth's average atmospheric temperature is unmeasurable...

Okay, it's true that we couldn't take the temperature of every single point on Earth and calculate the exact average. But we could sample a bunch of points on Earth and get a good guess and a margin of error. If the sample average changes beyond the margin of error, then we can be confident that the actual average is changing. Apparently Mr. Latour never took a statistics class.

No professional control engineer would accept responsibility for engineering Earth's thermostat. His first duty is to do no harm...

First, I don't think anyone wants to engineer a global thermostat. A thermostat, as Mr. Latour was probably trying to say in his first, jargon-filled paragraph, responds to the current temperature. I want my apartment to be between 68^o and 78^o. If it's hotter than that, turn on the AC; colder, the heat. That's a thermostat. The response to global warming is closer to, "Hey, the heat's been on for a while. Let's turn it down before it's 90^o in here."

Second, you would think that "first do no harm" would be an argument to stop pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere. Under this guise, if you don't know what it will do, you shouldn't do it. The Earth seemed fine before we started pumping it out.

3. While Earth's temperature has been warming slowly for 25,000 years and drifted up 0.6^oC from 1975-98, (0.026^oC/year), [sic] it stopped increasing since 1998...

Hmm, the "unmeasurable" global average temperature increased 0.026^oC/year between 1975 and 1998? Interesting. And while the Earth's temperature does fluctuate naturally, there has been a sharp increase that started, incidentally, about the same time as the Industrial Revolution:

4. The melt rate of ice is proportional to atmospheric temperature, not the derivative of temperature [i.e. how fast the temperature is changing, for the calculus-deprived]. Ice melts because its surface is warm, not warming. A glacier shrinks because it is warm; [sic] even if it is cooling.

Wow. And if its surface keeps warming, it will be warm enough to melt.

5. The prime mover of Earth's energy balance and temperature is the sun. Atmospheric CO₂ lags ocean and atmospheric temperature because its solubility decreases with temperature, just like champagne bubbles do. So temperature changes cause CO₂ changes, not the other way around.

You know where else the sun acts as the prime mover of temperature? A greenhouse. But a greenhouse wouldn't be as warm without the glass. A greenhouse is, of course, in no way analogous to the effect to which it lends its name.

And temperature changes causing CO₂ changes doesn't automatically discount "the other way around." You would think a systems engineer would have heard of a feedback loop.

6. CO₂ is not a pollutant; it is green plant food. Its greenhouse-gas effect is irrelevant and benign. H₂O vapor effects are 1,000 times greater. The greenhouse-gas effect is essential for life...

Most of what Mr. Latour says here is true; he just fails to understand the concept "too much of a good thing." Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect are both essential for life. (Without the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be about -17^oC.) Water is essential for Mr. Latour's life, but I doubt he wants me to pump 27 trillion kg of it into his house every year.

And it's true that the contribution of water vapor to global warming is higher than that of carbon dioxide, but the effect of adding more of it into the atmosphere is not as dramatic as that of CO₂. First, more water vapor means more clouds, which increase the Earth's albedo, reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing the amount of heat that reaches the earth in the first place. Second, increasing water vapor concentrations won't close the atmospheric window. (The greenhouse effect happens when molecules in the atmosphere absorb electromagnetic radiation, trapping it in Earth's atmosphere. But molecules absorb electromagnetic radiation only at particular wavelengths. Water, for instance, absorbs wavelengths around six microns, and practically none of that escapes the Earth's atmosphere. There is little in the atmosphere that absorbs in the 8-12 micron range. CO₂ does.)

8. By March 16, 2009, more than 700 international scientists have testified to the Senate's environment and public works committee,...debunking any claims of scientific consensus for anthropogenic global warming (AGW)...

While it's true that belief in AGW is not universal among scientists, 84% of scientists "think that earth is getting warmer because of human activity."

No benefit-cost financial analysis...has been provided...

Really? What's this?

11. It has been clear since 2006 that AGW is a scheme to tax people with CO₂ caps...

Really? Global warming is an elaborate hoax to provide political cover for taxing businesses? Since when have politicians put this much work into anything?

Besides, if they wanted to tax business, there are better things on which to base the taxation, like revenues or profits. I'd hope that the Democrats aren't such Milquetoasts that they have to invent an elaborate hoax and convince millions of people of its veracity before they are comfortable enough to enact a simple tax.

After the end of his letter, it says that Mr. Latour graduated from college in 1962, which means he's around 70 now. If he's wrong, he won't be the one who has to live with the consequences.

Bajoobahead #4: Ann Althouse

So I was watching this:

And I was growing increasingly angry. Althouse made two ridiculous points and Emily Bazelon did not push back at all. She only said, "That's plausible." No, they're not plausible. Not really.

The first point Althouse made was basically this, quoting Rush Limbaugh:

[T]he Great Unifier's [Obama's] plan, is to isolate... elected Republicans from their voters and supporters. He wants to make the argument about me. He wants to marginalize me. He wants me to be thought of as such an extremist that no mainstream Republican would ever associate with me....

He needs Republicans for cover only on his stimulus package. You gotta understand, folks, he does not need Republican votes. Maybe one or two in the Senate is all he needs and he doesn't need a single Republican in the House to get this done. Now, his definition of bipartisanship is when a bunch of Republicans cave on their own principles and agree with him and give him what he wants. That's magical, that's marvelous, why, that's bipartisanship....

This is a political play to marginalize me so that Republicans are afraid to associate with my ideas or any of us. He wants conservatism, mainstream conservatism to be thought of the way you and I think of communism.

Which is patently ridiculous. Obama's definition of bipartisan is not having his opponents roll over and accept what he wants. The stimulus bill itself illustrates this point. A third of the bill's cost was $275 billion worth of tax cuts, certainly not a Democratic measure. And the final House bill did not have a measure that would have "expand[ed] access to Medicaid-covered family planning services."

This measure, despite all of the Republicans' complaints, made a lot of sense. It would not have given the states any new powers; it would have simply removed a costly, time-intensive waiver process. The provision, if it had passed, was estimated to save $700 million over 10 years.

Now, the bill may have had components that the Republicans didn't like. It wouldn't have been bipartisan if it didn't. And still not one of the 177 House Republicans voted for it. I don't think Obama is the one being partisan.

Why isn't Rush Limbaugh being called the bajoobahead? That's self-evident, an almost ipso-facto truth; he is Bajoobahead #0, if you will. Especially after saying that he hoped Obama would fail. Any conservative American can say that they don't think liberal programs will work. It takes a true patriot to hope that the U.S. will go through four years of suffering so intense that we won't re-elect the guy who wants to institute those liberal policies.

Althouse's second point is this: if Obama is using rhetoric similar to Bush's, why is everyone saying that Obama "signaled a shift...from the Bush administration"? She even referred to this Daily Show clip:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Daily Show Full Episodes
Funny Political Videos

Important Things With Demetri Martin
More Funny Videos

But the answer was sort of embedded in the end of the clip: Obama has not yet done anything that would make his words ring hollow. And he has thus far signaled that he would be willing to sit down, listen, and work with other countries instead of running roughshod over them.

Bajoobahead #3: Kathleen Parker

Apparently Kathleen Parker has a problem with Barack Obama. In a particularly incoherent editorial entitled "El panderosa," (Shouldn't it really be el panderoso?) she criticizes Barack Obama's so-called pandering to the Hispanic community. Except her claims are completely illegitimate and the editorial flails wildly, trying to get any claim to stick to Obama.

She starts by accusing both Obama and McCain of pandering, but are there any specific complaints levied against McCain? Of course not. Next, Obama tells individuals' stories in his speeches, while McCain's are filled with substantive policy points (read: abburidos). THOSE ARE THEIR RESPECTIVE RHETORICAL STYLES. That doesn't mean Obama doesn't have policies to deal with the problems. And because "[p]oetry is in the DNA of this romantic, passionate people," his rhetoric is an obvious pander.

Ms. Parker then seizes on this quote by Obama:

Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they'll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.

She concedes that Americans would benefit from learning a foreign language, but then attacks Obama for not encouraging immigrants to learn English. She misses his point completely; he didn't say that immigrants shouldn't try to assimilate into American society, or even that they shouldn't learn English. His intent is to dispel the stereotype of the lazy, uneducated immigrant, when most immigrants work hard to learn English and improve their lives.

Ms. Parker, before you writes your next editorial, I recommend that you (and anyone else) consider this: Is a statement really a pander if it's something they truly believe?

Bajoobahead #1: Chester Bartels

Chester Bartels writes to the Grand Rapids Press:

Why has the press crowned Obama? [I mean so what if he has more delegates/votes than Hillary and has generally acted more ethically than she has?]

He is the most liberal senator, by record, and he has avoided voting on any issue of substance by voting here or not being present at all. What has he done? What has he proposed other than raising taxes and redistributing wealth (pure socialism)?

He is a hollow shell with no substance. Yet the media are largely behind him. Why? Do the media, too, find nothing to be proud of in the United States? [I am nothing but a patriot. I always wear a flag pin, even when I'm not wearing a lapel.] Do they want to ruin "the rich" so government can be the chief if not the only employer?

Do they want to stop an unfavorable war only to let the fundamentalist Islamic cults rule the Middle East? It would seem that a man with the given name of Barack Hussein Obama would have to be scrutinized a bit before we would want him to be a senator, let alone a president! [You can tell a lot about people by their middle name. For instance, my middle name is Hitler, and I'm a secret Nazi. That's why I didn't include my name because I'm hiding something.] Never forget that it was capitalism that won World Wars I and II, not socialism. [But do forget that capitalism also lost World Wars I and II and that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was on the winning side of WWII. And don't consider Marx's complaint that capitalism leads to the objectification of the working class because that will only lead you to conclude that Hitler's Germany was the apotheosis of capitalism.] The opportunity for profit is what drives men to succeed, not the opportunity to be given someone's else's hard-earned dollars.

If the Democrats win the Congress and the presidency, increase taxes as they have promised, institute national insurance as they plan to do, and increase government size and influence, then we can forget freedom as we know it. [I'm talking real freedom here, not the due process and the Geneva Conventions that only the socialist Democrats care about.] Thinking citizens must keep these socialists out of office. Let's find out a lot more about Obama before we even consider him as fit to rule this country[, but not before we write a letter to the editor filled with no new information and conclusions that aren't supported by non-trivial facts].

This post was written in Sarcastic Trebuchet font. This post was intended to mock Chester Bartels' letter to the editor and to expose certain beliefs/conclusions as baseless or illogical. Any feelings of pique caused by this post are purely coincidental.