Man, I'm glad we're so damn sensitive

The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia decided to celebrate Independence Day on June 4 instead of July 4 this year "to respect the upcoming Ramadhan month." Ramadan, or Ramadhan, is, of course, a Muslim observance that lasts a month or so -- June 17 to July 17 this year -- and the Fourth of July lands pretty much in the middle of it.

July 4th celebrations at U.S. embassies around the world often -- usually, in fact -- are used as outreach opportunities to the host country, featuring bands, food, frivolity and U.S.-made products the current administration is pushing to introduce overseas (this year in Jakarta it was electric motorcycles, which I'm sure are much better than Harleys). Lots of locals attend, including host government officials, and so it makes sense not to throw a daytime party for locals when the locals are fasting during the day.

Politifact points this out in rating posts on conservative blogs criticizing the decision as only "mostly true." Politifact, of course, wouldn't know a fact if it bit them on the ass. The embassy celebrated July 4th early, and it did so to accommodate Muslim religious beliefs. That is based on what the ambassador himself said, and so conservative blogs critical of the decision wrote their headlines accordingly, such as "U.S. Embassy Celebrates America’s Independence on June 4th in Order to Accommodate Muslims." Politifact cites this as a typical headline critical of the move.

The "fact-checking" site then calls the headlines only "mostly true," despite what the embassy itself said, because other embassies have also held the July 4th celebration at times other than July 4th. The Politifucks acknowledge that pretty much all of these have to do with weather (extreme heat and monsoon season are mentioned) and local vacation schedules, such as in Europe where at many embassies the entire fucking country is on vacation in July (but not France -- the French take August off). No mention of local religious issues for any other delays in the celebration. And yet, because other embassies have celebrated July 4th at other times, saying that the Jakarta embassy did what it did for the reasons it said it did it is only mostly true.

This is how liberals twist the world to fit their own view. If someone says "this is why I did this," it's hard to argue with that. In this case, the holiday in question is seminal in American history and, really, matters only to Americans. We don't get worked up about Bastille Day or Guy Fawkes Day, nor does the rest of the world really care much about the 4th of July. (By the way, what are the French doing about Bastille Day at their embassies. It is July 14, within the Ramadan celebration. Hmmmm.)

While it is used as an excuse at U.S. embassies to conduct local outreach, that is not the point of the holiday to Americans. You can conduct outreach any time. The locals don't give two shakes of a rat's ass about the 4th of July, after all. So conduct your outreach when it isn't hot, or monsoon season, or Ramadan, or whatever. Celebrate the 4th of July and the birth of our country  at the embassy with staff and American expatriates in attendance, on the 4th of July. In case the State Department hasn't noticed, the holiday's name tells you pretty explicitly when the holiday is.

And you're fucking-A right I'm serving hamburgers and all-beef hot dogs at our embassy and consulate 4th of July celebrations in India. Beef up the embassy's  Marine detachment if you have to. (See what I did there?) The holiday is for us, not the locals.

Concensus? Well, no.

We keep hearing that there is a concensus among climate scientists -- along the lines of 97 percent or 98 percent -- that mankind is driving catastrophic global warming through carbon dioxide emissions. The primary source of this "97 percent concensus" argument apparently is based on a graduate thesis that was somewhat less than rigorous. Recently, a study of the studies claiming concensus found that those studies dramatically overstate the number of climate scientists that view mankinds contribution to the greenhouse effect as a problem:

The main pillar of the warmist argument is the contention that a "consensus" exists among scientists that global warming is caused by man and threatens catastrophe. But a Canada-based group calling itself Friends of Science has just completed a review of the four main studies used to document the alleged consensus and found that only 1 - 3% of respondents "explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming," and that there was "no agreement with a catastrophic view."

Just for starters, science is not about concensus. It is about putting forth a theory or hypothesis and then trying to disprove it. Failure to disprove the hypothesis tends to support it. Climate alarmists have never done that. Their models are terrible, but every claim they make is based on climate models, not actual data. So they claim concensus. Just like their models, the claim is wrong and repeatedly based on horseshit studies.

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.

Please not that the Oreske paper was an opinion essay, not a peer-reviewed paper. There's some rigorous research. She failed even to make clear what her claimed concensus was agreeing on. And the survey that gave us the 97 percent number? Ouch.

The “97 percent” figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.

If you are trying to sell me a scientific conclusion, sell me on the science, not on the conclusion. The vast majority of people who "believe" in global warming don't understand the theory. They can't explain it, which makes discussions with them on this pointless. Believe me, I know. Disagree? I defy a global warming believer to explain the actual theory to me in the comments. Trust me, I will be abso-fucking-lutely brutal when you get it wrong. Which you will.

If the science were so settled -- please name another field of scientific research where that expression is used -- why would climate alarmists feel the need to get medieval on everyone who disagrees with them?

News that Lennart Bengtsson, the respected former director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, had joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), sent shockwaves through the climate research community. GWPF is most notable for its skepticism about climate change and its efforts to undermine the position of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The tremors his decision sent through the scientific community shocked Bengtsson.
The scientist said colleagues placed so much pressure on him after joining GWPF that he withdrew from the group out of fear for his own health. Bengtsson added that his treatment had been reminiscent of the persecution of suspected Communists in the United States during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s.

So, Der Spiegel, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought, is running this article. AGW skeptics -- that's anthropogenic global warming, for those believers out there who don't even speak the lingo -- actually get quoted here without being called "deniers," a term normally used to describe the nutbags and Islamist killers who insist the Holocaust never happened. Apparently, even suggesting that the AGW theory might not be right is too much for the alarmists to accept. But the debate is finally getting noticed:

Climate researchers are now engaged in a debate about whether their science is being crippled by a compulsion to conform. They wonder if pressure to reach a consensus is too great. They ask if criticism is being suppressed. No less is at stake than the credibility of research evidence for climate change and the very question of whether climate research is still reliable.
Bengtsson said in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE that he wanted to open up the climate change debate by joining GWPF. He said that in view of large gaps in knowledge, the pressure to reach a consensus in climate research "does not make sense".

What, exactly, is the argument against a healthy scientific debate? I can think of a number of excellent reasons to dismiss the alarmists -- their models fail to predict the past, none of their models agree with each other and all of them have failed to predict the future based on their performance since 1988. Why listen to someone who is always wrong and whose main argument seems to be that they know lots of guys who agree with them, evidence be damned? The global mean temperature, to the extent that means anything, has been flat since 1998. No warming. What are you worried about? Maybe if the alarmists didn't claim that AGW causes pretty much everything  -- and I do mean EVERYTHING -- they would have more credibility. As it is, fuck 'em.

I hope nobody expects me to take part in this celebration

The Washington Post gives out a free tabloid at Metro stations during the week called The Express. It is a useful time-passing tool while riding the train, although it does not, at least with me, satisfy its intended goal of making me want to pay to read the regular Washington Post. Be that as it may, I was confronted yesterday with a rather astounding full-page ad seeking my support for Public Service Recognition Week which, apparently, is this week.

I am a little unclear as to why I should support this "recognition" effort. I'm not aware of any Private Service Recognition Week, for instance. And believe me, "public service" is anything but. They get paid pretty well for those jobs, and my taxes are what is paying them. I'm not sure I should "honor" somebody who is making more money than I am while they simultaneously contribute nothing to the economy. They create nothing, they contribute nothing, they are an economic negative. Honor that? I think not.

Am I too harsh? Nope. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that, including wages and benefits:

Overall, the federal government paid 16 percent more in total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.

Only federal employees with professional degrees or doctorates made less on average than their private counterparts. That can be largely attributed to Big Law partners dragging the private average up. However, as USA Today once reported, in 2010 government lawyers on average made only about $3,000 per year less than the average private sector lawyer, and:

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Yeah, so forgive me if I don't tip my hat to those long-suffering public employees who make more money and benefits, that I pay for, and are more likely to die than get fired or go find another job. Fuck 'em.