Tag: news

Today, in response to lawsuits filed by the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and The New York
Times, the Obama administration has finally released an
important memo written by the Department of Justice explaining the
legal authority to use drones to sometimes kill Americans without
the benefit of a trial first. Anwar Al-Awlaki was an American
citizen and also allegedly a terrorist organizer for Al Qaeda,
killed in a drone strike in 2011 in Yemen.

The administration had been fighting the memo’s release and
losing. Today a redacted version of the memo was released. The ACLU
has it posted
here (the memo actually begins on page 67, following a lengthy
court ruling). The “too long; didn’t read” version: The
Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that gave us wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan gave the administration permission to pursue
and capture or kill members of Al Qaeda; Al-Awlaki was a member of
Al Qaeda; therefore, killing was legal.

Al-Awlaki’s Fourth Amendment right to due process is brought up
toward the end. The Justice Department argues here that capturing
Al-Awlaki was infeasible, yet he presented a threat to the United
States as “continued” and “imminent,” therefore lethal force was
justified.

What sort of continued and imminent threat did Al-Awlaki present
from Yemen? Don’t know. That part is all redacted. The
justification of why the CIA pursued this course of action is also
almost entirely redacted. Even with the memo, we actually don’t
learn anything new from a leak of a similar memo NBC published

last year. We don’t know why Al-Awlaki was considered to be an
imminent threat and why this drone strike was the only way the
Obama administration believed it needed to deal with him.

Also note that the memo is entirely only about the execution of
Al-Awlaki. The United States has killed four Americans abroad with
drone strikes, including Al-Awlaki’s teenage son. The son was not
purposefully targeted, but was killed two weeks after his father’s
death after running off to Yemen. He had no known connections to
terrorism himself.

The ACLU, in a release, said it would
push for more information to be made public:

“We will continue to press for the release of other documents
relating to the targeted-killing program, including other legal
memos and documents relating to civilian casualties.” [ACLU Deputy
Legal Director Jameel] Jaffer said.

“The drone program has been responsible for the deaths of
thousands of people, including countless innocent bystanders, but
the American public knows scandalously little about who is being
killed and why.”

Though the public has steadily turned against
affirmative action schemes—and courts continue to limit their
use—Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor remains a
steadfast defender of race-based college admissions.

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on
Sunday, Sotomayor offered an interesting glimpse into her mindset
on the issue. She maintained that race-based affirmative action was
the only reliable way to ensure campus diversity.

Stephanopoulos asked her whether it made more sense for
admissions offices to consider regional or economic background
instead of race. Her
answer was definitive:

Well, the problem with that answer is that it doesn’t
work. It’s not that I don’t believe it works, I don’t think the
statistics show that it works. It just doesn’t.

But perhaps more shocking was that she defended affirmative
action by likening it to legacy admission—a practice that
virtually everyone who knows about it hates (some 75 percent of
Americans, according
to The New York Times), except Sotomayor,
apparently:

Look, we have legacy admissions. If your parents or your
grandparents have been to that school, they’re going to give you an
advantage in getting into the school again. Legacy admission is a
wonderful thing because it means even if you’re not as qualified as
others you’re going to get that slight advantage.

Is it “wonderful” that the scions of politically and financially
well-connected families get to be judged on their last names,
rather than on their academic merit? It seems like Sotomayor thinks
legacy admissions are somehow helping the disadvantaged, when in
reality they do the opposite.

This isn’t abstract, theoretical, or even disputable. In
2009, Princeton accepted 40 percent of applicants whose parents
were alumni,
according to Inside Higher Ed. That was 4.5 times
higher than the rate of admission for non-legacy applicants. People
who didn’t have famous parents got penalized when they applied to
Princeton, plain and simple. That’s the system Sotomayor just said
was “wonderful.”

Why should admittance to elite colleges be inherited like an
aristocratic title? And why on earth would a Supreme Court justice
whose ostensible concern is fostering diversity and assisting
disadvantaged minorities be in favor of such a system?

Foes of inequality who criticize race-based affirmative action
should demand the end of legacy admissions with equal fervor. It
boggles the mind to think they would have Sotomayor against them in
this fight, too.

Read Reason‘s Shikha Dalmia on why legacy preferences
are the “original
sin” of admissions policies.

Some
segments of the Internet are abuzz with the claim by climate change
skeptic Steven Goddard (Tony Heller) over at his Real Science blog
that
NASA/NOAA have been jiggering the numbers so that they can
claim that warmest years in the continental United States occurred
recently, not back in the 1930s. Folks, please watch out for

confirmation bias.

Via email, I asked Anthony Watts, proprietor of WattsUpWithThat, what he thinks
of Goddard’s claims. He responded…

…while it is true that NOAA does a tremendous amount of
adjustment to the surface temperature record, the word
“fabrication” implies that numbers are being plucked out of thin
air in a nefarious way when it isn’t exactly the case.

“Goddard” is wrong is his assertions of fabrication, but the
fact is that NCDC isn’t paying attention to small details, and the
entire process from B91’s to CONUS creates an inflated warming
signal. We published a preliminary paper two years ago on this
which you can read here:  http://ift.tt/MhnP2W

About half the warming in the USA is due to adjustments. We’
received a lot of criticism for that paper, and we’ve spent two
years reworking it and dealing with those criticisms. Our results
are unchanged and will be published soon.

In his email, Watts also cites the strong criticisms of
Goddard’s earlier claims over at the
Blackboard blog:

Goddard made two major errors in his analysis, which produced
results showing a large bias due to infilling that doesn’t really
exist. First, he is simply averaging absolute temperatures rather
than using anomalies. Absolute temperatures work fine if
and only if the composition of the station network remains
unchanged over time. If the composition does change, you will often
find that stations dropping out will result in climatological
biases in the network due to differences in elevation and average
temperatures that don’t necessarily reflect any real information on
month-to-month or year-to-year variability. Lucia covered this well
a few years back with a toy model, so I’d suggest people who are
still confused about the subject to consult her
spherical cow.

His second error is to not use any form of spatial weighting
(e.g. gridding) when combining station records. While the USHCN
network is fairly well distributed across the U.S., its not
perfectly so, and some areas of the country have considerably more
stations than others. Not gridding also can exacerbate the effect
of station drop-out when the stations that drop out are not
randomly distributed.

I note that
Watts commented on the, hmmm, accuracy of Goddard’s work over
at the Blackboard as well:

Anthony Watts
(Comment
#130003)
June 6th, 2014 at 8:00 am

I took Goddard to task over this as well in a private email,
saying he was very wrong and needed to do better. I also pointed
out to him that his initial claim was wronger than wrong, as he was
claiming that 40% of USCHN STATIONS were missing.

Predictably, he swept that under the rug, and then proceeded to
tell me in email that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Fortunately I saved screen caps from his original post and the edit
he made afterwards.

See:

Before:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.w…..before.png

After:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.w….._after.png

Note the change in wording in the highlighted last sentence.

In case you didn’t know, “Steve Goddard” is a made up name.
Supposedly at Heartland ICCC9 he’s going to “out” himself and start
using his real name. That should be interesting to watch, I won’t
be anywhere near that moment of his.

This, combined with his inability to openly admit to and correct
mistakes, is why I booted him from WUWT some years ago, after he
refused to admit that his claim about CO2 freezing on the surface
of Antarctica couldn’t be possible due to partial pressure of
CO2.

http://ift.tt/Tp25GA

And then when we had an experiment done, he still wouldn’t admit
to it.

http://ift.tt/Tp25WV

And when I pointed out his recent stubborness over the USHCN
issues was just like that…he posts this:

http://stevengoddard.wordpress…..reeze-co2/

He’s hopelessly stubborn, worse than Mann at being able to admit
mistakes IMHO.

In his email to me, Watts details the sort of bureaucratic
bungling that produces what he thinks an significant artificial
warming signal in the lower 48 temperature records from which he
concludes:

It is my view that while NOAA/NCDC is not purposely
“fabricating” data, their lack of attention to detail in the
process has contributed to a false warming signal in the USA, and
they don’t much care about it because it is in line with their
expectations of warming. The surface temperature record thus
becomes a product of bureaucracy and not of hard science…Never
ascribe malice to what can be explained by simple incompetence.

See my earlier reporting on Watts et al.’s U.S. temperature data
paper in my article, “Everyone
Freaks Out About Two New Climate Change Studies.” In response
to criticism of that paper Watt and his colleagues have, as noted
above, recrunched the data and will release a new paper soon.

Out of Gallup’s regular list of American institutions, only the
police (53 percent), small business (62 percent), and the military
(74 percent) poll above 50 percent. And the military is actually
down from a recent high of 82 percent in 2009.

For more information, go here.

As
prohibitionists
typically do, Pope Francis conflated drug use with drug abuse
when he
denounced marijuana legalization on Friday. “Let me state
this in the clearest terms possible,” he said. “The problem of drug
use is not solved with drugs!” But what, exactly, is “the problem
of drug use”? Francis seems to have in mind a harmful,
life-disrupting pattern of heavy use. “Drug addiction is an evil,
and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise,” he said. “To
think that harm can be reduced by permitting drug addicts to use
narcotics in no way resolves the problem.” Even if we agree that
“drug addiction is an evil,” prohibition clearly magnifies that
evil by consigning users to a black market where prices are
artificially high, quality and potency are unpredictable, dangerous
methods of administration are encouraged, conflicts are resolved
through violence, and consumers are subject to arrest at any
moment. It is debatable whether these costs can be justified by
reference to the potential addicts they deter, especially since the
burdens are imposed on people who do not benefit from them. In any
case, what about drug users who are not addicts? Francis seems to
think they do not exist.

Although Francis referred to “alcohol abuse” as an example of
addiction, he did not condemn drinking per se (a dicey proposition,
given wine’s role as a Catholic sacrament). But he made no such
distinction in connection with the currently prohibited
intoxicants, which most people manage to consume without ruining
their lives. That black-and-white attitude may not be surprising
coming from a man with “years of personal experience ministering to
addicts in the drug-laden slums of the Argentine capital,” as the
Associated Press puts it. Similarly, the work of the cops and
addiction treatment specialists who
welcomed the pope’s remarks regullarly exposes them to people
with drug problems. It is risky to draw general conclusions from
such skewed samples. To put it another way, Francis’ encounters
with down-and-out paco addicts in Buenos Aires tell us nothing
about the merits of letting lawyers and schoolteachers in Colorado
unwind with a little Cheery O.G. after a hard day at work.

The U.S. Supreme Court today issued a decision in the case of
Utility
Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency in
which it more or less affirmed the EPA’s power to regulate the
emissions of carbon dioxide so long as they are emitted with other
pollutants that the agency has the authority regulate under the
Clean Air Act. The EPA claimed that since it had the authority to
regulate any facility that emitted more 100 tons of other
pollutants per year, it could similarly regulate any facility that
emitted more than 100 tons of carbon dioxide annually. More than 6
million such facilities including schools, big apartment buildings,
hospitals, dairy farms, and so forth emit that much carbon dioxide.
The agency concluded that regulating that many facilities would be
“absurd” so it decided to “tailor”
its regulations so that they applied only to facilities that
emitted greenhouse gases equivalent to more than 75,000 tons of
carbon dioxide annually.

The Supreme Court ruled today that the EPA can regulate the
emissions of greenhouse gases from facilities that emit 100 tons of
the other pollutants that it already has Clean Air Act authority to
regulate. Since, for example, big power plants, refineries, and
cement factories emit significant amounts of pollutants like
nitrogen oxides, particulates, ozone and so forth, the agency will
have the power to limit to their greenhouse gas emissions as
well.

As the Associated Press
reported:

‘‘EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case,’’
[Justice Antonin] Scalia said. He said the agency wanted to
regulate 86 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from plants
nationwide, and it will it be able to regulate 83 percent of the
emissions under the ruling.

Will the ruling have any effect on the Obama administration’s
proposals to force electric power generating plants to cut their
greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent? Not really. From AP:

The EPA and many environmental advocates said the ruling would
not affect the agency’s proposals for first-time national standards
for new and existing power plants. The most recent proposal aims at
a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from existing
power plants by 2030, but won’t take effect for at least another
two years…

…David Doniger, director of the climate and clean air program
at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the ruling was a
green light for the administration’s proposal to cut greenhouse gas
emissions from existing power plants. ‘‘There’s no adverse effect
on EPA’s power plant proposal. In fact, it looks like the court is
reaffirming EPA’s authority to set those standards,’’ Doniger
said.

Given Republican obstructionism with regard to climate change
policy, this is the sort of “second best” piecemeal regulation that
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman feels forced to

endorse today. 

The Cold War is heating back up and
the Russians have an edge on The Land of the Free in one critical
arena: drone-delivered pizza.

The Russian Federation – whether its
restricting speech online, making work visas
more difficult to obtain, or
muscling ethnic minorities in the recently snatched
Crimean peninsula – is not exactly known for its commitment to
limited government. And yet, The Moscow Times
reported yesterday on an activity that the Ivan Dragos of the
world get to enjoy while the Rocky Balboas do not:

A pizzeria in the Komi republic’s capital city
of Syktyvkar has launched a helicopter drone-delivery
service.

DoDo Pizza’s first unmanned delivery was made on Saturday
to much applause from witnesses in the city’s main
square. …

The drone was able to complete its task in just
half an hour, and the pizzeria’s owners plan to make
drone deliveries a regular practice.

This is the Sputnik of 2014, people.

Why is it that Russians (and
others worldwide) can get a quintessentially American dish
delivered by an unmanned aerial vehicle, but Americans cannot?
Regulations courtesy of the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA).

The FAA is tasked with rolling out a set of regulations for
commercial drone use in the U.S. by 2015, but in the meantime,
they’ve left businesses in a sort of
legal limbo. The agency has this year grounded operations of a
beer
delivery service, a
flower delivery service, and even a volunteer
search-and-rescue organization, because they don’t conform to
FAA rules (which
aren’t necessary legally binding). The agency made some
progress earlier this month by allowing BP to become the first
fully approved commercial drone operator, but that doesn’t exactly
deserve applause. Apparently, it took
over a year to work that deal out, and it shows the FAA is
more interested in picking winners and losers than simply allowing
any business to adopt drone technology and become more cost
effective for consumers. 

Of couse, you just might get pepper-sprayed by a drone in
America. Read Scott Shackford’s coverage of that
here.