Michael Crichton on Ignorant Alarmism

The two party system has nothing to do with the fact that most Americans are addicted to handouts and don’t want the rest of us to have the freedom that the founders established.

Sure both parties are way more statist than the 5% of us who are about as libertarian as the founding fathers, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious differences between the parties.

When you actually look at voting records (rather than the leftist media), it’s VERY clear that the libertarians are all Republican. I should keep the following graph on speed dial because it demonstrates so succinctly captures the difference between the parties.

http://www.republicanliberty.org/libdex/liberplots.htm

The upper right triangle is the libertarian triangle and there are NO Democrats there in any year and NO Republicans in the lower-left authoritarian corner. Some years there is almost no overlap.

80 years ago the Socialists figured out that blathering on about how far they were from the Pepsi and Coke parties wouldn’t get them anywhere, so they cast their lots with the Dems.

Unfortunately, capital L Libertarians aren’t as smart and so they’ve spent the last 30 years kicking themselves in the arse. The net effect of the Libertarian party and the related self-indulgent claim to be apart from the fray has moved this country to the left, that is away from personal and economic freedom.

-Mercy

The global warming hysteria is something quite different.

“the Y2K failure suggests that, in situations where there is strong pressure to conform with a consensus arises, some form of institutionally sanctioned skepticism is necessary. The generic term for somone willing to argue against such a position is ‘devil’s advocate’, and the history of this term reflects the fact that the canonisation process in the Catholic church is one which naturally generates enthusiastic support. The office of the Promotor Fidei, popularly referred to as the ‘Devil’s Advocate’, was instituted to provide a skeptical check on such enthusiasm by collecting and presenting evidence against candidates for canonisation. In the criminal legal system, skepticism is institutionalized through rules that ensure legal representation, even for criminal defendants who are viewed by the community as ‘obviously guilty’.”

If you’re interested in the truth, institutionalized skepticism is a key tool. If you’re interested in promoting a particular world view or action, you’re going to try and do away with as many skeptics as possible.

According to http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D902G26G1&show_article=1, “President Bush is giving a Rose Garden speech on Wednesday on climate change to lay out the way he thinks the U.S. can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Into the fray he dives, at the same time a Nobel Peace Prize recipient writes a letter (co-signed by other scientists) asking the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to admit that there is no observational evidence that CO2 is causing the earth to warm: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/04/14/nobel-prize-winning-peacekeeper-asks-un-admit-climate-change-errors

Rick

Jaycee is right that this is a bad example for AGW as well. Y2K was a quantifiable, well understood problem with a known solution, while GW is poorly understood, unquantifiable and has no known solution, it not even being clear that we need one. Hence for Y2K those involved quietly got on and fixed the problem while the press and politicians jumped up and down hysterically, whereas with AGW those involved jump up and down along with the press and politicians!

Because the bug fixes were extensive, we only provided patches for the latest versions of our software packages forcing customers on older versions to bring forward their upgrades. This is one of the factors that led to the technology bubble: increased sales before 2000 followed by decreased sales in the subsequent few years. Bringing forward upgrades also lead to exaggerated figures for the cost the Y2K problem, where the entire cost of an upgrade was costed against Y2K, even thought the upgrade would have been paid for anyway in a couple of years.

I spent 2 years 1998-1999 working on information technology Y2K projects. In that time my teams found and fixed thousands of date related defects whose consequences would have ranged from minor through to critical failures. If we hadn’t done that work critical systems such as billing would have failed and companies would probably have failed : these were enterprises totally reliant on functioning computer systems.

I know there was a lot of media hysteria about Y2K, but there was also a *lot* of maintenance and correction work being done in companies all over the planet. This is the real reason that there were no apocalyptic failures : companies either fixed their problems, or made contingency plans, or both.

In the final 6 months before Dec 31, all normal maintenance and development projects at the company I was at then were stopped : all IT development and testing resources were applied to fixing date related problems.

So, yes, there was a lot of media hysteria about Y2K, but the problem didn’t go away by ignoring it or because the underlying problem didn’t actually exist, it went away because a lot of hard work was done to rectify problems which really truly did exist.

Cheers
Jaycee