Crunchy Con

News from the People's Republic of California:

A 39-year-old Southern California man has been arrested for misdemeanor child annoyance after allegedly paying a teenager $31 to spit in his face. The Ventura County Sheriff's Department says Charles Hersel was arrested Wednesday in a sting operation at a mall in Thousand Oaks. He's free from jail pending a court hearing. A sheriff's statement says Westlake High School students claimed Hersel paid them to yell profanities, spit and slap him in the face. Several also claimed he offered them cash to urinate and defecate on him.

What an idiot. Doesn't he know that if got a blog with comments boxes, he could get that service -- or reasonable facsimile thereof -- for free? Heh heh.

Reuel Marc Gerecht on why the domestic Islamic terrorism threat is real, and why the FBI isn't prepared to fight it:

For the FBI, religion remains a much too sensitive subject, much more so than the threatening ideologies of yesteryear. Imagine if Maj. Hasan had been an officer during the Cold War, regularly expressing his sympathy for the Soviet Union and American criminality against the working man. Imagine him writing to a KGB front organization espousing socialist solidarity. The major would have been surrounded by counterintelligence officers.

A law-enforcement agency par excellence, the FBI reflects American legal ethics. Because the FBI is always thinking about criminal prosecutions and admissible evidence, its intelligence-collecting inevitably gets defined by its judicial procedures. Good counterintelligence curiosity--that must come into play before any crime is committed--is at odds with a G-man's raison d'être. And much more so than local police departments--which are grounded to the unpleasantness of daily life--it is highly susceptible to politically correct behavior.

Powerfully intertwined in all of this is liberal America's reluctance to discuss Islam, Islamic militancy, jihadism, or anything that might be construed as invidious to Muslims. The Obama administration obviously doesn't want to get tagged with an Islamist terrorist strike in the U.S.--the first since 9/11. The Muslim-sensitive 9/11 Commission Report, which unambiguously named the enemy as "Islamist terrorism," now seems distinctly passé.

Thoughtful men should certainly not want to see a U.S. president propel a "clash of civilizations" with devout Muslims. However, clash-avoidance shouldn't lead us into a philosophical cul-de-sac. The stakes are so enormous--jihadists would if they could let loose a weapon of mass destruction in a Western city--that we should not prevaricate out of politeness, or deceive ourselves into believing that a debate between Muslims and non-Muslims can only be counterproductive.

Journalists too disarm themselves, at least when it comes to dealing with groups they deem to be Underdogs (this is where I think liberal bias in newsrooms is most damaging). It's not that journalists are especially sensitive to religion, and that's why they are, and always will be, incurious about the extent of Islamic radicalization in America's Muslim institutions and mosques. It's that they don't really understand religion, and the power of ideas, and feel in their bones their job is to protect Muslims from the great American unwashed masses, especially the Christian ones they're sure are out there ready to string up Muslims at the least opportunity.

We Americans, religious and secular both, have powerful fundamental views about religion that put radical Islam in a certain context, one that prevents us from understanding how unlike other American religious expressions it is -- and how much of a threat it is to the civil order. If you think of radical Islam not as a religion, but as a hostile ideology (e.g., communism), its nature becomes clearer.

Just got back from a long weekend in Philadelphia, for a reason that I'll be able to explain later. This morning, I went to divine liturgy at Holy Ascension Antiochian Orthodox Church, a mission parish in Devon, a small-town exurb of Philly. Let me tell you, if you live in the area and are curious about Orthodoxy, or are already Orthodox and want to try a new parish, check out Holy Ascension. The feeling there reminds me of the early days of the great Holy Cross parish in Linthicum, Maryland. It's a relatively small parish, but full of energy -- and kids (I think there were slightly more children than adults), which is a sign of vitality. I was pleased to meet a couple of faithful readers of this blog (hey guys!), and was sorry that I had to run off to the airport shortly after the liturgy ended. I would have loved to have stayed to talk.

Joseph, one of this blog's readers, is a college professor and an emigre from Texas. He told me he and his wife were concerned about how difficult homeschooling would be in Pennsylvania, given that its laws are more strict than in Texas. In fact, he said, they've found it to be much easier in the Philly area, because the cultural capital is so much more concentrated. I didn't have time to discuss this further with Joseph today, but given conversations I've had with other crunchy con homeschooling types in the area, the idea, I think what he means is that with so many colleges in the area, there are so many resources available to homeschoolers. I have an Anglican friend in the area whose family is part of a homeschooling cooperative on the Main Line, and the things he's told me about that group astonishes. Anyway, Joseph said that in the Philly area, there are lots of conservative Christians who are culturally engaged and building up the resources and networks to live a kind of Benedict Option. I know from talking to my friend C., another reader of this blog and a Chestnut Hill resident, that the farmers market and alt-food culture in Philly is rather advanced.

Like I said, I really wish I could have stayed longer to hear more about this, but airlines have this thing about leaving on time. But if Joseph or anybody else from the area cares to elaborate in the comments boxes, please do.

I don't see how the astonishing climate change e-mail scandal is anything but a disaster for the global warming community. This thing really does make one doubt what one had accepted as scientifically true, because the consensus was reported as overwhelming. Excerpt:

And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.

Wanna read all the files hacked out of the University of East Anglia's computer? Here ya go.

Karl Denninger has been reading them. Excerpt:

It gets better. Another message, this one allegedly from 2000:

It was good to see you again yesterday - if briefly. One particular thing you said - and we agreed - was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?

Oh, so it's not about the planet getting warmer, but rather is a convenient means of advancing an agenda that has already been pre-determined?

That's chilling (no pun intended). Honestly, I don't know what to believe now about this stuff. I mean, seriously, read this:

A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn't always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a "unified" view on climate change. On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to "beef up" conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a "big public splash."

The release of the documents has given ammunition to many skeptics of man-made global warming, who for years have argued that the scientific "consensus" was less robust than the official IPCC summaries indicated and that climate researchers systematically ostracized other scientists who presented findings that differed from orthodox views.

Since the hacking, many Web sites catering to climate skeptics have pored over the material and concluded that it shows a concerted effort to distort climate science. Other Web sites catering to climate scientists have dismissed those claims.

The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from prominent skeptics, for example.

Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as "prats" and "utter prats." In other exchanges, one climate researcher said he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap out of" a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.

In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with.

One email from 1999, titled "CENSORED!!!!!" showed one U.S.-based scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. "As for thinking that it is 'Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us' ... as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not," the email said.

More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.

Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public.

So much for disinterested science, and just-the-facts. I'm not ready to say that man-made climate change is a hoax, but I'd say those hackers did us all a great service by lifting the veil on those nasty sh**s in labcoats.

UPDATE: I'm not saying that I no longer believe that climate change is occurring, and that mankind has a lot to do with this. I find it hard to believe that so much data have been faked. Still, I am saying that I'm not sure what to believe, because my faith in the integrity and the honesty of climate scientists has been shaken by this.

UPDATE.2: Tyler Cowen says he doesn't think this episode proves much other than that you shouldn't put things in e-mail that you don't want exposed, and that some scientists engage in a form of discourse that harms their cause. Personally, it's not changed my mind that global warming is happening and that mankind's emissions have a lot to do with it, but it has changed my certainty about that conclusion, and, frankly, pissed me off that scientists would mess around with data to reach particular conclusions. I know, I know, it shouldn't be surprising that scientists turn out to be -- surprise! -- human beings. But the entire scientific enterprise depends on disinterested empiricism, and this scandal strikes a blow against the confidence laymen have in that aspect of science. It's why things like the Jayson Blair scandal hurts journalism as a whole, not just the integrity of The New York Times. People shouldn't be surprised to learn that journalists can be unethical, and can falsify or spin data to reach a predetermined conclusion, but if enough people come to believe that sort of thing is normative, or at least tolerated, it erodes the basis for journalism's authority. Another analogy: no one who knows anything about human nature and church governance can be shocked, exactly, when it's revealed that clerics can be just as corrupt as anybody else. But the credibility and authority of a church or religious organization depends greatly on the shared belief that the clergy are, in the main, incorruptible. For scientists, the standard of incorruptibility is honesty regarding the gathering, presentation and analysis of data.

It seems like I've been hearing about the coming commercial real estate crash for a long time now. This real estate guy on New Geography explains why in his view, it really is about to hit, and how we're all in for a world of hurt. Excerpt:

A year from now, the landscape of America will be forever changed. The office and retail markets will be vastly different than they look today. Not much of it will be good. Five years from now, will empty shopping centers and auto dealerships remain shuttered or will they be rebuilt or torn down and their use converted to something more productive? Will our politicians cease their meddling in the market and allow the market to heal itself? These are questions that will haunt our economy for the next decade.

Could be. I talked to a real estate agent today about the economy. He said he's had a terrible year. "And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better," he told me. He went on to say that financial trader friends of his are deeply pessimistic about our economic future. Said this fellow, "Those guys believe we're going to see 25 percent unemployment before this thing turns around. That's Great Depression levels."

If this stuff comes to pass, ideas like Slow Money will seem awfully boutique.