Israel’s ministry of health has been ordered to complete, within four months, a detailed set of regulations for medical marijuana, with an emphasis on making it genuinely available to patients. They’re still fixated on making sure it isn’t available to “recreational” users, but this is certainly progress — and a far cry from our own federal government, which continues to insist on a policy rooted in ignorance, deceit and self-deceit. I’ll be truly thankful when our government catches up with Israel on this subject.
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Israel legalizes medical marijuana
November 25th, 2009, 4:28 pm by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writer
Dumb presidential tricks
November 25th, 2009, 4:04 pm by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writerWhat’s going on with the (un-bowed) Obama?
November 25th, 2009, 4:01 pm by Mark LandsbaumWe don’t want to read too much into this, but what’s the deal with the President. The picture in our paper shows Barack Obama entirely veritcal when he greeted the India Prime Minister.
No bow. What’s up with that? Should Manmohan Singh be offended? What’s Japan and Saudi Arabia got that warrants the prez bow that India doesn’t?
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At what point is entire global warming scenario corrupted?
November 25th, 2009, 3:35 pm by Mark LandsbaumSome defenders of the revealed information from the U.K. Climate Research Unit leaked e-mails essentially say, “Oh, you’re taking things out of context,” or “It’s only a little piece of the big picture, which is really still is valid, trust us.”
“Trust us.” You’ve gotta love it. Why would anyone cook the books when all that’s at stake is a trillion dollars or so in research grants, taxes and corporate welfare. Trust us, indeed.
But these defenses, such as they are, miss the point. A blog posted at Climate-Skeptic.com and Anthony Watt’s WattsUpWithThat.com lays it out pretty well (emphasis ours):
“Anthony Watts has a statement from the American Meteorological Society about the Hadley CRU emails. The basic message is “nothing to see here, move along:”
For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.
But they miss the whole point — a large body of research is not useful if that body systematically excludes any work critical of the orthodoxy. In fact, they should re-reread this paragraph from their own letter:
The beauty of science is that it depends on independent verification and replication as part of the process of confirming research results. This process, which is tied intrinsically to the procedures leading to publication of research results in the peer-reviewed literature, allows the scientific community to confirm some results while rejecting others.
The emails describe a large conspiracy to corrupt exactly this process. We see scientists conspiring to keep secret results and working papers that would have allowed their worked to be checked, verified, and replicated.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto makes a similar, excellent point here and how the press plays along.
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Gold hits new high, dollar hits new low
November 25th, 2009, 2:34 pm by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writerThis might not be the most appropriate item for the day before Thanksgiving, but we do well to face facts. Gold hit a new high today of $1,189 an ounce (India bought a bunch), and the dollar hit a 15-month low. Should we be thankful to see evidence that the global empire the U.S. has built is not sustainable and that adding more programs and deficits in the middle of a recession is not the way to restore economic health? Perhaps we could be, despite the suffering involved, if there were any evidence that our wise overseers in Babylon-on-the-Potomac paid the slightest bit of attention to these signals.
Activist blogger jailed in China
November 25th, 2009, 2:17 pm by Brian CalleThe Chinese blogger and activist known for his efforts to help victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 has been sentenced to three years in prison this week.
We have become accustom to the Chinese government’s free speech-squelching antics and authoritarian policies and this is another example.
Chinese authorities claim that blogger Huang Qi violated the law because he possessed “state secrets.” Officials allegedly found two government documents in his home that they claimed he held illegally. Charging Huang with a crime that involves state secrets allows the Chinese courts to limit his access to an attorney and prevent certain witnesses from testifying because of the “classified” nature of the documents. China often uses state secret laws as cover to punish speech and activism.
Huang’s real crime was his website 64Tianwang which he used to document and criticize the Chinese government’s disaster response efforts for the earthquake and shed light on the faulty construction of school buildings that collapsed killing nearly 5,000 children during the quake.
After the quakes he aggressively advocated for investigations into the building standards of the schools, another faux pas with Chinese lawmakers, which landed him in jail.
To their credit the U.S. State Department has criticized Beijing about Huang claiming he was only helping along China’s efforts instituting the rule of law. But unfortunately a free speech hero will still be sleeping in a jail cell tonight.
Audio recording: ACORN spokesperson claims California Attorney General investigation outcome will be favorable
November 25th, 2009, 12:51 pm by Brian Calle
Another Gitmo official quits
November 25th, 2009, 9:36 am by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writerEven though Phillip Carter is a former WaPo staffer, this story on him resigning as asst. SecDef for detainee affairs doesn’t even pretend to try to dig for possible deeper reasons for the resignation, contenting itself with the official boilerplate about “personal and family reasons.” Whatever the reason — and once in a great while in politics the cover story is the real story — his resignation is bound to complicate Obama administration efforts to close Guantanamo and reorient detainee policies. Coming on top of Greg Craig’s resignation, it suggests (not for sure maybe, but suggests) that administration detainee policy is in disarray. As if things weren’t complicated enough already by the decision to try KSM and the others in a civilian court. I approve that decision (though multiple hypocrisies remain in administration policy) on the ground that if the government wants to run everything through the military on a wartime basis, it ought to declare war; otherwise it’s giving us the worst of both worlds: ad hoc repression and violation of liberties and aimless prosecution of military activities. But there’s little question the decision is unpopular and will complicate all future efforts to figure out how to handle detainees.
Forces in Afghanistan
November 24th, 2009, 5:18 pm by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writerSometimes charts can be more informative than words (did this word guy just say that?)
Does that seem like a lot of mercenaries to you, too? Stay cool. You’re only paying for them. Note that this was 2006, before Obama sent another 31,000 or so troops.
Then there’s the global warming “data”…
November 24th, 2009, 4:51 pm by Mark LandsbaumJonah Goldberg at National Review Online makes another point about the unfolding story of the global warming scandal unearthed in those hacked (stolen?) documents. There’s more than e-mail…
“Although the e-mails are open to interpretation, there is also a lot of computer code included that is being waded through. There are already indications that the basic code used in many of these models is flawed. There is where the depth of the scientific scandal will be decided. The refusal of many of the principals to share data and methods has long been a source of suspicion by anti-AGW folks.If it turns out that not only was data fudged, but, that even basic computations were done in error, it could be the beginning of the end of all this nonsense.”
Others see similar possibilities, including Iain Murray at Pajamas Media, who writes:
“They’re calling it ‘Climategate.’ The scandal that the suffix–gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade or so revealed by a thousand or so emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists released following a leak from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. This may seem obscure, but the science involved is being used to justify the diversion of literally trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. The CRU is the Pentagon of global warming science, and these documents are its Pentagon Papers.”
And others still, saw it coming back in April. Professor Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Emeritus at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters said:
“The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart. Heads will roll. [...] It is also very important to note that global climate models are unable to produce an output that is verifiable. In other words the output can neither be proved nor disproved. . . . Not only do our studies completely negate the claims made by climate change scientists, but we can demonstrate with a high degree of assurance that all the proposed measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions will be an exercise in futility. There is no way whatsoever that the costly mitigation measures will have a meaningful effect on the world’s climate.”
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