Well stated!

I think we should demand a public display of how they come up with and publish their temperature measurements. It would be analogous to a used car salesman trying to interest someone while the tires leak air, the oil runs out of the engine and will not start while the bumpers are falling off.

“Robust” just does not describe what our confidence level should be regarding these temperature measurements.

Expose the code and bust the Anti-trust Cabal of Climatology.
Shiny
Ed

Ha. Nice bass line too.

It was an excellent segment and I haven’t seen it about three or four years.

For people who are uncomfortable with the concept and language of morality and ethics, other measures of right and wrong are recruited that provide an “arms length” decision-making mechanism. “Science” is one, “Capitalism” tends to be another. Yet in both cases, they only work well if the people engaged in their pursuit are honest. If you sift through the many years of propaganda relating to AGW, there is obsessive reliance on “the data” and its interpretation, and hysterical attacks on people who question them. This happens all up and down the food chain of this cult and I have been grimly amused at academic lectures, by English professors, who link the fall of Troy to Hurricane Katrina to George Bush’s denial of the Kyoto Treaty. Even to non-scientists, the fact that the so-called climate models have been utter failures in predicting anything should have been a tip off.

In the end, however, it was widely held perception that “scientists” were somehow immune from corruption and mistakes that I find most bizarre. When the scientists start suppressing the data, everyone should have understood what that meant. It seems very obvious that there was widespread, if passive, complicity in the scientific community as many found it convenient to raise funds for their research as long as it was linked to the big, methane-filled cash cow, Anthropogenic Global Warming.

One of the ongoing, low-level grumblings of the anti-war Left is the rate of PTSD found in returning vets. I’ve seen the number 138,000 bandied about. Considering the fact that Hasan was supposed to be counseling these folks, the irony is mind-boggling. The Left doesn’t actually want to do anything to help vets with PTSD, as healthy vets don’t feed the pacifist narrative. If it weren’t so grotesque, the claims of Pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Vicarious Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, that were proffered as an appropriately non-Islamist root cause of Hasan’s mass homicide, would be Onion parody material.

As a matter of interest, this group is actively addressing the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan Vets, especially in the area of mental health: http://iava.org/

They also link to other organizations, including the Wounded Warrior Project, which I am proud to support.

Study or no study, opposition is the best course.

In many of the books I’ve read on the 1930s, the authors note the ease at which Communists became Nazis (and, presumably, in 1940s, vice-versa).

The beliefs of our elite are uncomfortably close to Islam already: the caste-like hierarchy (affirmative action for our elites; the moslem-dhimmi division in Islam), the color symbolism (green), the power of women (released in our elites; suppressed in Islam) and; the self-justification for rule (because our elites alone can save the planet; because God appointed Muslims rulers).

I agree with you that Aristotle is a paternalist who advocates a startlingly encompassing role for government. He’s no libertarian. But he does advocate private control in certain instances, and medical care is one of them. Education is another. In saying he there gives voice to a classic libertarian argument, I didn’t mean to suggest that he champions it across the board; as you point out, medical care is for him the exception rather than the rule.

I think the larger point of the passage is revealed by what follows immediately after what I quoted. Aristotle is saying that private judgment is better than a universal rule “in medicine and all other matters which give scope for care and prudence.” But to be able to do better, you have to know the universals. Your doctor knows your particular case and can prescribe more effective treatment for you than some bureaucracy that by definition must prescribe rules across the board, but he still has to know medicine. Similarly, a politician, to make judgments in general or in particular cases, has to understand statesmanship. Hence the transition from the Ethics to the Politics.

Your argument presupposes that people get personalized or at least individualized insurance care from private insurers, which simply isn’t true. So if it’s bad for a government to use universal rules it stands to reason that he would also be opposed to a private system which in practice does the same. Unless you want to claim that Aristotle was a capitalist, and a laizzes-faire one at that, another concept which would have been as foreign to Aristotle as rights would.

However, your core purpose in this post is to rail against those who misquote Aristotle. In that one thing have you succeeded, but even then only partially. I agree with you that attributing that quote to Aristotle is egregious, but I think it’s equally problematic to attribute ideas to Aristotle that weren’t his, even if one is able to site the book directly. What I mean is, it only takes a few moments of reading the section to see that not only would Aristotle have supported a public option, he would have been more inclined to adopt a truly nationalized health care system.

For example, just a few paragraphs above the section you’ve quoted, Aristotle says:

“But it is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law; for they will not be painful when they have become customary. But it is surely not enough that when they are young they should get the right nurture and attention; since they must, even when they are grown up, practise and be habituated to them, we shall need laws for this as well, and generally speaking to cover the whole of life; for most people obey necessity rather than argument, and punishments rather than the sense of what is noble.”

Not only does he advocate a public education, but he advocates an extreme form of it wherein the state chooses our occupation and how it is that we should be nurtured. Of particular note is the part where he says “and generally speaking to cover the whole of life”, mostly because he is, in no uncertain terms, stating that the continued happiness of the people is reliant on a complete and total immersion into a culture which is dependent solely on the state. Further, when considered in context, it’s clear from the paragraph above that his “classic objection” to government interference is part of his argument against the spartan state where people lived as “Cyclops-fashion, ‘to his own wife and children dealing law” which is immediately followed by another instance of Aristotle arguing against privatization.

Abuse of Aristotle indeed.