Get ye to a Montessori training centre!

FREE RADICAL 76 IS OUT!

The new Free Radical magazine is out, and this issue has lessons for most, good reading for all... and a special free offer that should have everyone happy. Read on.

When the Berlin Wall fell it was obvious to everyone with eyes to see and a brain to think with that socialism had been tried, and it had failed spectacularly. No one alive at the time could fail to get the lesson: Socialism Sucks.

But it seems lessons that big have to be relearned every generation: the tragedy of Venezuela should be this generation’s object lesson that Socialism Sucks.

Socialism came to Venezuela, and in its inevitable wake has come poverty, penury and oppressive totalitarian rule. This issue of The Free Radical sends out A Challenge to Young Socialists to watch, and to learn – and to reject this ideological harbinger of misery.

Let freedom reign! Let freedom reign in boardrooms, bedrooms and smoko rooms. We talk to NZ Green MP Metiria Turei who wants to let freedom reign in New Zealand’s hospital treatment rooms, allowing medical practitioners to prescribe a drug that, as Jonothan Rennie's History of Medical Marijuana points out, was once used by Queen Victoria – a drug that Lancet has confirmed is less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco.

There’s much, much more in this issue:

• Frank Shostak and Lary Sechrest explain how economic illiterates and central banks make us poor;


• Lindsay Perigo and Muriel Newman lament the rise and rise and rise of Nanny State - as Perigo describes her, that disgusting "hybrid of gargoyle and dominatrix";


• George Reisman on how the thricefold seductions of socialism, environmentalism and irrational skepticism (but surely I repeat myself) are fuelled by irrational education;


• we have an obituary for the New Zealand woman who’s left several generations of students around the world functionally illiterate;


• an interview with the man to whose gun shop knife-wielding would-be suicide victims seem to be drawn;


• dissidence from "a dissident president";


• global warming sense from another president - "environmental extremism is the modern equivalent of communism," says Czech president Vaclav Klaus;


• confessions of a former warmist who threw himself off the global warming gravy train;

advice for parents from Larry Sechrest and Tia Wooller: Don't fake reality;

• an obituary for a philosopher whose own grip on reality was slight. He died, we think;


• reviews of conman Conrad Black's eulogy to "champion of freedom" Franklin Roosevelt, Al Gore's upfront assault on reason and the internet, and Stephen Hicks' exegesis of Nietzsche and the Nazis;

… all this and much more in this latest issue including new and regular columnists to challenge your funnybone and your thinking, and great scads of The Free Radical's usual brand of irreverent wit.

I invite you to step inside Free Radical 76: Politics, Economics & Life As If Freedom Mattered, and load up on intellectual ammunition!

Subscribe here.


Download a digital copy here.

Buy your hard copy (NZ only) from one of these quality outlets.

But that's not all. We're so confident of the quality of each and every copy of The Free Radical that this month we're throwing open our digital back issues. That's right: All digital back issues of The Free Radical are free! See below for links.

We're convinced that once you see the quality of our back issues, you won't want to miss out on getting your NEW copy of the Free Radical in your letterbox hot off the press.

Enjoy!

Cheers, Peter Cresswell

EDITOR, THE FREE RADICAL
PC.Blogspot.Com

DIGITAL FREE RADICAL BACK ISSUES -- all free to good homes:
FREE RADICAL 75: The Naked Truth About Self-Defence
FREE RADICAL 74: The Environmental Noose is Tightening!
FREE RADICAL 73: The Assault on Free Speech
FREE RADICAL 72: The Great Environmental Sellout
FREE RADICAL 71: The Stolen Election!

Hell

Hell
Originally uploaded by Jack Scoresby. For TFR74?

Falufulu Fisi: "The main problems with the IPCC report were..."

The main problems with the IPCC report were the heavily reliance in statistical inferences techniques being used. The whole report is full of those models. Causations are still completely illusive & exclusive from those models being published in the IPCC report. There is no single model in the IPCC report that has established a direct or indirect causation between CO2 and Global average temperature and everything are inferences.

Causation modeling techniques which are widely adopted in Physics & Engineering establishes a flow-diagram of causes & effects, which are what the 'laws of physics are basically about', in a chain relationship of variables such that a cause 'x' produced an intermediate effect 'y' which in turn acts an intermediate secondary cause to produce an intermediate secondary effect 'z', which it then acts as a third intermediate cause to produce third intermediate or final effect 'w', and on, and on, ...

Here is a simple open loop of a causation diagram of the above example (common terms used by engineers & physicists is called block-diagram).

x --> y --> z --> w

Climate physical realities are not open loop as above but a dynamical feedback close loop system as one of the possible structural variable relations shown below:

All the causation models depicted above (if my diagrams will be parsed & drawn exactly as I post this message) established a cause & effect between input X which is the 'cause' and output W which is the effect. The intermediate variables Y and Z are unobservable, the only observables are X and W, while Y and Z are not visible to us.

FACTS:
-----

#1) In black box statistical inferences modeling you have something like this:

x --> ? --> w

The question mark depicted in the above diagram establishes nothing about the physics (ie, cause & effect) , it is just pure induction of trying to correlate cause 'x' & effect 'w'. The question is where is the physics?

We do have the data for both X & W (cause-&-effect), but we know very little or nothing else of what are the intermediate steps between input X (cause) and output W (effect) in a climate dynamical systems. Also we know nothing about of which structural variable relation as depicted in Model #1, Model #2, etc, of which is the correct ones, even if the unobservable variables Y and Z have been identified.

#2) All the structural variable cause-&-effect relations depicted in Model #1, Model #2, Model #3, and so forth above could be functionally THE SAME. This means that you could apply the same input (cause) X and output (effect) W in to the dynamical systems to be modeled which fits the data to a high degree, however selecting which of the 5 models , ie, Model #1, Model #2, and so forth that fits physical reality (causality) is another different matter, which is still unknown today. This basically says that there are many possible causation models that fit the data, but only one will represent physical processes that govern the climate dynamics and this single process has not been identified yet.

Important Notes:
----------------

a) The variable structural relations depicted in Model #1 to Model #5 are not exhaustive, I could have come up with more, but I think 5 are enough to make my point. I also used 4 variables for simplicity, where as in reality the number of variables is huge, where most of those are still unknown.

b) Any of Model #1 to Model #5 is called a 'dynamical system' or 'closed-loop feedback or feed forward dynamical system'. Currently it is not known how many of such systems are there in climate dynamical systems. The other point is, scientists have no idea of how these independent 'closed-loop feedback or feed forward dynamical systems' are structurally related to each other. Some of these sub-systems are coupled to each other. The atmospheric systems & oceanic systems have now been coupled together in a still yet simplistic model by climate scientists.

c) Model #1 to Model #5 are SISO (single input - single output), which I simplified to make my point clear, but in reality, climate is MIMO (multiple input - multiple output).

d) If you have a huge number of potential climate variables, where the majority are to be discovered and a huge number of independent 'closed-loop feedback or feed forward dynamical systems', then image how complex when you hook-up each and every variable and every closed-loop system to form a one holistic climate earth systems and this is what you call PHYSICS.

Now, if anyone thinks that Falafulu is a nutter & denier, please read what this NASA sponsored workshop proposed in improving the climate modeling by adopting physics of causations rather than black-box statistical inferences.

"WORKSHOP ON CLIMATE SYSTEM FEEDBACKS"
http://grp.giss.nasa.gov/reports/feedback.workshop.report.html

The person who chaired the workshop above was Dr. Rossow of NASA and here is one of the first peer review papers to be published relating to the problems in climate modeling which they raised during the workshop. Here is Dr. Rossow's paper, I recommend that you read the problems he cited in his paper , just skip the mathematical derivations part, and concentrate on the non-math part which still makes it readable to non-expert in math’s or engineering.

"Inferring instantaneous, multivariate and nonlinear sensitivities for the analysis
of feedback processes in a dynamical system: Lorenz model case-study"
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2003/2003_Aires_Rossow.pdf

If you're curious about the theory behind feedback dynamical systems, then here is some diagrams from wikipedia to take a peek at.

"Control theory"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory

Blogs aren't effective?

Joe, you say of "the 'blog' phenomena... I view them as the opposite of the capital accumulation idea. This isn't to say they aren't worth doing, or they aren't effective. They certainly can be effective in terms of activism. But they violate the principle of not consuming all your time in maintenance."

I don't agree. I have to say, I think this shows a fundamental misconception of the nature of blogs. It really depends on the blog and what you wish to do with it.

First of all, if you have a blog and you're doing it properly, a blog takes no more work than it takes Tibor, for example, to write a piece a day - and in fact the process of regularly writing a piece a day helps automatise both the skill and the habit of writing. The more you write, the better at it you become; blogs give you a strong incentive to get better, and to write more. Producing a daily article or three becomes easier the more you do it.

So blogs help produce writing that would otherwise not exist.

But you're not really accumulating 'capital,' you say? Well, you are if you're doing it right, say I. Over time, as you write pieces and commentary on daily events, you build up a valuable resource that can be and is drawn on for later pieces. No point in saying something anew when you can simply quote what you said on a similar topic previously. And the more you write, the more you can quote.
In fact, the more you write, the more 'capital' you have to 'categorise' and 'tag.' Once you begin 'tagging' your writing by subject heading, and even collecting together all your own writing across the web on the basis of its subject heading, it doesn't take long before you build up a nest-egg of pieces on a range of topics.

For instance, the Categories that collect the writing from my own blog 'Not PC' now boast 108 posts on Architecture and Urban Design, 15 on Common Law, 103 on Property Rights, 63 on Education and 107 on or related to Economics -- and even 136 pieces on or related to Objectivism! -- and all produced since I began the blog last April as a way of intellectual activism ideally suited to the Objectivist activist in New Zealand: the communication of passionate art and rational ideas to those who desperately need them.

So there's an enormous amount of 'capital' right there already, right?

And once categorised and collected,whose to say what these pieces might be used for later? Even on the net as they are already they're a wonderful example of 'capital accumulation' with nary any maintenance whatever, there to be used and referred to regularly. But this is 'capital' that can be invested in future projects, for even more 'capital accumulation.'

The collection of pieces on 'Cue Card Libertarianism' for instance, begun by Lindsay Perigo back in 1993 and progressively updated at my blog, cry out to be collected in book form once the updating is completed, perhaps supplemented with any one of the 257 pieces I've written since April on the subject of or related to Libertarianism.

So I just don't understand this idea that blogs are somehow profligate wastes of time and energy. If you're doing it right, nothing could be further from the truth.

To say that writing and producing blogs posts is inefficacious as a form of activism or of 'capital accumulation' is like saying Rand's own articles for the The Objectivist and the Objectivist Newsletter were inefficacious, since there was no capital accumulation, and the value of the effort diminished over time. This on its face wold be ludicrous, and would ignore the enormous pay-off from her investment, not just in the greatly expanded clarity of her own thinking in writing these many wonderful pieces, but also, for example, in providing the material for the many collections of these non-fiction essay that we all now enjoy.

Tibor's own articles provide another example of good capital investment: many of Tibor's best articles can be found collected and lightly edited in many of his own books -- his investment in writing his regular articles pays off by producing material and ideas he can then publish in book form.

"How about maintenance?" you say. "[Blogs] certainly can be effective in terms of activism. But they violate the principle of not consuming all your time in maintenance."

As I said above, if you do it right this is just not so. And you yourself "admit the [RoR] site requires a lot of maintenance work." A blog, if you're doing it right, requires little more maintenance than writing something for the front page of SOLO or RoR. And I doubt that you'd call that a waste of time.

Pop star or porn star? Guess right and you get fifty points. Guess wrong and, well, you still haven't really lost now have you.

A great game for a Friday night. Linked game here. 

 

An Election Day Practice Ballot 

Frank Lloyd Wright: Stained glass windows from Avery Coonley Playhouse, 1912 

It's not Alastair Campbell 

Photo by Brett Holverstott of Stuart Mark Feldman's sculpture group, The Future In Our Hands. Review of the landmark sculpture by Michael Newberry here. "It is a brilliant achievement," says Newberry, "not only in the sense that it is a realization of the artist's ecstatic vision, but it also holds the exalted place of being an innovative work in the history of art." 

Cartoon by Nick Kim, courtesy of The Free Radical. 

'El Canal' by Capuletti 

Hah! Who doesn't like demolition? 

'Icarus Landing,' Michael Newberry