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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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This sounds like fun: An online and open excercise in stylometry/textometry: Crowdsourcing the Gleick “Climate Strategy Memo” authorship
If enough people participate, it might become a story in itself.
UPDATE: I would like to add a few more thoughts.
– First, as I said in the comments, battle has been joined. Joe Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, has openly accused Peter Gleick of forgery in this video interview for the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. There is no going back for either of them. Gleick must now sue Bast for libel if he is to maintain what’s left of his reputation.
– Second thought: the key question in determining whether Gleick’s story of receiving the strategy memo in the mail is true or not is whether the strategy memo was created before or after the authentic documents. Thus Gleick to prove his innocence, or Bast to prove Gleick’s guilt, must concentrate their attentions on the period between “the beginning of 2012”, when he says he got the strategy document, and the creation of the other documents.
For one thing, we need an actual date of receipt rather than “the beginning of 2012”. If it can be proved that there is information (e.g. specific figures) or chunks of exact wording in the strategy document that was not in existence at the date that Gleick says he received it, then he did not receive it but created it. Of course we also need to see the paper copy and the envelope it came in. Dr Gleick has no reason to refuse to provide this; if he has been the victim of a fraud or sting himself he should wish to uncover the culprit.
After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you’ve lost the power to convince them of anything else.
– Megan McArdle
Do you ever find the structure of a situation in the news fascinating in its own right, as you would the plot of a novel, almost irrespective of how it pans out in the real world?
Some documents were tricked or leaked out of an anti global warming thinktank, the Heartland Institute. Most of these documents have been admitted to be genuine, and while opinions differ as to how shocking they are, they were certainly not stuff that the Heartland Institute had wished to share with the world. So far the tables are turned on the the Climategate affair.
Only…
The juiciest document, the one that had the really damning quotes (it spoke of “dissuading teachers from teaching science”) is different from all the others. Megan McArdle, not herself in the sceptic camp, says it is looking faker by the minute.
If it does turn out that it is a fake, then the tables are turned on the table turners. But… but… why would anyone be so daft? Having pulled off the trick, got the goods, why put your gains at risk for such a trivial advantage as that of providing a quotable summary?
One of the reasons for the veracity of this particular document being in doubt is that it is sloppy. It contains errors of fact and is written in an unprofessional style. Still, that happens sometimes. “Organisation Contains Sloppy Writer” is not exactly a headline to make them hold the front page. Maybe the sloppiness is a reason to suppose it genuine. But let us run with it being fake for a while – was the faker in a hurry for some reason? It reminds me (and a lot of people) of the Rathergate memos. What a daft error it was to publish them in the default Microsoft Word font of 2004 when they were meant to have originated in the 1970s. I thought then and still think now that they were a first draft released too soon. Could something similar have happened here?
The Guardian pulls in its horns a little. Its story now carries a rather grudging little update saying that the Heartland Institute now claims one document is a fake. The Guardian does not make it as clear as it ought in my opinion that the doubtful document is the very one that had all the good quotes.
At this point, like all good detective stories, a whole new sub plot bubbles up. The climate sceptic blogs have a suspect and name him with what seems to me ridiculous confidence given that the stated evidence against him is vague; mostly a matter of similarities of style. Now who’s risking all they have gained for a trivial advantage? If their suspect turns out to be wrongly accused, the story, which they had snatched back and made into one about fakers rather than leakers, will be forfeit again.
And so it goes – and so it stalls, last time I looked. The person named has not responded to emails; he appears to be offline. But why shouldn’t he be offline? Do you spend your Saturdays checking your email to see if you have been accused of any career-ending shenanigans in the last few hours? Meanwhile other strange portents are seen; open letters are published then retracted and both sides go about with an air of knowing more than they are letting on.
Agatha Christie would put in the second murder about now.
UPDATE, 21 FEBRUARY:
The second body duly falls.
That “person named” to whom I alluded so delicately was Peter Gleick. He has now admitted obtaining the documents by deception. I note that the very thing that led to his name being mentioned as a suspect were similarities of writing style between Gleick’s published writing and the “different” email. Nonetheless he claims that he did not alter any of the emails he obtained. As to that, here is a page listing 100 interjections of the sort that express emotion without actually pinning one down to having said anything. Choose as appropriate. I quite like “hmm” and “ahem” myself, but my favourite must be “uh-huh” (affirmation) differing by only a breath from “uh-uh” (negation).
Hat tip to Douglas2 in the comments.
… to save the NHS, says Ed Miliband.
My first thought was, gosh, that’s nice, three months in which to kill it. I suspect that I am in a minority: the outpouring of love, loyalty and vows to defend the NHS unto death coming from the Guardian commenters to this report and to Miliband’s own article resemble nothing so much as the frenzied cries of “Deus vult!” that greeted Pope Urban II when he declared the First Crusade. I further suspect that when it comes to this issue the knights of the Guardian would indeed get support from the peasants of the Sun and the Daily Mail.
Heigh-ho. Just for the record, I shall repost an article that is now more than ten years old. It is by Anthony Browne, once Health Editor of the Guardian‘s Sunday sister, the Observer, and at one time a passionate supporter of the NHS:
Even as you read this, in almost every hospital in the country, there will be elderly, vulnerable people left for hours and sometimes days on trolleys. Each year, thousands of British people – the young, the old, the rich, the poor – die unnecessarily from lack of diagnosis, lack of treatment and lack of drugs. They die and suffer unnecessarily for different reasons, but there is just one root cause: the blind faith the Government has in the ideology of the National Health Service, and our unwillingness to accept not just that it doesn’t work, but that it can never work.
With a whoop and a holler the Guardian reports that Bjorn Lomborg’s climate sceptic think tank is to close. Before anyone tells me, yes I know that “climate sceptic” is not a good description of Lomborg’s opinions. The article itself is more accurate.
It seems the Danish government cut off funding:
… Denmark’s general election last year ushered in a new administration less keen to support his views. Earlier this month, the Danish government confirmed that it had cut more than £1 million in funding for Lomborg’s centre. As a result, he only has funding in place until the end of June.
Good news for the Danish taxpayer, one might think, but I suspect that the stream of kroner diverted away from Lomborg’s think tank is unlikely to be returning their way.
The Guardian commenters, mostly warmists in a much stronger sense than Lomborg, assume that this closure (if it happens) is a benefit for their cause. I doubt that is entirely true. They are living in the world before the internet. In that world, the major weapon in the battle of ideas was the catapult. The difficult bit was throwing your ideas hard enough and far enough. These days, though the loss of a big catapult is still a blow, anyone who cares to fight can find a little catapult and, er, my military metaphor has gone the way of the mangonel, but the new difficult bit is not projection but acceptance. Getting believed. If your problem is that the people are already half inclined to think that your opinion has a little too much of the pravda, the official line about it, the last thing you want to do is have it known that the opposition were silenced by anything other than argument.
They said it would never be agreed. Then they said it would never be launched. Then they said it would fail. When it was a success, the euro-haters still insisted that the single currency was a recipe for economic chaos and political instability. The phobes are proving to be wrong again. At a time when so much of Europe’s political leadership is in flux, the single currency is the steadying point in an uncertain and worrying world.
Imagine that the recent turbulence on the continent had occurred when Europe still traded in pre-euro currencies. What would have happened to the French franc when neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen forced the Prime Minister to quit? The franc would have plunged. What would have happened to the Dutch guilder when an anti-immigration party with a dead leader impelled itself into government? The guilder would have plunged too. Before a German election too close to call, even the stolid old mark would be gyrating. And instability in currency markets would be fuelling even more political chaos: a vicious, downward cycle.
That this has not happened is thanks to the euro. The single currency has taken all this political upheaval in its calm stride.
– From an anonymous editorial in the Observer headed “A tolerant euro”.
From 2002, in case you were wondering.
Hey, “tyranny” was his word, not mine. Sid Ryan writes in the Guardian:
There have been some serious incidents at the camp in the last few months including: thefts, tents being slashed and minor assaults. These problems are not of Occupy’s making, but they’re happening on its watch. When anyone is challenged about people’s behaviour they’re quick to cry “persecution” and appeal to the founding principles of inclusion. If Occupy can’t solve the problem of behaviour on-site, a hostile media and the police will end the movement before it gets going.
Even people who aren’t aggressive or violent can derail the movement. The very nature of the general assembly (GA), whereby everyone can wield a veto, makes it inevitable. A block should be used only if the blocker feels so strongly that they would rather leave the movement than see it carried through, but it is rarely used as such and rarely with a full understanding of the issues at stake. Occupy proudly states that the GA is “real democracy”, in fact it is a tyranny that makes it possible to drown out a hundred rational voices with a single irrational one.
Schadenfreude aside, Mr Ryan’s article provides an interesting case study of an attempt at non-coercive organisation, a subject that interests many libertarians. Perhaps what stops it working for them is Original Sin. I refer to the sinful desire, shared by both the reformist and the revolutionary wings of Occupy, to coerce others.
Added later: Guardian commenter Forlornehope mentions the Seige of Münster. One hopes events will not come to such a pass that St Paul’s ends up being adorned in the manner of St Lambert’s Church:
Vigorous preparations were made, not only to hold what had been gained, but to proceed from Münster toward the conquest of the world. The city was being besieged by Franz von Waldeck, its expelled bishop. In April 1534 on Easter Sunday, Matthys, who had prophesied God’s judgment to come on the wicked on that day, made a sally with only thirty followers, believing that he was a second Gideon, and was cut off with his entire band. He was killed, his head severed and placed on a pole for all in the city to see, and his genitals nailed to the city gate. Bockelson, better known in history as John of Leiden, was subsequently installed as “king”.
Claiming to be the successor of David, he claimed royal honours and absolute power in the new “Zion”. He justified his actions by the authority of visions from heaven, as others have done in similar circumstances. He legalized polygamy, and himself took sixteen wives. (John is said to have beheaded one wife himself in the marketplace; this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.) Community of goods was also established. After obstinate resistance, the city was taken by the besiegers on June 24, 1535, and in January 1536 Bockelson and some of his more prominent followers, after being tortured, were executed in the marketplace. Their dead bodies were exhibited in cages, which hung from the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church; the cages still hang there, though the bones were removed later.
Exposed: Taxman’s ‘illegal’ war against Britain’s small businesses. That is the title of a most interesting report in the Independent. Not so much a war, I would have said, as a shakedown.
The Government is unlawfully using late-payment penalty fines against tens of thousands of small firms who do not file their tax returns on time as a “cash-generating scheme” for the Exchequer.
In a damning judgement, the Tax Tribunal has ruled that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is operating a policy of “deliberately” waiting months before alerting businesses that have not filed their tax returns so that late- payment fines stack up.
…
“It is no function of the state to use the penalty system as a cash-generating scheme,” said the judge, Geraint Jones, QC. “We have no doubt that any right-thinking member of society would consider that to be unfair and falling very far below the standard of fair dealing expected of an organ of the state.”
While applauding his judgement in this case, I question his expectations of standards of fair dealing by an organ of the state. It’s not as if they didn’t try much the same with speed cameras.
I gather HMRC are to appeal*. Confusion to their knavish schemes.
(Via Englishman’s Castle)
*This sentence originally read “I gather HMRC are appealing.” Edited for accuracy.
Ten years ago today a Guardian headline read Euro lobby demands stronger lead.
Lord Heseltine effectively accused Mr Blair of a lack of nerve as he dismissed the government’s five economic tests as a “protective barrier” behind which it could “cower in order to have apparently intellectually defensible reasons for putting things off”.
On the next day, 1 January 2002, the same newspaper reported on the launch of the Euro.
The mood was uniformly upbeat at parties, pageants and ceremonies bidding farewell to once-treasured marks, francs, pesetas and lire.
“Our countdown is leading towards a new era,” Wim Duisenberg, the Dutch president of the European Central Bank (ECB), declared in Frankfurt. “By using euros, we will give a clear signal of the confidence and hope we have in tomorrow’s Europe.”
On a day of highs, Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, hit the highest note. “We are witnessing the dawn of an age that the people of Europe have dreamed of for centuries: borderless travel and payment in a common currency,” he said in a new year message.
Mr Prodi marked the change by buying flowers in euros, not schillings, on a visit to Vienna. And in remarks that will alarm a British government watching uncomfortably from the sidelines, the former Italian prime minister pledged that the arrival of the euro in people’s pockets would lead “ineluctably” to more economic coordination – the great fear of sceptics.
Lest anyone be tempted to gloat, here is a final quote, this one dating only from a month or two ago, from Patrick Crozier of this parish:
How to stop worrying about “contagion”
Just remember that every country in the Western world already has the disease.
I am sure there is some anti-EU moral to be squeezed out of this strange song of worship for a big (and apparently real) German excavator built by Krupps, possessed of a artificial mind, feared even by Beelzebub and used for fighting Godzillas.
My title comes from a comment by one crashstitches79.
Perhaps there is more of a pro-EU moral? Or an anti-Godzilla moral. Awesome, regardless.
Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Tim Blair have described the universe. Blair’s Law is “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force”.
On the 15th November, the Guardian gave over its comment pages to people from Occupy London. Most of the resulting articles were produced by earnest but weak-minded hippies. Two of the articles made the hippies look sensible.
The first of these was sad. It was the last of a set of three mini-articles by Occupiers on welfare, education and law; the law part being by written by a person “commonly known as dom.” It is important to him that you use that formulation, including the lack of an initial capital letter. He says,
Most days I walk around the site teaching people about the legal system, about the law, about how they’re being enslaved by a body of rules and statutory instruments. The prison without bars is made by bits of paper.
Bits of paper like your birth certificate. All registered names are Crown copyright. The legal definition of registration is transfer of title ownership, so anything that’s registered is handed over to the governing body; the thing itself is no longer yours. When you register a car, you’re agreeing to it not being yours – they send you back a form saying you’re the “registered keeper”. It’s a con. That’s why I say I’ve never had a name.
I must stress that I do not dispute the right of the entity commonly known as dom to call himself what he pleases, and in politeness I shall act in accordance with his preferences if ever I meet him. Apparently he wears one of those jester’s hats with bells on it. Later in the piece he suggests that we google “lawful rebellion”. I did, and soon it came to me that I had heard that phrase before, on this post and others on the EU Referendum site. That post in turn links to a site called The British Constitution Group. One glance at the site is enough to show its appeal to libertarians, Tory Anarchists and allied trades. I want to like it. I’m usually a complete sucker for a bit of Magna Carta and the Rights of Englishmen. But on reading around the various links within the site, not that complete. Someone has been reading too much Artemis Fowl. In those books, if you recall, a fairy cannot enter a human dwelling unless invited in. In the British Constitution Group website under the heading “CONSENT – The Most Important Word in the English Language” you will see the following:
An essential part of the arrest procedure is to read you your rights and then ask you ‘do you understand’ – the word ‘understand’ is synonymous with ‘stand-under’ – they are asking you whether you are prepared to ‘stand-under’ their authority… and when you answer yes – you are giving your consent.
…And because Persephone had eaten food in Hades, be it only six pomegranate seeds, she was doomed to return there. The concept of the hero being safe so long as he does not inadvertently perform some symbolic act that gives his enemies power over him is an ancient one and has great mythic power, but do not try this on irritable cops late at night.
The second Guardian article, by one Jon Witterick, was more clued-up and more sinister than the one by t.p.c.k.a.dom. Its title is Yes, defaulting on debts is an option. At first I thought it was about the financial situation in Greece and passed on to another story, thus nearly missing the tale of how Jon Witterick has avoided paying his debts and how, he claims, you can too. The key idea seems to be that debts cannot be sold on, and once again we meet the concept that you are safe so long as you do not speak the forbidden words:
I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed
Topping and tailing this admission of fraud and theft are a genuinely pitiable account of what it is like to be pursued by debt collectors and a genuinely repulsive attempt to argue that his decision not to pay what he owes is Iceland writ small. He does not say what he spent the money on, back before he decided it was not real.
Witterick’s website, to which I prudishly will not link, contains the following message:
→ Continue reading: Freemen of the land: an instance of Blair’s Law
Are Ridley Scott’s falling petals, which he seems to like so much that he puts them in his films over and over again, anything more than a way to gussy up the triumph of oligarchy, corporate capital and globalisation?
– Rick Moody, in a Guardian article entitled Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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