Enjoy!

Now that I have had a chance to follow the link today, the Politico article headline now reads “Michele Bachmann wins Ames Straw Poll.”

It seems to me that Ron Paul’s supporters called them on it and Politico had the headline changed.

The Paul campaign does raise a great point here. I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever seen a headline reporting on any contest that listed 1st and 3rd place while leaving out who came in 2nd. Then when you consider that 2nd place is a statistical tie (Bachmann beat Paul by only 152 votes) while Tim Pawlenty had 2,530 fewer votes than Bachmann, one has to wonder why the headline writer would write such a headline if s/he didn’t have some sort of anti-Paul (or pro-TPaw) bias.

Personally, I believe the bias is more than anti-Paul but anti-libertarian (or anti-anyone who doesn’t tow the big government Republican Party line). Ron Paul would be ignored the way Gary Johnson is if Paul didn’t have such a strong following or wasn’t competitive with establishment candidates (though I wouldn’t really call Bachmann an establishment candidate either). Even as Paul has as an impressive showing as he did in Iowa, there are still those in the MSM who treat him as though he is a 1%er who doesn’t merit any serious attention. It wasn’t that long ago that talk radio host/blogger Hugh Hewitt wanted the RNC to take over the debates and “exile” Ron Paul (along with Herman Cain and Gary Johnson) from the debates.

But in the end, the results are what they are. If the Iowa straw poll is any indication, Ron Paul is a force to be reckoned with in this primary battle. Tim Pawlenty wasn’t as encouraged by his 3rd place finish in the straw poll as perhaps the Politico headline writer was. In fact, Pawlenty was so disappointed in the results that today he dropped out of the race. Gary Johnson says Pawlenty “should be applauded for a great effort” and respects Pawlenty’s decision but also said “it’s too early to be picking winners and losers” indicating that he won’t be wrapping up his campaign anytime soon.

I tend to agree. It is still very early. Tim Pawlenty made his exit just a day after Rick Perry announced that he too is getting into the race. And who knows what Sarah Palin will do?

My frustration is that it seems that the media is trying to decide which candidates are worthy of being covered and which are not. Leaving Ron Paul out of a headline he logically should have been in or ignoring Gary Johnson almost entirely is but a couple of examples. Newt Gingrich had a very valid point in the Iowa debate when he said that the campaign coverage should have more to do with ideas than on the horse race aspect. I really couldn’t care less about the inside baseball B.S. concerning which campaign is losing staff members or who gives the best stump speech. What I want to know is how candidate x plans to govern as president or explain why s/he would be better for our liberty and our economy than the current president.

************

Just as I was about the click on the publish button for the above post, I saw this video that I thought was very interesting and seems to confirm my suspicions about the media.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

It seemed to me at the time that the birther distraction was helping Obama greatly, siphoning away reasoned political opposition to his policies and making the fringe of the Republican and Tea Parties the primary focus of the public eye. Even moreso that Donald Trump had picked up the charge. The face of the right became Orly Taitz and Donald Trump, much as the face of the left had become Cindy Sheehan and Dennis Kucinich towards the end of the Bush years. It’s never a bad idea to paint your ideological opponents as crazy; it’s especially effective when they cooperate. The birthers are no different than the truthers or the “selected, not elected” morons. They accomplish exactly nothing but tarnish the reputation of people who have legitimate beefs with an administration.

Obama releasing the certificate seemed to me to be likely to take the wind out of the sails of the birther movement — it seemed to take the “crazy” off the political table. I thought that the crazy wouldn’t simply double-down, but as Obama has proven over the last few days, I was wrong.

The birthers have taken a non-issue and allowed it to paint Obama as the victim of racism. Then, just when they were gaining steam, Obama “gave in to their demands” in a political move intended to look like he’s taking the high road. The proper move from the birthers would be to walk away. Instead, they’ve pressed on even harder [and crazier] and it makes Obama look like even more of a victim than before.

So here’s my message to the birthers: You got played like a fiddle. You were, and you continue, to work for Obama’s ends rather than against them by distracting the nation from legitimate criticism of his policies. And as much as you think you’ve got ironclad evidence that Obama isn’t qualified to hold office, you — like the 9/11 truthers before you — are never going to win.

Let it go.

This is exactly the point Jonathan Schwarz makes in his article in The Huffington Post:

In all the discussion about the current U.S. bombing of Libya, something important has gone almost unnoticed — the lesson the United States is teaching the government of every country on earth. That lesson is: no matter what, no matter the inducements or pressure, never ever give up chemical weapons or a nuclear weapons program. Doing so will not ensure that the U.S. does not attack you — on the contrary, it will make it much more likely.

[…]

In Libya’s case, Muammar Gaddafi announced in December 2003 that it was renouncing all WMD — Libya possessed chemical weapons, ballistic missiles and a nuclear weapons program — and invited international inspectors to certify its compliance. The U.S. declared that this “demonstrates that, in a world of strong nonproliferation norms, it is never too late to make the decision to become a fully compliant NPT state,” and that Libya would be “amply rewarded.” From the perspective of many governments, Libya is now receiving its reward, in the form of hundreds of Tomahawk missiles and the likely downfall of the regime that agreed to disarm.

I’m no more a fan of Muammar Gaddafi than I am Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Robert Mugabe and I hope they will each have to answer to their own people someday. But even as despicable as these individuals are, they aren’t stupid (though arguably crazy in some instances). If you were one of these dictators, how do you think you would respond if you witnessed from afar the U.S. using its military might to topple a fellow despot who gave up his WMD program to satisfy the nonproliferation policies the U.S. had long pursued in the region? Would you be more or less likely to pursue a WMD program?

How could the Obama administration not recognize that this could undermine these nonproliferation efforts?

Schwarz believes that none of this was lost on those within the administration but was part of the calculations.

But here’s what no Americans know: the current attack on Libya is not an unforeseen glitch in our efforts to get them to disarm. Instead, it was the explicit policy of the U.S. to get countries to disarm so that we would be able to attack them.

This may sound ridiculous to many Americans. After all, no president ever puts it like that. Instead, they say: our enemies must disarm because they threaten the precious lives of our citizens! But in fact when talking to each other, U.S. government officials say it over and over again: we don’t oppose countries like Iraq, Libya and Iran having WMD because we’re scared they’re going to attack us with them. Instead, we oppose them having WMD because that would allow them to deter us from attacking them.

From there, Schwarz cites examples from a 2001 memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and several paragraphs from a paper entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” written by a Neoconservative group called Project for a New American Century.

I don’t know how much this sort of thinking is in place in the Obama administration and couldn’t say if this attack on Libya is a result of such thinking or just plain old shortsightedness. Either way, this intervention is a horrible mistake and will have negative repercussions even beyond Libya itself.

CBS News reports:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allegedly let gun runners walk off with weapons – thousands of them – to see if they’d end up in the hands of the cartels. The Justice Department and ATF have denied it ever happened.

Special Agent John Dodson works in ATF’s Phoenix office and has blown the whistle on the controversial strategy, known as letting guns “walk.”

Dodson believes there are other ATF operations going on that have done the same thing.

[…]

Sources tell CBS News licensed gun dealers often wanted no part of selling to suspicious characters who could be supplying the cartels.

But, sources say, ATF enlisted the gun dealers as paid Confidential Informants and encouraged them to sell even more.

“ATF has asked me to assist in an official investigation,” reads one agreement.

Gun salesmen closed the deals, and ATF watched and listened with recording devices.

“ATF Special Agents conducted surveillance…and identified the dates and times that the conspirators… crossed the international border,” says one court document.

Dodson argues that something that should never be done. “A lot people are going to get hurt with those firearms between the time we let them go and the time they’re recovered again in a crime.”

Sources tell CBS News these ATF operations involved about 450 weapons. Despite the risk, two years later the same strategy was expanded to include thousands of guns.

Hopefully this special agent Dodson won’t receive the “Manning Treatment” for being brave enough to expose this to the media and the American public.

In response to this news, Libertarian Party Chairman Mark Hinkle in a statement said:

“The War on Drugs has caused far more death and destruction than it has prevented. The War on Drugs is a failure in almost every measurable way. The War on Drugs should end.

“It’s becoming more and more unclear whether the U.S. government even wants the violence to decrease. More drug violence means more jobs for federal drug agents. More drug arrests mean more jobs for prison construction and management contractors. There are a lot of people whose income depends on a big, thriving, unsuccessful War on Drugs.

“If the War on Drugs were halted, there would no longer be any such thing as ‘drug trafficking.’ Violence in Mexico would decrease very dramatically, as drug lords would quickly go out of business.

I’m not one who normally subscribes to conspiracy theories but Hinkle makes an interesting point. There are lots of people who benefit from the war on (some) drugs. More convicted drug dealers and drug users means more jobs for those who build prisons and maintain prisons. The prison industrial complex as a whole would suffer mightily if the war on (some) drugs was ever ended.

I also think the antigun crusaders both inside and outside the Obama Administration could also benefit. “These guns are so available to these drug cartels because they are so readily available to just anyone who walks into a gun store” they can say.

Hopefully some heads will roll on the result of this irresponsible scheme. The ATF and the Obama Administration no doubt have blood on their hands.

Selling AK-47s to the drug cartels to scare Americans into accepting even stricter gun control laws while strengthening the prison industrial complex? Duh, winning!

As a writer, first and foremost, the linguistic abuse that regularly metastasizes in politics is of particular note. Those who don’t share the passion for writing don’t tend to notice it, and so don’t get when they’re being duped. Hopefully this regular column, which I’ll publish each week, will shed light on the sort of verbal athletics that are regularly played.

“The Democrat Party” – I’m not a fan of either political party but I can’t help but notice this particular note of disrespect coming from the Republicans. It’s often said that you should call a group what they call themselves, and the phrase “Democrat Party” is a term no Democrat uses and which is obviously used to downgrade. In a tense interview with George Stephanopoulos, Rand Paul used the phrase with particular anger, demonstrating his ascendance into Republican partisanship.

Republican Names – It dawned on me recently – Republican politicians often seem to have either single or few syllable names: Paul Ryan, George Bush, Ron Paul, Rand Paul. While searching for the meaning of this phenomenon, I can only espouse it to a further illustration of the culture war – on one side, the Democrats, a leader with a name like Barack Hussein Obama II (whose Kenyan and Arabic names combined with American citizenship symbolize multiculturalism) and on the other, the Republicans, a leader with a name like Sarah Louise Palin, the simple charm of which matches the woman’s personality and upbringing.

“Obamacare” derogatory? – While this story is a little bit old, it’s worth bringing up simply because it will be relevant in the future. Daily Show host Jon Stewart pulled the card of saying Obamacare was “derogatory:”

Stewart immediately jumps on O’Hara’s slip, calling him out on using the “derogatory” phrase and firing back by referring to O’Hara’s book as a “tea-bagger book.” O’Hara stammers for a few seconds and tries to defend his word choice, but concedes to calling it the health-reform bill instead. (It’s a law, by the way.)

With the letter “g” used twice in the middle of “tea-bagger,” the phrase is a little too much like two very politically incorrect terms for sexual and ethnic minorities. Stewart is a comedian, of course, and such a term isn’t offensive enough to make him a bad guy. However, while not a bad guy, he is a hypocrite. How on earth is “Obamacare” derogatory while “tea-bagger” isn’t? Does Stewart prefer one sort of derogatory over another? If you go down that logical road, surely some servicemen must have found it upsetting to hear their mission in Iraq called “Mess-O-Potamia” regularly by Stewart.

Twitter – I am normally not a technophobe. I loved the Economist article critiquing Barack Obama’s rant against technology. Given that, you can’t be absolutely fundamentalist about anything, so it must be said that Twitter is not a means to a literate society. With each tweet limited to 140 letters, comments are limited in their meaning in addition to their length. A quick look at my Twitter main page found these gems of literary genius:

i wish i could just kamehameha ppl when i felt like it.

Nine-year-old boy invents better buns for bratwursts, wins admiration of world [Cool]

Shut Up You Fucking Baby! #FaveDavidCrossAlbumAndActualThoughtIAmHavingAboutMyBabyRightNow

[Jun-17]-Equities: Analysis of the Current Situation and Prospects in the Chinese CWSF Market: SHANGHAI, June 17 /… http://bit.ly/aKTMET

We already have a highly visual based reductionist talking point culture, which has enabled mental midgets like Sarah Palin to positions of influence that would have been laughable years ago. Take a look at old issues of Life Magazine and you’ll find the quality of prose more representative of today specialized digests like Lapham’s Quarterly in its quality than People magazine or Newsweek. In many ways, our society is ahead, but in terms of the average American’s language capacity, I’m afraid to say we’re falling behind.

Howard Zinn passed at the beginning of this year, and I will admit part of me was saddened at his passing. My mother owned his People’s History of the United States, and my fellow students at college seemed to adore his work. My best friend is a Zinn fanatic, bringing him up nearly every time politics comes up.

Now that months have passed since he died, the second-hand positive notions are gone and the real nature of Zinn’s career can be assessed. Reason wrote an appropriate article following his passing, concluding that Zinn was “a master of agitprop, not history.”

The absolute worst of Zinn came on his deplorable misinformation regarding the totalitarian state in Cuba and the rise of political Islam, both of which placed Zinn on the wrong side of history. That Zinn’s nonsense is regularly repeated by fairly intelligent people is sad phenomenon, indeed. From Reason:

Just how poor is Zinn’s history? After hearing of his death, I opened one of his books to a random page (Failure to Quit, p. 118) and was informed that there was “no evidence” that Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of La Belle Discotheque in Berlin. Whatever one thinks of the Reagan administration’s response, it is flat wrong, bordering on dishonest, to argue that the plot wasn’t masterminded in Tripoli. Nor is it correct to write that the American government, which funded the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s, “train[ed] Osama bin Laden,” a myth conclusively debunked by Washington Post correspondent Steve Coll in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars.

Of Cuba, the reader of A People’s History is told that upon taking power, “Castro moved to set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” Castro’s vast network of gulags and the spasm of “revolutionary justice” that sent thousands to prison or the executioners wall is left unmentioned. This is unsurprising, I suppose, when one considers that Zinn recently told an interviewer “you have to admire Cuba for being undaunted by this colossus of the North and holding fast to its ideals and to Socialism….Cuba is one of those places in the world where we can see hope for the future. With its very meager resources Cuba gives free health care and free education to everybody. Cuba supports culture, supports dance and music and theatre.”

Zinn’s movement leftism never gained nuance, even on his deathbed. His very last interview was with Playboy, in which he talked about America’s economy:

PLAYBOY: So what can the average American do?

ZINN: Not much alone, individually. The only time citizens can do anything is if they organize, if they create a movement, if they act collectively, if they join their strengths. The trade union movement, of course, is an example of that. The trade union movement is weak, and the trade union movement needs to become stronger. Citizens need to organize in such a way that they can present the members of Congress with demands and say, “We are going to vote for you if you listen to us,” or “We’re not going to vote for you if you don’t listen to us.” In other words, people have to organize to create a citizens movement. We have to think about the 1930s as a model; people organized in the face of economic crisis—organized into tenants’ movements and unemployment councils and of course they organized a new trade union movement, the CIO. So we need people to organize. Of course, this is not easy, and it won’t happen overnight. Because it’s not easy the tendency is to throw up your hands and not do anything, but we have to start at some point, and the starting point is people getting together with other people and creating organizations. For instance, people can get together to stop evictions. Neighbors can get together. This is something that can be done at a local level. This was done in the 1930s when neighbors got together to stop the evictions of people who weren’t able to pay their rent and the 1930s were full of such incidents. Tenants’ councils had been formed and when people were evicted from their tenements, their neighbors gathered and put their furniture back in the house.

That sort of nonsense about collective action being the only means of change is just that: nonsense. George Orwell alienated many of his friends on the left, who he made in his criticism of colonialism and fascism, by taking on Stalinism in Animal Farm and 1984. Malcolm X was murdered by his former friends at the Nation of Islam when he revealed the hypocrisy of its leader, Elijah Mohammed, and renounced extremism in favor of racial reconciliation. Oskar Schindler saved 1200 Jews by employing within his own factories. The list goes on, as does the list of those who were manipulated due to their unwavering allegiance to a collective of any kind. Fresh-behind-the-ears college students who take Zinn’s words to be the truth run the risk of becoming exactly what Zinn was: a tool of propaganda.

What’s this trial all about, you might ask. Well, here’s a description:

With thousands of spectators expecting to attend, Dr. James Manning’s ‘trial of the century’ of Barack Obama on charges of treason, fraud, and sedition begins tomorrow morning at 9 AM in New York City. Co-defendants in the trial are Columbia University and the CIA. In the last days of the run-up to the trial, Manning revealed that he has sources in government that will testify against Obama, Columbia, and the CIA. He also reported explosive information that Barack Obama has used upwards of 20 different Social Security numbers during his life. Witnesses are expected to testify at the trial that Barack Obama was never a student at Columbia University, although he received a degree from the school. Dr. Manning claims that Columbia, therefore, is an accomplice to fraud. Other witnesses are expected to testify that Obama fails the Constitutional test for Presidential eligibility due to the fact that his father was a British subject at the time of his birth and his mother was not old enough to confer citizenship when he was born. A dramatic new revelation, however, may serve to re-emphasize the importance of the trial. The state of Hawaii, according to sources, did NOT accept his birth registration that was filed, despite issuing a ‘statement of live birth.’

This is the same James Manning who became famous last year when he started referring to President Obama as a “long legged mack daddy” and who joined Birther Queen Bee Orly Taitz last year at a protest that nobody attended against Fox News for “covering up” the birther story. Root hasn’t said anything one way or the other about the birth certificate issue that I’ve been able to find, but he does seem to buy at least part of the argument:

Of course, the possibility that Root and Obama may have traveled in different circles at Columbia, a school that had thousands of undergraduates at the time, does not seem to have occurred to Wayne at all, since he’s expressed this belief before. Why is this important ? Well, this year, Root is running for Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, and he’s made it clear that this is merely a stepping stone to the 2012 nomination for President. Based on stuff like this, and the impression I got from reading Root’s The Conscience of a Libertarian, which I will be posting a review of in the very near future, I’ve got to completely agree with Radley Balko’s take on this:

I’m not a member of the Libertarian Party, though I’ve spoken to several state conventions over the last couple years. I have my problems with the party, but I’d like to see it do well, in part because for better or worse the LP has a significant impact on how people view libertarianism.

So let’s be clear about this: If Wayne Allyn Root becomes the face of the LP, it will be an unmitigated disaster for the party. It will also likely do quite a bit of damage to the public perception of libertarianism as a philosophy.

This is batshit crazy, off-the-charts conspiratorial hogwash. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize Barack Obama. Root has chosen to dip into angry-white-guy, “Obama’s a secret Muslim” absolute and utter lunacy.

Libertarians: The man is a nut. Associate with him at your peril.

Indeed.

Originally posted at Below The Beltway

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing.But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Richard Feynman Cargo Cult Science

Last Friday an explosive bit of news swept the Internet. Someone had posted a giant zip file containing hundreds of emails, several data-sets and some software code online that appeared to have been authored by the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University.

The CRU is the organization that compiles much of the data and analysis used in modern-day climate research. It is, at this point, impossible to calculate how many papers used data compiled by the Climate Research Unit.

Unfortunately, it appears that much of the data and certainly much of the analysis is unreliable; there are numerous gaps in the sparse documentary trail between raw data and the final results of the analysis, while the computer programs used to produce many of the datasets are buggy and are poorly understood.

Many of the emails focus on the efforts of Michael Mann and his fellow researches to prevent auditors like Michael McIntyre and Willis Eschenbach from gaining access to their raw data, attempts to pervert the peer review process to deny “skeptical” papers and theories legitimacy and discussions as to how best to “spin” results in order to promote politicians and the general public to react in a manner that they thought would be appropriate to the threat they perceived as being posed by global climate change.

This was as textbook a case of the Cargo Cult Science that Richard Feynmann warned about as one can ever expect to see, and the fact that the CRU team was not doing real science was apparent to many scientists familiar to their work, based on the misgivings hinted at in the email dump.

That being said, the process of scientific analysis being rather well developed – having been designed to arrive at truth by overcoming the natural human instincts at self-deception – we have to ask how could the process have broken down so spectacularly?

The answer lies, as it often does, it the corrupting intersection of universities and the government. In short, researchers in universities are trying to behave anti-competitively and have unconsciously made a deal with the devil with regards to using the government to get funds.

To understand what happened, we must first review what science is. Science is the systematic application of techniques that test theories describing systems producing observable phenomena through the collection of empirical measurements. It is decentralized, rather than a single authority coming to conclusions, anyone is free to make observations, generate theories and to come to conclusions concerning their accuracy and applicability. Moreover, the process is based on skeptical inquiry, assertions and claims are scrutinized by people who try to find holes or errors constantly.

The people who carry out scientific inquiry, scientists, generate, gather observations and test theories. These activities are documented and communicated to other scientists formally thorugh formal publication of papers. The process of formal publication requires anonymous reviewers of papers to approve of the paper prior to publication (a process that is as complex as that in any court of law and whose details are beyond the scope of this post). Scientists can incorporate the work of other scientists by citing their published papers. This decentralization and lack of authority is supposed to ensure that ideas are judged on their merits and not based on who asserts them.

The primary judgment of the quality of a scientist is his or her reputation. This inherently politicizes science since reputation is based on the perceptions of others. The history of science is legion with instances where people gained that perception through fakery and were eventually caught. Moreover, science requires resources. Since a scientist is not taking part in a income producing venture, per se, he or she must acquire their funds either by taking part in some income producing activity such as teaching at a university, or acquire a patron. Acquiring patrons is often highly dependent on not only the reputation of the scientist, but on the patron’s perception that the scientist will satisfy the patron’s goals in deciding to fund a scientist – hence the numerous studies calling into questions the link between smoking and lung cancer published by epidemiologists employed by tobacco companies.

Wen the patron is the government, the patronage is dependent on how well one pleases the civil servants and politicians who make the funding decisions. For politicians, a scientist who supplies them with dire warnings of emergencies that require heroic and visionary action are a godsend: they can pund the table and appear to be visionaries. For civil servants, the benefits of encouraging alarmist publications is simply the expanded power as funds are appropriated to cope with the emergency.

Moreover when government officials control the lion’s share of the funding, they are able to behave monopolisticaly, letting them down can doom one to poverty of teaching lots of classes with little money and time for research.

We will probably never know precisely why the senior staff at the Climate Research Unit decided to quit being scientists in order to take up the profession of Cargo Cult Scientist. It could be the celebrity of being known as leading researchers. It could be a genuine fear that if they didn’t lie, humanity would make the “wrong” decision and render the Earth uninhabitable. It could be a totalitarian desire to rework society according to blue-prints that were pleasing to them. It could be because they wanted the lucrative grant money. It could be that they feared being viewed as has-been or never-were hacks.

What we can tell, though, is that their fraud was predicated on their inexhaustible supply of grants from governments, grants that transferred an uninterruptible stream of taxes into their coffers. The system was such that these Cargo Cult scientists were able to establish themselves as authorities, and suborn the skeptical review of and replication of their work, and, for a time, act in an environment that lacked negative consequences for their misconduct. That is, until someone blew the whistle.

So no, the central banks can’t just dump their gold onto the market. Yet they have serious fears that the public senses the inflationary forces in the world and are looking for a hedge. And they REALLY don’t want the gold price to spike and fuel those fears.

So what if they created a scare in the gold market about purity? Instead of giving people trust in their own currencies, what if they tried to impugn trust in the ability to buy real gold?

The initial discovery was something like four gold bars, which the Hong Kong bankers drilled invasively to test the contents. Reminds me of drilling the earth and measuring how many grams of gold per tonne. The HK bankers hoped to have 99% gold yield in their drill program for the resident bars. They found something like 1% instead and 99% tungsten. By the way, tungsten sells for less than $70 per ton, which makes its swaps for gold to be 60x more profitable than silver bar swaps. Another handy usage for the Gold/Silver ratio in calculations. The hunt was on. Now not a single assayer on the planet is available, as all are tied up. They have been commissioned to test the gold bars shipped from the United States of Fraudulent Banker America in their own bullion vaults. They use basic methods of four drill holes with direct assay of shavings, but also less invasive methods like electro-magnetic waves to examine the metal lattice structure. When highest level methods are needed, they turn to mass spectrometry. NOW ALMOST NO GOLD BARS WILL LEAVE THE LONDON OR NEW YORK METALS EXCHANGES WITHOUT SOME AUTHENTICATION, AS DISTRUST IS WIDESPREAD.

Think, for a second, what a diabolical scheme this would be, if perpetrated by central banks.

In a move they can blame on simple counterfeiters (trying to pass off the tungsten as if it were gold at a huge profit), they can paralyze the entire gold market in a fear that if you buy gold, it won’t be real. They can try to destroy demand for gold in such a way that — if undiscovered — would never be traced to them. All this while keeping all their gold safely in their vaults and devaluing their fiat currencies.

Now, I’m not going to up and claim that such a scheme is being perpetrated. But would you put it past the central bankers, a group of people desperate to keep faith in their own fiat currencies — since faith is the only thing that backs them?