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Last week, the Wall Street Journal published from a group of anthropogenic climate change deniers — a small group of engineers, retired weathermen, and scientists, none one of whom worked in the the field of climate science.

A much larger group of scientists, most of whom actually work in the field climate change, submitted a signed letter in response. The cowardly editorial board of the WSJ rejected the rebuttal letter. In response, the pre-eminent science journal Science, known for scientific rigor, decided to published it: “Climate change and the Integrity of Science” (January 27th, 2012). (The WSJ did publish yesterday (Feb 1), a letters to the editors from Kevin Trenberth, a scientist).

Sigh.

Ever since what once was the best paper in the US was purchased by Rupert Murdoch, its value as a source of business news been continuously degraded. I spend more time on the Journal’s many excellent blogs than I do the print paper. And their iPad app sets the bar for media integration into a tablet. I may still read the print Journal, but I am down to 2 sections, Money & Investing and Personal Journal (called Friday/Weekend on those days).

This is a tragedy. Great journalism is becoming increasingly rare, and a vibrant independent press is a necessary part of any Democracy. Not only was the Journal a once great institution, but I have many friends and colleagues who work there — along with an increasingly large roster of those who used to.

Murdoch’s Foxification of the WSJ has reduced its reliability to me as an investor. Its objectivity is is no longer unquestioned. The obvious disregard for facts, for science, and the rabid disregard for Truth in the service of Murdoch’s ideology is slowly poisoning the rest of the paper — it now reaches beyond the OIpEd pages. At a certain unknown point in the future, I fear the entire publication may simply become too untrustworthy for investors to rely upon. At that point, I suspect Bloomberg will buy the FT, put out a US edition, and media watchers will begin the countdown to the final days of the WSJ.

That is a terrible shame. No one should take any delight in the destruction of what was once a great Wall Street institution.

The full list of signatories to the rejected rebuttal are after the jump. And for a slice into the world of cognitive dissonance, check out the comment stream following the published letter to the editor — its hilarious, in a sloping forehead kinda way.

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Previously:
Murdoch’s WSJ Changes Creates Opening for NYT, FT ( April 24th, 2008)

Read It Here First: “De-Financializing” the WSJ (April 28th, 2008)

WSJ Jumps the Shark (January 22nd, 2010)

Read It Here First: WSJ Becomes Fox-ified (July 16th, 2011)

Sources:
Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal
Peter Gleick,
CEO Pacific Institute, MacArthur Fellow, National Academy of Sciences
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkable-editorial-bias-on-climate-science-at-the-wall-street-journal/

Two incontrovertible things: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Real, and the Wall Street Journal is Political Rag
Greg Laden
Science Blogs, January 27, 2012
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/01/two_incontrovertible_things_an.php

Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend, the Washington Post published the follow up piece to the Nov 5th Big Lie column. I supplemented that with a run of charts to illustrate the facts I cited.

The pushback continues from the usual sources. We can group folks repeating the faux arguments into 3 distinct categories. Some of these reveal disturbing trends:

1) The Cognitive Dissidents (my term for a those politically dissenting from reality); their brains simply will not allow them to see what disagrees with their ideology. This is a very real and unfortunate part of human nature;

2) The Political Manipulators, who cynically know what they peddle is nonsense, but nonetheless push the stuff because it is effective. These folks are more committed to their ideology than the good of the nation, and as such earn my disdain.

3) The Innumerates, the people who truly disrespect a legitimate process of looking at the data and making intelligent assessments. These innumerates — mathematical illiterates — seem to revel in their own ignorance; it si embarrassing.

The denying of reality has been an issue, from Galileo to Columbus to modern times. Reality always triumphs eventually, but there are very real costs to it occurring later versus sooner . . .

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Still popular in WaPo Business Section!

Craig Reucassel interviews comedy genius Sacha Baron Cohen in character as his latest creation: climate skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton

From boingboing:

Australian comedy-news program The Hamster Wheel covers archconservative British politician Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a Thatcherite climate denier, and former editor for The Sunday Telegraph and other right-wing papers. The Hamster Wheel decides that Monckton (who once advocated confining people with AIDS to lifetime quarantine) must actually be a long-running Sacha Baron Cohen (“Bruno,” “Borat”) character and makes a compelling case that this must be so.

Whenever I go off on a rant when writing some critical polemic screed, I try not to edit myself. Just get it all out in print, and we can worry about editing down for style and clarity later. That works especially well if you, as a writer, have a some idea of where you want to go and what you want to say with a piece.

It also helps if you work with a top notch editor, and I have been fortunate to work with several: Aaron Task, my editor on Bailout Nation as well as at TheStreet.com; Thom Donlan at Barron’s; and my  editor at the Washington Post, Kelly Johnson.

Its freeing to blather out 2,000 words and let the professionals focus and tighten it up. But every now and again, something interesting ends up on the cutting room floor. In Bailout Nation, a delightfully vicious comment about Greenspan’s relationship with Ayn Rand was edited out (It was so obnoxiously clever I may have to publish it posthumously).

My column for this Sunday’s Washington Post, What Caused the Financial Crisis? The Big Lie Goes Viral, looks at the false crisis narratives pushed by people for various reasons. Its not unusual to see this from the usual suspects, but it is a big surprise when it comes out of NYC’s pragmatic technocrat Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

KJ slashed my blather in half, cutting out the flabby digressions and distractions. The finished piece just hums.

But as I alluded to earlier, some of the more interesting parts got lost in the process. What follows are some of the trimmings from two earlier versions of The Big Lie, none of which made it to the final piece.

First up: The original draft was all over the place, kinda randomly calling out people; the early version had the following text:

Peter Wallison, FCIC member: Before joining the financial commission, Wallison was the Co-Director of co-director of the American Enterprise Institute Financial Deregulation Project. Since the crisis occurred, the AEI changed the project’s name to the more benign “program on financial policy studies.” They also scrubbed Wallison’s bio from any mention of the Financial Deregulation Project.

Joe Kernan, CNBC Anchor: Viewers who tune in each morning expecting to get a quick update on the news instead see Squawkbox Anchor and former Merrill Lynch Broker Kernan shilling for the Street. He never seems to pass up an opportunity to exonerate banks and blame the wrong players for the financial collapse. Whether it was the Community Reinvestment Act or Fannie & Freddie, apparently anyone but Wall Street was at fault. Perhaps the tiresome repetition of the same discredited memes helps to explain the CNBC’s softening ratings.

Investor’s Business Daily: IBD published not an opinion piece, but an article laying fault for the entire crisis on a 1994 HUD statement against bank redlining. Of course, if that was the cause of the crisis, then the bank redlined areas of the country – inner cities like Harlem and the worst parts of Philly and Chicago and Detroit and Washington DC was were the lending boom and bust would have taken place. But we know it was the tony suburbs of California and Arizona, as well as the Condos in Florida and the Exurbs in Nevada that boomed the most.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg: Embarrassed himself this week, blindly repeating the discredited talking points. He exonerated Wall Street, stating “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.” What made Bloomberg’s erroneous comments so stunning is that he built his Bloomberg Data Service business on the notion that data is what ultimately matters most to investors. He ignored his own principles to repeat statements he knew (or should have known) were false.

I thought about the pieces to this as KJ and I edited it down to a more reasonable size. “Man bites Dog” is really the story here, mostly because Mayor Bloomberg is not just another wingnut. So the mid version of the column focused more on Bloomberg, and downgraded the usual Financial Crisis Denialists to a mere sentence apiece.

Cleaned up a bit, and notably better than the series above, it looked like this:

Mayor Mike Bloomberg: Embarrassed himself this week, blindly repeating the discredited talking points. He exonerated Wall Street, stating “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.” What made Bloomberg’s erroneous comments so stunning is that he built his Bloomberg Data Service business on the notion that data is what ultimately matters most to investors. He ignored his own principles to repeat statements he knew (or should have known) were false.

Its not just Mayor Bloomberg – you can see the Big Lie in action everywhere. Perhaps the Mayor saw a recent The Investor’s Business Daily article that blamed the crisis on a 1994 Housing and Urban Development memo (Smoking-Gun Document Ties Policy To Housing Crisis, by PAUL SPERRY 10/31/2011). Maybe he read FCIC member Peter Wallison’s dissent; of course, Wallison was co-director of the American Enterprise Institute “Financial Deregulation Project” so its no surprise he dissented from the report laying blame on radical deregulation of the finance sector. Perhaps the Mayor watches CNBC’s morning program, Squawkbox. Viewers are treated to a regular repetition of the Big Lie, as anchor Joe Kernan exonerates banks and blames Congress for the crisis on a near daily basis.

The final version is even more compact. It dispatched all of the goofballs — Wallison, Kernan, IBD are totally dropped from the finished product. The focus is partly on why Bloomberg went off the reservation, but mostly on what actually caused the finacial crisis.

I’ll tweet it as soon as soon as its out online @ritholtz

As a longstanding Apple fanboy (circa 1989), I have been following the outpouring of love and affection for Steve Jobs with great interest.

I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Steve Jobs’ biographer last night (video here), and I was aghast at something I learned: After Jobs learned of his pancreatic cancer, he delayed surgery by 9 months.

That decision was met with a massive push back from his friends and family. It was horrifyingly bad judgment. And, it likely cost him his life. He came to realize this towards the end of his life, according to his biographer.

Consider the immense fortuity of what had come before that. An unusual MRI for a stomach issue reveals   a shadow on his pancreas. That’s simply dumb luck. And the biopsy determines its islet, not ductile pancreatic cancer. (the rarer, curable kind of pancreatic cancer). That’s even more dumb luck. Then the patient delayed surgery for nearly a year. That’s just dumb.

I don’t know what the thought process was. Hubris? Arrogance? Magical thinking, as Jobs’ biographer called it. Whatever the reason, it very likely was a fatal decision. Had Jobs had the surgery immediately, he most likely would still be alive today — and in good health.

And that’s a great tragedy.

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Further reading:

• Steve Jobs Succumbs to Alternative Medicine (Skeptic Blog)
• Steve Jobs’ cancer and pushing the limits of science-based medicine (Science Based Medicine)

The answer is No — this appears to be a thoroughly disproven concept.

Hat tip @Lippard for the correction

Water — just a liquid or much more? Many researchers are convinced that water is capable of “memory” by storing information and retrieving it. The possible applications are innumerable: limitless retention and storage capacity and the key to discovering the origins of life on our planet. Research into water is just beginning.

Join Oasis HD Facebook page for more exclusive videos

http://facebook.com/oasishdchannel

Discuss:

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Source:: A Map of Organized Climate Change Denial
NYT, October 2, 2011

Just days after Hurricane Irene swept up the East Coast, causing massive flooding in Vermont and leading to almost 40 deaths, Fox Business Network personality Charles Payne just had to ask, is global warming really to blame?

His guest, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” said there is evidence to suggest it is a result of global warming, but that climatologists will need more time to fully connect the dots. Nye went on to lay out in plain terms some of the facts of climate change, including rising temperatures in the Pacific ocean. The two debated a Newsweek story claiming radical weather is the “new normal,” with Payne asking Nye if that was “irresponsible, or is there any science behind it?”

Well, Nye said, “there’s a lot more science behind it than saying it’s not.”

“The world is getting warmer,” he added. “Everybody, the world is getting warmer.” Nye went on to give some context to former Vice President Al Gore’s remarks comparing global warming skepticism to 20th century racism before Payne said, “you’re confusing our viewers.”

Watch the video:

Source:
You’re ‘Confusing Our Viewers’ On Climate Change
Talking Points Memo

Fareed Zakaria has reached the terribly obvious and long overdue conclusion that the right wing in the US is a fantasy-based denier of reality.

Whoopee.

After years of globally embarrassing foolishness, a cowed and cowardly media is belatedly showing signs of speaking Truth to Power.

For his observation that the earth is round, serious people are showering Zakaria with effusive praise. While the reality based observations are long overdue, it is embarrassing that we feel so compelled to applaud it. People seem to be forgetting: This is what media is supposed to do. The role of the press is to point out the absurdities of the powerful, afflict the comfortable, reveal what those in Power want to keep hidden.

Of course, that has taken a back seat to much more important events, such as Anthony Weiner’s junk shot, Michael Jackson’s untimely death, and an especially close American Idol final.

Bread & Circuses, anyone?

What does it say about our damaged US democracy and its wounded 4th Estate (aka corporate media) that merely making an obvious assertion is news? Is it an event when an essential element of a functional democracy actually has the bravado to tell a significant political movement that “No, the earth is not flat.”

The right wing has long embraced magical thinking. You can see it across a spectrum of thought: It is a short hop from believing that  Supply Side Tax Cuts are self funding to all other manner of nonsense. From denying Evolution to managing Health Care costs to Global Warming, it is a continuum. Making no-plan invasions of other countries is the natural progression of such magical thinking. If your beliefs are righteousness enough, then the outcome is assured by a munificent deity.

As a personal belief system, that may be fine, but as government philosophy, it makes for horrific policy decisions.

The Retreat from Empiricism has been detailed over the years, but not by the mainstream media. It has been the alternative press — websites, blogs, critics outside of the mainstream — who have stated the obvious for many, many years. Somehow, the Media missed nearly all of it. It wasn’t until after the Katrina disaster that the scales fell from Press’ eyes. Suddenly, in the middle of George W. Bush’ second term, the Press found their voice. Years after 9/11, after the national terror alert was manipulated for political purposes, long after the Nation was lied into a war of choice through dishonest and deceptive means at great cost in blood and treasure, did the Media found its voice.

Heckuva job there, Press corps . . .

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Previously:
Attack of the Dumb Journalists (October 29th, 2005)

Journalists, Heal Thyselves (December 26th, 2006)

Seeking the Truth — Or Obscuring It? (August 20th, 2010)

Marion Maneker on Zakaria’s Truth Telling (June 16th, 2011)

Sources:
How Today’s Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality
Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek June 16, 2011
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2077943,00.html

Retreat from Empiricism
Jay Rosen
Press Think, December 18, 2006
http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/12/18/suskind_empiricism.html