QotD: Tancredo outsourced

Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. He will be replaced by Montezuma Aztlán Calderón, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca who will denounce the Brown Peril for just $3 an hour plus room and board.

Jesse Walker, "Votes Americans Won't Cast", Hit and Run, 2007-12-20

You're not alone, Jon!

There are other folks who have their doubts about Ron Paul. Perry de Havilland is also wondering whether a Paul presidency would be a good thing:

I am a hawk, no doubt about it. If I am going to be taxed by the state, I would much rather my hard earned money be spent dropping bombs on the lackeys of Slobodan Milosevic (Bill Clinton's finest hour, without a doubt) and Saddam Hussain, than on corrosive domestic 'entitlements' and ever more kleptocratic regulatory statism.

So then along comes Ron Paul, the first US presidential candidate since Ronald Regan with any notion whatsoever that the state is way way way too big. Moreover here comes a person who thinks the only way liberty can be preserved is to take a radical axe to Leviathan's tentacles and re-establish constitutional limited government. Cool. Very cool, in fact. So do I really really like Ron Paul? Well I like him but less than you might think as some of his remarks are borderline delusional 'troofer' stuff and that does him no credit at all. Is he actually going to win? Probably not but that is not what this article is about (commenters please note). Do I even want him to win? Well that is what this article is about.

He wants a return to constitutional limited government. What's not to like about that? But then my eye falls on that picture of Murray Rothbard in Ron Paul's office. I am not a fan of Rothbard even though there is indeed much good stuff in The Ethics of Liberty. Although I think he was correct about a great many things, I also think he was often as intellectually dishonest as Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky and perfectly fits Adriana Lukas' definition of a barking moonbat: "someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency". For Rothbard to have argued that the cold war was a delusion and that the Soviet Union was not really a clear and present danger is so preposterous on so many levels that I am not even going to elaborate why. If you can not figure out that one yourself then this article is not addressed to you. In fact, please stop reading and get lost.

More positive reviews for Ron Paul

I have to admit that this article was custom-tailored to get my attention. Not only is it a positive article on Ron Paul, but it opens with an ultra-libertarian quote from P.J. O'Rourke:

"Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class."

— P.J. O’Rourke

As evidenced by the wild success of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, Americans have become Libertarians, even though they don’t seem to know it yet. Hardened views on the left and the right dominate the political scene in Washington D. C., with efficient and competent management of government the casualty of an ideological war between the two dominant parties. We have become a red state/blue state country, with elections angrily won 51 percent to 49 percent.

Little noticed in the increasingly shrill red versus blue sniping, however, is the emergence of a purplish centrism. The purple centrists who will shape future elections are we Libertarians, who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate. We believe in personal responsibility and minimal government. We do not meddle when the issues — be they Iraq, your bedroom or your religious beliefs — are not our business. In short, we say: Smoke all the crack you want, or go motorcycling without a helmet; just don’t expect me to pay for your rehab.

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a thoughtful attempt to claim the broad center in the middle of the red/blue political bickering that passes for political discourse today. And if there has been a real surprise in the GOP race, it has been the strength of the independent-thinking OB/GYN doctor from Texas. His Web site gets many visits, and not because men think they might see naked women on it.

The politics of data manipulation

Ken Holder points us to this little gem of a discovery:

Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record

An example of the Y2K discontinuity in action [. . .] this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. [. . .] While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

Links in the original article. Emphasis mine.