Category Archives: ethics

Setting Up The Excuse

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Watts Up With That is reporting a Mail on Sunday piece wherein a NOAA whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a leading scientist with NOAA at the time, has given MoA irrefutable evidence that the “Pausebuster” paper that NOAA rushed to print with lots of publicity just ahead of the 2009 Paris climate agreement was based on misleading, “unverified” data.  The purpose of the rush was to influence those present, including ex-President Barack Obama (D), and con them into believing that not only did the pause in global warming that’s still ongoing, not only never existed, the warming is continuing at a faster pace than thought.

It gets worse.

Not only had [NOAA] failed to follow any of the formal procedures required to approve and archive their data, they had used a “highly experimental early run” of a programme that tried to combine two previously separate sets of records.

About that program:

[T]he…software was afflicted by serious bugs. They caused it to become so “unstable” that every time the raw temperature readings were run through the computer, it gave different results.

And this:

…failure to archive and make available fully documented data not only violated NOAA rules, but also those set down by Science [which published the “Pausebuster” paper]. Before [Dr Bates] retired last year, he continued to raise the issue internally. Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: “I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure.”

The reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.

Now, here it comes.

Dr Bates said: “How ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose responsibility it was to maintain its integrity—and failed.”

And NOAA’s coverup, perhaps to cover its embarrassment over its incompetence and dishonesty, perhaps to prepare the ground for its coming slur against the new administration:

After the paper was published, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the paper internally.

It’s beginning to look like NOAA needs to be abolished.  Surely, we have better uses for its $6 billion budget (requested for 2016) than to fund falsified “science.”

The Business with Iran

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The Wall Street Journal opined on Iran’s missile launch last week and President Donald Trump’s imposition of sanctions against Iran in response.

[I]t does look as if President Trump may be willing to do what Mr Obama refused to do, which is to rigorously enforce the [nuclear weapons development] agreement….

Trump said during the campaign that he might not tear up the Executive Agreement, but instead enforce it to the letter.

Why would his doing so now be such a surprise? Oh, wait, the NLMSM spiked that part of his commitments while focusing, disparagingly, on his earlier musing about tearing up the EA.

The EO That Banned Muslim Entry into the US

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Or at least that’s what House and Senate Democrats, along with the NLMSM, claim President Donald Trump’s Executive Order does.  It’s certainly true that the EO suspends, for a time, entry from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.  Wow, that’s a lot.  That’s 199,200,000 Muslims.

However.  There is some small bit of information that’s carefully ignored by those Democrats with their badly manufactured tears and by the NLMSM.  The EO doesn’t touch some other predominantly Muslim nations; their ability to come and go into the United States is deliberately left untouched.

Minor nations like Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, The People’s Republic of China, Malaysia, Russia, Niger, Philippines.  And on and on.  Globally, there are roughly 1,700,000,000 Muslims.

That terrible order that’s targeted at the terrorist or terrorism-sponsoring seven that ex-President Barack Obama (D) himself designated as terrorist or terrorism-sponsoring affect a small minority of Muslims and it does that much solely as a side effect of the effort to keep out terrorists.

Security Holes

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Recall the hoo-raw over Apple’s refusal to help the FBI hack an iPhone used by the San Bernardino terrorists, the FBI’s claim that they couldn’t get into the iPhone without Apple’s help, and then the FBI’s successful penetration of the iPhone from hiring a third party to do hack it.  Recall further the FBI’s subsequent refusal to tell Apple about the security hole in Apple’s iPhone software (supposedly limited to the generation of cell phone used by the terrorists) that was exploited by the hack and the FBI’s associated refusal to tell Apple how the hack itself worked.

The FBI has been in court defending those refusals.

…the Justice Department argued that the information it withheld, if released, could be seized upon by “hostile entities” who could develop their own “countermeasures”….

This is curious logic, indeed.  The FBI is leaving the security hole in place on the assumption, apparently, that hackers can’t already identify the hole and exploit it—as that third party did so promptly after being hired by the FBI.  So, leave the hole unplugged; a countermeasure would just be found by hackers.

Never mind that any hack—all of them to date, against any software in any milieu, as well as any future hack—is a countermeasure against the software being penetrated.  There’s nothing static about any of this; software security and hacks are in a dynamic arms race.  It’s foolish to leave existing holes in place in the expectation that the arms race will stop.

A Failed Culture

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That’s what exists in the State Department, has existed for administration after administration, and has been exposed lately by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s remark earlier in the week about State Department personnel: I think that they should either get with the program or they can go.  The precious ones in the culture are out in force.

Some examples, with my attitude…exposed [link added]:

This ban, which can only be lifted under conditions which will be difficult or impossible for countries to meet….

Then these self-important ones should stop wasting time on their hurt feelings over not being personally consulted and spend their energies instead on helping those countries meet the conditions.  Whether or not they should have been consulted is an entirely separate argument, but the boss had and has no obligation to consult with them (see below) for all that it might be a good idea to do so.  Even at that, though, “consult” does not mean “get permission from.”

“I hope the White House is not suggesting that the officials would be fired,” [John Bellinger, State Department and National Security Council legal adviser in Bush the Younger’s administration] said….

This is completely disingenuous. “You should resign” is not at all a threat of being fired.

…the dissent channel is “a long-respected format” for diplomats and other State Department officials to express disagreement.

Indeed it is. However, it’s not a channel for employees to veto their boss’ instructions.

“It’s a specific example of the total lack of understanding, let alone respect of basic democratic norms,” a second official said.

A carefully anonymous official, notice. With good reason, too; he doesn’t understand that the organization isn’t a democracy—no organization other than a nation as a whole can be—it has a boss and employees.