Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

A bit of inconvenient truth is starting to leak out into the public domain from the UN's climate data vaults, despite the best efforts of the gatekeepers in the media to keep a lid on it. The world is getting cooler . Not more hip,  cooler .  It seems , most inconveniently, that the planet has not been getting any hotter for the last 15 or so years, even though global atmospheric carbon concentration continues to rise through 400 parts per million .  And all this whilst our opinion making elites have been incessantly telling us for decades that we must change our lives drastically to a non-carbon energy base or it it will all get catastrophically hotter. This cooling is not cool for today's urban hipsters who have so much invested in rising heat. What are we to do with our carbon taxes and trading schemes, our Priuses, our bicycles, our food miles, our righteous indignation, and our smug sense of superiority about our special insight i...

Nature does have a way of re-establishing karmic balance in the cosmos. Even in the face of the seemingly irrevocable  thoughtless destruction of pubic lice habitat by humans, mother nature bites back at such hubris. It seems that destroying lice habitat has had unforeseen adverse consequences for those who so wantomly contribute to the extinction of another species. In news just in : PUBIC HAIR GROOMING INJURIES ON THE RISE, RESEARCHERS FIND ... Restore Bush!

Glenn Reynolds has now published his promised (see previous post) article on due process in a time of over-regulation. He has called it Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime . You should read the whole thing. It's short. He encourages readers to offer their own suggestions for improvement. Do. It has already generated some traction. At the Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf has a put out a piece entitled 8 Ways to Stop Overzealous Prosecutors from Destroying Lives  and at The Volokh Conspiracy   Randy Barnett has a long blog post on it . I was entertained also by Glenn  drawing attention the other day at Instapundit to this passage in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged : “ Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against – then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re ...

 "Rule of Law" now imperilled by too much law Glenn Reynolds has recently linked to an article by David French entitled " David Gregory and the Decline of the Rule of Law ".  In it French asks: "Can we even speak of the rule of law as a meaningful concept when we combine an explosive regulatory state with near-absolute prosecutorial discretion?” This link appears as part of seemingly growing series of cross linkages that Reynolds is apparently accumulating for an imminent scholarly piece he says he is putting together on the theme " Due Process When Everything is a Crime ". In the western world we are now not just drowning in a sea of over-regulation from our over-zealous legislatures and bureaucracies. It seems that as well our law making institutions are bizarrely indifferent to the fate that its citizens labour under in the vast byzantine morass of freedom depleting strictures and cr...

More evidence has recently come to light of Mankind's pitiless destruction of other species in its relentless self-interested march to complete planetary domination and, hubristically it is hoped, to its own inevitable demise. The pubic louse is now an endangered species , apparently due to the viral new fashion preference in urban society for bikini waxes. There is now so little viable habitat for the poor pubic louse that it has been unable to breed in sufficient numbers to maintain its population. We surely now need a public campaign to preserve the pubic louse and its habitat. It could have a slogan like: "Keep Bush. Save the Louse". That might generate enough itch for the luvvies to have a good old fashioned scratch.

I stumbled across an article in Forbes via GeekPress today called " Eight Ways Goofing Off Can Make You More Productive ". Now this sounds like the kinda management theory I could buy into. The author, Susan Adams, refers to James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic saying: '... you work in concentrated 15-minute periods, divided up by breaks. “The thought process is not designed to be continuous,” he tells the  Times . He points out that efficient, productive work is much more valuable than long hours of wasted or partially productive time. ..' That is pretty much my take on my own productivity during a work day, with the exception of those rare longer periods of white hot intensity, when you are "in the zone" working on a creation that is attempting to pull together diverse threads of thought and that can't be let go off lest the whole thing collapses losing shape and coherence. Read the whole thing . It's not long. And there are only 8 ite...

If the judicial system of a major Western European nation can convict and imprison seismological scientists for not accurately predicting the severity and timing of an unpredictable earthquake ( this really happened this week in Italy ), is it any wonder that climate scientists have felt the need to constantly predict imminent climate catastrophe as a means of self preservation against the inevitable happening of natural catastrophes, which are certain to occur at some unpredictable time in the future. But it does somewhat undermine our confidence in the impartiality of the scientific reporting process if they have such a substantial and real incentive to overestimate catastrophe.