BLACK US troops mutinied in Townsville [Australia] in 1942 and turned machineguns on their officers, in a secret chapter of the war in the Pacific that has come to light through the papers of the late US president Lyndon B. Johnson.

The scandal was hushed up for nearly 70 years after being described in a report given to and apparently kept by Johnson as “one of the biggest stories of the war which can’t be written, shouldn’t be written”.

The subject of rumour and speculation for decades in the north Queensland city, it has now emerged that the mutiny was probably reported at the time to the White House by Johnson, then a young and ambitious US congressman, after he visited Australia in June 1942 on a fact-finding mission for president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The report Johnson took back to Washington, written for him by US journalist Robert Sherrod, tells how 600 African-American GIs seized their base and went on the rampage, trying to kill their white officers. Some terrorised local civilians.

Armed Australian troops were sent in at the height of the emergency on the US base. George Gnezdiloff, then a 20-year-old private in the north Queensland-raised 51st battalion, was told to block Ross River Road with his bren gun carrier. Other soldiers were issued with a password, Bucks, as they deployed to bottle up the Americans.

Gnezdiloff and his crew were ordered to shoot the mutineers on sight. “We had ammo, the lot,” the now 90-year-old recalled yesterday from his home in Proserpine, 300km south of Townsville. “We weren’t mucking around, I can tell you.”

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

But projection is a regular feature of Leftist thought so it is a good rule that whatever they say about others is really true of themselves — JR

Yup. That’s how a Canadian alarmist explains PM Stephen Harper’s lack of interest in global warming. Charlie Smith writes at Straight.com:

. Recently, I came across a neurological and psychological explanation why seemingly intelligent people like the prime minister don’t want to wrap their minds around climate change.

Keep in mind that Harper is the son of an accountant who worked for Imperial Oil. He probably grew up in a home with a high regard for the fossil-fuel industry.

Author William Marsden explains in his recent book Fools Rule: Inside the failed politics of climate change (Alfred A. Knopf Canada) that the when the brain is confronted with tiny changes to familiar patterns, it “quickly emits fear signals that can disrupt attempts at rational thought”.

Quoting McGill University neurologist Lesley Fellows, Marsden notes that there are parts of the brain that enjoy learning new things, but other areas summon anxiety when familiar habits are disrupted.

“Climate change poses a complexity of stressful challenges with which few people know how to deal,” Marsden writes.

Fellows explained to Marsden that “nebulous” threats, such as climate change, are not handled nearly as well by the brain as are immediate threats.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

When it comes to assigning blame for the current economic doldrums, the quants who build the complicated mathematic financial risk models, and the traders who rely on them, deserve their share of the blame. [See “A Formula For Economic Calamity” in the November 2011 issue]. But what if there were a way to come up with simpler models that perfectly reflected reality? And what if we had perfect financial data to plug into them?

Incredibly, even under those utterly unrealizable conditions, we’d still get bad predictions from models.

The reason is that current methods used to “calibrate” models often render them inaccurate.

That’s what Jonathan Carter? stumbled on in his study of geophysical models. Carter wanted to observe what happens to models when they’re slightly flawed–that is, when they don’t get the physics just right. But doing so required having a perfect model to establish a baseline. So Carter set up a model that described the conditions of a hypothetical oil field, and simply declared the model to perfectly represent what would happen in that field–since the field was hypothetical, he could take the physics to be whatever the model said it was. Then he had his perfect model generate three years of data of what would happen. This data then represented perfect data. So far so good.

The next step was “calibrating” the model. Almost all models have parameters that have to be adjusted to make a model applicable to the specific conditions to which it’s being applied–the spring constant in Hooke’s law, for example, or the resistance in an electrical circuit. Calibrating a complex model for which parameters can’t be directly measured usually involves taking historical data, and, enlisting various computational techniques, adjusting the parameters so that the model would have “predicted” that historical data. At that point the model is considered calibrated, and should predict in theory what will happen going forward.

Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality–he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn’t. It turned out that there were many different sets of parameters that seemed to fit the historical data. And that made sense, he realized–given a mathematical expression with many terms and parameters in it, and thus many different ways to add up to the same single result, you’d expect there to be different ways to tweak the parameters so that they can produce similar sets of data over some limited time period.

The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward–and sure enough, his calibrated model produced terrible predictions compared to the “reality” originally generated by the perfect model. Calibration–a standard procedure used by all modelers in all fields, including finance–had rendered a perfect model seriously flawed. Though taken aback, he continued his study, and found that having even tiny flaws in the model or the historical data made the situation far worse. “As far as I can tell, you’d have exactly the same situation with any model that has to be calibrated,” says Carter.

That financial models are plagued by calibration problems is no surprise to Wilmott–he notes that it has become routine for modelers in finance to simply keep recalibrating their models over and over again as the models continue to turn out bad predictions. “When you have to keep recalibrating a model, something is wrong with it,” he says. “If you had to readjust the constant in Newton’s law of gravity every time you got out of bed in the morning in order for it to agree with your scale, it wouldn’t be much of a law But in finance they just keep on recalibrating and pretending that the models work.”

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Excerpt: “A total of 211,697 inpatient BSIs were reported during 9,423 hospital-months. Adjusting for long-term trends, BSIs caused by each Gram-negative organism examined were more frequent in summer months compared with winter months, with increases ranging from 12.2% for E. coli (95% CI 9.2–15.4) to 51.8% for Acinetobacter (95% CI 41.1–63.2). Summer season was associated with 8.7% fewer Enterococcus BSIs (95% CI 11.0–5.8) and no significant change in S. aureus BSI frequency relative to winter.”

In other words, some types of infection rose but other types FELL during summer. So conclusions about a systematic effect of warming are unjustified

What makes hospital-acquired infections so intractable? There’s no question that some of the organisms that cause them are tricky: MRSA hangs out on the skin and and in the nostrils, and E. coli resides in the gut, making it easy for them to be carried into hospitals undetected. Hospital workers’ poor performance on hand-washing is well-documented. And recently, researchers have begun to wonder whether hospitals have missed an opportunity by not emphasizing environmental cleaning —- of rooms, computers and equipment, for instance -— given how persistently some bacteria can linger.

A new paper in PLoS One, though, says there’s another factor contributing to the problem, one that has missed consideration until now: weather. An 8-year study of infection data from 132 hospitals finds that as outside temperatures rise, in-hospital infections with some of the most problematic pathogens rise also.

The analysis is a warning to healthcare institutions to be additionally on guard when it is warm outside. But the authors say it’s also a warning to the rest of us: If global climate change raises ambient temperatures, it could increase the likelihood of deadly hospital infections as well.

The study — by researchers from the University of Iowa, University of Maryland, Princeton University and the nonprofit Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy — used a privately maintained national database of almost 212,000 clinical bloodstream cultures taken between Jan. 1999 and Sept. 2006. It plotted the infections’ incidence against data on mean temperature and dew point and total precipitation from the US National Climate Data Center. It accounted for the potentially confounding effect of seasonal variation in hospital admissions.

And it found: From winter to summer, Gram-negative bacteria, the most problematic hospital pathogens, rose anywhere from slightly to dramatically. E. coli infections rose 12.2 percent; Pseudomonas infections rose 28.1 percent; Klebsiella infections rose 28.6 percent; and Acinetobacter infections rose 51.8 percent.

Moreover, for every 10-degree Fahrenheit rise in mean temperature, there was a rise in infections with those same Gram-negatives. The increase varied from 3.5 percent for E. coli to 10.8 percent for Acinetobacter, independent of any changes in the season, the humidity or amounts of precipitation. Changes in temperature also affected S. aureus and MRSA, but much less: Those infections rose 2.2 percent for every 10-degree change.

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

How easy do you find it to look at revolting images such as a man eating worms? If the answer is ‘difficult’, it might offer an insight into your politics.

Scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln showed 50 volunteers a series of 38 disgusting images – including one of a man eating worms (the actual image is pictured, right).

Others included an incredibly emaciated body, a bloody wound and an open sore with maggots in it, as well as human excrement floating in a toilet.

The researchers then measured the electrical ‘disgust’ response in the skin of their 50 volunteers. When people are disgusted, their reaction causes a measurable change in the electrical conductivity in their skin. It’s a ‘disgust’ response that cannot lie.

They found, as they had predicted, that people who expressed strong conservative political views had a far stronger disgust response. People who were repulsed by the images were particularly likely to disapprove of gay marriage.

The researchers accept that people of all political hues are unlikely to accept their ideas – people like to imagine their political views are rational, rather than physical.

But they pointed out that it’s far more likely that the disgust response could influence a person’s politics than the other way round.

The researchers wrote, ‘Individuals with marked involuntary responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images.’

Sex-related issues appeared to be most strongly influenced by the ‘disgust’ response – a primitive instinct designed to protect people from disease.

The researchers suggest that basic, physical responses might be closely tied to our politics. Interestingly, that suggests that politics could be influenced far more strongly by genetic factors than previously believed. [That is already well-confirmed]

‘Mounting evidence points to the relevance of subconscious factors in political decision-making situations,’ wrote the researchers.

SOURCE

In the evolutionary scheme of things, disgust about homosexuality and incest obviously has survival value as both are detrimental to reproduction. As Haidt has shown, conservatives have the full set of emotional responses; Leftists do not

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Excerpt only below

It’s not too much of a simplification to say that modern American conservatives believe the national government to be ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.

Nor are the boundaries of acceptable simplification breached by saying that modern American “liberals” believe the national government to be sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.

This striking contradiction in political viewpoints has not, of course, gone unnoticed.

I was prompted to ponder this contradiction not long ago after I read an op-ed in the Washington Post by the neoconservative William Kristol calling on Uncle Sam to attempt to influence the outcomes of the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. My ponderings produced a hypothesis: Modern conservatives and “liberals” are obsessively fixated on bad guys (just different ones).

For both conservatives and “liberals” the world is full of problems caused by bad actors—greedy, heartless, power-hungry autocrats who deploy illegitimately acquired power to trample the rights and livelihoods of the masses. Ordinary men and women seek liberation from these tyrants, but—being ordinary and oppressed—the typical person cannot escape the overlords’ predation without help. Their liberation requires forceful intervention by well-meaning and courageous outsiders.

For modern American conservatives the oppressed masses consist of foreign peoples yearning for American-style freedom and political franchise. But these unfortunate foreigners are oppressed by oligarchs who happen to control their governments. “Liberals” (and liberals) who adhere to a doctrine of U.S. government nonintervention in foreign affairs raise the same three objections that conservatives (and liberals) raise against government intervention in the economy.

First, the complexities of foreign governments’ relationships with their citizens are so great and hard to discern that it is absurdly fanciful to suppose that Uncle Sam can intervene without causing more harm than good. Even the most well-meaning intervention is akin to a bull in a china shop: Out of its natural element, even Uncle Sam’s most careful actions will be so sweeping and awkward that the net result will be unintentionally destructive.

Second, even if foreign intervention begins with the best of motives, it degenerates into a process of transferring wealth from the politically powerless to the politically powerful. The interventions continue to enjoy noble names (such as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) and to be marketed as heroic efforts to defend the weak against the strong. But these, however, are nothing more than cynical and disingenuous political marketing efforts aimed at hiding from the general public the actual, unsavory consequences of these interventions in which corporations such as Halliburton and Blackwater rake in huge, undeserved profits at the expense of the American taxpayer and the foreign populations ostensibly being helped.

Third, many situations that appear to well-meaning outsiders to be so undesirable that someone simply must intervene are understood by many of the people most closely affected by these situations to be superior to likely alternatives. As oppressive as Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime genuinely was, it’s not at all clear that merely disposing of this particular bad guy has liberated Iraqis from oppression. Saddam’s rule was very much a result—and certainly not the principal cause—of Iraq’s anti-liberal culture and dysfunctional social institutions, not to mention earlier U.S. intervention.

Foreign countries’ political, economic, and social institutions are too complex and too deeply rooted in unique histories to be adequately grasped by American politicians and military leaders. Therefore American intervention—which is inevitably ham-fisted—adds to this mix only confusion and turmoil.

The two kinds of intervention situations aren’t analogous in all details; differences exist. But these differences are small when compared to the similarities. “Liberals’” confidence that domestic markets can be improved by battalions of bureaucrats charged with keeping bad guys in line is surprisingly similar to conservatives’ confidence that the welfare of foreigners can be improved by battalions of U.S. military troops charged with keeping bad guys in line.

SOURCE

In an odd turn of events, former GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz thinks that anyone that criticizes GM is not only “mis-informed” but insists that those “foaming ideologues” that criticize the car giant are “damaging the Republican Party.”

It is interesting that an executive in the company derided as “Government Motors” is trying to direct attention away from his minders in the Obama administration and toward the opposing party, and just before a general election at that.

It is also interesting to see Lutz defending GM as the “future” of the car business. Lately GM has not been turning out the sort of products that puts the company at the head of much of anything.

For one thing, value seems to be an area where GM is in the back of the pack. James B. Stewart of the Wall Street Journal’s SmartMoney.com found late in April that car shoppers don’t find GM to have much value to its products.

“Indeed, value was a theme I heard over and over,” Stewart wrote, “a reminder that high gas prices and malaise about the economy are having a profound effect on consumers, even the auto buffs who tend to populate car shows. This struck me as a marketing challenge for GM. Much as many shoppers seemed to like the GM offerings, nearly all of them cited models they deemed better values elsewhere at the show.”

If GM is the future of the auto industry as Lutz claims, its products are going to have to give customers the value they are looking for. Thus far they aren’t.

Speaking of the high cost of fuel, GM did seem to lead the field in one area. As Reuters recently reported, it led in inaccurate fuel gages.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on its website it opened a preliminary investigation covering Chevrolet Trailblazers, GMC Envoys, Buick Rainiers and Saab 9-7s from model years 2005-2007 after receiving 668 complaints alleging inaccurate fuel gauge readings.

In fact, there is yet another area where GM leads: in some of the industry’s worst cars. Last month GM found nine of its models in the bottom eleven cars.

Those models ranked as some of the worst in value, safety, and/or reliability, and gas mileage. As David Freddoso quipped, “Thank goodness we put up $80 billion to bail out GM and Chrysler. They are now building such wonderful cars that they have achieved total dominance of the Forbes “Worst Cars on the Road” list…”

Even one of GM’s top sellers is in trouble. Recently 154,000 Chevy Cruzes have been recalled due to steering problems.

Sadly, GM is hoping that the Cruze will “convince consumers that G.M. can build a world-class small car capable of challenging competitors.” This recall is not a good start.

Still, Vice Chairman Lutz wants to label anyone that sleights GM as a “foaming ideologue” for doubting the company. One wonders if his spin is merely bluff or something else?

Conservative chat, a bunch of people who got to know each other at LGF before the Lounge was banned – stop in to say hi!

On June 24 the House of Representatives passed by a bare minimum number of votes the DISCLOSE Act, a law that is supposed to be a new effort to get around the recent US Supreme Court decision that struck down parts of Congress’ campaign finance law. Bare minimum or no there is no doubt that this new law is an unconstitutional mess that unfairly limits the free political speech of some Americans while giving an unfair advantage to unions and certain lobbyists — lobbyists including the National Rifle Association and Big Labor groups such as the AFL-CIO and the SEIU.

The DISCLOSE Act (full name, Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act) was passed through the House by a 219 to 206 vote with only two Republicans voting in favor and 36 Democrats voting against. The two Republicans that voted in favor were Mike Castle of Delaware and Joseph Cao of Louisiana.

So what is this law supposed to do? For one thing the law would require “special interest group officials to physically appear at the end of campaign ads they sponsor, acknowledging their campaign contributions.” It would also require that advocacy groups detail on their public websites every campaign they’ve donated to.

But, as it turns out, Democrats excluded some of the biggest spenders on political ads and campaigns in the country, most of them their patrons. In a manager’s amendment the Democrats excluded any organization that has over 1 million members. That leaves Big Labor free and clear of these new disclosure rules. It also leaves the National Rifle Association free of the new requirements.

And this is precisely what makes the whole thing unconstitutional. It is true that Congress has made rules requiring disclosure of campaign donations and it is also true that the courts have declared it constitutional. But those laws were all levied equally on everyone. The laws affect everyone that donates a certain amount of money and higher, for instance. This law treats some donations as necessary of disclosure while affording other donations the luxury of secrecy.

The Constitution of the United States has always been conceived as one that affects everyone equally. But if the courts let this law stand, then we will be solidifying into law the concept that Congress can make laws that discriminate against some Americans while giving other Americans more freedom. This is a dangerous precedent to set.

One thing is sure, disclosure of campaign donations have been used by advocacy groups for opposition research. California’s recent pro-traditional marriage vote, for instance saw disclosure of donors put into the hands of groups that used the lists to track down and personally attack individual donors. In California such donor lists left folks that donated to protect traditional marriage for religious reasons open to personal attacks by gay advocacy groups.

The fact is that disclosure can go too far and have unintended consequences and this should also be taken into consideration and be weighed for effect.

For his part Republican Leader John Boehner is already denouncing the law.

With this misguided bill, Democrats would restrict free speech and violate the First Amendment. But not for everyone. This bill would muzzle small businesses but protect labor unions. It allows the Humane Society to speak freely, but not the Farm Bureau. It would protect the AARP’s rights, but not 60-Plus. And lastly it would protect the National Rifle Association but not the National Right to Life. The NRA is carved out and gets a special deal in this bill. The NRA is all about protecting the Second Amendment, but apparently its leaders don’t care about protecting the First Amendment. That’s very disappointing.

This is a potentially dangerous piece of legislation, but it isn’t law yet. The U.S. Senate has to pass it and then the president has to sign it. There is still time to defeat this unconstitutional favoritism for Big Labor and other Democrat constituencies (and the NRA, curiously enough — politics does make strange bedfellows at times).

Note: My apologies for calling this the DISCLOSURE Act instead of the DISCLOSE Act. It was absentminded of me. Text has been corrected to the proper name of the bill.