Archive for the ‘media’ Category

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The CRU files were leaked, not “hacked.”

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Here is a very solid explanation of why the files were leaked by an insider at CRU.

The released emails are a gold mine for a system administrator or network administrator to map. While none of the emails released contained headers, several included replies that contained the headers of the original emails. An experienced administrator can create an accurate map of the email topography to and from the CRU over the time period in question, 1998 thru 2009.

The entire post is a detailed explanation which is easy for a unix user to understand.

POP deletes email on the server usually after it is downloaded. Modern POP clients do have an option to save the email on the server for some number of days, but Eudora Light 3.0.3 did not. We can say that Professor Davies’ emails were definitely removed from the server as soon as “Send/Recv” was finished.

This revelation leaves only two scenarios for the hacker:

Professor Davies’ email was archived on a server and the hacker was able to crack into it, or
Professor Davies kept all of his email from 1999 and he kept his computer when he was promoted to Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer in 2004 from his position as Dean of the School of Environmental Sciences.
The latter scenario requires that the hacker would have had to know how to break into Prof. Davies’ computer and would have had to get into that computer to retrieve those early emails. If that were true, then the hacker would have had to get into every other uea.ac.uk computer involved to retrieve the emails on those systems. Given that many mail clients use a binary format for email storage and given the number of machines the hacker would have to break into to collect all of the emails, I find this scenario very improbable.

Which means that the mail servers at uea.ac.uk were configured to collect all incoming and outgoing email into a single account. As that account built up, the administrator would naturally want to archive it off to a file server where it could be saved.

The details of how these files were configured make it very unlikely an outsider hacked them.

So given the assumptions listed above, the hacker would have to have access to the gateway mail server and/or the Administration file server where the emails were archived. This machine would most likely be an Administrative file server. It would not be optimal for an Administrator to clutter up a production server open to the Internet with sensitive archives.

This means it is very unlikely that the server which had the e-mail archive was connected to the internet.

The ./FOIA/documents directory is a complete mess. There are documents from Professor Hulme, Professor Briffa, the now famous HARRY_READ_ME.txt, and many others. There seems to be no order at all.

One file in particular, ./FOIA/documents/mkhadcrut is only three lines long and contains:

tail +13021 hadcrut-1851-1996.dat | head -n 359352 | ./twistglob > hadcrut.dat
# nb. 1994- data is already dateline-aligned
cat hadcrut-1994-2001.dat >> hadcrut.dat

Pretty simple stuff, get everything in hadcrut-1851-1996.dat starting at the 13021st line. From that get only the first 359352 lines and run that through a program called twistglob in this directory and dump the results into hadcrut.dat. Then dump all of the information in hadcrut-1994-2001.dat into the bottom of hadcrut.dat.

….Except there isn’t a program called twistglob in the ./FOIA/documents/ directory. Nor is there the resultant hadcrut.dat or the source files hadcrut-1851-1996.dat and hadcrut-1994-2001.dat.

This tells me that the collection of files and directories in ./documents isn’t so much a shared directory on a server, but a dump directory for someone who collected all of these files. The originals would be from shared folders, home directories, desktop machines, workstations, profiles and the like.

Remember the reason that the Freedom of Information requests were denied? In email 1106338806.txt, Jan 21, 2005 Professor Phil Jones states that he will be using IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) to shelter the data from Freedom of Information requests. In email 1219239172.txt, on August 20th 2008, Prof. Jones says “The FOI line we’re all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI – the skeptics have been told this. Even though we (MOHC, CRU/UEA) possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don’t have an obligation to pass it on.”

Is that why the data files, the result files and the ‘twistglob’ program aren’t in the ./documents directory? I think this is a likely possibility.

This file existed because someone was planning to honor the FOIA request. Then, it was denied.

The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn’t be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip.

It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.

If as some say, this was a targeted crack, then the cracker would have had to have back-doors and access to every machine at UEA and not just the CRU. It simply isn’t reasonable for the FOI Officer to have kept the collection on a CRU system where CRU people had access, but rather used a UEA system.

Occam’s razor concludes that “the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one”. The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn’t because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples.

Diogenes searched the world for an honest man. He seems to have found one (or an honest woman) at University of East Anglia.

Posted in corruption, energy, media, politics | 3 Comments »

Climategate: Be Skeptical of Envirojournalism

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

By Bradley J. Fikes

Someone who is paid to find evidence of environmental catastrophes would probably find them more often than someone whose pay doesn’t depend on finding them. That’s something to keep in mind when you read environmental reporting on Climategate.

Any large news organization, such as the Associated Press, has reporters assigned to cover environmental issues. The agenda in environmental reporting is that humans are damaging the planet, and the role of the reporter is to wake people up to the damage. Otherwise, the beat would not be justified. For example, here’s how the New York Times explains its Dot Earth blog:

“By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life.””

It’s not hard to see what the point is — humans are a plague on the planet, and overpopulation is the problem. This is the discredited enviro-Malthusian view that prompted discredited doomsayer Paul Ehrlich to make his famous bet with Julian Simon that the price of five metals — selected by Ehrlich — would rise as demand increased. Ehrlich lost.

A field based on the premise that humans are ruining the planet is naturally going to attract reporters who think that way. They talk to like-minded scientists, they talk to each other, they talk to Greenpeace, with a token skeptic or two thrown in to give the pretension of balance.

So the output of these environmental reporters is generally swayed toward the most alarmist views. Global warming is the poster child.

Climategate is an unwelcome gate-crasher at the doomfest. Top climate scientists are caught red-handed discussing how to hide information that would call man-caused global warming, AGW, into question. They discuss how to squeeze skeptics out of peer-reviewed journals, and even blackball journals that discuss skeptical work.

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Posted in corruption, energy, media | 9 Comments »

Fourth LA Times Columnist (cough, cough) Discusses Medical Marijuana

Friday, November 20th, 2009

By Bradley J. Fikes

Three others have gone before him. This time it’s alleged LA Times business columnist David Lazarus, with a video showing him acting stoned.

Journalism didn’t work out for Lazarus, so now he’s trying this:


As with everything I write here, this represents my views, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times.

Posted in media | 2 Comments »

Cultural dropouts.

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Victor Davis Hansen has another timely column today. This one is on dropping out of the popular culture. Some of this is age, of course, but one comment really struck me.

Dr. Hanson, you are not alone in your withdrawal from the post-modern.

I do not own a television, no longer read any print journalism, and the radio antenna on my car was snapped off three years ago by vandals and I haven’t bothered to replace it. The only reason I am even vaguely familiar with the current crop of celebrities comes from standing in supermarket checkout lines and glancing at tabloid magazine covers. In the recent Rush Limbaugh-NFL dustup, I was shocked to learn that the Rams aren’t in Los Angeles anymore. The only movie theatre complex in my community went under this summer, and I didn’t know it for months.

I watch old studio system-era movies on DVDs. I plug my iPod to my car stereo as I drive and listen to music no longer welcomed on a radio station’s playlist. I’m reading a lot more these days: histories, novels and poetry.

What makes this all slightly sad, slightly humorous is that I write for the entertainment industry (thankfully not the Hollywood portion of it). Only the fact that the verities of life are eternal even in fiction and that online social networking (Facebook, Twiter, etc al.) allows me direct contact with my actual audience affords me the ability to still function in near-isolation.

I feel like Edward Grey sometimes. The lights seem to be going out all over Western culture, and I wonder if they will be lit again in my lifetime. The boomers’ lifelong goal of completely obliterating their parents’ world is nearing completion.

It may be that people like you and I are doing the right thing by withdrawing. We are the monks cloistering ourselves in our monasteries with our Latin texts ahead of the coming darkness preserving the old knowledge for the better days that will surely come. And unlike those medieval monks, we have the world’s libraries at our fingertips and the samizdat of the web to connect us in our isolation.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Wow ! I feel almost exactly that way.

Last night, I watched Red Dawn, the new super duper edition. I had always been annoyed at the ending of that movie. After the brothers, Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, had been killed, the narrator’s voice came on and said “The war ended, as wars always do.” I thought that was a very weak and pusillanimous ending for a war movie. In the Collector’s Edition I watched last night, the ending is different ! The weak comment is gone. I suspect some studio wuss added it after the film was finished. Now it’s gone. Enjoy.

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Posted in education, History, media | 3 Comments »

Blog Action Day On Global Warming

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

By Bradley J Fikes

Today, blogs around the world are being urged to dramatize the dangers of global warming. For all the politicization of the subject, global warming is supposed to be grounded in science. So I’m going to highlight some interesting science on how the earth may warm.  It’s from a scientific team led by Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute.

Svenskmark’s hypothesis is that cosmic rays play an important role in cloud formation, and that high levels of solar activity interfere with cosmic rays reaching Earth. Cosmic rays seed the formation of nuclei that collect water, forming clouds. When the sun is active, it emits radiation that blocks or deflects cosmic rays, reducing the cloud-forming nuclei.

So when the sun is active, there is less cloud cover, hence, more warming.

Svenskmark has published this hypothesis in scientific journals. But instead of being welcomed as the bringer of a novel concept, he has been met with scorn by scientists who think global warming by greenhouse gases is settled science.

This spring, scientists led by Peter Adams, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to drive a stake through the cosmic ray hypothesis. In a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, “Can cosmic rays affect cloud condensation nuclei by altering new particle formation rates?” the team reported results of a computer model of cosmic ray interaction with clouds.

The computer model showed that the cosmic ray effect was 100 times too small to alter the climate, according to a Carnegie Mellon press release on the study. The release also called the effect a “troubling hypothesis,” now proven to be a “myth” that should be “laid to rest.”

Of course, one can prove anything with a computer model. And it’s really not surprising that a scientist who is also an activist supporting global warming theory, as is Adams, would find the cosmic ray hypothesis “troubling.” It threatens his scientific reputation. Scientists are idealized as just looking for the data, without letting their biases get in the way, but that stereotype is no more true than that of journalists being unbiased.

So just as journalism is helped when people of different views do the reporting, science is helped when people advance a variety of different ideas. If one side controls the discussion, groupthink and enforced conformity take over.

And Svensmark and colleagues have not backed down. They produced another paper giving more evidence for the cosmic ray hypothesis, also in Geophysical Research Letters: “Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds.”

Svenskmark’s team measured the level of cloud cover after especially large, sudden decreases in cosmic rays, called Forbush decreases. The team concentrated on low-level clouds, which previous research indicated would be most affected by cosmic ray levels.

For the five strongest Forbush decreases, from 2001 to 2005, the team found a 7 percent decrease in the liquid water content of clouds. The vanishing water remained in the air as water vapor, but unlike liquid water, it doesn’t block sunlight. And satellite measurements of the area of cloud cover found a 5 percent decrease.

Such a drop in cloud cover, Svensmark says, is equal to all the global warming on earth during the 20th century.

So who is right? I don’t pretend to know. We’ll need far more research and a healthy scientific debate to figure out what is really going on — warming through cosmic rays, greenhouse gases, both, or neither.

But I do know when people use political pressure to advance their viewpoint, it’s more like religion than science. A good scientist should be delighted to learn of contrary evidence to a generally accepted theory, because that’s an opportunity to correct an error. To call the evidence “troubling” is a political reaction, not a scientific one.

In short, just as you should be wary of agenda-driven journalism, beware of agenda-driven science. Keep your mind open to new evidence,  and value independence over peer pressure to intellectually conform.

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As with all I write here, this is my viewpoint, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times.

Posted in media, politics, science | 11 Comments »

The left is closing their bubble to exclude any other opinion.

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

I have been reading, and occasionally posting comments at Washington Monthly, a far-left blog, since Kevin Drum moved there several years ago. Before that, he had an excellent blog called Calpundit. He was a leftist but open to other ideas and his readership was, in some instances, pretty well informed. After he moved to Washington Monthly, I found that blog’s readers less tolerant of non-leftist ideas. A comment that disagreed with the theme of the day would frequently be met with a stream of obscenity and abusive rhetoric but less logic and information than the previous blog. Kevin has now moved on to Mother Jones, another leftist magazine and blog. I read his blog there occasionally and have tried to post a comment a couple of times but the comments never appear.

My comments at Washington Monthly would often be deleted, sometimes leaving the obscene responses in place. They were responding to a post that no longer existed, an amusing situation. Now, in the heat of the health care debate, they have decided to ban my comments altogether. Today, as I attempted to post a comment, this appeared.

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

You are not allowed to post comments.

Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment.

The left has closed the last leak in their bubble. They simply cannot stand to see or hear other opinions. That is not healthy. An example of the reaction to other opinions is beautifully illustrated here. Thomas Sowell is a famous and highly regarded economist but to these folks, he is just another dumb conservative.
As for Sowell’s larger point, his column argues that brilliant people “tend to overestimate how important individual brilliance is.”

It’s a problem Sowell will never have to worry about.

Beautiful !

UPDATE: This observation is so pertinent that I must quote it in full. It is the essence of the left and their worldview.

[A] lot of people have entertained the idea, that Mikhail Gorbachev was to the late great Soviet Union, what Barack Obama is to the surviving United States — the leader who reforms so many things so quickly that his country suddenly disappears.

Interesting thought that had not occurred to me.

On the other hand, some interesting comparisons could be made between the thuggish party machine of Chicago, which raised Obama as its golden boy; and the thuggish party machine of Moscow, which presented Gorbachev as it’s most attractive face.

Both men have been praised for their wonderful temperaments, and their ability to remain unperturbed by approaching catastrophe. But again, the substance is different, for Gorbachev’s temperament was that of a survivor of many previous catastrophes.

Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Yes, I can see this in the theories of the left. They do not understand how to actually make things, though they think they do. When they do exist in the private sector, they are often the programmers who sit in small cubicles and think they are what has created the great corporate enterprise that employs them. They do not understand what it takes to actually sell those wonderful gadgets they think up. The rest of them, and the majority, exist in government and academia where they congratulate each other on their brilliance.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.

Yes, I fear this is indeed the case. For another view of this situation, read Michael Barone’s book, Hard America, Soft America.

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Posted in History, media | 4 Comments »

The Washington Post’s Shocking ‘Secret’

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

By Bradley J. Fikes

Its reporters and editors lean left. Of course, it’s no secret at all. The great majority of journalists have left-wing views. But as a card-carrying media member, people like me are not supposed to mention that fact. If we don’t tell the public, they’ll never figure it out.

The public has long seen through that threadbare pretension. But Post editor Marcus Brauchli has stuck his head back in the sand again. He’s ordered his staff to stop posting anything smacking of personal political opinions on social media.

Brauchli’s order was prompted by the politically oriented Twitter postings of Raju Narisetti, described by the Post’s ombudsman as one of the newspaper’s top editors.

The most offending Tweet of all?

The most offending Tweet of all?

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Posted in media, politics | 5 Comments »

Pro-ACORN Study Performed by Left-Wing Academics

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

ACORN has been unfairly targed by conservatives, assisted by a compliant media, according to a  study by two academics, Christopher R. Martin and Peter Dreier. An opinion piece praising the “exhaustive study” appeared in today’s Washington Post, by columnist Harold Meyerson.

But in any study regarding politics, the views of the authors should be taken into account. Click the links at Martin’s and Dreier’s names and you’ll see that they advocate a left-wing agenda, which the study supports. Meyerson makes absolutely no mention of this information.

The link at Dreier’s name goes to an article he wrote defending ACORN and calling for more activism, published in August by The Nation, “We Need More Protests to Make Reform Possible.” In August. In The Nation. Well, if you know what the “study” is going to say because you’ve made up your mind, “research” is pretty easy. You just leave out anything that contradicts what you want to prove:

“In recent years, right-wingers have been more willing to protest, whether their allies were in or out of power. With Obama in the White House and the Democrats in control of Congress, they’re exercising their memory muscle for creative dissent–and getting more media coverage than their liberal counterparts. . . .

“How can progressives help put an end to this legislative gridlock? What can we learn from the experience of the Depression and the New Deal?”

If Martin and Dreier were conservative professors slamming ACORN, reporters would make sure the word “conservative” was prominently attached to their names, like a scarlet letter. But since they’re leftists, the media uses another standard. You see, leftists can’t be biased.

Posted in media, politics | 3 Comments »

A death of more consequence

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Dominick Dunne died yesterday of bladder cancer. I enjoyed his articles in Vanity Fair about crime stories and celebrity gossip. Sometimes he went over the edge and his gossip got a bit tacky. Sometimes he was a bit too self congratulatory. Still, he provided entertainment and even a bit of wisdom. For years, I sent subscriptions to Vanity Fair to family members who enjoyed the Dunne pieces most of all. My mother was a devotee of his stories until she died in 2001. All in all, I think he contributed more to the store of human worth than another famous person who died this week. Sadly, Vanity Fair went off the rails during the Bush Administration and I have not subscribed for a few years. The loss of Dunne cuts the final tie I had with the magazine.

Here is the VF obituary and here is his final article for the magazine.

As for Ted Kennedy, Mark Steyn has it down cold.

As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine: “Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.”

That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen — and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was . . . a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: “Like all figures in history — and like those in the Bible, for that matter — Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

The basic facts about the incident are here. There is simply no excuse for Ted Kennedy’s behavior. Even treason was not beneath him.

What the political left simply cannot understand is that this sort of enabling behavior toward their fatally flawed heroes leads the reasonable person to have no doubt that “death panels” will be invoked in the worthy cause of health “reform.” After all, if one life is expendable in the quest for Ted Kennedy’s legacy, why not thousands ?

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Posted in History, media, politics | Comments Closed

PETA’s Poodles

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

By Bradley J. Fikes

The animal rights group PETA has a well-earned reputation for extremism carried to such an extreme it’s farcical. PETA recently chided President Obama for killing a pesky fly. According to PETA, Obama should have caught the fly in a humane trap and released it outdoors.

With such deranged views, PETA has a hard time getting taken seriously. So PETA zealots have created front groups that advance its agenda, while proclaiming other motives. One of these front groups, The Cancer Project, recently pulled a classic PETA-style publicity stunt, filing a lawsuit in New Jersey asking for a cancer warning label to be put on hot dogs.

Encouragingly, some journalists are skeptical of The Cancer Project’s claim to be purely concerned with human health. A Los Angeles Times story described it as a “vegan advocacy group.” The article even noted that the project is run by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, itself created by PETA members.

However, the Associated Press inaccurately called The Cancer Project as “an offshoot of a pro-vegetarian organization“. The perfunctory article didn’t even name the organization. Readers weren’t told it was a PETA front group.

(more…)

Posted in media, medicine, politics | 3 Comments »

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