The Heartland Institute / Peter Gleick Affair
As promised, here are my extended thoughts on what has been dubbed “Fakegate” (by the friends of Heartland, of course). If you never really dug into this, you might be surprised at what happened. Here is my conclusion:
The Heartland affair has shown not merely that some climate alarmists (namely Gleick) will stoop to outright deception, and most of his peers will close ranks to defend him in a sort of Green Wall of Silence. Perhaps more disturbing, it reveals that these people really have no idea how their opponents on the climate issue actually view the world. So when they dismiss skeptics as having no legitimate arguments, it should make outsiders take pause.
Without being a trained climate scientist, I can read the various blogs and try to parse the academic papers, but ultimately I have to rely a lot on the good faith and judgment of the scientists themselves. The Heartland affair has reassured my earlier conviction that the case for climate alarmism is far weaker than the alarmists have been telling us.
Murphy on Mises on Money
I thought this particular lecture (from the Mises Academy class that just ended, where we covered Ludwig von Mises’ Theory of Money and Credit) turned out pretty nicely. So I asked The Man if we could put it up for the world, and he agreed.
Here is the audio:
and here is the PowerPoint I refer to, throughout the discussion.
(If you want to download everything directly, here is the resource page.)
Tax Breaks and Gas Prices
Oh boy, you kids are in for a treat. John Connolly (the author of the recent guest post on being a Ron Paul delegate) spent some time setting up my YouTube capabilities. I’ll post a new video at least once a week, maybe more.
Potpourri
* Here is a trailer for a novel (The Eagle Has Crashed) where the author had hired me to review his economic projections.
* David R. Henderson brings our attention to a truly shocking op ed by Stanley Fish regarding the alleged double standard on the Bill Maher / Rush Limbaugh / using-naughty-words-to-describe-women issue.
* Walter Block at LRC highlights a very clever NWO spin on an old Star Trek episode.
* Speaking of paranoid worldviews, uh, check this out. Obama just enacted this over the weekend.
A Clarification of My Views on Christianity
[UPDATE below with Mencken link.]
There are two very common arguments that people in the comments bring up every week. So I thought I would try to deal with them here “in the spotlight.”
First:: People often ask some variant of, “Much of your evidence, Murphy, for Christianity is actually consistent with other world religions. So how come you think they’re all wrong, but you happened to get the one that’s juuuuust right?”
But this isn’t my view. I am not familiar with the specifics of Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Islam, etc., to say whether they are literally incompatible with my beliefs. I know a lot of my fellow evangelical Christians are quite strident in their denunciation of Mormonism and Islam, but as I say, I personally haven’t researched those systems carefully enough, to be able to definitively say, “OK yeah, I think those people are flat-out wrong.”
The most obvious example of what I mean is Judaism. Obviously I look to the Hebrew scriptures as part of my own religious heritage, so I certainly don’t think faithful Jews today are “wrong.” Rather, I think they are missing the unbelievably important fact that Jesus is the Messiah of whom their ancient prophets foretold.
It’s a similar thing with a lot of the wise sayings and precepts we can find in Eastern religions, or even Native American traditions for that matter. If there is a God, it would make sense that every culture going back through human history grappled with His existence in ways that were not identical but yet were similar in many respects.
I have given my reasons in plenty of posts before, about why I think the specific claims about the divinity of Jesus are true. What I’m addressing here, is the widespread belief by agnostics that the existence of non-Christian religions is somehow evidence that there’s not really a God after all. I find that a strange argument.
Second: One of my main arguments for thinking Jesus existed, prophesied His own death, and then came back to life, is that (I claim) some of His followers were willing to die for claiming this happened. Here’s the crucial part of that claim: These people would have known firsthand whether He really came back or not. That is what makes these people’s deaths so categorically more significant than, say, me being willing to “die for Jesus.” I actually don’t have firsthand knowledge. However, someone claiming to have seen Jesus Himself would know if he were lying about it or not.
Now I suppose you could come up with convoluted chains where some of the apostles claimed to have seen Him firsthand (even though they really didn’t), and then others lied about claiming to have seen Him just to try to spread the word, but only because these latter ones thought the first guys were telling them truth. So if that’s the kind of objection you want to raise, OK fair enough. But some people are saying things in the comments like, “Well gee whiz Bob, some Muslims died last week for Allah. I guess you think Mohammed must have been telling the truth, right?” And that’s not at all what I’m saying.
Last point on this: The first person who made me think the best hypothesis was that this guy Jesus actually came back from the dead was…H.L. Mencken. I was a hardcore atheist at the time, reading Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods for pleasure. And I thought Mencken conceded way too much to this ridiculous fairy tale, but anyway there it was: The skeptic Mencken didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, but nonetheless he thought the most sensible explanation for the unbelievable success of the gospel was that this teacher Jesus got lucky and predicted his own “resurrection.”
(It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Mencken’s exact description, but I think I’m accurately paraphrasing his position.)
UPDATE: At this link you can start reading Mencken’s discussion from page 222 about the Resurrection. Unfortunately it gets cut off right at the crucial part, where Mencken says, “The indisputable thing…” Earlier Mencken says something like, “Unless the whole New Testament is to be disregarded as moonshine…” and then says it must be the several people witnessed Jesus after his alleged death. However, in context it’s not obvious that Mencken is saying the NT is NOT pure moonshine.
Be that as it may, I know that when I read this part of his book as an atheist, I took Mencken to be saying that he thought it was pretty incontrovertible that there had been a guy Jesus, that he had been publicly nailed to a cross in front of his followers, and that afterwards some of his followers spoke to him. I admit you can’t conclude that from the link above, because the preview doesn’t contain the exact right page.
Also, let me admit that at this site, there is a Mencken quote from later in his career where he seems to say quite definitively that no scientific person can believe in the Resurrection.
Market Monetarism Bask
Somebody help me out here: Scott Sumner is acting like Ben Bernanke is contradicting himself with current Fed policy, and yet the latest BLS report shows that over the last 12 months, the “core” price inflation rate was 2.2%. (The headline CPI rate year/year was 2.9%, while on the PPI we see that finished goods are up 3.3%, intermediate are up 3.3%, and crude goods are up 0.7% [sic].)
So why couldn’t Bernanke say to Scott Sumner:
What’s your deal? Our target for core CPI is between 1% and 2%. We’ve been saying for a long time now that although unemployment is obviously higher than we’d like, at the same time we are concerned about fueling price inflation. And even though we’ve been scandalously tight in your book, over the last year we’re already above our target for price inflation. Therefore we’re already in stagflation, and you’re just telling us to move to a different point in the ugly tradeoff. OK fine, that’s your opinion, but stop acting like we’re below the efficient frontier or something. Yeah, it’s possible that the market forecasts (or even our official Fed forecasts) a year ago predicted less than 2.2% price inflation, but they were obviously wrong. In practice, we produced more price inflation than we wanted, and so our conservatism panned out.
For Once I Agree Wholeheartedly With Daniel Kuehn
There is something very clever at this link, I hope you’ll agree…
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