Later On

By Steve Karnowski, AP:

LINO LAKES, Minn. – Ever since his 1996 Toyota Camry shot up an interstate ramp, plowing into the back of an Oldsmobile in a horrific crash that killed three people, Koua Fong Lee insisted he had done everything he could to stop the car.

A jury didn’t believe him, and a judge sentenced him to eight years in prison. But now, new revelations of safety problems with Toyotas have Lee pressing to get his case reopened and his freedom restored. Relatives of the victims — who condemned Lee at his sentencing three years ago — now believe he is innocent and are planning to sue Toyota. The prosecutor who sent Lee to prison said he thinks the case merits another look.

"I know 100 percent in my heart that I took my foot off the gas and that I was stepping on the brakes as hard as possible," Lee said in an interview Wednesday at the state prison in Lino Lakes. "When the brakes were looked at and we were told that nothing was wrong with the brakes, I was shocked."

Lee’s accident is among a growing number of cases, some long resolved, that are getting new attention since Toyota admitted its problems with sudden acceleration were more extensive than originally believed. Numerous lawsuits involving Toyota accidents have been filed over the recent revelations, and attorneys expect the numbers will climb…

Continue reading. I hope Lee sues Toyota, too.

From the Official Google Blog:

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate.

The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel – Europe, Middle East and Africa

“Look forward, not at the past” is the Obama/Holder motto for crimes committed in the Bush Administration. So this request, described by Carrie Johnson in the Washington Post, will almost certainly not be fulfilled:

Senior Democrats and watchdog groups demanded Friday that the Justice Department investigate the disappearance of e-mail messages by Bush lawyers who drafted memos blessing harsh interrogation tactics, saying their absence cast doubt on an ethics report that cleared the lawyers of professional misconduct.

The lost e-mails cover a critical period in 2002 when Justice Department attorneys labored under heavy pressure on a memo that gave the CIA a green light to use simulated drowning, sleep deprivation and other since-repudiated interrogation techniques against al-Qaeda suspects.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), at a hearing Friday, pressed authorities for answers. “Why were these critical records deleted? Why were they kept from investigators?” he asked.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government accountability group, called on the Justice Department this week to launch a criminal inquiry into the disappearance of the e-mail messages, which could violate the Federal Records Act. The National Archives, which stores government documents, also reached out to the department to ask why it had not been notified about the missing messages before the release of the ethics report late last week.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary G. Grindler told lawmakers at the Senate hearing that the ethics report “does not suggest there is anything nefarious” about the missing documents. Under pointed questions from Leahy, Grindler said …

Continue reading.

I believe Obama and Holder will stick to their determination to let all Bush Administration criminals off and, to the extent possible, simply ignore their crimes and any evidence pointing to the same. They are accessories after the fact, unwilling to investigate.

Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian in the LA Times:

Congressional investigators said they had found evidence that Toyota Motor Corp. "deliberately withheld" evidence in lawsuits related to vehicle safety, exhibiting a "systematic disregard for the law."

The allegation, made Friday by Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, came two days after Toyota’s chief executive appeared before Congress asking forgiveness for the automaker’s handling of the issue of sudden acceleration.
Toyota said in a statement that it "takes its legal obligations seriously" and was confident that it "acted appropriately with respect to product liability litigation and our discovery practices."

In a three-page letter sent to Yoshimi Inaba, Toyota’s top official in the U.S., Towns details a review of company documents that the committee obtained from Dimitrios Biller, a former lawyer for Toyota who handled product liability lawsuits. The committee subpoenaed some 6,000 documents from Biller last week in anticipation of its hearing.

Although the documents do not relate directly to the issue of unintended acceleration, they do speak to the company’s handling of safety disclosures in general, and potentially lift a veil on what several members of Congress described in hearings this week as a culture of secrecy.

The documents had previously been protected from public distribution by …

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Mark Oppenheimer in the NY Times:

There’s nothing unusual about partisans of the Bush administration defending waterboarding as a useful form of “enhanced interrogation.” Others will go even further, forthrightly calling the technique “torture,” but saying that it may be a necessary evil. What is a bit unusual is the case being made by Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

In “Courting Disaster: How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” Mr. Thiessen, a practicing Roman Catholic, says that waterboarding suspected terrorists was not only useful and desirable, but permitted by the teachings of the Catholic Church.

This does not square, to put it mildly, with the common understanding of Catholic teaching. In the past month, as Mr. Thiessen went into book-promoting mode on TV and radio shows, Catholic bloggers and writers from across the political spectrum united to attack his views, and to defend their own: that waterboarding is torture, and that Roman Catholics are not supposed to do it.

Mr. Thiessen makes two basic arguments. First, he says that waterboarding, the simulated drowning used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and others, is not torture. “I didn’t get into the Catholic theological stuff of it until I sat down to write the book,” Mr. Thiessen said in a phone interview. So when Mr. Bush asked him, in 2006, to write a speech explaining the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, Mr. Thiessen asked himself other kinds of questions.

“There’s a standard of torture in civil law,” Mr. Thiessen said, “which is severe mental pain and suffering. I also have a common-sense definition, which is, ‘If you’re willing to try it, it’s not torture.’ ”

Thousands of American soldiers have been willing to undergo waterboarding as part of their resistance training, Mr. Thiessen notes; therefore, it stands to reason that it is not torture.

Then, leaving aside the definitional question, Mr. Thiessen invokes Catholic teaching to defend what he calls “coercive interrogation.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting article by Bruce Schneier:

On January 19, a team of at least 15 people assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai police released video footage of 11 of them. Although it was obviously a very professional operation, the 27 minutes of video is fascinating in its banality.

Team members walk through the airport, check into and out of hotels, get into and out of taxis. They make no effort to hide themselves from the cameras, sometimes seeming to stare directly into them. They obviously don’t care that they’re being recorded, and — in fact — the cameras didn’t prevent the assassination, nor as far as we know have they helped as yet in identifying the killers.

Pervasive security cameras don’t substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly: in San Francisco, California, public housing; in a New York apartment complex; in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Washington; in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact.

There are exceptions, of course, and proponents of cameras can always cherry-pick examples to bolster their argument. These success stories are what convince us; our brains are wired to respond more strongly to anecdotes than to data. But the data are clear: CCTV cameras have minimal value in the fight against crime.

Although it’s comforting to imagine vigilant police monitoring every camera, the truth is very different, for a variety of reasons: technological limitations of cameras, organizational limitations of police and the adaptive abilities of criminals. No one looks at most CCTV footage until well after a crime is committed. And when the police do look at the recordings, it’s very common for them to be unable to identify suspects. Criminals don’t often stare helpfully at the lens and — unlike the Dubai assassins — tend to wear sunglasses and hats. Cameras break far too often.

Even when they afford quick identification — think of the footage of the September 11 terrorists going through airport security or the July 7 London transport bombers just before the bombs exploded — police are often able to identify those suspects even without the cameras. Cameras afford a false sense of security, encouraging laziness when we need police to be vigilant.

The solution isn’t …

Continue reading.

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Earlier this month, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) quietly and selfishly put a blanket hold on dozens and dozens of President Obama’s pending nominees in order to secure pork for his state. Some of the nominees who were caught in Shelby’s hold included the candidates for “the top Intelligence officers at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as the number three civilian at the Pentagon.”

In a new interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Shelby is unapologetic about placing the holds, saying that he wanted to get the “attention” of the administration and was, ironically, concerned about the “lack of transparency and openness and fairness” in the tanker contract affecting Alabama. “I don’t think I abused the rules,” said Shelby defiantly.

Shelby has released most of the holds, but they remain in effect on three Air Force positions. Shelby dismissed the Pentagon’s statement that these holds are inhibiting the agency’s work, and admitted that he has no idea whether they are qualified:

BASH: I spoke with Geoff Morrell over at the Pentagon and just asked him what the impact is of not having these three people in place — one of whom, as you know, is the number two at the Air Force. He said, “Without these people, we’re not firing on all cylinders.” And he also said, “It does adversely affect the organization.”

Are you worried about that? This is a time of war –

SHELBY: The Pentagon is a big place. I don’t think one or two will affect anything except on the margins.

BASH: Do you think that the nominees you have holds on are qualified?

SHELBY: Oh, I don’t have any idea. I looked at them closely and we’ll see. Sometimes that’s not the issue.

Watch it.

Via TYD, this story (with photo) of a new iceberg that broke off from Antarctica. The iceberg is the same area as Luxemburg, though not so deep. 700 million tons of iceberg floating in the Antarctic.

Benen is excellent at explaining some things that Republicans cannot understand.

No need to pass healthcare reform through reconciliation

Matalin’s mendacity

Judd Gregg was right the first time

I highly recommend reading all three.

Via Open Culture:

If you’re a Krugman fan, you’ll enjoy this New Yorker profile by Larissa MacFarquhar:

When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens, like winning the Nobel Prize, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much. Here they live in a one-bedroom condo they bought a few years ago, nothing fancy but right on the beach. The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road.

“We first fell in love with St. John,” Krugman says. “It was New York lawyers who’d decided to give up on the whole thing and live on a houseboat and wear their gray ponytails.”

“But St. John went too upscale,” Wells says.

“Our complex is more Midwesterners. Retired car dealers and so on.”

The east end of St. Croix is something of a tourist spot, but the west end, where they decided to settle, is where the Crucians live, and it has a Jimmy Buffett feel to it that they like. In Frederiksted, the west end’s tiny town, there are a couple of coffee shops, a KFC, a Wendy’s, a few churches, a post office, and a promenade by the sea with concrete picnic tables. Not many people about. Farther out along the coast, there are beach bars with plastic chairs and Christmas lights, men with beards and very tanned middle-aged women sitting and smoking in the afternoon.

“The west end is where the whites who’ve gone native live,” Wells says. “They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”

“It was Buffalo Springfield.”

“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ” …

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Louis Menand in the New Yorker:

You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. He does not look like George Clooney. You have fantasies of terrible things happening to him, to your boss, to George Clooney. You find—a novel recognition—not only that you have no sex drive but that you don’t care. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?

However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals.

There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off). The Food and Drug Administration has been accused of setting the bar too low for the approval of brand-name drugs. Critics claim that health-care organizations are corrupted by industry largesse, and that conflict-of-interest rules are lax or nonexistent. Within the profession, the manual that prescribes the criteria for official diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the D.S.M., has been under criticism for decades. And doctors prescribe antidepressants for patients who are not suffering from depression. People take antidepressants for eating disorders, panic attacks, premature ejaculation, and alcoholism.

These complaints are not coming just from sociologists, English professors, and other troublemakers; they are being made by people within the field of psychiatry itself. As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totalled $9.6 billion. As a depressed person might ask, What does it all mean? …

Continue reading.

From Congressional Quarterly:

The House completed work Friday on an intelligence authorization bill that does not include a controversial provision aimed at harsh interrogation techniques.

Leaders delayed action on the bill late Thursday because of opposition to the provision, which would establish penalties for intelligence personnel who use “cruel, inhuman or degrading” techniques.

The bill went back to the Rules Committee, which approved a parliamentary move that would strip the provision, which had been offered by Jim McDermott , D-Wash.

McDermott’s language would have imposed a 15-year prison sentence for intelligence personnel found to be using such techniques and jail time of up to five years for medical professionals who enable those interrogations.

Republicans criticized the provision during floor debate Thursday.

“This will fundamentally change the nature of the intelligence community by creating a criminal statute governing interrogations,” Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said.

Rules Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes of Texas dismissed the GOP concerns, saying the provision simply underscored existing anti-torture statutes.

The bill would set policy for 16 intelligence agencies and the intelligence-gathering activities of the federal government. The Senate backed its version of the intelligence authorization in September by voice vote.

The two chambers now will try to resolve several policy differences in order to send the president an intelligence authorization bill for the first time since 2004. The Senate bill will be used as the legislative vehicle for going to conference

James Fallows talks about his experience with the phone. He begins:

Have a long queue of tech items to catch up on — before returning to "Going to Hell," China-US relations, new small-plane developments, beer, and, yes, "work." First up on the tech front: Nexus One phone, as previously mentioned here.

I could try to be fancy in introducing my comment, but why bother: This thing is great. It’s now been eight weeks since I switched my SIM card from a perfectly good Blackberry Curve to the Nexus One to see how it worked. I’ve never thought of switching it back and no longer have any idea where the trusty little Blackberry might be. (Sorry, BB! It’s not your fault.)

My one big complaint remains: typing on the on-screen "soft" keyboard, like an iPhone’s, just is a nuisance. On the other hand, the voice-recognition software is usable enough that more and more I rely on it instead of typing — for Web searches, to dial phone numbers, to give map and navigation instructions. Medium complaint: the battery makes it through a full day of use, but just barely. On the other hand, the battery is easily swapped out, unlike an iPhone’s, so in theory you could take a charged spare. Small weird complaint:  most users I’ve spoken with mention that it’s surprisingly hard to figure out how to keep the phone-call ringer ON while turning the email notification ringer OFF. Yes, there’s a way — it’s just not obvious.

In other aspects, this is great and better the more I use it. Seamless integration with Gmail, Google search, and Google’s calendar, task, maps, and voice functions — as you might expect.  Somewhat more surprisingly, a full and sharp version of Google Earth; plus, a voice-powered Google Translate function that spans a very large number of languages and, on the ones I have tried, works better than I would have thought. (You say a phrase in English and it gives you, say, the Chinese version — in characters. Hasn’t worked so well when we try to speak Chinese into it! Maybe that shows it actually is working….) Also integrated with, gasp, non-Google functions: Pandora, NPR and NYT news, lots more.

The "Navigate" function …

Continue reading.

What a good idea!!

Do you ever microwave food while it’s in a plastic container? Do you have the idea that it is safe to do that? Read Nicholas Kristof’s column in the NY Times:

Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children.

Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain. And despite their financial and human cost, they presumably won’t be discussed much at Thursday’s White House summit on health care.

Yet they constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment. An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Current Opinion in Pediatrics, just posted online, makes this explicit.

The article cites “historically important, proof-of-concept studies that specifically link autism to environmental exposures experienced prenatally.” It adds that the “likelihood is high” that many chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The author is not a granola-munching crank but Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chairman of the school’s department of preventive medicine. While his article is full of cautionary language, Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.

“The crux of this is brain development,” he said. “If babies are exposed in the womb or shortly after birth to chemicals that interfere with brain development, the consequences last a lifetime.”

Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.

One uncertainty is to what extent the reported increases in autism simply reflect a more common diagnosis of what might previously have been called mental retardation. There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.

Suspicions of toxins arise partly because studies have found that disproportionate shares of children develop autism after they are exposed in the womb to medications such as thalidomide (a sedative), misoprostol (ulcer medicine) and valproic acid (anticonvulsant). Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic. In each case, fetuses seem most vulnerable to these drugs in the first trimester of pregnancy, sometimes just a few weeks after conception.

So as we try to improve our health care, it’s also prudent to curb the risks from the chemicals that envelop us…

Continue reading.

Christian Miller for ProPublica:

Wade Dill does not figure into the toll of war dead. An exterminator, Dill took a job in Iraq for a company contracted to do pest control on military bases. There, he found himself killing disease-carrying flies and rabid dogs, dodging mortars and huddling in bomb shelters.

Dill, a Marine Corps veteran, was a different man when he came back for visits here, his family said: moody, isolated, morose. He screamed at his wife and daughter. His weight dropped. Dark circles haunted his dark brown eyes.

Three weeks after he returned home for good, Dill booked a room in an anonymous three-story motel alongside Interstate 5. There, on July 16, 2006, he shot himself in the head with a 9 mm handgun. He left a suicide note for his wife and a picture for his daughter, then 16. The caption read: "I did exist and I loved you.”

More than three years later, Dill’s loved ones are still reeling, their pain compounded by a drawn-out battle with an insurance company over death benefits from the suicide. Barb Dill, 47, nearly lost the family’s home to foreclosure. "We’re circling the drain," she said.

While suicide among soldiers has been a focus of Congress and the public, relatively little attention has been paid to the mental health of tens of thousands of civilian contractors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. When they make the news at all, contractors are usually in the middle of scandal, depicted as cowboys, wastrels or worse.

No agency tracks how many civilian workers have killed themselves after returning from the war zones. A small study in 2007 found that 24 percent of contract employees from DynCorp, a defense contractor, showed signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after returning home. The figure is roughly equivalent to those found in studies of returning soldiers.

If the pattern holds true on a broad scale, thousands of such workers may be suffering from mental trauma, said Paul Brand, the CEO of Mission Critical Psychological Services, a firm that provides counseling to war zone civilians. More than 200,000 civilians work in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the most recent figures.

"There are many people falling through the cracks, and there are few mechanisms in place to support these individuals,” said Brand, who conducted the study while working at DynCorp."There’s a moral obligation that’s being overlooked. Can the government really send people to a war zone and neglect their responsibility to attend to their emotional needs after the fact?"

The survivors of civilians who have committed suicide have found themselves confused, frustrated and alone in their grief…

Continue reading.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

During the healthcare summit yesterday, John McCain hailed California and Texas for implementing damage caps in medical malpractice suits. But then he stumbled a bit and decided he actually wanted to talk only about Texas, not California. He nervously made a lame joke about California stealing Arizona’s water to cover this up, but at the time I tweeted: "McCain doesn’t want to talk about California’s damage caps. Why? Because it hasn’t kept premiums down."

And it hasn’t. We passed a law called MICRA in 1975 that limited noneconomic damages in malpractice cases to $250,000. Adjusted for inflation, that cap is now about the equivalent of $60,000. Nonetheless, its impact on malpractice premiums has been negligible. The chart below comes from the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which definitely has a dog in the fight since it was founded by insurance industry scourge Harvey Rosenfield, who championed Proposition 103, an initiative that implemented state approval of insurance rates. It was passed in 1988.

Still, the results are pretty clear. After 1975, malpractice premiums continued to zoom upward, rising at an even higher rate than in other states. But after 1988 (that’s the green line for easy reference), California premiums leveled off while rates in the rest of the country continued to rise. The reason for this is pretty simple: large damage awards are actually pretty rare and don’t make up a big proportion of total malpractice payouts. Ending them doesn’t change the overall picture much. But it does substantially cut into trial lawyer income.

Which, of course, is the whole point. If you want to annoy trial lawyers, you should cap damages. If you really want to reform malpractice law, however, look elsewhere.

Very good column at Climate Progress, which begins:

I’d like your help debunking this atrocious piece of media misreporting, “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.”

Yes, the WSJ piece wins the prize for the most unintentionally ironic headline since it is the media’s self-destructive push to oversimplify that has led to repeated libeling of Michael Mann and other climate scientists (see “Newsweek staff who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet” and “Abandoning all journalistic standards, CBS libels Michael Mann based on a YouTube video — while reporting his exoneration!”

I am running a full response by Dr. Mann below.  It seems the least I can do in response to the umpteenth false attack on his reputation.  It simply boggles the mind — and raises serious questions of journalistic bias for the paper — that the WSJ can run this error-riddled attack on Mann and the Hockey Stick without even mentioning any of these three central facts:

• The Hockey Stick was affirmed in a major review by the uber-prestigious National Academy of Scientists (in media-speak, the highest scientific “court” in the land).
• The Hockey Stick has been replicated and strengthened by numerous independent studies.  My favorite is from Science last year — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds (the source of the figure below).
• Penn State itself in recent review, concluded, “After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data.”

Jeffrey Ball and Keith Johnson mention none of that, since those facts would undermine their phony narrative on the subject, which sums up this way, “In other words, maybe the chart shouldn’t resemble a hockey stick.”

In other words, maybe it should:

[click graph to enlarge, and click again to enlarge even more - LG]

Here is Mann’s quick response to the piece:

The article creates a factually incorrect narrative by conflating a number of unrelated things which follow a timeline that doesn’t support the interpretation provided.  It refers to email discussions between Keith Briffa and various 2001 IPCC report chapter 2 on “climate observations” co-authors, including Chris Folland, myself, and others:

Continue reading.