As IF Times

link Italian court ruling sends chill through science community | Reuters.

In today’s “you can’t make this stuff up” arena, comes this story about scientists being imprisoned for not predicting an earthquake.  In most jobs, if someone screws up, they get two week’s notice and then shown the door.  In Italy, apparently they are held to a higher standard.  The article tells the story of these unfortunate scientists who gave the town an all clear signal but then only 3 days later, the big one hits.  Talk about shaky forecasts.  What they should have done in hindsight was to recommended to the village what they do in this part of the world; that is tell everyone the big one will most certainly hit any day and to purchase as much disaster insurance as possible.   What’s the downside? Tell everyone the worst.  This medieval court outcome should send shivers to anyone exposed to the prediction racket.  I’m sure Italian stockbrokers, doctors and even weather forecasters are just a little bit more nervous today.  Imagine a stockbroker making a bad market call  and then phones home to tell the wife that he’ll be home… in about 3 to 5 years.

Well if they’re going to put scientists in the clink for not predicting disasters, maybe there will be a push to call journalists out for not exposing BS from politicians.  If we apply the logic of this Italian court ruling to these shores, maybe some reality gets forced back into the media business.  If media knew that political pronouncements were whoppers and failed to warn the public of such, then perhaps there should be consequences. The very reason for the majority of the scribblings on this site is because of the proclivity of media to promote stories that range from subtly coercive to outright pants-on-fire untruths.  Of course when politics are concerned, there’s an expectation of fabrication or exaggeration, but the media are not supposed to be complicit.

In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal,  Dorothy Rabinowitz for example illustrates the kind of guffaw provoking fairy tales that are pushed out for public consumption every day.  As she artfully points out, the fibs are not even subtle any more, they’re Bunyanesque in their affrontery.  We quote at length  from her article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443684104578067041987322754.html?mod=googlenews_wsj here:

“…In the 1967 film “A Guide for the Married Man,” a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: “Deny! Deny! Deny!”—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he’s shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.

“What are you doing,” she wails, “who is that woman?”

“What woman, where?” the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.

So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, “What woman?” Confused by her spouse’s unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she’s asking him what he’d like for dinner.

For much of the past four years, the Obama administration’s propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script.

All administrations conceal, falsify and tell lies—this is understood—but there’s no missing the distinctive quality of the prevaricating issuing from the White House in these four years…”

As we said, we expect politicians to have big noses, but it’s supposed to be the job of media to point that out.  There are still naive people in this day and age who think that if something is in print or on TV, it must be true.

And speaking of BS, the greatest whopper still getting mileage is the fiction of Global Warming.  Exactly the opposite of the Italian scientists, the GW crowd are predicting doom and extinction every time a penguin goes missing.  We still experience ‘respected’ scientists and of course politicians who are beating the “we’re all going to die” drum.  The narrative is that, despite millions and millions of years of the earth’s existence, the influence of man in the last blink of time, in geologic terms,  will be the undoing of the planet.  Somehow through the ages, the earth has survived earthquakes, great freezes, meteor strikes, bad weather and shifting of tectonic plates, but now, because we’re running a few cars, the earth will collapse and extinction will come to all life.

All we’re saying is that if scientists can be imprisoned for acts of omission, things they have no control over, then we should also incarcerate people for acts of commission, in which perps had complete knowledge of their duplicitous stories and still pushed them out.  This is all backwards.  Let’s fire the incompetents, but jail the liars.

link Washington sues Florida city over firefighter tests | Reuters.

Broad principles are at stake here.  To qualify for most jobs these days, it’s pretty well expected that there should be some barrier to entry, at least to filter out the most obviously unqualified people from a given position.  If that were not the case, I might decide to go into the brain surgery business because I happen to be good with my hands.  The guys who went to medical school for 10 years may not be so happy about that, but there’s a lot to be said for on the job experience.

Of course, we can’t equate firefighting with brain surgery.  Firefighting is basically a binary job task: if there’s a fire, put it out, if not, play cards or clean the trucks.  However, they still have to at least be able to read street signs and a maybe a road map.  Assuming that someone can pass the physical requirements, there really shouldn’t be too much in the way of obstacles to qualify as a firefighter.  It’s doubtful that a homeowner whose house was ablaze would care a scintilla about someone’s GPA when the firetruck pulls up.  But they do expect some level of competence.  If, as a group, certain people are unable to pass these requirements is it really logical to make the exams easier to pass?  By extrapolation, why have thresholds of competence for anyone?

It’s unclear how these written tests in Florida were administered, but logically, if they were written simultaneously and blacks as a group all failed to qualify, that’s one thing.  If the testers knew the candidates were black before giving out the tests, that’s another.  Presumably, as in school, the tests are scored on the results, not on the pictures.

One of the basic tenets of civilization is that in order to ‘get ahead’ in life, it’s necessary to get a good education in order to qualify for a good job.  As a matter of fact, millions of students submerge themselves in debt in order to realize that dream of a ‘better life’.  If the standards for any given job were waived just because most people couldn’t pass the entry requirements, there is little point in going to school.  People may as well demand to be hired for a position of their liking and get the media on board to support their cause.   While this may significantly reduce the hordes of people naively attending school, it does make the process of selecting a brain surgeon for example, iffier.

Although tenuous these days, there is still a correlation between between effort and results.  Most people have some kind of goal that they aspire to and they realize that in order to achieve those goals requires some kind of sacrifice entailing either mental or physical preparation.  Some will make the sacrifice, most won’t.  It is entirely illogical to expect that in any given employment role that the demographics of that role should mirror the constituency of the population at large.  In a recent ‘news’ story, the Obama administration was embarrassed by the revelation that there were very few minority staffers and advisers in his team.  I’m not sure if that’s true, but it does create a problem of optics for an administration that plays the race card so often, it’s the only card in the deck.

Again, firefighting is not brain surgery.  It’s hard to imagine that any able bodied person wouldn’t qualify to drag a hose around or follow orders.  But if the most nominal of suitability exams can’t be passed by a candidate, perhaps they should be looking elsewhere for a career, something that doesn’t require simple ability to process reason and logic and for which there are no competency tests.   Politics for example.