The Human mind & bias: Climate change & the hot model problem

CONTEXT

Ladies and germs, we have another potential rut roh on our hands. 🥺 This one is about climate, but my interest in this is the human mind first, but also the possibility that the climate situation is worse than consensus expert opinion would have us believe. If I recall right, I first raised that possibility in 2017 or 2018 on the old, now extinct Disqus community platform. FWIW, my blog then was called Biopolitics and Bionews. 

The argument was simple to climate science deniers who claimed that climate prediction models overstated the severity of the climate issue because the models were inaccurate. Well if the models overstated the case due to being inaccurate, why can't they be inaccurate due to understating the situation. No one on the climate science-denier side ever responded to me convincingly with data. Not even once.

In the ensuing years, evidence of understatement kept accumulating but was downplayed by the clueless MSM and flat out denied by the pro-pollution radical right authoritarian propaganda Leviathan. 

This tempest in the teapot is between science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder and climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Andrew Dessler. 

To keep the complexity simple (sort of), I extract and translate this from a recent Steve Novella post at Neurologica blog entitled Climate Sensitivity and Confirmation Bias. Novella is a practicing medical doctor and self-professed science communicator and science skeptic. dcleve, an occasional commenter here, thinks Novella is a crackpot pseudoscientist when it comes to his attitude toward psi research, dualism, free will and consciousness. IMHO, he has a point. Outside of that ongoing kerfuffle, Novella strikes me as a simple guy just working hard to put food on the table for the young ’uns. He is an assistant professor of neurology at the Yale school of medicine, so he’s a regular lunch pail ’n coffee thermos working stiff just like the rest of us. (full professors get better lunches with martinis)

Novella focuses on the Hossenfelder vs. Hausfather and Dessler debate about the hot model problem. He is looking for the nuance and subtlety of thinking and reasoning when experts debate and disagree. In addition to finding out I am wrong, that is a major thing I look for when I disagree with people here. I like looking at how minds in disagreement work.

Confirmation bias, the hot climate model problem 

and other whatnot

Communicator Hossenfelder posted a 22 minute video, I wasn't worried about climate change. Now I am, which focused on some recent climate modeling studies that suggest the climate change situation is significantly worse that consensus expert opinion had believed. That data is outside the usual range of warming that various other models have predicted. So the question is, should the data be taken as accurate or as a statistical fluke? 

A couple of weeks later Hossenfelder posted a shorter video (9 minutes), I Was Worried about Climate Change. Now I worry about Climate Scientists, that reflects how she sees climate science experts after the response to her hot model video.

We all can see where this is going, South. Hossenfelder's second video was prompted by what Hausfather and Dessler posted at The Climate Brink, a piece entitled Revisiting the hot model problem: 

In a recent YouTube video, the physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder brought up the “hot model problem” that one of us (ZH) addressed in a Nature commentary last year, and suggested that it might be worth revisiting in light of recent developments.

While 2023 saw exception levels of warmth – far beyond what we had expected at the start of the year – global temperatures remain consistent with the IPCC’s assessed warming projections that exclude hot models, and last year does not provide any evidence that the climate is more sensitive to our emissions than previously expected.

In this article we’ll explain a bit of the background of the hot model problem in CMIP6, how the community dealt with it in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report, and why we are still reasonably confident that we should continue to give hot models less weight in future warming projections.

Novella analyzes the disagreement like this:

To frame my take on this debate a bit, when thinking about any scientific debate we often have to consider two broad levels of issues. One type of issue is generic principles of logic and proper scientific procedure. These generic principles can apply to any scientific field – P-hacking is P-hacking, whether you are a geologist or chiropractor. This is the realm I generally deal with, basic principles of statistics, methodological rigor, and avoiding common pitfalls in how to gather and interpret evidence.

The second relevant level, however, is topic-specific expertise. Here I do my best to understand the relevant science, defer to experts, and essentially try to understand the consensus of expert opinion as best I can. There is often a complex interaction between these two levels. But if researchers are making egregious mistakes on the level of basic logic and statistics, the topic-specific details do not matter very much to that fact.

What I have tried to do over my science communication career is to derive a deep understanding of the logic and methods of good science vs bad science from my own field of expertise, medicine. This allows me to better apply those general principles to other areas. At the same time I have tried to develop expertise in the philosophy of science, and understanding the difference between science and pseudoscience. [remember dcleve!]

In her response video Hossenfelder is partly trying to do the same thing, take generic lessons from her field and apply them to climate science (while acknowledging that she is not a climate scientist). Her main point is that, in the past, physicists had grossly underestimated the uncertainty of certain measurements they were making (such as the half life of protons outside a nucleus). The true value ended up being outside the earlier uncertainty range – h0w did that happen? Her conclusions was that it was likely confirmation bias – once a value was determined (even if just preliminary) then confirmation bias kicks in. You tend to accept later evidence that supports the earlier preliminary evidence while investigating more robustly any results that are outside this range.

Here is what makes confirmation bias so tricky and often hard to detect. The logic and methods used to question unwanted or unexpected results may be legitimate. But there is often some subjective judgement involved in which methods are best or most appropriate and there can be a bias in how they are applied. It’s like P-hacking – the statistical methods used may be individually reasonable, but if you are using them after looking at data their application will be biased. Hossenfelder correctly, in my opinion, recommends deciding on all research methods before looking at any data. The same recommendation now exists in medicine, even with pre-registration of methods before collective data and reviewers now looking at how well this process was complied with.

So Hausfather and Dessler make valid points in their response to Hossenfelder, but interestingly this does not negate her point. Their points can be legitimate in and of themselves, but biased in their application. The climate scientists point out (as others have) that the newer hot models do a relatively poor job of predicting historic temperatures and also do a poor job of modeling the most recent glacial maximum. That sounds like a valid point. Some climate scientists have therefore recommended that when all the climate models are averaged together to produce a probability curve of ECS that models which are better and predicting historic temperatures be weighted heavier than models that do a poor job. Again, sounds reasonable.

But – this does not negate Hossenfelder’s point. They decided to weight climate models after some of the recent models were creating a problem by running hot. They were “fixing” the “problem” of hot models. Would they have decided to weight models if there weren’t a problem with hot models? Is this just confirmation bias?

None of this means that there fix is wrong, or that the hot models are right. But what it means is that climate scientists should acknowledge exactly what they are doing. This opens the door to controlling for any potential confirmation bias. The way this works (again, generic scientific principle that could apply to any field) is to look a fresh data. Climate scientists need to agree on a consensus method – which models to look at, how to weight their results – and then do a fresh analysis including new data. Any time you make any change to your methods after looking at the data, you cannot really depend on the results. At best you have created a hypothesis – maybe this new method will give more accurate results – but then you have to confirm that method by applying it to fresh data.

Perhaps climate scientists are doing this (I suspect they will eventually), although Hausfather and Dessler did not explicitly address this in their response.

It’s all a great conversation to have. Every scientific field, no matter how legitimate, could benefit from this kind of scrutiny and questioning. Science is hard, and there are many ways bias can slip in. It’s good for scientists in every field to have a deep and subtle understanding of statistical pitfalls, how to minimize confirmation bias [and hindsight bias and other biases!] and p-hacking, and the nature of pseudoscience.

There are 4 basic choice when faced with a mess like this. Mostly or completely accept it, mostly or completely deny it, not care/unaware or confused/unsure. The latter two groups are typically outcome-determinative.

Writing this post was really fun for me. This is at the heart of how I see the human condition, politics, ideology, the human mind and mental freedom vs. entrapment. Don't you just love bickering experts, especially ones in different areas of expertise ? I sure do! 

Q: Is this creepy wonkiness, good stuff, or something else, e.g., TL/DR & where is the popcorn?

News chunk ’n bits: Commentary on DJT’s insurrection case; Gaza peace talks go nowhere; Etc.

The New Republic published a great analysis piece on the what the USSC did to the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Here are some key bits of it:

The Supreme Court Butchered the Disqualification Clause

It was clear at oral argument last month that the justices, for whatever reason, did not want to enforce the disqualification clause against Trump. What they struggled to articulate during that session was a reason why it shouldn’t be enforced against him. The disqualification clause’s language—the very constitutional text that they are charged with interpreting—is categorical.

[The USSC argued] “there is little reason to think that these [election] Clauses implicitly authorize the states to enforce Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” the court wrote. “Granting the states that authority would invert the Fourteenth Amendment’s rebalancing of federal and state power. There is actually no reason to think otherwise. The Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters operated from the assumption that states had the power to decide a federal candidate’s qualifications. If they wanted to say differently, they would have done so.

They argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters did just that by including an enforcement clause at the end of the amendment. .... The [14th Amendment states that] Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. .... As a result, such state enforcement might be argued to sweep more broadly than congressional enforcement could under our precedents. But the notion that the Constitution grants the States freer rein than Congress to decide how Section 3 should be enforced with respect to federal offices is simply implausible.”  

This interpretation is nonsensical on its face. While the enactment clause allows Congress to enforce other provisions in the amendment, it makes literally no sense if applied to the disqualification clause. That clause already provided a very explicit role for Congress to play in the process: Lawmakers can, by two-thirds votes in each chamber, lift disqualifications that are automatically imposed. To graft the enforcement clause on top of it as well would lead to clearly absurd results, as the court’s three liberals pointed out in their concurring opinion.  

The court’s reference to “nullify[ing] the votes of millions and chang[ing] the election result” by disqualifying presidential candidates is utterly contemptible. If Arnold Schwartzenegger ran for president this year despite being born in Austria, nobody would claim that any of his supporters’ votes were nullified or the election results would be changed when states rightly kept him off the ballot.

The article goes on at length with other criticisms, one of which is that the USSC caved in to red state threats to thrown Biden off the ballot if the USSC threw DJT off. The USSC’s argument that federal candidates and officeholders can only be disqualified if Congress passes a law to affirmatively enforce the clause is blithering nonsense. An existing federal law, 18 USC §2383 reads as follows:

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

Unless I am mistaken, that law disqualified DJT. If that is correct, this USSC decision nullifies that existing law as unconstitutional because for each insurrection or rebellion, congress has to say it applies to those involved. In essence, the USSC decision sanctions insurrection. The original purpose of the disqualification clause was to disqualify Robert E. Lee without indicting him for insurrection. That was a political calculation that 3/4ths of the states ratified in the 14th Amendment. In other words, the political branch decided a political question. Now the USSC is saying, ‘nah, not really’, creating a political uproar in the process.

Assuming all the foregoing analysis is basically correct, this is well beyond nuts. This is the face of arbitrary authoritarian rule of the powerful, not the rule of law. And this time, three clueless Dems on the court went along with it.

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The AP reports about peace talks: The latest talks on Gaza have ended with no breakthrough, officials say. -- The United States, Qatar and Egypt have spent weeks trying to broker an agreement in which Hamas would release up to 40 hostages in return for a monthlong cease-fire, the release of some Palestinian prisoners and an influx of aid to address the humanitarian catastrophe in the isolated territory.

No surprise there.

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From the Low Information Voters Files: The New Republic writes: Maddening New Poll: Voters Are Unaware of Trump “Dictator” Threats -- A small percentage of voters surveyed are familiar with Trump’s most overt authoritarian outbursts. Some new polling from a top Democratic pollster finds mixed news for Team Biden on [the defense of democracy messaging] front: Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution.

Once again, Dems have crappy messaging. No surprise there either.

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An article that Salon published discusses the 2024 book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to Democracy, by Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller. I discussed that book here recently. In essence, Waldman and Shaller reject the common narrative that DJT supporters are mindless children. Instead, they argue that they are adults and are responsible for their actions and false beliefs. They hold rural white voters accountable for their choices, and for “willfully gobbling down right-wing propaganda.” 

The article recalls and echoes basically the same critique that Kevin Williamson leveled at rural white voters in March of 2016. I posted about that essay in 2021. Williamson called on rural Americans to take responsibility for themselves, by asking harder questions about exactly what would it take to improve their communities. Williamson’s criticisms were blunt and harsh. His essay provoked a firestorm of ferocious criticisms from the radical right.[1] 

The thing is though, both Williamson and Waldman and Shaller were, and are still are, exactly right. Biden has tried to help rural areas and in return most rural voters see him as a worse than evil monster tyrant and treasonous criminal. That rural narrative is pure bullshit. They complain and whine and slander, but they do not offer solutions or even engage in good will. Most are arrogant, insulting and a deadly serious threat to democracy.

It is reasoning like this that over a period of a couple of years after DJT’s election led me to assign more and more responsibility, blame actually, to rank and file TTKP voters and independents who supported DJT. My assessment has remained unchanged for at least a year, if I recall right:

TTKP elites, propagandists and major donors get ~55% of the blame, or credit if one likes corruption and tyranny

TTKP rank and file voters get ~45% of the blame

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party

Footnote: 

1. Here is some of Williamson’s blunt 2016 essay. It is entitled The Father-Fürher: 

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

 

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.

Our failing rule of law: A current example

The Hill reports about former long-time Trump organization CFO Allen Weisselberg getting a light tap on the wrist for committing five gigantic felonies: 

The former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization on Monday pleaded guilty to perjury charges stemming from his testimony in former President Trump’s civil fraud trial.

Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s longtime financial gatekeeper, was charged with five felony counts of perjury. He pleaded guilty to two counts Monday for lying during a 2020 deposition as the New York attorney general’s office built its civil fraud case against the Trump Organization.

As part of the plea deal, he also admitted he lied in his trial testimony and during another deposition last year, without pleading guilty to those charges.

The ex-Trump Organization executive surrendered Monday morning to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He entered state court later Monday in handcuffs and wearing a mask. A New York judge said he will be sentenced to five months in jail, the amount of time prosecutors requested.

“Allen Weisselberg looks forward to putting this situation behind him,” Seth Rosenberg, Weisselberg’s lawyer, said in a statement.

Five piddly months for protecting a gigantic fraud scheme? At the very least, it should be 5 years. 

The USSC just gutted the insurrection clause of the US Constitution

AMENDMENT XIV, Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

A unanimous USSC opinion says that congress gets to decide who is an insurrectionist and who isn’t. In essence, that holding kills and buries the insurrection clause. What DJT did on 1/6/21 is now formally and practically sanctioned as legal. We are well past the days of a reasonably functioning, bipartisan congress and the USSC knows it. 

Scotusblog comments:

Before disqualifying someone under Section 3, the justices observed, there must be a determination that the provision actually applies to that person. And Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives the power to make that determination to Congress, by authorizing it to pass “appropriate legislation” to “enforce” the 14th Amendment. Nothing in the 14th Amendment, the court stressed, gives states the power to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office, nor was there any history of states doing so in the years after the amendment was ratified.

Allowing states to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office could create a variety of problems. First, although Section 5 requires Congress to tailor any legislation that it enacts to implement Section 3 so that it specifically targets the conduct that Section 3 was adopted to prevent, state efforts to enforce Section 3 would not face this same limitation. “But the notion that the Constitution grants the States freer rein than Congress to decide how Section 3 should be enforced with respect to federal offices is simply implausible,” the court concluded.

In a relatively rare move, justice Barrett appeared to criticize the tone of the joint opinion filed by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, asserting that “this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

In their six-page joint opinion, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson agreed with the result that the per curiam opinion reached – that Colorado cannot disqualify Trump – but not its reasoning. The three justices acknowledged that permitting Colorado to remove Trump from the ballot “would … create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork.”

But the majority should not, in their view, have gone on to decide who can enforce Section 3 and how. Nothing in Section 3 indicates that it must be enforced through legislation enacted by Congress pursuant to Section 5, they contended. And by resolving “many unsettled questions about Section 3,” the three justices complained, “the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President.”

Before this, I thought that the USSC was tipping in favor of corrupt, bigoted Christian theocracy and corrupt plutocracy over corrupt dictatorship. In view of this decision, I am unsure of what kind of corrupt authoritarianism the USSC favors. It is clearly anti-democracy, anti-elections, anti-civil liberties and definitely pro-corruption and authoritarianism. But beyond that I am just confused. 

Supporting all three kinds of corrupt tyranny at the same time seems to me to be untenable and something that could spin out of control. For example, if DJT gets re-elected, he will try for full-blown dictatorship with martial law and lots of repression. He could easily turn that sentiment against the theocrats and plutocrats, in a way akin to what the corrupt dictators who run China have done or what Putin has done to Russia.  

For clarity, Christianity in America can be brought under the control of a brutal dictator like DJT wants to be.

Of course, DJT would need to be careful and thoughtful about whacking Christian elites to bring them to heel. There could be a major backlash among the clueless rank & file. And, DJT is not a careful or a thoughtful person. He is much more like an enraged, unthinking wild animal with sharp claws and fangs. He does not do nuance or shades of gray. He lightheartedly does blunderbuss and enthusiastically exerts blind, raw power for self-gain.

We live in interesting times.

. . . . and like an adult’s nightmare! 

Biden's Dangerous Zionism

 Biden's Dangerous Zionism:

3/4/24

It's well known that Joe Biden is a staunch Zionist. He is far and away the top recipient of money from pro-Israel lobbies on record. His often highly animated speech in statements on Zionism and the importance of Israel for US interests are familiar to those who have followed his career. But recently I was reading an essay called The Shoah After Gaza, in the London Review of Books, when I came upon a truly chilling Biden anecdote. So much so, that despite the high credibility of the author, Pankaj Mishra, and the publication (LRB) I felt compelled to find corroborating evidence, which I did.  I'll begin by simply quoting the paragraph from the article that knocked me back a few days ago when I read it. Mishra writes:

In 1982, shortly before Regan bluntly ordered [Menachim] Begin to cease his "holocaust" [Reagan's term] in Lebanon, a young US senator...met the Israeli Prime Minister. In Begin's own account of the meeting, this senator commended the Israeli war effort in Lebanon, and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the blood-thirstiness of the future US President, Joe Biden. He had to insist, "No, sir. According to our values, it's forbidden to hurt women and children even in war. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians. 

The source for this appears to be this article from the Times of Israel, which contains the same quote. I was able to find other sources that include additional quotes just as disturbing.

It is no small thing to try to outdo Menachem Begin when it comes to ruthless killings during times of war. There is an eerie irony in Menahem Begin's "humane" response to the sickening braggadocio of young Senator Biden. For Begin was the leader of the infamous Irgun, a terrorist group that fought both Arabs and the British from 1930 to 1948 in British Mandatory Palestine.  As far as "yardsticks" of civilization go, they employed few. For example,   on April 9, 1948, the combined force Irgun and the related Stern Gang attacked the  Arab village, Deir Yasin, several miles west of Jerusalem. Attackers killed 250 persons of whom half, by their own admission to American correspondents, were women and children.  Further, they did so despite having earlier agreed to a peace pact, and publicized the massacre as a cause for celebration. 

Irgun was also the group responsible for the King David Hotel Bombing that killed 91 people of various nationalities including Britons, Arabs and Jews. A list of other Irgun attacks can be found here . Begin himself recorded some of these incidents in his 1977 memoir, The Revolt. He was considered to be a terrorist by the UK, where he was banned for years; and fought against Israel's first PM David Ben Gurion and the IDF in 1948, before founding the opposition party, Herut,  which is the forerunner of his later Likud Party.

In 1948, when Begin planned to visit the US to drum up support for Herut, several Jewish luminaries including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt,  Zelig Harris, Sidney Hook, Rabbi Jesurin Cordozo et al.in the US wrote a letter of warning to the NY Times about Begin and his movement. Among other things, they wrote:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut or Herut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine....

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

 [After detailing atrocities of the aforementioned Deir Yasin Massacre the authors add]. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin...[They also describe some of the terrorist tactics employed] The Irgun and Stern groups groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute....

[Finally they note] The people of the Freedom Party [Begin's Herut which is the progenitor of his later Lidud Party] have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots

When, after serving under Golda Meir and founding Likud Party in1977, Begin was elected PM in a second act of his career, he negotiated with Anwar Sadat under intense pressure from Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1979. Ironically, Begin (along with Arab nationalist, Anwar Sadat) won a Nobel Peace Prize.  Nobel Prize Org. states that, "When Israel's Prime Minister Begin came to Oslo to receive the Peace Prize, there were such violent demonstrations against him that the award ceremony had to be moved to Akershus fortress."  [emph added]

Biden, an avid Zionist who knew Golda Meir  and other prominent leaders in Israel,  knew-- and knows-- this history very well. He knew exactly with whom he was conversing  when he said he would have gone further in Lebanon, even if it meant killing women, children and civilians.

 Biden Meets Begin (Context):

In 1982, Reagan gave the green light to Begin's plan to invade Lebanon in order to wipe out the then-terrorist organization, PLO which had its central command there. By the time Begin met with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Biden, in Washington, to shore up support, many in congress were angry about what they saw as the use of excessive force killing and displacing Lebonese civilians. Thousands of civilians would be killed by the Israelis by the time the war was over. At the time of the meeting, Ben Burgis writes the following in Jacobin:

"The specific Israeli attack that those other senators were confronting Begin about had, even according to the Israeli army, killed 460 to 470 civilians and made another twenty thousand homeless. [He notes that Palestinian figures put the numbers much higher]. That was the situation when Biden said he would have gone "further."

Shortly after the meeting, the U.S. government was shocked when Israeli General Ariel Sharon laid siege to Beirut, exceeding the plans he had shared with the Americans. Reagan, staunchly pro-Israel, was angry. The public outcry against Israel’s shelling of civilian neighborhoods added to Reagan’s alienation from Israel’s behavior. He told Begin that Israel was perpetrating a “holocaust” and he demanded that the prime minister reverse Israel’s cut-off of water and electricity to Beirut. Begin was outraged, but he complied with Reagan’s wishes.

Although a first-term president, Reagan proved willing to chastise Israel when he deemed his ally’s actions to be reckless and beyond decent bounds. He expressed concern over the deaths of Arab civilians, especially children, at least rhetorically. Reagan later succeeded in pressing the PLO to foreswear terrorism and thus brought the group into international diplomacy, helping build the path toward the Oslo Peace Accords of the 1990s.

Biden, on the other hand, had not only commended the Israeli attacks, but stated how much further he would have gone. According to Burgis, Begin's account of the meeting (rarely published in the West) includes the following quotes taken from an article in Yedioth Ahronoth a centrist Israeli paper that published Begin's account as he related it to them:

[Biden] said: “What did you do in Lebanon? You annihilated what you annihilated.”I was certain, recounted Begin, that this was a continuation of his attack against us, but Biden continued: “It was great! It had to be done! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.”

Genocide Joe is more than an insulting epithet, it seems. Biden here states that if terrorist rockets fired from inside Canada were  to hit the US, then the US would be justified in  attacking all the cities in Canada, even if it killed all the civilians in those cities in Canada. This is by definition, GENOCIDE.

Begin had assumed that Biden's yelling and banging on the desk as reported in various sources such as this article by historian, Tevi Troy, was yet another senatorial rebuke over excessive use of force causing civilian deaths in Lebanon. He was quite surprised to find that Biden was  a cheerleader regarding what he now calls "over the top" tactics of the IDF in Lebanon at the time. Indeed, the elder statesman and former terrorist, felt compelled to recite the norms and values of international law, which he also called "our yard stick of human civilization." (see above) Who knows what he really thought. Perhaps he saw in Biden, a hunger for war that reminded him unpleasantly of his many years as the leader of a terrorist group with blood on his hands. Then again, maybe he never really changed, and inwardly continued to think that "the ends justify the means," Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. We will never know. What is clear, though, is that as Prime Minister of Israel, no matter how bellicose he may have been, he felt compelled to defend international humanitarian legal principles as the basis of "human civilization" in our times.  Biden, on the other hand, felt no need for such restraint. His rant was unhinged and genocidal. 

All of this gives me good reason to believe that Biden's current unconditional support of Israel's genocidal "war" (or mass slaughter and starvation), is not due to his age, or being "outsmarted" by Netanyahu (as Fareed Zakaria recently wrote in the Washington Post). It's not even explicable in terms of his being the top recipient of Israel lobby money in the US. His behavior now is exactly what you would expect from the man who said the things I've quoted above to Israel's most hawkish Prime Minister (until the present one at least). This is hard to swallow for anyone with the faintest glimmer of hope that Biden will "see the light" and, in Zakaria's phrase, "speak tough truths to Israel." I, for one, am not holding my breath.

 -Aside from the links/sources used in the OP, I recommend this Mother Jones article on Biden's relationship with Zionism and Israel over the decades: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/how-joe-biden-became-americas-top-israel-hawk/

Let's talk about dancing dinosaurs................

 

Legoland California breaks world record for largest dino costume party

On Sunday, March 3, 2024 from 7 to 9 a.m., 1,273 dancing dinos joined the theme park to break the world record for the largest dinosaur costume party in the world.

Taking the title from Dundurn, Saskatchewan, Canada, which broke the record in 2023 with 1,187 dancing dinos

https://fox5sandiego.com/news/california-news/legoland-california-breaks-world-record-for-largest-dino-costume-party/

First I have  heard of this event and SO sorry I missed it. Aren't you??