Half Sigma

Google censorship rears its ugly head

According to Blogger content policy, “hate speech” is forbidden:

Hate Speech: We want you to use Blogger to express your opinions, even very controversial ones. But, don't cross the line by publishing hate speech. By this, we mean content that promotes hate or violence towards groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity. For example, don't write a blog saying that members of Race X are criminals or advocating violence against followers of Religion Y.

Dennis Mangan wrote about HBD topics, which the leftist establishment considers to be "hate speech."

The punishment, having the blog deleted and access to his account prohibited, fits within Google’s penalties for violating the terms of service:

If you encounter a blog that you believe violates our content policies, please report it to us using the 'Flag Blog' link located at the top of each blog (Note: If the blog owner has hidden this link, you can still report the blog by filling out this form).

Our team reviews these flags for policy violations. If the blog does not violate our policies, we will not take any action against the blog or blog owner. If we find that a blog does violate our content policies, we take one or more of the following actions based on the severity of the violation:

* Put the blog behind a 'mature content' interstitial
* Put the blog behind an interstitial where only the blog author can access the content
* Delete the blog
* Disable the author's access to his/her Blogger account
* Disable the author's access to his/her Google account
* Report the user to law enforcement

Mystery solved. I urge everyone to complain about this shameful act of censorship against politically incorrect opinions.

What happened to Mangan's blog?

It was deleted from Blogger today. You can still see the Google cache with a post dated today.

Did Dennis pull it down, or was it hackers?

UPDATE

Dennis writes to me in an email:

No, I can't log into my account. I get a message saying that it has been "temporarily disabled", probably due to "terms of use violation".

Sounds like Google censorship to me. Dennis wrote about HBD topics, and he wrote about climategate, but it's probably the HBD stuff which got him censored. Assuming it's not a "glitch," which I do not believe.

Religion of the elites: Deism to unitarian universalism to Gaiaism

For at least the last three hundred years, the elites in the West haven't shared the same beliefs in Christianity as the masses.

Deism was the predominate religion of the elites at the time of the American Revolution. Deism is the belief that there is a single God who created everything, but that He doesn’t get involved in the world He created. The major religions, including Christianity, were not the result of any Godly intervention, but are only correct insofar as the people who developed the religion figured out the existence of a single God and other philosophical truths.

The first line of the Declaration of Indepenedence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” was inspired by Deism and not Christianity.

It seems to me that Deism was a convenient way for the elites to not believe in any religion but avoid the stigma of being branded as atheists.

Deism has completely disappeared as a major belief, and has been replaced by unitarian universalism. There’s an actual church calling itself Unitarian Universalism, but I use lowercase letters to indicate that the concepts behind unitarian universalism predate the formation of that particular organization in 1961, and most people who believe in unitarian universalism don’t actually attend a church with that name on the door—they either don’t attend church at all, or they attend the services of some other sect, not necessarily a Christian sect.

Unlike Deists who believe that God doesn’t intervene in the world, unitarian universalists believe that the major religions of the world are inspired by God and therefore they are all good and one can get closer to God by following the beliefs of any religion.

Ghandi was the most famous unitarian universalist. He said, “I believe in the fundamental Truth of all great religions of the world. And I believe that if only we could, all of us, read the scriptures of the different Faiths from the stand-point of the followers of those faiths, we should find that they were at the bottom, all one and were all helpful to one another.”

To quote Ghandi again, Jesus is considered “one of the greatest teachers, humanity has ever had.” But he is not the Son of God, just one who was inspired by God to teach the true message. It’s not necessary to believe in Jesus in order to go to Heaven. Unitarian universalists, if they believe in an afterlife, believe that everyone can go to heaven, and that there is no hell.

The people who say that “Islam is a religion of peace” are speaking from a unitarian universalist perspective. The unitarian universalist confidently believes that God inspired Islam, and God’s message is peace, therefore Muslims who think they need to kill people don’t truly understand their religion. This is one reason why unitarian universalism is worse than Deism, because the Deist would believe that Islam is created entirely by men with no divine intervention, and they simply got it all wrong.

The elites are now moving from unitarian universalism to Gaiaism. Gaiaism is both post-Christian and pre-Christian, because people worshipped nature before the invention of monotheism. In Gaiaism, God is replaced by the planet, Mother Nature, or the mysterious life force which binds together all living things and forms one harmonious whole greater than any individual.

While Christianity and other major religions have the golden rule, that you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you, Gaians extend this rule to apply to animals and even plants.

Gaians believe that we should leave the Earth the way we found it. “Sustainable” is word frequently used in the environmental movements and is inspired by Gaiaism.

Gaians have developed the mythology of global warming to support their religion. Flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide is an example of how mankind is living inharmoniously with nature by changing the planet. The catastrophic consequences of global warming will be mankind’s punishment for sinning against the planet. The movement to change the name from “global warming” to “climate change” is consistent with the Gaian belief than man shouldn’t change the planet. This is the reason why nuclear power is frowned upon as a solution to global warming. Digging up uranium from the planet, converting it to a much more dangerous form, and burying it, is anathema to the Gaian beliefs about not messing with the planet. What Gaians really want is for mankind to return to a less technological lifestyle which doesn’t alter the planet.

Gaiaism is spreading

I came across a blog post about a guy who discovered that his daughter’s kindergarten teacher is making her class recite a Gaian prayer:

I promise to be good to the earth and to all life on this planet. To all growing things, all kinds of animals, and all races of people. I promise to protect all life on this planet, To live in harmony with nature and to share everything fairly, So that all people can live with one another in good health and peace.

If the teacher were making kids recite some Christian prayer, she’d be fired, but she can get away with preaching the Gaian religion because Gaiaism is the new religion of the elites, but it’s a religion masquerading as something other than a religion thus avoiding the First Amendment which would normally prohibit a public school teacher from preaching religion.

Bloggers need to get this identified as a religion so that the Constitution can protect us from it.

Too bad

Reese Witherspoon is single again, but unfortunately she prefers younger men.

UPDATE

It was a false rumor. She's still with her boyfriend.

Switzerland bans minarets

In Switzerland, 57% of the people voted to amend the constitution to ban the construction of minarets.

I previously wrote:

We need to amend the Constitution so that Islam isn't protected as a religion. It seems suicidal to me to allow the enemy to preach within our own borders.

I guess someone in Switzerland was reading my blog, although their constitutional amendment doesn't really go very far. It doesn't ban mosques, just minarets.

Time Warner Center, Thanksgiving

A few minutes before midnight. All is quiet.

Santa is Real

Global warming may be fake, but here we have incontrovertible proof that Santa Claus is real.

The selective breeding of Turkeys, and similarity to humans

From an online Turkey FAQ :

Q. Is It true that turkeys cannot mate naturally?
A. Yes, the commercial turkey's breast is too large for natural mating to be successful. All turkeys are artificially inseminated.

Selective breeding has created animals that are unable reproduce on their own because they are too fat.

People have also been, allegedly, getting fatter. I think we need to look into whether there’s a genetic explanation. Are fat people having more children than thin people? It’s well established that married people weigh more than single people, and traditionally married people have children and single people don’t. Maybe people are getting fatter for the same reason that turkeys have gotten too fat to mate. It’s all in the breeding.

* * *

“TGGP” links to a blog post confirming my suspicions that humans are evolving to be fatter. And also to be shorter.

Social validation and the false "consensus"

Ilya Somin writes at Volokh:

[O]ur knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm.

* * *

I think that the ridiculousness of positive feedback effects can be understood by anyone willing to put in the time effort to understand that issue.

The issue of whether additional carbon dioxide can cause any additional warming at all scares people because it involves complicated physics, so they are very reluctant to state that they disagree with it and possibly be proven wrong.

This dichotomy of issues creates a debating win for warmists, because people will split the issue and even those who disagree with feedback effects will say that carbon dioxide can cause “some” warming. It helps the warmists create the illusion of a false “consensus.”

It reminds me of when I did an internship in the Phoenix prosecutor’s office, which mostly prosecuted DUI cases. There were two statutes that defendants could be charged with, and prosecutors were happy when they could charge the defendant with both crimes, because a conflicted jury would often split the difference and acquit the defendant of one charge and find him guilty of the other. The only thing the prosecutors were really concerned with was having the defendant found guilty of at least one charge.

The economic winners and losers since 1973

Median income for males, in 2008 dollars, from US Census data.

Age	1947	1973	2008
25-34	20,650	43,696	33,415
35-44	23,989	52,108	44,189
45-54	22,606	50,553	45,540
55-64	19,765	41,375	41,757
65+	8,061	17,785	25,503

Why those three years? 1947 is the year the data begins, 1973 is the year of peak earnings, and 2008 is the last year for which data is available.

We see that from 1947 to 1973, everyone’s income increased.

From 1973 to 2008, the 65+ age group saw a continued increase in income, and the 55-64 age group had their income hold steady. The biggest losers were the 25-34 age group which saw a 24% decline in real income.

The reason why the number of young men who live at home keeps going up each year (a continuing topic at the NY Times) is because the percent of parents whose income is far greater than their sons’ keeps increasing each year. I wonder what the 2009 data will look like?

Smoking Woman

It’s surprising to see a SWPL woman smoking. She must be one of those Williamsburg types.

Lou Dobbs for president

The biggest problem facing the United States is immigration. Lou Dobbs is truly committed to the cause of scaling back immigration, and I can’t say that I trust any mainstream politician commonly mentioned as a likely 2012 presidential candidate to do anything about the immigration problem.

A few months back, Lou Dobbs noted that global warming is like a religion. Yes, he gets it! Most mainstream politicians are brainwashed by the global warmists. Jim Inhofe is one of the few Republicans willing to stand up against the warmist, but most are afraid to speak out against the "consensus."

Lou Dobbs graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics. He may not be the most brilliant scholar to graduate from Harvard, but he didn’t get admitted because of who is father is, and he’s way smarter than a certain moron ex-governor from Alaska. Lou has a demonstrated ability to talk about the issues on television.

Despite being Harvard educated, he has a middle class demeanor about him that makes him extremely electable. He can capture the vote of those voters who will only vote for a candidate they’d feel comfortable having a beer with.

Lou Dobbs is not a member of the Christian Right or any other weird religious sect. He’s a normal everyday guy with solid family values but who’s not a Jesus freak. He’s pro-abortion.

If Lou Dobbs is serious about running, then he needs to run as a Republican. He fashions himself an independent, and it’s great that he’s independent from the Republican Party leadership groupthink, but candidates who are not a Democrat or a Republican do not get elected president. (Not since the last Whig president anyway. How long ago was that?)

He also needs to overcome the prejudice that only a politician is qualified to be president. We don’t need yet another politician who decides how to think based on polls. We need a true leader who will think for himself and bring Americans along with him. That person is Lou Dobbs.

Matt Drudge publicizing Climategate

There are, currently, several Climategate links at the top of the Drudge Report.

One of the links is to the Washington Times editorial:

The content of these e-mails raises extremely serious questions that could end the academic careers of many prominent professors. Academics who have purposely hidden data, destroyed information and doctored their results have committed scientific fraud. We can only hope respected academic institutions such as Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst conduct proper investigative inquiries.

Most important, however, these revelations of fudged science should have a cooling effect on global-warming hysteria and the panicked policies that are being pushed forward to address the unproven theory.

Unfortunately, the Washington Times isn’t taken seriously by the nation’s elite because it’s owned by the Moonies, or something like that.

Global warming summary

Through the 1970s, physicists didn’t believe that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would cause any warming because there was already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to absorb all of the infrared radiation being reflected from the earth in the frequencies of infrared radiation that carbon dioxide absorbs and which don’t overlap with other greenhouse gases (chiefly water vapor).

In the 1970s, global cooling was the predominate prediction of climate alarmists. But there weren’t as many climate alarmists in the 1970s because people back then were more worried about a nuclear holocaust.

Despite there being no basic discoveries in physics or the chemistry of gases since the 1970s to explain why scientists would change their minds, people nevertheless starting worrying about global warming instead of global cooling and nuclear war.

The global warming argument boils down to “Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The earth is getting warmer. Duh!” However, actual temperature trends for the last 100 years don’t coincide with the actual increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; most of the warming occurred approximately between the period of the Time Magazine article on the coming ice age and about ten years ago.

ClimateGate demonstrates that global warming “scientists” are not true scientists seeking the truth about the climate, but rather advocates for global warming alarmism who play “tricks” with the data to get the desired results, prevent other people from obtaining their data and deny their Freedom of Information Act requests, and actively seek to stamp out dissenting voices by preventing them from being published.

* * *

What did I leave out?

39 years of stagnant income

According to the U.S. Census historical income tables, P-2, the median income for males, all races, in 2008 dollars:

1949: $18,545
1969: $33,380
2008: $33,161

The 21-year period between 1949 and 1969 saw a massive growth in the real median income for males, but the subsequent 40-year period saw stagnation in wages. No doubt the figure for 2009 will be lower than for 2008.

Building with Last of Fall Foliage

What else is in the ClimateGate zip file?

In addition to lots of emails, the zip file includes various code files. A reader at ClimateAudit writes:

People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be ashamed [to of let it out for] public viewing.

I’m sure the NY Times has an expert coder at work on analyzing this, right?

And once again, the release of this data seems more like the work of an insider whistleblower and not some random hacker. He knew exactly what to find and release.

ClimateGate, Monday morning update

The Telegraph has a short summary of the best quotes from the leaked emails.

* * *

The MSM keeps insisting that the release of information was by a “hacker,” but I agree with Before It’s News that it’s more likely an inside job. This should be called “whistleblowing” rather than “hacking,” but the MSM, which is controlled by the warmists, prefer “hacking,” because hackers are bad guys and whistleblowers are good guys.

Response to Steve Sailer on Sarah Palin

Steve is repeating himself, so I’m repeating myself in response.

Steve, who normally has no problem pointing out the politically incorrect truth about intelligence, which is that intelligence is a genetic trait and that some people are born smart and some people aren’t, acts like a liberal HBD-denialist when he writes about Sarah Palin. Instead of making bad excuses for her obvious lack of smarts, why don’t you just admit that Sarah is one of those people born with no better than average intelligence, not smart enough to be a national politician who smart people can take seriously.

And with respect to certain right-wing people who feel threatened by the truth that Obama is smarter than McCain or Palin (way smarter than Palin) or most other prominent right-wing politicians, why don’t you fix the problem by working to elect smart right-wing politicians instead of trying to eliminate the cognitive dissonance by arguing that Obama really isn’t smart.

The bubble economy and the next bubble

It started with the internet/stock market bubble. When that collapsed, in order to prevent an overall economic collapse, the Federal Reserve Bank initiated a loose money policy which then created a bubble in real estate and commercial credit in general. When that bubble collapsed, the Federal Reserve Bank initiated an even looser money policy which has created a bubble where?

The answer is that there is now a government debt bubble. Consumers and businesses spending money on credit has been replaced by the Federal government spending money on credit, aided by the loose money policy.

Today’s NY Times article:

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

The reason why the cost of debt servicing will increase so much is because (1) a high percentage of government debt is short term securities; and (2) interest rates are artificially low. When interest rates rise, the cost of servicing debt on all those short term securities will also rise.

Even by federal government standards, a $500 billion increase in debt servicing costs is a lot of money. According to this government PDF file, in 2008 the federal government spent $2.983 billion, and an estimated $3.998 billion will be spent in 2009. So an extra $500 billion in spending represents a 17% increase in the normal budget and a 13% increase in the massive Obama pork barrel stimulus budget.

Young Hot Guy?

A while back, Sheila Tone complained, “you have yet to provide any photos of young hot guys.” I think this guy might fall into the category of “young hot guy,” but who am I to judge such things?

ClimateGate, Sunday morning update

This post at Powerline has some excellent analysis of a series of emails about tree ring data, which demonstrates again that the goal of these "scientists" was not to discover the real truth but to advance the cause of Global Warming alarmism.

Unfortunately, there's a complete lack of interest on the part of mainstream media like the New York Times to do a serious analysis of these emails. God forbid they do any real journalism.

* * *

The Washington Post is doing a little better than the NY Times. From an article in today’s paper:

In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

These emails clearly demonstrate how global warmists are manipulating various organizations in order to create the appearance of a "consensus" which doesn't actually exist. It's similar to the way that Christians, when they controlled things, have tried to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas like evolution and the nature of the solar system. Some Hassidic Jewish sects don't even teach their kids English, in order to prevent them from being subjected to contrary ideas.

ClimateGate Saturday update

A blog post at Bishop Hill has a pretty good listing of the contents of specific ClimateGate emails that are especially damning to the climate change community.

These emails demonstrate what I have been saying all along, that climate change is a religion and not a science. The goal of these so-called scientists is not to dispassionately discover the truth whatever the truth may be. These scientists already know the Truth of global warming, their goal is to convert the world over to their Belief.

It’s a religion, and definitely not a hoax. In a hoax, the perpetrators of the hoax know that they are trying to convince people of something false. These guys believe in global warming, but unfortunately their belief isn’t based on scientific research. Their belief is like the belief of Christians that God created humans.

Within the religion of climate change, the ClimteGate emails do demonstrate that there is a conspiracy to hide data that “skeptics” could use to make “false” arguments and to deny “skeptics” a voice in scientific journals and other forums of public debate.

Unfortunately, I think that ClimateGate will blow over the way the James Watson gaffe blew over. The bad guys control the MSM. Those who control the media control how people think.

Pigeons on a Windowsill

Thoughts on ClimateGate

It appears that, at the very least, the leaded emails demonstrate that scientists at the UK’s major climate research center were acting not as scientists seeking the truth wherever it may lead, but rather as advocates for the idea of human-caused global warming.

I can only hope that the leak will prove some actual fraud, such as data disagreeing with global warming being intentionally destroyed in order to hide the truth.

I can only hope that the mainstream media will pick this up and take it seriously. So far, no mainstream U.S. newspapers have reported on this yet, it has only been in the British media. Perhaps places like the New York Times are so completely controlled by Gaianists that they no longer care about the truth, and it’s like expecting the Catholic Church to investigate evidence which shows that Mary had extra-marital sex nine months before Jesus was born.

* *

Commenter sabril writes:

Apparently, one of the e-mails talks about the problem that skeptical scientists are getting their work published in peer reviewed journals. The e-mail discusses what pressure can be put on the journal in question to get it to stop accepting skeptical articles.

Of course, this is consistent with what skeptics have suspected all along, i.e. that the warmists are attempting to suppress and silence dissent to create an illusion of "consensus."

* * *

Because this is a conservative story, it’s not surprising that Fox News is the first U.S. MSM to report on it.

* * *

Lubos Motl, who is a physicist blogger has a really good blog post about this leaked information.

Smoking gun emails prove climate skeptics were right?

A reader sent me links to these articles:

Guardian: Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

From WSJ blog:

Some of the old emails from scientists made public apparently make references to things like “hid[ing] the decline,” referring to global temperature series and different ways to slice and dice climate data.

* * *

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.

John Tierney recognizes Gaianism (but doesn't call it that)

John Tierney writes that environmentalism is the new religion that’s replacing Christianity. Well, he sort of writes that (hat tip Razib):

What would the product of such a transformation [of traditional religions] look like? One possibility that occurs to me is a version of environmentalism, but with better music and with rituals that are more elegant than sorting garbage. A Church of Green could provide some of the same moral lessons and communal values as traditional religions, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that green fervor is especially prevalent in European countries where traditional religion is on the decline.

To restate what I’ve previously written in many other posts:

(1) Religion is a human instinct. It’s one of many types of illogical thinking which, in our past or even the present, instills some kind of survival advantage.

(2) The “facts” upon which Christianity and Judaism (and probably other religions I’m less familiar with) are based have been disproved by science and rational investigation. Thus it’s hard for smart people to believe in these religions.

(3) Thus the religious instinct is turning to the new grass roots religion of Gaianism. Like Christianity, this new religion is also based on “facts” which seem bogus (such as global warming), but which are harder to scientifically disprove.

Vote for Lamar Smith

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas gets it . He says, “each time ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detains and deports an illegal immigrant worker, ICE creates a job for an American worker.”

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has ended workplace raids because they “are often accompanied by great personal trauma, including deportation…” Why do we care about traumatizing people who are breaking our laws? Serves them right.

Reading the Menu, and the Leica D Summilux 25mm ASPH possibly sucks

This photo was taken on Friday, October 9th. I think we're looking at a mother and a daughter reading a menu in front of a restaurant. Do they live in Manhattan? Did they drive in from New Jersey? Or are they tourists?

* * *

Like the previous night photos, this one was taken with the Leica D Summilux 25mm f/1.4 ASPH lens. Now isn’t that a really pretentious name for a lens?

How did I come to own it? Well, for quite some time, I kept thinking, if only I had a Lecia D Summilux 25mm f/1.4 ASPH lens, then I could be a real photographer, and life would be so much grander and more wonderful.

A commenter from the previous photo post wrote:

I'm not familiar with the Leica D Summilux 25mm f/1.4 ASPH lens, in fact with any Leica D, but from what I can see:

- noise present, and the ugly kind, especially on the red channel.
- I doubt this is f/1.4. I don't shoot micro 4/3s, so can't be 100% sure.
- bad bokeh. you can see onion rings. Based on the web pictures, Leica D Summilux 25 ASPH has creamy bokeh. This is not creamy. It's hard to say, but I believe the lens you used is an older design, without a floating element, definitely one over-corrected, that gives this kind of onion rings bokeh. It could be one of those old Zeiss designs.
- little CA present.
- little cat's eyes distortion.

Based on the busy/onion rings bokeh, I don't think this is a Leica D Summilux 25mm f/1.4 ASPH lens. In any case, the photo is not impressive.

The point of all this is, basically, “your camera sucks, your lens sucks, nyah nyah nyah nyah.” There is, in fact, quite a lot of people who go around the internet telling other people that their photography gear sucks. The same phenomenon is probably seen wherever nerds communicate with each other. On World of Warcraft forums, there are loads of people telling other people that their World of Warcraft characters suck.

The lens really is a Leica D Summilux 25mm f/1.4 ASPH, manufactured in Japan by Panasonic, so doubters would say that it’s not a “real” Leica lens. Does the lens suck? Well, nearly all of my camera gear sucks compared to expectations raised by chatter on the internet. I attribute this to two factors: (1) there’s poor quality control by the manufacturers; and (2) people like to make out that their gear is a lot better than it really is in order to boost their self esteem, which inevitably creates a lot of disappointment when people buy the stuff and find out it not as good as internet evangelists say it is. (It’s surely quite prole to try to get self esteem from the camera equipment that you own.)

If the lens does suck, it's because of the focusing issues it has (bad quality control, but unfortunately common with fast lenses, apparently even "Leica" fast lenses), and not because of the bokeh. If I called up Panasonic and said, "fix my lens because some guy on the internet says it has bad bokeh," I don't think they would offer to help me.

The commenter, at least, is correct to remind me not to fall into the trap of thinking that a crappy photo is made better because it was taken with a lens with a pretentious name. All the lens does is give one the ability to take sharp photos with wide apertures, it’s up to the person using the camera to put it to creative use. But I find that I’m a lot more creative using the small Canon S90 pocket camera than I am using a DSLR with a one pound lens and a noisy shutter. This is why you are looking at people’s backs in the photo above; the candid photo the S90 excels at doesn’t work with the DSLR, unless you have lots of chutzpah. (Of course, some readers don’t like those photos anyway—there’s just no appreciation for art.)