https://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/267470906700950
Now that Dr. Mann has drawn attention to it, even more people will want to read the National Review article “Football and Hockey” to find out what he’s so upset about. I didn’t even know about this article until Mann tweeted this demand announcement today. This announcement on Twitter Facebook is probably a bad move on Dr. Mann’s part. Here’s why:
From Wikipedia: The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.
Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters, to suppress numbers, files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.
Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term after Streisand, citing privacy violations, unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have an aerial photograph of her mansion removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. Adelman said that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the government sanctioned and commissioned California Coastal Records Project. Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, “Image 3850” had been downloaded from Adelman’s website only six times; two of those downloads were by Streisand’s attorneys. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month.
You’d think after his botched attempt to get this video removed, Dr. Mann would have learned that lesson. For the record, I don’t agree with the article Steyn cites in the National Review, but I think Dr. Mann’s effort to get it removed will backfire on him.
h/t to Tom Nelson
UPDATE:
Letter from Dr. Mann’s lawyers to the National Review in three parts:
http://s14.postimage.org/7yv69pk9t/599812_401767993212742_781065817_n.jpg
http://s8.postimage.org/m9zsep2ol/531607_401768043212737_603000984_n.jpg
http://s13.postimage.org/n2q0sgihz/205403_401768099879398_275428058_n.jpg
Scanned images posted by Dr. Mann to his public FaceBook site. h/t to reader “Typhoon”.
NOTE TO COMMENTERS AND MODERATORS: I’m going to have a low tolerance for any comments that excerpt parts of the article, as well as other sorts of over the top comments – please be on your best behavior or such comments will be snipped/deleted – Anthony
I think Mann has bitten off a bit more than he will be able to chew this time around. Steyn has been sued for years by Canadian Muslims and the various Canadian speech control panels for his comments on Islam, yet he continues to speak and hold them all up to ridicule. The only thing worse for Mann at this time would be a full public endorsement by ManBearPig himself. Cheers –
Mann the lifeboats. His ship is sinking
I think Mark Steyn makes an excellent point. Any organization willing to cover-up such a heinous crime as what Sandusky perpetrated, is fully capable of covering up/white-washing erroneous and irresponsible research. Mann can retain all the lawyers he wants, NRO nor Steyn will not apologize for what was written as he wrote nothing that was lawsuit worthy. The article that Steyn quotes, that is another issue. If Mark Steyn wouldn’t retract what he wrote about in the link below, what makes Mann think he can make Steyn quiver in his boots.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-sheffield/2008/06/28/mark-steyn-cleared-human-rights-panel
perhaps National Review should put up a page of parodies of Mann and the Team since they will be receiving a lot of web visitors for this…..
oh, and also a page with serious links for all the visitors who want to learn more!
My nickname for white-coated wiseguy Michael is “The Mangler”, for we all know he “mangles” empirical data. We now know The Mangler and his Mob (aka, the “Team”) are running a global warming and climate scam and a shaking down gutless governments for billions.
Doesn’t this sound really cool: Michael “The Mangler” Mann!
The article seems to be rather kind to Mann. If Mann was in a business and fabricated critical business data he would likely be in jail by now.
The point about institutional cover up is a good one as it seems that the captain of the good ship Penn State wasn’t making decisions with all thrusters operational – poor judgement begets further poor judgement in many cases.
[snip -over the top- Anthony]
But if Steyn’s piece was in the Nat. Rev. it would have been seen already by 50,000 (??) subscribers, plus many online readers, some of whom in turn would have posted links to it elsewhere online. And he might well have figured that the scepto-sphere might have amplified it from there. So I don’t think the Streisand analogy holds up. News of the Streisand photo wasn’t in the mainstream until the suit was filed. But the National Review is a mainstream magazine and site.
Also, Mann may have figured, after he had his lawyers send a letter, that it was going to become news in a couple of days anyway, if NR mentioned it, as it might. Plus some of his followers no doubt inquired about it on his twitter-stream, so all his followers may have been wondering about his response, and he may have figured he owed them a response.
I don’t think Mann knows who he’s going up against here. Mark Steyn was tried in Canada for defamation and hate speech, and ended up getting the statute under which he was tried revoked by Parliament. The guy is a master of political commentary. Here he quoted another person’s article to raise the issue, then made the point that the same guy who covered up one scandal involving a highly visible member of the Penn State faculty was in charge of the investigation of another highly visible member accused of wrongdoing.
The “hockey stick” is a fraud, as everyone knows the observed temperature record was tacked onto the end of the proxy-generated record to “hide the decline,” so I don’t think there’s much there to go on either.
Steyn is no shoot-from-the-hip blogger who types faster than he thinks. He knows that if Mann comes after him, he’ll drag the whole shebang into open court, where Mann won’t get the kid glove treatment he got from Penn State.
The difference for Spanier with Mann is that these universities not only hire various professors, but what they do attracts big US Government funding, and money from energy and finance companies. Plus you protect your own.
But what the heck Spanier is doing keeping Sandusky around is just mindboggling. I once suspected they were keeping Sandusky around because he was continuing to help the team. It is undisputed that he is one of the big brains on college gridiron football defenses. There are NCAA rules that would be at issue regarding disclosure and the amount of coaches one can have that may have been broken. But Joe’s getting old and needing help…
But I read the Freeh report and I think it might just be sheer idiocy mixed with the idea of the “football family.” It could be argued that the 1998 event was dropped by law enforcement, but how do you after the 2001 event, witnessed by a former Penn State QB and current Asst. Coach, not take the keys away from Sandusky? And how do you continue to let him to run childrens’ events through Second Mile on Penn State Grounds??
The Freeh Report specifically noted that Sandusky’s retirement package specifically gave him access to football training facilities, not just athletic facilities generally accessible to faculty. The Report also verified Sandusky regularly worked out at the football facility. That’s the nail in Penn State football. The football facilities are NCAA turf. That is, there will be an outside review by an outside institution on the conduct as it relates to NCAA administrative rules.
The trustees took immediate charge of the matter, and the Freeh Report is complete free of any cover up or glossing in favor of the Report’s hirer–Penn State. I’m sure Mann is outraged over the incident and I feel the faculty, maybe including Mann, want to see PS football taken down a notch, or deleted altogether with the NCAA “Death Penalty.” I think Mann has good reason to be outraged, but I will point out that a lot of the outrageous humor about Sandusky comes from the fact that Penn State held itself out to be a pure and shining program. It’s like when a moralizing teleevangelist gets caught with a hooker–that’s funny. Actually, their football program is truly very clean–if you exclude the fact they were harboring and sustaining the most evil man in American sports history. I also read that Spanier is not just your average college president, but one very involved with the NCAA, one writer observing:
“”In the interim, let him serve as the prime example of NCAA hypocrisy, arguably the single worst administrator to ever try to control, shape and domineer intercollegiate athletics. Spanier was the ultimate NCAA busybody. He sat on and later chaired the organization’s Board of Directors, a position arguably more powerful than NCAA president. He was on the high-level NCAA management council. He chaired the BCS Oversight Committee.”
So maybe Spanier was too busy for the Mann-related issues??
“It’s an opinion, whether it is libelous or not is for the court to decide. My point is that Dr. Mann Tweeted/Facebooked this publicly, and he knows full well that thousands of people follow his twitter feed on both sides of the argument. If he didn’t want anyone to bring attention to it, and he truly was libeled by it, he certainly didn’t help his case by digitally zapping his announcement (with a link to the article he’s claiming is libelous) into cyberspace for the world to read. That’s a mistake on his part I think. – Anthony”
But honestly, if a national magazine compared you to a pedophile, would you laugh it off? Would you admire someone who retells the story and then writes that “whether it is libelous or not is for the court to decide”? And would you follow your own advice to avoid the “Streisand effect,” and write nothing about it yourself?
Would you think it OK if some blogger who disliked you made a headline of this story in his blog, using exactly the words you’ve written above?
REPLY: Like Mann, I’m a public figure, meaning you have to have greater tolerance, which is why I decided not to sue that little twerp in Buffalo and Joe Romm’s pet, Mike Roddy, for libel, for saying I have sex with farm animals. Scroll down to the “corrections” at the end. I wrote about this several times on WUWT, and decided that it stood as an example of the hateful vitriol from the climate left.
Mann needs to know how to pick his battles. His battle should be with the original author, not Steyn. – Anthony
I see nothing wrong with the National Review article. It was accurate when published on the 15th.
Steyn made no comparison between the sexual proclivities of Sandusky and Mann’s climate work. Openmarket did. Google cache still has the original Openmarket article as it read on the 15th. They have since altered the article and noted their late alteration. Steyn’s quotes were accurate when written.
Since Penn State so readily covered up for Sandusky, why should anyone have any confidence in any inside investigation conducted by them?
IANAL, but I don’t think Mann has any legal case against NR or Steyn. Mann is just shooting himself in the foot by drawing attention to it. I wonder if he will reload and do it again with any other sites?
Not only is he publicizing the article, if he goes through with his threat the discovery for the lawsuit might get a little dicey for Mann.
The elite at Penn State have proven themselves to be an untrustworthy lot… and Mann apparently has no qualms with being associated with these people. While the the metaphor in the the article was over the top I think the point remains that Mann associates with people proven to be liars and are complicit in covering up abhorrent activities and he relies upon an “investigation” performed by them as proof he’s done nothing wrong. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t believe a word the man says…
Mann, demands a retraction or an apology. He would have better luck just putting NR on double secret probation.
This is a fairly innocuous Steyn piece. He hardly got started. Steyn’s words are no worse than those found here on WUWT. So Mann would need to go after the quoted Simberg to get traction. And of course, Simberg quotes Lindzen The editor of the Simberg piece indicates two inappropriate sentences were removed. Wow!
Only two comments to make:
1) I’m both a frequent climate change commentator and an avid Steyn reader, and I had no idea this piece existed until Mann complained about it. Streisand effect indeed!
2) I’ve also closely followed Steyn’s career as a columnist, including his knock-down, drag-out fight with the various Canadian Federal and Provincial human rights commissions that have taken him on in legal and extralegal fora over the past few years. Here’s a hint about how well these things have gone: not only has he never once been “convicted” of anything, the Canadian government just repealed the internet hate speech provision (Section 13.1) of the Canada Human Rights Act.
Steyn also regularly gets into verbal scuffles with third-rate academic hacks, and the hacks rarely come off well. Doubt me? Google “The Shagged Sheep”…and enjoy.
Advice to Dr. Mann: intellectually speaking, it’s never wise to bring a broken hockey stick to a nuke fight.
Whitewashing is going to be THE growth industry for the 21st Century. Expect to see major institutions offering accredited courses in it soon. With their extensive experience, Penn State and East Anglia could be pioneers in this exciting new field!
It has to get a lot worse for Mann before I’ll waste any time reading about him–even by someone as accomplished in skewering buffoons and the skag organizations they belong to as Mark Steyn.
Oh, was that a show of disrespect?
I am not going to comment on Michael Mann, but I would like to share with WUWT the following Barbra Streisand hits!
Evergreen,
Enough is Enough,
Happy Days Are Here Again,
Guilty,
What Kind of Fool Am I
Anthony, I promise not to say another word!!
If the devil himself sat as judge and jury you would have to take his verdicts with a grain of salt.
Mann brought this criticism on himself by going to great lengths to say he was “exonerated” by the Penn State review. Implied is his peers were above reproach. Turns out they weren’t.
J. Philip Peterson says:
July 20, 2012 at 4:52 pm
Sorry but what Dr.Michael Mann has done to help make energy more expensive in the world (let alone the United States) is much worse for the children of the world [snip – please lets not go there – Anthony].
Sorry, I apologize Anthony, but I was just trying to point out the magnitude of each
egregious act. -Phil
It seems puzzling that climate scientists claim to have little time to archive data or respond to FOIA requests but the good Dr. Mann has sufficient time to participate in multiple court cases.
“A mann’s got to know his limitations.” (apologies to H. Callahan)
I am by no means a lawyer, but attempting a legal recourse to this would appear to me to open all sorts of discovery avenues to the person sued. Dr. Mann may wish that he never took this course before it is all over.
1. Mann is [unfortunately] a “public figure” making it much harder to prove libel.
2. The truth is an absolute defense to libel.
3. Opinion is not libel.
4. Actual harm.
First, Steyn was quoting another story by Rand Simberg – he did NOT make the comment. He explicitly said he would not go as far as Simberg, but agreed the point was well made. It IS entirely relevant to question the leadership of Penn State regarding their review complaints of Mann’s improprieties considering their complete failure regarding complaints about Sandusky.
Second – Steyn’s comment is accurate. In the clear context of his comments, and considering the likelihood of an equally flawed review of the complaint, it is not remotely untruthful to say Mann could be considered the “Sandusky of climate change” as it pertains to Penn State.
Any reasonable, rational, even marginally intelligent person reading either Steyn’s or Simbergs comments can clearly see and understand. there was no attempt to accuse Mann of anything related to Sandusky’s actions – the comment was solely related to the Penn State response to complaints.
So go ahead Mr. Mann – litigate to your hearts content. Please sue me as well while you are at it. I think your actions, lies and distortions show you to be a crook and a fraud – and one causing untold harm to others. Feel free to ask for my legal service address – I’ll gladly provide it.