Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2011

Climategate 2.0 for dummies

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

For anyone who managed to avoid hearing about the original release of emails from many of the leading lights in the anthropogenic global warming community, revealing a much more sordid and less-than-honest process to publicize information on the global climate, James Delingpole explains why the latest batch of emails are important:

The latest batch of emails, leaked by a person or persons unknown (but whoever they are they deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor at the very least) comprises 5,000 files, dumped as before onto a Russian server, revealing private correspondence between many of the scientists at the heart of the Great Global Warming scam.

These are men like Penn State’s increasingly infamous Michael Mann (inventor of the discredited Hockey Stick) and the University of East Angia’s Phil Jones: not just two-bit research assistants but the “experts” whose data, research papers and lobbying forms the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) pronouncements on Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The IPCC, in turn, is the organization on whose doomy prognostications of man-made climate disaster our political leaders base their policy. So when Obama pours billions of your tax dollars into failed clean-tech companies like Solyndra, when you are banned from using the kind of lightbulbs that actually illuminate a room rather than merely flicker and give you a headache, when the EPA’s Lisa Jackson tries reducing the number of showers you take or seeks to regulate when you use your aircon, when your energy bills rise and your flights grow more expensive due to carbon taxes — all these infringements on your economic wellbeing and your liberty can be traced back to these Climategate scientists. This is why Climategate matters.

November 24, 2011

US to be crushed by Oriental economic juggernaut, film at 11

Filed under: China, Economics, Japan, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Do any of these statements sound familiar?

  • “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history”
  • “The power behind the [. . .] juggernaut is much greater than most Americans suspect, and the juggernaut cannot stop of its own volition, for [it] has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas.”

This kind of statement can be found in all the prestigious newspapers, opinion journals, and magazines . . . in the late 1970s through the late 1980s. The economic juggernaut of the day was Japan. It was poised to crush the feeble remnants of American capitalism with the all-powerful keiretsu, Japan’s corporate conglomerate organizations. The strong would smash the weak, leaving America (and the rest of the Anglosphere) in the dust. Just in case you didn’t follow economic history, it didn’t happen.

Today, the economic bogeyman is China:

“We are getting our clock cleaned by Chinese state capitalism,” wrote Robert Kuttner, now editor of The American Prospect, earlier this year at The Huffington Post. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson piled on at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, declaring, “The age of American predominance is over. The [Chinese] Yuan will be the world’s reserve currency within two decades.” The conservative Citizens Against Government Waste even aired a television commercial featuring a Beijing economics class in 2030 in which a professor explains how America became indebted to China. The professor concludes, “So now they work for us.” The class chuckles knowingly.

This gloomy message of American decline relative to China appears to be seeping into popular consciousness. An April 2011 poll by Xavier University found that “a stunning 63 percent believe that the Chinese economy is more powerful than the US economy.”

“The U.S. could lose its status as the world’s biggest economic power within five years,” reported The Daily Mail in April. The Mail article was based on calculations released by the International Monetary Fund projecting that total Chinese GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, will surpass U.S. GDP by 2016.

Can that be? Let’s do the math: China’s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China’s GDP would rise to $40 trillion. If the U.S. economy grew at, say, 3 percent a year, total GDP would be $27 trillion. Back in 2007, before the financial crisis, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report projecting that Chinese GDP would be $26 trillion in 2030, compared to $23 trillion for the U.S. It bears noting that current Chinese purchasing power per capita is about $6,000, compared to $46,000 for Americans.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible — the longer the US government struggles to avoid cutting back, the more likely it is that the US will enter a long economic decline — but China has economic problems a-plenty.

Nigel Farage on “German-dominated Europe”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

NFL week 12 early predictions

Filed under: Football — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:37

Our American friends are late in celebrating Thanksgiving, which is why your favourite US websites are full of turkey jokes and pumpkin pie photos. Because they know they have a captive audience who may well be desperate to get away from their distant (or not-distant-enough) relatives, the NFL schedules three games on Thursday:

    Green Bay vs @Detroit (6.0) 12:30pm
    @Dallas vs Miami (7.0) 4:15pm
    @Baltimore vs San Francisco (3.5) 8:20pm

Last week: 9-5 (5-9 against the spread)
Season to date 96-64

The shot that started the First Interplanetary War?

Filed under: Space — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:25

Yes, it may not happen for a few more decades, but we were the instigators of what might be the most long-distance war in human history:

The new habitability study has involved the collaborating scientists devising two different indexes for rating worlds, in proper scientifiction style*. We now have the Earth Similarity Index (ESI), showing how much like Earth a body is, on which Earth is 1, Mars is 0.7 and our Moon is 0.56.

The scientists have also worked out a Planet Habitability Index (PHI), based on such things as planetary magnetic fields, atmosphere, likely local temperatures etc. Titan, icy natural-gas slush moon of Saturn, scores high on this at 0.64.

But, very worryingly, the planets of the dim, red M-class star Gliese 581 — lying just 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra — score high up the listings in both systems. Under ESI, the exoplanets Gliese 581g, d and c are the next three most habitable known worlds after Earth: and they are also well up under PHI.

Normally this would not be cause for alarm, but — as regular readers of Reg exoplanet coverage will know — should there be intelligent aliens at Gliese 581 they will soon have an intense and well-justified grievance against us.

It was a deliberate and evil provocation we gave, and our fate may already be sealed.

November 23, 2011

BC Supreme Court upholds law against polygamy

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:34

I’m somewhat surprised that the court upheld the existing law: I’d expected them to strike it down as overbroad.

Polygamy remains a crime in Canada, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman ruled Wednesday. In his ruling, Bauman said the law violates the religious freedom of fundamentalist Mormons, but the harm against women and children outweighs that concern.

Bauman reserved judgment on the landmark case in April, after hearing 42 days of legal arguments during the unusual reference case, with opposing parties arguing the right to religious freedom and the risk of harm polygamy poses to women and children.

The constitutional issue was referred to the B.C. Supreme Court by the provincial government after polygamy charges laid against Bountiful, B.C., Mormon leaders Winston Blackmore and James Oler were stayed in 2009.

While this particular case involved Mormons, the majority of people whose marital arrangements would be affected are Muslims: there are an unknown (but growing) number of polygamous marriages among recent Muslim immigrants to Canada. If the existing law had been struck down, there would have been a scramble among regional and local government agencies to cope with the expected increase in demands for appropriate housing and support from newly legal multi-spouse families.

Sing a song, go to jail

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Soccer — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

This is rather disturbing:

Imagine the scene. A dawn raid. A vanload of police officers batter down a front door. A 17-year-old boy is dragged from his home and driven away. He is charged with a crime and appears in court. His lawyers apply for bail, but the court decides his crime is too serious for that. So he is taken to a prison cell and remanded in custody.

What was his crime? Terrorism? Rape? No, this 17-year-old was imprisoned for singing a song. Where did this take place? Iran? China? Saudi Arabia? No — it was in Glasgow, Scotland, where the 17-year-old had sung songs that are now deemed by the authorities to be criminal. The youth was charged with carrying out a ‘religiously aggravated’ breach of the peace and evading arrest.

Why haven’t you heard about this case? Why aren’t civil liberties groups tweeting like mad about this affront to freedom? Because the young man in question is a football fan. Even worse, he’s a fan of one of the ‘Old Firm’ teams (Celtic and Rangers), which are renowned for their historic rivalry, and the songs he sang were football ditties that aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Draconian new laws are being pushed through the Scottish parliament to imprison fans for up to five years for singing sectarian or offensive songs at football games, or for posting offensive comments on the internet, and this 17-year-old fell foul of these proposed laws.

The political delusion: “We must re-establish the primacy of politics over the market”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:06

That’s Angela Merkel, expressing the thought that many politicians have, but rarely speak out loud. There’s a lot of wishful thinking wrapped up in that statement:

“We must re-establish the primacy of politics over the market.” That sentence, spoken a little while ago by Germany’s Angela Merkel, sums up the startlingly unoriginal character of the approach adopted by most EU politicians as they seek to save the common currency from what even Paul Krugman seems to concede is its current trajectory towards immolation.

As every good European career politician (is there any other type?) knows, the euro project was never primarily about good economics, let alone a devious “neoliberal” conspiracy to let loose the dreaded market to wreck havoc upon unsuspecting Europeans. The euro was always essentially about the use of an economic tool to realize a political grand design: European unification. Major backers of the common currency back in the 1990s, such as Jacques Delors and Helmut Kohl, never hid the fact that this was their ultimate ambition. Nor did they trouble to hide their disdain of those who thought the whole enterprise would end in tears.

From the common currency project’s beginning, economic considerations were continually subordinated to the goal of using the euro to cement political bonds. That’s why most countries were allowed to enter the euro despite not having met some basic entry criteria. It also explains why no one really seemed to care too much when Greece admitted in 2004 that it had fudged, distorted, and lied its way into the euro club. Now, however, Europe is discovering what happens when political games diminish a currency’s ability to reflect economic facts on the ground.

H/T to “Monty” at Ace of Spades HQ, who commented:

This in a nutshell is everything that is wrong with the sovereign governments of both Europe and the United States (and China, and Russia, and…well, you get my point). The “market” is not a thing to be managed, or a process to be controlled. The market is just an aspect of the natural world, working on the creatures who move through it. Merkel’s comment reflects the combination of arrogance and ignorance that is at the root of so many of our economic problems.

QotD: How the sequester is a symptom of political cowardice

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Those who can do. Those who can’t form a supercommittee. Those who can’t produce a majority vote in a supercommittee sequester. Those who can’t even sequester are telling the world something profound about American inertia.

As Veronique points out [. . .], the “automatic” sequestration cuts would over the course of ten years reduce US public debt by only $153 billion. Which boils down to about a month’s worth of the current federal deficit.

Yet even slashing a pimple’s worth of borrowing out of the great oozing mountain of pustules will prove too much for Washington.

Mark Steyn, “Happy Sweet Sequester’d Days”, National Review Online, 2011-11-21

Tim Harford on credit rating agencies

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:52

I think it’s safe to say that he’s not over-impressed with the organizations involved in doing credit risk assessments:

What are rating agencies again?

They are private companies that express opinions about the likelihood that, for example, Italy will pay the money it owes bondholders. Sometimes they express opinions about how much money people will get back if Italy defaults on its loans. One way or another they’re providing opinions about the risks that creditors face.

That’s it? Just a bunch of opinions?

Basically, yes. And there are plenty of other opinions out there from journalists and particularly from people who put cash on the line and buy and sell these bonds. But the rating agency opinions have real-world significance in a way that a bloke in the pub doesn’t. Many investment funds promise their investors that they will only hold assets with ratings above a certain level. If a rating is downgraded, those funds have to sell, even if they think the asset is a bargain. Ratings are also hard-wired into regulatory rules, with similar effect. And another thing: unlike most opinions, they’re quantified.

Quantified on a scale of 1-10?

No, quantified on a scale of D through CC+ and BBB- all the way to AAA. Or alternatively, au choix, from C through Caa2 and Ba1 to Aaa. Depending on which agency you’re looking at.

Why?

For ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD REASON.

November 22, 2011

QotD: Our Charter of “rights” and “freedoms”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

On the evening of January 12, 1981, justice minister Jean Chrétien sat in front of the special parliamentary committee on the Constitution. “I am proposing that Section 1 read as follows: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” he said.

“This will ensure that any limit on a right must be not only reasonable and prescribed by law, but must also be shown to be demonstrably justified.” Translation: “This will ensure that even though we pretend the public has rights that are fundamental to any free and democratic society, we can take them away at will, so long as we can convince a judge that such measures are justified.”

The language used by Mr. Chrétien would eventually become Section 1 of the Charter, which gives government the constitutional cover to infringe the supposedly “fundamental freedoms” that follow it. In order to figure out when such infringements are in fact justified, the Supreme Court came up with the Oakes test.

Using this two-step process, laws that violate our Charter rights must have a “pressing and substantial” objective, and the means of effecting the limit must be reasonable and proportional. The infringement has to be connected to the law’s objective; it has to be as minimal as possible; and it must balance the consequences of such a limitation, with the objective that is being sought.

Jesse Kline, “Freedom shouldn’t come with caveats, but it does”, National Post, 2011-11-22

The biggest threat to the environmental movement

Filed under: Economics, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

No, it’s not some ferociously polluting corporation, or a dangerously powerful conservative politician or a candidate for the GOP nomination in the United States. It’s algae:

“We can engineer, humbly, like we have been domesticating plants for a long time,” one scientist told me. “We engineer the algae to do biochemically something quite different to what they’d be doing in the wild: they still take photons from the sun, and via biology, turn it into a useful captured molecule. We have them doing something similar but with stunning efficiency: it’s 40 to 100 times more efficient,” says Elbert Branscomb, chief scientist to the US Department of Energy.

There are (at least) around 60 startups hoping to produce oil and diesel biologically, with accelerated fermentation or photosynthesis techniques to produce an end product that is 100 per cent compatible with the existing infrastructure. Some, for example, tweak the algae to make them do photosynthesis anything from 40 to 100 times more efficiently. LS9 received $30m in funding and has a one-step process to convert sugar to create renewable petrol. It expects production within five years. If oil prices remain high, say over $40 or $50 a barrel, then it’s viable.

So why is this the biggest threat to the environmental movement?

But the greatest challenge cheap hydrocarbons poses is for people whose outlook is founded on what I call “End Times logic”. The most successful political movement in recent years is environmentalism, which expanded from specific concerns about pollution and conservation into an all-encompassing worldview, complete with very preachy appeals to changing parts of our lifestyles.

These ranged from “Don’t flush the loo too often”, to “Don’t fly for a weekend break”, to “Eat less red meat”. Very few politicians have felt courageous enough to contradict this. And the movement has achieved its ascendancy through urgent, apocalyptic appeals, rather than using calmer methods of rational persuasion which involve costs and benefits to be totted up. These new energy sources pose a profound problem: they saves the planet, and we carry on with minimum disruption.

I expect that one effect will be that environmentalism will become much more about everyday concerns such as pollution, and conservations again, back to where it started. But it grew into a vacuum, after the end of the Cold War, when great political ideas seemed to lose credibility. As a way of driving the political agenda, it will become currency without value. Buzzwords such as “sustainability”, founded on a resource-constrained view, will no longer be credible. People will simply laugh at them.

Another case where “spending cuts” still mean increased spending

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

No, not the US government, even though the media will be talking up the “savage” spending cuts coming because of sequestration (which will only reduce the rate of increase, not actually reduce spending). In this case it’s Britain:

Why is Britain growing more slowly than other developed nations? Why have we been outperformed over the past 12 months by every EU state except Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Romania?

Let’s start by dismissing the Labour-Guardian-BBC explanation: the idea that the economy is shrinking because of ‘the cuts’. As this blog never tires of pointing out, net government expenditure is higher now than it was under Gordon Brown. We are set to borrow at least £122 billion this year. Spending is above 50 per cent of GDP. How much more ‘stimulus’ do critics want?

What the international league tables show is that the countries which decreed the biggest bailouts experienced the sharpest contractions. Far from ‘stimulating’ the economy, these various programmes have taken money out of the productive sector. If stimulus spending worked, the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War.

Acronym watch: “In the euro zone farmyard, it’s time to forget about the PIGS and start counting the broken EEGs”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

The journalists will appreciate this new acronym:

The euro zone needs a new acronym. For the past three years, PIGS has served as a catchall for the cash-strapped states on the single currency’s periphery. But now that the crisis has moved to the core, a change is overdue.

PIGS has proved surprisingly durable. When it was first coined, citizens of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain were understandably upset at being lumped together in such a derogatory way. Yet as Ireland and Portugal followed Greece in seeking bailouts, their similarities outweighed historical differences.

Some felt the acronym was self-fulfilling, giving attention-deprived speculators a handy shortlist from which to select their next sovereign victim. However, its survival was also an accident. When Italy got into trouble earlier this year, it slotted smoothly into the slot previously reserved for bailed-out Ireland. Politically sensitive bodies avoided the zoomorphic insult by reshuffling the letters to create the GIPS.

[. . .]

A better idea might be to start with the one remaining euro zone member that isn’t under attack from the bond markets. Andrew Balls, head of European portfolio management at PIMCO, now describes the euro zone states being shunned by investors as EEGs: Everyone Except Germany.

Herman Cain and the most awkward anecdote so far

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

I suspect Herman Cain has managed to talk himself out of the GOP nomination race with little anecdotes like this one:

Cain speaks for nearly a half an hour and despite a couple fleeting “999” mentions, keeps his speech to topics of faith and his recent battle with cancer. He begins with a story about how he knew he would survive when he discovered that his physician was named “Dr. Lord,” that the hospital attendant’s name was “Grace” and that the incision made on his chest during the surgery would be in the shape of a “J.”

“Come on, y’all. As in J-E-S-U-S! Yes! A doctor named Lord! A lady named Grace! And a J-cut for Jesus Almighty,” Cain boomed.

He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”

“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign — not that I had anything against foreign doctors — but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s a Christian from Lebanon.'”

“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”

The crowd laughs uneasily.

Oh, good. He’s not quite xenophobic, just religiously . . . cautious. At least he chose the right kind of place to tell this little story:

By the time Herman Cain took the stage, Jesus had already been crucified, resurrected and returned to Earth to collect the faithful once that day.

Cain made a campaign stop Friday at The Holy Land Experience, a Christian-theme amusement park in central Florida where visitors pay $35 to watch a reenactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ just minutes from Disney World.

In the park, which is run by the religious television station Trinity Broadcasting Network, employees dressed as shepherd boys, pharisees, Roman soldiers and merchants from first-century Israel lead the faithful on tours through the re-created streets of old Jerusalem, perform re-enactment shows and serve as baristas in the coffee shop. Over the course of a day at Holy Land, you can take communion — fed to you from the hand of a bearded actor playing Christ with flowing brown hair — browse an impressive collection of early Bibles, rock out to praise-song karaoke, get baptized and even have your picture taken with Jesus on a Harley.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

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