Wednesday, March 10. 2010
America's great export: Rocket science finance, layers of abstractions and computer modeling, and shadow banking. One quote:
What is shadow banking? It is one of a handful of terms — structured finance is a more technical one, ghostly economics a more evocative one — used to describe the infrastructure of debt finance that provided the conduits for capital from around the world to flow into the American housing sector. It is best understood as a technological innovation amalgamating computing power and probabilistic modeling to vastly expand the various world markets in debt securities. The late journalist Mark Pittman, in an authoritative 2008 report for Bloomberg, called it “the biggest U.S. export business of the twenty-first century”...
Related, how our government does rocket science finance - minus the rocket science.
Tuesday, March 9. 2010
 Image: The American air is getting cleaner.
Gun-free zones: Shooting fish in a barrel
Brit governments putting microchips in garbage cans. h/t. How do the people put up with that crap? Well, The Englishman doesn't.
Stimulants increase learning and learning speed. h/t Insty. Every college kid knows that.
Poll: Young Adults Turn Toward GOP. Change!
Diane Ravitch discouraged by education reform. Schools should be entirely run by and for localities, not by the Feds and not by the unions. That's how reform can happen. The famous Albert Shanker quote: "When schoolkids get union cards is when we'll worry about their interests." Something like that.
Effects of CO2 are logarithmic, not linear. That's High School math. Is it part of the computer models?
Feminists: College gals should drink, Yes means No, and campus rape definitions. I thought the feminists said all hetero sex was rape.
Don't hold your breath for The New World Order
Bucknell: You cannot debate the 2009 Dem stimulus package. Too controversial for college?
 Florida, sugar, government and the Everglades: The corporate State
Not predicted by the models: South Pole cooling, ice increasing
Doc:
...if I am ever told I have to see every patient who wants to see me and the government determines both the appropriate treatment and the fee I can charge, I will retire and find another way to make a living. (Maybe I will be so disturbed by the changes in my profession that I would need to go on Disability?)
WHT?
This exciting new project is aimed at increasing public awareness of the links between climate change, poverty and child rights, and engaging ...
Good grief. Those are some crazy links!
The Census: "My race is human"
Doug Hoffman is back! He'll win.
John says the O is an ignoramus about insurance costs. Maybe he is, or maybe it simply does not serve the narrative to mention the reality that if coverages are mandated, costs increase.
Evil, evil Drudge. Do not look at his site!
Are we allowed to have two per day? Previous one was from Lenin, this from Nancy Pelosi on health care:
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
Vladimir Lenin: “Socialized Medicine is the Keystone to the Arch of the Socialist State.”
Of course it is. With it, they control your very life. For your own good. I mean, for the "Greater Good," or for "Society." Whoever they are. Never met them.
The Dems and the O are always about talking and negotiating endlessly with other countries, and never drawing a line. But with their fellow Americans, 'The time for talk is over.'
Thus an accommodating attitude towards enemies, and a warlike attitude towards Americans.
It suppose that is change.
 Cover image via Jonah
You like him; how can you tell if a guy likes you back? h/t Linkiest
Harvard Law Prof Bill Stuntz Talks of His Impending Death, Faith
No Tweeting: Last year, a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed 600 potential jurors after several acknowledged going online to research the criminal case before them
Pinkerton:
Sen. Lautenberg voted for the Senate proposal that would have denied him the free choice that probably saved his life.
Euroland: Coming Soon: Gravity to be Legislated!
3 good reheated ones at Thompson
Twit is legend in his own mind: Friedman Aflame - The Times columnist’s mind melts fact and reason into nonsense. Can we say "narratives"?
Gore: Organized Campaign Behind Climate Skeptics. Yes, and Maggie's Farm is the well-funded HQ of the cabal.
Believes in NBC-driven media: NBC’s Chuck Todd Blasts “Drudge Driven Journalism”
Surber's Good v. Evil
Riehl: The Traveling ObamaCare Salvation Show
You know what America needs now? A brutal political battle over amnesty
Geert Wilders speaks in London
Green jobs scam
Via Q&O:
Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism.
Indeed.
Rep opposes school choice for his constituents. Does he oppose school choice for the Obama girls?
"He says he opposes an increase in charter schools, even though many of his constituents seem to want more of them, because he believes they have allowed the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, to abdicate their responsibility to improve Harlem’s regular elementary schools, which have shrunk as more parents have chosen charters."
Steyn on the Oscars:
It was fun when Marlon Brando had his award picked up by Sachem Littlefeather, Apache Indian and President of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, protesting about the treatment of Indians by Hollywood. It was even better when she turned out to be Maria Cruz, struggling actress and Miss American Vampire of 1970. It was touching, in 1977, when Debby Boone sang `You Light Up My Life’ backed by a chorus of 11 children from the John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf interpreting the lyric in sign language. It was even more poignant when it subsequently emerged that they were just regular Equity kids pretending to be deaf and that the signing was complete gibberish. Ah, happy days.
Monday, March 8. 2010
Toon via Moonbattery
Mark Steyn: Obamacare worth the price to Democrats. Steyn gets it. It's worth any price.
America puts off the pain to have some jam today. And, CBO: $1T yearly deficits for at least the next 10 years
The Tides Foundation: Bagman for the Left
Feeling a "bit off" today? Who doesn't? Crystal meth is good for that feeling.
No mention that a "minority" made that noose. But exactly in what way is academia "tolerant"? Higher ed strikes me as the most intolerant place in America.
Tiger:
Barack Obama has called an "entrepreneurship summit" with the Muslim world. Naturally, I have a question: What could Barack Obama or anybody in his administration teach about entrepreneurship? Years from now, when the Muslim world has gone another generation without a single useful invention, will they look back at this "summit" and regard it as another evil western deception? Of course, they will have only themselves to blame insofar as the invitation promises advice from "social entrepreneurs," Orwellian slang for "transnational community organizer."
The Golden State's Me Generation - In the midst of the Great Recession California students protest in favor of themselves. Worth reading just for the quote from the Prof.
Reason: Busting the Well-Endowed - It's time to cut federal funding for the arts
Sunday, March 7. 2010
The Washington Post’s editors took Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to task in February 2009 when she downplayed speaking out about human rights abuses during her trip to China. She'd said: "We have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis." The Chinese were delighted. The Washington Post editors pointed out that the US speaking out hasn’t interfered in the past when there are mutual goals, “But Ms. Clinton's statement will have an effect: It will demoralize thousands of democracy advocates in China, and it will cause many others around the world to wonder about the character of the new U.S. administration.”
Last December, Hillary Clinton clarified. In an address at Georgetown University:
Under the first element of the agenda, Clinton said the United States would be working to hold everyone accountable for human rights in their countries. In order to “reinforce our moral authority,” she said, the U.S. will lead by example by way of reporting figures for human trafficking that occur within its borders for the first time.
Clinton said that while holding other accountable could entail public denunciations of a country’s leaders, “other times our negotiations would take place behind closed doors,” such as with China and Russia.
The second element, “principled pragmatism,” also applies to China and Russia especially, she said. The administration can deplore the murders of Russian journalists and violation of minority rights in China, but “the assumption that we must either pursue democratic rights or [national strategy] is wrong.”
The third element involved partnering with and supporting groups like NGOs which share U.S. goals, and the fourth involved highlighting success stories and rejecting the notion that some situations cannot be remedied.
Tomorrow, Monday, Sec. Clinton has the opportunity to effect her third element.
The Wall Street Journal editorial highlights Friend and Faux on Human Rights:
Some of the world’s most courageous champions of human rights will convene today, Monday, March 8, in Geneva, seat of the United Nations’s Human Rights Council [where gross human rights violator Iran is up for possible election to the UN Human Rights Council]. But don’t expect the Council itself to welcome these distinguished visitors.
The Geneva Summit -- organized by groups such as U.N. Watch and Freedom House, and chaired by Poland’s Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel -- will bring together political dissidents from China, Iran and Burma, rights activists for the Tibetan and Uighur peoples, a survivor of the North Korean gulag, plus a former Sudanese slave named Simon Deng who plans to speak about “the gross human-rights abuses by radical jihadists and the Islamic government in Khartoum.…
In 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that it was time “that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tell.” In Geneva today, the real truth tellers will be meeting down the block from the Council’s chambers. It would be nice to see the U.S. ambassador show up.
The world’s oppressed await.
 Image via Moonbattery. Related, Obamacare Is a Budgetary Disaster
Related, $2.3 trillion later, 23 million still uninsured
Related, a quote at Powerline:
The great mystery of the health care debate is why liberals, who don't trust doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies or insurers, trust Congress and federal bureaucrats.
Natural methane, from the ground
Can Wild Bison Repopulate the Plains? I am all for that.
A good summary of the issues at Weekly Std: In Denial - The meltdown of the climate campaign.
School Board President of Failing Detroit Schools Can’t Write
All about Rahm Emanuel and health care, etc. TNR. h/t, Driscoll
Krugman vs. Krugman
Chile quake shifted earth's axis. h/t, Vandy
Prof Bill Gray responds to Globe's op-ed titled Climate Change is Proven Fact. At least we are finally getting some debate, and outing those who benefit from the alarmism.
Stossel: The case for legalizing drugs, prostitution, organ sales, and other consensual acts.
While College Fails to Adequately Transmit Civic Knowledge, It Influences Opinion on Polarizing Social Issues. h/t, Protein
Can there be a value-neutral tax? Does income tax punish work?
Left gears up to fight media wars
David Warren:
Economic decline is a choice, not a fate, and it has everything to do with big, intrusive government.
Saturday, March 6. 2010
Re the press and climategate:
The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics. They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards. They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay. That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.
Friday, March 5. 2010
California Republican Senate primary contenders Tom Campbell, Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore had an hour radio debate today, their first, slated to focus on national security issues. I listened closely to the first 43-minutes, leaving to play 1-on-1 with my son after school and watch the basketball tryouts. I was struck that at the tryouts there was none of the under the basket elbows and knees I was used to from Brooklyn schoolyard basketball. But there was plenty at the debate.
Continue reading "CA Senate Debate Knees and Elbows (UPDATE: Refs Miss Campbell Fumble)"
Headed to Sugarbush for the weekend. (Do you know what a "sugarbush" is? It is a grove of Sugar Maples.)
In praise of Parsnips. We love parsnips. Steam, then light sautee in butter.
Chile will survive the earthquake because its democracy works.
Global aid harming Haiti economy. h/t, Tiger
‘The Science is Settled,’ They Told Copernicus
Population Bomb Author Giving Advice to Global Warming Nuts. A quote in the article:
Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.
 If you are like me, you are getting sick and tired of the endless push for government control of medical care.
These folks aren't listening to America, but they are wearing us down and the Libs are doing a full-court press now.
One more chance to send your Senators and your Rep a brief note with your opinion. A FAX is more useful than an email, but anything is better than nothing. I advise doing so regardless of their position on the topic.
I faxed my folks in DC. I told them I would support the Republican proposals for health care reform, but that the 2000 page Dem mess is an obnoxious and unwanted piece of garbage.
FAX and emails of Congress here.
 Want more kids to graduate from college? It can be easily done: just lower the standards even further.
Speaking of college, look at these ungrateful crybabies
Muslim group moves to ban burka
How loopy is Liu? He is a real live moonbat.
Legal aspects of the digitus impudicus
The NYT finally deigned to do an obit for Arnold Beichman. Final paragraph:
Socialism is dictatorship, he told Columbia College Today, the alumni magazine, in 2005. “The control of wealth is the control over human life,” he said. “So if a centrally planned economy decides how wealth is to be created and how it is to be distributed, then they really have a control over human life.”
Like we said:
In a private meeting with House progressives, President Obama said that this bill is just a foundation for future reform, and could pave the way for a later push for the public option and even single-payer systems at the state-level.
Hurricane Katrina Victims to Sue Oil Companies. That defense team is going to have fun.
From OMG! Global warming!!!
Thursday, March 4. 2010
The current Newsweek reviews a new book about North Korea based on study of its internal news reports, art and school texts. Threats, mostly hollow, and mild sanctions, by Bush and Obama, have not stopped North Korea’s nuclear bomb making or long-range missiles fired over Japan.
Kim Jong Il and, before him, Kim Il Sung based their legitimacy not on fabricated reports of the country's economic success (that line is directed at outsiders) but on a world view that casts them as "great parental leaders" who embody Korean virtue at its most untainted. In this national narrative, the Korean people "are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world" without the leaders' benefic guidance, writes Myers. This potent myth of racial superiority is aimed at confirming to the North Koreans that they are morally superior to Americans and the rest of the world, even if they lag behind it in technology or wealth. When visiting foreigners are covered by the domestic media, they are portrayed as being highly respectful--even obsequious--toward their North Korean hosts.
Today a North Korean colonel who spent 16 years in Austria procuring luxury goods for the father and son tyrants, before faking his death in order to defect, held a news conference to tout his tell-all book that “shows the deep divide between the lifestyles of the North Korean leadership and their citizens, who sometimes must subsist eating tree bark, knowing they will be sent to labor camps if they criticize the government.”
Kim Jong Ryul said the late dictator had dozens of sprawling villas — some of them built underground — filled with crystal chandeliers, silk wallpaper and costly furniture…. It was in these palatial homes that Kim Il Sung and his family would feast on an immense array of fine foods — including Austrian specialties….He also described how Kim Il Sung — while publicly denouncing "Western decadence and imperialism" — had an extensive luxury car collection that included Mercedes, Lincolns, Fords, Cadillacs and Citroens. Kim Jong Il, who liked taking fast sports cars for a spin, also appeared to share his father's passion.
There’s more tasty tidbits, like Kim Il Sung sending chefs to Austria to ferret out recipes from the best restaurants.
Admiring the North Korean regimented mass dance steps, Vietnam has imported North Korean marching dancemasters to advise the government on choreography for its celebration of Hanoi’s 1000th anniversary.
Impoverished and isolated, North Korea has little to export [aside from nuclear materials and technology] and its tourism earnings have been hit by political wrangling with South Korea over the North's military threats to the region and nuclear weapons programme.
North Korea’s agriculture minister who defected in 1998 estimated that up to 2.8 million North Koreans starved to death during the ‘90’s, that’s about 10% of its population. Now, Pyongyang’s geniuses have committed “currency reform” that made its currency worthless, to wipe out the black market trade that kept many North Koreans alive. Then there’s about 200,000 in North Korea’s prison camps, worked and starved to death in harsh conditions, along the way experimented on, tortured and even babies murdered.
Hey, but don’t let some dead or starved North Koreans, like this woman, stand in the way of a party.
A disastrous currency reform, which wiped whatever little savings North Koreans had, has compounded the effect of international sanctions. For many, survival has become impossible. Currently, ten million North Koreans are living on less than a dollar a day.
In the meantime, this year’s celebrations include the traditional Flower Festival.
For Kim’s birthday, the red kimjongilia was all the rave. The flower, a begonia, was created by Japanese botanist Mototeru Kamo of Shizuoka Prefecture and dedicated to Kim Jong-il.
Two sporting events were also held in the capital yesterday (figure skating and synchronised swimming) in honour of Kim who opted instead to attend a concert by the Unhasu Orchestra, organised to mark the new lunar year, which began on Sunday.
The North Korean leadership’s new motto: Party Hearty Like There’s No Tomorrow. It’s worked so far, for them.
Redstate. The government could not run a candy shop. Enuf said.
 Many cheerful facts about aging
Obsolete: The US Mail
Why recycling glass is silly and useless
Reporters used to be tough guys. This one sounds like a big baby - plus he doesn't have a clue
US now #1 in natural gas production. Hey - it's organic!
Not predicted by models: Sea ice thickens
Prediction of the intertubes, c. 1995
Lowry: Clever rhetoric from the O:
It's all rhetorically clever as far as it goes. But the problem here has never been the salesmanship, but the bill itself, which is an anchor around anyone trying to sell it.
The problem with one-party government: Led by New York, big-government blue states sink deeper into corruption.
Why can't we sell our own bone marrow?
Mankiw:
Americans, as well as citizens of many other advanced nations, now spend about twice as many years in retirement as they did a generation or two ago. During that time, they expect the government to provide them with income support and healthcare. Is it any wonder that we face serious fiscal problems?
Why does this Tea Party thing drive Libs crazy?
Wednesday, March 3. 2010
Post-industrial ghost towns. Why won't these folks move for jobs, like most people do? Texas has tons of work.
Krauthammer on Congress.
Sowell: Alice in Healthcare
Related, The WSJ's Abuse of Power begins:
A string of electoral defeats and the great unpopularity of ObamaCare can't stop Democrats from their self-appointed rendezvous with liberal destiny—ramming a bill through Congress on a narrow partisan vote. What we are about to witness is an extraordinary abuse of traditional Senate rules to pass a bill merely because they think it's good for the rest of us, and because they fear their chance to build a European welfare state may never come again.
Wilkinson gets it:
A lot of people are saying government is broken. They’re mainly saying it because the Democratic health care bill isn’t going to pass in a form that gives most Democrats what they wanted. The argument, in its general form, goes like this: There is this huge problem! My team’s favored solution to the problem is politically infeasible. So, politics is broken! When you put it like that, it’s evidently a pretty silly argument.
To get a better grip on the debate behind the debate I think you need to understand that big entitlement politics is about enacting policy that generates a kind of lock-in effect for a new power-shifting political equilibrium. Savvy political operators know that big entitlements, once established, create their own political demand. That’s why, for example, it was so important for the left to kill Social Security reform.
"create their own demand." Exactly right. From one seed, another mighty weed to strangle our garden.
Frank Rich: Obsessed and deranged. And Paul Krugman: Always pissed off. These two cranks have a problem with gratitude. We may be cranks too, but we have gratitude - and try for a bit of humor.
Tea Party violence
Inst. of Physics slams CRU
Weekly Standard: Media Failure: Global Warming Edition
Tuesday, March 2. 2010
Mitt Romney. But does he have sex appeal? Does he tingle? Is he cool?
 Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss.
I needed this quick refresher on Hobbes' moral and political philosophy
Our tax dollars at work: The FDA Takes on Cheerios
Hawaii elevates race, big-time. Aren't WASPs a tribe too?
Mohawks Only. Canadian Indians go for ethnic cleansing
To conservatives: Shut up. You are hurting the kids.
A new lame campaign to deal with evil talk radio
Black ministers for WalMart
Chicago Boyz:
There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.
We do not always vote this way, but I think this is true:
America is, quite simply, a center-right country. Many have cited polling data showing that self-described conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1. But that's not nearly so telling as the fact that self-identified conservatives have outnumbered liberals in every year since 1968; when combined with self-proclaimed moderates, the country is enduringly 65% to 75% moderates and conservatives.
Monday, March 1. 2010
- The new, improved Science. Prof. Phil Jones:
...he claimed it was not 'standard practice' to release data and computer models so other scientists could check and challenge research.
- You can now forget everything they said about hurricanes. Never mind.
- Everybody is mocking Al Gore's goofy NYT op-ed piece. I am beginning to feel sorry for the guy. This from Big Journalism's Former Veep Goes Girly-Man, Has Hissy Fit in Pages of New York Times:
This piece of pure, dribbling, drooling emoting is going to either make you collapse in a torrent of tears or retch into the nearest barf bag. The only human beings on the planet to whom this editorial would appeal are a bunch of 13-year-old girls without a single clue between them.
With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, Al is going all out to save his “investment” in global warming hysteria. Here, he comes up with histrionics befitting the amount of personal loss he stands to suffer.
From VDH's excellent but scathing Obama Fatigue:
...just as liberals were turned off by Bush’s cowboyisms, so too conservatives are tired of Obama’s professorial, condescending sermons. After a year, the people are tired of all the “let me be perfectly clear” psycho-drama, the “make no mistake about” pseudo-tough man pose, the straw man “I reject the false choice that some would…,” and the narcissistic “I have ordered…..my team…to.” The boilerplate is now recognizable even to the Washington press corps. But as important, it dovetails with more disturbing propensities: there are the periodic signs of inanity like “Cinco de Cuatro” and “corpse-man;” the constant fudging on the truth of multibillion dollar new programs really “saving” money; and the surreal bowing to dictators and emperors, with the relish of turning our misdemeanors into felonies and our enemies’ felonies into benefactions.
Read the whole thing. I did not vote for the guy, but I "hoped" for better.
Perfect place for moonbats to move to.
Powerline: Global Warming Fraud: The Big Picture
Related, A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC: The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker
From Roger:
It is just lovely that the New York Times — the world’s most discredited newspaper — would give so thoroughly discredited a mountebank this lavish soapbox upon which to make a fool of himself. Next stop, Hyde Park Corner — or maybe a padded cell.
Frank Rich: Liar
UK update: Now the Government wants competence tests before you can be a dog owner. How about to enter the country? Or to have kids?
Latest:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged her colleagues to back a major overhaul of U.S. healthcare even if it threatens their political careers, a call to arms that underscores the issue's massive role in this election year.
Do you think they might just promise them jobs? I'm sure of it.
Now you know: The O says "We can't control nature."
Commenter at Politico:
Had Rangel had an "R" next to his name, he would've been gone last year.
Sunday, February 28. 2010
Smart guys do not tolerate fools or BS, and Lindzen doesn't. How about a Nobel Peace Prize for Prof. Lindzen's lecture videotape? It's long. It's about data vs. models.
Richard Lindzen PhD, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming.
If that link doesn't work (it works for me), try this: http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/100210Lindzen/f.htm#
|
