The Obama administration and congressional Democrats long ago gave up any pretense of working to rationally reform American health care. The exercise now underway in the Senate is a mad dash to get to 60 votes, and nothing more. That’s why some Democratic senators who had no idea exactly what is in the “breakthrough deal” announced by majority leader Harry Reid last week immediately hailed it as a milestone. They’re for anything that creates a sense of “momentum” and “inevitability.” - The Weekly Standard

I’ve given up trying to understand what is going on with the Health Care Bills. The complexity is a feature not a bug for some….

The financial crisis killed small entrepreneurs as surely as Joseph Stalin killed the kulaks, and the roots of the economy are dead and dry.

Spengler Fisks the labor statistics.

(You know things are really bad when the “good” news is that banks are adding clerical staff to process all the mortgage foreclosures.)

I recently braved the crowds which were surprisingly large for a recession on Saturday and went shopping for Christmas gifts. A few photos from my travels in downtown Chicago.

Upper left – an Agent Provocateur bag left in the trash. Someone probably purchased something for their girl and then realized that bringing the bag home is a dead giveaway. Or this is really saying “here is a gift which ostensibly is for you but is actually for me.”
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Linguists define the pulls and pushes on our identity: Biology & nature (man is a symbol-making, language using animal), society & nurture (we speak the language that surrounds us), and, finally, our separate and individual selves. We express our own vision, our own interpretation of life in our unique sentences. The unique nature of our choices is what contemporary tests for plagiarism reset on – the series of words we choose from our flexible language are not likely to be repeated in another document on Google or Turnitin. But biology is important. I don’t come from demonstrative people. The family jokes that I avoid hugs, touching, commitment. But that isn’t because I don’t think part of love’s impetus and expression is physical. Instinctive, it is biology, defined by culture; of course, it is also expressed in the unique ways of our clan, of ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Currently reading Turning Points in Western Technology (D S Cardwell, 1972.) The author observes that during the late 1700s and early 1800s, the state of French science and mathematics was very advanced–more so than that in Britain–and asks the question: Why was industrial development in Britain so much more successful than that in France?
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Megan McArdle, an AGW true believer, seems to think that most of the problems highlighted by Climategate are due to confirmation bias. That is where the experts tend to accept data that is in line with what they expect, while assuming that anything which goes against the prevailing theory must just be faulty in some way.

I’d agree with her except for the way the people involved in the scandal went against the law to delete emails, hatched plans to punish other scientists whose work showed different results, and even worked to discredit scientific journals which dared to publish contrary research.

That sort of willing participation in unethical and illegal behavior doesn’t fit any definition of “confirmation bias” I’ve ever come across. Crooks, liars, cheats and con artists act like that, not respectable scientists who simply put a bit more weight on one side of the scale.

It is certainly true that the history of science is rife with examples of confirmation bias. But, while debate and disagreement might become heated, it is rare to come across a case where one side of the issue actively schemes to silence their opponents through purposely causing them some form of harm.

In this instance, I suppose the AGW dissenters should be grateful that only their careers were damaged.

UPDATE
The Belmont Club has a post that is worth your time.

… a continual state of feud and strife prevails throughout the land. Tribe wars with tribe. The people of one valley fight with those of the next. To the quarrels of communities are added the combats of individuals. Khan assails khan, each supported by his retainers. Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbor. Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.
 
Nor are these struggles conducted with the weapons which usually belong to the races of such development. To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer. The world is presented with that grim spectacle, “the strength of civilization without its mercy.” At a thousand yards the traveller falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.
 
Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder,always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.

Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898)

A few days ago on the way to work I was listening to Dirk Van’s show and he posed an interesting question to the listeners. Is the space program worth it?

Most said that it was, for a variety of reasons. Some of them posed were national pride, research that is done, and there were others.

I remember visiting the Kennedy Space Center several years ago. I loved the museums filled with the rockets and equipment used to explore space. I also was able to walk through the area where they were working on the International Space Station. I was with my father and he said to me “this has got to be a black hole of money here”. I couldn’t argue. I assume that NASA is run like any other government program, and is rife with waste.

The benefits of the space program are many. So many of the things that we use every day that we take for granted have been either invented or improved due to the space program.

But can’t we build a structure that can hold a perfect vacuum here on earth for a LOT cheaper and do the research there? Like for say, a billion dollars? For fiscal year -09, NASA’s budget was almost $18bb!

Do we need the weightless part to get the good research done?

Can’t private industry or individuals look for life on other planets?

I would love to hear from some of our scientists who read the blog as well as others on this subject.

Imagine that some of our Congresspeople–Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Robert Byrd, for example–formed a professional sports team. Baseball, basketball, football–take your pick.

Would anyone invest money in such a team? Would anyone go to watch it, for any purposes other than mockery? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

Well, the average Congressperson probably knows far more about sports than he knows about business. Almost certainly, he watches sports on TV…he may well have played himself in his younger days…whereas the typical Congressional knowledge of business is comparable to a baseball-watcher who doesn’t understand the difference between balls and strikes. Yet this Congress, with the encouragement of the Administration, is arrogating to itself the power to micromanage every business in the country in excruciating detail.
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From a brilliant column by Caroline Glick:

Then there is the message he sent the Afghans. Just as Barak and Olmert discouraged the Lebanese from cooperating with IDF operations against Hizbullah when they declared that the IDF would not remain in Lebanon, so by announcing a timeline for withdrawal at the same time he announced his force build-up, Obama told the Afghan people that they have no reason to collaborate with US and NATO forces on the ground.
 
For Obama personally, this is a win-win situation. If McChrystal is able to make headway, Obama will take the credit. If not, Obama will blame McChrystal, and the Afghans, and NATO, and the Republicans, and George W. Bush for his failure. Then he will withdraw all US forces from the country, and watch as a disinterested observer as the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan – all to the rousing applause of his anti-war political base.
 
On the other hand, for the American people and for the free world as a whole, this is a lose-lose situation. The sound and light show strategy Obama announced will enable al-Qaida and the Taliban to grow stronger as they wait out the American withdrawal. Likewise, just as Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon emboldened the Palestinians to initiate their terror war in September 2000, so the US retreat from Afghanistan will embolden terror forces and their state sponsors the world over to attack US and Western targets.
 
IN ISRAEL, the refusal of successive governments to fight our jihadist enemies to victory served to demoralize the public by making it believe that the IDF is incapable of truly protecting the country. The path that Obama has now embarked upon in Afghanistan will likely have the same impact on many Americans. This posture of weakness and helplessness will be sharply contrasted with the emboldened stance of America’s enemies.
 
From the time the Netanyahu government took office in late March until its recent moves to cut a shockingly dangerous deal with Hamas and prohibit Jewish building in Judea and Samaria, there was a sense that Israel had turned a corner. The public rejected the Barak-Olmert legacy of defeat and elected Netanyahu to change the course of the country. Depressingly, today it is less apparent that Netanyahu has in fact abandoned their legacy of defeat.
 
What is absolutely certain, however, is that until both Israel and the US change course and defeat our enemies, we will not be safe. Moreover, we must recognize the infuriating fact that even if both countries decide to defeat their enemies, their embrace of victory will come too late for the soldiers killed in futile and pointless battles and for civilians murdered in terror attacks that could have been prevented.

This is worth reading in full.

I fear that both the USA and Israel will pay a terrible price for the despair-inducing plague of bad leadership that afflicts both countries.

In 1920, Robert Goddard was conducting experiments with rockets. In an editorial, The New York Times sneered at Goddard’s work and particularly at the idea that a rocket could function in a vacuum:

That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

In 1969…the year of the Apollo moon mission…the NYT finally got around to issuing a correction for their 1920 mistake.

What is noteworthy about the original editorial is not just the ignorance, but the arrogance and the outright nastiness. As the AstronauticsNow post points out, “The enlightened newspaper not only ridiculed the idea that rocket propulsion would work in vacuum but it questioned the integrity and professionalism of Goddard.” The post goes on to say that “The sensationalism and merciless attack by the New York Times and other newspapers left a profound impression on Robert Goddard who became secretive about his work (to detriment of development of rocketry in the United States)…”

It appears that some of the attributes of the NYT which make it so untrustworthy and unlovable today are actually cultural characteristics of long standing.

Worth keeping in mind when reading NYT analyses of Climategate.

America’s desultory participation in WWII began on December 2, 1941 when Imperial Japanese forces attacked the Dutch East Indies in order to seize vitally needed oil, tin and rubber resources. The Dutch could put up only a token resistance with five cruisers against Japanese battleships and aircraft carriers.

Throughout the operation, the Japanese were scrupulous to avoid harming any British or American interest. Nevertheless, the British felt forced to defend the interest of the Dutch government in exile and declared war on Japan on December 28th 1941. There quickly followed the loss of the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales and the fall of Singapore.

FDR did not wish war with Japan because he was focused on the threat of Fascism in Europe. American public opinion remained stubbornly isolationist until February 14th 1942 when the American cruiser Indianapolis was torpedoed by an unknown submarine with substantial loss of life. Using the incident, FDR narrowly won a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan on March 7th 1942. Many have since argued that FDR hoped that Hitler might follow through on his Tripartite treaty obligation and declare war on the U.S but Hitler never rose to the bait.

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A few weeks before the Climategate scandal started to bounce around the blogs, I wrote an essay here about how the global warmists were acting just like every other doom-shrieking huckster from the past five decades. Since all of the others were wrong, terribly and horribly wrong, I said that I wasn’t too worried about any toasty catastrophe.

That is why I haven’t been paying too much attention to the collapse of the latest doom-of-the-week. After all, it isn’t like I haven’t seen this tired process play itself out over and over again.

But it is tough to avoid it altogether if you rely on blogs for your news. And there is a recurring theme that gives me pause.

Most climate scientists that appear on news programs, or who write op-eds for the various news outlets, all say the same thing. This scandal might cast more than a decade of work done by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia into doubt, but it doesn’t invalidate research done by other scientists which support the idea that this planet is warming due to human action.

Well, gee, why in the world doesn’t it invalidate their work as well?

Didn’t the CRU boast the largest and most comprehensive collection of climate data in the entire world? Didn’t this massive collection of data inspire, if not directly influence, just about every other climate scientist’s work? Aren’t the people who authored the Emails which prove dirty tricks, data manipulation, and collusion to hide problems with their research the most prestigious and influential climate scientists in the world?

So why in the world should anyone take any climate scientist’s word for their integrity, and soundness of their work? Isn’t the onus on them to prove that they aren’t crooks and liars, like the big guys were?

This seems perfectly reasonable to me, but I may be missing something.

Product demonstrations can sometimes be useful in convincing prospective customers that your product is a Good Thing, or in convincing prospective investors that your company represents a substantial opportunity. (Although many demos are so badly executed that they do more harm than good.)

In business history, there are a few examples of demos that stand out for their dramatic nature and their impact. Here are the ones that come to mind:

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From time to time Dan from Madison writes about gambling and the hypocrisy of the NFL in their actions on this topic. In particular, the NFL was upset about legal wagering on sports in Delaware, when today it pretty much is only officially legal in Nevada and a couple other states (also Oregon and Montana, per this article).

Something strange happened in Russia this summer. Even though the economy was in a severe downturn and hundreds of thousands were employed in casinos throughout the country, the government (basically Putin) decreed that casinos were to be shut down on July 1, 2009. This article by the NY Times provides a good summary of the situation and its impact.

The gambling industry says the ban will leave more than 400,000 people without work in Russia, at a time when it has been hard hit by the economic downturn: the World Bank predicts the economy will contract by 7.9 percent this year. The government has put the figure at 60,000 people, though industry analysts say that is absurdly low.
 
After the law passed, federal officials and casino executives seemed certain that it would be watered down, which is apparently why neither the casinos nor the four regions did anything to prepare. “You know, in our country, the decisions are made by only one person,” said Samuil Binder, deputy executive director of the Russian Association for Gaming Business Development. He was referring to Mr. Putin.

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Fellow, sometime-and-in-some-fashion, academics or others dabbling in paper writing?

Dixon looked out of the window at the fields wheeling past, bright green after a wet April. It wasn’t the double-exposure effect of the last half-minute’s talk that had dumbfounded him, for such incidents formed the staple material of Welch colloquies; it was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. ‘Let’s see,’ he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: ‘oh yes; The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485…’

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis.

I never tire of this book – it’s one of my favorites – even as I pretty much dislike the main character and the object of his affection, the tepid and colorless Christine. What are your favorite campus, or academic, satires?

Update: David Foster and Jim Bennett, in the comments section, both voice the same thought I had on re-reading the above excerpt: an article on the economic impact of shipbuilding techniques sounds pretty darn interesting, actually. I think the scene says something about the main character, Dixon, and his lack of interest in the very topics he is meant to research and study. In short, his heart’s not in it. Either that or Kingsley Amis had zero interest in economics and the title struck him as the most vapid imaginable. Anyone know?

For the last couple of years there has been talk of a “renaissance” in nuclear power in the United States. The government has issued some loan guarantees to various parties and the greens are starting to come around to nuclear power because of greenhouse emissions. While I am a supporter of nuclear power and of investing in generating capacity in general, from the moment that this false hope started I have been steadfast in maintaining that virtually no new nuclear plants will be built in the US in the near term, meaning the next 5 or so years.

One other block against any sort of nuclear power investment is HISTORY. This article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “Costs Cloud Texas Nuclear Plan” discusses the South Texas Project, a nuclear site in Texas that is owned today by municipal utilities in Austin and San Antonio, Texas and NRG, a public company that owns various generating assets around the USA.

The South Texas Project (STP) has 2 nuclear units today. NRG applied for federal financing to build 2 additional nuclear units at the site, as part of this “renaissance” of nuclear power.

The original STP project was subject to massive cost overruns. Per the article:

“skittishness about the cost of nuclear energy is understandable. The first two units at STP were supposed to cost less than $1 billion but ended up costing more than $5 billion. With that memory seared into its memory, San Antonio officials have been sensitive to anything suggesting that they could, again, get blindsided by escalating costs”

Note that the costs escalated by a FACTOR OF FIVE from the original estimate – $4B cost overrun in 1982 dollars translates into over $8B based on this “inflation calculator” I found on the web.

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“Obama’s lonely decision” may have been the right one — if that’s really what he decided, if he really did decide. That’s the problem. You don’t know with this guy. What he does is so often unrelated to what he says that it’s usually most productive to watch what he does and ignore what he says. Kagan makes the classic error of evaluating Obama based on words. I don’t think we’ll be able to evaluate Obama’s handling of Afghanistan until we see how he follows through on his speech. That will take some time. All we can say now is that he avoided the issue for months while our position in Afghanistan deteriorated, and then when backed against a political wall finally asserted a policy. Only time will tell if he means what he said. The optimistic interpretation — Kagan’s — is that political pressure not to screw up will keep him honest. I’m skeptical. Obama’s history is that of a man who believes he can talk his way out of anything and has succeeded so far. Why would he behave differently now? He might — people can change. But that’s not the way to bet.

One of the problems with being a liar is that nobody believes you when you tell the truth. I hope that Obama really does show backbone in Afghanistan and commits to victory, but he’ll have to act like it (not merely talk like it) before reasonable people will believe him.

The President of the United States presides over a government that employs a huge number of people who write regulations that either slow down job creation or are actual job killers. In these times of high unemployment, the President could, by executive order, instruct these employees to use their existing discretion in favor of the interpretation that would save or create the most jobs.

There would be no need to wait for the Congress. There would be no need to spend the public’s money on this initiative. This executive order would be entirely ’shovel ready’ and its impact on the deficit is overwhelmingly likely to be positive. So far as I know, President Obama has not signed such an order, nor has he given any evidence that he is even considering it.

Why?