Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!
Why all the hatred all of a sudden? Nobody gives the Amish a hard time. Nobody tells the Hasidic Jews they should try to dress like everyone else.
I'd suggest one reason. Fear -- just of the unknown, the "other," or the "different" -- but rather fear of what might be hidden under or disguised by those all-encompassing robes.
Maybe I'm prejudiced, but all that suicide bombing scares me.
Democrat candidates move to left, raising individual chances of primary victory at cost of lowering chances of victory in general election.
Nothing new here. The Edsall thesis puts this forward as the easiest way to understand the entire Democratic Party since the McGovern convention cnanged the basic rules of the nomination game.
Via Instapundit and The Corner we get this story. (Mark Steyn's post at The Corner is not well-structured; it is very easy to mistake the post's excerpt from actual story for Scrappleface parody.)
Anyway, here's the prediction. It is highly likely this person will be the first major US religious leader to be killed by terrorists. I am neither joking nor smiling.
Desertification, the phenomenon of encroaching desert lands, is hardly a novel occurrence in the history of mankind. It has played a salient role in hastening the decline of civilizations since ancient times. For example, both the Sumerian and Babylonian empires suffered telling blows when their agricultural productivity was destroyed, a gradual process principally attributable to improper drainage practices that allowed excessive salt concentrations to pollute their irrigated lands.
Archaeologists also have suggested that prolonged desiccation undercut the agricultural basis of the Harappan culture, a people who lived in the third millennium B.C. in what is now Pakistan. Finally, there seems little question that the Mediterranean littoral of Africa was far more fertile and cultivatable in the Carthaginian era (600-200 B.C.) than it is today.
Nonetheless, while man's experience with desertification may not be new, realization of it and its far-reaching ecological impact is. Worldwide recognition of desertification as a transnational environmental problem did not come about until 1968, when a severe drought struck the Sahel, a region in western Africa lying along the southern margin of the Sahara.
For six years, the countries of the Sahel - Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad - were devastated by uninterrupted drought and resultant famine. The natural and human consequences were tragically catastrophic: Lake Chad shrunk to only one-third of its normal size; the Niger and Senegal river systems failed to flood, thus leaving barren much of the most productive croplands in the region; shallow wells dried up, seriously restricting the grazing range of pastoralists; vegetation was denuded as starving animals stripped the land.
Reasonable rainfall did return to the Sahel in 1974, but not before drought, famine, and disease had killed an estimated 250,000 people and millions of domestic animals. As the tragedy and human suffering of people in the Sahel unfolded between 1968-1974, international attention became focused on their plight and the primary reason behind it: the inability of man to cope with spreading deserts in harsh climes.
The following graphic, from a study by one Colin Campbell, shows world oil production will peak in 1996 (also shown are actual data demonstrating what we all know -- world oil production did not peak in 1996):
Since the 1990s this same Mr. Campbell seems to have published an entire series of books -- sort of like Nancy Drew, I guess -- each with the same prediction, that world oil reserves will peak within the next four to five years.
I don't want to bother linking to any of the discussions of the Sopranos' end except for this brief comment questioning whether the profundity is before- or after-the-fact.
But I do have one question on a detail that nobody -- at least nobody in all the discussions I've taken the time to look at -- seems to have yet noticed.
When Tony first looks at the empty booth in that famous (or at least now-famous) ice cream parlor he's wearing a plain green shirt. In the next shot, when we see Tony in that same booth he's wearing a different shirt. (The effect, for me at least, was very much like the last minutes of 2001, when the astronaut looks sees an older version of himself in the phantom hotel room.) Anyway -- why hasn't anyone commented on the two shirts?
If I'm wrong and others have noticed this, please send links. Thanks.
The tradition of French Rationalism has inspired policy wonks -- from the early utopian socialists through Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton -- to trust that "smart" centralized thinking will quickly build just and efficient societies. (It takes a villiage to run an economy. Yeah.)
So why does the world's fastest-growing manufacturer suffer defficient infrastructure major economic dis-coordination even though it still has a centralized planning structure with virtually absolute power?
If it ends with "ism" is it a religion? (Or is it, better still, maybe a "religion"?)
If Americanism is truly a religion, is Political Correctness merely a denomination of the same? Or, on the other hand, is it a fully self-contained competing creed?
On the Tivo last night I watched the first episode of the new HBO series John from Cincinnati. The following quote from its writier, David Milch, may be everything you need to know about the show, and we quote:
I'm not an antitrust lawyer, nor do I play one on TV (or in podcasts). None the less, it seems to me the remedy available in this particular issue is as clear as the water the fish will never discover. If you don't like the way Vista slows down Google's desktop search tools rather than seeking remedies in Federal antitrust legislation simply don't upgrade to Vista .
Alternately one can avoid the extra Google tools. In my business' office we tried them (while running XP) and found the extra stuff slowed the system to a crawl. So we took the tools off the system. End of story. No government involvement needed.
"[T]he city...employee...negotiating the deal...was...a member of that group and secretly advising...how to obtain the land..."
Remember in Back to the Future when the angry Arab terrorists plow into the parking lot, guns blazing, in a tippy-teetering ancient VW Van? For some strange reason this story brings that scene to mind:
On the face of it, the Islamic Society was a surprising entry into the legal arena [of a libel suit]. Its founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, had been indicted in 2003 for his role in a terrorism financing scheme, pleaded guilty, and had been sentenced to a 23-year prison term. Another individual, Yusef Al-Qaradawi, who had been repeatedly identified by the Islamic Society as a member of its board of trustees, had been described by a U.S. Treasury official as a senior Muslim Brotherhood member and had endorsed the killing of Americans in Iraq and Jews everywhere. One director of the Islamic Society, Walid Fitaihi, had written that the Jews would be "scourged" because of their "oppression, murder and rape of the worshipers of Allah," and that they had "perpetrated the worst of evils and brought the worst corruption to the earth."
The Islamic Society nonetheless sued, claiming both libel and civil-rights violations...[but soon, in] short order, one after another of the allegations made by the Islamic Society collapsed.
The complaint asserted that the defendants had falsely stated that money had been sent to the Islamic Society from "Saudi/Middle Eastern sources," and that such statements and others had devastated its fund-raising efforts. But documents obtained in discovery demonstrated without ambiguity that fund-raising was (as one representative of the Islamic Society had put it) "robust," with at least $7.2 million having been wired to the Islamic Society from Middle Eastern sources, mostly from Saudi Arabia.
The Islamic Society claimed it had been libeled by [defendants' contentions] it had provided support for extremist organizations. But bank records obtained by the defendants showed that the Islamic Society had served as funder both of the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas-controlled organization...and of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was identified by the 9/11 Commission as an al Qaeda fund-raising arm.
The complaint maintained that any reference to recent connections between the Islamic Society and the now-imprisoned Abdurahman Alamoudi was false since it "had had no connection with him for years." But an Islamic Society check written in November 2000, two months after Alamoudi publicly proclaimed his support for Hamas and Hezbollah, was uncovered in discovery which directed money to pay for Alamoudi's travel expenses.
To top it all off, documents obtained from the Boston Redevelopment Authority itself revealed serious, almost incomprehensible, conflicts of interest in the real-estate deal. It turned out that the city agency employee in charge of negotiating the deal with the Islamic Society was at the same time a member of that group and secretly advising it about how to obtain the land at the cheapest possible price.
So the case was dropped. No money was paid by the defendants, no apologies offered, and no limits on their future speech imposed..."
...new evidence suggests...shifting production overseas has inflicted worse damage on the U.S. economy than the numbers show. BusinessWeek has learned of a gaping flaw in the way statistics treat offshoring, with serious economic and political implications. Top government statisticians now acknowledge that the problem exists, and say it could prove to be significant.
The short explanation is that the growth of domestic manufacturing has been substantially overstated in recent years. That means productivity gains and overall economic growth have been overstated as well. And that raises questions about U.S. competitiveness and "helps explain why wage growth for most American workers has been weak," says Susan N. Houseman, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research who identifies the distorting effects of offshoring in a soon-to-be-published paper.
Interesting, no? Can this be related to new Democratic moves reinstituting old preClintonian trade restrictions? Maybe.
But what's even more interesting is how Business Week leaves out the simple fact GDP statistics are being questioned all the time for all sorts of reasons related to not only global but also domestic outsourcing. For example, one recent working paper published by the article-cited W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research states:
Although measured employment in manufacturing declined by 4.1 percent from 1989 to 2000, counting employment services workers assigned to manufacturing, employment in that sector actually rose by an estimated 1.4 percent. Factoring in manufacturers' use of employment services workers does not erase the large declines in manufacturing employment since 2000, but a growing share of manufacturing work in the United States is being performed by employees of staffing agencies.
Counting is arbitrary and always subject to question and examination. Reporing otherwise plays only to the public's ignorance of how economics really works.
Mickey Kaus seeks meaning in the immigration bill's apparent death:
Maybe it's about not being able to take the worst ideas from the left (instant legalization of illegals) and the right (second class guest workers), put them together, call it centrism, bask in fawning MSM coverage and ram it down the throat of voters who don't want it!
I think it's all about life and death of bad stuff. At the end of all horror movies the monster always springs back to life at least once. Right?
UPDATE: Then there's Mark Kirkorian, who fails to take the final step by comparing the failure of comprehensive immigration reform with the Hillary Clinton health care reform plan fiasco. (Did that monster jump back to life in the form of the Senior Drug Benefit? Who knows. Mabye that last cup of coffee was one too many.)
The Strategic Oil Reserve (SOR) wasn't created to stabilize prices (like Econ 101's "ever-normal-granary") -- but it can be used for that purpose if the President is politically determined to do so.
The crisis over pork prices in China, like the jolt many Americans feel when gasoline prices jump, offers one example of how prices can suddenly soar. The Chinese government is struggling to cope -- including deliberating whether to sell a snuffling, smelly strategic reserve of hundreds of thousands of live pigs kept at special subsidized farms for precisely the shortage the country is now facing.
This story of workers' radiation exposure is of concern because the workers were wearing safety suits. Were the suits defective, or were they used incorrectly?
"But we've got to do something...(What? We don't?)"
Daniel Henninger falls into the "we've got to find a solution" trap:
[Objections are] understandable and even defensible... What remains is what to do about it...There are at least 12.5 million illegal Hispanic-origin workers in the U.S. now. If the opponents want at least 6 million of them out of the U.S., they should write up legislation that will achieve that goal, tell the American people that this is indeed the explicit purpose and then let voters convey their desires to the Members of Congress.
He's focusing in the wrong direction. Opponents are less worried about the status quo than of new legislation's unintended consequences. The currenly proposed "solution," they worry, may turn (or try to turn) the entire American workplace into one long lined all-passengers-barefoot airport security screening dump, complete with 1000 pages of politically correct regulations solving nothing but the problem of how to raise US employment costs to newer and yet more stratospheric levels.
This is what usually happens when those who've spent little time in the private sector try to "reform" it for its own good.
"Null set" is by definition a set with no elements.
If set A is unequal to set B this means A has elements not in B, B has elements not in A, or both of the above.
Since "null set" has no elements, it is impossible for one null set to have elements not in another null set.
Therefore (a) there is one and only one null set and (b) it is inappropriate to refer to something as "a" rather than "the" null set.
(For further information see A.C. Chiang, Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics, Chapter 2.)
UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Cast (whose BA is in mathematics) worries we'll get angry letters from mathematicians about this, because (as he puts it):
there is nothing in principle wrong with saying "a" null set. In set theory the term null set is indeed a proper noun, designating the unique set of cardinality 0, but in measure theory the term null set is frequently used to designate a set of /measure/ 0, of which there are of course infinitely many. And I think that measure theory is quite a bit more relevant to public policy than pure set theory.
So -- anyone else want to weigh in on this?
UPDATE: More here, here, and here. (So far EconoPundit seems the only blogger to have actually attempted a mathematical proof.)
How do you say "the sky is not falling" in Mandarin?
As you ponder the Reuters-quoted "obviously panic selling" currently taking place on Chinese stock exchanges, consider the following illustrations.
Here, via Yahoo Charts, is the Shanghai SSE Composite Index for the past five days:
Here, via Yahoo Charts, is the same index for the past five years:
UPDATE: I'm disappointed. EconoPundit's few-but-valued Mandarin speaking readers haven't sent in an answer to the main question.
UPDATE II: The charts, it appears, are self-updating. Way way cool!
UPDATE III: Oopsies. Now they're gone, at least on this terminal. Read this post carefully once again, because it may be deleted unless I can recreate the graphs without spending too much time on it.
It is a matter of time before political rationales for US/China trade liberalization come into question in word-for-word terms similar to those used by Iraq war opponents. We "engaged" China because this would "build democracy," in other words, but it continues to look like democracy simply wasn't and isn't being built.
See also under this heading: environmentalist opposition to US/China trade liberalization, union opposition to US/China trade liberalization, textile/small manufacturing/auto industry/etc/etc opposition to US/China trade liberalization, and on the list goes. About the only folks left in favor are jerks like me who like buying a $100 pair of bluejeans for just $18 at Costco!
