Has Gaia Betrayed The Greens?
...Again, for people who base their claim to world leadership on their superior understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, greens prove over and over again that they are surprisingly naive and crude in their ability to model and to shape the behavior of the political and economic systems they seek to control. If their understanding of the future of the earth’s climate is anything like as wish-driven, fact-averse and intellectually crude as their approach to international affairs, democratic politics and the energy market, the greens are in trouble indeed. And as I’ve written in the past, the contrast between green claims to understand climate and to be able to manage the largest and most complex set of policy changes ever undertaken, and the evident incompetence of greens at managing small (Solyndra) and large (Kyoto, EU cap and trade, global climate treaty) political projects today has more to do with climate skepticism than greens have yet understood. Many people aren’t rejecting science; they are rejecting green claims of policy competence. In doing so, they are entirely justified by the record....
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet?
...But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."
So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.
Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox....
...But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."
So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.
Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox....
Nearly one in 10 employers to drop health coverage
...Nine percent of companies said they expect to stop offering coverage to their workers in the next one to three years, the Wall Street Journal reported. Around 81 percent said they would continue providing benefits and 10 percent said they weren't sure.
The companies, though, said a lot will depend on how future provisions of the law unfold, since most of the key parts are scheduled to take effect in 2014. One in three respondents said they could stop offering coverage if the law requires them to provide more generous benefits than they do now, if a tax on high-cost plans takes effect in 2018 as scheduled or if they decide it would be cheaper for them to pay the penalty for not providing insurance....
...Nine percent of companies said they expect to stop offering coverage to their workers in the next one to three years, the Wall Street Journal reported. Around 81 percent said they would continue providing benefits and 10 percent said they weren't sure.
The companies, though, said a lot will depend on how future provisions of the law unfold, since most of the key parts are scheduled to take effect in 2014. One in three respondents said they could stop offering coverage if the law requires them to provide more generous benefits than they do now, if a tax on high-cost plans takes effect in 2018 as scheduled or if they decide it would be cheaper for them to pay the penalty for not providing insurance....
‘I have committed intellectual blasphemy’
...One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.
Since I started writing essays challenging the global-warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for The Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years.
There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus....
...One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.
Since I started writing essays challenging the global-warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for The Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years.
There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus....
Thursday, July 26, 2012
The New Artisan Economy
...While the idea creators—those who design iPhones and develop new drugs—will continue to be the drivers of prosperity, more than a few crumbs may fall to the workers who support them. For example, Moretti estimates that Microsoft alone is responsible for adding 120,000 low-skill jobs to the Seattle area, where the company is based. This is because of the support workers required to style the hair, cut the grass, and yes, build the houses, of all those Microsoft engineers and computer scientists. ...
... In the longer run, the bottom 20 percent—indeed the bottom 99 percent—will need to be retrained and re-educated to get a larger share of U.S. GDP. Eminent Harvard labor economist Larry Katz sees a future where many lower-skilled workers are employed in the service sector supporting America’s innovative class....
...While the idea creators—those who design iPhones and develop new drugs—will continue to be the drivers of prosperity, more than a few crumbs may fall to the workers who support them. For example, Moretti estimates that Microsoft alone is responsible for adding 120,000 low-skill jobs to the Seattle area, where the company is based. This is because of the support workers required to style the hair, cut the grass, and yes, build the houses, of all those Microsoft engineers and computer scientists. ...
... In the longer run, the bottom 20 percent—indeed the bottom 99 percent—will need to be retrained and re-educated to get a larger share of U.S. GDP. Eminent Harvard labor economist Larry Katz sees a future where many lower-skilled workers are employed in the service sector supporting America’s innovative class....
The Price of Gun Control
...Tell a gun owner that he cannot be trusted to own a firearm—particularly if you are an urban pundit with no experience around guns—and what he hears is an insult. Add to this that the bulk of the gun-buying public is made up of middle-aged white men with less than a college degree, and now you’re insulting a population already rubbed raw by decades of stagnant wages.
The harm we’ve done by messing with law-abiding Americans’ guns is significant. In 2010, I drove 11,000 miles around the United States talking to gun guys (for a book, to be published in the spring, that grew out of an article I wrote for this magazine), and I met many working guys, including plumbers, parks workers, nurses—natural Democrats in any other age—who wouldn’t listen to anything the Democratic party has to say because of its institutional hostility to guns. I’d argue that we’ve sacrificed generations of progress on health care, women’s and workers’ rights, and climate change by reflexively returning, at times like these, to an ill-informed call to ban firearms, and we haven’t gotten anything tangible in return. ...
...Tell a gun owner that he cannot be trusted to own a firearm—particularly if you are an urban pundit with no experience around guns—and what he hears is an insult. Add to this that the bulk of the gun-buying public is made up of middle-aged white men with less than a college degree, and now you’re insulting a population already rubbed raw by decades of stagnant wages.
The harm we’ve done by messing with law-abiding Americans’ guns is significant. In 2010, I drove 11,000 miles around the United States talking to gun guys (for a book, to be published in the spring, that grew out of an article I wrote for this magazine), and I met many working guys, including plumbers, parks workers, nurses—natural Democrats in any other age—who wouldn’t listen to anything the Democratic party has to say because of its institutional hostility to guns. I’d argue that we’ve sacrificed generations of progress on health care, women’s and workers’ rights, and climate change by reflexively returning, at times like these, to an ill-informed call to ban firearms, and we haven’t gotten anything tangible in return. ...
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Spies in the sky signal new age of surveillance
..."If you're concerned about it, maybe there's a reason we should be flying over you, right?" said Douglas McDonald, the company's director of special operations and president of a local chapter of the unmanned vehicle trade group. "But as soon as you lose your kid, get your car stolen or have marijuana growing out at your lake place that's not yours, you'd probably want one of those flying overhead."...
..."If you're concerned about it, maybe there's a reason we should be flying over you, right?" said Douglas McDonald, the company's director of special operations and president of a local chapter of the unmanned vehicle trade group. "But as soon as you lose your kid, get your car stolen or have marijuana growing out at your lake place that's not yours, you'd probably want one of those flying overhead."...
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Doc says ‘physicians have reached a tipping point’ [VIDEO]
...In 1995, Westchester Orthopedic employed one person to perform administrative tasks. By the late ’90s, they employed one per doctor.
Mark Smith, president of physician recruiter Merritt Hawkins in Irving, Texas, said there are more regulations today than ever before. Doctors in his association report spending 60 percent of their time on completing regulatory paperwork.
“There have even been reports of small practices going out of business,” Smith said. “This has been unheard of in my 24 years in this organization.”
In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act mandated specific data collection that increased costs on doctor’s private practices without increasing reimbursements. The next year, the Obamacare decreased reimbursement and specified more reporting requirements — again increasing costs....
“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Obama to Americans: You don’t deserve what you’ve earned
...There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet....
Government Didn’t Create the Internet
The Internet is a trillion dollars of fiber optic cables laid in the ground and under our oceans. Fiber optic technology was developed by corporations, such as Corning Glasworks, not the government. The trillion dollars in capital that was used to pay for laying cable came from Wall Street, not the government.
The one thing you might be able to credit the government with is standards. The early days of computing were a hodge-podge of networking standards. Only computers from the same vendor could talk to each other -- indeed, often only the same model of computers. The situation was like the railroad network in the pre Civil-War South: each state’s rail network had different gauge tracks, different widths, different turn radiuses, different slopes. As cargo was shipped across the South, it needed to be offloaded from one rail network and loaded onto another, several times. After the Civil War, the U.S. government decreed a common railroad standard for the entire country so that it could move troops quickly to anywhere in the country to suppress insurrections.
In much the same way, around 1980, governments around the world, working with international standards organizations, created the "OSI" or "Open Systems Interconnect" group. The purpose of OSI was to create a single standard for all networks, to create a world wide "internetwork" that all computers could be connected to. By 1990, developed countries (US, Europe, Japan) had laws called "GOSIP" or “Government OSI Profile” that required all computers purchased by the government must support the OSI network standard. All large corporations, such as IBM and HP, supported this standard with their computers.
What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP -- a networking standard the government tried to kill off....
Obama: “If You’ve Been Successful, You Didn’t Get There On Your Own”
The wealthy already pay more taxes than everyone else, both as a percentage of total federal taxes collected and as a percentage of their own income. So unless Obama is seeing different facts than the rest of us, upper-income earners are definitely not getting a free ride, or even half of a free ride, on the backs of middle-class earners. So the “somebody” who “invested” in “publicly funded widget XYZ” is actually the wealthy person Obama is bashing....
Mankiw: Middle Class Receives More in Government Benefits Than They Pay in Taxes
Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received. For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):
Bottom quintile: -301%
Second quintile: -42%
Middle quintile: -5%
Fourth quintile: 10%
Highest quintile: 22%
Top one percent: 28%
The negative 301% means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned....
Obama's Soft-Core Socialism
...The contempt for small business was aptly summarized by Hillary Clinton back in 1993, when she was pushing her plan to nationalize health care. Told that her proposals would devastate small companies, she replied: "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America."...
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Obama to Americans: You don’t deserve what you’ve earned
...There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet....
Government Didn’t Create the Internet
The Internet is a trillion dollars of fiber optic cables laid in the ground and under our oceans. Fiber optic technology was developed by corporations, such as Corning Glasworks, not the government. The trillion dollars in capital that was used to pay for laying cable came from Wall Street, not the government.
The one thing you might be able to credit the government with is standards. The early days of computing were a hodge-podge of networking standards. Only computers from the same vendor could talk to each other -- indeed, often only the same model of computers. The situation was like the railroad network in the pre Civil-War South: each state’s rail network had different gauge tracks, different widths, different turn radiuses, different slopes. As cargo was shipped across the South, it needed to be offloaded from one rail network and loaded onto another, several times. After the Civil War, the U.S. government decreed a common railroad standard for the entire country so that it could move troops quickly to anywhere in the country to suppress insurrections.
In much the same way, around 1980, governments around the world, working with international standards organizations, created the "OSI" or "Open Systems Interconnect" group. The purpose of OSI was to create a single standard for all networks, to create a world wide "internetwork" that all computers could be connected to. By 1990, developed countries (US, Europe, Japan) had laws called "GOSIP" or “Government OSI Profile” that required all computers purchased by the government must support the OSI network standard. All large corporations, such as IBM and HP, supported this standard with their computers.
What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP -- a networking standard the government tried to kill off....
Obama: “If You’ve Been Successful, You Didn’t Get There On Your Own”
The wealthy already pay more taxes than everyone else, both as a percentage of total federal taxes collected and as a percentage of their own income. So unless Obama is seeing different facts than the rest of us, upper-income earners are definitely not getting a free ride, or even half of a free ride, on the backs of middle-class earners. So the “somebody” who “invested” in “publicly funded widget XYZ” is actually the wealthy person Obama is bashing....
Mankiw: Middle Class Receives More in Government Benefits Than They Pay in Taxes
Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received. For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):
Bottom quintile: -301%
Second quintile: -42%
Middle quintile: -5%
Fourth quintile: 10%
Highest quintile: 22%
Top one percent: 28%
The negative 301% means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned....
Obama's Soft-Core Socialism
...The contempt for small business was aptly summarized by Hillary Clinton back in 1993, when she was pushing her plan to nationalize health care. Told that her proposals would devastate small companies, she replied: "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America."...
All Claimed July Warming In The US Is Due To Data Manipulation
...The unadjusted graph shows no warming since 1895, with the hottest July occurring in 1901. All of the claimed July warming is due to data manipulation....
New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homgenization
...Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in:
“increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).”
And…
“homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not well justified by experiments, and are rarely supported by metadata. It can be argued that they often lead to false results: natural features of hydroclimatic times series are regarded as errors and are adjusted.”...
...The unadjusted graph shows no warming since 1895, with the hottest July occurring in 1901. All of the claimed July warming is due to data manipulation....
New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homgenization
...Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in:
“increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).”
And…
“homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not well justified by experiments, and are rarely supported by metadata. It can be argued that they often lead to false results: natural features of hydroclimatic times series are regarded as errors and are adjusted.”...
Why Our Elites Stink
Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.
...As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service...
Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.
...As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service...
The Polluted Waters of 50 Shades of Grey, Etc.
...however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed....
...True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours....
...however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed....
...True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours....
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Newly found weather records show 1930′s as being far worse than the present for extreme weather
...It also is useful for putting the recent heat wave in perspective. Despite the 24/7 caterwauling, only two new state records—South Carolina and Georgia—are currently under investigation. And, looking carefully at Shein et al. dataset, there appears to be a remarkable lack of all-time records in recent years.
This is particularly striking given the increasing urbanization of the U.S. and the consequent “non climatic” warming that creeps into previously pristine records. Everything else being equal—and with no warming from increased greenhouse gases—most statewide records should be in or near big cities. But they aren’t.
This year there were a huge number (many thousands) of reports of daily high temperature records being set across the eastern two-thirds of the country in recent weeks, and even a large number (a few hundred) reports of all-time records high temperatures being set for a particular location. But if only two new statewide records were set, that’s hardly an historic heat wave when considered in its totality....
The Other Scandal In Unhappy Valley
...Michael Mann, like Joe Paterno (and to a lesser degree, Jerry Sandusky) was a rock star in the context of Penn State University, bringing in millions in research funding. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal was also the president when Mann was being investigated. We saw what the university administration was willing to do to cover up heinous crimes, and even let them continue, rather than expose them. Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide academic and scientific misconduct, with so much at stake?
It’s time for a fresh, truly independent investigation.
Climate was HOTTER in Roman, medieval times than now: Study
...A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.
A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today - despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back then.
"We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Professor-Doktor Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, one of the scientists leading the study. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy."
They certainly are, as it is a central plank of climate policy worldwide that the current temperatures are the highest ever seen for many millennia, and that this results from rising levels of atmospheric CO2 emitted by human activities such as industry, transport etc.
If it is the case that actually the climate has often been warmer without any significant CO2 emissions having taken place - suggesting that CO2 emissions simply aren't that important - the case for huge efforts to cut those emissions largely disappears....
The other foreclosure crisis: Losing a home over $400 in back taxes
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- People are losing their homes over unpaid tax bills that, in some cases, add up to just a few hundred dollars.
Outdated state laws that allow local governments to sell tax liens on delinquent properties to investors in order to more quickly collect on overdue property taxes is sparking a second "foreclosure crisis," a report from the National Consumer Law Center said Tuesday....
...The report cited a case of an 81-year-old Rhode Island woman who fell behind on a $474 sewer bill. A corporation bought the home in a tax sale for $836.39. The woman was evicted from the home she had lived in for more than 40 years and the corporation resold the place for $85,000, the report said....
Applying Title IX to science enrollment – what possibly could go wrong?
...Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes. (Under the three-part Title IX test created by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work, colleges are allowed to temporarily comply by increasing the number of female athletes rather than cutting the number of male athletes, but the only viable permanent way to comply with its rule is to restrict men’s participation relative to women’s participation, reducing overall participation.) Thus, as Charlotte Allen notes, the Obama administration’s guidelines are likely to lead to “science quotas” based on gender....
Applying Title IX to science enrollment – what possibly could go wrong?
...Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes. (Under the three-part Title IX test created by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work, colleges are allowed to temporarily comply by increasing the number of female athletes rather than cutting the number of male athletes, but the only viable permanent way to comply with its rule is to restrict men’s participation relative to women’s participation, reducing overall participation.) Thus, as Charlotte Allen notes, the Obama administration’s guidelines are likely to lead to “science quotas” based on gender....
83% of doctors say they might quit over Obamacare, according to new poll
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the median debt at graduation from medical school is $150,000 at public institutions and $180,000 at private institutions. Add to that malpractice insurance premiums that can as high as $200,000 a year, and you begin to get a sense of why American physicians might be wary of government intrusion into the practice of medicine.
One new survey shows the disenchantment running so high that 83% of doctors queried say they are thinking of hanging up their stethoscopes permanently now thatObamacare stands poised to remain the law of the land....
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