Quotes of the day

Paul Krugman's wife, Robin Wells, came out with a piece arguing Occupy Wall Street's issues are something economists should address. I wonder whether she thinks biologists should all teach about creationism because so many students believe in some sort of transcendental spark to life. Probably not.   ... You see the same thing with Noam Chomsky, were socialism always is to be encouraged, but any time it happens, as in the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, or Cambodia, these aren't considered 'true' socialist countries (if only Trotsky won!). Their naive beliefs do not work because they aren't feasible, and so too the idea that large banks can be some big cookie jar for agreed-upon investments as opposed to being administered by professionals.--Eric Falkenstein

Moral of the story: it’s harder to tax the top earners than you think.
The second moral is that tax incidence remains a neglected topic, even among top economists.
The third moral is that too many people, including both Krugman and his critics on this point, have been neglecting the literature.--Tyler Cowen

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.--Christopher Horner

Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.--Bret Stephens

We have waited for the wave of investigative journalism seeking the reasons for Black absenteeism — but so far we have been disappointed. Black failure to attend right wing demonstrations appears to be a mysterious matter demanding detailed investigation, but there is nothing to discuss when they shun left wing ones. Moreover, a relative absence of Black faces in right wing crowds clearly demonstrates the racism of both the protesters and their ideas, while an absence of Black faces in left wing crowds means — absolutely nothing.--Walter Russell Mead

Occupy Wall Street might seem like a movement that would resonate with black Americans. After all, unemployment among African Americans is at 15 percent, vs. almost 8 percent for whites. And between 2005 and 2009, black households lost just over half of their median net worth compared with white families, who lost 16 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

...

A Fast Company survey last month found that African Americans, who are 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, make up only 1.6 percent of Occupy Wall Street.

...

While the black press and civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the National Urban League were critical to past protest movements, black churches were the organizational force behind the rhetoric. Church leaders mobilized famous names and unsung heroes to end segregation through meetings, marches, demonstrations, boycotts and sit-ins. But where is the church now?

...

Some argue that the black church is losing its relevance, especially among young people who have been turned off by the religious theater of celebrity preachers. Even after lenders were accused of targeting black churches and communities as fertile markets for subprime mortgages, these churches are not joining Occupy protests en masse.

...

And despite their inclusive mission statements, major civil rights organizations and leaders appear to be selling out black America for corporate money. Beginning in the 1980s, for example, the tobacco and alcohol industries meticulously cultivated relationships with leaders of black communities. Institutions such as the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund and the Congressional Black Caucus have counted those industries as major donors — at the expense of the health of the black community.--Stacey Patton

What if fat is good and carbs are bad? What if the government has been nudging people toward obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Oops! Maybe it would be better to allow more competition in ideas and less nudging. I’ll nudge myself, thank you very much.--Russ Roberts

What you're looking for is some characteristic that is common to the people own pets, exercise regularly, have an occasional drink or two, and practice religion. What could be inferred about all of those people? I'm interested in your answers because the readers of this blog are good at pattern recognition. You'll probably come up with several plausible answers. The pattern I noticed is that each of the lifestyle choices directly lowers stress by improving a person's attitude. My hypothesis is that stress is the root cause of most health problems.--Scott Adams

In the context of daily life as we experience it, of course our joys and sorrows feel intensely meaningful. But just as it surely makes a (if you will) meaningful difference why the war itself is being waged, it surely makes a rather large difference whether our joys and sorrows take place in, say, C.S. Lewis’s Christian universe or Richard Dawkins’s godless cosmos. Saying that “we know life is meaningful because it feels meaningful” is true for the first level of context, but non-responsive for the second.--Ross Douthat

Chart of the day: Inconvenient Truth Squared

Source here.

Quotes of the day

A Craigslist search shows women aren't after the bankers.--John Carney

[Sallie Krawcheck] should really be an insurance or financial industry expert and talking-head on CNBC—like Dick Bove. She hasn’t got the operational leadership chops to lead the IT unit that manages Merrill’s Thundering Herd Desk-Top. Would Ike have put a Company Commander in charge of the pivot to Bastogne? Hell no! He asked Patton to do it!--unnamed commenter

I raised $30 million and if you’re saying I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.--Rick Perry

I’m offended for all the little girls and parents who didn’t have a choice.--Michelle Bachmann

What does it mean to be a man? No one really knows, but it makes for some damn good television. In the first decade of the 21st century, a critical consensus formed that we're currently living in the golden era of television. ...When you list out the great shows that make up this television renaissance, certain commonalities emerge: high production values, a greater investment in acting talent, and complex plotting that assumes an audience that never misses an episode. But with the sole exception of True Blood—which has camp enough to put it into a genre of its own—all these shows share something else. Every other non-vampire show centers around a modern man struggling with the limitations of his outlook in a world full of complexity and changes that prevent survival through simple reliance on old gender norms. If you want to make a critically acclaimed drama, you need to build up a patriarch, preferably in a highly masculine environment, and then start to peel away his certainty about the way the world works and what it means to be a man in this world. ... Americans can't get enough of watching powerful men run into walls created by the limits of narrow, traditional masculinity. ... The irony is that these new shows about men mine territory familiar to feminism, and could even be described in many cases as explicitly feminist. But for all the feminism on TV, high quality dramas about women haven't taken off. Women get plenty of meaty, complex roles in these top tier shows, but only as supporting characters in shows centered around men's gender drama. ... I blame the nation's inability to deal directly with women engaged in complex, dramatic struggles that call gender roles into question. We are, after all, a country where people can go on TV and call Sarah Palin a feminist without choking on their own tongue. Perhaps the absurdities of being female in this modern era don't lend themselves well to drama, but have to be approached sideways, through comedy. Women do very well heading up some of the best comedy on TV--Amanda Marcotte

Champagne Super Novak.--Brian Phillips

... approximately 40 percent of sunlike stars have at least one low-mass planet orbiting around it. On the other hand, the majority of alien planets with a mass similar to Neptune appear to be in systems with multiple planets, researchers said.--Denise Chow

... how did [analysts] get the 50,000 [additional jobs from the White House plan] number? A preliminary analysis. By whom? When? Using what assumptions? And where did the [New York] Times get that estimate? From the White House press team? But the number 50,000 is treated as something like a fact. One reason it’s not close to a fact is that there’s no way of verifying whether this “estimate” is accurate after the fact. So what’s the meaning of this estimate? None. It’s a meaningless statement. But the media treats it like it’s science. It’s not science. It’s fake science. It’s scientism.--Russ Roberts

... there probably is no market for unbiased media. There is definitely a market for hard-core right-wing opinions. There is definitely a market for what we call mainstream media, where both the opinions and the reporting are biased to the left. There is also a market for something like the Washington Post, where the editorials are pretty centrist while the reporting strikes me as showing zero understanding of anything right of center. --Arnold Kling

Modern research on teacher quality makes clear that the factors used to determine a teacher’s compensation tell us little to nothing about how well the teacher will perform in the classroom. That consistent finding has (or should have) enormous implications for the future of the current system. The results of an employment policy based entirely on credentials uncorrelated to student achievement are obvious: we see wide variation in the quality of public school teachers.--Marcus Winters

The argument for large and expensive efforts to prevent or reduce global warming has three parts, in principle separable: Global temperature is trending up, the reason is human activity, and the consequences of the trend continuing are very bad. Almost all arguments, pro and con, focus on the first two. The third, although necessary to support the conclusion, is for the most part ignored by both sides.--David Friedman

It is a crisis of capitalism because our economic model and policy settings cannot produce sustainable growth, adequate income formation or employment creation. We have lost the housing, financial services and credit creation growth drivers and been left with excessive levels of personal and government debt to unwind, a dysfunctional financial system, and weak labour markets. The capacity to produce and sell goods and services has outstripped that of consumers to borrow and spend. Without credit and jobs, other fault lines have been exposed, including the long stagnation of real wages and extremes of inequality. It is truly a crisis of aggregate demand.--George Magnus

Diversity undermines solidarity. People don't mind paying high taxes to support people "like them." But free money for "the other" leads to resentment and political pushback. If you're a social democrat, this implies a tragic trade-off between social justice for natives and social justice for potential immigrants. But if you're a libertarian, the opposite is true. The welfare state doesn't make open borders impossible. It's open borders that makes the eventual abolition of the welfare state imaginable.--Bryan Caplan

My philosophy is that losers have goals and winners have systems.--Scott Adams

Quotes of the day

No joke: Presidential candidate Rick Perry and comedian Stephen Colbert, who last week barraged Iowa voters with advertisements urging voters to support “Rick Parry,” shared the same political committee treasurer – until they didn’t. Salvatore Purpura, who has represented numerous political committees as treasurer over the years, told POLITICO that he resigned on Thursday as treasurer of Colbert’s super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.--DAVE LEVINTHAL

So, no disrespect Gov [Perry], but when you’re getting your Keynes on like that, no need to hide it behind all that anti-gov’t rhetoric.--Jared Bernstein

Would Keynesian stimulus spending work only when it came as a surprise? Or only when the spending was outside the range of prior business experience? Keynesian economists have not even begun to answer these questions. For now, Keynesian theory has so many exceptions that we might as well discard it.--Casey Mulligan

It sounds like this time the [People's Bank of China] might be pretty serious about diversifying their risk away from USG bonds, right? Let’s leave aside the fact that every six months we have heard the same thing for the past several years, and nothing has happened, shouldn’t we nonetheless be worried? Won’t reduced PBoC purchases be hugely disruptive to the US economy and to the US Treasury markets? No, they won’t. There is so much nonsense still being said about this, even by economist who should know better, that I thought I would try to address what it would mean if the PBoC were actually serious and not simply making noises aimed at domestic political constituents. First of all, remember that the PBoC does not purchase huge amounts of USG bonds because it has a lot of money lying around and doesn’t know what to do with it. Its purchase of USG bonds is simply a function of its trade policy. You cannot run a current account surplus unless you are also a net exporter of capital, and since the rest of China is actually a net importer of capital, the PBoC must export huge amounts of capital in order to maintain China’s trade surplus. In order the keep the RMB from appreciating, the PBoC must be willing to purchase as many dollars as the market offers at the price it sets. It pays for those dollars in RMB. It is able to do so by borrowing RMB in the domestic markets, or by forcing banks to put up minimum reserves on deposit. What does the PBoC do with the dollars it purchases? Because it is such a large buyer of dollars, it must put them in a market that is large enough to absorb the money and – and this is the crucial point – whose economy is willing and able to run a large enough trade deficit.--Michael Pettis

If you look at the box score from last night’s baseball game, there’s a lot of risk in concluding which player is the best hitter on the team based on what you find in that one box score. We’re very used to seeing, say, player performance vary from game to game and making conclusions about the most productive player based on a large sample of observations, likewise with the stock market. We know that the stock market varies not only day-to-day, but hour-to-hour and minute-to-minute, and we can watch that variation online almost in real-time…. There is a lot of risk in drawing conclusions about what the Dow Jones industrial average index value will be 10 years from now based on what happened yesterday… So again, the current state, or the most recent departure, is not a rational basis for making conclusions about the long-term trend or the long-term state of a system that’s noisy.--Noah Diffenbaugh

Enumerating a long list of disparate things that may happen, without any probabilities, may work for Nouriel Roubini, but he's a charlatan: here he is last week taking credit for his client switching to cash a couple months ago, he doesn't mention he has been suggesting investors go to cash since 1990, always for a slew of reasons (though Lawrence Summers is here giving props to Roub for calling the housing crisis). I have seen reports that endlessly enumerate risks many times in large corporations, and they are highly correlated with people who either are too afraid to make a mistake, or profoundly do not understand their job.--Eric Falkenstein

As expected, the group members rated the most narcissistic leaders as most effective. But they were wrong. In fact, the groups led by the greatest egotists chose the worse candidate for the job. Says Nevicka, “The narcissistic leaders had a very negative effect on their performance. They inhibited the communication because of self-centeredness and authoritarianism.”--Association for Psychological Science

Quotes of the day

... the Supreme Court has agreed to review United States v. Jones, the DC Circuit’s “mosaic theory” case on whether and when use of a GPS device installed on a car is a Fourth Amendment search.--Orin Kerr

Even in a crowd of rising food and commodity costs, corn stands out, its price having doubled in less than a year to a record $7.87 per bushel in early June. Booming global demand has overtaken stagnant supply. But rather than ameliorate the problem, the government has exacerbated it, reducing food supply to a hungry world. Thanks to Washington, 4 of every 10 ears of corn grown in America — the source of 40 percent of the world’s production — are shunted into ethanol, a gasoline substitute that imperceptibly nicks our energy problem. Larded onto that are $11 billion a year of government subsidies to the corn complex.  ... Because of the subsidy, ethanol became cheaper than gasoline, and so we sent 397 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year. America is simultaneously importing costly foreign oil and subsidizing the export of its equivalent.
That’s not all. Ethanol packs less punch than gasoline and uses considerable energy in its production process. All told, each gallon of gasoline that is displaced costs the Treasury $1.78 in subsidies and lost tax revenue.--Steven Rattner

After earning my PhD, in chemistry, I worked in drug-discovery research for more than 20 years. Aside from being a fascinating profession, it was pretty secure -- until the last decade. Then it became anything but. Why the change? Well, it costs about $1 billion to bring a new drug to market. Blockbuster drugs that bring in multiple billions in profits, such as Lipitor, are needed to support the R&D costs of all other drugs -- ones that don't pan out, and ones that just can't help enough people to justify the investment before the patent expires. And the patents of almost all current blockbusters are expiring about now, cutting drug companies' revenues drastically. Adding to the problem is the Food and Drug Administration, which has become overly restrictive and risk-averse, has made it very difficult (and even more expensive) for companies to bring replacement drugs to market. To trim expenses, companies began to outsource research to India and China. It started as a trickle, but soon became a tsunami, leaving many thousands of highly intelligent and well-trained professionals with nothing to do -- a shameful waste of talent.--Josh Bloom

Combined with central government debt and other liabilities such as bad bank loans, analysts estimate China’s overall explicit debt load is about 70 per cent of gross domestic product. But some analysts believe the contingent liabilities of the government are much higher, once debts on the books of state-owned enterprises and other entities implicitly backed by the state are included. “If you take a very broad view of the Chinese government’s contingent liabilities rather than explicit debt on the books then the number comes to well over 150 per cent of China’s GDP in 2010,” according to Victor Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University in the US. The US has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 93 per cent, while Japan’s ratio is over 225 per cent.--Simon Rabinovitch and Jamil Anderlini

... I do not believe that China’s high savings and low consumption rates are a function of any remarkable preference on the part of Chinese households for savings over consumption. They are simply the automatic consequence of a system in which increases in GDP growth are subsidized by transfers from the household sector, which effectively constrains the relative growth of household income and, with it, household consumption. In that case the only way for China to rebalance would be for Chinese household income to grow faster than GDP. This requires three things above all. It requires that wages grow faster than productivity, that the currency appreciates, and that real interest rates rise. This does not seem to be happening in China, as I discussed in a blog entry last month. Wages have been rising quickly in the past year, but the currency is barely appreciating in real terms against the dollar (and is probably depreciating on a trade weighted basis), and of course real interest rates are declining sharply.--Michael Pettis

In Does Education Matter?, [Alison] Wolf illustrates the absurdity of the increase-the-graduates/increase-the-growth logic by reference to the high remuneration of lawyers. That is, given lawyers’ high wages, having more lawyers would surely mean that there are more and more people earning more and more dough, and therefore in total, society is becoming more and more wealthy. ‘[This] would suggest’, she writes, ‘that the fastest way to boost growth would be to send everyone to law school’. Which is clearly ridiculous. In fact, what the high remuneration of lawyers tells us is that we live in a highly regulated society – as opposed to a productive one – which consequently values lawyers. It doesn’t mean that churning out an ever-increasing number of law graduates is the elixir of economic growth. Likewise, Wolf writes, ‘it is no more self-evident that since some education makes some of us richer, more would make more of us richer, than it is that “two aspirin are good” means “five aspirin are better”’. The wrongheaded belief that you can generate growth simply by increasing the number of graduates has led to the effacement of the structural problems of the economy. In other words, seeking the wrong answers has generated the wrong questions. For example, ‘there tends to be an obsession with how many engineers the UK produces, when the real question ought to be why haven’t we got more engineering industry?’, says Wolf. You don’t have to be a fully signed up economic determinist to recognise that our economic travails cannot be solved through education, education, education.--Tim Black

Al Gore’s lifestyle is a test case for the credibility of his gospel — and it fails. The tolerance of Al Gore’s lifestyle by the environmental leadership is a further test — and that test, too, the greens fail. The average citizen is all too likely to conclude that if Mr. Gore can keep his lifestyle, the average American family can keep its SUV and incandescent bulbs. If Gore can take a charter flight, I don’t have to take the bus. If Gore can have many mansions, I can use the old fashioned kind of shower heads that actually clean and toilets that actually flush. Al Gore looks to the average American the way American greens look to poor people in the third world: hypocritically demanding that others accept permanently lower standards of living than those the activists propose for themselves. ... The Vice President thinks he can square this circle, but he can’t. Sometimes the truth is inconvenient. Mr. Gore must find either a new cause or a new way to live. ... I don’t judge, dear reader, and neither should you. May we all find mercy when we stand alone, naked and ashamed before the judgement seat of God. ... If Al Gore really wants to understand why the global green movement has tanked, he should start by taking a long hard look in the mirror. Gaia, too, can be betrayed by a kiss.--Walter Russell Mead

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed. That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. ... Like war, global warming may well be real — but that doesn’t mean a treaty can help. The green movement’s core tactic is not to “hide the decline” or otherwise to cook the books of science. Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.--Walter Russell Mead

Today, heterosexual marriage is frequently depicted as a site for domestic violence and child abuse. A review of academic literature on the subject would indicate a preoccupation with the damaging consequences of heterosexual marriage. Terms such as the ‘dark side of the family’ invoke a sense of dread about an institution where dominating men allegedly brutalise their partners and their children. This preoccupation of professional victimologists is reflected in popular culture. Cinema and television constantly give us stereotypical stories about unhappy, failed and dysfunctional heterosexual marriages. In contrast, same-sex unions are treated with reverence in popular culture, depicted as mature relationships between loving equals. Of course, heterosexual couples continue to get married, but there has been no time in history when the institution of heterosexual marriage has enjoyed such feeble affirmation. Indeed, these days heterosexual couples are often likely to hear the refrain ‘Why get married?’ or ‘Why wait for marriage before having children?’. Paradoxically, in some quarters the idea that marriage for heterosexuals is no big deal coincides with the cultural sacralising of same-sex unions. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that behind the gay-marriage discussion there lurk some profound questions about how to endow intimate relationships with meaning today. And in such circumstances, elite-sanctioned snobbish intolerance is really no more acceptable than anti-gay prejudice.--Frank Furedi

Image link here. Photo link here.

Government Bimbo of the Day

is the Environmental Protection Agency's Chief of air programs.

Decided not to post a picture. You are welcome.

The 2010 Global Warming Exchange question has been closed

here.  (See above right as well, for quotes and link).

2010 was a warm year, despite record snow and ice in highly populated areas.  Here is the message I provided on the expiry:

The NASA GISS GLOBAL Land-Ocean Temperature Index for 2010 averaged out to 0.6325 Celsius above baseline. The winning prediction is 'greater than 0.6 Celsius (>0.6)'. Congrats to the winners, and to all participants for nudging closer to the truth.

I will list the 2011 question shortly.  Many thanks to Inkling Markets for their generous hospitality.

Quotes of the day

The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred.--Immanuel Kant

Next week, Indian politicians plan to ban all Bollywood movies for “sucking the blood from the poor” because they charge for movie tickets.--Vivek Nemana

... [high school] students with credit cards are less financially literate than students without credit cards.--Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Volume 31, Number 2, 151-160

I favor such [economist ethics] codes, but I'm not sure they will help much. First, most economic research doesn't matter in the first place. Second, the research which does matter very often is distorted anyway. It is pulled out of context, exaggerated, presented by intermediaries and political entrepreneurs without qualification, and so on. That's the real problem. In this context I'm not sure that a conflict of interest statement is going to push people closer toward truth; the process wasn't accurate or finely honed in the first place. What is published is already so much more scientific than the policy process itself. Improving the former inputs with an ethics code seems like pushing on the less important lever and to some extent it is a very weak substitute for the almost complete lack of an ethics code in politics itself. Third, a lot of the problem is economists in government --advising -- rather than what is published in economics journals. Newspapers already have conflict of interest policies for many (or all) of their writers, but I don't see they are much enforced or have much improved the quality of most Op-Ed pages as policy advice.--Tyler Cowen

Brad DeLong is not a nice man. I would say worse, but I aspire to be a more generous soul than Brad.--Don Boudreaux

The new [health innsurance] system is based on a series of expert projections on how people will behave. In the first test case, these projections were absurdly off base. According to the Medicare actuary, 375,000 people should have already signed up for the new high-risk pools for the uninsured, but only 8,000 have. More seriously, cost projections are way off. For example, New Hampshire’s plan has only about 80 members, but the state has already burned through nearly double the $650,000 that the federal government allotted to help run the program. If other projections are off by this much, the results will be disastrous. ... Companies and unions across America are running the numbers and discovering they would be better off if, after 2014, they induced poorer and sicker employees to move to public insurance exchanges, where subsidies are much higher. The number of people in those exchanges could thus skyrocket, especially as startup companies undermine their competitors with uninsured employees and lower costs. --David Brooks

Every inquiry into paleoclimate controversies, no matter how much whitewash was applied, concluded that climate scientists should archive data. If Neukom, Jones and their coauthors publish a multiproxy article, that means the multiproxy data, not just the output. If the contributing authors are not willing to archive their data, then it shouldn’t be used in a study in a climate journal. End of story. Nor is it sufficient for the author to provide the addresses of the various contributors and force an interested reader to obtain data from each of them individually. There’s no guarantee that they will cooperate. The obligation rests with the publishing authors.--Steve McIntyre

If the [autism-by-vaccination claims] allegations are true, [Andrew Wakefield, a doctor, and an attorney] managed to kill more people than Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy put together.--Megan McArdle

[Peyton Manning] was very encouraging. He always has been. He's just that kind of a guy, a very classy guy.--Tom Brady

I don't remember hearing that lyric in "Hit 'Em Up."--Bill Simmons

Being someone that many teams passed over there was a reason for it, you know? They didn't think I was a very good player, and they were probably right. I wasn't doing a good enough job listening to my coaches, I wasn't working at it hard enough, I wasn't good enough. Going 199th, it forces you to be critical of yourself. That ends up being the best thing for you.--Tom Brady

Quotes of the day

Indeed, arguments to the effect that something can't be good if it hasn't "survived," when its failure to "survive" reflects, not any competitive outcome, but the effect of laws aimed at snuffing it out, are perfectly circular: they amount to saying that, because something has everywhere been outlawed, it deserves to be outlawed.--George Selgin

[Within a few years] children just aren't going to know what snow is. [Snowfall will be] a very rare and exciting event.--Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, in 2000

"[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers."--Michael Oppenheimer, in 1990.

If present trends continue, the world will be ... eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age." Kenneth E.F. Watt, in 1970.

Over the past three years, American politics has been dominated by a liberal fantasy and a conservative freakout. The fantasy was the idea that Barack Obama, a one-term senator with an appealing biography and a silver tongue, would turn out to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Robert F. Kennedy and Mahatma Gandhi all rolled into one. This fantasy inspired a wave of 1960s-style enthusiasm, an unsettling personality cult (that “Yes We Can” video full of harmonizing celebrities only gets creepier in hindsight) and a lot of over-the-top promises from Obama himself. It persuaded Democrats that the laws of politics had been suspended, and that every legislative goal they’d ever dreamed about was now within reach. It was even powerful enough to win President Obama a Nobel Peace Prize, just for being his amazing self.--Ross Douthat

The big-picture problem for the left is that in the context of government-run health care Berwick's rule [of rationing] is not only sensible, but it's the only possible outcome. This leaves proponents of a "right" in the uncomfortable position of having to say that it's only a right up to a certain age, a certain degree of sickness, or a certain cost. Yet, if a "right" ends at an arbitrary point set by bureaucrats and legislators -- a point not based on conflict with other rights but rather with changeable financial or political considerations -- then it can't be a right. Furthermore, if a positive right such as that claimed by supporters of Obamacare can be curtailed because of cost, then every government program that relies on the redistribution of wealth can be curtailed. Either they're all "rights" or none of them is. Of course, the idea that government, with an incentive to "control costs," would be involved with end-of-life counseling is disturbing enough. But perhaps the biggest problem for Progressivism in the news of Berwick's giant step toward health care rationing is that the country is learning in an unmistakable way that the emperor has no clothes. In our constitutional republic, positive rights are anathema to liberty and to life itself.--Ross Kaminsky

Marginal cost is the cost of supplying one additional unit of output—say, one more pound of apples or one more automobile. In most cases, marginal costs rise as firms increase the amounts they supply to consumers. But textbooks identify certain goods and services as ones whose supplies can be increased at zero cost. These textbooks also insist that economic efficiency requires that, in these circumstances, firms increase their supplies and charge consumers nothing for the additional output. Obviously, no private firm will do such a thing if its customers are willing to pay something for the extra output. So, many economists concluded, economic efficiency requires government intervention—say, to force the price down to zero or for government itself to supply such goods and services. The classic example of such a good is a bridge spanning a river. Once the bridge is built—and assuming that traffic on the bridge isn’t congested—the cost of letting an additional car cross the bridge is practically zero. But the private owner of the bridge will nevertheless charge positive prices to each vehicle seeking to use the bridge. Economists blinded by textbook simplicity took this fact as evidence that private ownership of bridges is inefficient unless these owners are prevented by government from charging for use of their bridges during nonpeak times. Coase effectively shouted, “That’s absurd!” He rejected the convention of evaluating the appropriateness of prices based on the assumption that bridges already exist.--Don Boudreaux

Professor Alfred Kahn served as living proof that there need be nothing dismal about the science he loved.--Thomas Hazlet

Quotes of the day

A new NASA computer modeling effort has found that additional growth of plants and trees in a world with doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would create a new negative feedback – a cooling effect – in the Earth's climate system that could work to reduce future global warming.--Patrick Lynch

I thought of bringing something in that actually was pornographic. I could say to you, then, `This is porno, this [body scanner image] is not.' I'll recognize it when I see it. ... We're not in the risk elimination business. The only way you can eliminate car accidents from happening is by not driving. OK, that's not acceptable. The only way you can eliminate the risk of planes blowing up is nobody flies. ... I want to use the latest intelligence to inform our judgments and actions, and use the best technology when we don't have intelligence. So there's a huge gap there. So here are the threats, here are capabilities, here are gaps. So how do we fill those gaps? And right now we do it with a somewhat blunt approach.--John Pistole, TSA chief

It is my personal belief that they pulled me aside because they thought I was attractive... My boyfriend sailed through with no problems, which is rather ironic in that he fits the stereotypical 'look' of a terrorist when his beard has grown a bit. After the search, I noticed that the male agent who had pulled me out of line was smiling and whispering with two other agents and glancing at me. I was outraged. This could, and I'm sure does, happen to other women. It isn't right to hide behind the veil of security and safety in order to take advantage of women, or even men for that matter, so that you can see them naked. It's a misuse of power and authority, and as much a personal violation as a Peeping Tom. The difference is that Peeping Toms can have charges pressed against them. ... One of my best friends was flying to New York for business, and at some point during the flight, she stood up to retrieve something from her bag in the overhead compartment. When she reached into her bag, something cut her hand. She looked into her bag and discovered a pair of 6-inch gardening shears which she had forgotten to remove prior to packing her bag. The bag, and my friend, had passed through security with no issues. How is this full-body scan supposed to be making us safer if 6-inch gardening shears can still make it aboard domestic flights undetected?--Donna D'Errico, model and TV actress

Because you caught my eye, and they didn’t.--TSA Agent, according to D'Errico

It's not clear why men's behaviors might improve after marriage, he noted. Married men may spend more time with their spouses than their friends, King said, and bad behaviors such as delinquency and binge drinking tend to be group activities. In addition, married men "have more to lose" if they're caught doing illegal activities, and may care what their spouses think. It's also not clear why men with more antisocial behaviors may not marry in the first place, [Alexandra] Burt said. They are probably not the most eligible bachelors, she noted. "You may not be looking to settle down with someone who's prone to aggression, theft, and other things." And for men with these tendencies, marriage may not be so appealing, she added.--Alison McCook

Interesting that the lamestream media, mindlessly mouthing the mantra of Sarah Palin's lack of intellectual curiosity never thought to ask John Edwards what he was reading.--Sissy Willis

Fat, apparently, is not so much a feminist issue as a sexist one. Sauce for the goose? Scandal. Sauce for the gander? No problem.--Alistair Macauley

Look what happens before we run out for every drive, and who are all the guys standing over by the heater? It’s all offensive linemen. They’re not wearing sleeves, but believe me, that little headgear that I’m wearing, that’s OK with them.--Tom Brady

What made Don Meredith one of a kind … well, when he retired from football he was hired to become a broadcaster for this new thing called Monday Night Football. That was 1970. He had no broadcasting training. He was not exactly known for his detailed study or his intense work ethic. Nobody really knew how his Texas twang would play on a medium then known for the deep and crack-free voices of professional announcers.  How did it go? Well, I’d say this, and I doubt too many people would disagree: No color commentator — not in the long history of professional football on television — ever made professional football games as much fun as Dandy Don Meredith.  How did he do it? You don’t think there are television executives wondering that very thing? They have tried everything. They hired a comedian to be in the booth. They hired a funny newspaper columnist to be in the booth. They hired stars to sing the football openers. They designed some animated robot to dance after commercials. They hired every funny player and coach they could find. They have brought in guests, they have brought in impersonators, they have worked up insane graphics, they have worked up a million angles. But they have never quite recaptured when Don Meredith had when he was in the booth with Howard Cosell.  Maybe Meredith was just an unusual combination — a truly great football player who didn’t take football all that seriously. He brought authority and irreverence. He’d sing in the booth, of course. Turn out the lights! The party’s over! Well, he was always singing. He’d crack jokes that were always just a little bit rascally, jokes you had to be a certain age to understand (“Fair Hooker,” he said, repeating the name of the Cleveland Browns receiver. “I haven’t met one yet.”). As one person who worked closely with Meredith said, he was just one of those people who had life beat. Howard Cosell, with his big words and big mind and hyper-sensitivity, never stood a chance. ... Cosell would often say that he liked Meredith — “DAYN-dy DON!” — because he thought Meredith’s rustic charm played well off his own lawyerly bombast. But it really was the other way around. Meredith was the Fonz. Cosell was Potsie. Sure, Cosell was one of a kind in his own way, too, and his great strength was that he made the games matter. But Meredith made the games fun. And fun is what games were meant to be. ... In the 25 years that have gone by since he walked away from broadcasting, television scouts have tried desperately to find someone for the booth with some of Meredith’s spirit, someone who could broadcast not only the passion of football, not only the intensity of football, not only the tactics of football … but also the joy.--Joe Posnanski

I spent most of my adult life chasing bigger paychecks, loftier job titles and flashier possessions. These were my goals not because I chose them, but because I never considered that any other goals existed. My friends and family seemed to want these things, and I assumed that I wanted them, too.
When I accepted the job at Starbucks, it struck me that I probably would never again have money, titles or expensive possessions — yet one evening at Starbucks, I realized that I was as happy as I had ever been in my life. This “low-level” job gave me supportive bosses and coworkers, lots of human interaction and enough money to live a simple life. These were my real priorities, and I had never even known it. Instead, I had wasted most of my life pursuing other people’s goals.--Michael Gates Gill

... rates of churchgoing have fallen much faster among less-educated Americans than they have among college graduates, to the point where there’s now a strongly positive correlation between education and church attendance — one that didn’t exist in the ’70s. (The recent trend toward secularization, it turns out, may have been driven more by community college dropouts than by Richard Dawkins-reading Ph.Ds.)--Ross Douthat

And there you have it. Two nice normal people in a terrible mess not because they’re terrible people but because of the properties of systems. Now here’s the miracle. While this is very hard for two people to sort out on their own – which explains why we feel so stuck so often in our own relationships – it’s surprisingly easy for a good therapist who understands systems to sort this out, and you can do it without any blame. ... Change the context, change the assumptions, and you change the self. Do that with people in a relationship, and you change the relationship. --Mira Kirshenbaum

Intrade lists a Global Cooling futures contract of sorts

Specifically, it is underlied by the increase of Arctic Ice.

Pretty cool! (sorry)

Image link here.

Quotes of the day

I've never been involved in a trade that has such unlimited upside with a very limited downside.--John Paulson

Ask yourself what you would do if someone came in and sold all of your investments overnight. The next morning you wake up and you’re left with 100% cash in your account. You can repurchase the same investments at no cost. Would you build the same portfolio? Does that portfolio fit your unique financial goals?--Carl Richards

[Mark] Zuckerberg’s transformation over the years from awkward dweeb to telegenic smoothie is really extraordinary. Whoever is coaching him should be handsomely rewarded. It’s almost too dramatic a change, as if he’s had a chip implanted in his brain or replaced himself with a more TV-friendly clone.--Andrew Wallenstein

As you rise in the ranks, people stop telling you what they should tell you.--Richard A. Davis

I argue that if we rush into low-carbon technologies too soon, because we think the problem is more urgent than it is, we risk doing real harm to ecosystems as well as human living standards—as the biofuel fiasco all too graphically illustrates. The rush to turn American corn into ethanol instead of food has contributed to spikes in world food prices and real hunger, while the rush to grow biodiesel for Europe has encouraged the destruction of orangutan habitat in Borneo. ... Mr. Gates thinks I underplay the role of education, government, patents and science in the innovation that drives economic improvement. Maybe, but I make a carefully argued case that most of the existing commentary overplays the role of these institutions and that innovation is sometimes hindered by these institutions, too, especially by patents and government monopolies. Am I saying that we should cease worrying about trends that might cause problems? Of course not. I am arguing that we should worry about real problems, including Africa's plight, but that we should do so in the knowledge that we have solved many such problems before and can do so again. I am certainly not saying, "Don't worry, be happy." Rather, I'm saying, "Don't despair, be ambitious"—though I admit it's not nearly as snappy a song lyric.--Matt Ridley

What I suggest is that, without any prejudice, look at the instances over the past 50 years in which countries tried countercylical fiscal policy. What were the successes? What were the failures? My impression is that there were many more of the latter than the former. Look, I take second place to no one in my dislike for representative-agent, rational-expectations macroeconomics. But I think that the failure of M70 was not just that it lost favor with people who were obsessed with microfoundations and fascinated by math. Much of the failure of M70 was and remains empirical.--Arnold Kling

In 2008, for the typical household in the top one-percent of income-earning households in America, the percent of its adjusted gross income that it paid in federal income taxes was 23.27. Middle-income households paid less. For households whose earnings put them in the top 50 percent, but below the top 25 percent, of income earners, the percent of their adjusted gross income paid in income taxes was, on average, 6.75. For households in the bottom 50 percent of income-earners, the percent of their adjusted gross income paid in income taxes was, on average, 2.59.--Don Boudreaux

In a forty-five-minute speech on the economy on September 8th, Obama called out Boehner, by name, eight times. The President seemed almost to be wishing for the gift that voters had handed Bill Clinton with the Republican sweep of 1994—a polarizing opposition figure. Clinton needed to regain the middle in order to save his Presidency, and Newt Gingrich, from the start of his Speakership, proved an obliging foil.--Peter Boyer

You have to measure Boehner against other Boehners—you can’t measure him against me. Boehner would tell you up front that he’s not attempting to be the defining figure of this moment. He’s trying to be the organizer of the team that may define the moment. Clinton was able to pivot with me because I was a large enough figure that Clinton could say to the left, ‘You really want Gingrich?’ And they’d go, ‘O.K., even though we’re really mad at you, we’re not that mad at you.’ This may be an argument for the Boehner model.--Newt Gingrich

I am so sick of playing small ball. That’s why I stepped out there with the Roadmap in the first place. The country doesn’t deserve small ball. The country deserves real answers to the enormous problems facing us. And we owe it to our employers, the people who elected us, to give them a choice of two futures. Look, we know where the left wants to go, we know the path that we are on. We owe it to the country to show them an alternative path, based upon our principles. And if, after getting a second chance, we blow that opportunity, then shame on us.--Paul Ryan

Climate science is not science

Ross Mckitrick concludes:

1. The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC and WMO reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers. The divergence problem was concealed by deleting data to “hide the decline.” The panels that examined the issue in detail, namely Muir Russell’s panel, concurred that the graph was “misleading.” The ridiculous attempt by the Penn State Inquiry to defend an instance of deleting data and splicing in other data to conceal a divergence problem only discredits their claims to have investigated the issue.

2. Phil Jones admitted deleting emails, and it appears to have been directed towards preventing disclosure of information subject to Freedom of Information laws, and he asked his colleagues to do the same. The inquiries largely fumbled this question, or averted their eyes. Despite being asked by Parliament to conclusively resolve this issue, Sir Muir Russell did not attend the interviews with Jones and, as reported in UK media, his inquiry did not ask Jones if he had deleted emails.

3. The scientists privately expressed greater doubts or uncertainties about the science in their own professional writings and in their interactions with one another than they allowed to be stated in reports of the IPCC or WMO that were intended for policymakers. Rather than criticise the scientists for this, the inquiries (particularly the House of Commons and Oxburgh inquiries) took the astonishing view that as long as scientists expressed doubts and uncertainties in their academic papers and among themselves, it was acceptable for them to conceal those uncertainties in documents prepared for policy makers.

4. The scientists took steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work. This point was accepted by the Commons Inquiry and Muir Russell, and the authors were admonished and encouraged to improve their conduct in the future.

5. The inquiries were largely unable to deal with the issue of the issue of blocking publication of papers, or intimidating journals. These ended up being subjective, he-said-she-said disputes, and in some cases the documentation was too sparse. But academics reading the emails could see quite clearly the tribalism at work, and in comparison to other fields, climatology comes off looking juvenile, corrupt and in the grip of a handful of self-appointed gatekeepers and bullies.

Transparency is the most powerful weapon against misuse

What do scientists have to hide?

More bunk from the IPCC

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be renamed Invoking Poorly Considered Choices:

Last week, after six months of evasions, obfuscation, denials and retractions, a story which has preoccupied this column on and off since January came to a startling conclusion. It turns out that one of the most widely publicised statements in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a claim on which tens of billions of dollars could hang – was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.

Via Steve McIntyre.

Quotes of the day

Pickup artists [are] the girliest of men.--Megan McArdle

The purpose of [pickup artist] strategies is to substitute a relatively standardized routine for wit, apathy for confidence, and then bugger off before the woman realizes your greatest accomplishment in life is a level 60 orc shaman. The Game, in other words, basically just tells you how to fake it. Which is fine when you're in college or just starting out and haven't had time to do anything yet. But as a schtick, it really wears thin as time passes. ... The Game is the mental/social equivalent of breast implants. Superficially appealing, especially to the less experienced, but ultimately inferior to the real thing.--DavidBN

... sexually unrestricted men and women, compared to sexually restricted individuals, were better able to discriminate between these actual and deceptive signals of receptivity for female targets.--Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 47, Issue 7, November 2009

... men's benevolent sexism was associated with greater relationship motivation and greater investment in romantic ideals and family.--Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Volume 10, Issue 1, January 2009

... gratitude, controlling for materialism, uniquely predicts all outcomes considered: higher grade point average, life satisfaction, social integration, and absorption, as well as lower envy and depression. In contrast, materialism, controlling for gratitude, uniquely predicts three of the six outcomes: lower grade point average, as well as higher envy and life satisfaction.--Journal of Happiness Studies (11 March 2010)

When it comes to part-time work, the gender wage gap goes the other way: Women generally out-earn men.--Catherine Rampell

Make sure you pay my taxes on time.--Genevieve Huebsch Gratz, Ken Griffin's grandmother

So why do we trust hospitals so much more than car drivers?--Robin Hanson

It takes a lot to spook the solid old gold market. But when it emerged last week that one or more banks had lent 380 tonnes of gold to the Bank of International Settlements in return for foreign currencies, there was widespread surprise and confusion.--Rowena Mason

The U.S. had a $4 billion trade surplus in agricultural products with China in the first four months of 2010, helping shave the total deficit to $71 billion in the period. The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans and cotton, commodities for which China is the world’s top importer. Exports “exploded” after China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, says the US Department of Agriculture. Growing livestock and textile industries have stoked demand for animal feed and fiber.--Gregory Meyer and Leslie Hook

Acting as budget director during the economic boom of the late 1990s was a bit like handling a state-of-the-art yacht in still water. Managing a budget that's bursting at the seams to keep the economy on track while half of Congress screams about the deficit will be more like windsurfing a South Pacific typhoon.--Derek Thompson

Maybe [Robert] Reich is right, but he can only be right if economics is wrong. The marginal product of labor must be a fiction. George must prefer unemployment to working as a contractor. Allowing workers to choose higher pay instead of government mandated protections must be a dangerous illusion of liberty. And if he's right, then hundreds of millions of pages of paternalism actually are necessary to trump the free will of 300 million Americans. But don't kid yourself, cowboy, because regardless whether that story is right, it's the story that rules.--Tim Kane

By 1875 fully one-third of federal revenues came from the beer keg and the whiskey bottle, a proportion that would increase in the years ahead and that would come to be described by a temperance leader in 1913, not inaccurately, as "a bribe on the public conscience." ...it would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax. Given that you wouldn't collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed like an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes.--Daniel Okrent

The first stage was for the Panel to determine that the [Climategate or Climatequiddick] e-mail enquiry was not really about the e-mails – it was about what the accused, in the event, achieved. The e-mails evidenced the “guilty mind” and prospective conduct of the conspirators. By moving away from the content of the emails they then suggest that the intent of the conspirators became irrelevant. This is a well recognised and rarely successful ploy. If you shoot at a man with malice and miss the consequence of your malice is mitigated, but not its criminality. The Panel, in the absence of any permitted challenge, have equated absence of success to absence of malice.--Bob Denton

I think [President Obama] should have been more firm with those on the other side of the aisle. He is a person who doesn't like confrontation. He's a peacemaker. And sometimes I think you have to be a little more forceful. And sometimes I don't think he is enough with the Republicans.--Harry Reid

Harry Reid, having voted for the war before he was against it, having claimed he was misled when in fact he was derelict in his duty to review available information, having called General Petraeus a liar and then declared the war lost and the surge a failure, and having clung to that position in the face of the obvious success of the surge, has not learned his lesson.--William Jacobson

Harvard historically has no problem with raging comsymps, though an actual deep-cover Russian agent may push the bounds of even Harvard’s famous tolerance for America-bashing.--Jules Crittenden

Since the early 1990s, both medievalists and electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts in making complementary claims: medievalists to continuing cultural relevancy and electronic media theorists in continuity to literary tradition. The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet “pages.”--Elizabeth Drescher

Church is the child tasting bread, the man stooping low, the cloud of witnesses who for once are not weeping at what we have made of things, the sudden realization that all of it is true, the parts we yearn for and the parts we dread and the parts we ignore or twist to fit our tiny theologies — all of it is true, and it is true the way your fury and love and secret shames are true.--Tony Woodlief

I may need to suspend the Global Warming Exchange

It turns out that NASA's data may be worse than the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) -- the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails.

Via Don Surber.

Steve McIntyre on the continued tricks of the "hide the decline trick"

In my submission to the Parliamentary Committee, I observed that the “trick” wasn’t “clever” – it was the deletion of inconvenient data.
...
The trick was not a “neat” way of handling data, nor a recognized form of statistical analysis. The trick was a clever way of tricking the readers of the IPCC 2001 graphic into receiving a false rhetorical impression of the coherency of proxies – a point understood at the beginning by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, but now misunderstood due to continued disinformation.

Quotes of the day

At least I’ll never have to apologize to the Singapore government, unlike certain newspapers.--Scott Sumner

No crop should get subsidies. But the politicians’ solution is to keep supporting meat production -- and then turn around and pay schools to serve vegetables.--John Stossel

Add it up and the government is counting on squeezing an extra $1.2 trillion over 10 years from a tiny sliver of taxpayers who already pay more than half of all individual taxes. It won't work. It never works. --Alan Reynolds

The GAO attached a feather duster to a space heater, sent the photo to the EPA, and got approval in just 11 days.--John Stossel

How on earth could this have happened? This is the sort of thing the government is supposed to be good at: providing transparency and certification for private efforts. Yet it seems they weren't even bothering. ... But I think this goes back to my belief that the government is simply doing too much. We want a program for virtually every single problem in human existence, and the incentive of politicians and bureaucrats is to create one. It doesn't matter so much whether it actually solves the problem, as long as it seems to. If the GAO just discovered this now, I suspect that manufacturers discovered this long ago. In effect, the government has enabled them--hell, encouraged them--to get millions of people to pay extra for a worthless label. The manufacturers, the politicians, and the regulators were all better off--but the rest of us were worse off.--Megan McArdle

Mr. President, this isn’t double-down.…This is all-in.--General David Petraeus

... Petraeus would testify that things had begun to improve—that the counter-insurgency strategy he had initiated eight months before was working, against all odds and expectations. Violent incidents had fallen off dramatically. Former Sunni insurgents had come around and begun to oppose al-Qaeda. Dangerous Shiite militias were putting down their arms. Instead of conceding futility and abandoning Iraq to chaos and civil war, there was a good chance the United States could stabilize the country enough to begin a relatively bloodless and honorable phased withdrawal. The general brought, in short, unwelcome news, at least to many Democratic lawmakers. ... Obama, Biden, and Clinton are now even more directly Petraeus’s bosses than they were on that day in September 2007. As they proceed to escalate the war in Afghanistan and dial down the operation in Iraq—and as they confront new dangers in Pakistan and Iran—they are now on the same team with the general, no matter how far apart they were back then. For them, and particularly for President Obama, the responsibility and consequences of wielding American power have become very real—as they long have been for the general. On the hard questions of war, the Obama White House is not just listening to Petraeus but heeding his advice. ... In the sorry three-year saga of events in Iraq after the invasion, there had been only one unequivocal success—the 101st Airborne’s occupation of Mosul, under the command of David Petraeus. If there is one basic reason he succeeded where others had failed, it was his enthusiastic embrace of nation building, which was anathema to the Bush administration. ... Petraeus believed the pre-9/11 soldier had been taught what to think. He wanted the post-9/11 soldier taught how to think. ... At the end of November, when Obama committed to a surge in troops, he pushed Petraeus to accelerate its pace. He wanted results to come sooner rather than later, so that he could offer the American people some prospect of an end. But the course he embraced was, in essence, the Iraq strategy he had opposed three years earlier—Obama had come full circle. And whatever the results in the short term, the strategy pre-supposes that America will be present in force for years to come. Successful counter-insurgency comes in only one size: long.--Mark Bowden

Ford completely destroyed the massive brand value that Volvo had built up over the years. Geely is getting Volvo for next to nothing. Ford might as well be giving the brand away.--Matthew DeBord

[Rupert Murdoch] is quite happy to have his newspapers express views contrary to his own when it sells papers. The media market determines media bias – and – as the above string of numbers show – the media market has a conservative bias and that bias is getting stronger. Media bias follows the money-making bias of media owners. People who proclaim liberal media bias are just not following the dollars.--John Hempton

Sheep is just as bad; pork and chicken are half as bad; cod or wheat are at least eight times less carbon-intensive; potatoes and herring are far better still. Organic methods reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but not by much. Yet this all looks modest relative to the costs of transport. Vaze reckons that steak’s emissions will get you about eight miles by plane, or 15 miles if you travel alone in a car. As for the tax, it should be on all greenhouse gases, not just cow burps. I suspect it would create a few vegetarians, perhaps better diets for cows, and headaches for the taxman. --Tim Harford

I suppose this dissonance is captured, for college basketball, in a single image: the spectacle of muscular, tattooed, seeming warriors strutting about in baggy silk culottes that might as well come with a matching man-purse. But even if you dress like a sissy, need you act like one? I understand it’s an important game, and that you desperately want to win, and that you yearn for victory with all your precious, over-inflated heart. But man up. The other team was better. Or maybe just luckier. Or maybe you should have practiced your free throws harder last summer. Whatever the reason, the gods of basketball have found you wanting. So pull up your big-girl panties and get over it. And if you’re going to cry like a big overgrown sissy, at least have the self-respect to do it in the locker room.--Tony Woodlief

Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.--Corita Kent

After crunching the data—including the women's facial preferences, their country of origin and that country's national health index—the Face Lab researchers proved something remarkable. They could predict how masculine a woman likes her men based on her nation's World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancy and the impact of communicable disease. In countries where poor health is particularly a threat to survival, women leaned toward "manlier" men. That is, they preferred their males to have shorter, broader faces and stronger eyebrows, cheekbones and jaw lines. ... A woman might be attracted subconsciously to a high-testosterone man because he'll give her kids an edge health-wise. But if health comes at the expense of fidelity and good parenting, how much does masculinity really matter? The apparent answer is not so much—if you're a woman living in a country with a decent health-care system and few harmful pathogens. While a masculine father's "good genes" may confer health advantages to children, so do good medical attention and a clean environment. ... generally speaking, the researchers found that a nation's health index explained more of the variation in women's masculinity preferences than did many culture-specific female norms identified in previous studies.--Jena Pincott

That's what science is about

well, never mind.