The Salt Lake Tribune tells us Antarctic ice melt shows warming is speeding up The sound of a chunk of Antarctic ice hundreds of years old and seven times the size of Manhattan collapsing into the ocean should be enough to rouse the concern of even the most staunch global warming skeptics. A more accurate …
Author: Jim
Losing in Iraq, part two
An hour or so ago I read that the surge was about to be diminished, because it is unsustainable, and posted “Losing in Iraq, part one†I guess Sadr read it also, for a few minutes ago I read that the Green Zone is being shelled and the oil is being cut off. I read …
Losing in Iraq, part one
When the US began its attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, I said that destroying our enemies anywhere in the world would be easy, but building states would be hard, would most likely fail, for no one understands how a state is built, and the trend of the times is for states to fail. And …
Global warming explained
In a paper with the deliberately boring title “A Provisional Long Mean Air Temperature Series for Armagh Observatory†C.J. Butler and D.J. Johnston find a near perfect correlation between solar cycle length and temperature from 1796 to 1992 – which implies that recent warming is real, but wholly explained by events happening on the sun. …
Future Housing prices
Real mortgage interest rates are high and rising in the US, because the the future value of the US dollar is uncertain. Lenders fear the possibility of very high inflation, so demand high interest rates. This makes it difficult to buy a house. At the same time, borrowers fear deflation.  They fear they could put …
Alan Greenspan on crack
Four days ago, Alan Greenspan posted an article wondering what went wrong: “We will never have a perfect model of risk†“Risk management systems – and the models at their core – were supposed to guard against outsized losses. How did we go so wrong?†Hey Alan! Check your spam folder for 2006. You will …
Stagflation
The US economy faces recession: To stimulate the economy, the fed is lowering interest to near zero and the government handing out six hundred dollars to everyone. But what the US faces is not recession, but stagflation, and handing out free money is not the cure for stagflation. Stagflation was first observed in the first …
Moral hazard:
Financiers know that if they misbehave, the Federal Reserve will print money and give it to them in return for worthless collateral. Public knows that when the central bank prints money, its value diminishes, and thus the public become reluctant to sell, and unable to buy. Hence stagflation.
Cargo Cult Science.
xkcd.com is the ultimate geek cartoon. Getting the joke usually requires esoteric knowledge of some combination of science, maths, popular culture, and internet trivia. In today’s cartoon, Zombie Feynman shows up, seeking to eat brains, but then again explains the essence of the scientific method. He then implies that string theorists have no brains. This …
The global warming swindle
Anthropogenic global warming is a swindle in that the scientific method has been abandoned, the evidence is in substantial part lies, and so on and so forth. But it is not a swindle in that it is provably false. It could be true. The evidence vastly overstated, and the effects vastly overstated, but it could …