Immediately after losing a senate seat to a Republican populist, Obama the next day proceeded to go populist. He, is, he tells us, going to punish those unregulated wall street fat cats who caused the crisis. He is going to tax the banks, and restrict proprietary trading by banks. But proprietary trading had little to do with the crisis. All the things that caused the crisis are still going: the …
What the election of Scott Brown means
Notice Scott Brown’s old pick up truck. Partly, of course, it is simply a massive swing against the Democrats. The economy is collapsing, people blame the party in power. But it also means more important and more interesting things: Scott Brown was campaigning as the anti elitist candidate, brandishing a working class and underclass identity, such as his old truck and his conviction for shoplifting. The elite is unpopular, not …
Google censors Google censorship
Recursive censorship: Typing climategate booker into bing four of the first five hits are about Google censoring Booker’s climategate article. The Booker Climategate Article – Scandal or Indexing Problem … Climategate: Googlegate? – Telegraph Blogs Of Climategate, Googlegate & When Stories Get Too Long Mimsy: Climategate crashes Google? Typing climategate booker into google, none the first four hits are about Google censoring Booker’s climategate article – the same hits are …
Mencius and Kling agree
Mencius Moldbug has long argued that we live in a theocracy. The priesthood teach that the state deserves authority, the schools teach the official religion, and the state funds the schools and the priesthood. Now Arnold Kling gives the same analysis,
Google still evil
Despite an announcement that it has stopped censoring in China, google.com.cn still censored Correction: A commentor points out that if we search for Tiananmen+Square+massacre instead of just Tiananmen+Square, we get uncensored results. Nonetheless, there is something smelly about that page rank. Also, google continues to censor right here: Type “Christianity is†into the search box, and it will drop down the following suggestions wrong a lie bullshit not a religion …
What the Tea Party stands for
There is a risk that the Tea Party movement is sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they’re part of the same movement, which is a good way to get people into power so that they can start scooping up some of the gravy, and a bad way to accomplish any political objective. The original Tea …
Torture the underpants bomber
Fifty eight percent of those polled favor “aggressive interrogation techniques such as waterboardingâ€Â for Umar Farouk. He should be asked who gave him the bomb, and where they gave him the bomb. We should then kill everyone in the general vicinity of where the bomb came from. Not because we cannot afford to lose a few planes and a few passengers every now and then, but because we cannot afford …
Unemployment
Officially, unemployment has fallen to the curiously round number of ten percent. Are you feeling more prosperous? Yes, strange to report, zero hedge observes that the money paid to the unemployed has risen substantially, and risen a lot in the last two months. While there are officially nine and half million unemployed, there appear to be fourteen million receiving unemployment benefits. Funny thing that.
No twentieth century warming 3
Hadcrut temperatures are fraudulent, for the Climategate files reveals that no one knows how they were constructed. The Air vent attempts an honest reconstruction: Of course, this reconstruction can only be as good as the data it rests on, which we now know from the Climategate documents directory to be poor. I argue we should throw out all dubious data – which likely means we should rely on proxy indications …
The scientific method
When science becomes a priesthood, it is no longer science. Reference to authority is unscientific, indeed antiscientific, a rejection of the principles of science. One must appeal to evidence, not authority. What authority says is not scientific evidence. Independent replication is evidence. If people all over the world have made observations for the last 100 years about temperature, I can’t replicate them; but other people at the time could replicate …