CapitalistImperialistPig

From Arianna Huffington today: This week, Justice Alito offered up the refined, Supreme Court version of Joe Wilson's "You Lie!"; OK, Arianna is in the business of sensational journalism, but in my book there is a huge gap between Wilson's "You lie" and Alioto's "that's not so." The difference is between a deliberate insult and a possibly quite respectful diagreement on facts or their interpretation. Alioto was still out of order - as out of order as an administration official would be saying or mouthing the same thing in a Supreme Court hearing. The sentiment was appropriate but the occasion was not. He, like heckler at the Supreme Court, should have been summarily ejected. Wilson, on the other hand, deserved more drastic punishment.

I watched ABC's This Week today, with Barbara Walters hosting. She asked fairly good questions of new Senator Scott Brown, but didn't follow up on his evasions. So far pretty much same-old, same-old. The round table discussion was a revelation though. It was by far the best that I have seen on any news show. The cast of characters was mostly familiar: Paul Krugman, Ariana Huffington and Old Sourpuss George Will, but they brought in a ringer - Roger Ailes, chairman and creator of Fox News. Walters was unobtrusive, forgoing the usual chair at the focus, and interupted only occasionally and always to good effect. To my shock, Ailes was one of the most even handed and consistently intelligent commentators. Even more surprising, there was some real give and take among the panel, almost unheard of in the Stephanopoulis regime. I have never previously been a fan of Barbara Walters, but maybe I now am. She has to deserve most of the credit for the improvement.

Debate is a good way to learn things, especially if Socrates is your teacher. Debating experts on their own subject is usually unreasonable though - a more humble approach is usually called for. The direct challenge tends to waste their time and yours. I have been known to make exceptions for economists and other social scientists, though. Social scientists generally tend to write about subjects with which we all have some practical experience and social scientists tend to make prescriptions for the way governments should operate. Economics in particular purports to prescribe a lot of things that affect the share of the economy each of us can obtain. It has long been observed that republics have the unfortunate tendency to evolve into first oligarchies and ultimately dictatorships. The usual way for this to happen is that a group of the wealthy uses their wealth to control the state and the state to funnel wealth to them. Under such circumstance, there is good reason to believe that ec...

I don't want to pretend to be an authority on general relativity, though I have studied it a little. The following thoughts represent my current understanding of one issue that seems to come up when the so-called paradoxes of special relativity are discussed. There is a persistent myth that General Relativity is necessary to deal with accelerated reference frames. I even remember hearing that from one of my professors as an undergraduate. It's come up in discussion of the Ehrenfest Paradox below. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler (in Gravitation ), demolish the myth as follows: ...special relativity was developed precisely to predict the physics of accelerated objects-e.g. the radiation from an accelerated charge. Even the fantastic accelerations... of 28 g of a neutron in a nucleus... The basis of the myth is somewhat obvious: special relativity treats inertial reference frames as "special" while general relativity purports to treat all reference frames on an equal bas...

One of the surest clues to phony science is the bad faith effort. It's possible that some among the mainstream climate community have gotten carried away from time to time or hyped certain facts more than they deserved, but the record of the climate sceptics consists of one bad faith effort after another. No sooner does one phony argument get shot down than they invent another. Eli, that most excellent climate Rabett, has now assembled evidence of yet another, this time featuring our old buddy Roger Pielke Sr. and friends .

One of my frustrations with the climate science community has been a certain dodginess about the sources of short term climate variability - stuff like the more or less static behavior of global temperature over the past dozen years. So it was a big relief for me when Real Climate succeeded that stupid and defensive The IPCC is not infallible (shock!) headline with a new article on the recent paper by Solomon et. al. (I'm not so impressed by their headline for it either, but...). Susan Solomon is a chemist and no newcomer to making important discoveries in atmospheric science. She was one of the first to unravel the connection between clorofluorocarbons and the ozone hole. Her teams discovery this time is revealing the role that stratospheric water plays in regulating the atmospheric temperature. Water doesn't get to the stratosphere easily - it condenses out at lower levels - but the tiny amount that does get there keeps a significant amount of heat in. The stratosphere ...

The Pres was in total command in his meeting with the Republican Caucus . No doubt the most severely deluded saw it a little differently, but I think the Republicans were throwing him their best stuff and he was pounding into deep left field. He is not the smoothest of speakers, but he was clearly in command of the facts, and he called out his questioners on their more egregious distortions. I expect that most Americans didn't get a glimpse of it but he really should try to set up occasions to have more of these. He does need to simplify his rhetoric even more, and while that meeting was not the place for it, turn up the heat.

A really big shirt pocket for your iPad.

Will we see a wimp out tomorrow? The signs don't look promising.

Steve Landsburg, an economist/mathematician who fancies himself an expert on relativity (he has written a book on GR) poses the following problem: . A circular train (front of the locomotive attached to the rear of the caboose) sits on a circular track. At some point, the train accelerates and starts traveling around the track. Because the train is moving, I (an observer stationary relative to the track) should see it shrink. But the track doesn’t shrink. So the train can’t stay on the track, and gets pulled inward, ending up inside the track. On the other hand, the passengers say the track has shrunk, so they should expect to get pushed outside the track. How can everyone be right? This is a famous puzzle known as The Ehrenfest Paradox , but I think that Landsburg's "solution" is less than adequate - not really even correct. Any comments? UPDATE: Here is what I came up with. It has one major flaw that I really should try to fix: I really like this problem and had sever...

To the extent to which such matters were discussed at all, my history lessons portrayed European colonization of much of the rest of the world as a triumph of civilization over the primitive, and it’s true that many of the colonial victims were relatively primitive technologically, especially in the Americas, Australia, and much of Africa. That was not the case in Asia, so how, I asked, did Europe conquer India and China despite the logistical difficulties of operating across an ocean? Arun has now provided several posts by way of answer, and I now suspect that I might have been asking the wrong question. Maybe the central premise – Civilization advancing against the barbarian hordes – has it backwards. Maybe it’s usually the barbarians who are the aggressors, invading and looting the higher civilization. Certainly that is the way we understand the fall of the Roman Empire, and it would seem to apply equally to the Roman conquest of the Greeks. Nor can we doubt the application ...

Rush speaks to the The Onion: ....My comments about the situation in Haiti have hurt and angered many Americans who genuinely care about the plight of the Haitian people, and that hurt and anger will likely never go away. Many of you are probably wondering, "What would compel a human being to say things like that?" Well, here's your answer: I am a very bad person. And, to tell you the truth, I don't really want to be alive anymore. Try to look at it from my point of view. I have no reason to live. In my 59 years, I've made millions of dollars, built a veritable media empire, and accomplished virtually everything that a man of my limited imagination and worldview could possibly accomplish. And yet, at this point, in no way could you refer to what I'm doing as "living," exactly. I just sort of exist. I derive no real pleasure from life. Oh, sure, I talk a big game about what a golf nut I am and how much I enjoy the taste of a fine cigar, but it's a...

DeLong's diagnosis: the problem in not with Ben , but with the rest of the Open Market Committee. Obama needs to make a couple of recess appointments. Brad knows whom he wants: Excuse me: OBAMA!! GET ALAN BLINDER AND DAVID ROMER ON THE FED BOARD NOW!!!! There. Now I'm back. I found Brad's defense against Krugman's indictment pretty persuasive. It's not short, but it has a lot in it.

The global standard for poverty is living on less than one dollar per day. I'm not sure what this means. Can anybody actually live on what they ***can buy*** for \$1/day? I certainly doubt it. A subsistence farmer or fisherman could, perhaps, but that's just because most of their actual income is outside the formal economy. Does anybody know the way they construct such a "standard?" My real question is whether this measures how people live or just their participation in the money economy. One can imagine an ideally self-sufficient farmer with livestock, garden, and grain who needs almost no money but still eats well and lives comfortably. One can also imagine pretty desperate poverty in the US on \$10/day for somebody with no home.

Wandering around my local Barnes & Noble, I noticed several copies of Chad Orzel's new book How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. As it happens, I've known Chad for decades, about one and a half of them. Not that he knows me, or would recognize me if he ran into me (not something you want to happen to you, by the way - he is a really big guy). Before there were blogs, before the intertubes had been animated by the web, there was Usenet . Usenet, if I remember correctly, was sort of a collection of global bulletin boards, used mostly to post porn, but also for various useful purposes like discussing science fantasy or theoretical physics. (It was on the latter that I first encountered Lumo ). Chad was one of the demigods of the group rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan devoted to the Wheel of Time fantasy series of the late Robert Jordan. The group itself was perhaps one of greatest wastes of human brainpower since theology. Chad is now a physics prof with a popular blog called ...

Via Andrew Sullivan , Conor Friedersdorf deserves the largest audience possible when he tells conservatives to wake the hell up: If I may address the skeptics on the right directly, it is penny wise and pound foolish to worry about creeping tyranny via government-run health care or gun control when we’re another terrorist attack away from popular support for an archipelago of secret prisons where anyone can be whisked away and tortured without any evidence against them. Look to Europe if you doubt whether government-run health care or black sites run by secret police are a more immediate threat to the liberty of innocents. Do you think that I exaggerate? Know that one of the Gitmo Three was arrested at age 17, held for some years without being charged, and scheduled for release at the time of his death due to the military’s conclusion that no evidence linked him to al Qaeda or the Taliban. We may never know exactly how he and his fellow detainees died: A conclusive, independent autopsy...

The usual rascals on the Supreme Court agreed to turn the United States into a corporate state for sale to the highest bidder today. While there was considerable wailing and knashing of teeth, even from an occasional Republican, everyone pretty much agreed that there was nothing Congress could do. Actually that's not true. Consider Section 2 of Article 3 of the Constitution: (The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority; to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls; to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction; to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; to Controversies between two or more States; between a State and Citizens of another State; between Citizens of different States; between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a Stat...

Why do we like music, and what about it do we like? Via Marginal Revolution , here is a provocative theory. The fundamental idea: There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality. In his book on Black Holes, S. Chandrasekar has a pair of epigraphs which I will try to quote from memory: Heisenberg - Beauty consists of proper proportion of the parts to the whole, and to each other. and Francis Bacon: " There is no thing of excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion ." The point, I think, is that both order and tension with disord...

Wolfgang and I have been discussing bailouts. Of course a bunch of banks got money, but many of them are paying off. Aside from them, WB says, in answer to: >> Who got bailed out here? Then just think about where the biggest losses were/are, which will (almost certainly) not be recovered. Ranked by the loss amount they are: Fannie, Freddie, AIG, GM and GMAC. The loss limit on F&F was recently raised from 200B$ each to basically unlimited. So who were the beneficiaries here? All these corporations had their stockholder equity wiped out, so it wasn't them. Essentially all those who got were the bondholders or others who were owed money - seemingly the very "savers" Wolfgang is worried about. In the case of F&F, a big chunk of that debt, something like 1.5 trillion dollars was owed to foreigners, mostly banks. If those agencies had suddenly become unsellable, banks all over the world would have toppled like dominoes, and credit for the US would have disa...

Krugman has never been an Obama fan, and he's not about to sign up now. He really hates what Obama is bringing to the health care issue now. Maybe House Democrats can pull this out, even with a gaping hole in White House leadership. Barney Frank seems to have thought better of his initial defeatism. But I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in. I'm beginning to suspect that my friend had the right idea with his Christmas present for Obama. He sent him two balls.

I think George Packer has one of the more insightful analyses in this New Yorker article. A couple of excerpts: Part of Obama’s weakness has been this unwillingness or inability to say a few simple things passionately, which would let Americans know that he is on their side. Reagan knew how to do it, which meant that, even when his popularity was sinking at a similar point in his presidency (remember 1982?), the public still knew where he stood, not necessarily on the details of policy, but on a few core principles that he could at least pretend never to sacrifice. The most fundamental problem, though, was the sheer magnitude of the problems he faces: But the fundamental reason why the soaring emotions of the inauguration have soured just a year later goes beyond anything that Obama can do. The country is in deep trouble, not just with ten percent unemployment (though that accounts for a lot of unhappiness), but with chronic, long-term social and economic problems. Whatever responsib...

Obama has failed at the health insurance reform that was to be the centerpiece of his first term. That failure will infect every other effort he makes. I don't think that that failure was foreordained. He, and Congress squandered their opportunity in negotiation and infighting, and the President chose to stay out of it rather than aggressively asserting his leadership. Two things lay at the core of the failure, I think. First he failed to fight back when the Republicans adopted a strategy of total resistance. More importantly, by buying into a stimulus package that was far too small, he left ordinary people in the economy to flounder. What is done cannot be undone, but he still needs to run the country for three more years. It would probably be a good psychological gesture now to fire his economic team, at least those associated with the bailout. He should also withdraw his nomination of Bernanke. The country has lost faith in his economic stewardship and he can't fire...

The European conquest of the New World was mostly just a matter of germs and technology. The conquest of much of Asia is harder to explain. Europeans had no germs that Asia hadn't already seen, and the technological differences were fairly small. China was constructing ships far larger and otherwise superior to those of Vasco da Gama and Columbus 100 years earlier. Japan saw European guns and a few decades later was making better ones itself, only to completely abandon the technology in a few decades more. The failures of China and India to effectively resist are the biggest puzzle. Almost certainly the failure was one of social organization, in that they were unwilling or unable to reorganize themselves for effective resistance. Essentially, I am guessing, their civilizations had become too conservative and too set in their ways to recognize and face the threat. In the case of India, I am counting on Arun to set me straight. I see certain parallels to the modern situation. The US ...

Why is Haiti so poor? Of course every crackpot has a theory, but Tyler Cowen links to this short essay by Bob Corbett which is better and more comprehensive than anything else that I have read. Much of the story is the usual: Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian masses suffer some of the most debilitating and depressing misery of any people in the world. Yet, virtually all that misery is human caused, in most cases, by a tiny minority inside and outside Haiti who have the wealth and power to control. Peculiarities of history conspired against Haiti. As the only country to free itself as the result of a slave revolt, it was seen as a major threat by all the slave holding powers (most of them, in 1804) and was persecuted by the world. Much of the international oppression was orchestrated by France and the US. US interference has been dominant since the occupation 1915-1934. Corbett's article has lots of interesting details about internal and exte...

gk2gk puts the best face on the case for dating geeks.

This column by E. J. Dionne should be required reading for Democrats - especially Obama. (via TPM . Sometimes the critique has to come before conciliation.

Give a clever lad some fancy statistical software, and you can never tell what will happen next. Lubos and his analysis of satellite data get a favorable mention in Andy Revkin's NYT climate blog. Move over McGuys. Or do I mean: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

James Hansen reports that 2009 was the second hottest year on record, second only to 2005 in If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold? The title is an acknowlegment of the popular notion that this has been a very cold winter. Well, it has been a cold winter in many of the most populous areas of the Northern Hemisphere, but global temperatures are umm, global, and Europe, Asia, and the Eastern US together are still a small part of the total globe. The clueless, of course, will never grasp the notion that ice in their driveway is not evidence for or against global warming. Hansen also mentions the reason the recent months have looked cold to many of us - the strong arctic oscillation this year. Cold polar air has moved far to the South, chilling places used to more warmth, but the other side of the oscillation is that some normally very cold places in the far North have been unusually warm.

There is a significant dust up in liberal circles over the role of MIT health economist in crafting the health care bill. The facts, so far as I can tell, are that the government paid him to do an analysis of the economics of the Senate health insurance reform bill, and that his analysis was then cited as independent by various government sources without noting that he was paid to do the analysis. Marci Wheeler of Fire Dog Lake and Glenn Greenwald cried foul, calling this similar to the Bush administrations hiring commentators to put out propaganda. Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong take strong exception. DeLong: Jon Gruber is not a "consultant" or "strategist" who gets bribed by a political party or a government. Jon Gruber is, instead, an MIT health economics professor whom HHS hired to run a whole bunch of people whose job it was to mirror CBO--to carry out the analytical work on health proposals to tell HHS in advance what CBO was likely to say would be the b...

If polls are to be believed, the Republican candidate, running on a platform of killing health insurance reform, is on the verge of victory in the Massachusetts Senate race. If that happens, the American people are officially not smart enough to survive. How can they already have forgotten the state the Republicans left the country in?

Says David Brooks - speaking here about his fellow Jews. Pretty frigging great it seems. Besides constituting 50% or so of the NYT Op Ed columnists, it seems that: Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates. Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction Not to mention roughly 90% of television comedy writers. Now one could quibble about a few of those numbers. Two of the greatest Chess World Champions, Fisher and Kasparov, had some Jewish ancestry, but Fisher was a notorious anti-semite. Does he count? Whatever. Jews are an accomplis...

Lumo writes (in the comments ): Dear CIP, I said CO2 was irrelevant for a particular temperature graph we were discussing - and the word "irrelevant" has an effective meaning: the CO2's effect is undetectable with any statistical significance. Believe me that I do know the greenhouse effect, I believe it, understand it, and have been lecturing on it. OK, my bad - I misunderstood your remark, but whether or not CO2 is relevant to the increased temperatures in middle England is not a settled question. You continued: Venus' CO2 partial pressure in the atmosphere is something like 300 000 times higher than it is on the Earth: the total pressure is 100 times higher than here, and 96% instead of 0.038% of the atmosphere is CO2. Be sure you can't get there to the Venus-like mass of CO2 in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels - not even all fossil fuels that exist anywhere on Earth (insufficient by many orders of magnitude). The only way you get there is for you to be a...

New York Magazine has a long excerpt from John Heilemann & Mark Halperin's book on the Edwards campaign, it's implosion, and the curious dynamics underlying. Much of the story is familiar to any political junkie, but Elizabeth Edwards is portrayed rather harshly compared to the usual kid glove treatment she gets. It is pretty scary, though, to see how close this dimwit egomaniac came to getting the nomination and handing the presidency to McIdiot & Palin.

Andrew Sullivan remembers something from the past life of Iris Robinson , Irish MP and wife of the First Minister of Northern Ireland.

...flashes of intelligence and (Gasp!) wit in his review of Avatar. [SPOILER ALERT (just in case the reader is one of the 7 human beings who has not yet seen the movie). Every once in a while Davy manages to escape the trite fables of conservative theology long enough to write something interesting. Personal faves: This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization. And: The white guy notices that the peace-loving natives are much cooler than the greedy corporate tools and the bloodthirsty U.S. military types he came over with. He goes to live with the natives, and, in short order, he’s the most awesome member of their tribe... Along the way, he has his consciousness raised. The peace-loving natives are at one ...

While I'm on the subject of odd objections, LM, in the comments, said CO2 is "irrelevant." Now while that wouldn't sound too strange coming from a young Earth creationist, it is genuinely weird coming from somebody supposedly educated in physics. Not quite G&T strange (see previous post), but damn strange, since CO2 is clearly one of the principle actors in Earth's climate, not to mention the climates of the other planets. The misnamed greenhouse effect was discovered by the mathematician and physicist Fourier almost 200 years ago, but didn't create much of a stir for quite some time. Maybe the first big caution signal was sounded when the hellish temperatures at the surface of Venus were discovered. That was a big surprise, since Venus is such shiny planet that it absorbs less sunlight than Earth, despite being only about 2/3 as far from the Sun. When it was realized that it was the greenhouse effect of thick carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus that was ...

Of all the odd objections to global warming theory, one of the oddest has got to be the claim that global warming would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, since it would imply that the cold upper atmosphere was warming the Earth. One reason it's an odd objection is that nearly every one of us experiences a very similar phenomenon every time we put on a jacket or sweater on a cold day. That jacket or sweater starts out colder than us and stays colder than us (if the air is cold), but it keeps us warm by transferring some of the heat we lose back to us. The second law doesn't permit **net** transfer of heat from the cooler body to the warmer body, but if it's warmer that the outside, it can slow the loss of that heat. That's what your jacket does on a cold day and that's what the CO2 in the atmosphere does to the surface of the Earth.

Does a lot of modern economics seem to defy common sense? Kevin Drum extracts this devastating commentary on saltwater/freshwater from Daniel Davies: The production of more or less mendacious intellectual smokescreens for policies which favour the interests of rich and powerful men isn’t a sort of industrial pollution from the modern economics profession — it’s the product. (UPDATE: Tyler Cowen has kindly presented us with a current example here. ) James Galbraith , where Keynes has some similarly harsh criticism: It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injus...

Our good buddy Lubosh Motl has posted some figures on warming trends in Central England from 1659 to the present. When he plots the warming trend (essentially the first time derivative of the temperature) he finds quite amazingly that the past and present look rather alike to the casual eye. Anyone who has ever looked at noisy data knows that if you start looking at derivatives of noisy data the noise is sure to crowd out the data. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that he would resort to such a cheap bit of fakery - suitable for fooling the bozos I suppose. If you look at the actual temperatures instead of the time rate of change, you can see something more meaningful and familiar: a noisy signal, with the warmest temperatures heavily concentrated in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century. UPDATE: I presented this notion to the Prof and his reply was: For a random walk, it is extremely likely that the beginning and/or end of an interval maximizes and/or minimizes the ...

Red Queens, hummingbirds, and helicopters have to run as fast as they can simply to stay in one place. Actually going somewhere is usually easier. This circumstance is the result of the interaction of "induced" drag (the drag or retarding force intrinsic to the generation of lift) and parasitic drag (the drag produced by friction of the air). The former scales like 1/(wing velocity) squared and the latter inversely (velocity squared), which means that induced drag dominates at low velocities and parasitic drag at high velocities. Another fun fact from Henk Tennekes Simple Science of Flight .