CapitalistImperialistPig

Our lagomorphic guru seems increasingly convinced that the Kali age is upon us - or at any, rate, that the triumph of Mordor is at hand. In addition to plenty of hot Siberian air invading the Arctic, it seems that in some places wet bulb temperatures have been creeping dangerously close to the 35 C death zone - the temperature at which humans can no longer cool themselves without refrigeration. A heat wave just a couple of WBT degrees warmer might produce hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties. Svalbard might actually see liquid water precipitation next week. Oh well. No wonder I prefer to think about exoplanets.

Josh Marshall sees our current constitutional crisis as the public manifestation of John Boehner's weakness - the weakness of his situation and the weakness of his character. This weakness has made him unable to control the forces Ted Cruz and the Tea Party (AKA, the Koch Machine), have loosed. Such men are dangerous, especially in times of chaos and incipient catastrophe. The key though, again, is that Boehner is personally weak and situationally weak. He's afraid of what House Tea Partiers will do to him if he relents. So he's hoping that if he plays for time and takes the country right up to the brink of catastrophe some other option might become available. And yet Boehner is weak. The Tea Party's ability to push him further and further in their direction is testament to that. So at the last moment, does he really assert his power? I think it's very questionable that he has it in him. The forces he's trying to ride are much bigger than he is. There's go...

Kevin Drum notes the Administration's surprisingly lackadasical approach to warning of the hazards of default. Jack Lew was on MTP yesterday and could hardly be bothered to look worried about default. It's true that Lew took a pretty low-key approach, despite host Savannah Guthrie's best efforts. "Are you talking catastrophe?" she asked. Lew wouldn't bite, so then she gave him another chance. "It would be calamitous for the economy?" Still no bite! "It would be very bad," was the worst Lew could summon up. That's pretty soporific, all right. The problem, I assume, is that Lew is in an impossible situation. Breaching the debt ceiling would be pretty calamitous, but Treasury secretaries have an obligation not to panic markets with loose talk. Backbench congressmen, by contrast, can say anything they think might get them a few minutes on the evening news. Maybe it is time to try to panic the markets a bit. Something is needed to get B...

MoDo takes a dystopian look at a 2084 where Koch brothers drones patrol the skies of a ruined Capital. She blames that Canadian/Cuban terrorist: “Well, son, they knew there was something creepy about the ringleader, Ted Cruz,” the man replies. “His face looked pinched, like a puzzle that had not been put together quite right. He was always launching into orations with a weird cadence and self-consciously throwing folksy phrases into his speeches, like ‘Let me tell ya,’ to make himself seem Texan, when he was really a Canadian.” The boy looks alarmed. “A Canadian destroyed the world, Papa?” “Once the government shut down, a plague came, because they had closed the Center for Disease Control,” the man says. “Storms, floods and wildfires raged after FEMA was closed down and the National Guard got decimated.

The proliferation of planet discoveries now makes the question of the absence of aliens a lot more pointed. There now seem to be billions and billions of planets, many of them likely rather Earthlike, so where (as Fermi asked) are all the aliens? I asked this question of a deep thinker I know. His opinion: "It probably means we will destroy this place in the next few hundred years." There is no shortage of evidence thaat we aren't smart enough to handle the power technology has given us to screw up.

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? Glendower: Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command The devil Hotspur: And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil— By telling the truth. Tell truth and shame the devil. .............WS Henry IV Part 1 Act 3 Scene 1 Paul Krugman tries to shame the Devil by calling "Bullshit" on the latest nonsense of Cameron and Osborne. When the Cameron government came in, it was fully invested in the doctrine of expansionary austerity. Officials told everyone to read the Alesina/Ardagna paper (which is succinctly criticized by Christy Romer (pdf)), cited Ireland as a success story, and in general assured everyone that they could call the confidence fairy from the vasty deep. Now it turns out that contractionary policy is contractionary after all. As a result, despite all the austerity, deficits remain high. So what is to be done? Mo...

Tyler Cowen has an An Austro-Austrian business cycle theory.

I always thought the Cassandra story seemed a bit improbable - how could people be dumb enough not to heed the wise words of the prophetess. Boy was I the dummy. Here we are, coasting into economic catastrophe and our prescient prophets are reduced to frustrated despair . There is only the consolation of alone being right on the ship of fools - and this really great Anna-Frid ABBA song

I continue to be shocked at Obama's failure to lead on economics. Paul Krugman: John Boehner, March 2009: It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it Barack Obama, yesterday: “At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own,” Obama said. “ We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success. You can't campaign for stimulus and belt tightening at once - not and make any sense anyway. My worst fear is that he actually realizes this, and has given up on trying to makes sense. After all, Bush and Palin never made sense in their lives and they seemed to do OK. Suppose Obama h...

OK, I don't find this a particularly credible Doomsday Scenario , but just in case, a hearty f-u to all the environmental doubters out there. If the methane bubble—a bubble that could be as big as 20 miles wide—erupts with titanic force from the seabed into the Gulf, every ship, drilling rig and structure within the region of the bubble will immediately sink. All the workers, engineers, Coast Guard personnel and marine biologists participating in the salvage operation will die instantly. Next, the ocean bottom will collapse, instantaneously displacing up to a trillion cubic feet of water or more and creating a towering supersonic tsunami annihilating everything along the coast and well inland. Like a thermonuclear blast, a high pressure atmospheric wave could precede the tidal wave flattening everything in its path before the water arrives. When the roaring tsunami does arrive it will scrub away all that is left. And oh yeah, the methane could trigger all other sorts catastrophes, ...

The Bear Stearns bailout, says Paul Krugman is just a beginning. Among many investment banks, Bear Stearns stands out as an example of the undeserving rich: Bear was a major promoter of the most questionable subprime lenders. It lured customers into two of its own hedge funds that were among the first to go bust in the current crisis. And it’s a bad financial citizen: the last time the Fed tried to contain a financial crisis, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Bear refused to participate in the rescue operation. Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes. But the Fed rode to Bear’s rescue anyway, fearing that the collapse of a major investment bank would cause panic in the markets and wreak havoc with the wider economy. Fed officials knew that they were doing a bad thing, but believed that the alternative would be even worse. As Bear goes, so will go the ...

If you were a long-time, successful Bear Stearns employee last year, times might have been pretty good. Chances are that you had accumulated several tens or hundreds of million dollars in stock. If you were clever enough to sell your stock back then, you might be even happier right now. If you hung on to the bitter end though, you got $2 for each of those shares that was worth $170 last year. Still, the firesale to J P Morgan was better than nothing, I suppose. How likely is this scenario to repeat? I don't know, but there are a heck of a lot of nervous bankers out there, staring up river and down, seeing black swans everywhere. I just hope everybody remembers that George Bush and Alan Greenspan made this cake and that the Republican congress baked it.

I'm going to guess that most of us would not have considered french fries and cola drinks to be health foods. Some, like your humble correspondent, were taken in by the idea that diet versions of the soft drinks would be less unhealthy. A couple of new studies blow that one out of the water. Consumption of diet drinks, it seems, is strongly correlated with so-called metabolic syndrome , as reported in the NYT story by Nicholas Bakalar. Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure. Fried foods, surprise, surprise, are also bad, but not as bad. Ditto red meat and refined grains. Combine that with an earlier report that cola drinks, diet or no, tend to kill your kidneys, and you have a recipe for knocking the heck out of my basic food groups. So what does that leav...

26 % of the votes in and it's starting to look pretty bleak here in Obamaville. Confident predictictions of a crush seem out the window. At this point, any victory for Obama will be great, but it's starting to seem unlikely. For Hillary, living to campaign again seems certain. A grim prospect of Hillary vs. McCain and another Republican President looms. UPDATE: Hillary wins. The Bradley effect wins. Bush's war wins. The bullshit pollsters lose big. I suspect Edwards is done, but this is a season for surprises, so who knows. Did Hillary benefit from the universal media prediction of her demise? Probably. Did she benefit from a sympathy vote? Who can guess? Did she benefit from New Hampshire contrariness? Maybe. Is the race now wide open? I think so. UPDATE II. Curiouser. All pre-election polls showed Obama with a substantial or even huge lead. Exit polls showed him winning more narrowly. But Hillary wins decisively. The Bradley effect? What kind of voti...

I never would have believed it myself. I seem to recall that Ann Coulter once wished for the destruction of the New York Times building, presumably with the staff inside. Now, it seems, I can no longer in good conscience disagree. It's time to retire the Gray Lady, time to realize that print is, or by all that's holy, ought to be, dead. Word is that ... I can't bear to say it... Sob. And SOB. And other imprecations too vile for a family flog.

Iran's president Ahmadinejad has proof that the US won't attack Iran. God, and his calculations told him so. "I tell them: 'I am an engineer and I am a master in calculation and tabulation. "I draw up tables. For hours, I write out different hypotheses. I reject, I reason. I reason with planning and I make a conclusion. They cannot make problems for Iran.'" Ahmadinejad has long expressed pride in his academic prowess. He holds a PhD on transport engineering and planning from Tehran's Science and Technology University and is the author several of scientific papers. The deeply religious president said his second reason was: "I believe in what God says." "God says that those who walk in the path of righteousness will be victorious. What reason can you have for believing God will not keep this promise." Two religious nuts getting ready to start the slaughter. Just what we need.

Memo to Self: Lose the Diet Soda Not a surprise, but still a disappointment: Do Diet Foods Lead to Weight Gain? Well yes, says this Time article: If you think you're cutting calories by eating diet or low-calorie versions of your favorite foods, think again. A new study by Canadian scientists published in the journal Obesity suggests that our bodies can't be fooled that easily. Other studies reported in the same article say: Two years ago, scientists at the University of Texas reported in an eight-year study that for every can of diet soda that a person drank, he raised his risk of being overweight by 41%, compared to a 30% increase in drinkers of regular, sugared drinks. Earlier this year, another study of diet-soda drinkers came to a similar conclusion, this time about metabolic syndrome, the dangerous constellation of risk factors, such as obesity, high cholesterol and insulin resistance, that increases the likelihood of heart disease. In this report, part of the 60-year-o...

The first problems tackled by artificial intelligence researchers tended to be those that humans find hard - proving mathematical theorems, for example. Early successes convince many that AI would not be a tough nut to crack. Claude Shannon wrote about computer chess in 1950, and many thought it would only be a short time before computers surpassed humans at it, but in fact it was almost another half-century (1996) before IBM's multi-million dollar Deep Thought beat Gary Kasparov. Computers and programs that can beat top grandmasters are now quite cheap. One of the last refuges of human intellectual superiority in a purely formal setting is the game of go . John Henry still can beat the steam hammer in that game, but the first cracks in our dominance are appearing. June's Scientific American reports on a new strategy that I think may have implications beyond purely formal tasks. It's based on so-called Monte Carlo techniques with some new refinements. Monte Carlo meth...

Congress is now more unpopular than the President. This is bizarre but perhaps inevitable. People are impatient that Congress hasn't been able to do anything about the war, and uninterested in the investigation of Bush's crimes. It's a pity our citizens are so ignorant and unintelligent. It's also a shame that most of them don't care about our rights or our constitution. Of course I'm pretty annoyed myself.

Wolfgang has a short, not quite harmless post on Easter Island, AIDS, the Fate of the World. Rumors that WB is a roadie for an obscure rock band are likely false.