CapitalistImperialistPig

UPDATE: Doug has launched a vigorous attack on this post, and there is a real chance that the Pig may dine on crow on this one. To be Determined. Not to worry that we haven't had an NHL season this year, we still have one guy willing to play the thuggish hockey bully. Joe Barton, U. S. Representative from Texas, and Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is our man. Those who follow such things may recall some controversy over the so-called 'hockey stick' graph in climate science. Briefly, the hockey stick is a graph of world wide temperatures over the past 1000 years that looks a bit like a hockey stick, more or less flat for a long period, and bending sharply up (like the blade of a hockey stick) over the last several decades. The controversy, or rather pseudo-controversy, arises from an article by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick in an industry magazine called Energy & Environment . The magazine is not peer reviewed, and neither author is a clima...

Mary Williams Walsh has an instructive article in the the Sunday New York Times analyzing How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension . The short version: Wall Street talked United Airlines into following the pension strategy President Bush would have us all follow with Social Security. Of course there is no danger that the perps of this particular scam will be held to account by the Administration or the Republican Congress. While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers. It's easy to forget that while the stock market is a crucial component of democratic capitalism, there are always many who ...

Friday's Washington Post has an editorial that is a modest step toward making the Post a responsible paper again. The Truth About Abu Ghraib lays out the case that the Abu Ghraib abuses were indeed orchestrated from the top of the Bush administration and expecially that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller perjured himself in testimony before Congress and betrayed the soldiers that it was his duty to lead. FOR 15 MONTHS now the Bush administration has insisted that the horrific photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the result of freelance behavior by low-level personnel and had nothing to do with its policies. In this the White House has been enthusiastically supported by the Army brass, which has conducted investigations documenting hundreds of cases of prisoner mistreatment in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but denies that any of its senior officers are culpable. For some time these implacable positions have been glaringly at odds with the known fact...

Re: previous post. Not sure I can recommend going to Lumo's web site in good conscience. His blog seems to send my computers into some kind of spastic fit. Not sure if that's a planned feature or what. Next: Return to our regularly scheduled political rant.

Lubos Motl has both exceeded and confounded my expectations by producing an extensive and (mostly) polite response to Lee Smolin’s article discussed below. His response is partly positive in that he seems to accept that background independence might be a good thing, but he also has plenty of objections to the “relativistic” program of Leibniz and Smolin. Unfortunately, his response demonstrates his tendency to create and demolish strawmen instead of the real arguements. First a point of philosophy: He doesn’t like Leibniz’s principle of “the identity of the indiscernible.” On the other hand, Leibniz's "identity of the indiscernible" - which says that the objects with the same properties must be identified - is technically wrong in all theories we've been using in the last 300 years. If two objects/states A,B are related by a global symmetry transformation, they have the same properties but they must still be considered as two distinct objects (configurations or...

Paging Tom Friedman. I actually sort of liked your column today . You use a contemporary sports analogy to argue that it might be nice to have a leader in this country. One might object that leading a country is slightly tougher than leading of team of bikers whose paychecks you control, but whatever. Wouldn't you think that if you were president, after you'd read the umpteenth story about premier U.S. companies, like Intel and Apple, building their newest factories, and even research facilities, in China, India or Ireland, that you'd summon the top U.S. business leaders to Washington to ask them just one question: "What do we have to do so you will keep your best jobs here? Make me a list and I will not rest until I get it enacted." Course if they said "cut my taxes," what's a Prez to do? Oh, well, maybe we have the leaders we deserve. Maybe we just want to admire Lance Armstrong, but not be Lance Armstrong. Too much work. Maybe that's the wri...

Fundamental physics seems to have hit a bit of a flat spot, with Quantum Gravity being the most obvious target out there and proving rather obdurate. String Theory is what Sean Carroll called the "Microsoft" of quantum gravity theories, with a death grip on many prominent university faculties, while Loop Quantum Gravity plays the role of Apple. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the dispute between the theories has taken on some of the rancor and vitriol one expects in English or Sociology departments rather than physics. Each theory has found a few eloquent public expositors, but with little of the give and take one saw in the great physics controversies of the past - over relativity, quantum mechanics, the big bang, or even Regge pole theory. String Theory plays its Microsoft role to the hilt, rarely even deigning to admit the existence of competitors, aside from a few more or less rabid attack dogs. LQG, though, has produced a number of intelligently argued criticis...