CapitalistImperialistPig

Jo Rowling reports that some of the chapters of volume seven of Harry Potter seem to have doubled themselves. Of course hard core HP fanatics are hoping the book will just have to be split into two thick volumes. I know I am.

said Antarctica, as widely reported in the press. Or maybe not says William Connolly of the many names. First of all, this is only 3 years of data; to make any sense of it, you have to assume that this is representative of the long term trend. ... Another point (see last IPCC link) is that its quite hard to match the *observed* sea level change to the various components; switching Ant from -ve to +ve would help resolve this. How does this affect predictions that Antarctica will become a net relative sink in the future, due to extra precipitation outweighting increases in melt? Not at all, I should say. OK, I'll scratch that off my worry list for a couple of years. William goes on to discuss some of the complications and uncertainties of the measurement method. Now about the acidification of the ocean?

One of my correspondents asked me what civil liberties I had given up under the Bush imperium. That's a good question. I'll need to think about it. Meanwhile, to get back to the title subject, I was doing some flying recently. Now I know the theory here, it's just that I'm not too good at advance planning. Anyway I get to the security gate, remove my hiking boots, jacket, and vest. I take off my watch, my pedometer, suspenders, and belt buckle. I take out and open my camera, telescope lens, laptop, portable printer and projector, and video camera. Ditto my cellphone, my Europhone with spare SIM cards for Egypt and Romania, my Blackberry, and my pager. I hate the wand and pat down routine, so I take off my wedding ring, my class ring, my bluetooth earpiece, my gold necklace, both toe rings, and my navel ring with its attached set of miniture burglary tools, which I use to deactivate and remove the State and Federal radio ankle bracelets. I empty my pockets: comb...

Betty the Crow reads Slate's John Dickerson on the Bush video. She's not impressed. By anybody concerned. (Via Brad Delong ) Slate’s John Dickerson is alarmed by Bush’s Katrina catalepsy As he weighed in yesterday on the now-infamous video of Silent George Bush attending a pre-Katrina video conference, John Dickerson unleashed a burst of inadvertent clarity that perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with Bush, the administration and the reporters who cover both. Dickerson, the former Time Magazine Washington correspondent who now holds down the Ruminant desk at Slate, is shocked and alarmed by the president’s lack of engagement with the briefing from National Hurricane Center officials and then-FEMA chief Michael Brown (who is, terrifyingly, beginning to look like the most competent administration official involved in the response to Katrina). “I don’t know what question the president should have asked,” Dickerson plaintively writes toward the end of his column, “but shouldn’...

The wierd video of Bush being briefed on the impending Katrina disaster before it happened is odder than just another Bush lie ("I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." ) The oddest part is not that he was explicitly briefed on just this likelyhood but sat impassively asking not a single question. There is clueless and there is lost in space, and Bush was out there on Omega Centauri. Peter Baker and Spencer F Hsu's WP article has the story and a link to the video. The video leaves little doubt that key people in government did anticipate that the levees might not hold. In combination with the earlier revelations that White House aides were afraid to interupt the President's vacation to tell him how bad the disaster was, this adds to the image of a remote, clueless, and disengaged executive whose response to bad news is to shoot the messenger. The continuing revelations that he responded in the same fashion when reports of trouble in Iraq ...

Americans pay about twice as much as the citizens of any other country for their medical care, and don't get especially good care. By most measures of average health, we do rather poorly. It's hard not to believe that our incredibly complex and inefficient system is mostly responsible. Unlike the situation in other advanced countries, in the US large segments of the population have no health insurance. Uninsured persons are typically charged two to five times as much for their medical care as the insurance companies are charged for similar services. Almost all medical providers have a small army of employees whose mainor only job is to manage insurance and collections. This is a crappy system that costs too much and provides too little. An easy answer is available. Essentially all other rich countries have universal health insurance covering everybody. The quality of care provided is typically very good, with average health outcomes comparing favorably to the US. The c...

For most Americans, their principal assets at retirement are their Social Security, their Medicare entitlement, and, if middle class, a house and often some kind of private pension. If they are upper middle class, or have been unusually prudent, they also have significant savings or investments. In my case, I own my house, and have a modest amount in savings and investments, but my only hope for a comfortable middle class retirement is my pension (including SS), which, if I work a few more years, should replace a bit more than half my current income. For that reason, I get pretty nervous when I see the headlines about company after company using bankruptcy to shed unwanted pension fund liabilities. In some cases, corporate raiders take over companies, sell the valuable assets, pocket the profits, and hand the bills to the pensioners. The same demographic and competitive factors that threaten private pensions also menace state, local, federal, and military pensions. When the courts...