New Study

Thursday 25 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

A new study in Climate from a very heavy hitter in the geophysics world concludes that global warming is a result of natural occurances rather than from CO2 buildup (PDF) caused by man.

Abstract: The rise in global average temperature over the last century has halted since roughly the year 2000, despite the fact that the release of CO2 into the atmosphere is still increasing. It is suggested here that this interruption has been caused by the suspension of the near linear (+ 0.5 °C/100 years or 0.05 °C/10 years) temperature increase over the last two centuries, due to recovery from the Little Ice Age, by a superposed multi-decadal oscillation of a 0.2 °C amplitude and a 50~60 year period, which reached its positive peak in about the year 2000—a halting similar to those that occurred around 1880 and 1940. Because both the near linear change and the multi-decadal oscillation are likely to be natural changes (the recovery from the Little Ice Age (LIA) and an oscillation related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), respectively), they must be carefully subtracted from temperature data before estimating the effects of CO2.

[. . .]

Conclusion:

It is likely that both the near linear increase and multi-decadal oscillation are primarily natural changes. Thus, in order to estimate the effects caused by CO2 over the last two centuries, it is important to isolate these natural components of climate change from real temperature data. (emphasis mine)

I doubt, however, that this study, despite being done by a world-renowned climatologist, will get any exposure whatsoever because the narrative is more important than the truth.

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The Future of GMO

Thursday 25 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

The future of GMO crops could be brilliant. Vegetables that are able to grow without the use of pesticides could be a huge boon to the poor worldwide, dramatically increasing yields per acre and decreasing the cost of production, while using far fewer chemical pesticides and fungicides that pollute the land. Fewer chemicals make for a more sustainable method for stewardship of the land and decrease the cost making more food more accessible to those where food production is both inefficient and harmful to the environment. But there are issues; not with the technology itself, which is scientifically sound, but with those who oppose GM tech in a very cult-like manner. Amy Waxman of NOVA:

Weeks later, De Jong tells me the panel [on GMO crop production] opened his eyes. He was shocked at how people who don’t live near farms feel entitled to advise farmers, especially on environmental matters. “There is a romantic notion of environmentalism, and then there is actual environmentalism,” De Jong says. “Farmers are very conscious of the environment. They want to hand off their operation to their kids and their kids’ kids, so they maintain the land the best they can while doing what they need to do in order to sell their harvest,” he says. “My guess is that the majority of people who are anti-GM live in cities and have no idea what stewardship of the land entails.”

“I find it so tragic that, by and large, crop biotechnologists and farmers want to reduce their pesticide use, and yet the method we think is most sustainable and environmentally friendly has been dismissed out of hand.” He pauses as he recalls the event and says, “There is no scientific justification for it—it is just as if there is a high priest who decided, ‘Thou shalt not be GMO.’ ”

Urban “environmentalists” that have no fucking idea how to produce food and whose beliefs are based on nothing but anti-science superstition telling farmers how to run a farm and preserve farmland. Awesome. But there are other hurdles as well. Governments around the world have made the approval of GM crops nearly impossible, and for no good scientific reason. These hurdles are man-made, and based on environmental and public health voodoo rather than science.

At the moment, only large corporations have the financial resources to weather the approval process, which, by and large, isn’t standardized and can drag on for several years. Multiple US federal agencies, driven in part by the public’s fears, ask for proof on safety and efficacy beyond a point that feels reasonable to some scientists. For example, people worry that inserted genes will spread to wild crops, but reported occurrences have been exceedingly rare and their existence is debated among the scientific community. As agencies examine and re-examine all imaginable scenarios, public sector projects and small businesses crumble under the pressure of paying employees while taking in no revenue.

“Some of the regulations required for crop approval are not science-based, and they have crippled the ability of the public sector to deploy GMOs for public benefit,” De Jong says, “I can make a transgenic potato for less than $50,000, but I cannot afford to pay five to ten million dollars to go through regulatory hoops.” As a result of hurdles like these, Monsanto’s engineered corn and soybeans monopolize the market for GMOs. By enforcing their patents on GM seeds, Monsanto and other large corporations with GMO products can dictate how much farmers pay for seeds—a precarious dependency to be in when an additional 2 billion people in developing nations need to be fed in 2050. De Jong is pushing for policy reform.

Bureaucrats in suits who have no idea how to produce anything at all except tomes of regulations about things with which they have no practical experience, driven, in part, by fanatics opposed to GM crops, have made entrance in to the market virtually impossible for all except the very largest biotech corporations (surely those corporations with large enough pockets, like Monsanto, have willingly helped create this overly burdensome regulatory environment that effectively bars any competition from entering the market, using the army of federal regulators as a method for their own economic protectionism).

I, and everyone around the world, have to continue to buy food which is more susceptible to diseases and insects while the production of said food continues to pollute the land at drastic rates because city-dwelling greenies are luddites. Fucking great.

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Still

Wednesday 24 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Shocking news: People who couldn’t afford their mortgages before the housing meltdown, still can’t afford them even after tens of billions of dollars have been lofted their way.

Borrowers who received help through the government’s main foreclosure prevention program are re-defaulting on their mortgages at alarming rates, a federal watchdog said in a report released Wednesday.

Nearly 1.2 million mortgage modifications have been completed since the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was first launched four years ago. Yet more than 306,000 borrowers have re-defaulted on their loans and more than 88,000 are at risk of following suit, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) found in its quarterly report to Congress.

Who could have imagined that?

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The Pot on Boil

Wednesday 24 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, opines on the racializing of the Trayvon Martin shooting:

But let’s pause with the examples and consider the script itself. The trope, of course, is that black suspects are mercilessly hounded, even if they are innocent; and white suspects stroll free, even if they are self-evidently guilty. It is plainly true that both things have happened in our recorded history. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they still happen, though we are long past the point where they are common or that they go unremarked or that they are allowed to stand if exposed to the light of day. Still the collective memory of this sort of racial injustice is so powerful that it can blind us to the facts at hand.

The Trayvon Martin shooting just isn’t a very good fit with the racial injustice narrative. Martin was not a poor put-upon innocent; Zimmerman was a man of mixed race, living in an integrated neighborhood, and possessed of a life history that contained only friendly relations with blacks. And both the police and the jury believed he acted in genuine self-defense. The narrative of the white neighborhood watch guy gunning down in cold blood the innocent child who went out to buy Skittles didn’t stand up to facts.

Academics in our post-modern age, however, are rarely daunted by facts. When the facts get in the way of a good narrative, the narrative tends to win. What’s going on?

FROM ZANZINGER TO ZIMMERMAN

One way to think of this willingness to let a narrative trump the facts is that it is a victory of poetry over reason. A story retold often enough in an emotionally compelling way becomes “true” even if it isn’t. That heartfelt truth can indeed flatten almost any obstacle, especially if it is rooted in real events. When it comes to instances of blacks unfairly accused and whites getting away with murder, we have both a tragic national history and a poetic consciousness of what happened.

[. . .]

If you arrange the keys on a typewriter one way, they remain that way for generations and for new technologies, such as keyboards, no matter the inconvenience. If you set the width of the railroad tracks at a specific gauge, it too will remain that way seemingly forever. Economists call this “path dependency.” Initial decisions, sometimes intended just as improvised answers to a situation, tend to stay with us.

That can happen with misinformation too. In the early hours of a story, reporters often get things wrong. NPR did a telling round-up of the misinformation reported as news in the early hours following the Newtown shootings. Some of those misstatements are still in circulation.

One of the misstatements in the Trayvon Martin case wasn’t actually a statement at all. It was the picture of the 17-year-old Martin as a twelve-year-old, which was widely circulated and heightened the sense that Zimmerman had murdered an innocent child. But the most consequential mistake was the report that Zimmerman was “white.” This became amended over time to “white Hispanic,” but the truth was more complicated. Zimmerman is of mixed race, and was raised in a household that included two African-American girls. This had no bearing on the question of whether he had committed a crime in connection with Martin’s death but it has a great deal of bearing on the aptness of the narrative presented by Burnham, Potter, Goodwin, Dennis, Kelley and so many others. In that narrative Zimmerman was “white,” or as Goodwin puts it, a person who “identifies as white,” and that identification was crucial to turning the story into an allegory of racial injustice in modern America.

ANGER

The Trayvon Martin story has one other crucial element: it is a story meant to inflame. Indignation is a worthy response to real injustice, but indignation can also be a force in its own right. Anger feels empowering, and it can become a kind of mob rule of the emotions over our better judgment. Several years ago I wrote a book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, about our cultural shift from the slow burn to the fast fuse. We Americans over the last half century gradually relinquished our sense that real strength lies in self-control and that anger has to be governed. Instead we became convinced that repressing anger is psychologically damaging and letting it out is empowering. Vituperative anger became not only destigmatized but admired and celebrated.

In a sense, we now wait around for opportunities to get angry and we have supplied ourselves with an arsenal of occasions in which we are licensed to let loose. Righteous indignation over racial injustice is near the top of the list.

This applies in nearly all contexts of American life, but higher education holds a special place in that arsenal. Our colleges and universities are the nation’s primary font for racial ressentiment. The American college campus is the place where we accentuate racial division as a matter of policy via preferences in admissions, organization of students into grievance-based groups, and curricula that foreground the narrative of racial oppression as the central story of American history. In this environment, the need to stoke grievance is never-ending, and the opportunity to turn tragic events into fodder for protest is almost irresistible.

[. . .]

So the anger-is-empowering theme and the readiness to grab hold of an event and fit it to the anger narrative is in great part a university invention, supported by a substantial portion of the professoriate who have little to offer other than their commitment to keeping the pot on boil.

Having spent my fair share of time in academe, I can certainly attest to the idea that, in academia, believing that race relations have dramatically improved since the 1950s is in itself racist. They have racism tied up in a nice little bow, especially in the Trayvon Martin case. Zimmerman shot Trayvon because he’s a racist, and he’s a racist because he shot Trayvon. There are no other possibilities to someone steeped in the academic lore of racism. Trayvon was shot because he was black. That there is no evidence of racism on the part of Zimmerman (and to acknowledge that there is ample evidence that he wasn’t racist at all) matters not; to not accept it as an article of faith is itself racist.

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The Tradeoff

Monday 15 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

In reference to what I meant earlier when I wrote

The state had a job, and they didn’t meet their burden. That some people wish to to blame the one legal mechanism, the state having the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, that keeps even more people from being jailed (particular those in the black community who already have an massive over-representation in America’s overly vast prison system), is flabbergasting but not necessarily surprising.

Ken White, a nationally renown trial lawyer with vast experience as both a prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney, addresses this point very succinctly and with the authority of over 20 years experience practicing law.

Can due process produce a result that is, in some sense, unjust? Yes. People can kill and defraud and rape and abuse but leave insufficient evidence of their crimes to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The fact that the victim suffered is unjust. The fact that the perpetrator was not punished is unjust. The fact that skin color drives outcomes is unjust. It is unjust that moral wrongs go unredressed: such as, perhaps, the moral wrong that Trayvon Martin would be alive if George Zimmerman didn’t think he had a right and duty to confront people of the wrong color in his neighborhood. But there’s a central question some people ignore about such injustice: compared to what?

People assail results like the acquittal of George Zimmerman. But critics don’t tell us what the alternative should be. Shall guilt or innocence be determined by society’s reaction to the vapid summaries of prosecutions on cable news? Clearly not. Should verdicts necessarily reflect social consensus of the time about the crime and the accused? Tell that to theScottsboro boys — theirs did. Should we make it easier to convict people of crimes in order to reduce injustice against the weak? How foolish. The weak already suffer because it is too easy to convict — because we love to pass criminal laws, but hate to pay for an adequate defense. Thanks to “law and order” and the War on Drugs and our puerile willingness to be terrified by politicians and the media, one-sixth of African-American men like Trayvon Martin have been in prison, trending towards one-third. The notion that we can improve their status in America by making it easier to convict people and by undermining the concept of a vigorous defense is criminally stupid. The assertion that an acquittal is wrong and unjust might, in some cases, be true, in the sense that some juries will vote their ignorance or racism or indifference. But the assertion that an acquittal is by its nature unjust because of how we feel about the case serves the state — the state that incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners.

I didn’t watch much of the Zimmerman trial. The parts I watched left me unimpressed with the quality of the prosecution’s case. I haven’t seen any people who are actual criminal trial practitioners (with the exceptions of ones whose job is to talk to Nancy Grace and her ilk) who thought the case was going well for the prosecution. So my reaction is rather like that of the other criminal defense lawyers I know, like Brian Tannebaum andGideon and Eric Mayer and Scott Greenfield. The verdict didn’t surprise me, because based on what I know as a trial lawyer (as opposed to an occasional consumer of CNN), the prosecution wasn’t proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt, given the law that applied (as opposed to the law people felt ought to apply). I don’t see a basis to conclude that a jury of six women of varying backgrounds voted out of racism, rather than voting because they took the government’s burden of proof seriously.

It’s tragic that Trayvon Martin was killed, and I believe that George Zimmerman bears moral responsibility for his death. The banners of racism that have unfurled in defense of Zimmerman repulse me. I would be damn worried about my kids if I lived in George Zimmer[m]an’s neighborhood. But ultimately I am more afraid of the state — and more afraid of a society that thinks case outcomes should depend upon collective social judgment — than I am of the George Zimmermans of the world. Critics might say that view reflects privilege, in that as an affluent white guy I am far less likely to be shot by someone like Zimmerman. Perhaps. But I am also vastly less likely to be jailed, or be the target of law enforcement abuse tolerated by social consensus. Weakening the rights of the accused — clamoring for the conviction of those we feel should be convicted — is a damnfool way to help the oppressed. (emphasis mine)

Having to find a defendant guilty beyond reasonable doubt is one of the very few legal mechanisms that continue to defend individuals, especially the weak and underrepresented in society, from the might of the state. Decrying that mechanism because it didn’t work out for you in a particular case is, as White properly notes, criminally stupid.

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Tragedy of the Commons

Monday 15 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

A modern day example of the Tragedy of the Commons.

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The Crux

Monday 15 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

I don’t have a dog in the Zimmerman fight other than the rule of law be followed. And the rule of law is clear: the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in order for the jury to find a defendant accused of a crime guilty. The prosecution in the Zimmerman case didn’t even come close. That this case was used as a vehicle for much larger racial issues is a travesty, and reveals that many people have no interest in the rule of law. This case was decided in public just as soon as it was learned that the victim was black, and the shooter white Hispanic. Jonathan Turley at USA Today:

With the verdict, the Zimmerman case entered the realm of legal mythology — a tale told by different groups in radically different ways for different meanings. Fax machines were activated with solicitations and sound bites long ago programmed for this moment. The legal standards long ago seemed to be lost to the social symbolism of the case.

Criminal cases make for perfect and often dangerous vehicles for social expression. They allow longstanding social and racial issues to be personified in villains and victims. We simplify facts and characters — discarding those facts that do not fit our narrative. We pile meanings on the outcome that soon make the actual murder secondary to the message. Zimmerman and Martin became proxies in our national debate over race. There was little patience or need for the niceties of rules of proof and adjudication.

[. . .]

Ultimately, it was the case and not the prosecutors that were weak.

[. . .]

A juror could not simply assume Zimmerman was the aggressor. Zimmerman was largely consistent in his accounts and his account was consistent with some witnesses. After 38 prosecution witnesses, there was nothing more than a call for the jury to assume the worst facts against Zimmerman without any objective piece of evidence. That is the opposite of the standard of a presumption of innocence in a criminal trial.

Some people feel that Zimmerman is guilty without any proof whatsoever as to what happened that night, choosing to believe a narrative for which there is no objective proof whatsoever. That is not how we decide guilt in a system that respects the rule of law and not the rule of man. We don’t adjudicate guilt because we feel like he’s guilty. The state had a job, and they didn’t meet their burden. That some people wish to to blame the one legal mechanism, the state having the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, that keeps even more people from being jailed (particular those in the black community who already have an massive over-representation in America’s overly vast prison system), is flabbergasting but not necessarily surprising. Many legal experts argued that there wasn’t even enough evidence to bring the case to trial. That the prosecution wasn’t able to prove guilt in court should surprise no one.

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Economics of the Drug War

Saturday 13 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

A breakdown of the drug war from an economic perspective.

The late Nobel Laureate James Buchanan was known to say, “Economics puts limits on people’s utopias.” Unfortunately, the advocates of the U.S. government’s war on drugs have failed to appreciate the economics underlying the drug war that makes their utopian vision impossible to achieve through drug prohibition.
Although the Obama administration has softened the rhetoric of prior administrations by talking about treatment rather than an “enforcement-centric ‘war on drugs’ approach,”1 enforcement budgets remain large and penalties for distribution severe. As for legalization, the administration claims that “drug legalization also runs counter to a public health and safety approach to drug policy. The more Americans use drugs, the higher the health, safety, productivity, and criminal justice costs we all have to bear.”2

Regarding violence, in a recent speech in Mexico, President Obama stated, “Much of the root cause of violence that’s been happening here in Mexico… is the demand for illegal drugs in the United States.”3 However, Mr. Obama failed to specify whether the cause of the violence is drugs per se or the fact that drugs are illegal.

Economics is a science of means and ends. Thus, the question for economics is whether the means—drug prohibition—is effective in promoting the ends of greater health, safety, and productivity, as well as lower violence and criminal justice costs.

And the conclusion is exactly what you’d expect it to be.

The U.S. government’s policy of drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition before it, is a failure—and not one that can be corrected by a mere tweaking of current policy. The economic analysis of fighting a supply-side drug war predicts that the war will enhance drug suppliers’ revenues, enabling them to continuously ratchet up their efforts to supply drugs in response to greater enforcement. The result is a drug war that escalates in cost and violence.

Furthermore, the secondary consequences of prohibition are perverse. The drug war causes drugs to be more potent and their quality less predictable than if drugs were legal, leaving the remaining users at greater risk and, in the face of higher prices, more likely to commit crimes to support their habit.

There is only one moral path in drug policy: legalization. It maximizes personal liberty and erases virtually every negative side effect of the drugs themselves, while completely eviscerating ALL of the side effects of prohibition itself which are, by far, the most harmful aspects in the war on drugs.

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Agreement

Saturday 13 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

I couldn’t agree more.

Similarly, pointing to single restaurants and pizzerias is not an adequate rebuttal to charges of poor overall pizza production. The ability to support a single decent pizzeria should be regarded not as a point of pride but, if anything, as the bare minimum for qualification as an American city.

A city without one good pizza joint is no city at all.

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Mafia is Right

Wednesday 10 July 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Mafia sums it up about right . . .

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