asians scared sarah palin away from hawaii Angry Asian Man (hat tip Ed Harrison)
A Social Worker for Pets New York Times
The Most Underreported Health Reform Story Trudy Lieberman, Columbia Journalism Review
Aetna Forcing 600,000-Plus To Lose Coverage In Effort To Raise Profits Huffington Post (hat tip reader John D)
IRS Tells Single Mom She’s Too Poor, Must Be Lying Consumerist
Time for some straight talking on climate change Malcolm Turnbull. When some members of the Liberal party in Australia (their conservative party) make more sense than pretty much anyone on the left in the US on climate change, you know it’s bad.
Neel Kashkari and Theodore Kaczynski?? Tim Iacono. From what I recall, Kashkari’s roof is decidedly nicer than Kaczynski’s was.
Are You Unemployed? Michael Shedlock
John Paulson Returns to Earth Business Week. For the record, Paulson’s bet againt subprime was wildly imprudent on the scale on which he made it. And it had much bigger ramifications too….
Dollar Fear Trumps Greed in Prices to Protect Against a Rebound Bloomberg
Manufacturing Bloom Noam Scheiber, The New Republic
Bankers had cashed in before the music stopped Lucian Bebchuk, Alma Cohen and Holger Spamann, Financial Times. This Bebchuk et al. study was reported on by the Times two weeks ago (and the study was up at Bebchuk’s site) but the fact that it has been turned into a comment at the FT has it treated as a “news” item.
How to Run Up a Deficit, Without Fear Robert Frank, New York Times
It’s a return to the Star Chamber as Europe finally tramples Magna Carta into the dust Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph
Ben Bernanke Stark Reports
Three Strikes on Ben Bernanke: AIG, Goldman Sachs & BAC/TARP Institutional Risk Analytics
Bernie v. Bernanke Matt Taibbi (hat tip reader John D)
Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Buzz):
And a bonus:
13 comments
Comments are closed.
re: Magna Carta
In the US, proponents of the Patriot Act and/or FISA should read it, esp. the following:
“No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, unless by lawful judgment of his peers.”
On climate change
I have to say that it makes me very cross that politicians have not read and understood the IPCC report on climate change. Some ignored numbers are that although most climate change is attributable to greenhouse gases CO2 probably contributes 60 percent to global warming. That means we could still have global warming even if we drastically cut CO2. CO2 emissions and absorption makes up what is known as the carbon cycle. Contributors to the increase in CO2 include deforestation, agricultural changes, plankton distribution and transportation. In fact transportation makes up about 13 percent of human emmissions. Change in forestry and agriculture combined make up about 30 percent. Yet Again I see regulatory capture and big business lobbying as politicians target the ordinary man instead of big business. I have issues with the IPCC report but at least I have read it unlike many politicians who are formulating policy.
On deficits
There is always an assumption that the only negative thing about deficits is that you have to pay them back. Why is it convenient to ignore the possibility that you can get a currency devaluation and import price inflation? There are all sorts of implications and side affects of deficits that are ignored which can add to the ultimate cost. Seems the average punter may have a better understanding of these than some economists and this comes from someone who is not against stimulus if it is limited in size and targetted corrected.
Brick, I appreciate the fact that you seem to have read the IPCC report. Frankly, I looked at the Summary.
May I ask, how is this figure of 60% of warming due to CO2 arrived at? When I look at the table on page four of the 2007 IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (http://tinyurl.com/2xl4c6), I see many factors related to human activity that cause warming and cooling. (Most people don’t understand that some human activities cause cooling, too.) Just eyeballing their estimates of the contribution of CO2, methane, N2O, halocarbons, tropospheric ozone, stratospheric water vapor from methane, and surface albedo to “radiative forcing” it does not look to me like 60% of warming is due to CO2. Furthermore, human influences like aerosols produce a large cooling effect, which — if you look at the table — appear to fully offset the warming effect of CO2. This is easy for even a non-scientist to see by simply looking at the table on page four of the report.
Is this 60% figure based on computer climate models? If so, then wouldn’t that estimate be kind of suspect, given that we cannot observe warming at 10 kilometers in the topics, as the models predict? Also, the models have not predicted nor accounted for the lack of warming in the past ten years in spite of increasing CO2. So, the models clearly are not accurate and are in dire need of re-tooling. If the estimate of 60% of warming due to anthropogenic CO2 release is based on these models, can we really have any confidence in that estimate?
Enquiring minds…
Thanks for the “Three Strikes” IRA link… should be required reading AFAIC.
Those guys (Whalen et’al) really do their homework and look under the rocks, while (most) everyone else talks about the rocks. GREAT ARTICLE!!!
NYT & <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a5zYfzDuHBTs"Bloomberg plastered this morning w/Front Page articles that Treasury expects lower than expected losses from TARP.
Color me skeptical… and the more I think about it, color me really skeptical. Do we even have a TARP balance sheet yet?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this looks to me like BO econ team effort to build confidence.
RE: Water in Australia
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34167067/ns/world_news-world_environment/
Australia town to shoot invading camels
Outback town to corral, shoot thousands of invading animals seeking water
The Associated Press
updated 12:58 a.m. MT, Fri., Nov . 27, 2009
ALICE SPRINGS, Australia – Australian authorities plan to corral about 6,000 wild camels with helicopters and gun them down after they overran a small Outback town in search of water, trampling fences, smashing tanks and contaminating supplies.
The Northern Territory government announced its plan Wednesday for Docker River, a town of 350 residents where thirsty camels have been arriving daily for weeks because of drought conditions in the region.
“The community of Docker River is under siege by 6,000 marauding, wild camels,” local government minister Rob Knight said in Alice Springs, 310 miles northeast of Docker. “This is a very critical situation out there, it’s very unusual and it needs urgent action.”
The camels, which are not native to Australia but were introduced in the 1840s, have smashed water tanks, approached houses to try to take water from air conditioning units, and knocked down fencing at the small airport runway, Knight said.
rt
Mish! The man thinks that state employees should take pay cuts because they’re scum. I have some trouble believing this revanchist has any concern for the unemployed.
The lions guy is very impressive – I did not know hyenas could be conditioned at all, and leopards are notoriously cranky. Several lion/tiger guys have died because they decided to take on leopards as a new career challenge.
The Aussies have been watching too much Sarah Palin.
The New Republic’s article on Ron Bloom is another twist in a continued saga of unemployment in the U.S. or more specifically the loss of work do to off-shoring of production. It folds nicely with a news item in the Gaston Gazette (can’t link) of Freightliner’s transition of production from Gaston county, NC to Saltillo and Santiago, Mexico in order to remain ‘competitive’ in the North American market. These are not jobs that are being jerked suddenly from the U.S., but the gradual transition to a cheap labor market for enhancing competitiveness. Being so, these jobs are not going to return quickly, no matter momentary political goals, but are in effect, gone for good. Not to address some of the blog comments, that it was the unionization of the Daimler facility that caused this decision, other than to observe it would be hard to imagine of even a non-union plant being competitive with substantially lower labor costs in Mexico, unless of course U.S. workers were inclined to transition to that lifestyle, the article also contains a list in summation, of recent former employees from “Other companies with Gaston County workers recently certified for TAA:” (Trade Adjustment Assistance, setup to mitigate the effect of NAFTA and other trade policies resulting in loss or jobs for U.S. citizens), which would argue, that Freightliner, far from being an anomaly, is rather the trend; that these displaced workers are being trained to do something, but that something isn’t building anything of tangible value, particularly in light of a Global glut of inexpensive labor impersonally competing (with the full endorsement and resources of their respective governments) against the rolling hills of North Carolina.
All this leads back to Bloom, and his position as ‘czar’ of manufacturing, or something to that affect. As the article points out, that while Bloom may be a top-notch negotiator, serving multiple interests (not just worker’s), he doesn’t have the ability to change overall policy, the prime mover in the disintegration of the U.S. manufacturing base, which seems to feel that this country can be a service economy selling finance products (of dubious value) or maybe insurance policies to the Chinese (as though hording tons of copper wire isn’t an insurance policy, but I digress) or even running the ad campaign for “Happy Meal” toys in Honduras. So Ron Bloom, although a refreshing break from the riff-raff of the current administration, may though no lack of ability, be looking at only modest, localized gains rather than the correction of course required. Nevertheless, I wish Mr. Bloom the best, and against the backdrop of Gaston, would be hearten if he made any kind of progress czaring for manufacturing, or whatever his job description is.
Not sure about the Sarah Palin crack. The Antipodes (and the Europeans) held their collective breaths for the US election, as their worst fears seemed to crystallise. You guys are scary.
Some background on the AU climate debate.
Liberals (conservatives) have recently been neo-conned (not necessarily Palinised) into climate change denial. Turnbull (YS link) as opposition (minority) leader had negotiated changes to the carbon trading ETS (cap & trade variant) which his party promised to support and then reneged.
We are now left with Malcolm Turnbull (ex lawyer and Goldman Sachs director) as a man of principle! Credibly and incredibly!
LOL we have our own Sarah, but instead of moose meat she serves fish and chips (although she does have the same affect on old boys loins, boner vote/hormone hire).
BTW where does GS not have a ex-employee masquerading as a politician for Frick Sake, all roads lead to one house and yet every one is looking for directions errrr? Dag nab-it GPS is busted, well we’ll just have to wait for the repairman…what the warranty is out! Oh well were lost for good now, better to learn how to live in the here and now…sniff (shiny pitchfork {*tm* vinny brand] hits the dirt floor with a dull resonant thud).
Claim of “denial” of climate change is perhaps backwards. It is the AGW crowd trying to deny a medieval warm period that was hotter than present day, without any help from human technology. It is AGW camp trying to “hide the decline” in temperatures found in the recent tree ring cores.
Scientists have even taken to apparently cherry-picking Yamal pine trees in scientific studies to minimize the medieval warm period and exaggerate 20th century warming. That’s fraud science, or at least stupid and inept science. I think even Sarah Palin could do better than that. The Hadley Climate Research Unit, it seems, cannot.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/29/the-yamal-implosion.html