Politics
- Late news this afternoon,…Herman Cain is done, stick a fork in him.
- Herman Cain Denies New Affair Allegation – ABC News
- Breaking: Herman Cain may be sunk | The Zingularity
- First Read – Cain denies new allegation of affair
- Jeffrey Sachs: Fairness and the Occupy Movement Revisited
- Rep. Barney Frank retiring – The Washington Post.
- MittvMitt.com: The story of two men trapped in one body – YouTube.
- Despite GOP Claims, U.S. Health Care Nowhere Near ‘Best’ in the World | NationofChange
- GOP poised to raised taxes on the middle class
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Economics & The Economy
- The lessons of “Margin Call” | Felix Salmon
- Jared Bernstein: What Now?
- Ryan makes FP ‘Global Thinkers’ list – MJ Lee – POLITICO.com
- The Poor, the Near Poor and You – NYTimes.com
- Why Atlas Shrugged » New Deal 2.0 (the emphasis is mine)
[…] Real societal wealth is anything that enhances the lives of those in our society, starting with basics such as food, shelter and medicine, but also including almost any property a person can own or anything a person can experience, such as entertainment or greater convenience. Real wealth can be eaten, used, shared. or experienced.Profits cannot be eaten and they do not provide shelter. As a consequence, it’s essential to recognize that the creation of profits is often confused with the creation of real societal wealth. They are different. Profits are an accounting proxy we use for indicating whether wealth is created. But like all proxies, this one sometimes falls short. With regard to the financial industry, this proxy has failed the nation spectacularly.
[…]
- On Capitol Hill, Rand’s ‘Atlas’ Can’t Be Shrugged Off : NPR
- Eight Reasons Why Extending Unemployment Benefits Will Boost the Economy » New Deal 2.0
- A couple of posts from Brad DeLong’s blog:
Climate & Climate Politics
- A tale of two climate articles | The Zingularity
The funny thing about climate change — and I don’t me funny haha, more like funny eye/roll and groan — is the evidence is so powerful and easy for anyone to understand. Among creationist grifters one aspect of the fleecing is to demand evidence for evolution happening now, right now, and then reject any adaptations or speciations offered. It’s easy to do, the transitions day to day over the life of a person are not dramatic, imagine if they used the same tactics plate tectonics! But when it comes to climate change the evidence is simple, it is indeed happening now, right now, and since everyone has experience with thermometers and outdoor temperatures, it’s easy for the laypublic to understand that evidence.
The climate change denial industry literally reduces to urging people to ignore their lying eyes and listen to the energy industry scientists and lawyers. One way to do that is to demonize climate scientists and that’s exactly what this story in the Daily Mail is attempting to do in a somewhat feeble manner….
- An unbelievable angry right wing rant from an ignorant science denier: It is “Global Warming Week” and the press will be full of it « The Greenroom
- RealClimate: Ice age constraints on climate sensitivity The paper being discussed and criticized here has been seen in the press lately with headlines to the effect that “Global warming much less serious than thought” or something to that effect. Maybe that’s not really the news the press should have been reporting (the emphasis is mine)…
[…] Unfortunately, the media coverage has not been very good. Partly, this is related to some ambiguous statements by the authors, and partly because media discussions of climate sensitivity have a history of being poorly done. The dominant frame was set by the press release which made a point of suggesting that this result made “extreme predictions” unlikely. This is fair enough, but had already been clear from the previous work discussed above. This was transformed into “Climate sensitivity was ‘overestimated’” by the BBC (not really a valid statement about the state of the science), compounded by the quote that Andreas Schmittner gave that “this implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. Who had previously thought what was left to the readers’ imagination. Indeed, the latter quote also prompted the predictably loony IBD editorial board to declare that this result proves that climate science is a fraud (though this is not Schmittner’s fault – they conclude the same thing every other Tuesday).
The Schmittner et al. analysis marks the insensitive end of the spectrum of climate sensitivity estimates based on LGM data, in large measure because it used a data set and a weighting that may well be biased toward insufficient cooling. Unfortunately, in reporting new scientific studies a common fallacy is to implicitly assume a new study is automatically “better” than previous work and supersedes this. In this case one can’t blame the media, since the authors’ press release cites Schmittner saying that “the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. It would have been more appropriate to say something like “our estimate of the effect is less than many previous estimates”.
- Nations Meet to Address Problems of Climate Change – NYTimes.com
- The Climate Scientists Who Wrote the Hacked Emails Explain the Cherry-Picked Phrases, If That’s Your Thing | ThinkProgress