Coyote Blog

Via TJIC:

It took decades and, at times, antagonistic battles, but Harvard's gay community says it has finally cemented its academic legitimacy at the nation's oldest university. College officials will announce today that they will establish an endowed chair in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, in what is believed to be the first professorship of its kind in the country.

Can the adults among us agree that a degree in LGBT studies has about zero economic value?  Even a history degree has more economic value, as history studies tend to still be accompanied by some academic rigor.  But the pathetic scholarship standards and non-existant statistical rigor with which most social sciences, and various [fill in the blank with oppressed group] studies departments in particular, are taught make the economic value of such a degree at best zero and at worst a negative.

I have no problem with anyone studying whatever they wish using their own resources.  This is one place I diverge with Ayn Rand -- she might say that pursuing non-productive activity is inherently immoral.  I would say that pursuing your own goals, whatever they be and however valuable or valueless they might be to others, is just fine as long as you don't demand that everyone else to support you.

The problem is that a degree at Harvard probably requires a $200,000 investment to complete.  Given that, beyond a few career spots in academia, a LGBT studies degree is unlikely to ever recover enough (versus having no degree)  to pay for such an investment, problems are inevitable.  Either someone (read: taxpayers) will likely foot the bill, or else some student is going to find herself with tens of thousands of dollars of student debt and no realistic way to pay it back.

In fact, this latter situation is a common leitmotif of recent media stories, the college grad unable to handle his or her shocking debt load.  Somehow, stories all seem to blame the capitalist system as a failure point.  Michelle Obama, who similarly pursued [historically oppressed group] studies at Princeton, has expressed just this point of view.

Despite their Ivy League pedigrees and good salaries, Michelle Obama often says the fact that she and her husband are out of debt is due to sheer luck, because they could not have predicted that his two books would become bestsellers. "It was like, 'Let's put all our money on red!' " she told a crowd at Ohio State University on Friday. "It wasn't a financial plan! We were lucky! And it shouldn't have been based on luck, because we worked hard."

Is this problem really so hard to diagnose, or have we gotten so politically correct we cannot state a fact out loud that everyone understands -- that is, some degrees have more economic power than others.  LGBT studies degrees likely have very little economic utility.  So it is fine to pursue such a degree, but don't be surprised when you are not offered a six-figure income at graduation, and don't come to me expecting that I pay for your choice.

This post from Kevin Drum didn't start auspiciously, repeating the leftish meme that the tax day protests were all Astroturf events.  But I must admit I had a real double-take on his last paragraph, wherein he points out something about tax polls that most people seem to be missing:

With Tax Day coming up, and astroturf tea parties being organized around the country, a lot of people have been linking to polls showing that most Americans aren't, in fact, actually unhappy with the amount of income tax they have to pay.  Gallup, for example, reports that 61% of Americans think the amount they're paying this year is fair. Or there's this one, also from Gallup, that asks directly whether the amount you're paying is too high or not:

Not bad!  49% think their income taxes are just fine or even a bit low.  Except for one thing: this chart shows exactly the opposite of what it seems.  Consider this: about 40-50% of Americans pay no federal income tax at all¹.  That's zero dollars.  I think we can safely assume that these are the people who think that their taxes are about right.  What this means, then, is that virtually every American who pays any income tax at all thinks they're paying too much. There are various reasons why this might be so (a sense of unfairness regardless of amount paid, a fuzzy sense of how much they're paying in the first place, simple bloody-mindedness, etc.) but overall it's not exactly a testament to our collective willingness to fund the machinery of state.

Outstanding.  Which only leads me to wonder why, if he realizes this, does he believe that people might not spontaneously organize protests, rather than it having to be a Rove-Fox News plot.  I think the answer to that is the Left just can't shake their own perception that protest marches belong to them in the same way the Right feels that AM Radio is their media to rule.  (What, by the way, does that leave for libertarians, other than Rush, Ayn Rand, and Firefly reruns?)

Via the environmental blog Thin Green Line:

Check out this post on Bay Area Moms revealing that products with high fructose corn syrup contain mercury. Scary!

I have had some experience working with recreation on lakes that have mercury-contaminated fish  (not good for business) so I thought I would check out the articles.  Mommy Files blog here.  Advocacy group quoted here.  Actual study here.  Test results here.

This strikes me as being right at the focal point of where both the environmental and consumer protection movements went off the rails -- the issue of relative risks.  In short, risks for things with scary names (mercury and radiation being two great examples) cannot seem to be processed rationally.  Everything is toxic, at some concentration.  The key is understanding concentration and relative risks, and not panicking when anyone yells "mercury" in a crowded grocery store.

Before I get into this more, it is a little hard to discuss because I can't really find in the study or the advocacy press releases what forms the mercury take in the HFCS -- it may be they just don't know yet.  The form the mercury is in matters.  Most people would be surprised, but while pure liquid mercury is not good for you, but it isn't particularly toxic when compared to other forms  (just ask Sir Isaac Newton, who used to drink the stuff).  Mercury vapor is really bad, as are certain chemical derivatives of mercury, such as the form often found in fish.

So here is some perspective on mercury concentrations, again remembering these standards often apply to specific chemical variants.  The US legal limit on fish is 1 part per million, or 1 ppm.    The legal US limit on mercury in water is 2 parts per billion, or 2 ppb.  One might think that means the mercury in water is more dangerous, but it is actually in a much less dangerous form (according to my imperfect understanding) than the mercury in fish.  However, it is assumed that one drinks more grams of water a day than grams of fish.  This does not entirely explain the 500-fold discrepancy -- my guess is that this is also a matter of attention, as drinking water standards and contaminants get much more headline plan than for fish (again, in part due to a general inability, particularly in the media, to sort through relative risks).

So then we have HFCS.  The worst test value was apparently in Quaker Oatmeal to Go, which had a value of 350 parts per trillion (ppt).  In other words, the worst sample found anywhere had a mercury level nearly 6 times lower than the federal drinking water standard (2 ppb = 2000 ppt).   What this means is that you would have to eat 63 pounds of Quaker Oatmeal to Go a day to have the same mercury risk as drinking 5 liters of water at the federal standard each day.  And that is the worst product.  Only 17 of 55 products tested had any detectable mercury at all, and only 7 had concentrations over 100 ppt.

Don't even get me started on fish.  8 ounces of fish at the federal standard would have the same mercury as 1,429 pounds of Quaker oatmeal.  The risks are not even in the same ballpark.  The oatmeal risk is three orders of magnitude lower than the fish risk.   I wonder how many of the moms who now quiver at giving their kids oatmeal still feed their kids lots of nutritious fish?

The right way to write this story is not "scary!"  The right way to write this story is "Hey, we found some mercury where we did not expect it, this bears further study, but right now the concentrations are so far lower than you would find in many other everyday foods you eat or drink that it's not worth worrying about.  If you really want to protect your kids from mercury, stay away from fish."

Postscript: I lament the passing of sugar in favor of HFCS.  So often food activists gloss over this issue, preferring to imply it is some kind of corporate conspiracy to give us worse food.  But in fact, the main blame for this shift lies entirely on Congress, which maintains absurdly high sugar tariffs and a continued blockade of Cuba that give us among the highest sugar prices in the world.  Faced with this reality, food manufacturers cleverly found an alternative.   I prefer good old sugar, and implore Congress to ditch corporate welfare for sugar manufacturers

MaxedOutMamma (an economist somewhere but she seems to only drop tantalizing clues as to where she plies her trade) is concerned:

I was troubled by how many people seemed to feel the economy wasn't in deep trouble.   Profound skepticism and the belief that this is all media/political highjinks seem almost to be the consensus.

I guess you may have to put me in the majority.  I certainly don't doubt that we are headed for a recession.  And it would not surprise me if this is the worst recession that most 20-something Obama voters have experienced, though that is not saying much.  But I am not sure we are even facing the Seventies in this one and we certainly are not facing the 1930s.

Here is the problem that we more casual consumers of economic news must struggle with -- the media has fairly accurately predicted 20 of the last 3 economic downturns.  Everywhere you turn, you see analogies to the Great Depression, a period of time where unemployment topped 25%.  Given the media's track record and the nearly breathless panic about the looming economic disaster, any sane person has to put a divide-by-X filter on economic news.  It is certainly possible that I and other are using too large of an X as a correction factor, but is that my fault, or the fault of the purveyors of information who can't tell any story straight.

By the way, for us Polyannas, here are several interesting posts from Mark Perry

• Housing affodability highest since 2002
• Loan delinquency rates at historical lows (except mortgages, but mortgage delinquency rates still below 1991)
• Real estate bubble limited to less than 10 states (and really only four)

I blame the English and all of us in the media for the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan.  If we had just stuck with "New Amsterdam" rather than having the name forcibly changed to New York by Anglo chauvinists, the WTC would never have been attacked.  We all conspired in this tragedy by continuing to call it "New York."

Crazy?  I would have thought so, but apparently this logic is quite in vogue

Postscript:  I find it moderately hilarious to see folks on the left defending names imposed by western colonialists over indigenous names.  But if it makes us Westerners to blame for terrorism, I guess it's in a good cause.

I have finally been able to publish a video of my presentation at the climate debate held by the Regional Council of Rural Counties last September.  The entire video is about an hour long.  As usual, I am offering several ways to view it.  First, it has been posted on YouTube but had to be broken into seven parts.  The playlist of all seven parts is below:

The playlist link is here:  RCRC Climate Debate (Skeptic's Side)

Unfortunately, YouTube crushes the resolution so many of the charts are hard to read.  You can download the full resolution windows media version (about 96MB) as long as my bandwidth holds out by right-clicking and downloading form this link:  Download RCRC Climate Debate (wmv)

Also, you can stream higher resolution version of this film (and all my other climate films) at this site.  The resolution is not as good as the downloadable version but is much better than YouTube.  Again, bandwidth pending.

Finally, you can download the actual powerpoint presentation shown in this video here or you can view the presentation online here.

In the future, all of my videos and presentations will be available via the links just under the banner at Climate Skeptic.

I'm thinking of the three major consumer purchases that are probably at the base of the hierarchy of needs:  Fuel, food, and shelter.  Its interesting how very different the media and public perception is of price changes in these areas.

The reaction to fuel price increases is easy to predict - they are always portrayed as bad.  Rising prices hurt everyone, producers are evil, and speculators who make bets on rising prices are even more evil.

The reaction to rising food prices is more mixed.  That's because we have come to the collective decision that producers of food are sympathetic figures whereas producers of oil are unsympathetic.  So media laments about rising food prices are often tempered by good news stories about rising farm profitability.

And then there is shelter.  For this category of consumer expenditure, everything is flipped on its head.  Rising prices are good, and falling prices are bad.  One might argue that housing is different, because consumers often take an equity position in shelter that they do not take in food or fuel.  But all this means is that home buyers are speculating on the price of shelter, going long on bets that prices will rise.  They could easily just rent, and pay for their shelter month-to-month like they pay for their food or fuel, but many consumers bet on rising rents and shelter prices by buying shelter futures (ie purchasing a home).  In a real sense, home buyers are all speculators (using margin accounts at that!), but this is one case where we encourage speculation, and even have tax subsidies for it.

If the reader finds this a funny way to think of home ownership, here is a thought experiment.  Let's say at the age of 30 I wanted to take an equity stake in my current and future fuel needs.  I take out a loan to buy enough Exxon stock such that the annual dividends will cover my fuel purchases for the year.  If fuel prices go up, the dividends likely go up as well, so I am sheltered from the vicissitudes of worrying about my monthly fuel bill, and all I have to do is pay off a regular and predictable mortgage on my Exxon stock.  In 30 years, when the note is paid off, likely I have a big capital gain in my Exxon stock, which I could cash in at retirement if I want to downsize to less driving and fuel use.  Or I can pass it on to my kids.

The only difference I can come up with, economically, between this example and how we do housing is that in my example, consumer capital is invested in productive enterprises rather than dead real estate.

Here is the hard truth for those of us who believe that, since CO2 has had little effect on global temperatures to date, expensive abatement plans will similarly have little if any measurable effect:  They are coming anyway.  It is actually probable that the Republicans could combine with heavy industrial states like Michigan in the Senate to block dramatic new legislation.  But President Obama already has the legal and legislative authority to enact sweeping and expensive CO2 mandates without going back to Congress. 

So with that depressing thought, here is a bit of good news:  The media may well come over to the skeptics' side soon, at least partially.  Here is why:  The media is extraordinarily loath to really challenge policy proposals in advance that are popular with the center-left.  They are even less likely to challenge said proposals when they touch on a story of doom.  There is nothing the media enjoys more than piling on a good public scare. 

But history has shown that the media will turn on these proposals once they are implemented, and sometimes quite soon after.  Remember ethanol subsidies?  The press were behind this crap all the way, until Congress passed enhanced subsidies a while back, and then the press suddenly starting "discovering" the effect on rising food prices, the environmental problems with land use, the ugliness of some of the subsidy politics, the fact that few scientists think corn ethanol will actually reduce CO2, etc.  Yeah, I know, all of this was entirely predictable (and predicted by many of us) in advance.  But this just seems to be how the media works.

Because the only thing the media loves more than fear-mongering a crisis that is 20-years away is fear-mongering one that is visibly upon us.  The press freaked at the California energy crisis a few years ago, peppering the public with stories of rising prices and rolling blackouts.  And what has happened since then?   Electricity demand has risen, no one can build electrical capacity, wind and solar are a joke, and Obama is only going to make it harder and more expensive to produce enough power (I think Obama's exact words were "bankrupt the coal industry.") 

The Town of South Attleboro, MA sent out wildly threatening past due letters for folks with balances as low as 1-cent  (thereby investing at least 42 cents to get one back).  In response to charges that this was stupid, City Collector Debora Marcoccio responded:

A computer automatically printed the letters for any account with a balance remaining, and they were not reviewed by staff before being sent out, Marcoccio said.

"It would be fiscally irresponsible for me to have staff weed through the bills and pull out any below a certain amount," Marcoccio said. " And what would that amount be?"

What, are we living in the 19th century with clerks in a musty room preparing bills by hand?  This fix probably requires one whole entire line of program code in the billing system to fix.  I could probably teach myself to code whatever language the payroll system is written in (my guess is COBOL, which, god help me, I already know) in less time than this woman has spent fielding complaints and media inquiries.  Compare this to what TJIC has to do just to get the mail out.

And don't you love people who don't even have enough spine to make a simple decision about the cutoff for minimum bill size.  I have found this is one of those things the government is really, really bad at -- making decisions under uncertainty  (which covers about all decisions, except routine ones embodied in SOP).  Government has no incentives, in general, for productivity, or production, or customer satisfaction.  The only time government employees get feedback at all is when they get negative feedback from having someone yell at them for making a decision that some higher-up didn't like..  So if a decision is not justifiable either by past precedent/SOP or explicitly by the rules, it is not made.

By the way, I had a personal programming milestone last night.  I finally built a website without using a WYSIWIG editor that formatted the way I wanted it to all in CSS without a single table.  I predict that now that I have finally gotten a decent handle on CSS, which mainly consists of learning all the workarounds for when it doesn't work as you would expect, that someone is about to introduce a whole new system for formatting web pages.

Recent circulation numbers showing continued, substantial declines of traditional newspapers give me an excuse to make a point I have wanted to make for some time. 

I am a frequent critic of newspapers.  I think they have lost focus on the hard-hitting investigative journalism which used to be their highest and best calling, instead considering reiteration of an activist's press release sufficient to check the journalism box on some particular issue.  When investigative reporting does occur, it almost always is focused to support the dominant or politically correct outcome, rather than to really challenge conventional wisdom.   Media coverage of any technical issue involving science or statistics or economics is often awful, in large part because journalism is too often the default educational path of folks who want to avoid numbers.  Any time I have been on the inside of some issue receiving coverage, I have generally been astounded by how little the print descriptions matched reality.  Now that I am interviewed more as a source for articles, I never think my views are well-quoted (though that may be my fault for not talking in sound bites).  And, like many, I get irritated that the media's arrogance and self-referential reporting seems to increase in direct proportion to their drop in circulation.

All that being said, the world without healthy newspapers is a bad thing. 

First, we bloggers can blather on all day about being the new media, but with the exception of a few folks like Radley Balko, we're all editorial writers, not reporters  (I consider my role at Climate-Skeptic.com to be more like journalism, but only because there is such a glaring hole on that topic in traditional media).  I couldn't do what I do here, at least on this particular blog, without the New York Times and the Washington Post.  I'm a remora feeding on their scraps.  I can't bring down the big fish by myself, I can only feed on the bits they miss.

Second, and perhaps more important in this world of proposed reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, print media is the mode of speech best protected by the First Ammendment.  This isn't the way it should be -- all speech should be equal -- but in reality goofy regulatory regimes for radio, TV, and even the Internet all offer the government leverage points for speech control they don't have with the print media.  It's why half the dystopic sci fi novels out there have a world dominated by TV -- because that is where government has the most control of speech.

So here's hoping you guys at the NY Times get your act together.

The media is really bending over backwards to find ways to twist earnings data for average Americans to try to make the point that real income for many folks has stagnated or dropped.  They are doing this to support a two-pronged legislative strategy in the next Obama administration:

1. Use the power of the government to further tilt the balance towards unions and against employers in wage negotiations  (this strategy having worked out so well to create prosperity in the automobile and airline industries)
2. Further modify the income and Social Security tax structures to make them even more regressive than they are today.

They are firing on all cylinders behind this strategy.  They are even mobilizing the neo-Keynesians to make the pitch that the Great Depression and the current financial crisis were caused by a shift in wealth from laborers to the capital classes, and that the only way to prevent future crises and depressions is to, wait for it, increase the power of unions and institute more wealth redistribution  (Example here, via Kevin Drum).

I was going to do a post fisking the James Livingston article linked above on Kevin Drum's site, but Livingston's hypothesis was such a mess that it was just going to take too much of my day.  But in doing some research, I found this chart from a couple of years ago in the NY Times that really caught my attention:

Talk about chutzpuh -- look at the lede on the chart and then look at the chart itself.  Yes, the lede is correct, but only if you choose the totally meaningless number of "cash wages" rather than total compensation.  If one looks at total compensation (or what they call "overall" compensation), the entire argument falls apart.   Workers have maintained about their same "share" of the economy.

Sure, a large percentage of that is now in health care benefits, but that's a choice workers have made (and the government has encouraged through tax policy).  In fact, this compensation mix has been driven in large part by the Left's beloved unions, so on what basis can folks say that these other benefits somehow "don't count?"  Certainly, they cost their employers equally, whether it is cash or health care.  Corporate profits are up a bit, but in line with their normal historical levels in the 1950s and 1960s, the golden age of the US economy, according to the Left.  (By the way, the pattern of falling wage shares and rising profit shares after recessions is a well-documented one.  Wage-earners do best at the end of an economic cycle, employers more towards the beginning.  The chart cut off after 1997 would look about the same as the last several years).

I will tell you right now that every time you hear someone bemoaning the stagnation of wages, they will never, ever, ever be talking about total compensation per individual.  Having, through government policy and union activity pushed the compensation mix to non-cash elements, they then play a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game of not giving any credit for those compensation elements.

Other games that are played to try to make the case that real earnings have stagnated include:

• Time frame selection. Everyone making this argument will choose 2000 as a starting point.  They justify it by saying it is the beginning of the Bush years, but 2000 is really selected because it is a pre-recession peak, and they have to measure peak-to-trough of the economic cycle to try to make their point.  Just as an example, if you look at the household income numbers below, you can see there is very typically a 5-year drop after a recession followed by net gains.  If we chose, say, the first Clinton term we could play the same game, showing a peak-to-trough drop in real incomes.
• Household income game. The household income numbers are fraught with peril, because companies don't pay households, they pay individuals.  And household makeups are changing simultaneous to income changes.  For example, imagine the economy was just my household.  If my wife were to get fed up with my shtick and divorce me tomorrow, average household income would drop by 50% in one day (as our total income stays the same but we go from one to two households).  If my wife were to go back to her high-paying pre-kids job tomorrow (if only it were so!) our household income would go way up, in part because the labor department does not capture the value of the labor she provides at home.Mark Perry has a lot more on the household income numbers here, but he shows that the household size number has been changing a lot, causing the metric to understate income changes per individual:

• Individuals matter. Median income looks at the middle person on the ranked list of US incomes.  So, for example, if there are 100 million income earners, the median income is the income of number 50 million on this list.  But whoever the person is at spot 50 million is almost certainly not the same person who was at spot 50 million last year.  They might have fallen on the list, but the odds are they moved up.  As folks age and gain experience and/or seniority, they tend to increase income faster than inflation.  Most minimum wage earners, for example, tend to be under 25.  The number of families supporting three kids on minimum wage (at least of the primary bread-winner) at the age of 45 is really, really low, despite the anecdotes we are bombarded with in the media.

• Immigration has a huge effect. The total number of foreign born people in the labor force is estimated around 21 million, of which perhaps 6.3 million are illegal immigrants.  Positing that at least 10 million of these arrived in the last two decades, and that many of these folks began at relatively low, below-median incomes, means that median incomes are hugely affected by immigration.  Leaving immigrants out so the comparison is close to apples and apples, to find the true median income gain over the last 20 years one would have to count up 10 million or so spots on the list.  Again, as in the previous point, most individuals can be better off even if the median stagnates  (presumably immigrants coming in at the bottom are also better off, even at the bottom, than where they were before, or they would not have come.  We often forget that much of our bottom quartile of income in this country would be upper middle class in many other nations).  This is a classic mix problem that most people, and the media, almost always get wrong.  In a situation with a changing mix of multiple groups, each of the groups can be improving on some metric, but the overall metric can go down.  You can see the income stats by race here.  Every race group has increasing median income, but since the Hispanic group has grown 8x faster than the anglo population in the US, the total results are mixed downwards.Here is a quick example.  Group A has values of 5,6,6,7.  Group B has values of 1,2,3.  Ten years later Group A is the same size and has values of 6,7,7,8.  Group B has doubled in size, and now has values of 2,3,4,2,3,4.  In these examples, every single individual has a higher value.  Also, Group A's median has increased from 6 to 7, and Group B's has increased from 2 to 3.  But the median for the whole combined group A+B has dropped from 5 to 4.  Both medians (and averages) can do funny things when mix is shifting.
• Even the NY Times. The NY Times actually makes two of these points for me in another article, arguing that historic median income drops were concentrated in areas of high immigration, and reported drops were due to the choice of the economic peak as a starting point.  WOW?  Is this the same NY Times I began this post criticizing.  Yes it is, the only difference is that this article ran in 2001, when they were reporting on the economy during a Democratic administration.
  
• Income taxes are already wildly progressive.  While I would love to be in that top 1% group, I don't really begrudge them their success.  Besides, who can look at the chart below, again from Mark Perry, and come to the conclusion that the top 1% are being treated unfairly generously.

• Every country that has implemented this plan (government-backed unions and wildly progressive tax policy), including most of Western Europe, is demonstrable worse off than the US on absolute measures.  This is both the median, but also in every quintile, including the poorest.  While it is true the poorest quintile has a bigger gap from the riches in the US vs. France for example, on an absolute basis our poorest are at least as well off  (particularly when differences in immigration policy are taken into account).

I was thinking a bit about Jeff Skilling (former Enron CEO) today.  What must he be thinking as a series of large firms that were supposedly far more stable than Enron go down one after the other to liquidity crises much like that of Enron?  Bear Stearns and Lehman, two firms that should have been rock solid, go down in the blink of an eye in a credit crunch, and all we hear from the media is how the firms fell victim to larger forces beyond their control.  At least at Enron they were up-front with the market about their taking on large risks.  Now, the government is running around in the background trying to match-make these failing companies and helping to save at least a squidge of shareholder equity.  The only thing the government did in the Enron collapse was hound Skilling and others into jail.   

Sure, Skilling may have made some overly optimistic statements about his company as he was trying to stave off the crunch, but no more so that the happy-face statements issuing from Bear or Lehman in their final days.  Executives who find themselves in a credit crunch are in a nearly impossible position.  The best way they can serve equity holders is to downplay or even bury bad news to head off the looming crisis of confidence.  But if they do so, they face presecution for making false statements about the company, ironically under laws meant to protect equity holders.

I am sure you have seen various rankings where the US falls way behind other western nations in terms of infant mortality.  This stat is jumped on by the left as justification for just how cold and heartless America is, and just how enlightened socialized medicine must be.  However, no one seems to bother to check the statistic itself (certainly the media is too incompetent to do so, particularly when it fits their narrative).  Statistics like this that are measured across nations are notoriously unreliable, as individual nations may have different definitions or methods for gathering the data.

And, in fact, this turns out to be the case with infant mortality, a fact I first reported here (related post on medical definitions driving national statistics here).  This week, Mark Perry links to an article further illuminating the issue:

The main
factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and
prematurity. The way that these factors are reported "” and how such
babies are treated statistically "” tells a different story than what
the numbers reveal.  Low
birth weight infants are not counted against the "live birth"
statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates.

According
to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a
premature baby weighing less than 500 kg is not considered a living
child.
But
in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live
births. The mortality rate of such babies "” considered "unsalvageable"
outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive "” is extraordinarily
high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews
U.S. infant mortality statistics.Norway
boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. But when
the main determinant of mortality "” weight at birth "” is factored in,
Norway has no better survival rates than the United States....

In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth
(take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered
alive.

If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the
first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a "miscarriage" and
does not affect the country's reported infant mortality rates....

Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since
2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g
(0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States.

Hmm, so in the US we actually try to save low-birthweight babies rather than label them unsalvageable.  Wow, we sure have a cold and heartless system here.  [disclosure:  My nephew was a very pre-mature, very low-birthweight baby who could have fit in the palm of your hand at birth and survived by the full application of American medical technology.  He is doing great today]

I am starting to discover that I am an exception in the blogosphere, which seems to turn its collective noses up at the Olympics.  Well, my family loves to watch the Olympics together, and it is a real event in our house these two weeks.

Anyway, I was watching Bob Costas interview President Bush last night, and he asked a question I would paraphrase as "how is the US going to exercise influence on China given China's increasing strength and all the problems we have in the US."

Now, I am the first one to criticize the US and its government on any number of dimensions, but when one pulls back to an international view, one has to have some perspective.  What are these overwhelming problems we face when compared to the struggle for freedom and/or economic sufficiency in much of the world?  The US media has developed a bedrock assumption that the US is some kind of wasteland in need of total overhaul, when in fact we are the example all the world emulates.  Just look at the images from China -- sure there are a lot of unique cultural differences, but in many ways you see a people trying to be like us.

This is cross-posted from Climate-Skeptic, but it is very much in the spirit of the Canadian tribunals and University speech codes.  There are increasing efforts, mainly on the left, to make the world a better place by limiting speech of those who don't agree with them.

So, apparently Lawrence Summers was correct:

Wall Street Journal -- Girls
and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests, but
boys more often excelled or failed, researchers reported. The fresh
research adds to the debate about gender difference in aptitude for
mathematics, including efforts to explain the relative scarcity of
women among professors of science, math and engineering.

The
latest study, in this week's journal Science, examined scores from
seven million students who took statewide mathematics tests from grades
two through 11 in 10 states between 2005 and 2007.

The
researchers, from the University of Wisconsin and the University of
California, Berkeley, didn't find a significant overall difference
between girls' and boys' scores. But the study also found that boys'
scores were more variable than those of girls. More boys scored
extremely well -- or extremely poorly -- than girls, who were more
likely to earn scores closer to the average for all students. The study found that boys are consistently more variable than girls, in every grade and in every state studied
(see crude diagram above - showing distributions where mean
intelligence is the same, but the standard deviation of male
intelligence is greater than female intelligence).

In Minnesota, for example, 1.85% of white boys in the 11th grade hit the 99th percentile, compared with 0.9% of girls -- meaning there were more than twice as many boys among the top scorers than girls.

Of course, Summers did not get in trouble for being incorrect.  He got in trouble for saying something he was not supposed to say.  And it seems that the media are trying to avoid the same mistake, reporting what they want to believe, and not what the study actually says.

As I write in a post at Climate Skeptic, this is part and parcel of a new post-modernist science, where (as MaxedOutMamma writes) "If a
research finding could harm a class of persons, the theory is that
scientists should change the way they talk about that finding".

John McCain put his name to the campaign finance bill that, in effect, allows only the media, not other private citizens, unlimited free speech in the run-up to the election.  So I think it is hilarious that the media seems to be lined up against McCain in the next election. 

There is nothing in any law book that says the media has to be unbiased.  In fact, today's notion of an unbiased media is a relatively new concept.  Most newspapers of the 19thy century had a clear political orientation, something that is still the case to some extent in Britain today.  It was absurd to give such a limited group a monopoly on political speech close to an election.  I have opposed this law from day 1, but I do find it funny that McCain himself maybe its first victim. 

San Francisco has a ballot initiative this November to seize all PG&E transmission lines and assets in the city such that all city power comes from a new government owned utility.  Further, the initiative would require that this new entity get 100% of its power from renewables, particularly wind and solar, by 2040.  It is similar to a 2001 initiative.

All due respect to PG&E's private property, but I would love to see this happen.  If I were governor, I would be seriously tempted to encourage them to proceed, with the only proviso that no one else in California be allowed to sell electricity to San Francisco on the hugely unlikely possibility that there might be a day without sunshine in San Francisco.   (I find it hilarious that San Francisco's solar future is trumpeted in the "fog city journal.")  This might actually be a big enough disaster that even the media would have trouble ignoring its spectacular failure.  It would also do wonders for the Arizona and Nevada economy, as major industries would move our way.

I am sure San Francisco is well on their way to success.  After all, the city just completed its largest ever solar project. 

            The solar system is expected to generate 370,000 kilowatt hours of
electricity annually, enough to power 80 San Francisco homes.

Wow.  It can power 80 whole homes, as long as its not night time or winter (when it is seldom sunny in SF).

It is interesting that with home prices and gasoline prices going in opposite directions, the media can declare both trends to be disasters for Americans.  Via Scrappleface:

The U.S. housing crisis reached fever pitch this month, with potential foreclosures up 48 percent compared with May 2007.

The devastation of receiving foreclosure notices has now swept
through a full 2/10ths of one percent of American homes. About 1/10th
of one percent of owners may lose their homes. For some of those
people, it's actually their primary residence in jeopardy, rather than
a second home, rental property or vacation condo.

 

To add insult to misery, mortgage rates skyrocketed this month to
6.32 percent, a shocking figure a full third of what it was during the
Carter administration.

As a result of the flood of homes on the market, real estate agent
commissions have dipped precariously, and home buyers increasingly
wrestle with the guilt of paying bargain prices for excellent
properties.

Market analysts say home prices could plummet as much as another 10
percent by the end of 2009, leaving first-time home buyers to face the
specter of owning a more spacious residence. The additional square
footage inequitably boosts the burden of cleaning, heating and air
conditioning.

After digging a First Amendment hole for itself in the Plame affair, the New York Times seems to still be hell-bent on narrowing the very First Amendment protections that probably kept its employees out of jail in the early 70's.  Specifically, the Times frets that the US is out of step with Europe in having a much broader view of freedom of speech:

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed
a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business
executive who had called food stamps "basically a Puerto Rican
program." The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not
allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be
suppressed or punished just because they may increase "the general
level of prejudice."

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

"It
is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a
legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month,
"when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative
responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against
certain forms of vicious attack."

In the 1970's, members of my family worked in the oil industry, and we received numerous death threats of varying believability, and several of our friends received letter bombs or had family members kidnapped.  Many of these attacks and threats were directly traceable to certain media shows that featured editorial attacks on the oil industry.  So is the Times suggesting that the media should hold off on its criticism of the oil industry because this criticism created an atmosphere of hate in which these attacks were conducted?

No freaking way, because these calls to limit criticism and "hate speech" always have an ideological filter.  There is never a suggestion that the speech bans be even-handed.  Criticism of African Americans is outlawed, but exactly parallel language about white folks is A-OK.  Criticising Islam is out, but Christianity is a fine target.  Death threats against Haitian activists must be avoided at all costs, but death threats against corporate executives are no reflection on free speech or the media.  The article is quite explicit that by their definition, hate speech only applies to "minorities," which you can translate to mean "groups the political class has decided to protect."  You may be assured that members of the political class will find a way to get themselves included in this definition, so they can be free of criticism,

Kudos to Harvey Silvergate, who even makes the exact same point I have made about Hitler a number of times:

"Free speech matters because it works," Mr. Silverglate continued.
Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech
than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.

"The world didn't suffer because too many people read "˜Mein Kampf,' " Mr. Silverglate said. "Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea."

I will add that I am also happy to be out of step with Europe in terms of any number of other policies, including American libel law, or laws that make it ever so much easier to start a business, and European tolerance for a cozy business-political elite that, whatever their party, focuses on keeping their elite wealthy and powerful.

After digging a First Amendment hole for itself in the Plame affair, the New York Times seems to still be hell-bent on narrowing the very First Amendment protections that probably kept its employees out of jail in the early 70's.  Specifically, the Times frets that the US is out of step with Europe in having a much broader view of freedom of speech:

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed
a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business
executive who had called food stamps "basically a Puerto Rican
program." The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not
allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be
suppressed or punished just because they may increase "the general
level of prejudice."

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

"It
is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a
legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month,
"when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative
responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against
certain forms of vicious attack."

In the 1970's, members of my family worked in the oil industry, and we received numerous death threats of varying believability, and several of our friends received letter bombs or had family members kidnapped.  Many of these attacks and threats were directly traceable to certain media shows that featured editorial attacks on the oil industry.  So is the Times suggesting that the media should hold off on its criticism of the oil industry because this criticism created an atmosphere of hate in which these attacks were conducted?

No freaking way, because these calls to limit criticism and "hate speech" always have an ideological filter.  There is never a suggestion that the speech bans be even-handed.  Criticism of African Americans is outlawed, but exactly parallel language about white folks is A-OK.  Criticising Islam is out, but Christianity is a fine target.  Death threats against Haitian activists must be avoided at all costs, but death threats against corporate executives are no reflection on free speech or the media.  The article is quite explicit that by their definition, hate speech only applies to "minorities," which you can translate to mean "groups the political class has decided to protect."  You may be assured that members of the political class will find a way to get themselves included in this definition, so they can be free of criticism,

Kudos to Harvey Silvergate, who even makes the exact same point I have made about Hitler a number of times:

"Free speech matters because it works," Mr. Silverglate continued.
Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech
than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.

"The world didn't suffer because too many people read "˜Mein Kampf,' " Mr. Silverglate said. "Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea."

I will add that I am also happy to be out of step with Europe in terms of any number of other policies, including American libel law, or laws that make it ever so much easier to start a business, and European tolerance for a cozy business-political elite that, whatever their party, focuses on keeping their elite wealthy and powerful.

We all know that the media is perfectly capable of ignoring even the most basic precepts of economics, but I thought Chris Plummer's article was especially heroic in doing so.  Even more so, it is absolutely stunning in its arrogance.  In his article, he writes on all the great ways that $8 a gallon gasoline will help make the world a better place.  I will stay away from the global warming related issues -- I have a whole other blog dedicated to that -- but here are a couple of the most egregious parts:

They may contain computer chips, but the power source
for today's cars is little different than that which drove the first
Model T 100 years ago. That we're still harnessed to this antiquated
technology is testament to Big Oil's influence in Washington and
success in squelching advances in fuel efficiency and alternative
energy.

   
       

Given our achievement
in getting a giant mainframe's computing power into a handheld device
in just a few decades, we should be able to do likewise with these
dirty, little rolling power plants that served us well but are overdue
for the scrap heap of history.

OK, this first one is a science problem and not an engineering problem.  Here is the problem:  Gasoline contains more potential energy by weight and volume than any power storage source we have been able to invent (OK, its actually second, nuclear fuel is first, but I presume Plummer is not going there).  That is the problem with electric cars, for example.  Electric traction motors are demonstrably better sources of motive power than internal combustion engines.  Even Diesel railroad engines are actually driven by electric traction motors.  The problem is energy storage.  Batteries store much less energy per pound and per cubit foot than gasoline.  Ditto natural gas and hydrogen (except at very high pressures).

This claim that only the political power of oil companies keeps no-brainer alternative technologies at bay is absurd, though it is one that never dies in the lunatic fringes.  Mr. Plummer is more than welcome to make himself a billion dollars by selling one of these mystery technologies he fails to disclose.  I will be first in line to buy.

Necessity being the mother of invention, $8 gas would trigger all
manner of investment sure to lead to groundbreaking advances. Job
creation wouldn't be limited to research labs; it would rapidly spill
over into lucrative manufacturing jobs that could help restore
America's industrial base and make us a world leader in a critical
realm.

This is the broken window fallacy on steroids.  I am a HUGE optimist about the limitless capabilities of the human mind, probably more so than Mr. Plummer (by the way, if he is such an optimist, he should read some Julian Simon).  But the best that humanity can probably do any time soon is offset a goodly percentage of the damage from $8 gas.  There is no net win here.  If there were, he should also be advocating $10 bread, $2,000,000 starter home prices, and $200 a month internet service.  Just think about all the innovation that would be required to react to these!

On a similar note, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad recently gained a platform on the world stage because of
their nations' sudden oil wealth. Without it, they would face the
difficult task of building fair and just economies and societies on
some other basis.

Yes sir.  Chavez would be much worse off if he was getting $8 for his gas rather than $3.  What is this guy thinking?  Well, he says this:

In the near term, breaking our dependence on Middle Eastern oil may
well require the acceptance of drilling in the Alaskan wilderness

OK, but that can be done at $3 gas,and should have been allowed at $2 gas.  This oil could have been developed in an environmentally friendly way years ago.  Only Congressional stupidity stands in the way  (probably with the past support of Mr. Plummer).

The recent housing boom sparked further development of
antiseptic, strip-mall communities in distant outlying areas. Making
100-mile-plus roundtrip commutes costlier will spur construction of
more space-efficient housing closer to city centers, including cluster
developments to accommodate the millions of baby boomers who will no
longer need their big empty-nest suburban homes.

   
       

Sure, there's plenty of
land left to develop across our fruited plains, but building more
housing around city and town centers will enhance the sense of
community lacking in cookie-cutter developments slapped up in the
hinterlands.

Andrew Coyne is live-blogging the Mark Steyn inquisition.  Check it out.

A few snippets:

10:16 AM
They're going to call, among others, Dr. Andrew Rippon,
professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Victoria, to show
that Steyn has misunderstood the relationship between the Koran and
Islamic society. Well, that's as may be. Would be a good subject for
debate. But why exactly does that require the state to adjudicate it?...

10:57 AM
Just coming back from a break. Lots of media interest, it seems: CBC, CTV (I'm told), the National Post, local media, and a guy from the New York Times,
who's doing a piece comparing how the two countries' legal systems deal
with speech cases. Needless to say, he can't believe what he's
witnessing"¦

11:04 AM
Under Section 7.1, he continues, innocent intent is not a defence, nor
is truth, nor is fair comment or the public interest, nor is good faith
or responsible journalism.

Or in other words, there is no defence.

Andrew Coyne is live-blogging the Mark Steyn inquisition.  Check it out.

A few snippets:

10:16 AM
They're going to call, among others, Dr. Andrew Rippon,
professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Victoria, to show
that Steyn has misunderstood the relationship between the Koran and
Islamic society. Well, that's as may be. Would be a good subject for
debate. But why exactly does that require the state to adjudicate it?...

10:57 AM
Just coming back from a break. Lots of media interest, it seems: CBC, CTV (I'm told), the National Post, local media, and a guy from the New York Times,
who's doing a piece comparing how the two countries' legal systems deal
with speech cases. Needless to say, he can't believe what he's
witnessing"¦

11:04 AM
Under Section 7.1, he continues, innocent intent is not a defence, nor
is truth, nor is fair comment or the public interest, nor is good faith
or responsible journalism.

Or in other words, there is no defence.

First it was breast implants, then thimerosal, and now it is phthalates.  Each have been attacked in turn by the junk-science / media / tort law complex.  Nobel Prize-winning chemist William Knowles wrote this week:

Lawmakers -- representing the concern of parents influenced by certain
environmentalists -- are calling for an outright ban of phthalates from
children's toys because of the misguided belief that by exposing
children to toys made with these chemicals we are putting their health
at risk.

Phthalates have a long history of attacks by environmental groups
dating back more than 30 years. Even then babies were of prime
consideration. Few chemicals have undergone such extensive testing and
survived as being safe. In fact, diisononyl phthalate, the most
commonly used phthalate in children's toys, has been subjected to more
than 200 tests....

Today, with no new scientific evidence, we are again challenging
phthalates as dangerous to babies and threatening to ban them. These
are products that have survived the toughest test of all, the test of
time. There is no evidence that babies or anyone else has ever been
harmed by them.

Eliminating phthalates from consumer products would be a true
challenge. Even more worrisome, however, is the notion that any
replacement would ever be able to pass the extreme scrutiny diisononyl
phthalate and other phthalates have.

There is nothing wrong with examining the products our children
come into contact with to be sure they pose no health risks. However,
in this case, it would be a great mistake to ban what has been proven
to be a benign product without some further scientific evidence.