Coyote Blog

Via Zero Hedge:

The Washington Post and New York Times have recently opened up their platforms to Op-Eds defending, justifying and promoting abhorrent behavior committed against conservatives. Calling them out is the Washington Examiner's Byron York, who notes that "the toxicity of the resistance to President Trump has risen in recent days," with both papers "publishing rationalizations for denying Trump supporters public accommodation and for doxxing career federal employees."

First up, Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the infamous Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Wilkinson unapologetically booted White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family last June. Wilkinson told the Washington Post at the time that her gay employees were too triggered by Sanders to serve her due to the Trump administration's transgender military ban.

It is going to be fascinating to see how these folks on the Left thread the Constitutional needle to make it illegal to refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings but legal to refuse service to Republicans.  My prediction is that someone on the Left is soon going to try and I am sure the New York Times will gladly give them editorial space to do so.  My guess is that any such theory will take advantage of the popular but bogus "hate speech is not free speech" idea.

I don't really get worked up about accomodation law too much one way or another.  I know our company benefits from being open to all.  We get calls all the time from customers who have been turned away because they have kids or have an older RV and we are happy to have their business.  It's not as true today but 15 years ago we gained a lot of good workers by hiring gay campground managers when many campgrounds thought it was "unsafe" to employ gay people around kids in campgrounds.  On the other hand, I read the First Amendment right of association as the right not to associate as well, so if folks want to turn away business it does not wildly bother me.  I personally wouldn't bake a cake for, say, the local Nazi party rally or Che Guevara birthday party.

My public policy rule of thumb is to allow folks to refuse accommodation as long as they represent a small percentage of the supply in a market.

John Hinderaker of Powerline writes approvingly of Trump's apparent trade deal with Mexico.  First, he quotes the New York Times celebrating the higher taxes:

Under the changes agreed to by Mexico and the United States, car companies would be required to manufacture at least 75 percent of an automobile’s value in North America under the new rules, up from 62.5 percent, to qualify for Nafta’s zero tariffs. They will also be required to use more local steel, aluminum and auto parts, and have 40 to 45 percent of the car made by workers earning at least $16 an hour, a boon to both the United States and Canada and a win for labor unions, which have been among Nafta’s biggest critics.

I am not sure how narrowing the scope of products subject to lower taxes is a "boon" to this country, though I suppose labor unions might be happy and one is suspicious that this is sufficient reason for the NYT to support it.  My suspicion is that these numbers are incredibly carefully tailored by Ford and GM lobbyists to hit a couple of their competitors while missing themselves -- this has all the fingerprints of a classic crony deal that benefits very few powerful groups to the detriment of most consumers.

So the NYT can be expected to cheer for bad crony economics that helps a few unions, but what about Conservatives, who are supposed to understand markets and trade.  Hinderaker writes:

So, from 62.5% to 75% to qualify for zero tariffs. Not exactly radical, but positive.

So broadening a US government tax on US consumers is "positive."  Powerline in the past has rightfully chided Paul Krugman for abandoning his understanding of economics in favor of cheerleading the Democratic team.  Now Powerline is doing the same for Trump.

This article about a skeptic of the dominant Alvarez meteor-extinction debate is quite interesting and worth a read.  Gerta Keller has had quite an interesting life.  But I will say I found it particularly fascinating comparing details here to the climate debate.  Here are a few example quotes that will seem very familiar to those who have watched the back and forth over global warming, particularly from the skeptic side:

Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers. “I’ve never come across anything that’s been so acrimonious,” Kerr says. “I’m almost speechless because of it.” Keller keeps a running list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind her back or to her face. She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at the stake.”

Nobel prize winner Alvarez sounds a bit like Michael Mann:

Ad hominem attacks had by then long characterized the mass-extinction controversy, which came to be known as the “dinosaur wars.” Alvarez had set the tone. His numerous scientific exploits—winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, flying alongside the crew that bombed Hiroshima, “X-raying” Egypt’s pyramids in search of secret chambers—had earned him renown far beyond academia, and he had wielded his star power to mock, malign, and discredit opponents who dared to contradict him. In The New York Times, Alvarez branded one skeptic “not a very good scientist,” chided dissenters for “publishing scientific nonsense,” suggested ignoring another scientist’s work because of his “general incompetence,” and wrote off the entire discipline of paleontology when specialists protested that the fossil record contradicted his theory. “I don’t like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they’re really not very good scientists,” Alvarez told TheTimes. “They’re more like stamp collectors.”

This sounds familiar, dueling battles between models and observations:

That the dinosaur wars drew in scientists from multiple disciplines only added to the bad blood. Paleontologists resented arriviste physicists, like Alvarez, for ignoring their data; physicists figured the stamp collectors were just bitter because they hadn’t cracked the mystery themselves. Differing methods and standards of proof failed to translate across fields. Where the physicists trusted models, for example, geologists demanded observations from fieldwork.

There is pal review

he said impacters had warned some of her collaborators not to work with her, even contacting their supervisors in order to pressure them to sever ties. (Thierry Adatte and Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, who have worked with Keller for years, confirmed this.) Keller listed numerous research papers whose early drafts had been rejected, she felt, because pro-impact peer reviewers “just come out and regurgitate their hatred.”

And charges that key data is not being shared to avoid it falling in the hands of skeptics

She suspected repeated attempts to deny her access to valuable samples extracted from the Chicxulub crater, such as in 2002, when the journal Nature reported on accusations that Jan Smit had seized control of a crucial piece of rock—drilled at great expense—and purposefully delayed its distribution to other scientists, a claim Smit called “ridiculous.” (Keller told me the sample went missing and was eventually found in Smit’s duffel bag; Smit says this is “pure fantasy.”)

Leading to a familiar discussion of scientific consensus

Keller and others accuse the impacters of trying to squash deliberation before alternate ideas can get a fair hearing. Though geologists had bickered for 60 years before reaching a consensus on continental drift, Alvarez declared the extinction debate over and done within two years. “That the asteroid hit, and that the impact triggered the extinction of much of the life of the sea … are no longer debatable points,” he said in a 1982 lecture.....

All the squabbling raises a question: How will the public know when scientists have determined which scenario is right? It is tempting, but unreliable, to trust what appears to be the majority opinion. Forty-one co-authors signed on to a 2010 Science paper asserting that Chicxulub was, after all the evidence had been evaluated, conclusively to blame for the dinosaurs’ death. Case closed, again. Although some might consider this proof of consensus, dozens of geologists, paleontologists, and biologists wrote in to the journal contesting the paper’s methods and conclusions. Science is not done by vote.

I am going to show you this chart from the New York Times and you tell me the lede:

If your first reaction was something like "wow, the gender gap in favor of girls in English simply dwarfs any gender gap that exists in favor of boys in math," you had the same reaction as I did.  All I could think was that all this discussion of getting more girls in STEM is a fine aspiration, but my God, boys in English are a dumpster fire.

I saw the chart standalone like this before I flipped to the source New York Times article and read more.  And, incredibly, this is the title of the article: "Where Boys Outperform Girls in Math:  Rich, White and Suburban Districts."  That's right, the authors look at this chart and all they want to talk about is the small area in the lower right quadrant of the chart, the only place where boys out-perform girls (and even there the maximum boy advantage perhaps a third of the girl advantage across the board in English).  This is bizarre beyond belief.

I wrote the other day in a sort of toss-off conclusion that is looking more accurate today:

Look, I have no doubt that one could easily put together a book about all the ways the public education system fails girls because I think the public education system in many parts of this country fails EVERYONE.  But we seem to keep obsessively questioning whether we are doing enough for girls in education when the problem seems to be boys....

I am not an expert on why this is.   Shifting success norms from competition to cooperation, elimination of historic outlets for non-academic males like vocational programs, and huge amounts of money and counseling resources all dedicated to girls probably play a part.  But the frustrating thing is you almost never see a discussion of this topic.  Anyone who does try to address it is immediately pigeon-holed as some alt-right male rights extremist and defenestrated from the Overton Window.

Update:  Had "boys" and "girls" swapped in the third paragraph.  Thanks for those who pointed it out.  As one reader noted, I need to find a female to help me edit I guess.

The term "hate speech" has become a useful tool for speech suppression, mostly from the Left side of the political aisle.  The reason it is such a dangerous term for free speech is that there is no useful definition of hate speech, meaning that in practice it often comes to mean, "confrontational speech that I disagree with."   I think most of us would agree that saying, "all black men should be lynched" is unambiguously hateful.  But what about saying something like "African Americans need to come to terms with the high rate of black on black violence."  Or even, "President Obama plays too much golf."   I would call both the latter statements opinions that, even if wrong, reasonably fit within the acceptable bounds of public discourse, but both have been called hate speech and racist.

The Left's new tool for speech suppression appears to be the term "fake news."  Certainly a news story that says, "American actually has 57 states" would be considered by most to be fake.  We understand (or most of us outside places like the New York Times, which still seems to get fooled) that sites like the Onion are fake.   But, as I suspected the very first time I heard the term, "fake news" also seems to be defined as "political sites with which I disagree."  Via Reason:

But Zimdars' list is awful. It includes not just fake or parody sites; it includes sites with heavily ideological slants like Breitbart, LewRockwell.com, Liberty Unyielding, and Red State. These are not "fake news" sites. They are blogs that—much like Reason—have a mix of opinion and news content designed to advance a particular point of view. Red State has linked to pieces from Reason on multiple occasions, and years ago I wrote a guest commentary for Breitbart attempting to make a conservative case to support gay marriage recognition....

Reporting on the alleged impact of fake news on the election is itself full of problems. BuzzFeed investigated how well the top "fake" election news stories performed on Facebook compared to the top "real" election news stories. The fake stories had more "engagement" on Facebook than stories from mainstream media outlets. There's basic problems with this comparison—engagement doesn't mean that people read the stories or even believed them (I know anecdotally that when a fake news story shows up in my feed, the "engagement" is often people pointing out that the story is fake).

There's also a problem when you look at the top stories from mainstream media outlets—they tend toward ideologically supported opinion pieces as well. Tim Carney over at The Washington Examinernoted that two of the top three stories are essentially opinion pieces:

Here's the top "Real News" stories: "Trump's history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?" As the headline suggests, this is a liberal opinion piece, complaining that the media doesn't report enough on Trump's scandals.

No. 2 is "Stop Pretending You Don't Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton." This is a rambling screed claiming that people only dislike Clinton because she is a woman.

So in an environment where "fake news" is policed by third parties that rely on expert analysis, we could see ideologically driven posts from outlets censored entirely because they're lesser known or smaller, while larger news sites get a pass on spreading heavily ideological opinion pieces. So a decision by Facebook to censor "fake news" would heavily weigh in favor of the more mainstream and "powerful" traditional media outlets.

The lack of having a voice in the media is what caused smaller online ideology-based sites to crop up in the first place. Feldman noted that he's already removed some sites that he believes have been included "unfairly" in Zimdars' list. His extension also doesn't block access to any sites in any event. It just produces a pop-up warning.

Tellingly, in a quick scan of the sites, I don't see any major sites of the Left, while I see many from the Right (though Zero Hedge is on the list and writes from both the Left and the Right).   Daily Kos anyone?  There are conspiracy sites on the list but none that I see peddle conspiracies (e.g. 9/11 trutherism) of the Left.

This is yet another effort to impose ideological censorship but make it feel like it is following some sort of neutral criteria.

Part of what I wrote to Princeton:

left-leaning kids ... today can sail through 16 years of education without ever encountering a contrary point of view. Ironically, it is kids on the Left who are being let down the most, raised intellectually as the equivalent of gazelles in a petting zoo rather than wild on the Serengeti.

Princeton gazelle student writing in the Daily Princetonian:

In the morning, I woke up to a New York Times news alert and social media feeds filled with disappointment. The United States had democratically elected a man who, among so many other despicable qualities and policies, is accused of and boasts about committing sexual assault. As a woman passionate about gender equality, women’s leadership, and ending sexual violence; as someone dedicated to the Clinton campaign and ready to make history; and, quite frankly, as a human being, I didn’t know how to process this. I still don’t. I felt for my friends and anyone who feels that this result puts their safety and their loved ones’ safety at risk, acknowledging that I am not the person this outcome will affect the most.

I didn’t leave my room Wednesday morning. I sat and sobbed and I still have the tissues all over my floor to prove it. When I absolutely had to get up for class, I put on my “Dare to say the F-word: Feminism” t-shirt and my “A woman belongs in the House and the Senate” sweatshirt to make myself feel stronger. Still crying, I left my room.

After hearing the election results, I had expected that the vandal would have torn down my angry note or left some snide comment. To my surprise, it was still there, and people had left supportive notes beside it. I have no idea whether the vandal is a Trump supporter or a misguided prankster unable to fathom the negative impact that a Trump presidency will have on so many people. But I know that the love and kindness others anonymously left gave me the support I needed Wednesday morning.

In every election since I was about 18 years old, I woke up on the day after the election to a President-elect I did not support, one who championed policies I thought to be misguided or even dangerous.   But I had the mental health to go on with my life;  and I had the knowledge, from a quality western history education (which no longer seems to be taught in high school or at Princeton), that our government was set up to be relatively robust to bad presidents; and I had the understanding, because I ate and drank and went to class and lived with many other students with whom I disagreed (rather than hiding in rubber room safe spaces created by my tribe), that supporters of other political parties were not demons, but were good and well-intentioned people with whom I disagreed.

Aspirin is grandfathered from all the FDA silliness, right?  That's what I thought until this:

But if the FDA gets its way, nitroglycerin will not be obtainable for pennies. The situation was stable until Pfizer went through the time and expense required to test its particular version of nitroglycerin, Nitrostat, which the FDA approved in 2000. Once the FDA did that, other versions became officially "unapproved." In 2010, the FDA sent warning letters to two companies, Glenmark and Konec, ordering them to cease marketing their versions of nitroglycerin, known as sublingual nitroglycerin tablets, leading to the New York Times headline above. The article quotes Dr. Harry M. Lever, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who said, "If it's not approved and no one has tested it, we can't be sure that it's safe and effective." He added that if patients with angina took substandard or ineffective nitroglycerin tablets, their pain might not subside and the problem could potentially progress to a heart attack.

His statement is false. The unapproved versions have been tested in three important ways: the companies that manufacture these drugs thoroughly vet them to make sure that they are pure and offer a consistent dose of nitroglycerin; these marketed drugs have been tested in the bodies of millions of Americans in regular medical practice over many years; and many different organizations have tested nitroglycerin in countless clinical trials.

I can't think of anything about the situation in nitroglycerin that doesn't obtain for aspirin.  By this, all it would take would be for one company to have the cojones and cash to get FDA approval for their aspirin and they might be able to wield a monopoly.

I had this argument the other day with my mother-in-law -- you can't allow a President more power just because he is "your guy" and you trust him.  No matter how well you think that person will use the power (and I trust no one), you are setting a precedent for the next guy whom you may very well not like.   I wrote this way back in 2005:

Technocratic idealists ALWAYS lose control of the game.  It may feel good at first when the trains start running on time, but the technocrats are soon swept away by the thugs, and the patina of idealism is swept away, and only fascism is left.  Interestingly, the technocrats always cry "our only mistake was letting those other guys take control".  No, the mistake was accepting the right to use force on another man.  Everything after that was inevitable.

For years I have asked liberals -- who have cheered President Obama's power grabs as righteous on the basis that "Congress won't don anything, so Obama has to" -- how comfortable they will we with a President Lindsey Graham using the same powers.

I was frequently dismissed, but not any more -- as folks on the Left begin to wake up and imagine President Trump using the same powers wielded by Obama.  To this end, the New York Times has a good article on Obama's drone war and the precedent set for the next President:

President Bush started the drone wars, but Mr. Obama vastly expanded them. Almost entirely on his watch, United States strikes have killed as many as 5,000 people, possibly 1,000 of them civilians. The president approved strikes in places far from combat zones. He authorized the C.I.A. to carry out “signature strikes” aimed at people whose identities the agency did not know but whose activities supposedly suggested militancy. He approved the deliberate killing of an American, Anwar al-Awlaki.

The president also oversaw an aggressive effort to control the public narrative about drone strikes. Even as senior officials selectively disclosed information to the news media, his administration resisted Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, arguing that national security would be harmed if the government confirmed drone strikes were taking place.

The administration also argued in court that federal judges lacked the authority to say whether drone strikes were lawful. It refused to release the evidence that it claimed made Mr. Awlaki a lawful target. In lieu of information, the administration offered assurances that the president and his aides were deeply moral people who agonized over authorizing lethal force.

That last line is perhaps the most dangerous single argument in all of democracy, that it is somehow OK to give an individual enormous extra-Constitutional powers because you trust that individual.  Only now, at the end, do they understand:

But as this election season has underscored, powers this far-reaching should not rest solely on the character of the president and his advisers. In a democracy, the ability to use lethal force must be subject to clear and narrow limits, and the public must be able to evaluate whether those limits are being respected.

When discussing Trump, I see a lot of writers referring to 20th century precedents of populist autocrats.  But if you want to be worried about American democracy, a better example is perhaps the Roman Republic.  The Republic was not killed by one man, even Julius Caesar.    The Republic fell through the slow accretion of autocratic precedents over nearly a hundred years, many of which were set by folks like Gracchus (who seems to have been a well-intentioned reformer) and Sula (who was a hero in Rome).

The date was September 15, 2004.  Trends take years to manifest, but often there is a watershed event at which one can say a tipping point has been reached.  Such was the case when the New York Times ran the headline:

THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: NATIONAL GUARD; Memos on Bush Are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says

"Fake but Accurate" has become, even when the words differ slightly, a common refrain in post-modern journalism.   It is a statement that the narrative matters more than facts, and that the truth or falsity of a narrative would no longer be judged solely on facts and logic.

I have zero opinion about the quality or quantity of President Bush's military service, but the memos in question were unquestionably fake.  They used printing technology that did not exist at the time.  They exactly mirrored Microsoft Word's default settings for font and margin.  The person who supposedly typed the memos said she never did so, and no one could provide any plausible chain of possession for how the documents reached CBS.  So fake.  But CBS and many outlets stuck with the story in the face of all these facts because the narrative was one they so desperately wanted to be true, and fit so well their pre-existing opinions of Bush.  Dan Rather and Mary Mapes have apparently never admitted they were fakes.

Recently, Robert Redford has reinforced this event as a seminal turning point in journalism by making a movie called, of all things, "Truth", which essentially still sticks to the story the memos weren't faked.  He couldn't be more clearly making the point that in post-modern media, "truth" is the narrative, not the facts.

By the way, I find this every day in the climate world, where I hear "fake but accurate" all the time in defense of the narrative of apocalyptic man-made climate change.  I can't tell you how many times that, having demolished some analysis as flawed (e.g. Michael Mann's hockey stick), I am told that, "well, that study may be wrong but it's still accurate."

Ellen Pao has had some career problems of late, but as I wrote yesterday, if she takes some responsibility for her own mis-steps and stops blaming it all on misogyny, she might learn something useful and build positive things on the experience.

A very loyal reader gives me a heads up that her husband, who is never mentioned in recent stories, actually faces a LOT more serious trouble (it is probably journalistically appropriate to leave her husband out of the recent stories, but one wonders if the New York Times would show the same scruples on a story about the CEO of Exxon if, say, his wife were independently in the midst of some sort of scandal).

Ellen Pao's husband is Buddy Fletcher, former Wall Street Wunderkind and now subject of a LOT of regulator scrutiny and pension fund lawsuits.  Here is one:

The firefighters’ system eventually said yes, and along with two other pension funds — the Municipal Employees’ Retirement System and the New Orleans Firefighters’ Pension and Relief Fund — invested a combined $100 million in one of Mr. Fletcher’s funds, FIA Leveraged. As they understood it, the fund would invest in liquid securities that could be sold in a matter of weeks.

The details sounded, as one board member put it, “too good to be true.”

In fact, they were.

Mr. Fletcher’s hedge fund has since been described by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee as having elements of a Ponzi scheme, and four retirement systems are fighting to recover their money. A federal judge is scheduled to rule in March on a plan to liquidate the fund’s assets, which the trustee deemed “virtually worthless” in a report last November.

And another:

New York investment manager Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr. is being sued by the MBTA Retirement Fund and some of his own hedge funds on accusations that he defrauded them of more than $50 million.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in New York, accuses Fletcher and his firm, Fletcher Asset Management , and other parties of conducting a “long-running fraud” in which they misused money for their own benefit, inappropriately took inflated management fees, and overstated the value of assets.

As previously reported, the MBTA pension fund invested $25 million with Fletcher in 2007 on the advice of the fund’s former executive director, Karl White.

White pitched the investment to the pension fund just nine months after he had resigned to work for Fletcher.

The pension fund’s holding is now worthless, and the bankruptcy trustee investigating the case has alleged that Fletcher never invested the money as promised.

And here is an older, in-depth look at Fletcher.

It is starting to look like most of the money went to his family (e.g. $8 to his brother to fund a film), to buffing his image (e.g. $4+ million donation to Harvard), and to an incredibly opulent lifestyle (e.g. 4!! apartments in the Dakota).

Despite the fact that he seems to have grossly overstated income and assets of his funds, no one -- regulators, clients, auditors -- figured it out.  The most interesting part to me was the first group to detect the potential fraud was, of all groups, the governing board of the Dakota.  This group, full of successful Wall Streeters, looked at his financial statements and turned down his application to buy yet another apartment, coming to the conclusion he not only did not have the funds to buy this apartment but they were unsure how he was paying the vig on the $20 million loan securitized by his existing apartments.

One thing Fletcher apparently has in common with his wife is that he seems to respond to every negative business decision with a discrimination lawsuit.  This one backfired, however, and only served to point public attention to the fact that a group of savvy financiers thought Fletcher's wealth was potentially imaginary.  Government investigations and lawsuits have followed.

He still has a chance to escape, though.  Despite Jon Corzine's outright theft of funds from MF Global commodity investor accounts, he got off scott-free due to his close ties to the Democratic Party.  Time for Fletcher to start giving any free assets he still holds (if there are any) to Hillary's campaign.

I had not seen this feature before, but I wanted to give the New York Times some kudos for its "retro report" which apparently looks at past news articles and predictions and wonders what happened to those issues since.  This report is on the failure of Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb predictions.  It is the kind of feature I have wanted to see in the press for a long time.  Good for them.

Sort of.  They fairly ably demonstrate that this 1970's-era doomster prediction was overblown, but then simply substitute a new one: over-consumption.  Ironically, the "over-consumption" doom predictions are based on the exact same false assumptions that led to the population bomb fiasco, namely an overly static view of the world that gives little or no credit to market mechanisms and innovation combined with an ideological bias that opposes things like technological progress, increased wealth, and free exchange.  The modern "over-consumption" meme shares with the Population Bomb the assumption that the world has a fixed carrying capacity, that we have or will soon exceed this capacity, and that actions of man can do nothing to change this capacity.

In essence, the over-consumption doom scenario is essentially identical to the Population Bomb.  In essence, then, the New York Times ably debunks a failed prediction and then renews that prediction under a new name.

John Hinderaker had an article titled "THE TIMES GOES KNOW-NOTHING ON IMMIGRATION".  In it, he criticizes the New York Times' for being too supportive of open immigration.  He proceeds to point out what he believes to be serious negatives of immigration.

I won't go back to my defenses of immigration today.  But I did find his article title ironic.  Was it purposefully so?  I can't imagine that it was.  The word "Know-Nothing" is most associated in American History with the Know Nothing party, formerly the Native American party (meaning "native" white folks, not indigenous peoples).  As you might guess from the name, their main rallying cry was to limit or stop immigration -- at the time their ire was mainly aimed at the Irish.

This is obviously ironic because from historical use, it is Hinderaker that is going know-nothing, not the Times.   And further ironic because the Irish, whom the Know Nothings wanted to keep out, now are considered by most Conservatives to be part of the backbone of America that is being threatened by all these new immigrants.  Most of the arguments he uses against immigrants are virtually identical to those used, and since proven incorrect, by the Know Nothings in the 19th century.

Postscript:  The term Know-Nothing, if I remember right, came not because they were ignorant, but because they tended to be very secretive.  When asked about their party, they would answer that they know nothing (this works best for those who watched Hogan's Heroes and can say this in a sergeant Schultz voice; if you are too young for Hogan's Heroes, then imitating Ygritte in GOT is acceptable).

I really, really did not want to have to write yet another post on this.  99+% of all climate funding goes to alarmists rather than skeptics.   Greenpeace laments donations of funds to skeptics by Exxon of a million dollars or so and wants to drive out all such funding when Greenpeace and Tides and the US Government are giving literally billions to alarmists.  Despite this staggering imbalance, the only stories you ever see are about the dangers and bias introduced by that measly 1% skeptics get.  I guess that 1% is spent pretty well because it sure seems to have people running in circles declaring the sky is falling.

One would think that at some point the world would wake up and realize that criticizing the funding sources behind an individual does not actually rebut that individual's arguments.

Potential bias introduced by funding sources (or some other influence) are a pointer -- they are an indication there might be a problem warranting deeper examination of the evidence introduced and the methodology of collecting that evidence.  Such potential biases are not themselves evidence, and do nothing to rebut an argument.  A reasonable way to use such biases in an argument would be something like:

I want to begin by noting that Joe may have had a predisposition to his stated conclusion even before he started because of [funding source, political view, whatever].  This means we need to very carefully look at how he got to his conclusion.  And I intend to show you that he made several important errors that should undermine our acceptance of his conclusions.  They are....

Unfortunately, nowadays people like the New York Times and our own Arizona Representative Raul Grijalva seem to feel like the job is done after the first sentence.  They have decided that the best way to refute recent scientific work by a number of climate scientists is to try to show that some of their funding comes from fossil fuel companies.

Beyond the strange implicit assumption that fossil fuel funding would automatically "disprove" a research paper, there is also an assumption that oil company funding is "unclean" while government or non-profit environmental group funding is "clean".  Remember the last time you saw a news story about a climate alarmist's funding?  Yeah, neither do I.

There is no justifiable reason for this asymmetry.  Funding does not potentially introduce bias because it is sourced from for-profit or non-profit entities.  In fact, the motivation of the funding source is virtually irrelevant.  The only relevant questions related to bias are:

1. Did the funding source demand a certain conclusion at the outset of the study as the price of the funding -- or --
2. Is there a reasonable expectation that the source would deny future funding if the conclusions of the study don't go their way

My sense is that #1 is rare and that the real issue is #2.

But #2 is ubiquitous.  Sure, if a group of skeptical scientists suddenly started writing papers about 8 degree warming predictions, Chevron is going to be less likely to fund their future research.  But on the flip side if Michael Mann suddenly started saying that future warming will only be a modest 1-2 degrees, do you think that he would continue to get funding from Greenpeace, the Tides Foundation, the WWF, or even from an Obama-run Federal agency?  No way.   There is absolutely no less bias introduced by Chevron funding than from Greenpeace funding, because in each case there can be a reasonable fear by the researcher that future funding would be denied by that source if the "right" answer was not reached.

Postscript & Disclosure of Biases:  I have never received any outside funding for this blog or my climate work.  However, if Chevron were to send me a check for a million dollars, I would probably cash it.  I do own individual shares of ExxonMobil stock as well as shares of the Vanguard S&P500 index fund, which includes equities of a number of energy companies.  I also am a frequent purchaser of gasoline and electricity, as well as a number of other products and services whose prices are tied to energy prices (e.g. air transportation).  As a consumer, I would rather not see the prices of these products rise.  I buy a lot of food, whose price might be improved by longer growing seasons.  My camping company tends to benefit from rising gasoline prices, because rising prices causes people to stay closer to home and camp at the type of places we operate.  It is hard to predict how regional climates will change if overall global temperatures rise, but since many of my campgrounds are summer escapes at high altitude, they would probably benefit somewhat from rising temperatures.  I own a home in Arizona whose value would probably be lessened if the world warmed 2-3 degrees, because it would make winters in the northeast and midwest more bearable and thus hurt Arizona as a location for a winter second home.  Global warming may reduce the life of my dog as we are less likely to walk her when it is over 100 degrees out which makes her less healthy.  I own land in Hawaii that might be more valuable if sea level rises puts it 6-8 inches close to the ocean.  I am planning a vacation to see the tulips bloom in Holland and changes in climate could shift the blooming date and thus cause me to miss the best colors.  Fifteen years from now my daughter would like a June wedding and changes to climate might cause it to rain that day.  My daughter also owns 5 shares of Walt Disney and their earnings might be helped by global warming as nostalgia for cooler weather could greatly increase DVD sales of "Frozen".

It is hard to look at this data and see anything but a positive story, but apparently the New York Times and the rest of the media only see tragedy.  If there is no problem, there is no justification for increased government power, therefore there must be a problem.

(I am presuming this is in real dollars rather than nominal, but God forbid that the NYT ever makes such things clear).  They do manage to show a slight negative recent trend in the growth of the percentage of low income Americans, but only by cherry-picking the dates of comparison to the peaks and troughs of the last two business cycles.  Overall I would read the story as middle and lower class are moving into upper income brackets, but the Times headlines it as "Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up," illustrated with a classic empathy-inducing sad-mom photo.

By the way, since more rich people fall than middle class, it would seem to make sense to discuss instead the falling fortunes of rich people, but of course the NYT has no desire to write that article.

Brink Lindsey of Cato is on the topic "If you could wave a magic wand and make one or two policy or institutional changes to brighten the U.S. economy’s long-term growth prospects, what would you change and why?"  I am by no means in the distinguished academic company that were invited to contribute, but I thought it was an interesting topic.  Here is my (uninvited) contribution.

The question of skills and the American workforce is typically tackled in only one direction:  that we need more high-skilled workers to meet the challenge of emerging industries and business models that are increasingly driven by technology.  A recent report by the OECD, and as summarized in the New York Times, is a typical example of this concern.  As Eduardo Porter writes in the Times:

To believe an exhaustive new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the skill level of the American labor force is not merely slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen dangerously behind.

The report is based on assessments of literacy, math skills and problem-solving using information technology that were performed on about 160,000 people age 16 to 65 in 22 advanced nations of the O.E.C.D., plus Russia and Cyprus. Five thousand Americans were assessed. The results are disheartening....

“Unless there is a significant change of direction,” the report notes, “the work force skills of other O.E.C.D. countries will overtake those of the U.S. just at the moment when all O.E.C.D. countries will be facing (and indeed are already facing) major and fast-increasing competitive challenges from emerging economies.”

A lot of head scratching goes on as to why, when the income premium is so high for gaining skills, there are not more people seeking to gain them.  School systems are often blamed, which is fair in part (if I were to be given a second magic wand to wave, it would be to break up the senescent government school monopoly with some kind of school choice system).   But a large portion of the population apparently does not take advantage of the educational opportunities that do exist.  Why is that?

When one says "job skills," people often think of things like programming machine tools or writing Java code.  But for new or unskilled workers -- the very workers we worry are trapped in poverty in our cities -- even basic things we take for granted like showing up on-time reliably and working as a team with others represent skills that have to be learned.  Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, despite his Princeton education, still learned many of his first real-world job skills working at McDonald's.  In fact, back in the 1970's, a survey found that 10% of Fortune 500 CEO's had their first work experience at McDonald's.

Part of what we call "the cycle of poverty" is due not just to a lack of skills, but to a lack of understanding of or appreciation for such skills that can cross generations.   Children of parents with few skills or little education can go on to achieve great things -- that is the American dream after all.  But in most of these cases, kids who are successful have parents who were, if not educated, at least knowledgeable about the importance of education, reliability, and teamwork -- understanding they often gained via what we call unskilled work.   The experience gained from unskilled work is a bridge to future success, both in this generation and the next.

But this road to success breaks down without that initial unskilled job.   Without a first, relatively simple job it is almost impossible to gain more sophisticated and lucrative work.  And kids with parents who have little or no experience working are more likely to inherit their parent's cynicism about the lack of opportunity than they are to get any push to do well in school, to work hard, or to learn to cooperate with others.

Unfortunately, there seem to be fewer and fewer opportunities for unskilled workers to find a job.  As I mentioned earlier, economists scratch their heads and wonder why there are not more skilled workers despite high rewards for gaining such skills.  I am not an economist, I am a business school grad.   We don't worry about explaining structural imbalances so much as look for the profitable opportunities they might present.  So a question we business folks might ask instead is:  If there are so many under-employed unskilled workers rattling around in the economy, why aren't entrepreneurs crafting business models to exploit this fact?

A few months back, I was at my Harvard Business School 25th reunion.  Over the weekend, they had dozens of lectures and programs on what is being researched and taught nowadays at the school.  I can't remember a single new business model discussed that relied on unskilled workers.

Is this just the way it is now?  Have the Internet and computers and robotics and complex genomics made unskilled work obsolete?  I don't think so.  I have been running a business for over a decade that employs more than 300 people in unskilled positions.  I will confess that the other day I came home tired from work and told my wife, "Honey, in my next company, I have to find a business that doesn't require employees."  But that despair doesn't come from a lack of opportunities to deliver value to customers with relatively unskilled labor.  And it doesn't come from any inherent issues I might have running a large people-driven service company -- in fact, I will say there has been absolutely nothing in my business life that has been more rewarding than seeing a person who has never had anything but unskilled jobs discover that they can become managers and learn more complex tasks.

The reason for my despair comes from a single source:  the government is making it increasingly difficult and costly to hire unskilled workers, while simultaneously creating a culture among new workers that short-circuits their ability to make progress.

The costs that government taxes and rules add to labor have been discussed many times, but usually individually.  Their impact is clearer when we discuss them as a whole.  Let's take California, because that state is one I know well.  To begin, the minimum wage is $9 (going to $10 an hour in 2016).  To that we have to add taxes and workers compensation premiums, both of which are high because because California does little to police fraud in unemployment and injury claims.  For us, these add another $3.15 an hour.  We also now have to add in the Obamacare employer mandate, which at a minimum of $3000 per full-time employee (accepting the penalty is cheaper than paying for health care) adds another $1.50 an hour.  And the new California paid sick leave mandate adds another 45 cents an hour.  So, looking just at core requirements, we are already up to a minimum of $14.10 an hour, less than 2/3 of which actually shows up in the employee's paycheck.

But these direct costs don't even begin cover the additional fixed costs of hiring employees.  We pay a payroll company thousands of dollars a year to make sure that regulations on taxes and paychecks are followed.  We spend so much time making sure our written plans and documentation on safety meet the requirements of OSHA and its California state equivalent that we barely have the capacity to actually focus on safety.  In California we have to have complex systems in place to make sure our employees don't work through their lunch break, that they have the right sort of chair and that they sit in them frequently enough, that they follow all the right procedures when the temperature outside goes over 85 degrees, that they get paid for sick leave and get their job back after extended medical leave.... the list goes on and on.

In a smaller company, we don't have lawyers and a large human resource staff.  In fact, we tend to have little staff at all.  If some new compliance issue arises -- which happens about every day the California legislature is in session -- the owner (me) has to figure out a solution.  In one year I literally spent more personal time on compliance with a single regulatory issue -- implementing increasingly detailed and draconian procedures so I could prove to the State of California that my employees were not working over their 30 minute lunch breaks -- than I did thinking about expanding the business or getting new contracts.

Towards the end of last year I was making a speech to a group of business school students, and someone asked me what my biggest accomplishment had been over the prior year.  I told them it was probably getting the company down from hundreds of full-time workers to less than 50, converting everyone to part-time.  And it was a huge effort, involving new systems and a number of capital investments to accommodate more staff working fewer hours.  And it had a huge payout, saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in Obamacare penalties and compliance costs.  But come on!  How depressing is it that my biggest business accomplishment was not growing the business or coming up with a new customer service but in cutting the working hours for good employees?  But that is the reality of trying to run a service business today.  The business couldn't be profitable until we'd adjusted our practices to these new regulations, so there was no point in even thinking about growth until we had done so.

Labor-based business models that work at a $7 or $8 total labor cost may well not work at $15, and they certainly are not going to grow very fast if the people responsible for seeking out growth opportunities are instead consumed in a morass of legal compliance issues.  But there is perhaps an even more damaging impact of government interventions, and that is to the culture of work.  I will confess in advance I don't have comprehensive data to prove my hypothesis, but let me tell a couple of stories.

Until 2010, we never had an employee sue us.  We had over 8 years hiring 350 seasonal workers a year, mostly older retired folks, without any sort of legal issues.  Since 2010, we have had eight employee suits threatened or filed, all of which we have won but at a legal cost of $20-$25 thousand each (truly Pyrrhic victories).  So what changed around 2010?  Well, our work force composition changed a lot.  Before that time, we typically hired older retired folks, because the seasonal nature of the job is simply not very appropriate for a younger person trying to support themselves without other means (like retirement or Social Security).   However, after 2009 when a lot of younger folks were losing their traditional jobs, they began applying to our company.  Our work force shifted younger, which actually excited me because I felt it would help us in attracting a younger demographic to the campgrounds we operate.    But all eight of these legal actions were by these new, younger employees.  I asked one person who was suing us over what was a trivial slight, really a misunderstanding, why they did not just call me (my personal number is in their employee handbook) to fix it.  They said that if I had fixed it, they would have lost the opportunity to sue.

I mentioned earlier that we had struggled to comply with California meal break law.   The problem was that my workers needed extra money, and so begged me to be able to work through lunch so they could earn a half-hour more pay each day.  They said they would sign a paper saying they had agreed to this.  Little did I know that this was a strategy devised by a local attorney who understood meal break litigation better than I.  What he knew, but I didn't, was that based on new case law, a company had to get the employee's signature every day, not just once, to avoid the meal break penalties.  The attorney advised them they could get the money for working lunch AND they could sue later for more money (which he would get a cut of).  Which is exactly what they did, waiting until November to sue so they could get some extra money to pay for Christmas bills.  This is why -- believe it or not -- it is now a firing offense at our company to work through lunch in California.

Hopefully you see my concern.   I fear that we have trained a whole generation that the way one gets ahead is not to work hard and gain new skills but to seek out and exploit opportunities to file lawsuits.  That the way to work in an organization is not to learn to manage the inevitable frictions that result from different sorts of people working together but to sue at the first hint that you have been dissed.  As an aside, I think this sort of litigiousness, both of employees and customers, is yet another reason employers are reluctant to hire low-skilled employees.  If as a business owner one is absolutely liable for any knuckle-headed thing your most junior employee might utter, no matter how clear you are in your policies and actions that such behavior is not tolerated, then how likely are you to hire a high-school dropout with no work experience?

Is it any surprise that most entrepreneurs are pursuing business models where they leverage revenues via technology and a relatively small, high-skill workforce?  Uber and Lyft at first seem to buck this trend, with their thousands of drivers.  But in fact they prove the rule.  Uber and Lyft are very very careful to define themselves and their service in a way that all those drivers don't work for them.  I would go so far to say that if Uber were forced to actually put all of those drivers on their payroll, and deal with they myriad of labor compliance issues, their model would fall apart

We cannot address the skill gap unless people have entry level, low-skill-tolerant jobs to take the first steps up the ladder of success.  If the government continues on its current course, it will become impossible to run a business that employs unskilled workers.  The value of the work performed will simply not justify the cost.  We may be concerned about income inequality today, but if we kill off the profitability of employing unskilled workers, then we are going to be left with a true two-class society -- those with high-skill jobs and those on government assistance --and few options for moving from one to the other.

I would characterize long-term Japanese economic policy this way:

• Technocratically planned economy where the government chose winners and losers and directed capital to industries favored for development (e.g. MITI with steel, autos, electronics).
• Strong government favoritism for exports and exporters over the domestic economy -- export industries are heavily protected at the cost of raising costs for internal consumers and limiting competition in domestic markets.
• Enormous, near Herculean commitment to deficit spending as stimulus.  With deficits consistently running in the 8% of GP range and total government debt a stratospheric levels, Japan is the poster child for Krugman's anti-austerity

To these three I would add something that is seldom mentioned, that Japan has a near Scandinavian GINI index, with income inequality well under that of the US.  Oh yes, and they were an enthusiastic adopter of CO2 limits.

And the result of all this has been... 25 years of stagnation.

I remember when every one of these three planks was enthusiastically lauded by the US elite.  I was at Harvard Business School in the late 1980's and much of the discussion was about the US needing to adopt MITI-like government industrial planning and management.  If pressed at the time, people might kind of sort of acknowledge that life wasn't so good for Japanese consumers, but we were in a Michael Porter big picture competitiveness-of-nations phase, and no one seemed to care that their definition of national success did not turn out so well for the people actually living there.

To me, Japan is a giant case study in Austrian economics.  It's like they set out to run a quarter-century test: "let's see if mispricing of credit and forced misallocation of capital is really the cause of recessions."  So it is amazing that no one seems to want to acknowledge the results of this experiment.  Paul Krugman appears weekly in the New York Times to frequently advocate for exactly this same economic plan.

An excellent editorial from Tim Carney

Democrats occupied the Senate floor all night Monday, talking aboutclimate change. They didn't try to advance any legislation, and they didn't even try very hard to get media attention.

“The members know that serious climate change legislation stands no chance of passage in this divided Congress,” wrote the New York Times' climate-change reporter, Coral Davenport. Beyond that, Democrats know that action on climate legislation would help Republicans take the Senate in 2014.

So why occupy the Senate floor talking about the issue? In short: Faith, identity and cash.

The liberal climate cause is easier to understand if you think of it as a religion. Monday’s talkathon sounded at times like a religious revival. Senators spoke about the faithful who “believe in wind” and “believe in renewable” energy. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said climate for him is “a faith issue.”

One doctrine in the Church of Climate is sola fide. In the words of Reformation theology: Justification comes through faith alone. “Good works” are irrelevant....

Beyond exercises in faith and identity politics, the Democratic all-nighter should be understood as a very odd fundraiser. Most fundraisers feature one or two politicians speaking to dozens of donors. Monday night featured a dozen politicians speaking to one donor: Energy billionaire Tom Steyer.

Steyer, having made his riches partly in green energy and fossil fuels, has decided to spend his billions electing Democrats who will pass climate legislation. He says he’s divested from his energy holdings, signifying his intentions are sincere.

Steyer spent $8 million to help elect Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia last fall. “Steyer will inject millions into assorted races” in 2014, reports Joe Hagan in Men's Journal. Steyer has made it very clear what a politician needs to do to get his money: Make a big deal about climate change.

By the way, kudos to Carney for getting this correct.  It seems like an easy nuance to get accurately, but no one in the media ever does

Democrats called Republicans “deniers” 28 times during the talkathon. Majority Leader Harry Reidframed his speech this way: “Despite overwhelming scientific evidence and overwhelming public opinion, climate change deniers still exist.”

There’s an ounce of truth to this attack: Some Republicans wrongly deny that carbon dioxide and similar gasses exert a net upward pressure on atmospheric temperature, and that this has affected the climate.

But liberals hurl the term “climate denier” at anyone who doubts the hyperbolic catastrophic predictions of Al Gore, posits that non-manmade factors (like the sun) may also drive climate change, or opposes Democrats policies — the same policies Democrats aren’t actually trying to pass.

I have actually learned to embrace the "denier" label.  When it is applied to me, I agree that I am, but that one has to be careful what exact proposition I am denying.  I don't deny that the world has warmed over the last 100 years or that man-made CO2 has contributed incrementally to that warming, both now and in the future.  What I deny is the catastrophe.

I am simply exhausted with Paul Krugman calling people anti-science neanderthals for staking out fairly mainstream economic positions that he himself has held in the past.  It would be one thing to say, "well, I used to believe the same thing but I changed my mind because x, y, z".  That would be a statement to respect.  Instead Krugman 1) pretends he never said any such thing and 2) acts like his opponent's position is so out of the mainstream that they are some sort of terrorist for even suggesting it.

I had an example just the other day.

Here is another, from Ben Domenech:

Yesterday, New York Times columnist and CUNY economics professor Paul Krugman had some very strong words about the position in Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s new poverty report that American welfare programs discourage work and “actually reduce opportunity, creating a poverty trap.”  In fact, after contrasting the Ryan report’s view on poverty traps with some data on inequality and welfare states, Krugman resoundingly concluded that Ryan’s ideas were a total sham:

So the whole poverty trap line is a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy; the alleged facts about incentive effects are mostly wrong, and in any case the entire premise that work effort = social mobility is wrong.

Despite Krugman’s strong conclusions, however, Ryan’s views about US welfare policies and poverty traps are actually pretty mainstream – cited by people across the political spectrum as a big reason to reform state federal poverty programs.  In fact, a New York Times columnist and Princeton economics professor expressed these widely-held views on the Old Grey Lady’s pages a mere two months ago:

But our patchwork, uncoordinated system of antipoverty programs does have the effect of penalizing efforts by lower-income households to improve their position: the more they earn, the fewer benefits they can collect. In effect, these households face very high marginal tax rates. A large fraction, in some cases 80 cents or more, of each additional dollar they earn is clawed back by the government.”

Even more, the Ryan report’s “poverty trap” analysis is based on the work of the Urban Institute’s Gene Steuerle’s (see p. 7 of the Ryan report), on whom the very same Princeton professor once wrote:

[I]t’s actually a well-documented fact that effective marginal rates are highest, not on the superrich, but on workers toward the lower end of the scale. Why? Partly because of the payroll tax, but largely because of means-tested benefits that fade out as your income rises. Here’s a recent discussion by Eugene Steuerle…

That professor, if you haven’t already guessed, was none other than Paul Krugman. 

By the way, can I say how happy the first sentance of this quote makes me, to no longer see my alma mater mentioned in the same breath as Krguman at every turn?

Update:  If you want to understand how deep the fraud runs, make sure to watch the 60 second video below with the US environmentalists caught on tape plotting their fraud.

Via Bloomberg:

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said today that the second-largest U.S. oil company provided enough evidence that a 2011 judgment on behalf of rain forest dwellers in the country’s Lago Agrio area was secured by bribing a judge and ghostwriting court documents. Kaplan oversaw a seven-week nonjury trial over Chevron’s allegations.

“The decision in the Lago Agrio case was obtained by corrupt means,” Kaplan said in an opinion that gave Chevron a sweeping victory. “The defendants here may not be allowed to benefit from that in any way.”

Chevron, based in San Ramon, California, was ordered to pay $19 billion to a group of farmers and fishermen by the Ecuadorean court. The award was reduced to $9.5 billion on Nov. 12 by the Ecuadorean National Court of Justice, the nation’s highest tribunal. That's almost half of its 2013 profit.

The Ecuadorean villagers, and activists working on their behalf, argued the oil producer should be held financially responsible for pollution of the Amazon rainforest by Texaco Inc. from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, claims the company already paid $40 million to clean up its share of the drilling contamination....

In its racketeering case before Kaplan, Chevron alleged that a U.S. lawyer leading the Ecuadoreans, Steven Donziger, and members of his team engaged in “repeated acts of fraud, bribery, money laundering” and obstruction of justice in pursuit of a multibillion-dollar payout.

I don't think there is any doubt that Chevron owed the Ecuadorans some clean up, since even they have agreed to doing work there.  And it is not unreasonable to be skeptical that Chevron's actions were perhaps incomplete.  But the $19 billion judgement always has smelled, particularly when the judge in the Ecuadoran case publicly admitted he had been bribed.

There was deep corruption in this case from the start, corruption that never will be adequately covered in the media because it "was for a good cause."  Similar levels of corruption by Chevron would have led the front page of the New York Times for weeks.

As a reminder, let me quote from an earlier story.  Please watch the short video, it is amazing:

The clip below is an outtake from the environmentalist movie "Crude", which purported to document the environmentalist's case against Chevron in Ecuador.  Apparently, between takes of earnest and un-selfinterested environmentalists saving the world from greedy corporations, these self-same environmentalists discussed lying about the science and duping the courts in order to score a big payday for themselves.

The video is doubly interesting because, as Anthony Watts explains, the woman in the video taking money to make up untrue findings was recently confirmed to the NAS, where there is a good bet that we will see her as the source for "evidence" that fracking is contaminating groundwater.  These three folks are all the subject of a civil suit from Chevron but all three should be subject to criminal charges for fraud and conspiracy.

Several of the environmentalists involved, including Dr. Ann Maest, have since recanted their corruption, sort of.  They claim they were "misled" in this New York Times story, but the clip above certainly belies that.  Donziger did not mislead her, he is seen convincing her that in Ecuador they can get away with lying.  All for a good cause, of course.

Dispatches from the echo chamber:  Mother Jones was on this story full force for years.  Then suddenly stopped reporting at all when it became clear that allegations of fraud were credible.  Check out the articles.

Update:  More here

I like digging through the raw data in the Obamacare report rather than just accepting the bits the New York Times wants to report.  As a business guy, I was looking at the data from a sales-conversion perspective -- ie, who is buying and who is not?  And of course, why?

When I was in the marketing world, we used to call the process of sales conversion the sales funnel.  For the exchanges this means some percentage of the available market actually show up at the exchange, and then some percentage of those actually complete the arduous sign-up process, and some percentage of those actually select a policy, and presumably some percentage of those actually pay, though we don't know what that latter percentage is.  At each step, we ask ourselves what people are we converting from one step to the next, and why.

Here is the Obamacare exchange sales funnel through December (as has become tradition, it is a scavenger hunt to fill this in and the data locations move around from month to month).

As you can see, of the nearly 3.7 million people who have selected a private plan or been put in Medicaid or CHIP, fully 88% are on the government dole (subsidized or full Medicare).

The interesting new data is on the plan selection breakdown between subsidized and un-subsidized.   This leads to an interesting finding that is a bit non-obvious from the report itself because the data is spread all over the report.  But lets look at conversion of applicants to plan selection based on whether folks are subsidized or subsidized.

For the 2,383,131 applicants who find they are no going to be subsidized, only 436,603 have selected a plan, for a 18% conversion rate

For the 2,756,667 applicants who find they will get supported by the taxpayer, 1,646,237 selected a plan, far a 60% conversion rate.

In essence, applicants are more than 3 times more likely to sign up if they are getting taxpayer money.  The exchanges are not selling health care, they are selling subsidies.  People sign up, check to see if they have money coming, and go away if they don't and stay if they do.

The next really interesting piece of data would be the demographics and health status of the 18% who did sign up for an unsubsidized plan.  I would not be at all surprised if the demographics there were far, far worse than the average.  Emerging hypothesis:  People come to the exchange, and sign up if they get a subsidy, or if they have health problems or high risk.

The New York Times has a long article on  Harvard Business School's effort to change its culture around women.  Given that both my wife and I attended, albeit 25 years ago, I have a few thoughts.

• I thought the article was remarkably fair given that it came from the NYT.  Men who are skeptical of the program actually are allowed to voice intelligent objections, rather than just be painted as Neanderthals
• I would have abhorred the forced gender indoctrination program, as much for being boring as for being tangential.  I am fortunate I grew up when I did, before such college group-think sessions were made a part of the process everywhere.  I would presume most of these young folks are now used to such sessions from their undergrad days.   I would not have a problem having an honest and nuanced discussion about these issues with smart people of different backgrounds, but I thought the young man they quoted in the article said it really well -- there is just no payoff to voicing a dissenting opinion in such sessions where it is clear there is a single right answer and huge social and even administrative penalties for saying the wrong thing.
• I went to HBS specifically because I loved the confrontational free-for-all of the classes.   It was tailor-made to my personality and frankly I have never been as successful at anything before or since as I was at HBS.   I say this only to make it clear that I have a bias in favor of the HBS teaching process.   I do think there is an issue that this process does not fit well with certain groups.  These folks who do not thrive in the process are not all women (foreign students can really struggle as well) but they are probably disproportionately women.  So I was happy to see that rather than dumb down the process, they are working to help women be more successful and confident in it.
• It is interesting to see that the school still struggles to get good women professors.  When I was there, the gap between the quality of men and women professors was staggering.  The men were often older guys who had been successful in the business and finance world and now were teaching.  The women were often young and just out of grad school.  The couple of women professors I had my first year were weak, probably the two weakest professors I had.  In one extreme case our female professor got so jumbled up in the numbers that the class demanded I go down and sort it out, which I finally did.  I thought it was fun at the time, but now I realize how humiliating it was.
• To some extent, the school described in the article seems a different place than when I was there.  They describe a school awash in alcohol and dominated by social concerns.  This may be a false impression -- newspapers have a history of exaggerating college bacchanalia.   At the time I was there, Harvard did not admit many students who did not have at least 2 years of work experience, such that the youngest students were 24 and many were in their 30's and 40's.  A number were married and some even had children.   To be there, they not only were paying a lot of money but they were quitting paying jobs.  The school was full of professionals who were there for a purpose.  I had heard that HBS had started to admit more students right out of college -- perhaps that is a mistake.
• The fear by the women running the school that women would show up on Halloween wearing "sexy pirate" costumes represents, in my mind, one of the more insidious aspects of this new feminist paternalism (maternalism?) aimed at fellow women.  Feminism used to be about empowering women to make whatever choices they want for their lives.   Now it is increasingly about requiring women to make only the feminist-approved choices.
• I actually wrote a novel where the protagonist was a confident successful female at HBS.   So I guess I was years ahead of the curve.

Postscript:  Below the fold is an excerpt from my novel.  In it, the protagonist Susan describes how an HBS class works and shares my advice for being successful at HBS.

Continue reading ‘Harvard Business School and Women’ »

I don't like tribal red-blue politics, but I read a couple of blogs both from team elephant and team donkey to at least make sure I am not living in a libertarian echo chamber.  From that I know that bloggers on the Right were complaining for years about Maureen Dowd's dishonest editing of quotations to make Republicans look bad.  Apparently, bloggers on the Left, in this case Kevin Drum, have had it with Dowd's dishonest quote manipulation as well.

Which all means that Dowd likely has a job for life at the New York Times, as journalism today seems more about generating controversy and clicks rather than delivering facts -- and controversies like this that send everyone running in circles on Twitter certainly generate attention.  From the New York Times : We have met TMZ and they are us.

From Foreign Policy

Every turn in the investigation that led to Petraeus's resignation perfectly illustrates the incredible and dangerous reach of the massive United States surveillance apparatus, which, through hundreds of billions of dollars in post-9/11 programs -- coupled with weakened privacy laws and lack of oversight -- has affected the civil liberties of every American for years. The only difference here is the victim of the surveillance state's reach was not a faceless American, but the head one of the agencies tasked to carry it out.....

It seems the deciding factor in opening the investigation was not the emails' content, but the fact that the FBI agent was friendly with Kelley. (Even more disturbing, the same FBI agent has now been accused of becoming "obsessed" with the Tampa socialite, sent shirtless pictures to her, and has been removed from the case.)...

One would assume, and hope, police have to get probable cause for all emails, just like they would for a physical letter or a phone call. But the law governing email -- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) -- doesn't have such requirements for emails more than 180 days old. Because ECPA was written in 1986, before the World Wide Web even existed, archived emails were an afterthought given the incredibly small storage space on email servers....

While these details may shock the average reader, these privacy-invasive tactics are used regularly by both federal and local law enforcement around the United States. In fact, as the New York Times reported, referring to Petraeus, "Law enforcement officials have said they used only ordinary methods in the case." The only difference here is the target was the director of the CIA and one of the most decorated soldiers in modern military history.

Electronic communication needs better Fourth Amendment protection.

By the way, another scandal here that interests me more than the sex thing is that the head of the CIA has such a terrible grasp on basic fieldcraft

Petraeus and Kelley were communicating not by sending each other emails, but using an old (and apparently ineffective) trick -- "used by terrorists and teenagers alike" -- of saving drafts in the draft folder of Gmail, thinking this was more private than if they sent them to each other. But as the ACLU's Chris Soghoian explained, this was not so

OK, there are lots of reasons to get Obama out of office.  The problem is, that for most of them, I have no reasonable hope that Romney will be any better.  Corporatism?  CEO as Venture-Capitalist-in-Chief?  Indefinite detentions?  Lack of Transparency?  The Drug War?   Obamacare, which was modeled on Romneycare?  What are the odds that any of these improve under Romney, and at least under Obama they are not being done by someone who wraps himself in the mantle of small government and free markets, helping to corrupt the public understanding of those terms.

So I am pretty sure I cannot vote for Romey.  I really like Gary Johnson and I am pretty sure he will get my vote.  Republican friends get all over me for wasting my vote, saying it will just help Obama win.  So be it -- I see both candidates undertaking roughly the same actions and I would rather that bad statist actions be taken in the name of Progressives rather than in the name of someone who purports to be free market.

To test my own position, I have been scrounging for reasons to vote for Romney.  I have two so far:

1.  Less likely to bail out Illinois when its pension system goes broke in the next few years

2.  I might marginally prefer his Supreme Court nominees to Obama's

That is about all I have.  Stretching today, I have come up with a third:

3.  If we have a Republican in the White House, the press will start doing its job and dig into the facts about drone strikes and warrant-less wiretapping.

You know the press are in full defense mode protecting their guy in office when the only press that reports on the ACLU's accusation about sky-rocketing wire tapping under Obama are the libertarians at Reason and the Marxists at the World Socialist Web site.  Four years ago the New York Times would have milked this for about a dozen articles.  It may take a Republican President to get the media to kick back into accountability mode over expansions of executive power.

In his New York Times column, Paul Krugman blames the coming British recession on the government's "austerity."  In the Left's parlance, "austerity" means the government is not spending and in particular deficit spending enough.

But it turns out that

a. Of 44 major economies in the world, the British have been running the highest budget deficits of any country except two - Greece and Egypt are higher.

b. British real government spending has risen every year through the financial crisis

Presuming Krugman has access to these basic facts, is his argument that Britain should be deficit spending even more (and if so, wtf is enough?) or is this just political hackery to help Obama dispel concerns about his deficits?