Survival of Chromosomal Changes

Survival of Chromosomal Changes

SURVIVAL of CHROMOSOMAL CHANGES The following are excerpts from the informative blog by Robert Williams, specifically from his... Comparison of the Human and Great Ape Chromosomes as Evidence for Common Ancestry ... which is part of his larger collection as...Evidence for Human and Ape Common Ancestry.

HOW CHROMOSOMAL CHANGES CAN SURVIVE and LEAD TO NEW SPECIES Some may raise the objection that if the fusion was a naturalistic event, how could the first human ancestor with the fusion have successfully reproduced? We have all heard that the horse and the donkey produce an infertile mule in crossing because of a different number of chromosomes in the two species. Well, apparently there is more to the story than we are usually told, because variations in chromosome number are known to occur in many different animal species, and although they sometimes seem to lead to reduced fertility, this is often not the case. Refs 5, 6, and 7 document both the existence of such chromosomal number differences and the fact that differences do not always result in reduced fertility. I can provide many more similar references if required. The last remaining species of wild horse, Przewalski's (sha-val-skis) Wild Horse has 66 chromosomes while the domesticated horse has 64 chromosomes. Despite this difference in chromosome number, Przewalski's Wild Horse and the domesticated horse can be crossed and do produce fertile offspring (see reference 9 below).

5. Chromosomal heterozygosity and fertility in house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) from Northern Italy. Hauffe HC, Searle JB. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PS, United Kingdom.

Following the discovery of over 40 Robertsonian (Rb) races of Mus musculus domesticus in Europe and North Africa, the house mouse has been studied extensively as an ideal model to determine the chromosomal changes that may cause or accompany speciation. Current models of chromosomal speciation are based on the assumption that heterozygous individuals have a particularly low fertility, although recent studies indicate otherwise. Despite their importance, fertility estimates for the house mouse are incomplete because traditional measurements, such as anaphase I nondisjunction and germ cell death, are rarely estimated in conjunction with litter size. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we have taken advantage of the house mouse hybrid zone in Upper Valtellina (Lombardy, Italy) in which five Rb races interbreed. We present data on the fertility of naturally occurring ("wild-caught") hybrids and of offspring from laboratory crosses of wild-caught mice ("laboratory-reared"), using various measurements. Wild-caught mice heterozygous for one fusion were more infertile than predicted from past studies, possibly due to genic hybridity; laboratory-reared heterozygotes carrying seven or eight trivalents at meiosis I and heterozygotes carrying one pentavalent also had low fertilities. These low fertilities are especially significant given the probable occurrence of a reinforcement event in Upper Valtellina.

PMID: 9799266, UI: 99016093

6. An observed chromosome fusion. Hereditas 1998;129(2):177-80 A new centric fusion translocation in cattle: rob (13;19). Molteni L, De Giovanni-Macchi A, Succi G, Cremonesi F, Stacchezzini S, Di Meo GP, Iannuzzi L. Institute of Animal Husbandry, Faculty of Agricultural Science, Milan, Italy..

A new Robertsonian translocation has been found in cattle. A bull from Marchigiana breed (central Italy) was found to be a heterozygous carrier of a centric fusion translocation involving cattle chromosomes 13 and 19 according to RBA-banding and cattle standard nomenclatures. CBC-banding revealed the dicentric nature of this new translocation, underlining the recent origin of this fusion. In fact, both the bull's parents and relatives had normal karyotypes. In vitro fertilization tests were also performed in the bull carrying the new translocation, in two bulls with normal karyotypes (control) and in four other bulls carrying four different translocations.

PMID: 10022084, UI: 99146110

7. Cytogenetics and reproduction of sheep with multiple centric fusions (Robertsonian translocations). Bruere AN, Ellis PM. J Reprod Fertil 1979 Nov;57(2):363-75.

The significance of centric fusions (Robertsonian translocations) in domestic animals, with special reference to sheep, is reviewed. The mating is described of a further 856 ewes with either a normal chromosome number 2n = 54 or carrying one or more of the three different translocations (centric fusions) t1, t2 and t3 in various heterozygous and homozygous arrangements. Rams which were used in the matings were homozygous for one of the translocation chromosomes (2n = 52), double heterozygotes (2n = 52), triple heterozygotes (2n = 51) or were carriers of 4 translocation chromosomes (2n = 50) and 5 translocation chromosomes (2n = 49). A remarkably even distribution of segregation products was recorded in the progeny of all combinations of translocation ewes x translocation rams in those groups in which sufficient animals were available for statistical analysis. Forty-eight chromosomally different groups of animals were mated. Further, the overall fertility of the translocation sheep, measured by conception rate to first service, lambing percentage and number of ewes which did not breed a lamb, was not significantly different from New Zealand national sheep breeding data. In some groups the poorer reproductive performance could be explained by the age structure of the flock and inbreeding depression, which probably affected the performance of some animals. Sheep with progressively decreasing chromosome numbers, due to centric fusion, 2n = 50, 2n = 49 and 2n = 48, are reported. The 2n = 48 category represents a triple homozygous ewe and a triple homozygous ram and is the first report of the viable evolution of such domestic animals. Less than 1% of phenotypically abnormal lambs were recorded in a total of 1995 progeny born over 10 years. It is now considered that there is little or no evidence to suggest that centric fusions in a variety of combinations affect the total productive fitness of domestic sheep. It is suggested that future research should be more actively directed to understanding their genetic significance.

PMID: 513026, UI: 80074806

9. Cytogenetic studies of three equine hybrids. Chandley AC, Short RV, Allen WR. J Reprod Fertil Suppl 1975 Oct;(23):356-70

A detailed investigation of testicular meiosis in a mule, a hinny and a Przewalski horse/domestic horse hybrid were made. Abnormalities of pairing were observed in the mule and hinny in most germ cells at the pachytene stage of meiotic prophase, and spermatogenesis was almost totally arrested. A few mature spermatozoa were recovered from the ejaculate and epididymal flushings of the hinny. The Przewalski horse/domestic horse hybrid was fertile and showed normal spermatogenesis. Chromosome banding studies showed a close homology between the karyotypes of the Prezwalski horse (Equus przewalskii, 2n = 66) and the domestic horse (E. caballus, 2n = 64), and it is evident that a single Robertsonian translocation has occurred transforming four acrocentric chromosomes of E. przewalskii into two metacentric chromosomes in E. caballus. The investigations showed that a trivalent is formed at meiosis in the hybrid (2n = 65), segregation from which gives two classes of genetically balanced spermatozoa. Both of these are capable of producing normal offspring if they fertilize the eggs of a domestic mare.

PMID: 1060807 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

I Checked My Privilege, And It’s Doing Just Fine - Kurt Schlichter - Page full

I Checked My Privilege, And It’s Doing Just Fine - Kurt Schlichter - Page full

Liberals have a new word for what normal people call “success.” They call it “privilege,” as if a happy, prosperous life is the result of some magic process related to where your great-great-great-grandfather came from.

It’s the latest leftist argument tactic, which means it is a tactic designed to prevent any argument and to beat you into rhetorical submission. Conservatives, don’t play their game.

It’s easy to see that this notion that accomplishment comes not from hard work but from some mysterious force, operating out there in the ether, is essential to liberal thought. To excuse the dole-devouring layabouts who form so much of the Democrat voting base, it is critical that they undermine the achievements of those who support themselves. We can’t have the American people thinking that hard work leads to success; people might start asking why liberal constituencies don’t just work harder instead of demanding more money from those who actually produce something.

....

So how do we deal with this idiocy? The proper response to the privilege gambit is laughter. The super-serious zealots of progressivism hate being laughed at, but there’s really no other appropriate response outside of a stream of obscenities. The privilege game is designed to circumvent arguments based on reason and facts and evidence, so the way to win it is to defeat it on its own terms.

Call: “Check your privilege!”

Response: “What you call ‘privilege’ is just me being better than you.”

They won’t like it. It will make them angry. Good. Because tactics like “Check your privilege” are designed to make us angry, to put us off-balance, to baffle us and suck us down into a rabbit hole of leftist jargon and progressive stupidity.

Don’t follow them. Mock them. Accuse them of adhering to a transphobic cisnormative paradigm and start shrieking “Hate crime!”

Don’t worry about not making sense. They’re college students. They are used to not understanding what people smarter than they are tell them.

Respectful argument should be reserved for those who respect the concept of argument. The sulky sophomores who babble about privilege do not. They only understand power. And we give them power when we give their nonsense the respect we would give a coherent argument.

Wal-Mart banks, overdraft protection, and consumer rationality

Wal-Mart banks, overdraft protection, and consumer rationality

The Wall Street Jounral has a fascinating story on the front page about the operations of banks located inside Wal-Mart–although not really for the reason that the reporters believe it is interesting. The authors think it is interesting because they see it as exposing nefarious practices by these banks, which generate large overdraft protection fees and (it is implied) exploit consumers. In fact, the real story is exactly the opposite–it is compelling evidence of how consumers use alternative credit products, and I suspect, compelling evidence of the unintended consequences of government regulation of consumer credit products.

In an article that former Comptroller of the Currency Robert Clarke and I published in the fall, we discussed in detail how consumers use bank overdraft protection and payday lending and the competition between the two products. In particular, we note that available evidence strongly suggests that in choosing between the two products, consumers generally choose rationally. First, those who use these products (like all alternative lending products) are people who don’t have credit cards or would exceed their credit limits on their credit cards and trigger high fees. So they use these products because they are the least-bad alternative they have at the moment to meet pressing financial obligations.

But even more striking, when choosing between payday lending and overdraft protection, consumers generally choose rationally. As we note in the article, the similar uses but dissimilar pricing of payday loans and overdraft protection provide an excellent natural experiment to examine how consumers use the two products. Payday loans have a fee scale tied to the size of the loan–typically $15 per $100 borrowed. Overdraft protection, by contrast, is a fixed-rate product (mostly)–an overdraft charges a flat fee, typically $27-$35 or so, regardless of the size of the overdraft. As a result, for a single loan, payday lending will generally be less expensive for loans of up to $180 (depending on a particular bank’s fees) and an overdraft will be less expensive beyond that level.

....

But there is another element of the story that is also interesting and potentially speaks to unintended consequences of government regulation. The story is accompanied by a chart of banks that derive an unusually high percentage of their revenues from overdraft fees. From looking at the chart, at least four of the 10 banks listed appear to be banks specializing in lending to military members or located on or near military bases. Why is that significant? Because in 2007 Congress passed the military lending act, which imposed a 36 percent APR price ceiling on loans to military members (essentially outlawing payday loans for soldiers)–but left overdraft protection unregulated. As I have discussed previously, in light of the fact that consumers can and do substitute between payday loans and overdraft protection, one would expect that the loss of access to payday loans would lead soldiers to increase their usage of overdraft protection. Given the unusually high representation of military banks among the 10 largest generators of overdraft fees, that appears to be exactly what has happened. I haven’t had a chance to dig into the FDIC data, but I would predict that if one examines the overdraft fees generated by the military banks one will find a dramatic upward surge when the Military Lending Act was passed.

Let me emphasize that I am not denying that not all consumers fully understand their usage of these products and dig themselves a hole–just as many others do the same with credit cards, home mortgages, or home equity loans. And they are certainly expensive and should not be used lightly–I am no enthusiast for these products and I wish we lived in a world where every consumer was financially responsible, had stable income and expenses, and had easy access to inexpensive, high-quality credit. But that’s not the world we live in. And we see that when we take away preferred choices from consumers, even choices that don’t look ideal to government bureaucrats, consumers are not necessarily going to be made better off as a result. Instead, in many cases they will simply be forced to use even worse and more-expensive choices. So regulators should be very cautious about taking away products from people who use them, and by all indications use them rationally in light of their particular circumstances.

As I’ve said before: “Regulators cannot wish away the need of low-income consumers for credit…. Congress can pass all the laws it wants, but it can’t repeal the law of supply and demand and the law of unintended consequences.”

9 Obamacare Predictions That Have Come True

9 Obamacare Predictions That Have Come True

Four years ago, many health policy analysts, including those at The Heritage Foundation, predicted some of the effects this law would have on Americans. These are all coming true.Here are nine of our predictions that have come to pass—and it’s not over yet.
1. The individual mandate is an enforcement nightmare.As a candidate, President Obama worried that an individual mandate to buy insurance would be unenforceable. He changed his mind once he became president. This year—the first year that the mandate penalties are to be imposed—he has already started backtracking on the enforcement of the provision he signed into law.
2. The law will create new disincentives to work.Between Obamacare’s higher taxes and its subsidies that drop off if you raise your income, there’s not a lot of incentive here to work harder and better your situation.
3. The law, particularly the employer mandate, will impose new costs on businesses that undercut jobs and wages.The employer mandate has been delayed until 2015, but the uncertainty Obamacare has created—and its 18 new tax hikes—have put a huge dent in job creation.
4. The law undermines competition and further consolidates health insurance markets.Heritage Foundation analysis of federal and state exchanges shows that the law has, in general, reduced competition and consolidated health insurance markets. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of insurers offering coverage on the individual markets in all 50 states has declined nationwide by 29 percent.
5. The law guarantees major premium increases.As Heritage predicted, the average annual premiums for single and family coverage in 2014 are rising in the state and federal health insurance exchanges all around the country. In 11 states, premiums for 27-year-olds have more than doubled since 2013; in 13 states, premiums for 50-year-olds have increased more than 50 percent.
>>> Get more details on all of these Obamacare effects6. The law discourages insurance enrollment among the young.The law’s insurance rules and new benefit mandates will make it cheaper for many younger Americans simply to remain uninsured and pay the penalty fine. It’s not surprising that young people have been staying away.
7. The law’s Medicare savings would not financially strengthen Medicare.The law’s proponents originally promised that “savings” from Medicare changes would be spent simultaneously in two places: helping Medicare and expanding Obamacare. But money can be spent only once, so that didn’t work.
8. The law’s Medicare changes will result in reduced benefits and threaten seniors’ access to care.The law’s impact is fairly straightforward: Fewer Medicare providers, reimbursed at rates progressively reduced over time, will create access problems for patients. Medicare cuts have been underway for several years now.
9. The law compels taxpayers to fund abortion and weakens protections of the right of conscience.Obamacare mandates health plans that include coverage of abortion. It also spawned the Health and Human Services regulatory mandate that forces American employers to provide coverage for abortion-inducing drugs. It is safe to say that four years ago, millions of Americans did not expect that the national health care law would become a vehicle for an aggressive government infringement of personal liberty or coerce Americans to fund medical procedures and drugs in direct violation of their ethical and religious convictions.

Who Really Created the ‘Rape Culture’? | National Review Online

Who Really Created the ‘Rape Culture’? | National Review Online

The young women who find themselves in a rough world of sexual insensitivity and sometimes even brutality are looking in all the wrong places to lay blame. They should look left; to the cultural left, that is, including the feminists.

The modern campus is a little hothouse of leftist ideas about human nature and the ideal human society. The universities are devout propagators of false nostrums about sex differences and sexuality. The world that the Left (very much including the feminist Left) has created is one that could have been designed by a poorly civilized teenaged boy. Far from teaching that women are more sensitive and vulnerable than men, the Left encourages a sexual free-for-all.
Every freshman on campus is invited to the bacchanal. At Yale, they call it “Sex Week.”
....
If men and women were just the same in their sexual needs, desires, and behaviors, then the hook-up culture would yield an equal number of unhappy males and females complaining of rape and assault. What could be the reason that the overwhelming number of those who feel victimized — who are victimized — are women?
Of course the culture must teach men not to rape. Western culture has been doing so for thousands of years. Next to murder, rape is the most harshly punished crime. But rape is also notoriously difficult to prove — especially if the victim shows no bruises. The false accusation of rape is almost as serious as the crime itself. Serious, non-ideological people recognize that this most intimate crime can be an excruciating legal thicket.
Before feminism declared it a thought crime, we used to teach men to be gentlemen. That meant never taking advantage of a woman who was too drunk to give consent. Smart women didn’t rely only on a man’s conscience, though. They didn’t get blind drunk and go to a stranger’s room. It was once considered foolish to take off your clothes with someone who didn’t love you — far less someone who hardly knows your name. That’s not “slut shaming,” it’s simple prudence.
The current climate has encouraged the worst instincts among some young men and doubtless confused many others. Some may find themselves accused of sexual assault when they got mixed signals. Others are predators who pick off easy prey in a world without guardrails. Women have been brainwashed into thinking that this sexual sewer is empowering.
Mail your thank-you notes to the Left.

Are the Effects of Minimum Wage Increases Always Small?

Are the Effects of Minimum Wage Increases Always Small?
New Evidence from a Case Study of New York State

AbstractThe authors estimate the effect of the 2004–6 New York State (NYS) minimum wage increase from $5.15 to $6.75 per hour on the employment rates of 16- to 29-year-olds who do not have a high school diploma. Using data drawn from the 2004 and 2006 Current Population Survey, they employ difference-in-difference estimates to show that the NYS minimum wage increase is associated with a 20.2% to 21.8% reduction in the employment of less-skilled, less-educated workers, with the largest effects on those aged 16 to 24. Their estimates imply a median employment elasticity with respect to the minimum wage of around –0.7, large relative to previous researchers’ estimates. The authors’ findings are robust to their choice of geographically proximate comparison states, the use of a more highly skilled within-state comparison group, and a synthetic control design approach. Moreover, their results provide plausible evidence that state minimum wage increases can have substantial adverse labor demand effects for low-skilled individuals that are outside previous elasticity estimates, ranging from –0.1 to –0.3.

#4 – The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

#4 – The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

#4 – The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need
Argued a college president at a recent seminar: “Your free market, private property, limited government theories were all right under the simple conditions of a century or more ago, but surely they are unworkable in today’s complex economy. The more complex the society, the greater is the need for governmental control; that seems axiomatic.”
It is important to expose this oft-heard, plausible, and influential fallacy because it leads directly and logically to socialistic planning. This is how a member of the seminar team answered the college president:
“Let us take the simplest possible situation—just you and I. Next, let us assume that I am as wise as any President of the United States who has held office during your lifetime. With these qualifications in mind, do you honestly think I would be competent to coercively control what you shall invent, discover, or create, what the hours of your labor shall be, what wage you shall receive, what and with whom you shall associate and exchange? Is not my incompetence demonstrably apparent in this simplest of all societies?
“Now, let us shift from the simple situation to a more complex society—to all the people in this room. What would you think of my competence to coercively control their creative actions? Or, let us contemplate a really complex situation—the 188,000,000 people of this nation [Editor’s note: now, in 2014, about 318 million]. If I were to suggest that I should take over the management of their lives and their billions of exchanges, you would think me the victim of hallucinations. Is it not obvious that the more complex an economy, the more certainly will governmental control of productive effort exert a retarding influence? Obviously, the more complex our economy, the more we should rely on the miraculous, self-adapting processes of men acting freely. No mind of man nor any combination of minds can even envision, let alone intelligently control, the countless human energy exchanges in a simple society, to say nothing of a complex one.”

The Shaky Case against the Death Penalty | National Review Online

The Shaky Case against the Death Penalty | National Review Online

Let’s analyze the three main arguments made on ABC against the death penalty.
1. “Support for the death penalty has fallen from 80 percent in 1993 [actually 1994] to 60 percent in 2013.”...what ABC News didn’t explain was that the years chosen were carefully cherry-picked. Support for the death penalty in 1994 was the highest ever recorded,according to Gallup. But consider instead all the 43 surveys from 1936 to 2012. Those surveys showed that an average of 63.8 percent of Americans supported the death penalty. Sixty percent in 2013 is down slightly from the average over the preceding 76 years, but it was hardly an earth-shattering change.
2. “Some states . . . for the same crime [are] three times more likely to sentence an African-American defendant to death. I think that’s very, very troubling. . . . Race is an issue.”This is simply false. In murder cases, whites are executed much more frequently. Nationally, from 1977, when the death penalty was reinstituted, to 2011, the last year for which the FBI has compiled data, 64.7 percent of those executed were whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of the murders.
Nor do individual states stand out in the way this statement claimed. I went through the totals for each individual state over the seven years from 2005 to 2011, and none have the imbalance the ABC News panel complained about.
3. “We still see 60 percent still supporting it despite the fact that innocent people are on death row.” . . . ”I am troubled by the fact that there are people who have been exonerated through DNA. That’s horrific, and we have to do something about that.”Nobody wants an innocent person convicted. The Innocence Project claims that, since 1989, 34 people convicted of any type of murder have been exonerated by DNA evidence; of these, 18 had been sentenced to death. In that same time, about260,000 Americans have been convicted of murder, with DNA evidence being used in about 12,000, or 4.5 percent. The error rate then was less than 0.3 percent, and it is actually much lower than that, since many of the exonerations came from convictions that were made before 1989. Furthermore, DNA evidence has improved its accuracy in trials over the past couple of decades, as it has become more commonly used. There is an old saying that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person. But the current system seems to be doing much better than that.
Finally, all this ignores one extremely important point: There is overwhelming evidence that the death penalty deters murder and saves lives. Combine that with the fact that errors, few to begin with, are becoming ever less common, and objections to the death penalty are basically eviscerated.

6 hostage negotiation techniques that will get you what you want - The Week

6 hostage negotiation techniques that will get you what you want - The Week

Not just for hostage situations.

It's not something that only works with barricaded criminals wielding assault rifles — it applies to most any form of disagreement.
There are five steps:
1. Active Listening: Listen to their side and make them aware you're listening.
2. Empathy: You get an understanding of where they're coming from and how they feel.
3. Rapport: Empathy is what you feel. Rapport is when they feel it back. They start to trust you.
4. Influence: Now that they trust you, you've earned the right to work on problem solving with them and recommend a course of action.
5. Behavioral Change: They act. (And maybe come out with their hands up.)
The problem is, you're probably screwing it up.

Skeptical Arguments that Don’t Hold Water « Roy Spencer, PhD

Skeptical Arguments that Don’t Hold Water « Roy Spencer, PhD

1. THERE IS NO GREENHOUSE EFFECT. Despite the fact that downwelling IR from the sky can be measured, and amounts to a level (~300 W/m2) that can be scarcely be ignored; the neglect of which would totally screw up weather forecast model runs if it was not included; and would lead to VERY cold nights if it didn’t exist; and can be easily measured directly with a handheld IR thermometer pointed at the sky (because an IR thermometer measures the IR-induced temperature change of the surface of a thermopile, QED)… Please stop the “no greenhouse effect” stuff. It’s making us skeptics look bad. I’ve blogged on this numerous times…maybe start here.
2. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT VIOLATES THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. The second law can be stated in several ways, but one way is that the net flow of energy must be from higher temperature to lower temperature. This is not violated by the greenhouse effect. The apparent violation of the 2nd Law seems to be traced to the fact that all bodies emit IR radiation…including cooler bodies toward warmer bodies. But the NET flow of thermal radiation is still from the warmer body to the cooler body. Even if you don’t believe there is 2-way flow, and only 1-way flow…the rate of flow depends upon the temperature of both bodies, and changing the cooler body’s temperature will change the cooling rate (and thus the temperature) of the warmer body. So, yes, a cooler body can make a warm body even warmer still…as evidenced by putting your clothes on.
3. CO2 CANT CAUSE WARMING BECAUSE CO2 EMITS IR AS FAST AS IT ABSORBS. No. When a CO2 molecule absorbs an IR photon, the mean free path within the atmosphere is so short that the molecule gives up its energy to surrounding molecules before it can (on average) emit an IR photon in its temporarily excited state. See more here. Also important is the fact that the rate at which a CO2 molecule absorbs IR is mostly independent of temperature, but the rate at which it emits IR increases strongly with temperature. There is no requirement that a layer of air emits as much IR as it absorbs…in fact, in general, the the rates of IR emission and absorption are pretty far from equal.
4. CO2 COOLS, NOT WARMS, THE ATMOSPHERE. This one is a little more subtle because the net effect of greenhouse gases is to cool the upper atmosphere, and warm the lower atmosphere, compared to if no greenhouse gases were present. Since any IR absorber is also an IR emitter, a CO2 molecule can both cool and warm, because it both absorbs and emits IR photons.
5. ADDING CO2 TO THE ATMOSPHERE HAS NO EFFECT BECAUSE THE CO2 ABSORPTION BANDS ARE ALREADY 100% OPAQUE.First, no they are not, and that’s because of pressure broadening. Second, even if the atmosphere was 100% opaque, it doesn’t matter. Here’s why.
6. LOWER ATMOSPHERIC WARMTH IS DUE TO THE LAPSE RATE/ADIABATIC COMPRESSION. No, the lapse rate describes how the temperature of a parcel of air changes from adiabatic compression/expansion of air as it sinks/rises. So, it can explain how the temperature changes during convective overturning, but not what the absolute temperature is. Explaining absolute air temperature is an energy budget question. You cannot write a physics-based equation to obtain the average temperature at any altitude without using the energy budget. If adiabatic compression explains temperature, why is the atmospheric temperature at 100 mb is nearly the same as the temperature at 1 mb, despite 100x as much atmospheric pressure? More about all this here.
7. WARMING CAUSES CO2 TO RISE, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND The rate of rise in atmospheric CO2 is currently 2 ppm/yr, a rate which is 100 times as fast as any time in the 300,000 year Vostok ice core record. And we know our consumption of fossil fuels is emitting CO2 200 times as fast! So, where is the 100x as fast rise in today’s temperature causing this CO2 rise? C’mon people, think. But not to worry…CO2 is the elixir of life…let’s embrace more of it!
8. THE IPCC MODELS ARE FOR A FLAT EARTH I have no explanation where this little tidbit of misinformation comes from. Climate models address a spherical, rotating, Earth with a day-night (diurnal) cycle in solar illumination and atmospheric Coriolis force (due to both Earth curvature and rotation). Yes, you can do a global average of energy flows and show them in a flat-earth cartoon, like the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget diagram which is a useful learning tool, but I hope most thinking people can distinguish between a handful of global-average average numbers in a conceptual diagram, and a full-blown 3D global climate model.
9. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURE Really?! Is there an average temperature of your bathtub full of water? Or of a room in your house? Now, we might argue over how to do the averaging (Spatial? Mass-weighted?), but you can compute an average, and you can monitor it over time, and see if it changes. The exercise is only futile if your sampling isn’t good enough to realistically monitor changes over time. Just because we don’t know the average surface temperature of the Earth to better than, say 1 deg. C, doesn’t mean we can’t monitor changes in the average over time. We have never known exactly how many people are in the U.S., but we have useful estimates of how the number has increased in the last 50-100 years. Why is “temperature” so important? Because the thermal IR emission in response to temperature is what stabilizes the climate system….the hotter things get, the more energy is lost to outer space.
10. THE EARTH ISN’T A BLACK BODY. Well, duh. No one said it was. In the broadband IR, though, it’s close to a blackbody, with an average emissivity of around 0.95. But whether a climate model uses 0.95 or 1.0 for surface emissivity isn’t going to change the conclusions we make about the sensitivity of the climate system to increasing carbon dioxide.

The Benghazi Scandal In One Email | Power Line

The Benghazi Scandal In One Email | Power Line

One aspect of the scandal, anyway. The administration has released a series of emails in response to FOIA requests by Judicial Watch. You can read them here.....From the earliest hours after the attack, this is how the Obama administration saw Benghazi. The overriding imperative was to deflect attention from the “broader failure of policy” that led to the disaster.....The other striking fact about the emails is the complete absence of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Maybe someone was keeping them informed, but they are never mentioned in the emails (except when someone prepares a statement to be issued under their names). During the crucial hours, they are never referred to. There is no suggestion that they are playing a part; that they are in the loop; that they are making decisions; or that they are, in any way, important players. Maybe there are more emails, not yet disclosed, that would reflect their roles. Or maybe they really were ciphers–seat warmers with no concerns beyond the political, not expected to do anything in an hour of crisis.
UPDATE: And now Jay Carney is lying about the Rhodes email–of which, by the way, he was one of the recipients!

Top Ten Good Skeptical Arguments « Roy Spencer, PhD

Top Ten Good Skeptical Arguments « Roy Spencer, PhD

1) No Recent Warming. If global warming science is so “settled”, why did global warming stop 15 years ago, contrary to all “consensus” predictions?
2) Natural or Manmade? If we don’t know how much of the warming in the longer term (say last 50 years) is natural, then how can we know how much is manmade?
3) IPCC Politics and Beliefs. Why does it take a political body (the IPCC) to tell us what scientists “believe”? And when did scientists’ “beliefs” translate into proof? And when was scientific truth determined by a vote…especially when those allowed to vote are from the Global Warming Believers Party?
4) Climate Models Can’t Even Hindcast How did climate modelers, who already knew the answer, still fail to explain the lack of a significant temperature rise over the last 30+ years? In other words, how to you botch a hindcast?
5) …But We Should Believe Model Forecasts? Why should we believe model predictions of the future, when they can’t even explain the past?
6) Modelers Lie About Their “Physics”. Why do modelers insist their models are based upon established physics, but then hide the fact that the strong warming their models produce is actually based upon very uncertain “fudge factor” tuning?
7) Is Warming Even Bad? Who decided that a small amount of warming is necessarily a bad thing?
8) Is CO2 Bad? How did carbon dioxide, necessary for life on Earth and only 4 parts in 10,000 of our atmosphere, get rebranded as some sort of dangerous gas?
9) Do We Look that Stupid? How do scientists expect to be taken seriously when their “theory” is supported by both floods AND droughts? Too much snow AND too little snow?
10) Selective Pseudo-Explanations. How can scientists claim that the Medieval Warm Period (which lasted hundreds of years), was just a regional fluke…yet claim the single-summer (2003) heat wave in Europe had global significance?
11) (Spinal Tap bonus) Just How Warm is it, Really? Why is it that every subsequent modification/adjustment to the global thermometer data leads to even more warming? What are the chances of that? Either a warmer-still present, or cooling down the past, both of which produce a greater warming trend over time. And none of the adjustments take out a gradual urban heat island (UHI) warming around thermometer sites, which likely exists at virtually all of them — because no one yet knows a good way to do that.

I, Pencil (Audio, PDF and HTML) : Library : Foundation for Economic Education

I, Pencil (Audio, PDF and HTML) : Library : Foundation for Economic Education

A classic

Sarah Palin on Baptism, Waterboarding . . . and 'Torture' | National Review Online

Sarah Palin on Baptism, Waterboarding . . . and 'Torture' | National Review Online

I wonder how much of the reaction to Gov. Palin's remarks are driven by Palin Derangement Syndrome, which seems to be as common among the Country Club Right as it is on the Left.

Sarah Palin’s comparison of waterboarding to baptism, even in jest, was bad judgment. If I were Gov. Palin, I’d lose all the baptism jokes, since they manage to provoke devout Christians and authentic Muslim moderates as much as they do jihadists. But I think it is a mistake so off-handedly to agree with the Left’s political and hypocritical claim that waterboarding, as applied by the CIA to three high-value al Qaeda detainees under careful (albeit controversial) guidelines, amounted to “torture.”
As we discussed ad nauseum during the debate over “enhanced interrogation,” there is no question that waterboarding can amount to torture (and, indeed, can result in death) depending on the technique used. Nevertheless, torture—if we are talking about the crime, as opposed to using loose rhetoric about physical or mental abuse—has a legal definition. It requires the infliction of severe pain and suffering by a government official who deliberately and consciously intends to torture his victim. (Title 18, U.S. Code, Sec. 2340 et seq.) Moreover, to qualify as psychological torture, the infliction needs to be “prolonged mental harm” of the kind caused by the infliction or threatened infliction of severe pain, or “the threat of imminent death.” (It can also include things irrelevant to our consideration, such as use of mind-altering substances or the threat that third parties, like family members, might be tortured or killed.) Waterboarding the way the CIA executed was highly uncomfortable, but it did not cause severe pain, it was of short duration, and it did not cause fear of imminent death (the detainees were told that they were not going to be killed).
As I’ve previously noted, Attorney General Holder conceded in congressional testimony that the use of waterboarding in the training of some U.S. military personnel was not torture because there was no intent to torture. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department adopted the Bush administration’s very narrow legal definition of torture before a U.S. appeals court in a case involving JohnDemjanjuk, the late alleged Nazi concentration camp guard who raised fear of torture in fighting his deportation to Germany. And as Karl Rove has recounted, when bipartisan congressional leaders (including Nancy Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee) were briefed on what the CIA was up to on the interrogation front, their main concern was “whether we were doing enough” to extract information from detainees.
None of this necessarily means the use of physically abusive interrogation methods,waterboarding included, was good policy. People who want a categorical ban on such tactics constantly avoid addressing the ticking-bomb scenario and similar questions that bring the logic of their position into stark relief: forced to choose, they would prefer the occurrence of a preventable atrocity and the loss of perhaps thousands of lives to interrogation that harms a hair on the head of a culpable terrorist. In turn, people who argue against categorical bans (as I have done) often avoid addressing the inevitability that tactics they endorse for dire circumstances will be applied in less dire circumstances—and that our resistance to a ban, even though highly qualified, could encourage rogue regimes in their more routine use of abusive practices.

The World's Resources Aren't Running Out - WSJ.com

The World's Resources Aren't Running Out - WSJ.com

How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.
"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).
But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.
Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.
That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists.

 In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere's capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.
It is striking, for example, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent forecast that temperatures would rise by 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels by 2100 was based on several assumptions: little technological change, an end to the 50-year fall in population growth rates, a tripling (only) of per capita income and not much improvement in the energy efficiency of the economy. Basically, that would mean a world much like today's but with lots more people burning lots more coal and oil, leading to an increase in emissions. Most economists expect a five- or tenfold increase in income, huge changes in technology and an end to population growth by 2100: not so many more people needing much less carbon.
In 1679, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist, estimated that the planet could hold 13.4 billion people, a number that most demographers think we may never reach. Since then, estimates have bounced around between 1 billion and 100 billion, with no sign of converging on an agreed figure.
Economists point out that we keep improving the productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanization, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upward. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years, world-wide.
Ecologists object that these innovations rely on nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas, or renewable ones that are being used up faster than they are replenished, such as aquifers. So current yields cannot be maintained, let alone improved.
In his recent book "The View from Lazy Point," the ecologist Carl Safina estimates that if everybody had the living standards of Americans, we would need 2.5 Earths because the world's agricultural land just couldn't grow enough food for more than 2.5 billion people at that level of consumption. Harvard emeritus professor E.O. Wilson, one of ecology's patriarchs, reckoned that only if we all turned vegetarian could the world's farms grow enough food to support 10 billion people.

The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling.
Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to grow food, or starve.
But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they run out.

 In 1972, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University came up with a simple formula called IPAT, which stated that the impact of humankind was equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied again by technology. In other words, the damage done to Earth increases the more people there are, the richer they get and the more technology they have.Many ecologists still subscribe to this doctrine, which has attained the status of holy writ in ecology. But the past 40 years haven't been kind to it. In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more. Richer people with new technologies tend not to collect firewood and bushmeat from natural forests; instead, they use electricity and farmed chicken—both of which need much less land. In 2006, Mr. Ausubel calculated that no country with a GDP per head greater than $4,600 has a falling stock of forest (in density as well as in acreage).
Haiti is 98% deforested and literally brown on satellite images, compared with its green, well-forested neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The difference stems from Haiti's poverty, which causes it to rely on charcoal for domestic and industrial energy, whereas the Dominican Republic is wealthy enough to use fossil fuels, subsidizing propane gas for cooking fuel specifically so that people won't cut down forests.

Robert Popper: Political Fraud About Voter Fraud - WSJ.com

Robert Popper: Political Fraud About Voter Fraud - WSJ.com

In January, Attorney GeneralEric Holder told MSNBC that voter fraud "simply does not exist to the extent that would warrant" voter ID laws, adding that many who favor such measures do so in order to "depress the vote." Vice President Joe Biden claimed in February that new voter ID laws in North Carolina, Alabama and Texas were motivated by "hatred" and "zealotry."
In an April 11 speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network, President Obama recited statistics purporting to show that voter fraud was extremely rare. The "real voter fraud," he said, "is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud."
These arguments themselves are bogus. Consider the two studies from which Mr. Obama drew his statistics. The first, which he said "found only 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation in 12 years," is a 2012 report issued by News21, an Arizona State University project.

The News21 website explains that students "under the direction of journalism professionals" sent public records requests to state and federal officials asking for information about voting fraud cases. The project acknowledged significant gaps in its data. Several states made no meaningful response. Counties argued that "public records laws don't require officials to respond at all." Election officials and state attorneys general admitted that they did not track voter fraud. The Justice Department referred News21 to its 93 local U.S. attorneys but, the website reported, "many of those offices, in turn, referred News21 back to the department."
Crucially, News21 noted that "nearly all the data" it received had "some vital piece of information that had been requested specifically but that was missing." Responses lacked "important details about each case—from whether the person was convicted or charged to the circumstances of the alleged fraud to the names of those involved."
Given these limitations, it is hard to believe any valid conclusions about voter fraud can be drawn from this study.
Mr. Obama also cited an "analysis" showing that only 40 voters "were indicted for fraud" from 2002 to 2005. That number is drawn from an Aug. 2, 2005, Justice Department news release—which describes the department's "Ballot Access and Voting Integrity" initiative—and from a related list of federal cases. The release mentioned 120 pending election-fraud investigations, 89 prosecutions and 52 convictions.
It is preposterous to cite that news release as proof that voter fraud is rare. The release contains no information concerning prosecutions in any of the 50 state court systems for violations of state voting laws, even though these are far more common than prosecutions for violations of federal voting laws. Even as a list of federal offenses, the news releasee is inadequate. Justice did not claim to have compiled all convictions, prosecutions or investigations—let alone all known or unsolved cases—involving federal voter fraud. The release was only a list of legal actions relating to what was then a three-year-old initiative.

We do know that this country's decentralized system of election administration offers abundant opportunities for fraud. For example, a February 2012 report by the Pew Research Center on the States, "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient: Evidence That America's Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade," found that 1.8 million deceased registrants were listed as active voters, and that 2.75 million voters had active registrations in more than one state.
In court papers filed last year, Virginia noted that a limited cross-check with 21 other participating states—which did not include California, Texas or New York—showed that 17,000 voters were registered in three or more states. Imagine if the cross-check were extended to all 50 states and if Virginia's results were typical.

If the available evidence suggests that the amount of voter fraud is understated, the evidence that voter-ID laws suppress voting is nonexistent. In elections held after new voter-ID laws were enacted in Georgia and Tennessee, for instance, minority turnout either was stable or increased. In Tennessee, the turnout among Hispanics of voting age rose to 34.7% in 2012 from 19.2% in 2008, according to surveys by the U.S. Census Bureau, even though a strict new photo ID law was in effect in 2012. Turnout among blacks of voting age declined slightly, to 57.4% in 2012 from 58.1% in 2008, but this was within the Census survey's margin of error. In both years, black turnout was around 4% higher than the comparable white turnout.

How kinesin actually moves – Pharyngula

How kinesin actually moves – Pharyngula

Recently, Carl Zimmer made a criticism of the computer animations of molecular events (it’s thesame criticism I made 8 years ago): they’re beautiful and they’re informative, but they leave out the critical aspect of stochastic behavior that is important in understanding the biochemistry. He’s talking specifically about kinesin, a transport protein which the animators are particularly fond of illustrating.
Every now and then, a tiny molecule loaded with fuel binds to one of the kinesin “feet.” It delivers a jolt of energy, causing that foot to leap off the molecular cable and flail wildly, pulling hard on the foot that’s still anchored. Eventually, the gyrating foot stumbles into contact again with the cable, locking on once more — and advancing the vesicle a tiny step forward. This updated movie offers a better way to picture our most intricate inner workings…. In the 2006 version, we can’t help seeing intention in the smooth movements of the molecules; it’s as if they’re trying to get from one place to another. In reality, however, the parts of our cells don’t operate with the precise movements of the springs and gears of a clock. They flail blindly in the crowd.
The illusion of directed, purposeful movement is a simplifying shortcut: as Zimmer describes, there actually is a lot of noise in the system, it’s just that the thermodynamics of the interactions promote a directionality to the motion. This is Chemistry 101. I figured that everyone with an undergraduate level of understanding of molecules would be able to grasp this.
I did not take into account willful ignorance, however. Jonathan Wells is angry that anyone dared to question the perfect “stately grace” of molecular machines, and accuses proponents of stochastic motion of Flailing Blindly: The Pseudoscience of Josh Rosenau and Carl Zimmer. He has a Ph.D. in biology, and he doesn’t understand what I just said was Chem 101?

Per Bylund: What Sweden Can Teach Us About ObamaCare - WSJ.com

Per Bylund: What Sweden Can Teach Us About ObamaCare - WSJ.com

Other stories include people waiting many hours before a nurse or anyone talked to them after they arrived in emergency rooms and then suffering for long periods of time before receiving needed care. A 42-year-old woman in Karlstad seeking care for meningitis died in the ER after a three-hour wait. A woman with colon cancer spent 12 years contesting a money-saving decision to deny an abdominal scan that would have found the cancer earlier. The denial-of-care decision was not made by an insurance company, but by the government health-care system and its policies.
This is why Swedes over the past two decades have been rushing to purchase medical coverage through private insurance, which guarantees and delivers timely and qualitative care. Insurance Sweden, the country's national insurance company trade organization, reports that in 2013 12% of working adults had private insurance even though they are already "guaranteed" public health care. The number of private policyholders has increased by 67% over the last five years, despite the fact that an average Swedish family already pays nearly $20,000 annually in taxes toward health care and elderly care, including what Americans call Medicare.

Sweden has started to self-correct, choosing a more sustainable path: private health-care options that allow for competition, customer choice and better overall care for Swedes. America should learn from Sweden's experience and follow the Nordic country's recent example, turning away from government-controlled health care to embrace a free-market solution.
It is possible to have truly affordable, qualitative and accessible care. But the only way to get this result is through a system where providers freely compete with each other to lower costs and raise quality. There is no short cut to well-functioning, affordable health care. Sweden's undesirable experience shows this very clearly.

Liberty and Small Government in Tao te Ching : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Liberty and Small Government in Tao te Ching : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.
The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.
Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.

When the government is too intrusive,
people lose their spirit.
Act for the people’s benefit.
Trust them; leave them alone.

If you don’t trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, “Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”
[. . .]
Whoever relies on the Tao in governing men
doesn’t try to force issues
or defeat enemies by force of arms.
For every force there is a counterforce.
Violence, even well intentioned,
always rebounds upon oneself.
[. . .]
Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn’t wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?
He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.
[. . .]
Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.
[. . .]
If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn’t meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.
[. . .]
When they lose their sense of awe,
people turn to religion.
When they no longer trust themselves,
they begin to depend upon authority.
Therefore the Master steps back
so that people won’t be confused.
He teaches without a teaching,
so that people will have nothing to learn.

Thomas Sargent Shortest Graduation Speech - Business Insider

Thomas Sargent Shortest Graduation Speech - Business Insider

I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words.
Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.
1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible.
2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs.
3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.
4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.
5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.
6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well-meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse.
7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation.
8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made.
9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore).
10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation.
11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves).
12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates.

Studies about Conservatives

Studies about Conservatives - karl.lembke@gmail.com - Gmail

He opens with the accusation that fundamentalist religion makes you bigoted.  One could believe that of Muslims  but is it true of Christians?  The evidence Sweetie summarizes in support of his claim is however entirely correlational.  And the first thing you learn in Statistics 101 is that "Correlation is not causation". To believe otherwise is to commit a logical fallacy.   Yet Sweetie boldly asserts: "Religious belief, in other words, causes bigotry". 
In case it is not clear to Leftists why that is stupid, the correlation could be caused by a third factor.  Both religion and bigotry could be caused by (say) poverty.  So religion and bigotry will be correlated but the causal factor is poverty.  Religion itself will have caused nothing.  It's a pity that I have to give lessons in basic logic but where Leftists are concerned you often have to do that.  Fallacies are their speciality.
So that disposes of the first three paragraphs of Sweetie's opus.  Or am I being hasty?  Can I really write off all those correlations?  I will give a second reason why I can.   The correlations will usually be very weak.  Let me give an example that I have commented on before.  There is an article here  which presents evidence that religious people are less "reflective'.  I would have thought that religious people reflect all the time but there you go. 
When you look up the research on which the claim is based, however you find that the correlation between reflection and religion is only .14 even before controls are applied.  In other words, the two variables had only about 1.5% of their variance in common.  There was a correlation there, all right, but it was so negligible to be of no significance or importance at all.  And such low correlations are common in all the literature Sweetie surveys.  Leftist researchers make mountains out of pimples.  Putting it another way, if there were 100 reflective people you were surveying, you would find that 49 were religious and 51 were not religious.  What sort of basis is that for predicting who will be reflective?

But let me now go on to the basic, fatal, underlying flaw in Sweetie's thinking.  He fails to acknowledge what Leftism is.  He makes much of the common Leftist claim that conservatives are "authoritarian", but what could be more authoritarian than Leftism?  The very essence of Leftism is a wish to change society.  But "society" is people.  So what the Leftist wants to do is prevent people from doing things that they ordinarily would and make them do things they ordinarily would not. And the Leftist proposes to do that by various forms of coercion.  How authoritarian is that?  It could hardly get more authoritarian.  The Leftist claim that conservatives are the authoritarian ones is thus a huge case of Freudian denial and projection.  LEFTISTS are the authoritarian ones but they themselves just cannot confront that. 

Minimum Wage Hike Is Offset By Cuts In Fringe Benefits - Investors.com

Minimum Wage Hike Is Offset By Cuts In Fringe Benefits - Investors.com

...the Congressional Budget Office found that if the minimum wage is hiked to $10.10 an hour, expected job losses by 2016 will amount to a scant 0.3% of the jobs affected.
Those in favor of a minimum wage increase are willing to accept these employment losses for the few in exchange for income gains for the many.
But this view fails to recognize that wage income is not the only form of compensation with which employers pay their workers.
Also in the mix are fringe benefits, relaxed work demands, workplace ambiance, respect, schedule flexibility, job security and hours of work.

PJ Media » Obamacare Number Games: How Many Enrollees, Really?

PJ Media » Obamacare Number Games: How Many Enrollees, Really?

Avik Roy — one of the few journalists who has actually been examining the data and drawing his own conclusions rather than regurgitating or looking to justify each of the administration’s assertions — estimates that the actual number of newly covered young people is less than one-third of the number claimed, and perhaps far less.
In fact, the percentage of uninsured Americans aged 18 to 24 has not changed at all from 2008 — prior to the economic collapse — through 2013. And of course, the change in policy did not come free. Roy estimates that family plans now cost $160 to $480 a year more due to the new coverage — and that is for all families, including all those without children who are newly covered.

Michael Saltsman: Why Subway Doesn't Serve a $14 Reuben Sandwich - WSJ.com

Michael Saltsman: Why Subway Doesn't Serve a $14 Reuben Sandwich - WSJ.com

Start with Costco, whose CEO, Craig Jelinek, is an outspoken advocate of raising the minimum wage. "At Costco, we know that paying employees good wages makes good sense for business," Mr. Jelinek said in a statement in March of last year. Mr. Jelinek offers new employees $11.50 an hour, but his narrative omits a few key details. First, Costco charges its customers as much as $110 a year for the privilege of shopping at the store. That's a $2 billion-per-year luxury no grocer or restaurant enjoys.
As a result, the warehouse retailer rakes in what amounts to a more than $10,000 profit per employee, according to data from business research company Hoovers. A casual dining restaurant, on the other hand, earns a roughly $2,000 profit per employee, which explains why most businesses aren't following the president's "just be more like Costco" advice.

Like Mr. Jelinek, Zingerman's co-founder Paul Saginaw supports hiking the minimum wage. He posted a minimum-wage manifesto on a company website last September.
As Mr. Obama relished the perfect sandwich prepared by well-paid employees, he neglected to mention how much he paid for the happy experience: Zingerman's Reuben costs $14. That's about three times as much as a Subway foot-long. When I was an undergraduate student at Michigan, I rarely dined at Zingerman's because it was so expensive.
If every deli could charge $14 a sandwich, then perhaps an $11 or $12 minimum wage would be feasible. But your local sandwich shop cannot match the price points of a shop serving a parent-subsidized clientele in a college town. Expecting restaurants everywhere to do so is a recipe for business failure.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez's March visit to a Shake Shack in Washington, D.C.—again, to promote the company's above-minimum starting wage—was typical. While praising the restaurant's wage structure, Mr. Perez did not mention that the least-expensive double cheeseburger on the menu sells for $6.90, or more than 40% more than a Double Quarter Pounder at the McDonald'sMCD -0.58% nearby.
If McDonald's could raise burger prices by 40% without losing customers, it would have done so already without input from Messrs. Obama and Perez.

The Weekend Interview: A Black Conservative's War on Poverty - WSJ.com

The Weekend Interview: A Black Conservative's War on Poverty - WSJ.com

Mr. Woodson says that many poor communities don't need another government program so much as relief from current policies. "For instance, a lot of people coming out of prison have a hard time obtaining occupational licenses," he says. Aspiring barbers, cabdrivers, tree-trimmers, locksmiths and the like, he notes, can face burdensome licensing requirements. Proponents of these rules like to cite public-safety concerns, but the reality is that licensure requirements exist mainly to shut out competition. In many black communities, that translates into fewer jobs and less access to quality goods and services.

But Mr. Woodson saves his most passionate disdain for those on the black left who all but abandon the black poor except to exploit them. "Around 70 cents of every dollar designated to relieve poverty goes not to poor people but to people who serve the poor—social workers, counselors, et cetera," he says. "We've created a poverty industry, turned poor people into a commodity. And the race hustlers play a bait-and-switch game where they use the conditions of low-income blacks to justify remedies"—such as racial education preferences—"that only help middle-income blacks."

BULLETIN: U.S. Navy Invents Perpetual Motion Machine | The American Spectator

BULLETIN: U.S. Navy Invents Perpetual Motion Machine | The American Spectator

<>All these stories overlook the inconvenient fact that  it takes energy to do all these things. It takes energy to split hydrogen out of water. It takes energy to synthesize it back into a hydrocarbon. And because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, energy is always lost in the process. Consequently, you always end up with less energy than when you started.

Lots of folks don't understand the Second Law of Thermo.
Interestingly enough, though, when I mentioned this in one forum, someone pointed out this would also be the case with the original hydrocarbon-based fossil fuel -- ignoring the fact that fossil fuels represent energy stored over time, millions of years ago. Fossil fuels are useful only because something else stored all that energy that we're now tapping.

Peer-reviewed, with the reviewers listed in the report.
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/

The newest volumes in the Climate Change Reconsidered series, due for release in April 2014, are Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts and Climate Change Reconsidered II: Human Welfare, Energy, and Policies. Digital versions of the reports’ chapters will be available here as they finish the editing process.

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts constitutes an independent, comprehensive, and authoritative report on the impacts of climate change on plants, terrestrial animals, aquatic life, and human well-being. Climate Change Reconsidered II: Human Welfare, Energy, and Policies then uses economics and policy analysis to explain the implications of climate change on energy production and consumption and a wide range of public policies.

These two volumes are the fifth and sixth in a series of scholarly reports produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of climate scientists sponsored by three nonprofit organizations: Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), and The Heartland Institute. Previous volumes in the Climate Change Reconsidered series were published in 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2013. Those volumes along with separate executive summaries for the second, third, and fourth reports are available for free online on this site.

Whereas the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warn of a dangerous human effect on climate, NIPCC concludes the human effect is likely to be small relative to natural variability, and whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs.

Climate Change Reconsidered II consists of three parts, the two being released now and an earlier volume, subtitled Physical Science, released on September 17-18, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois USA. Additional release events took place the following weeks in Washington, DC, New York, Florida, St. Louis, England, Germany, Holland, and California. That volume can be viewed here.

Summary for Policymakers
Front Matter (Foreword, Table of Contents, Executive Summary, and Introduction)
Chapter 1. Carbon Dioxide, Plants and Soils
Chapter 2. Plant Characteristics
Chapter 3. Plants Under Stress
Chapter 4. Earth’s Vegetative Future
Chapter 5. Terrestrial Animals
Chapter 6. Aquatic Life
Chapter 7. Human Health
Appendix 1: Acronyms
Appendix 2:  Authors, Contributors, and Reviewers
Appendix 3:  Plant Dry Weight Responses to Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment
Appendix 4:  Plant Photosynthesis Responses to Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment

Summary for Policymakers
Front Matter (Foreword, Table of Contents, Executive Summary, and Introduction)
Chapter 1. Human Welfare
Chapter 2. Climate Economics
Chapter 3. Climate and Energy
Chapter 4. Policy Implications
Appendix 1: Acronyms
Appendix 2: Authors, Contributors, and Reviewers