Monday, June 30, 2014

Does truth need motivating?, For what and whose benefit?

NOAA/NASA Dramatically Altered US Temperatures After The Year 2000

Prior to the year 2000, NASA showed US temperatures cooling since the 1930′s, and 1934 much warmer than 1998.
ScreenHunter_627 Jun. 22 21.18
NASA’s top climatologist said that the US had been cooling
Whither U.S. Climate?
By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makiko Sato — August 1999
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought.
in the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country
NOAA and CRU also reported no warming in the US during the century prior to 1989.
February 04, 1989
Last week, scientists from the United States Commerce Department’sNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that a study of temperature readings for the contiguous 48 states over the last century showed there had been no significant change in average temperature over that period. Dr. (Phil) Jones said in a telephone interview today that his own results for the 48 states agreed with those findings.
Right after the year 2000, NASA and NOAA dramatically altered US climate history, making the past much colder and the present much warmer. The animation below shows how NASA cooled 1934 and warmed 1998, to make 1998 the hottest year in US history instead of 1934. This alteration turned a long term cooling trend since 1930 into a warming trend.
But NASA and NOAA have a little problem. The EPA still shows that heatwaves during the 1930s were by far the worst in US temperature record.
ScreenHunter_556 Jun. 20 05.14high-low-temps-figure1-2014
Heat waves in the 1930s remain the most severe heat waves in the U.S. historical record (see Figure 1).
George Orwell explained how this worked.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Saturday, June 21, 2014

marriage reasons

Tolstoy wrote that   "every bad marriage is bad for a different reason, and all good marriages are good for the same reason". 

What Scientific thoughts on Carbon??

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/19/CO2-is-good-for-us-climate-change-is-bunk-greens-are-raging-extremists-says-Greenpeace-co-founder

CO2 GOOD; CLIMATE CHANGE BUNK; GREENS ARE RAGING EXTREMISTS, SAYS GREENPEACE CO-FOUNDER


 19 Jun 2014
"Climate change" is a theory for which there is "no scientific proof at all" says the co-founder of Greenpeace. And the green movement has become a "combination of extreme political ideology and religious fundamentalism rolled into one."
Patrick Moore, a Canadian environmentalist who helped found Greenpeace in the Seventies but subsequently left in protest at its increasingly extreme, anti-scientific, anti-capitalist stance, argues that the green position on climate change fails the most basic principles of the scientific method.
"The certainty among many scientists that humans are the main cause of climate change, including global warming, is not based on the replication of observable events. It is based on just two things, the theoretical effect of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly carbon dioxide, and the predictions of computer models using those theoretical calculations. There is no scientific "proof" at all."

 Moore goes on to list some key facts about "climate change" which are ignored by true believers.
1. The concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere is lower today, even including human emissions, than it has been during most of the existence of life on Earth.
2. The global climate has been much warmer than it is today during most of the existence of life on Earth. Today we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago and has not ended.
3. There was an Ice Age 450 million years ago when CO2 was about 10 times higher than it is today.
4. Humans evolved in the tropics near the equator. We are a tropical species and can only survive in colder climates due to fire, clothing and shelter.
5. CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. All green plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that provide energy for their growth and our growth. Without CO2 in the atmosphere carbon-based life could never have evolved.
6. The optimum CO2 level for most plants is about 1600 parts per million, four times higher than the level today. This is why greenhouse growers purposely inject the CO2-rich exhaust from their gas and wood-fired heaters into the greenhouse, resulting in a 40-80 per cent increase in growth.
7. If human emissions of CO2 do end up causing significant warming (which is not certain) it may be possible to grow food crops in northern Canada and Russia, vast areas that are now too cold for agriculture.
8. Whether increased CO2 levels cause significant warming or not, the increased CO2 levels themselves will result in considerable increases in the growth rate of plants, including our food crops and forests.
9. There has been no further global warming for nearly 18 years during which time about 25 per cent of all the CO2 ever emitted by humans has been added to the atmosphere. How long will it remain flat and will it next go up or back down? Now we are out of the realm of facts and back into the game of predictions.
Moore makes his remarks in the foreword to a new book by bestselling Australian geologist Dr Ian Plimer called Not For Greens. The book describes the various, complex industrial processes which go into the making of just a single teaspoon, starting with the mining of various metals.
If Greenpeace's membership remained true to their principles they would have to eat with their bare hands because, as Moore notes, they are opposed to mining in all its forms.
"If you ask them for the name of any mine that is operating in an environmentally acceptable standard you will draw a blank. They have become so cornered by their own extremism that they must deny their daily use of cell phones, computers, bicycles, rapid transit, and yes, the simple teaspoon."

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Does not matter;- as understanding the BASIC situation is never done ! !

tom hunter (4,225 comments) says: 

Since Cha decided to be a smart-ass and put the following quote into yesterday’s GD, I thought I’d repeat it, together with my own addition:
Who said it?
If you’re going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?
Here’s fun. Take part of that answer:
It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or ….. one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?
Then wonder as to whether this question ever crossed the minds of the trio of Obama, Clinton, and Power when they decided to destroy Gaddafi in Libya, throw Mubarak to the wolves in Egypt, and wander around for a couple of years saying that Assad had to go. And that’s before we get to the whole “Redline” farce.
What did they call it again? R2P? No, that’s the UN, but we’ve not heard much about that since Libya.
Oh I know – SMART POWER – with added Leftism for increased smarts.
The failures are now coming so rapidly that even the godforsaken WaPo is starting to notice:
FOR YEARS, President Obama has been claiming credit for “ending wars,” when, in fact, he was pulling the United States out of wars that were far from over. Now the pretense is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
And before we start with the diversionary whine about how this is just about opposition to Obama at home and abroad., let’s note the almost unhinged attacks on Bush that occurred here on KB a few years ago about what he was doing wrong in the ME. Most of those commentators have vanished of course – probably out of embarrassment as The Smartest President Ever checks out.

SPC (5,219 comments) says: 

tom hunter, the premise of the Bush regime change policy was that in principle it was not unique to Iraq but was part of US foreign policy to support democracy emerging from dictatorship.
The USA has always paid lip service to supporting democracy (though tolerated anti-communist tyrants), but rarely via troops on the ground to impose a regime change. A substantial difference that was put down to replacing the Taleban for hosting al Qaeda and replacing the Baath regime in Iraq “for having WMD” and breaching UN cease-fire terms to allow inspections.
The problem the US had after Iraq, was that if they could not pre judge what democracy would emerge when supporting the overthrow of tyranny – was that the same applied in any other ME nation, where Islamists would become active in the aftermath.
The alternative is a policy to support the overthrow of tyranny and support democracy except in Moslem nations, because working with tyrants that ruled over Moslems was more convenient. That would be discriminatory. The alternative was/is to then work with any and all tyrants and give up support for democracy.
SPC (5,219 comments) says: 
And the US did not decide the fate of the Mubarak regime, its unpopularity did. The military chose to pose as facilitating the peoples will in removing him enabling an election the MB would win – all to use any subsequent unpopularity with the people to return to power. Sisi was Suleiman’s (intelligence chief under Mubarak) former boss in the military.
As for Syria, that began when unarmed protestors were shot in Damascus. And the West was a minor player in supporting challenge to that regimes continuance – it was more the example of Libya that inspired the Free Syria Army than actual western support for the FSA. Most of the support came from Islamist volunteers and Gulf funding (part of a Sunni vs Shia sectarian divide).
flash2846 (145 comments) says: 
To quote my father “Its Wog on Wog so why do you care? And if you do care ask yourself why the other Wogs don’t”
Dad (former military) has a point. In every global conflict people of European decent risk and lay down their lives to help the week and innocent. Occasionally they are assisted by African’s, Asians, Pakistani etc. but never the Arab. He’ll take money for use of his airspace though. “Scum of the Earth” Again quoting Dad.
SPC (5,219 comments) says: 
I.S.I.S. is not a long term threat.
Syria will reclaim the north off them. Iran will work to ensure Baghdad is held. The Kurds could take Mosul now if given back Kirkuk if they did.
But the problems in Iraq will not go away unless Sunni (and Kurds – Kirkuk as a capital) have autonomy, Sunni once before dismissed an al Qaeda presence from amongst them and would do so again if given autonomy.
The Sunni in Iraq are validly concerned about a Hezbollah type force being built up in Iraq – this speaks to the regime becoming a tyranny or itself being destabilised from within its own Shia ranks.

Friday, June 13, 2014

All Rights For All; at what Costs?

The Madness Of Crowds And The Great Insanity

Tyler Durden's picture
Submitted by Ty Andros via TedBits,
Never in my 30+ year career as a market observer have I seen so many out on a limb which is about to be SAWED OFF. Those who live within the matrix are fully loaded for a recovery which is not and will not appear. Nominally the Main stream media can proclaim ECONOMIC recovery has arrived, point to the rising developed world stock markets, seemingly benign bond markets of all categories: sovereign, investment grade and Junk, Private equity, corporate buy backs and more have priced in “Happy Days are here again”. HFT, unrestrained leverage in a financially repressed world and Quantitative easing have done the rest in pushing financial assets to heights rarely, if ever, seen. Volatility is at all-time lows in most markets and investor confidence at superhuman levels. Like a boat where all the passengers are on one side of the boat and it is about to capsize, investors similarly have no fear.


“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The central banks have created moral hazard on a scale which is simply unbelievable and set a stage for a bonfire of the vanities seldom, if ever, seen in history. In fact, nothing I can see rivals it.
“Over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is a large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance. . . . The greater the weight of speculative and Ponzi finance, the smaller the overall margins of safety in the economy and the greater the fragility of the financial structure.”
- Hyman Minsky, 1992
Professional Investors who have spent a lifetime playing these contrarian opportunities offered by human behavior are being carried out on stretchers as historic market behaviors fail to materialize. So the financial imbalances and historic overvaluations just grow and grow and when they are resolved only God knows.   In my opinion, it isn’t materializing because many markets are manipulated, pure and simple, with and without the assistance of the central banks, government regulators and the bankster financial community. As long as the results and consequent headlines are politically correct there are no consequences to be feared, they will be allowed to continue. Politicians HATED markets because they used to expose them as the liars they are. NO MORE as they are now in the hands of megalomaniac’s and sociopaths who don’t know the difference between right and wrong.
“Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law even places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim, when he defends himself, as a criminal. But often the masses are plundered and do not even know it.”
- Frédéric Bastiat
The masses are being plundered on a scale which is inconceivable and unmatched in history; it is the source of the middle classes dying in the developed world. The developed world has become a well-disguised plantation of serfs and slaves. They are given nothing to store and save their labor in as the currency they hold are printed endlessly and have no reserves to back them and are redeemable in NOTHING, contrary to every sound currency in history. Modern day money is nothing less than a wealth confiscation scheme run by morally and fiscally bankrupt central banks and governments against their own citizens.
Is there any human activity where you are not taxed today in one way or another? Is there any major financial holding which people own free and clear of annual taxes or don’t have to share any gain with the masters in central governments? They are your partners in everything even though you performed the work to buy your assets. The government has given the working man nothing in exchange for sharing in the profits or appreciation. Government services such as roads, schools, sewers, police and courts are paid for out of taxes.
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As long as big government progressives, elites, the main stream media, and banksters can manipulate and control the reality for the vast majority of citizens they tell themselves they are doing a public good. Fredric Bastiat described this nexus well:
“Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law even places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim, when he defends himself, as a criminal. But often the masses are plundered and do not even know it.”
- Frédéric Bastiat
Throughout the developed world, progressive governments have created huge welfare states that have crippled the futures of the people under whom they were meant to place a safety net. Now, it is a permanent way of life for them and the rolls are exploding daily.
“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay. If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system.”
- French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
This is the system in the developed world today and it will not be stopped except by Mother Nature and Darwin. These programs have now created a class of people who have no ability to rise and prosper in life: they have no skills, no ability to produce more than they consume, and do not know the source of their inability to do so. They are told their lack of success is someone else’s fault.   They are crippled intentionally to be victims of the elites who wish to prey on them and their ignorance. They have been provided a POTEMKIN FAKE education by public schools who FAIL to provide them the educations necessary to rise through adversity and in life. These FAKE educations have ONLY one goal as outlined by George Carlin:
“…But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They DON’T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting F#CKED by system that threw them overboard 30 f#ckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passably accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
- George Carlin
Is this not the world we live in today? These words were said over 15 years ago. The USEFUL idiots as Lenin called them have no ability to think, manufactured by public school monopolies (which I call indoctrination/brain washing centers) and told they have been born with the right to all of their basic needs provided by the government:
“It is not an endlessly expanding list of rights —the “right” to an education; the “right” to health care; the “right” to food and housing. That is not freedom. That is dependency. Those are not rights. Those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville
They believe the impossible dream that they have the right to live their lives at the expense of others and will vote for the people that tell them this is so and use a government gun to make it happen. Most of society today does not know: where money comes from, what it is or isn’t in a historical or practical sense, how wealth is created, the virtues of capitalism and wealth creation, why it’s important to stay debt free and live within your means, why they should work hard and never give up, why save money, why it’s important to be self-reliant, what the constitution is and why it’s important to protect our freedom and future, nor economics of any sort but socialism and Keynesianism (central government control of all aspects of life also known as Marxism).  
In my estimation this means they are functually ILLITERATE to life’s basic requirements to grow and thrive as a human in society.  They couldn’t be less prepared to meet life’s challengesThe school systems are designed to create peasants and serfs to socialism. Not educated, self-reliant and independent citizens. Prior generations such as mine where taught all these things. We want it restored, and now are labeled extremists and terrorists for insisting on it. This teaching of socialism labeled democracy has led to very destructive behavior:
Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.  This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment they think that they have grasped it… the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently near to be enjoyed.  Democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy.  A depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1825
This is the agenda of the voting public with the president and his minions in congress and the bureaucracy as his supporters. I have never seen an administration so dedicated to dividing people and attacking the private economy which is the basis of future prosperity. Progressives in Government espouse the gospel of Carl Marx even though they never say so explicitly:
“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects, to his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or simple stupidity.”
- Henry Hazlitt on envy and Marxism
This is from where progressives derive their power as this is what the public is taught in public schools. They are a generation of unaccountable victims. Government does not create prosperity or wealth, it destroys prosperity and wealth… correction: it CONSUMES them.
Several weeks ago, I commented on the $30 trillion dollars ($30 million million dollars printed out of THIN air) of new debt which has been created since the nadir of the Global Financial Crisis in late 2008. This has created the greatest fire hose of HOT money zooming around the world in history. Too much money chasing too few opportunities is repressing yields and returns. Combine this with deliberate FINANCIAL REPRESSION by banksters and governments as they transfer the returns from prudent savers to themselves to fill in the insolvency theirReserveless banking systems created. Trillions of dollars of unpaid interest has flowed to insolvent governments and banks during this period and continues to do so as REAL inflation eats the money the public is paid in and stores its wealth in. While bankers and governments borrow money for nothing, false government inflation statistics hide the theft from the public (see www.shadowstats.com).
“You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.”
- Rahm Emanuel, February 9, 2009
This debt has been disguised as GDP by the governments of the world while they used the crisis not to reform themselves but, instead, to implement new and innovative ways to loot and enslave the publics they claim to serve by increasing taxes, taking regulations to levels of suffocation of private enterprise (moving this demand to connected crony capitalists), removing freedoms and taking confiscation of private property to new extremes. An insidious process, and exactly opposite of the recipe for economic recovery. They have destroyed the human spirit of hope, hard work, and tenacity as they destroy the incentives to do so.
“When people who earn more than the average have their ‘surplus,’ or the greater part of it, seized from them in taxes, and when people who earn less than the average have the deficiency, or the greater part of it, turned over to them in hand?outs and doles, the production of all must sharply decline; for the energetic and able lose their incentive to produce more than the average and the slothful and unskilled lose their incentive to improve their condition.”
- Henry Hazlitt
In the process, creating a society of misery spread widely (definition of socialism): 
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
- Adam Smith
Is this not the mood of the vast majority of the developed world? And they are giving up in record numbers, succumbing to the hopelessness in the world their elite masters have created for them.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
- Carl Sagan
In closing, the greatest top in economic activity and leverage in human history has been in the making since 2000. When the leverage FAILS, the world’s developed economies will be thrust into the next leg of the cleansing process of deleveraging which began in 2000, made another top in 2008 and now this time.  The leverage is far greater now than it was at the 2000, and the 2007/2008 highs. The destruction of it will be equally bigger.  The world has slipped below the proverbial event horizon of a Black hole, slipping closer and closer to the final denouement of the insanity running amok today.
Then, we will have a time of great economic and social turmoil as what has gone before slides to its doom. Then, a great reformation will emerge just as it did in China after the cultural revolution failed in 1976 and then with Deng Xiaoping in 1989 when he said “to get rich is glorious” and he unleashed the human spirit in China and wealth creation exploded. Don’t you think similar epiphany’s lie in the future after the socialist welfare states of the world collapse? 
“Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments, they must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe.”
- Ludwig Von Mises
This conclusion is firmly on the horizon; let’s call it the great INSANITY. I believe this version is the greatest in history and will be written about for centuries. Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it and this time is no different. However, there is always great opportunity with great danger as the greatest transfer of wealth from these that hold it in paper to those that don’t is underway and there is nothing that can stop it. The sociopaths and elites have no ability to turn the ship of states around as their policies have created the collapse. While this is a manmade disaster, it is most definitely the greatest opportunity in history for those that see it and adjust their behavior accordingly. Don’t ever forget, THEY WILL PRINT THE MONEY!

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Picketty Income mobility question


I think I have made a copy some where else on my blog too.

To follow Rome in reply to Dialectic18 

I can assure you we do, Pikety like Krugman use the same flawed data, looking at abstract categories rather than individuals over time. Clicking on the link (Pile of data) we can see the error:
Americans in the top one percent, like Americans in most income brackets, are not there permanently, despite being talked about and written about as if they are an enduring "class" — especially by those who have overdosed on the magic formula of "race, class and gender," which has replaced thought in many intellectual circles.
At the highest income levels, people are especially likely to be transient at that level. Recent data from the Internal Revenue Service show that more than half the people who were in the top one percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005. Check out a Treasury Department study titled “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005.” It uses income-tax data, showing that people who were in the top 1 percent in 1996 had their incomes fall — repeat, fall — by 26 percent by 2005. http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/Income-Mobi...
Among the top one-hundredth of one percent, three-quarters of them were no longer there at the end of the decade.
These are not permanent classes that Piketty assumes, but mostly people at current income levels reached by spikes in income that don't last.
These income spikes can occur for all sorts of reasons. In addition to selling homes in inflated housing markets like San Francisco, people can get sudden increases in income from inheritances, or from a gamble that pays off, whether in the stock market, the real estate market, or Las Vegas.
Some people's income in a particular year may be several times what it has ever been before or will ever be again.
Among corporate CEOs, those who cash in stock options that they have accumulated over the years get a big spike in income the year that they cash them in.
This lets critics quote inflated incomes of the top-paid CEOs for that year. Some of these incomes are almost as large as those of big-time entertainers — who are never accused of "greed," by the way.
Just as there may be spikes in income in a given year, so there are troughs in income, which can be just as misleading in the hands of those who are ready to grab a statistic and run with it.
Many people who are genuinely affluent, or even rich, can have business losses or an off year in their profession, so that their income in a given year may be very low, or even negative, without their being poor in any meaningful sense.
This may help explain such things as hundreds of thousands of people with incomes below $20,000 a year living in homes that cost $300,000 and up. Many low-income people also have swimming pools or other luxuries that they could not afford if their incomes were permanently at their current level.
There is no reason for people to give up such luxuries because of a bad year, when they have been making a lot more money in previous years and can expect to be making a lot more money in future years.
Most Americans in the top fifth, the bottom fifth, or any of the fifths in between, do not stay there for a whole decade, much less for life. And most certainly do not remain permanently in the top one percent or the top one-hundredth of one percent.
Most income statistics do not follow given individuals from year to year, the way Internal Revenue statistics do. But those other statistics can create the misleading illusion that they do by comparing income brackets from year to year, even though people are moving in and out of those brackets all the time.
There are people who are genuinely rich and genuinely poor, in the sense of having very high or very low incomes for most, if not all, of their lives. But "the rich" and "the poor" in this sense are unlikely to add up to even ten percent of the population.
Ironically, those who make the most noise about income disparities or poverty contribute greatly to policies that promote both. The welfare state enables millions of people to meet their needs with little or no income-earning work on their part.
Most of the economic resources used by people in the bottom 20 percent come from sources other than their own incomes. There are veritable armies of middle-class people who make their livings transferring resources, in a variety of ways, from those who created those resources to those who live off them.
These transferrers are in both government and private social welfare institutions. They have every incentive to promote dependency, from which they benefit both professionally and psychically, and to imagine that they are creating social benefits.
For different reasons, both politicians and the media have incentives to spread misconceptions with statistics. So long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.
This video gives a great breakdown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcsvAT4JT-g
- See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains?sort=2#sort-comments

Monday, June 9, 2014

Obese, Smokers, Thin and Healthy; Lifetime Costs

Ed Snack (1,658 comments) says: 

James, I’ll have to find the reference again, but here’s a quote from the NYT about it:
“In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.
Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the “healthy-living” group (thin and nonsmoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on “cost of illness” data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.
The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.
On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.
Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.
The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of dollars.
“This throws a bucket of cold water onto the idea that obesity is going to cost trillions of dollars,” said Patrick Basham, a professor of health politics at Johns Hopkins University who was unconnected to the study. He said that government projections about obesity costs are frequently based on guesswork, political agendas and changing science.
“If we’re going to worry about the future of obesity, we should stop worrying about its financial impact,” he said.”
It’s back in 2008, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that the conclusion has been overturned.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Freedom of Religion? Human Rights? Free people?

SAKOVKT
Forget it, Frank.  (Pope Francis?)
Freedom of Religion really isn’t a basic “human right”.
Matter of fact, I have no idea what a “human right” really is, other than an Allied propaganda stunt at the end of WW2.
As our Founders noted, the people shall be free, so long as they remain virtuous enough to govern themselves. When they lose their virtue, they shall need more governance to which they must forfeit their freedom for their own good.
Freedom of religion is, therefore, a right in a free society only in which people hold our Constitution (or something similar) as the highest secular law, and not the law of any religion or ideology that contradicts it.
Once that happens, we can obviously no longer tolerate freedom of religion.
But, so what!
If that happens, we don’t have a basic law of the land, anyway!
We’re already seeing the current regime deteriorate freedom of religion in regards to sex, abortion, contraceptives and homosexuality, the primo --------- perversion of politics. How can Americans say that we actually do enjoy freedom of religion, with all these gov’t intrusions upon it?
(Sex actually isn’t a political issue. It’s a social issue in which gov’t has no business meddling and never has meddled, to any result but harm. A free people can shut Larry Flint and “Hustler Magazine” up, on the character of its content, since none of it is political, contrary to the Supreme Court ruling. This is where we started going wrong, IMO. Larry Flint was not protected by freedom of speech. He wasn’t saying anything!)
A free people really has no right to chose a religion that advocates killing all non-believers or is just plain stupid. Hopefully, a free people would know better than Islam.
Tolerating such a thing would be nothing but a prelude to the end of all religious freedom, which would, not so coincidentally, perhaps, be just fine with ---------.
Flip side: a free people does have a right to regulate its own social mores. It can ban homosexual conduct, pornography, baggy pants, “no shirt. no service”, vulgarity, whatever, on the basis of majority. This is the “grey area” or “hidden law” in all cults of law.
When people push the limits, other people respond, and if it comes to a head, we make a decision, case by case, building a “common law” of what’s generally considered acceptable by the majority: not a noisy minority or elitist judges.
Pornography may be difficult to define. You may only know it when you see it. But when you do see it, you don’t have to call it “free of speech”!
Religion actually does “trump the Constitution”. A religion that does not contradict it presents no problem. One that does, however, cannot be tolerated under the “freedom of religion” clause any more than our Constitution could be tolerated in Sudan.
If it’s really “human rights” you want, then Sudan is doing just fine.
It has adopted Islam “at a collective level” and is compelling everyone to comply, just like Mo said. No one who believes in “human rights” has a thing to complain about without violating Sudanese “human rights”.
In America, however, I’d say that we actually do have problem, since people who make wedding cakes are no longer allowed to practice their faith but Muslims are!
Why wedding cakes seems to be such an issue but Merriam Ibrahim isn’t, is truly baffling and has more to do with “Human Lefts” than ‘human rights”!
I have depoliticized the above comment, as the gist of the debate is more important. ----