weegee

Unwarranted dogmatism

Watts Up With That? | The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change:


Unwarranted dogmatism has taken over in many fields of science: in Big-Bang cosmology, dinosaur extinction, theory of smell, string theory, Alzheimer’s amyloid theory, specificity and efficacy of psychotropic drugs, cold fusion, second-hand smoke, continental drift . . . The list goes on and on.

Dissenting views are dismissed without further ado, and dissenters’ careers are badly affected. Where public policy is involved — as with human-caused global warming and HIV/AIDS — the excommunication and harassment of dissenters reaches a fever pitch with charges of “denialism” and “denialists”, a deliberate ploy of association with the no-no of Holocaust denying.

Three Quotes

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

H L Mencken




"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
Oscar Wilde


"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

William Shakespeare

Hit & Run :Reason.com

FBI Shoots Up House of Unarmed People 


An FBI SWAT team stormed a family home in District Heights, Maryland, yesterday at 6 a.m.

Agents fired at an unarmed 18-year-old woman in what appears to have been a no-knock raid.

  Via ABC 7:

“They almost hit my daughter, man,” says Emory Hughley. “If I hadn’t told her to go back in her room they probably would have shot her.”

Mammograms barely lower death rate, lead to many wrong diagnoses

Washington Post

The growing use of routine mammograms over the past 30 years has done little to lower the death rate from breast cancer but has sharply increased the number of women who are wrongly diagnosed with the disease, a new study reported.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/2012/11/21/269fc076-33f0-11e2-bb9b-288a310849ee_story.html

Orwell on Limousine Liberalism

Orwell quote:

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our "enlightenment," demands that the robbery shall continue. 

51 Over-Used Adverbs, Nouns, and Clichés in Writing

Over-Used Adverbs, Nouns, and Clichés in Writing:

Over-Used Adjectives in Writing

A noun is a person, place, or thing – and an adjective should describe the noun in more detail (eg, “successful writers”). Some writing teachers say that adjectives are wholly unnecessary, while others advise writers to use sparingly. It’s up to you.

1. Many
2. Pretty
3. Nice
4. Kind
5. Pleasant
6. Tall/short/fat/skinny
7. Big/little
8. Shimmering
9. Absolutely
10. Same exact
11. Truly unique
12. Quite
13. Funny
14. Many
15. Incredible
16. A lot
17. Bad/good
18. Roaring
19. Interesting
20. Amazing
21. Any

In Japan, Adult Diapers Sales Exceed Babies Diapers

ZeroHedge:

Franco Modigliani won the Nobel Prize in Economics 1985, partly for his “life cycle hypothesis“, which states that spending and savings patterns are predictable and largely a function of age demographics. In other words, Modigliani’s hypothesis is basically that age demographics largely determine the health and robustness of an economy.
...............................
Specifically ... the basic health of any country’s economy is largely driven by the number of its citizens who are in their peak spending years (39-43 year olds).

So you want to simplify the tax code . . .

What are you going to get rid of?

Are you going to eliminate the incentive to provide employers health insurance? Are you going to get rid of charitable deductions or pension contribution deductions? What about dinging the child credit or mortgage interest? Or how about clipping Social Security benefits for retired workers?

Good luck to the politician that votes to eliminates any of these. 


http://www.businessinsider.com/the-top-20-tax-expenditures-2012-11

Weegee

Top 5 Ways To Get Pulled Over by the Cops - Edmunds.com

Top 5 Ways To Get Pulled Over by the Cops - Edmunds.com: "CHP officer McElroy says he sees people who apparently have forgotten they're driving cars: They're busy shaving, eating and even changing clothes. And what exactly is the violation you're committing when you're changing clothes in a car? "Unsafe speed," he says. "There is no safe speed for pulling a shirt off over your head while driving.""

'via Blog this'

Epictetus

"It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows."

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."

'If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid."

Epictetus

Nonsense paper accepted by mathematics journal

Nonsense paper accepted by mathematics journal: "Each of these sentences [of the paper] contains mathematical nouns linked by the verbs mathematicians use, but the sentences scarcely connect with each other. The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator. Mathgen has a set of rules that define how papers are arranged in sections and what kinds of sentence make up a section and how those sentences are made up from different categories of technical and non-technical words. It creates beautifully formatted papers with the conventional structure, complete with equations and citations but, alas, totally devoid of meaning. Nate Eldredge – the blogger behind That’s Mathematics! – wrote Mathgen by adapting SCIgen, which does something similar for computer science. Papers generated by SCIgen have been accepted for publication at academic conferences and journals that claim to carry out peer review."

'via Blog this'

Bankrupt: Twinkies and Dingdongs

Hostess Brands, the company better known as the maker of Butternut, Ding Dongs, Dolly Madison, Drake's, Home Pride, Ho Hos, Hostess, Merita, Nature's Pride, and of course Wonder Bread and Twinkies has just made a liquidation filing.

". . .the labor unions representing 18,000 workers fought the company, and the unions won... A very pyrrhic victory. Sadly, they are all now out of a job as the unionized victory just happened to lead to the terminal winddown of their employer.

As to the future of the iconic brands, fear not: Hostess' numerous brands will be bought in a stalking horse auction by willing private buyers, however completely free and clear of all legacy labor and pension agreements which ultimately led to the company's liquidation."

Experience Teaches Effectually, But Brutally.

Malinvestment

"The danger here, as we have seen in every other bust for a century or more, is that we can only suspend the laws of economics for so long. And in general we are only good at considering immediate consequences, while being very, very bad at considering later consequences. As 19^th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat observed, 'The bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.' "

Unintended Consequences of Obamacare

'. . . took my son to a dermatologist appointment last week. Insurance was balking, so we thought we’d have to cough up the $930 originally quoted. Turns out the cash price is $150…

Unintended consequences of Obamacare will reverberate through the economy for decades. In an extremely negative way."

Take that Apple: Samsung Hikes Apple Component Price By 20%

"The paradox here is that AAPL's victory is quite pyrrhic: if and when Samsung feels sufficiently threatened, it can just pull a Gazprom and halt the supply of mission critical components to the world's biggest publicly traded company." Naturally, the hyperbolic all out response would mean an immediate nuclear war of attrition between the two electronics giants. Instead Samsung would be even better served to show Apple who is boss in quantized increments. Today, it has done just that, forcing Apple to swallow a 20% price increase on hundreds of millions of Samsung application processors used in iPads and iPhones. "Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the (increase.)" Game, set, match Samsung."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-12/samsung-hikes-apple-component-price-20

Obama victory infuriates Pakistani drone victims

"The same person who attacked my home has gotten re-elected," he told Reuters in the capital, Islamabad, where he fled after the attack on his village in South Waziristan, one of several ethnic Pashtun tribal areas on the Afghan border.

"Since yesterday, the pressure on my brain has increased. I remember all of the pain again."

In his re-election campaign, Obama gave no indication he would halt or alter the drone program, which he embraced in his first term to kill al Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan without risking American lives.

Drone strikes are highly unpopular among many Pakistanis, who consider them a violation of sovereignty that cause unacceptable civilian casualties.

"Whenever he has a chance, Obama will bite Muslims like a snake. Look at how many people he has killed with drone attacks," said Haji Abdul Jabar, whose 23-year-old son was killed in such a bombing.

Analysts say anger over the unmanned aircraft may have helped the Taliban gain recruits, complicating efforts to stabilize the unruly border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. That could also hinder Obama's plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2014.

Job candidate tells Bloomberg to ‘take this job and ….. ..’ over global warming cover | Watts Up With That?

‘take this job and ….. ..’ :

Dear Sir / Madam,

I write regarding my cancellation of attendance at the ‘Bloomberg Assessment Test’ . . . I wanted to communicate my reasons for doing so. 

 ‘Bloomberg Business Week’ – published a highly misleading article, leading on the front page – ‘It’s Global Warming, Stupid’ . . .   

 . . . Josh Tyrangiel tweeting that same day, presumably to ramp up sales of this particular issue that, “Our cover story this week may generate controversy, but only among the stupid.”  This is not language becoming of the editor of a major mainstream news publication and solidifies my opinion that BBW is an outlet for propaganda, rhetoric and schoolboy level insults, not a publication to be taken seriously – especially for anyone who works in the business world needing facts . . . . not only are the claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming highly uncertain . . .  but that even many of the experts who stand behind alarming claims made regarding the latter disputed any feasible links to Hurricane Sandy.
...................

If Bloomberg is willing to tolerate publication of work that is nothing but insulting propaganda . . . I do not wish to be associated with it.

Yours sincerely,

Danny Weston
University of Greenwich

'via Blog this'

Apple's Laughable New iPad Patent

From  The Absurdity Of Our Patent System:

Earlier this week, Apple got a bunch of new patents approved, including one covering the "design" of the original iPad.

What does this "design" patent cover?"

For the last few decades, the idea of tablet computers has often been discussed. Several companies have created prototypes. As far as I can remember, all of these prototypes were rectangles with rounded corners. (Do you remember a triangle-shaped one? Maybe a disk? Neither do I). Sharp corners, meanwhile, could potentially hurt consumers, so of course intelligent designers will round them.

But now Apple has been given a patent for the iPad design that includes its rectangular shape and rounded corners.

You can't make this stuff up.:)

Machiavelli on Political Cycles

 ZeroHedge: "Machiavelli accounts for this 'repetitive' oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune."

'via Blog this'

Why Warren Buffett plays bridge

Aside from an affection for cheeseburgers and cherry Coke, one of the personal facts commonly known about Warren Buffett is his love of bridge, which he periodically plays online with Bill Gates.

Why bridge? Though Graham wasn't talking about Buffett at the time, he offers a clue:

I recall to those of you who are bridge players the emphasis that bridge experts place on playing a hand right rather than on playing it successfully. Because, as you know, if you play it right you are going to make money and if you play it wrong you lose money – in the long run. There is a beautiful little story about the man who was the weaker bridge player of the husband-and-wife team. It seems he bid a grand slam, and at the end he said very triumphantly to his wife ‘I saw you making faces at me all the time, but you notice I not only bid this grand slam but I made it. What can you say about that?' And his wife replied very dourly, ‘If you had played it right you would have lost it.'

It seems to me (and it has certainly been my experience) that it takes an enormous amount of restraint to focus on playing every investment hand “right,” according to an established discipline, allowing the law of averages to work in your favor, rather than trying to win every hand. I would guess that this is exactly what appeals to Warren Buffett's temperament. Over the long-term, good investing requires it.

European Growth Estimates Cut

globaleconomicanalysis

The European Commission economists are not in the "forecasting business". They are in the "confidence building" business. As such, it is their duty to "forecast" growth, even if it is obvious that their "forecast" is ridiculous.

Effective Writing | PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement

Effective Writing: "When Hemingway was criticized by Faulkner for his limited word choice he replied: Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

'via Blog this'

Apple hides 2nd Samsung apology on UK site so it can’t be seen without scrolling

Apple hides Samsung apology on its UK site so it can’t be seen without scrolling : "The company has already enraged the judge once with its first cheeky apology to Samsung. It’s difficult to say what the judge will make of this most recent change, but if he finds out, I can’t see him being pleased."

'via Blog this'

Yardeni on Tuition Inflation

Business Insider: "If you are looking for out-of-control inflation, look no further than the college and hospital next door in the US. The CPI data show that college tuition and fees have increased 1,036% since January 1979 vs. 546% for Medical Care Goods & Services vs. 238% for the overall CPI. In other words, college costs have more than quadrupled relative to the CPI over this period, while Medical Care has more than doubled relative to the CPI. "

'via Blog this'

Apple will have to apologise for its apology

Apple will have to apologise for its apology as well its patent infringement claims against Samsung when it publishes a statement on its UK website tomorrow.

The three sentence statement that Apple will have to display on its homepage will say:

On 25th October 2012, Apple Inc published a statement on its UK website in relation to Samsung's Galaxy tablet. That statement was inaccurate and did not comply with the order of the Court Appeal of England and Wales. A correct statement can be found at this link.

Samsung had complained that the initial apology which ran on the UK homepage last week did not comply with the spirit of the court order, and judges yesterday morning agreed with them

It would be up to Samsung to allege contempt of court if they wished to.

Will Rogers

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

It's not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.