TigerHawk sees a "plague of process"

Or a "cult of procedure," but "plague of process" is better. He has touched a nerve with this post, and commenters are hashing it out. Every time I have tried to write about this, I have been side-tracked by the word "bureaucracy." Get the language right, and the reasoning goes more easily. Kind of like having a better map.

Social history of TV, and where it's headed

Or, why TV is like gin, and what may happen if the world starts metaphorically drinking Red Bull instead.

A while back I put up a post called "Natural History of TV." Here's Clay Shirky taking a look at the social side of the thing that takes up more of the time of more of the people than seems possible, until you look at numbers. Reminds me of the time years ago a friend borrowed a TV set to look at some particular thing, and gave it back a couple of months later, saying, "It's a cute little monster, but I can't afford to feed it."
I think Shirky is seeing, and talking about, the approach of the Singularity. The Singularity, if and when it arrives, is likely to turn out to have been seen coming from many different directions, and to have looked like many different things to different observers. We may not even notice its arrival, but look around one fine day and discover that things have become very different.

This comes from Making Light, where there are comments.

Update: a "lightly edited transcription" can be found at Clay Shirky's blog, Here Comes Everybody. Thanks to Lynn at Violins and Starships for the pointer.

The Rather Difficult Font Game

That's the name of it: The Rather Difficult Font Game. It's a game, with fonts. Faces, actually, but even the pros don't insist on the distinction much any more. At the end you get a score. Mine was 28. If I try it again, it will probably be something different. By way of Making Light.

Messed up climate numbers

Patrick Michaels in the WSJ:

Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess

President George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.

Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner would cut emissions even further – by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve these massive reductions, we'll just have to get by with less energy.

We'll get along somehow? Maybe the US can just stop using autos altogether. Everyone on the bus! How communal, uh, communitarian, uh, community-oriented.

There's a lot more politics than there is science in this global-warming business. Now that's it is becoming the unquestioned, assumed background to more legislation that will damage the economy and hence the country, it must be fought. We are overdue for another ice age, if you look at the cycles. So a whole lot more data should be gathered and integrated before major coercive action is taken. The proposed legislation is not going to benefit the country. It's well-intentioned foolishness.

Michaels concludes this article with

the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?

But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland's ice – we should be talking about reality.

Read the whole thing to see why the perceptions that raise the threat of the taxes are questionable. It's politics and self-interested rent-seeking all the way down.

Here earlier: Energy.

For Earth Day, the Heidelberg Appeal

Background

The Heidelberg Appeal was publicly released at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. By the end of the 1992 summit, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal. Since then, word of mouth has prompted hundreds more scientists to lend their support. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it. In spite of this spontaneous and growing support from the world’s scientific community, the Heidelberg Appeal has received little media attention.

Neither a statement of corporate interests nor a denial of environmental problems, the Heidelberg Appeal is a quiet call for reason and a recognition of scientific progress as the solution to, not the cause of, the health and environmental problems that we face. The Appeal expresses a conviction that modern society is the best equipped in human history to solve the world’s ills, provided that they do not sacrifice science, intellectual honesty, and common sense to political opportunism and irrational fears.

The Heidelberg Appeal

We want to make our full contribution to the preservation of our common heritage, the Earth.

We are, however, worried at the dawn of the twenty-first century, at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development.

We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look toward the past, does not exist and has probably never existed since man’s first appearance in the biosphere, insofar as humanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse. We full subscribe to the objectives of a scientific ecology for a universe whose resources must be taken stock of, monitored and preserved.

But we herewith demand that this stock-taking, monitoring and preservation be founded on scientific criteria and not on irrational preconceptions.

We stress that many essential human activities are carried out either by manipulating hazardous substances or in their proximity, and that progress and development have always involved increasing control over hostile forces, to the benefit of mankind.

We therefore consider that scientific ecology is no more than extension of this continual progress toward the improved life of future generations.

We intend to assert science’s responsibility and duties toward society as a whole.

We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant data.

We draw everybody’s attention to the absolute necessity of helping poor countries attain a level of sustainable development which matches that of the rest of the planet, protecting them from troubles and dangers stemming from developed nations, and avoiding their entanglement in a web of unrealistic obligations which would compromise both their independence and their dignity.

The greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, and not Science, Technology, and Industry, whose instruments, when adequately managed, are indispensable tools of a future shaped by Humanity, by itself and for itself, overcoming major problems like overpopulation, starvation and worldwide diseases.

More at Michelle Malkin's place.

Oh, and -- Happy Lenin's Birthday.

Latvian smoked sprats

A propos of nothing at all, something very tasty:

You want to look for that round black can. Sometimes available at Shaw's, always at the Russian deli in Ocean City, MD. (That's the OC Party Market, 300 S. Baltimore Ave. , corner of Dorchester St. Also Russian beer, chocolate, many varieties of caviar and smoked fish, and so on.) Also Zabar's, and the Bedford Cheese Shop in Brooklyn. The pic is a link, also. And there's a list, not complete, but better than nothing.

I like to throw them on top of a pile of what the local markets call German potato salad, which has potatoes, onions, parsley, not much else, and microwave the whole thing for about a minute and a half. The potatoes and vinegar help to cut the oiliness. Gosh, do you think that pouring off a little of the oil might help to "cut the oiliness?" Hmm. Something else to think about. Might be even better in the skillet. What a wonderful world, that contains such possibilities.

I have not been paid by any Latvian fish canners for this endorsement. I just ate some a few minutes ago, and was so pleased by the experience that I wanted to say something about it.

Big boats, little boats

So David Geffen's yacht is nearly twice the size of Saddam Hussein's? My word. And him a Democrat. He'll really feel the repeal of the tax cuts. Might have to fire a couple of deckhands or stewards. But they will surely be all right. The Democrats are looking out for them, just as in 1990. Remember the tax bill that the first President Bush signed, the one that got him in such trouble for not remembering his own lip-reading remark? Passed by a Democratic congress: House vote, Senate vote. Including the luxury tax on boats costing over $100,000, which led to this:

According to a recent The Wall Street Journal editorial, the Labor Department estimates that in Florida, the nation's leading boat building state, builders laid off 5,000 out of 18,000 laborers by the end of 1990 and these layoffs are not isolated. Retailers, manufacturers, and services aligned to the boating industry are simultaneously affected. To provide even the slightest justification for these job losses, the government should at least be realizing substantial revenue gains. Nevertheless, according to the same editorial, the Joint Committee of Taxation has released collection estimates of which only $3 million were attributable to boats in 1991. Where is the justification?

This brings to mind Barack Obama's remark last night to the effect that the capital gains tax should be raised "for purposes of fairness," without regard to raising revenue. (Full debate transcript here.) The Law of Unintended Consequences will not be flouted.

In other boating news,

A ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court in California could snare boaters in a bureaucratic net of permits and regulations if a consequent court-ordered deadline is not thrown overboard.

… as of Sept. 30, recreational boaters will no longer be exempt from greywater discharges, including normal discharge from marine engines, laundry, shower and galley sink wastes, or any other discharge incidental to the normal operation of a vessel.

Because the court's decision is not limited to vessels with ballast water tanks, the court order could impact motor boats, sailboats, dinghies, kayaks and even canoes.…

Under current regulations, the state Department of Environmental Management (DEM) requires that all sea going vessels be registered with the state. That means canoes, kayaks, dinghies and paddleboat owners would all be required to obtain an EPA permit.

Paperwork bonanza on the way.

Kristen Byrnes on NPR

I mentioned Kristen Byrnes and her thorough debunking of An Inconvenient Truth here a while back. Now I see that she has been interviewed on the radio by NPR. There is a link to the audio at that page.

This comes by way of a good, newish climate-science blog, Watts Up With That, which goes on the sidebar right now.

Gleanings

Nothin' for a week here, might as well put these up.

Wikipedia is apparently completely unreliable on climate issues. (via)

Ron Bailey reviews Expelled, the movie about "intelligent design" with Ben Stein. Hey, that rhymes! Considering the response that An Inconvenient Truth received, Stein should be in line (another rhyme! Oh, I'm cookin' here) for a Nobel Prize next year. Who needs real science, when the fake stuff is so much more fun? The movie's full title is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Does that mean,"Leave your intelligence in the lobby?" I know I'll have less respect for Ben Stein's intelligence in the future.
Update: Oh, look, a whole website devoted to Expelled, called Expelled Exposed. Thanks Charles. Glenn Reynolds has more on Ben Stein's view of science and scientists, and there's a wild comment thread going at The Volokh Conspiracy.
Another update: now there's a poem from lizard Winslow.
Yet another update: Much more discussion at Winds of Change.
And: John Derbyshire's merciless review: A Blood Libel on Our Civilization.

JFK and drugs. (via)

Professor Dutch's Top Ten No Sympathy Lines. (via)

If you search at Gateway Pundit for "Brrr," you'll get a lot of interesting posts on global whatever-it-is.

PrestoPundit has unearthed a paper by Barack Obama Senior, the father from whom the candidate received the dreams. It's called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." (via)

"Professional courtesy," my eye. You knew this was going on, but those who did it could deny it. Once some documents slip out, it's another story. Special license plates shield officials from traffic tickets. (via)

From CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, comes "the grid." Coming soon: superfast internet. (via)

The Investigative Project on Terrorism's CAIR series is complete. 10 installments.

The war on Sharpies. "We've purged every permanent marker there is in this building," says the proud elementary school principal. [sarcasm] So that's why they call them "magic" markers! [/sarcasm] (via)

Energy

You hardly ever hear someone say, "Gee, I wish I wasn't so energetic. I'm sorry to have so much energy." Energy is the sine qua non of civilization, or even merely taking out the trash. It is not possible to achieve prosperity by conservation. Mind you, I'm strongly in favor of thrift. As we used to say in New England,

Use it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do,
Or do without.

That's just avoiding waste, making the most of what's available. But one of Vernor Vinge's points in Marooned in Realtime was that the further along we get, the more energy we can dispose. Blake at BitMaelstrom has a worthwhile post on this, inspired by this thread at Althouse. It's the same thread referenced below in the Paul Krugman … post; and contains the reference to Dexter cattle, which do well in all climates.

Alex Gregory, at The New Yorker:

Apocalypse? No!

That's the title of a new movie that you will not be seeing at the local Multiplex. The DVD is available from GreatSwindle.com. It's Lord Monckton's contra Al Gore slideshow, filmed live at the Cambridge Union Society, Oct. 8, 2007. I am strongly tempted to transcribe a whole lot of it. But I'll refrain, for now.

I think I'll donate a copy to my local library, if they will promise me that it will go into the collection. Highly recommended.

More Monckton here and here.

In other news from the AGW propaganda front, Morgan Freeberg and Gerard Van der Leun have played a round of blog ping-pong. The serve: The Climate Thugs and the No Balls BBC: Visual Aids. The return: I Made a New Word XV. The volley: Word o' the Day: bo•lus•te•mol•o•gy. All worth reading. The return post by Freeberg incorporates a General Theory of Everything that's wrong with journalism and media. I was just chatting with a reporter/columnist for the local daily who was saying that it's hard times for print media. "The New York Times has just laid off 200 people," he said. I said, "If they weren't a propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party, they might not be on such hard times." At which point, he went into moonbat mode, asking if the Washington Times or Fox News could be taken seriously. Which shows that even in a small town, the journalist swims in liberalism like the fish in the sea, taking it for granted as the normal environment.

Cthulhu has a talk show

He's dead, he's sleeping, he's dreaming, and — he's on the air answering callers! Not just any Old One, a really Great Old One. Now for today's edition of Calls For Cthulhu. Folks, let's hear it for the mighty, unspeakable Cthulhu!

He also has a license plate. Or maybe the license plate belongs to a fan. Oh, yes, it would have to, since Cthulhu dwells in R'lyeh under the sea. Well, maybe not, it's a Virginia plate, and Virginia has a lot of shoreline, maybe R'lyeh is closer to shore than previously thought. It would have to be a fairly short cable run, for the TV show, and if someone, or something, wanted to come ashore, to scout around a little bit, checking on what to eat first, a car would be handy. Then again, too much contemplation of the Great Old Ones is itself dangerous, so it's time to end this now.

Paul Krugman agrees with Rolling Stone and me, and we're fast-tracking

Now there's an odd triple. In today's Grains Gone Wild, Krugman says that "We also need a pushback against biofuels, which turn out to have been a terrible mistake." Click the "biofuel" label for more on this here.

Krugman waits only until his next sentence to make one of those non-predicting predictions, the kind where he's right either way: "But it’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past." Or, of course, maybe something can be done. It's not clear. Is anything clear? It's clear that using food as fuel is a mistake. Bio-diesel from stuff that would otherwise be garbage is one thing, but turning cropland over to raising fuel is another matter. So where can the pushback come from? The leftist environmentalist Democrats are in the bag on this. Congressmen of either party from corn-raising states are in the bag. Will these people ever admit to making a mistake, and sponsor repeal of their own legislation? Damn, it would be refreshing to see. Krugman is a Democrat, though, so he can see no way out, and is left with a conclusion based on a begged question. There's a hidden assumption in the last sentence, that "cheap oil, may be a thing of the past." Assuming nothing changes. And why would anything change? Surely all the oil fields have been discovered [Falklands? Brazil? Bakken? Anyone?], surely Iraq will never get their oil on line, surely things can only get worse.


All because of the war, of course. You gotta blame Bush. Whatever will the BDS sufferers do next year? And the global warming. Another quote: "[B]ad weather, especially the Australian drought, is probably related to climate change. So politicians and governments that have stood in the way of action on greenhouse gases bear some responsibility for food shortages." Note the weasel logic: "probably related"; but "politicians and goverments … [no "probably," not even a "might"] … bear some responsibility for food shortages."

The food shortages would be why we must get out of the way of giving the next president power for Fast-tracking climate policies. You knew this was coming. As the first commenter says,

Now that highly regarded scientists are getting the word out (although the press won't report it - any of it here at the D.C.?) these laws MUST be fast tracked before people realize what a fraud Global Warming is. It's about government control of people's lives, not "saving the planet." It's about becoming wealthy, as Al Gore has, on the issue. Data show that Earth has been in a cooling trend for the past ten years.

The increasing urgency of the warmingists reminds me of those offers you get in the junk mail: "Limited time only! Buy NOW before it's TOO LATE!"

There are comments on the Krugman column at Althouse.

Update: More on the Krugman column from Tom Maguire: The Eerily Prescient Professor Krugman, and Paul Krugman, Lying To Protect The Democrats.

Everybody's against green fuel this week: here's Ron Bailey, with a good quote from Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, "Biofuels are purely and simply the biggest Green mistake we've ever made and we're still making it."

Gleanings

About time to release these into the wild.

John Derbyshire reviews American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.

Annie Dillard goes furthest into the dark territory: "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me … we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt … space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death.”

[…] to the degree that ordinary folk disengage from nature, we shall be less able to evaluate what we are told by the Al Gores of the world, nature’s self-appointed custodians, and their legions of tax-eating experts.

I just love Annie Dillard's writing. I don't know if I agree with her, or even understand her, a fair amount of the time, but my word, that woman can write.

Radley Balko: Standing Near Children Now a Crime.

Rand Simberg coins a word: ambit, v., from ambition. Like "aspire," only not so nice. "Her ambition is to…" = "She ambits to…"

Generations on welfare. "Six million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job and 'benefits are a way of life', according to a report by MPs." (via)

Youth crime in Britain. Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, links to Clive Barker and Time magazine. It's just getting worse. Parts of Britain are losing the status of civilization, and it's not the booze, either, it's the attitudes of invulnerability and entitlement among those with a ton of self-esteem and no self-respect. (via)

Ace says Want To Be Happy All of Your Life? Make an Ugly Woman Your Wife Dude Your Husband.

Striped icebergs.

LauraW, at Ace's place, calls this a Nifty Mashup. I don't disagree. Jim Morrison meets Debbie Harry for "Riders on the Rapture."

Rainbow Quest

Pete Seeger had a TV show for a while in the 1960's, called "Rainbow Quest." Click over to PCL Link Dump for a list of many of them. A fair number of these are posted by YouTube user peglegsam, who should not be confused with Peg Leg Sam, or Peglegasus, either. These include performances by many wonderful folk and folk revival singers, among them Elizabeth Cotten, Jean Ritchie, Rev. Gary Davis, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, oh my it goes on.

Some of these Youtube clips have better sound than the old records; better than my old vinyl copy of the Folkways Anthology, anyway. Bob Lee Junior Blues, for instance. The sound is good on this version of Kokomo, with some surprising guests in the video.

Perils of choosing one's friends

There is even less there there to Obama than previously thought, says Thomas Sowell.

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" — in Obama's own words — as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college — members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

Obama self-consciously constructed his persona, to a greater extent, at least, than some. Than me, anyhow.

Thanks to Althouse, where the comment thread has gotten wild and wooly.

Update: More on this from Neo-Neocon and Engram. More from Stanley Kurtz.

Another update: Rev. Wright's new house. "God damn America!"

Gore stealth campaign building a contributor database

"Join Al Gore in supporting solutions to the climate crisis." That's the Alliance for Climate Protection. Otherwise known as wecansolveit.org. 914,339 already enrolled as of 4 pm EDT March 25. 915,969 at 12:15 am the same night. I wonder if they'll all buy Al's carbon credits.

So they want to protect the climate, eh? Morgan Freeberg says everybody is linking to this:

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued…

I don't want to be left out, so now I have linked to it, too. And a few people are linking to this:

Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"

Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center.

After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. "I fell in love," he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.

"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.
How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.

So Gore is building a movement based on protecting a couple of degrees of temperature that seem on closer examination to be able to take care of themselves. What do you do with a movement that's as wrongheaded as that? Just send them home?

Complaints about the economy, about competitiveness? Tax cuts would help

There's some talk of a recession going round, and various remedies proposed for a slowing economy. Odd, when the simplest thing to do to move the economy along is within the reach of nearly every legislative body in the country. (Nevada, South Dakota, Wyoming are off the list.)

Thirty countries are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. Here's a nice little table from a Tax Foundation article, U.S. States Lead the World in High Corporate Taxes, showing the tax rates for the 50 states of the US and the other countries of the OECD, ordered by rate.

What this shows is that the American economy is so robust that even in chains it is strong. Imagine what we could do if we were free!

Comparing U.S. State Corporate Taxes to the OECD

OECD Overall Rank	Country/State	Federal Rate Adjusted	Top State Corporate Tax Rate	Combined Federal and State Rate (Adjusted) (a)
	Iowa	35	12	41.6
	Pennsylvania	35	9.99	41.5
	Minnesota	35	9.8	41.4
	Massachusetts	35	9.5	41.2
	Alaska	35	9.4	41.1
	New Jersey	35	9.36	41.1
	Rhode Island	35	9	40.9
	West Virginia	35	9	40.9
	Maine	35	8.93	40.8
	Vermont	35	8.9	40.8
	California	35	8.84	40.7
	Delaware	35	8.7	40.7
	Indiana	35	8.5	40.5
	New Hampshire	35	8.5	40.5
	Wisconsin	35	7.9	40.1
	Nebraska	35	7.81	40.1
	Idaho	35	7.6	39.9
	New Mexico	35	7.6	39.9
	Connecticut	35	7.5	39.9
	New York	35	7.5	39.9
	Kansas	35	7.35	39.8
	Illinois	35	7.3	39.7
	Maryland	35	7	39.6
	North Dakota	35	7	39.6
1	Japan	30	11.56	39.54
	Arizona	35	6.968	39.5
	North Carolina	35	6.9	39.5
	Montana	35	6.75	39.4
	Oregon	35	6.6	39.3
2	United States	35	6.57	39.27
	Arkansas	35	6.5	39.2
	Tennessee	35	6.5	39.2
	*Washington	35	6.4	39.2
	Hawaii	35	6.4	39.2
3	Germany	26.38	17.0	38.9
	*Michigan	35	6	38.9
	Georgia	35	6	38.9
	Kentucky	35	6	38.9
	Oklahoma	35	6	38.9
	Virginia	35	6	38.9
	Florida	35	5.5	38.6
	Louisiana	35	8	38.5
	Missouri	35	6.25	38.4
	Ohio	35	5.1	38.3
	Mississippi	35	5	38.3
	South Carolina	35	5	38.3
	Utah	35	5	38.3
	Colorado	35	4.63	38.0
	Alabama	35	6.5	37.8
4	Canada	22.1	14	36.1
	*Texas	35	1.6	36.0
	Nevada	35	0	35.0
	South Dakota	35	0	35.0
	Wyoming	35	0	35.0
5	France	34.43	0	34.4
6	Belgium	33.99	0	33.99
7	Italy	33	0	33
8	New Zealand	33	0	33
9	Spain	32.5	0	32.5
10	Luxembourg	22.88	7.5	30.38
11	Australia	30	0	30
12	United Kingdom	30	0	30
13	Mexico	28	0	28
14	Norway	28	0	28
15	Sweden	28	0	28
16	Korea	25	2.5	27.5
17	Portugal	25	1.5	26.5
18	Finland	26	0	26
19	Netherlands	25.5	0	25.5
20	Austria	25	0	25
21	Denmark	25	0	25
22	Greece	25	0	25
23	Czech Republic	24	0	24
24	Switzerland	8.50	14.64	21.32
25	Hungary	20	0	20
26	Turkey	20	0	20
27	Poland	19	0	19
28	Slovak Republic	19	0	19
29	Iceland	18	0	18
30	Ireland	12.5	0	12.5
*Michigan, Texas and Washington have gross receipts taxes rather than traditional corporate income taxes. For comparison purposes, we converted the gross receipts taxes into an effective CIT rate. See footnote 2 for methodology.
(a) Combined rate adjusted for federal deduction of state taxes paid

See who's on the bottom of the list: The Celtic Tiger, Ireland. Now instead of Irish young people seeking jobs in the USA, we meet Irish businessmen looking to buy castles in the USA.

From TaxProf, where there are comments, by way of Glenn Reynolds.

How can hypallage help you as a wirter?

What? you say. The answer is here. Try to keep from laughing so hard that you hurt yourself. This may be the secret to poetry.

Climate models : climate :: map : territory

I casually tossed off a quote ["the map is not the territory"] from Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity in a post below that was supposed to be about Eliot Spitzer. On further reflection, it seems to me that there is a connection between this line and the global warming hysteria. This whole post is encapsulated in the title; if you know how to read that punctuation, all that follows is redundant. Reading the title out loud, one would say, "Climate models are to the climate as the map is to the territory."

Maps or models may be good, better, not so good; none of them is the actual thing, therefore all will have non-correspondences to the actual thing. The only way to build a perfect map of Rhode Island involves a lot of water, earth, and stone, and a table about 75 by 40 miles on a side. Thousands of years of history would have to be included, also. You would not want to forget the arrowheads beneath the ploughed land. The trick is to get the model to correspond closely enough to the thing being modeled that it is useful.

I submit that current climate models have not reached a degree of accuracy such that they are actually useful. And that the makers of such models who think they are useful are overly enamored of their own brilliance, and should take a step back to look at the real world, whose complexity is far greater than the calculations of human beings. In order to create a computer model, one first must list all the factors. If you think you have listed all the factors, then you need to re-examine your assumptions, because it's that close to certain you have left something out. Or as Donald Rumsfeld said, "[A]s we know, there are 'known knowns;' there are things we know we know. We also know there are 'known unknowns;' that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also 'unknown unknowns' — the ones we don't know we don't know." Neglecting the existence of the unknown unknowns is a sure path to the kind of fall before which pride goeth.

A bit of Procol Harum

I have been a guitar player for most of my life. There are notes in the guitar parts of these pieces that I cannot identify. A little mystery, thank you Mr. Trower. A Christmas Camel. Cerdes. Repent Walpurgis, with Dave Ball carrying the guitar; not quite so mysterious or powerful as the version with Trower, but that is not online. I wish I could link "Something Following Me" here, but it does not seem to be online either. And this, for sheer weirdness, without guitar, Gary Brooker with The Drifters (what!?): A World of Love.

Update: Well, in a world which includes an Internet, what wonders we may behold. YouTuber ftyfty123 has the Trower guitar part on Repent Walpurgis note-for-note, almost but close enough, and up close. Look sharp to see the bits that involve almost the same note on two strings, with one choked enough to make the notes beat against each other.

Gorbachev a closet Christian

It was not hard to see, when Mikhail Gorbachev took the reins of the USSR, that something was different. All the glasnost and perestroika were new policies. An observer might have thought that the new Maximum Leader was perhaps not fully committed to the dialectical imperative. A bit of a softie, that is to say. And now we find that Gorbachev was a Christian all along, and indeed one with a particular fondness for the most gentle of saints, St. Francis of Assisi. No wonder the Wall fell. Reagan was playing the hardest of hardball against an "evil emperor" whose heart was not really in the evil empire game, unlike all of his predecessors. Sooner or later, the USSR would have had a leader who was a human being, with human feelings, rather than a committed ideologue. Better sooner than later.

Arthur C. Clarke, R.I.P.

The last of the big three of classic SF has left the planet. Glenn Reynolds says: "The world is better for his having lived, and worse for his having died." We may all hope for such a notice. Patrick Nielsen Hayden says: "He rejoiced to live in a gigantic universe of unencompassable scale, and he thought the rest of us should rejoice, too." Jerry Pournelle says: "Farewell, old friend." Ann Althouse quotes: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." John Derbyshire says: "His feet were always planted firmly in known fact, while his mind soared through infinite space and time." Charlie Martin says: "By his 90th birthday, Clarke had seen the world go from aircraft of cloth and wood to robotic starships, made of metal and silicon, sending back reports from the deep cold dark between the stars." NY Times obit here; an appreciation by Jeff VanderMeer at Amazon's Omnivoracious.

From the NY Times article that gets Glenn Reynolds's name wrong [see first comment]:

"I get fed up with things you can't solve one way or another," he said. "I'm not a dreamer, never have been. I think of myself as somebody who looks at scientific things, and asks: 'Where can we go with this? How can we use this to make our world better?' And I hope that in some small way I have helped push the process forward."

He did that.

It's hard to think of a favorite Clarke story, there are so many. Against the Fall of Night would be the one, of all of them, if I had to pick one. I first read it in the expanded version as The City and the Stars, with this cover by Richard Powers. But at this moment, "The Nine Billion Names of God" [link via] is the one that comes to mind: "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

A little more Gore

Let's start with this:

The founder of The Weather Channel either wants to sue, or thinks someone should sue, Al Gore for fraud over his peddling of carbon credits. Who has standing? Sooner would be better than later. Thanks to Morgan Freeberg at the blog nobody reads for the video.

And move on to this: A year ago, I said "I still think he'll announce, possibly at the last minute, after all the other candidates have shredded each other to bits. He could then step in as the (choke) non-political candidate, the Man With a Mission." Now, the stealth campaign seems to be simmering a little more warmly. There are petitions, no end of CafePress goodies and an "Official Gore Store" for those official campaign buttons (ever so much better than the knock-offs), and more websites than you want to visit. The convenient GoreHub site lists quite a few of them. And Roger L. Simon has this: "You Know Me Al."

On the other hand: Gore is busy with his CurrenTV IPO, and the millions at stake there might look more interesting than the Presidency. Still, if the IPO can be done by the middle of August, he could have both!

Gleanings

Another batch of these? Why, yes.

How the Markets Really Work.

David Mamet explains why he is "no longer a brain-dead liberal." Good comments at Roger L. Simon's place; more discussion at Althouse; observations and links at Powerline.

How could you pull the trigger of the world's smallest pistol? (via)

Ten Simple Rules for Graduate Students in the Evil Sciences. In the spirit of the classic "The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord." (via)

Nice surrealistic music video from Panic at the Disco: Nine in the Afternoon. By way of Politiscope, who asks "How many times did Panic at the Disco have to listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band before they finally decided, 'Eff it. Let's just try to be them.'"

Obama not so much the Messiah (see below) as the Kwisatz Haderach. (via)

How many Obama supporters does it take to change a light bulb? (via)

Theo is serious sometimes, funny sometimes. He's got the funny goin' on with some videos. The cellphone with all the features, the Sumsing 3000 Turbo Xi Multitask. The wackiest, sexiest juice commercial you'll ever want to see. Oh, those Canadians! NSFW.

Tech note: the post below with the MSNBC video is not editable. I suspect that this is because the embedding is done with an iframe tag, rather than the object tag that Youtube videos use for embedding. It's annoying, as it keeps me from adding updates, or doing anything to it at all.