JkOnTheRun reports that you can now download WikiPedia to your favorite device. For those who know my obsession with downloading everything, you know I love this one!
Nick Lewis detects CNN using comment spam to promote their shows and keyword stuffing to depress the search ranking of blogs that criticize CNN. This goes beyond news coverage to being actively evil. Wow.
Based on my sysadmin's recomendation, I am experimenting with CRM114. CRM114 is a system that needs training to operate well. It requires training on error rather than training on a corpus of prototypes. So, I wanted to have it installed so that all legit mail comes to my inbox and all my spam to a spam folder. While training I will check both folders, saving false positives in a teach-non-spam folder and false negatives in a teach-spam folder. For this to work I needed a program to grab the contents of my teach folders and pass them to CRM114 for training. So I wrote some code that I actually put into production! If it works, I will put into into production for the other people on this server. It works for anyone using an IMAP server with access to shell. Now I have cron run it every 5 minutes and I am now training. Yay. The source is here. Feel free to use it and tell me what you think.
In a prior post I talked about the advantages that the religious have over the less religious. This Optimize Magazine Article is an interview with the author of The Integrity Advantage about the importance of integrity in business. One of the examples from the book is baseball player Ace Greenberg's decision to celebrate Yom Kippur rather than go to the ballpark in 1934. He uses Warren Buffet as another example. Perhaps it is not religion per se that results in success, but simply being high integrity. Maybe religious observance is just an integrity marker.
Captain Ed says the recent ISG report says that they cannot rule the possibility that Iraqi WMD were transferred to Syria. But can't investigate because they lack access to Syria and the Bekka valley in Lebanon. He quotes the WaTimes:
But on the question of Syria, Mr. Duelfer did not close the books. "ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war," Mr. Duelfer said in a report posted on the CIA's Web site Monday night.He cited some evidence of a transfer. "Whether Syria received military items from Iraq for safekeeping or other reasons has yet to be determined," he said. "There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation."
But Mr. Duelfer said he was unable to complete that aspect of the probe because "the declining security situation limited and finally halted this investigation. The results remain inconclusive, but further investigation may be undertaken when circumstances on the ground improve."
Although Syria helped Iraq evade U.N.-imposed sanctions by shipping military and other products across its borders, the investigators “found no senior policy, program, or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD.” Because of the insular nature of Saddam Hussein’s government, however, the investigators were “unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials.”
CNN is gaining against Fox News in the ratings. The question is why now? My theory is that CNN is more convenient to watch (default) and people care less about its ideological blinders when we are outside of election season. Note I don't watch either network so it is also possible that CNN has simply improved and Fox degraded. But if so, why would that be?
A friend forwarded a link to this NYTimes article which claims the Marines are upset about implicitly the Bush administration denying them armor and needed manpower in Iraq. As a Vietnam War veteran, he was outraged at the Bush administration at this stuff. Subsequently I found this blog post which did the homework on the NYTimes article only to find that the real issue is interservice communication problems not civilian decision making.
I told him that this is a common pattern for the NYTimes. It selects and produces content in order to produce outrage at the political enemies of its readers. Clarifying details are often left absent. Recall that the first NYTimes coverage of the swift boats was an incredibly one-sided article about its funding rather than its claims. Recall the NYT coverage of the Al Qaqaa arms depot from just before the election that turned out to be entirely bogus.
The NYTimes provides value to its readers by making them believe they are reading all the news that is fit to print while actually providing all the news that fits their worldview.
If something in the the NYT is making you see red, don't assume that your anger is actually justified. Its more likely just dramatic entertainment.
Free markets favor the religious because they can keep their flocks together and decide how they want to operate their societies with less imposition from the government. So the market is looking more secular than ever before. From Job Henke:
'm simply not persuaded by the argument that there is a burgeoning "Theocracy" in the United States. You can tell the Social Conservatives are losing by the very battles they are fighting. Almost without exception, they are doing rear-guard duty. I mean, we've got partial nudity on prime-time television, and gay marriage on the radar.That's one hell of a long way from the 1940s-50s, where even married TV characters had separate beds, and the question was not whether homosexuals deserved marriage, but whether they deserved a lobotomy. We may feel strongly about arguments like the 10 Commandments statue, Intelligent Design in schools, and Janet Jackson's nipple, but the fact that we're arguing about these should indicate just how secular our government has become. 50 years ago, we were putting God into the Pledge of Allegiance, Intelligent Design would have been a big step forward for (creationism-dominated) science classes, and TV stations would have refused to show Janet Jackson from the forehead down.
From Michael Barone:
In the 2004 presidential exit poll, 74 percent of voters described themselves as churchgoers, 23 percent as said they were evangelical or born-again Protestants and 10 percent said they had no religion.This is in line with longer trends. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark in "The Churching of America 1776-1990" used careful quantitative analysis to show that in America's free marketplace of ideas, the religions and sects that have grown are those that make serious demands on members. Those that accommodate to secular critics and make few demands decline in numbers. The Roman Catholic Church continues to grow in America; the Assemblies of God and the Mormon Church grow even faster. But mainline Protestant denominations, which spend much effort ordaining gay bishops or urging disinvestment in Israel, lose members
[...]
Who inherits the future? In free societies, each generation makes its own religious choices, but people tend to follow the faith of their parents. Secular Europe, with below-replacement birthrates among non-Muslims, could be headed for a Muslim future, as historian Niall Ferguson suggests.In the United States, as pointed out by Phillip Longman in "The Empty Cradle" and Ben Wattenberg in "Fewer," birth rates are above replacement level largely because of immigrants. But, as Longman notes, religious people have more children than seculars. Those who believe in "family values" are more likely to have families.
This week is the Jewish holiday of Passover. Passover is intended to help Jews remember that they were once slaves in the land of Egypt and God got us released, redeemed us, delivered us from danger into freedom, and put us on the way back to the land of Israel (it would take a generation before we actually did, but that is another story).
In any case, central to observance of this holiday is the concept of God having redeemed us. In other words, God payed a price to buy our freedom and perhaps we now have some obligation towards him. Two major components of the holiday are the recitation of the plagues Egypt suffered because of its failure to be just. With each plague, Jews spill some wine to acknowledge that we all bear cost for this action even as it helped us gain freedom. Another is "the pour out thy wrath" section where Jews open the front door and ask God to pour out his wrath on people who commit major injustice. So part of the price is that we need and demand that the people who do evil must be punished. SImple compassion is not enough. I feel that part of the obligation is a pay-it-forward obligation to help others achieve justice. It is not entirely surprising that many neo-cons are Jews. The idea that we have an obligation to free people from oppression is deeply embedded in our psyche.
An interesting side point is that, while the Jewish God delivered redemption from unjust slavery, the Christians God redeemed them from punishment for their sins. A side-effect of this is that the obligation of Jews is to honor God and alleviate injustice, the obligation of Christians is to help people find Jesus so they can participate in redemption for their original sin. I never really understood this before.
Zimram Ahmed says:
I agree with Arnold that people are irrational when it comes to thinking about healthcare, and that part of this irrationality expresses itself as a preference for insulation coverage over catastrophic coverage. I've certainly felt the urge, to pick the healthcare plan that covers the most stuff when having to make that decision.
I like the Macintosh operating system interface better, but the hardware is far inferior to my top PC laptop pick, the Panasonic Y2. The future is in web based software and always-on connections (see e.g. SalesForce.com going after MSFT). But today we are not there yet.
Fifteen consecutive opinion polls during April have confirmed that the 'no' vote in the French referendum on the Constitutional Treaty stands at some 53 per cent .... An improbable alliance of right and left is tapping the mood that French travails in general, and unemployment in particular, are because France cannot be true to an idea of France. France has been locked in quasi economic stagnation for more than a decade; unemployment is 10 per cent and youth unemployment even higher.
Michelle Malkin covers it. No, everyone doesn't do it. No, its not acceptable. Much of the left is simply unhinged.
The current issue of Rolling Stone has an article by James Howard Kuntsler worrying about peak oil.
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.
[...]
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.
So the concept of peak oil as an event just makes very little sense. Technological changes affect both the cost and the value enough to make any claim that we have reached a peak extremely dubious. To say that we have reached "peak oil" is to be like that apocryphal patent clerk from 1899 who urged that we should close the patent office because everything that can be invented already has.
Incentives matter. Prices affect technology. Supply and demand curves are really fundamental. If oil prices are low, people will find new uses for it. If prices are high, people will find substitutes. Peak oil advocates claim that there are no substitutes that are not absurdly more expensive. But anyone who bothers to research the state of modern nuclear technology knows this is false (and see patent office comment above).
But even aside from alternative fuel technologies, peak oil advocates seem to forget that people can store oil. If people really believed that oil was going to run out, they would buy oil and keep it in storage tanks (or in the ground) for the future. Effectively the expectation of future high oil prices would drive up current prices sufficiently that we should expect no major price change associated with any form of peak extraction.
In other words, the recent changes in oil prices may be driven much more by middle eastern instability and china's decision to overinflate its economy than any major change in oil fundamentals. At very least, we can say that the concept of peak oil sounds much more like a scare tactic than an actual explanation for anything that is actually happening.
See this great site for economic data. Note this is despite the huge growth in the use of computers, air conditioners, etc. Note that our population is still growing so overall electricity usage is increasing.
Bacepundit points to VCrisis which notes:
During the first semester of 2004 Spain sold chemical warfare agents and radioactive materials to Venezuela worth €539.603 according to a report entitled "Spanish exports of defence materials and related products and technologies". The report, produced by Spain's Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, was revealed to Europe Press. Venezuela appeared as the twelfth buyer of such defence material to Spain for the period that saw José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero winning the vote over Partido Popular.
[..]
Report's statistics show that Venezuela was the only country under the category "countries to which chemical warfare agents and radioactive materials were sold". Worth noting that the said category includes "biological and nerve agents destined to chemical warfare" of which Venezuela bought €30.374.
From the WaPost
At 1:27 a.m. on Nov. 19, 2002, Officer David Mobilio of the Red Bluff Police Department was working the graveyard shift when he pulled his cruiser into a gas station in his quiet little farm town. As he stood beside the car, the 31-year-old husband and father of a toddler was shot three times, twice in the back and once in the head, at very close range.
[...]
No witnesses. It was a killing that might have never been solved.That is, until a confession appeared on the Internet. Six days after the shooting, a manifesto appeared on more than a dozen Web sites operated by the left-leaning Independent Media Center.
It began: “Hello Everyone, my name’s Andy. I killed a Police Officer in Red Bluff, California in a motion to bring attention to, and halt, the police-state tactics that have come to be used throughout our country. Now I’m coming forward, to explain that this killing was also an action against corporate irresponsibility.”
From the 11 April Business Week, pp.50-51. (Via Marginal Revolution)
University of Alberta political economist Wenran Jiang calculates China spends three times the world average on energy -- and seven times what Japan spends -- to produce $1 of gross domestic product. It also is far more inefficient than nations like Brazil and Indonesia...Chinese steelmakers on average use about twice as much energy as Japanese or Korean rivals per ton of output. Only 5% of the country's office and residential towers meet China's own minimal energy-conservation standards.
From the 11 April Business Week, pp.50-51. (Via Marginal Revolution)
University of Alberta political economist Wenran Jiang calculates China spends three times the world average on energy -- and seven times what Japan spends -- to produce $1 of gross domestic product. It also is far more inefficient than nations like Brazil and Indonesia...Chinese steelmakers on average use about twice as much energy as Japanese or Korean rivals per ton of output. Only 5% of the country's office and residential towers meet China's own minimal energy-conservation standards.
Larry Kudlow thinks we are in an oil price bubble. So does Tim Evans. I think part of the explanation for the rise in oil prices is indeed speculators. I think another major part of the rise in oil prices is the willingnes of oil producing countries to accept dollars in exchange for their output. One can't help but notice that oil prices are rising faster than other commodity prices and that the price of Euros has also risen.
My suspicion is that Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, etc. do not want to store value in dollars because the new post 9/11 rules governing money laundering and terrorism mean that they are more at risk of being discovered funding terrorism and having their accounts frozen. I don't know how to test this proposition. Any finance professionals out there with an idea?