Everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose

The Revenant
by Billy Collins

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair to eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all of my strength
not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner--
that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

Edinburgh Café by Dieter Krehbiel (photography)

Edinburgh Café by Dieter Krehbiel (photography)

Click to enlarge.

From now on, I’m buying nothing but [Chrysler] Plymouths

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 248.

US presidents have around ten weeks to assemble their governing team. Ike was adamant in avoiding cronyism, preferring big businessmen who would take a financial hit through government service as opposed to ‘business failures, college professors [crossed out and replaced by ‘political hacks’] and New Deal lawyers’. His appointments included ‘Engine Charlie’ Wilson, the President of General Motors, as secretary of defense, George Humphrey, the President of the Mark Hanna Company, to the Treasury, while the Boston banker Robert Cutler became national security advisor. The cabinet consisted of ‘eight millionaires and a plumber’ – a token and useless trade unionist. Engine Charlie in particular was ‘a classic type of corporation executive: basically apolitical and certainly unphilosophic, aggressive in action and direct in speech – the undoubting and uncomplicated pragmatist who inhabits a world of sleek, shining certitude’. He combined an ability to be coldly callous towards the ordinary worker with credulousness about doing a ‘package deal’ with the Soviets over Korea. After one too many Wilsonian monologues, a fellow cabinet member scribbled: ‘From now on, I’m buying nothing but [Chrysler] Plymouths.

They are still scrabbling around the monkey cage hurling feces

It is Monday morning and we are, perhaps, reaching high-tide in reaction to the late Friday dump of the Mueller report concluding, as many of us did soon after the original hypothesis was formulated, that there was no there, there. No collusion. No obstruction.

On the left, predictably, there are frantic scribblings to redeem this fantasy which they have pushed for more than two years. On the right, there is, not surprisingly jubilation, effectively a nationwide "I told you so."

There are murmurings that we should now investigate the actual collusion which does seem to have occurred, as revealed by the Mueller investigation. The collusion between members of the unsuccessful Clinton campaign, the outgoing Obama administration, and, most critically, a very large number of actors among the leadership of the DOJ, the leadership of the FBI, and the leadership of the various intelligence services, especially the CIA and the NSA. A collusion to at least subvert if not overturn the results of our election.

I agree. The Russians, the Chinese and others have always and will always try and interfere with our elections and we need to take actions to prevent that. But it appears to me that the greatest threat to our state occurred from within. No one was guarding the guardians. The Mueller investigation has made it quite clear that we had politically motivated spying and legal charges made selectively against individual American citizens. We had a systemic abrogation of due process, rule of law, equality before the law. All for sordid partisan purposes.

I doubt it was an orchestrated collusion, just an emergent order of large numbers of people in the right circumstances to form small groups with similar illegal and immoral purposes. We'll see. It appears to me that James Clapper, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and many of their immediate reports along with at least Power and Rice (for their unmasking of American citizens) all committed multiple and material illegal actions with the goal of undermining the incoming administration. Hopefully we will get an investigation into this because I view it as by far the greater threat to our Republic - the repurposing of common civic institutions for partisan purposes.

Rather than dwell on Mueller and the politics though, what is striking to me is the consequences of this on the media whose reputation is already down there with the lowest of the low. How does the mainstream media recover its role as a valued Fourth Estate after having now been shown to have spent two and more years peddling the proverbial fake news?

Across the headlines and the journalistic tweets, it is not even apparent that they want to redeem themselves. There is denial, there is parsing, there is labored hair-splitting. A pillar of their critical theory faith and of their partisan belief system has been shown to not exist. Not that it was weak or rotten. It never existed.

There are a couple of principled exceptions. Glenn Greenwald, no John Bircher, is excoriating mainstream journalism for their deliberate deceptions. Matt Taibbi, another solidly center left journalist is similarly taking his brethren to task. But they are a distinct minority. Most mainstream media journalists seem not to view this as an alarm for reform of their practices but a mere inconvenience in their role as the resistance.

Looking at the New York Times, this morning, you can see all the subtle and not so subtle spinning going on.

Click to enlarge.

The Mueller report has been unalloyed great news for Trump (and the nation) and yet every above the fold headline is a desperate clutching at straws. An Olympic swimming pool of water just got dumped on their smoldering autumnal fire of damp collusion leaves and now they are trying to find embers to fan.

Of course the opinion pieces see no good news in the discovery that there was no sinister subversion of democracy by the Trump campaign.

Click to enlarge.

No subtle spinning there. They are desperately whacking the dead horse as hard as they can.

But again, the danger of their perverted worldview is not solely in all the spinning and dancing and yodeling of their critical theory battle cry.

The danger is in how their postmodernist worldview infects everything else, especially reporting on the real news (which they eventually get around to.)

On the front page, lower down, there is

Click to enlarge.

Hmmm. I follow the economic news pretty closely. What bad economic news was there out of the US on Friday? I don't recall anything.

Sure, I am deeply concerned about the run up of the national debt but hardly anyone else is and it barely gets covered in the media. Sure, we are going to have another recession anywhere from six to thirty-six months from now. But that isn't new news. So what was the negative economic news on Friday. Follow the link to the article and the headline changes from a focus on bad news in the US and Europe to Global Stocks Fall as Pessimism Continues. Its a global thing, not a US thing. Almost feels like they were compelled to spin at least something negative on the front page with which to tar Trump.

But still, what was the negative news in the US?

Global markets mainly fell on Monday, setting the stage for a lower opening on Wall Street as investors digested a spate of bad news from the United States and Europe.

Japan led the decline, though stocks fell broadly across Asia. The downturn carried over into European markets, but some indexes shed their losses through the day. Futures that allow investors to bet on the direction of the American stock market suggested that Wall Street would fall when trading started.

Chinese officials over the weekend signaled their eagerness to strike a deal with the Trump administration to bring the trade war between the two countries to an end — the sort of thing that has sometimes cheered markets in the past. But investors on Monday were still grappling with a signal from the United States on Friday that the world’s biggest economy faces the threat of falling into recession.

Ahh. We are getting close. There was something on Friday that signaled a recession. Going to that link, we get to Stocks Fall as Bond Market Flashes a Recession Warning. OK, that is real news. Not that the markets are down (or up). They are always down or up. The news is the yield-curve inversion.

The bond market smells a recession. On Friday, stock investors caught a whiff, too.

Economic forecasters and Wall Street traders have been watching for months as interest rates on long-term United States government bonds have dropped toward the rates on short-term debt.

Investors normally demand higher yields to buy longer-term bonds, and when those long-term yields decline it can signal a slowdown in economic growth.

On rare occasions, long-term yields can actually fall below yields on short-term bonds — a “yield curve inversion” in the parlance of the markets. Such unusual occurrences have preceded every recession over the last 60 years.

And it happened on Friday.

The inversion followed a sharp decline on yields on long-term Treasury bonds this week after the Federal Reserve decided on Wednesday to leave interest rates unchanged and signaled that it was unlikely to raise rates through the end of 2019.

But a round of dour economic data from Europe actually pushed the measure into inverted territory. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note tumbled to 2.44 percent Friday, its lowest level since January 2018. That was just below the 2.45 percent yield on three-month Treasury bills.

Now that is real news, interesting news and it did happen on Friday. And I missed it.

Why? Because it isn't particularly predictive, as the article goes on to point out.

There are many different ways to measure the yield curve. On Wall Street, many analysts look at the difference between yields on two-year and 10-year Treasury notes, which has not yet inverted.

But research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has cited the yield difference between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year Treasury notes — which inverted Friday — as the most reliable predictor of recession risk.

Traders in the stock market picked up on the downbeat signal. The S&P 500 had been climbing despite a recent drop in bond yields, effectively shrugging off the decline as further evidence that the Fed would keep rates low for the foreseeable future. Keeping rates low has been a good thing for stocks over the past 10 years.

But on Friday, the S&P 500 fell 1.9 percent, as stock market investors grew concerned about the outlook for economic growth. It was the second-worst drop for the market this year. The Nasdaq composite index fell 2.5 percent.

Experts on interpreting the predictive power of the yield curve cautioned that a single day of an inverted yield curve doesn’t necessarily mean the economy will tumble into recession.

Campbell Harvey, a Duke University finance professor whose research first showed the predictive power of the yield curve in the mid-1980s, stressed that an inversion must last, on average, three months before it can credibly be said to be sending a clear signal. If that does occur, history shows that the economy will fall into a recession over the next nine to 18 months.

But even with the yield curve’s track record for predicting recessions, Professor Harvey emphasized that there was no such thing as certainty in economic forecasting.

“A model is just a model,” he said. “It’s not an oracle. It helps us forecast the future, but it might at any point fail.”

So the actual expert on this says that the yield curve needs to be inverted for three months before it begins to serve as a valid signal. The NYT leverages a 0.1% inversion for a single day into an article on an anticipated recession and then into proclaimed bad US economic news on its front page. Talk about a mountain out of a molehill.

You can't help but feel they needed something negative on the front page to counter all the positive Trump news and this is what they came up with. So on the very day they ought to be rebuilding their brand reputation for truthful and quality reporting, they are still scrabbling around the monkey cage hurling feces.

We need a functioning and credible fourth estate. It is hard to see any signs that we will be moving back to one anytime soon.

The answer must be discovered in all contexts wherein scarcity exists no matter the desired end.

From Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails by Christopher J. Coyne. Page 63.

Let me begin with some basics of the economic way of thinking. The core economic question is how decisions are made about how scarce resources will be allocated among competing uses. Scarcity necessitates choice, which in turn implies trade-offs since one use of scarce resources precludes another. Economic actors must decide: Should a good or service be produced at all? If the answer is yes, how much of the good or service should be produced? And what is the least cost means of producing that good or service? The answers to these questions, which constitute the “economic problem,” are not a given, but rather must be discovered in all contexts wherein scarcity exists no matter the desired end—whether purely humanitarian concerns, or maximizing monetary profit or some other end.

In a stylized sense, there are two options for solving the economic problem. One option is markets in which buyers and sellers exchange goods and services, typically for a monetary price. In markets, individuals and groups of individuals have plans they pursue, and they utilize market exchanges as a means of coordinating their activities in order to accomplish their desired ends. Prices and profit and loss, which guide people in discovering the answer to the economic problem, serve as coordinating devices by providing continuous feedback as to whether resources are allocated to their highest-valued uses. These signals provide the information and incentive for people to adapt their behaviors accordingly. Within the market setting, resource (re)allocation is not guided by a central planner(s) but instead by the actions of millions of dispersed people each pursuing his or her own individual plans. The allocation of resources emerges out of numerous diverse and independent interactions of individuals with different goals instead of from a consciously predetermined plan with a single set of ends developed by one or a few individuals.

An alternative means of allocating resources is through central planning. Under this method, the plans of many dispersed individuals are replaced by a single overarching plan developed by whoever is designated as the central planner(s). Whereas markets rely on prices and profit and loss as signals to coordinate the activities of people, central planning relies on the allocation of resources according to a prearranged blueprint that attempts to achieve a single set of ends that are predetermined by the planner. Further, the absence of market prices and profit and loss signals means that central planners cannot utilize them as feedback to guide the adaptation of their behaviors. Instead, they have to rely on alternative sources of feedback (such as actual output versus output targets) that do not provide the same information or efficiency as prices and profit and loss, as will be discussed in more detail further on.

There is widespread agreement among economists that markets are superior to central planning as a means of allocating resources in complex contexts precisely because they are so adaptable. However, even though humanitarian action typically takes place in complex settings, humanitarians tend to rely on central planning as the way in which decisions regarding resource allocation are made. As one study of government provided foreign aid indicates, efforts to improve the human condition are often carried out by “unwieldy bureaucracies that centrally plan [the] economies of developing countries, by making large-scale choices. If the international aid regime were a national economy, one thing is clear: the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be after it to reform.” Similarly, in his discussion of the focus on “aid effectiveness” by humanitarian donors, Owen Barder, a development economist, notes that “the coordination mechanism envisaged . . . for bringing it [aid effectiveness] about is that of a planned economy not a market: it is a collective decision among the donors about who will do what, according to where they believe their strengths lie.”

This poem is not addressed to you

This poem is not addressed to you
by Donald Justice

This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.

Even while you sit there, unmovable,
You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.
The poem will go on without you.
It has the spurious glamor or certain voids.

It is not sad, really, only empty.
Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why.
It prefers to remember nothing.
Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.

Your type of beauty has no place here.
Night is the sky over this poem.
It is too black for stars.
And do not look for any illumination.

You neither can nor should understand what it means.
Listen, it comes without guitar,
Neither in rags nor any purple fashion.
And there is nothing in it to comfort you.

Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon.
You will forget the poem, but not before
It has forgotten you. And it does not matter.
It has been most beautiful in its erasures.

O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned!
Nor is one silence equal to another.
And it does not matter what you think.
This poem is not addressed to you.

Jane Austen seems much more pertinent to this data than Michael Foucault

It is pathetic how hard they seek to superimpose a pre-existing ideological causal affect on an otherwise interesting empirical finding. From Women scarce in the one percent by Jill Yavorsky, et al.

The study, "Women in the One Percent: Gender Dynamics in Top Income Positions," is featured in the February issue of American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association. Yavorsky is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department and Organizational Science doctoral program at UNC Charlotte. Her co-authors are Lisa Keister of Duke University, Yue Qian of University of British Columbia and Michael Nau of The Ohio State University.

The new study uses the 1995 to 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to analyze gender income patterns in the one percent. To qualify for top one percent household status, the authors calculate that a household must bring in $845,000 in total income in 2016 dollars. The researchers' calculations from the 2016 SCF also indicate that top one percent households receive nearly one-fourth of all U.S. income, further highlighting the importance of studying this group.

While the top one percent has garnered increased scholarly and media attention in recent years, little research has considered whether men's or women's income is primarily responsible for moving households into the one percent. Research also has been sparse on whether women have access to their own pathways to earning one percent status based on their income alone.

This new study shows that women's income alone is sufficient for one percent status in only 5 percent of all elite households. Moreover, women's income is necessary in pushing a household over the one percent threshold in only 15 percent of all one percent households. In other words, women's income is largely inconsequential in most of these households for obtaining one percent status.

So we are still in the Jane Austen world where

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

The researchers then go on to the standard social justice jag of power structures, discrimination, etc. despite all the evidence to the contrary which has emerged over the past three decades.

It is worth noting that we are talking about income here where the patterns are somewhat different from household wealth where women tend to be much better represented but through inheritance rather than marriage per se. It also highlights the differences when you look at a system as a collection of individuals versus as a collection of households. Both are valid but there are distinct differences between the two.

Regardless, Jane Austen seems much more pertinent to this data than Michael Foucault.

Randolph Against the Odds, 7th March, 1778 by Geoff Hunt

Randolph Against the Odds, 7th March, 1778 by Geoff Hunt

Click to enlarge.

In an assembly he never graced with his presence

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 232.

British advice, based on the experience in Malaya, was also beside the point, since the Viet Minh had a far larger basis of popular support than the CTs had enjoyed. Attempts to make the South Vietnamese wage a hearts-and-minds campaign among their own population were not a success. To have authority meant a right to beat people and steal. Instead of going about ‘with a guitar under the left arm, a sub-machine gun under the right’, as hearts and minds was poeticized, brutality and torture were the norm.

Diem was adamantly opposed to democratic elections, rightly fearing that Ho Chi Minh would win. A CIA assessment concurred, claiming that Ho would receive 80 per cent support in a free election. Diem initiated a ‘Denounce the Communists’ campaign, in which thousands of southern Viet Minh sympathizers, or anyone who opposed him, disappeared into concentration camps. Newspapers which criticized him were closed. His brother Nhu supplied a political creed to bolster Diem’s reactionary desire to be a latter-day emperor, as evidenced by the little shrines which flourished around his photographed image. By October 1955, Diem was sufficiently sure of himself to hold an illegal referendum in the south, in which people could choose between him and Bao Dai. He was chosen, becoming president for five years under the October 1956 constitution. Diem’s political clients packed the new 123-seat National Assembly. Eighteen of its members were told to act as an opposition, while always voting with the government. They included Nhu, who won a seat as an Independent in an assembly he never graced with his presence.

That April, the last French troops withdrew from South Vietnam. The First Indochina War had cost the multiracial French forces 90,000 dead or missing in action. On the other side, the Viet Minh had lost maybe 200,000. Almost without a pause for breath, French veterans of this war found themselves transferred to Algeria, where their FLN opponents included Algerian Army of Africa soldiers who had been captured, and retrained in guerrilla warfare, by the Viet Minh.

Climate data is the "This is Rachel from cardholder services . . . " of science.

From Bring the Proxies Up to Date!! by Steve McIntyre.

One of my longstanding criticisms of climate alarmism is that the underlying data sets are such a kluge. As a management consultant having performed many IT system implementations and conversions over the years, data quality, data consistency, and data constancy are critical elements for the smooth management of incredibly complex global enterprises. I add data genealogy to that list - where did the data originate, what has been done to it, what has been the chain of custody?

If you ask the question as to what would give us a good temperature data set for understanding climate change (and its sources), you would probably answer at a minimum:

A standard technology for measuring the temperature across the vertical (troposphere to surface to oceanic depths)

A standard technology for measuring the temperature across the territory, i.e. a uniform network of measures across the entirety of the globe.

A common degree of accuracy (one degree, point one degree, point zero one degree?)

A clear documentation record of raw data adjustments (why, how, how much, etc.)

A record that stretches uniformly across centuries and millennia.

A record that is publicly available to all.

But we are a long way from that minimum for many legitimate (and also illegitimate) reasons. That is nobodies fault, but it raises concerns about just how much reliance can be place on the forecasts of klugey models using even more klugey data.

We use multiple proxies at different points in time (ice cores, pollen, tree-rings, etc.).

We don't understand the sensitivities of those proxies, how they correlate with one another, and how they evolve with evolving environmental circumstances.

We use different modern technologies which are not well calibrated with one another.

We use technologies with different degrees of precision.

Prior to 1970 the record is constituted of multiple technologies with no global calibration.

Prior to 1970 the record is geographically patchy with some areas oversampled and other (large to immense) geographic areas un-sampled at all for long stretches of time.

When using proxies, they are typically small samples in small time frames in a very small set of locations.

Records of raw data adjustments are poor or non-existent.

Many data sets have limited public availability

It is not that there definitely is global warming of definitely not global warming. The only thing that is definite is that we do not have adequate data sets to make any firm inferences.

In this post by McIntyre, many of these issues are raised, both in the post and in the commentary attached to it. McIntyre is focused on understanding what has happened to the historical proxies such as tree-rings since the 1980s (when proxies were replaced with satellite data)?

I will make here a very simple suggestion: if IPCC or others want to use “multiproxy” reconstructions of world temperature for policy purposes, stop using data ending in 1980 and bring the proxies up-to-date. I would appreciate comments on this note as I think that I will pursue the matter with policymakers.

Let’s see how they perform in the warm 1990s -which should be an ideal period to show the merit of the proxies. I do not believe that any responsible policy-maker can base policy, even in part, on the continued use of obsolete data ending in 1980, when the costs of bringing the data up-to-date is inconsequential compared to Kyoto costs.

For example, in Mann’s famous hockey stick graph, as presented to policymakers and to the public, the graph used Mann’s reconstruction from proxies up to 1980 and instrumental temperatures (here, as in other similar studies, using Jones’ more lurid CRU surface history rather than the more moderate increases shown by satellite measurements). Usually (but not always), a different color is used for the instrumental portion, but, from a promotional point of view, the juxtaposition of the two series achieves the desired promotional effect. (In mining promotions, where there is considerable community experience with promotional graphics and statistics, securities commission prohibit the adding together of proven ore reserves and inferred ore reserves – a policy which deserves a little reflection in the context of IPCC studies).

Its a great question. Apparently, nobody has looked.

McIntyre is pretty outraged, as is warranted, by the alarmist community dishonesty.

One of the first question that occurs to any civilian becoming familiar with these studies (and it was one of my first questions) is: what happens to the proxies after 1980? Given the presumed warmth of the 1990s, and especially 1998 (the “warmest year in the millennium”), you’d think that the proxy values would be off the chart. In effect, the last 25 years have provided an ideal opportunity to validate the usefulness of proxies and, especially the opportunity to test the confidence intervals of these studies, put forward with such assurance by the multiproxy proponents. What happens to the proxies used in MBH99 or Moberg et al [2005] or Crowley and Lowery [2000] in the 1990s and, especially, 1998?

This question about proxies after 1980 was posed by a civilian to Mann in December at realclimate. Mann replied:

Most reconstructions only extend through about 1980 because the vast majority of tree-ring, coral, and ice core records currently available in the public domain do not extend into the most recent decades. While paleoclimatologists are attempting to update many important proxy records to the present, this is a costly, and labor-intensive activity, often requiring expensive field campaigns that involve traveling with heavy equipment to difficult-to-reach locations (such as high-elevation or remote polar sites). For historical reasons, many of the important records were obtained in the 1970s and 1980s and have yet to be updated. [my bold]

Pause and think about this response. Think about the costs of Kyoto and then think again about this answer. Think about the billions spent on climate research and then try to explain to me why we need to rely on “important records” obtained in the 1970s. Far more money has been spent on climate research in the last decade than in the 1970s. Why are we still relying on obsolete proxy data?

As someone with actual experience in the mineral exploration business, which also involves “expensive field campaigns that involve traveling with heavy equipment to difficult-to-reach locations”, I can assure readers that Mann’s response cannot be justified and is an embarrassment to the paleoclimate community. The more that I think about it, the more outrageous is both the comment itself and the fact that no one seems to have picked up on it.

From a data integrity perspective, I become alarmed when data is hidden or restricted, when there are claims about data complexity, arm-waving about how expensive it would be to validate data.

These are all reasonable excuses under particular circumstances. But just as when you take a call and discover that "This is Rachel from cardholder services . . . " and you know without listening that this is a time-suck or fraud about to be committed, similarly when researchers, data analysts or business people start talking about complexity and cost of data integrity and arguing for why the data cannot be shared, you immediately know that something is rotten in the state of Data Denmark.