Free kibbles

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Here's a good reminder that the frauds never stop: cold temperatures in Britain blamed on global warming.

New paper shows that climate models, the ones that purport to claim the end of the world because of global warming, do a terrible job when run backwards. Until a model can accurately reproduce past climate when run backwards, it's useless for predicting the future.

POLICE STATE:

Article makes case the 1999 Moscow bombing blamed on Chechen separatists was really a false flag operation designed to create support for the already imminent Chechen invasion, then compares that to events in America today.

"At the time, Mohamud hadn't done anything that could be defined as a criminal act by even the most emancipated definition. This changed after the young man was radicalized by two specialists from the FBI's vast and experienced corps of professional provocateurs, who successfully engineered a supposed terrorist plot and manipulated Mohamud into triggering what he was told was a powerful explosive device at a Christmas tree lighting in Portland."

"The evidence presented in the FBI affidavit offers no reason to believe that Mohamud intended to harm anyone before he fell under the influence of two undercover operatives from the Bureau's Homeland Security theater troupe."

"There is one critical and telling detail in this case that distinguishes it from the others: Prior to being approached by the FBI's provocation squad, Mohamud attempted to travel to Alaska to work at a legitimate job, but was prevented from doing so when the Feds – who had him under surveillance – put him on a no-fly list. The teenager was then approached by a covert FBI operative who "hired" him to carry out a terrorist attack, providing the unemployed young man with $3,000 in cash."

Now we know one group who is absolutely radicalizing young Muslims: the FBI.

Assange's lawyers claim they are being watched by security services. This report claims Assange is wanted for sex without a condom, not rape.

FTC in talks with adobe about flash problems. That code for threatening them. Nothing good can come of this.

FOREIGN POLICY:

US State Department buying up shoulder fired surface to air missile launchers in a program that must have been inspired by those gun buy back programs and which will backfire just as spectacularly. Now individuals and groups with old missile launchers can sell them to the US and use the money to buy new ones. Great.

MEDIA:

This seems a weird turn of events: WikiLeaks is taking advise from five major media outlets on what to release and what to redact. I wonder why they're allowing the government propaganda arm to have a say.

MISC:

Survival of the fittest never meant survival of the most selfish. People must cooperate to prosper, so it makes sense that cooperation would be naturally selected.

"Keltner's team is looking into how the human capacity to care and cooperate is wired into particular regions of the brain and nervous system. One recent study found compelling evidence that many of us are genetically predisposed to be empathetic."

Duh. What do you think the instinct for species survival is? My parents' genes want to be propagated, therefore I'm inclined to cooperate with my brothers and sisters. My grandparents' genes want to be propagated, so I'm inclined to cooperate with my cousins. My great-parents' genes want to be propagated, so I'm inclined to cooperate with my second cousins (or is it first cousins once removed?). I love it when scientists think they've discovered new when in fact it was blatantly obvious everybody has known it all along.

Finnish divers discover 200 year old champagne and beer in wreck, then drink it. I hope they saved some to auction off on eBay.

American tow trucks are behind this one.

Six secret monopolies.

Is evolution responsible for the anti-market bias in more than the trivial way that obviously everything people do and believe is the result of evolution?

"Economic illiteracy is widespread, but why should this be a problem? Ignorance is even more pervasive in microelectronics and computer programming, and yet computer technology is nothing short of astounding.

In most fields of study, people leave science to experts and trust the correctness of their conclusions. Not so for economics: rather than leaving the matter to economists, people hold strong positions that are plainly false. Economic ignorance by itself is not the problem. As Murray Rothbard put it,

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

If people trusted economic theory to professional economists, their economic ignorance would be as harmless as their ignorance of most other subjects."

This is a bad start to the essay. The Austrians lead the way in explaining why economics cannot be understood empirically like science and engineering. There are plenty of economic so-called experts who have an anti-market bias. Second, everybody has some understanding of economics. They buy and sell and work and enjoy leisure every day, all of which are economic activities. In the areas where physics are common, such as gravity, people don't need a scientist to tell them gravity makes things fall down, not up.

"Noneconomists are systematically biased against markets, so this is not just a problem of ignorance, in which case we would expect variability, not a one-sided bias."

That's a pretty amazing assertion that doesn't hold in my life. I know plenty of people who trust markets who haven't had any education in economics. I trusted them long before I took economics in college, and when they talked about macroeconomics, I thought they were nuts and tuned out. But I do agree that our society has a pervasive anti-market bias, but there's nothing mysterious about it. Just turn on the news or pick up a newspaper. They're brainwashing people with it.

"Two major features of the EEA are of interest here. First, it was a zero-sum world. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived on whatever was provided by nature. There was effectively no economic progress — certainly not during a person's lifetime. One person's consumption came at the expense of everybody else's. With little specialization, production, or property, the scope of trade was minimal. Societies were basically small, egalitarian communes. Second, the EEA was characterized by reciprocal exchange, not market exchange. Reciprocal exchange is the receiving and returning of favors, e.g., sharing my kill with you on the understanding that you'll reciprocate in the future. Zero-sum thinking and the logic of reciprocal exchange form the core of our intuitive economics."

But this description of the environment our ancestors, basically animals, lived in makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense our brains evolved to succeed in that environment.

"In a zero-sum world, an egalitarian distribution of resources would have been advantageous. A wealthy person would be depriving others of crucial resources by taking a bigger piece of the fixed-size pie. As a result, we intuitively feel that one man's wealth comes at the expense of others. Since incentives hardly matter in a zero-sum world, there is little to lose by redistributing wealth. This explains the popularity of socioeconomic egalitarianism."

This doesn't explain anything. Incentives most certainly do matter. They're the difference between living and dying in lean times. Gathering more food than others in times of shortage was a way to improve your chances of survival and the chances of your children. On the other hand, if you were in a family that didn't gather as much, you increased your chances of survival by taking what others had. So both traits were being selected. The third trait being selected is cooperation because a cooperative group could hunt or gather more food per individual than an individual could alone.

"Furthermore, since hunter-gatherer societies were polygynous, a wealthy male with multiple wives would literally be depriving other males of their genetic survival.[4] There would have been a large benefit for nondominant males to restrain the dominant ones. This explains the antiwealth bias, our tendency to associate wealth with evil."

This is just made up. We don't see this in any animals. Dogs have pack leaders. The leader leads until he gets so old that young males decide to challenge him. If he wins, he becomes the new leader, and the other members of the pack defer to him. Great apes have leaders, and the leadership system is remarkably similar. Human leadership structures are equally remarkably similar.