Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: World Affairs

  • Denialism, Denialist Blog and Health Care

    I am way behind on blogging. Facebook microblogging has taken a lot of wind out of my blogging sails.

    Joe Romm on denialism. This is one of the fiercest denunciations of denialism I have seen.

    Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.

    …

    My personal experience is that no amount of scientific evidence can convince the well-known “skeptics.”… The media — and everyone else — should stop using the term. It makes a mockery of the English language, it is an insult to real scientific skeptics, and it feeds the overall disinformation effort that makes humanity’s self-destruction more likely.

    The deniers and delayers, as CP uses the terms, are those who aggressively embrace one or both parts of a two-fold strategy. First, they deny the strong and growing scientific understanding that the climate change we are witnessing is primarily human-caused, that the human component of the climate forcing will increasingly dominate the climate system, and that we face multiple catastrophic impacts if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon.  Second, they work to delay this country from taking any serious action beyond perhaps investing in new technology (although even that is mostly lip service since the overwhelming majority of deniers and delayers are conservatives and libertarians who oppose all serious efforts to accelerate the development and deployment of low carbon technologies).

    …

    Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.

    Steve Running on the 5 stages of climate grief. Following up on this 5 stages, Romm adds a final (though loftier) kind of denialism:

    Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid.  Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we’re going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows.  But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial.  Her three-part series, “The Climate of Man,” which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

    Actually this is a form of denialism I do not subscribe to.  I believe we in fact are capable of slowly destroying the planet without taking corrective action.  Global warming is a slow-acting disaster without direct effects. Even if the North Pole totally de-ices, that doesn’t impress people in Houston. The problem with global warming.

    (I’ll be commenting more about Steve Running in a future post).

    Here is a listing of climate change denialist arguments, ranked in order of popularity.

    The Denialist blog is a great science blog dedicated to debunking pseudo-science.  (Here’s a Deck of Cards about how to recognize/refute denialists.

    (Even though i published this, I have a few more links to add).

  • Fun with Bank Graphs

    I enjoyed this graph in the financial times.

    It’s market capitalization of the world’s 20 largest banks.

    Here’s the best part. At the bottom of the graph is a a slider, so you can see how the listing changes over a 10 year period.

    Fun games you can play:

    1. Look at Citigroup’s capitalization over time. Notice anything peculiar about the most  recent year?
    2. Look at HSBC (the company I am suing). It seems to have ups and downs.
    3. Look at the biggest banks in 1999. See how it compares with the biggest banks in 2009. Can you draw any conclusions about the world economy from it?
    4. Look at Fannie Mae (did you even know it was a bank?) Track its rise and fall.
    5. Look at how the color bars grow and decline over time (the color bars represent the wealth of all humanity).
    6. Wow, look at how great a year 2007 was for banks!
    7. Wow, where did Bank of America go?

    Essay question: is the  better performance of Asian banks in 2009 a result of 1)China’s  modernization or 2)China’s cautious investment
    policy or 3)incompetence of US banks or d)all of the above.

    Update: Darn, it looks like this fun graph is now behind a pay wall. Last time I link to FT!

    See also: Tyler Cowen’s New York Times piece about why the AIG bailout costs  more taxpayer money than those oft-talked about corporate bonuses.

    Is it just me or does the whole world eagerly await Robert Reich’s blogposts?  Friday he said we need to recognize a depression for what it is and just a few minutes ago he complains that Geithner’s threat to fire CEO’s dependent on government handouts is essentially empty. He writes:

    All told, about one out of every five large American companies depends on government contracts, and a majority of these firms are losing money right now. So … off with their heads.

    Simon Johnson notes that the prescription for rescuing the US economy is similar to that the IMF gives to developing nations: stop coddling your corporate fat cats! Simon Johnson writes for Baseline Scenario, a great recession blog.

  • Why Europeans disagree with Obama

    From a NYT discussion about Obama at G20:

    Twelve reasons why Obama’s G20 quest will fail. A European perspective:
    1. The historical economic nightmare of the U.S. is depression; the historical economic nightmare of Europe is hyperinflation.
    2. Europeans are renters; they have not defaulted on their home loans and are not responsible for the economic crisis.
    3. Europeans already have universal health care and have paid dearly for it.
    4. Europeans have not lived beyond their means like the Americans have, and have a positive savings rate.
    5. European financial institutions are in trouble, not because they lived beyond their means, over-financed subprime mortgages and bundled them up into obscure securities, but because they purchased the securities on assurances from American rating agencies who lied to them.
    6. Europeans already have a social safety net.
    7. Europeans already spend a large part of their income on public projects through higher taxes.
    8. Europeans have always paid double for fuel than Americans through higher fuel taxes.
    9. Europeans did not engage in subprime home ownership mania; if they went overboard on anything it was in providing social safety nets, which have never depressed anyone’s economy but their own.
    10. Europeans did not blunder into a costly war in Iraq, but spoke out overwhelmingly against it.
    11. Europeans are sick and tired of Americans telling them what to do every time that Americans blunder the world into a catastrophe.
    12. Europeans have every right to want Americans to bear the burden of getting the world out of the mess that Americans created.

  • We need to compensate the Uighurs for ruining their lives

    My comment on the NYT about the imprisonment of the Uighurs. William Glaberson and Margot Williams have written a news report about the problem, and the NYT contains a  discussion about possible solutions.

    Why does  the US government feel absolutely no sense of urgency in solving this problem?

    It’s hard for me to understand why resettlement in the US is not a serious option.

    Even if it were not considered as a long term solution,  it seems ridiculous not to give them temporary asylum in the US while the government arranges someone to take them.  We created the problem; now we need to fix it.

    Having these people still in prison when there is no attempt to justify the cause flies in the face of core American values. Gitmo has ruined many people’s lives, and yet the US government feels no pressure to rectify this.

    The arguments presented here are academic and legalistic, but they are missing the point. The US government is devastating the lives of each individuals, and has no incentive to take action quickly.  The rights of these individuals matter a lot to me, certainly more than a flawed judicial process that the current administration owes no allegiance to.

    From a PR perspective, my solution is to pay each Uighur $100,000 for each year they have spent in Gitmo and offer the prisoners and their immediate family full citizenship as well as a written apology personally signed by Obama. If these people were released, aid organizations would step in to provide humanitarian assistance. This could turn into a modest success story. Why do we assume that these people could turn into terrorists/criminals? For all we know, they could contribute a lot to American society (perhaps offering insight into our own democratic system).

    The problem is that the American government pays no price for the continued detention of these people. Because of the legal morass, the tendency of the bureaucracy is to do nothing. That is a terrifying statement about our legal system. In the case of wrongful imprisonment, the government needs to be held accountable and needs to be liable for the lives it has helped to ruin.

  • Great Global Warming Video at 350.org

    Wow, the 350.org people have produced a great nonverbal video about global warming. (More info)

    Remember my money quote from a week ago:

    US produces 6.0 million metric tons annually and EU produces  4.0 million metric tons annually, China+ Taiwan produces 7 million metric tons annually, and both Russia and India over around 1.5 million. Ponder that. EU has 25% more people, the same total GDP but 67% of our carbon emissions. This is sad.

    See also: how to talk to a climate skeptic  and Skeptico on the logical fallacies that global warming denialists use.

    John Kerry on Will’s misleading columns about global warming:

    No matter how the evidence has mounted over two decades — the melting of the arctic ice cap, rising sea levels, extreme weather — the flat earth caucus can’t even see what is on the horizon. In the old Republican Congress they even trotted out the author of Jurassic Park as an expert witness to argue that climate change is fiction. This is Stone Age science, and now that we have the White House and the Congress real science must prevail. It is time to stop debating fiction writers, oil executives and flat-earth politicians, and actually find the way forward on climate change.

    From the statements by Nobel prize winner Stephen Chu that sparked the controversy:

    Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer.
    In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.
    "I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said. "We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going" either.

    A pair of recent studies raise similar warnings. One, published in January in the journal Science, raised the specter of worldwide crop shortages as temperatures rise. Another, penned by UC Berkeley researchers last year, estimated California has about $2.5 trillion in real estate assets — including agriculture — endangered by warming.

  • Tiny Iranian threat

    Fareed Zakaria on whether Iran actually poses a threat to the US:

    Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century…. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

    It might be worth reviewing this graphic again. 

    image

  • Dancing with Numbers

    Random thoughts about Europe vs. US.  EU’s population is 499 million people (and that excludes totals of non-EU members who eventually will gain admission like Ukraine,  (46 million) Turkey (71 million) and the Yugloslav states (20 million?). 499 million people and a GDP of 14 trillion (or $28,000 per capita). US has a population of 305 million people, a GDP of 14 trillion dollars (or $47,000 per capita).

    Let’s look at total carbon emissions by country. US produces 6.0 million metric tons annually and EU has 4.0 million metric tons annually, China+ Taiwan produces 7 million metric tons annually, and both Russia and India over around 1.5 million. Ponder that. EU has 25% more people, the same total GDP but 67% of our carbon emissions. This is sad.     Here’s some US data

    In the first chart we see that total C02 emissions in the US  have gone from 5.0 million metric tons per annum to 5.9  (with a trivial amount from renewables).

    image

    In the second chart, we see that carbon emissions from residential electricity has increased 150% from 1990. (Even though coal is listed in a separate category, I assume that coal is subsumed under the Electricity section).

    image

    In the last chart, we see how much carbon emissions fluctuate in the US over time (presumably as a result of weather).

    image

    More about the economic situation. Baseline Scenario, a longish analysis of the world’s economic crisis as of February 2009. The related blog is here. Here’s a bill Moyers interview with Simon Johnson where Johnson explains how easy it is for the government to take over a bank:

    We have no problem in this country shutting down small banks. In fact, the FDIC is world class at shutting down and managing the handover of deposits, for example, from small banks. They managed IndyMac, the closure of IndyMac, beautifully. People didn’t lose touch with their money for even a moment. But they can’t do it to big banks, because they don’t have the political power. Nobody has the political will to do it.

    So you need to take an FDIC-type process. You scale it up. You say, “You haven’t raised the capital privately. The government is taking over your bank. You guys are out of business. Your bonuses are wiped out. Your golden parachutes are gone.” Okay? Because the bank has failed.

    This is a government-supervised bankruptcy process. It’s called, in the terminology of the business, it’s called an intervention. The bank is intervened. You don’t go into Chapter 11 because in that’s too messy. Too complicated. There’s an intervention, you lose the right to operate as a bank. The FDIC takes you over. I think we agree, everyone agrees, we don’t want the government to run banks in this country.

  • Man Held at Gitmo…for owning a cheap Casio watch!

    After William Glaberson’s excellent wrapup of improper detentions in Gitmo, I took a review of the wiki articles on Gitmo prisoners.  (This is one of the distributed knowledge tasks for which Wikipedia does excel).

    I skimmed through several of the profiles of Gitmo prisoners, spending a little bit more time on Abdullah Kamel Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari, a Kuwaiti citizen who went to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian assistance. His case seems typical. There was an accusation that he had gone to an Al Queda training camp and also a listing of his name on a database of Al Queda names, but his name was apparently a common one (the US government had found aliases of the person’s name in the database).

    Now here’s the truly odd part. One notable piece of evidence was that the man owned a particular watch, the Casio F91W, a watch that was used to trigger certain terrorist bombs. It remains important evidence for 18 prisoners. Here’s the funny part. It is a popular watch, and the fact it is programmable doesn’t imply anything other than that people prefer watches with lots of functions than simply telling time. (Apparently, the big attraction of the watch —aside from its low $10 price was that it would tell the direction of Mecca and signal the call to prayer). (You can buy the watch on amazon.com for $15).

    Tom Lasseter for McClatchy did a profile on the prisoner, along with this exchange about his identity:

    The third and final evidentiary finding presented that day was that an alias Kandari was known to use was found on a computer owned by a senior al Qaida leader.

    "Can you tell me the name that was found in the computer?" Kandari asked.

    "We don’t have that information in the unclassified evidence," said the tribunal president, a U.S. Air Force colonel whose name is redacted from the transcript of the hearing. "I don’t know what name was in the computer at this time."

    Kandari tried to guess what the alias might have been, but he got no response from the three officers, according to the transcript.

    "Why he put my name in the computer, I don’t know. They don’t know me; I swear they don’t know me. . . . The problem is the secret information; I can’t defend myself," Kandari said.

    "They don’t have any evidence against me, to put me here," he said. "I don’t have a choice, God is well here, so I’ll be patient. Why did they put me here like this?"

    The tribunal president replied: "That’s what we are here to determine."

    The tribunal ruled that Kandari was an enemy combatant.

    (Actually, though he was released in 2006, after 4 years of imprisonment and brutal beatings and harassment).

    Here’s the table of contents for an excellent 8 month investigation by McClatchy into Gitmo.  While reading through the case histories, you begin to see a pattern. Many people were tangentially involved in the Afghan conflict, mostly by being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Most were implicated by unknown sources, and most suffered terribly during their incarceration. In the case of Murat Kurnaz, he dropped 80 pounds during Gitmo, and during his 4.5 “vacation” at Gitmo, his wife had divorced him, and his grandfather and favorite uncle had died. In the case of Mohammad Ayub, he lost 60 pounds and was kept in cold rooms and sprayed with pepper spray. Egad, I’ve just read 10 more stories; all have peculiar circumstances which are difficult to summarize in a sentence on a blog.

    See also: my proposal to compensate Gitmo prisoners for false imprisonment.