NYT moves columnist blogs into a controlled venue -- with some deprecated RSS

The NYT has moved Krugman’s blog to a new platform. I presume this is true for all their journalists. The NYT RSS index still points to his now frozen blog at nytimes.com/blogs/krugman. 

So what’s the new platform?

K wrote that posts will show up on his regular columnist page: nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman. That page has an RSS feed. Of course, as is the norm these days, the page does not indicate the feed exists. It has an odd structure

www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman/rss.xml

When I added the feed to Feedbin it displayed in a strange sequence — without the publication date. So the source RSS may be malformed. It’s possible the NYT will fix this.

I note that the footer for the post from 12/9/2017 still points to his old blog “The Conscience of a Liberal”. 

It looks like the NYT is sort-of keeping it’s RSS feeds around, but the transition is at least a bit messy. I can’t tell how one distinguishes K blog posts from his “print” articles, they seem to share one stream. That has to make his writing more formal and more controlled. Which is perhaps the point. 

I am reminded again of an unfortunate side-effect of the ad-funded internet. “Free” media streams now target the easily manipulated populations, typically to serve causes of the corporate and wealthy, often to persuade  the credulous to act against their own interests. They are essentially parasitic. Pay streams can be excellent, but they are only accessible to a small minority.

Weinstein, The Enquirer, Pecker and Trump - a curious set of friendships

From NYT essay on Weinstein and his enablers an interesting set of misogynistic relationships …

Weinstein’s Complicity Machine - The New York Times

… Mr. Weinstein held off press scrutiny with a mix of threats and enticements … He was so close to David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The Enquirer, that he was known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable “F.O.P.,” or “friend of Pecker.” That status was shared by a chosen few, including President Trump.

Via Twitter, how Trump is fighting sexual harassment in DC.

Crisis-T: what to do about the delusions and the lies.

I’ve been using “crisis-T” as a tag for our times. I used to think it was a bit melodramatic; that maybe T would somehow veer to the fantasies of Thiel and the like.

Welcome to week two of Crisis-T. A week in which I’ve started monitoring neo-soviet propaganda for clues to what Bannon, Flynn and Putin are thinking (the troika).

Emily and I are still working out how to respond to this. I hope the March for Science happens — I’d join that one way or another. We already subscribe to the NYT, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Talking Points — it’s essential to support journalism with hard coin. The 2018 congressional campaign has begun and we will be active (I’ll likely vote in the GOP primaries, more on that later). We’ve done our first of many ACLU and Planned Parenthood donations. Basically we more or less track what Scalzi is doing.

I write and tweet of course, but that’s more therapeutic than useful. It does mean though that I run into some of the issues that real journalists face. Like how to approach the maelstrom of lies and delusions that Bannon and Trump produce. On the one hand presidential speech is a form of action, it can’t be disregarded. On the other hand I’m beginning to worry Bannon is not a conventional idiot. He may have a real talent for strategic propaganda and effective distraction.

I wonder if we should treat the lie-stream like the weather.  Box it on the proverbial page 2 as Bannon-T lies and delusions of the day. Each lie-delusion is then listed with a contrasting statement of testable reality. Then the main pages can focus on even more important problems, like swapping the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of National Intelligence for Bannon on the principals committee of the National Security Council.

More as we figure this out …

Update Jan 30, 2017: Jeff Atwood has one of the best action lists I’ve seen.

Crisis-T: Subscribing to the NYT (and a few others)

The absolute minimal response to Crisis-T starts with financial support for quality journalism and donation to the ACLU. If you have a reasonable income and don’t do some of this then you aren’t even trying.

Today quality mainstream journalism means the New York Times and perhaps the Washington Post. The Economist might an option if you’re a conservative, but they don’t do much investigative journalism. Really, if you’re a conservative who opposes T then WaPo and the NYT are your options. (The WSJ is not an option.)

Outside of the mainstream I’m a fan and supporter of Talking Points Memo ($50/y). It’s avowedly liberal-dem but also conscientious journalism. Josh Marshall is a marvel. The New Yorker’s been doing great work, we support them as well.

Of these minimal responses the NYT is the most expensive. At one point their list subscriber price was somewhere north of $350 — though list was mostly for those who didn’t shop around. I still have a faculty price of $98/year for web and app access though I haven’t taught for years. It’s possible all you need to qualify is a .edu email.

Today the web/app price list price is $143. I’d pay that much, but you can do a yearly subscription through the iTunes app for $130. I couldn’t find the Android and Kindle subscription costs.

The best price is the student price - at $52 a year billed monthly.  Some schools may pay for digital access to all students, but if you opt into a school-funded free subscription you’re not supporting journalism. I don’t think the NYT does anything to block limited sharing of a student account. It appears the only test for the student rate is an educational address

I suspect I’m not the only subscriber who shares their account with a spouse. That’s a substantial, if improper, discount. (“Subscribers to All Digital Access at the college rate are not eligible to share their access with a family member.” — which implies other subscribers can share.)

So you have a wide range of ways to pay for digital access to the NYT - from list at $143/y to iTunes at $130/y to student/.edu at $52/y. Spousal sharing reduces the cost even more. Some rates are more proper than others, but all support investigative journalism. Pick one.

PS. Dear NYT: $100 a year with spousal sharing would be a great way to grow your readership.

No, Apple News.app is not necessarily evil. Why do you ask?

[When first wrote this I chose an article, that, by chance, didn’t have a redirect to the original site. Which means I got things a wee bit wrong. Sirshannon gently corrected me. So now a bit of a rewrite …]

Viewing what I thought was a NYT article in News.app (turns out to be an Apple article that showed up on NYT page, which is kind of interesting) I can use Pinner.app 4.0 to create a Pinboard: Bookmark. That bookmark includes a URL like this:

https://apple.news/ABLDsKpUXSOafJmAr1FFtNg

From Pinboard app.net pourover and IFTTT (still around) share that link and my comment to app.net, twitter and my kateva.org/sh personal archive.

So far, so open. But what happens next?

If you access the particular link on an iOS device Apple launches News.app and you can view it there — both Safari.app and Chrome.app do the same thing.

If you access the link anywhere else you get this:

However, that’s not the end of the story (thought I thought it was). This link, opened in a web browser, redirects to a web page:

https://alpha.app.net/sirshannon/post/65149315#65148990

Apple does not redirect to the web version of the article. With NYT and other sources I chose one can open the News page in Safari.

This isn’t is surprising for two reasons. The first is that, even more than Google, Apple is all about Roach Motel class lock-in. The second is that, unlike the RSS of old, News.app has a viable ad-funded business model. Links to the open (perennially dying) web don’t fit that model.

So, despite my dire expectations, Apple, for now, is providing redirects to the web source. This doesn’t mean Apple will never interfere with the distribution of information that would hurt Apple’s business or offend its executives, and my confusion between NYT and Apple content is a bit weird (user error?), but for now News.app isn’t necessarily evil. I’ll be staying with Reeder and the lost mist-enshrouded all but forgotten Shangri La of RSS, Feedbin and Reeder until the last link dies  I’ll be experimenting with sharing News.app articles from it via RSS, Feedbin and Reeder ...

The NYT web site is becoming unreadable on my iPhone

I subscribe to the NYT so I can go from a Feed rendered in Reeder 2.0 on my i6 to the articles rendered in mobile WedKit. I’ve gotten used to hitting an interstitial ad on initial page view, a quick back and forth clears that. (Don’t try to hit the close button, doesn’t work.) I’ve even gotten used to hitting the ‘continue’ button they’ve embedded to make things even more painful.

Today, however, articles are so infested with interlaced ads, and so slow to render, that I’m getting to the end of the road. I sent a message via the NYT subscriber web contact form:

It is increasingly hard to read the NYT on a mobile device. My iPhone is very slow to display pages, it may be related to changes made to embed more advertising.

The articles are also now broken up by ads and harder to read.

I'm really losing patience. The next step is to give up my subscription, maybe try The Economist instead.

Somebody there needs a slap on the head.

A shot in the dark - Am I my brother's keeper?

Roger Ebert wrote a column on gun control and received 650 comments.

He read them all.

Then he responded, with one of his best columns ever. Some of the lines are so well said I've excerpted them below. I've written about this many times, but, of course, not with his eloquence.

A shot in the dark - Roger Ebert's Journal

Catie and Caleb Medley went to the doomed midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises." It was a movie they'd been looking forward to for a year, her father said. Gunfire rang out. The bullets missed Catie, who was pregnant. Caleb was shot in the eye. On Tuesday, their son Hugo was born. Caleb is listed in critical condition, and the cost of emergency treatment for his head wound has already reached $2 million. The Medleys were uninsured.

... Many of the comments were about health care, and one of the arguments frequently heard was: "I don't want the federal government taxing me to pay for the medical costs of people who don't care enough to provide for their own costs."...

... In our imagination it's always other people who get sick. I have a reader who tells me he's never been sick a day in his life. I tell him that's interesting from an autobiographical point of view, but otherwise not relevant. I can assure him that unless he's killed in an accident, sooner or later he will most surely get sick, and sooner or later he will most surely die.

Are we our brothers' keepers? Many people who resort to scripture are under the impression that we are not. They forget that it was Cain who said he was not his brother's keeper, after murdering Abel. In a similar sense, if our fellow citizens die because they have no access to competent medical care, they argue that we are not their keepers...

... I quote from the Bible for a particular reason. Many of the opponents of Universal Health Care identify themselves as Christians, yet when you get to the bottom of their arguments, you'll find them based not on Christianity but on Ayn Rand capitalism...

Ebert is talking about prosperity theology (wikipedia, see also Prosperity Theology | Christian Bible Studies [1]), a belief that wealth is a sign of god's approval, and poverty of god's disapproval. Since sin earns god's disapproval, the poor are sinners.

Although American Christians have brought prosperity theology to new heights, it's not unique to Christianity or to Mormonism. Hinduism's justification of caste maps well to the idea that poverty goes with sin, and wealth with grace.

In 2012 the fundamental difference between the right and the liberal is how we answer the question: "Am I my brother's keeper". Ironically, avowed Christians often give the answer of Cain and Ayn, while secular humanists often give the answer of Abel.

Cain and Abel. Romney and Obama. Some things never change ...

[1] Probably the only time I've ever linked to Christian Bible site.

After the decision - healthcare 2012

America's ObamaCare monster lurches forward.

It is hideous. Bits and pieces have fallen off, more will fall. It lost an elbow with the unexpected medicaid ruling.

Still, it moves. Lurches become steps. Trillions of dollars will build momentum. Plans made are being executed.

There will be ways to incent states to extend medicaid coverage. I am sure of that.

Some predict renewed GOP vigor and an enraged Tea Party.

I don't think so. I think that the American infotainment industry is now going to start talking about what the mandate really means. That mountain will become a molehill.

More importantly, the healthcare industry is going to pivot to making this concrete. Corporations hate uncertainty, and they hate reversing course. Romney will listen to them.

I would not be surprised if the ObamaCare hate dies as quickly as the 'defense of marriage' passion.

The monster is ours. We can rebuild him ...

Oldest web news portal - refreshed

For about 340 web years (@ 17 human) Emily and I have used the same web news portal. It's a basic HTML 2.x table based layout link page. The links change very slowly - the BBC World link may be original. It may be older than the Yahoo news page.

I did the first version in a text editor, perhaps BBEdit. Then FrontPage 95, 98, 2000, 2002 ... and back to FrontPage 98. FrontPage 98 lives in an old XP VM on my iMac; I start it up every few months to update the page (my old web site is archived). There's still nothing like FrontPage that will run on a Mac, so perhaps I'll go back to BBEdit next.

I've updated the page again - Yahoo and Salon broke some links and I finally replaced my defunct iframe embedded Google Reader Shared Posts. Instead of the GR Shares there's a somewhat awkward embedded Pinboard Mobile page (my microblog/GR Share replacement).

Feel free to bookmark it if you're looking for a simple news links page -- the URL hasn't changed in over 250 web years. It will probably last as long as me.

My personal salon - the feeds I read completely

RSS is history. We know that. It's been replaced by ... by .... 

Right. Whatever is going to replace Feeds (RSS/Atom) hasn't quite arrived. So, while we wait, we read. In my case, I read using Reeder.app on my iPhone, Reeder for Mac on my main machine, and Google Reader elsewhere.

Recently, I did a reorg and cleanup of my subscriptions. I deleted perhaps 30 -- some hadn't been updated since 2006. A few were quite good, but ended abruptly a few years ago. Perhaps the author will return, maybe something happened to them. Google abandoned many blogs when they went G+, I deleted most of them. They're not very interesting any more anyway.

I was left with 363. I've long organized them by source and topic, such as "NYT" or "Science". This works pretty well, but there's a subset of blogs that are special. These blogs may not publish very often, but I read almost every article. They deserved more attention.

I've put these into a folder I call "Core", and I've shared them in a Google Reader Bundle called "Core" [1]. You can subscribe to them through the "bundle" (assuming it still works) and delete the ones you don't want. Or you can google the names on this list (I left out Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech because I'm just that kind of guy): 

All That's Interesting - pictures mostly
Blood & Treasure - China from a UK view
Charlie Stross - thinker and writer
Coates - intellectual.  Aka TNC, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coding Horror - geek and thinker
Cosmic Variance - physics
Daring Fireball - often annoying, almost always interesting. Mac
DeLong - an old favorite, though we read too much of the same stuff.
Ezra Klein - politics
Fallows - aviation, the world
Follow Me Here... - psychiatrist. A lot like me.
Gail Collins - NYT
Gwynne Dyer (NZH) - rabble rouser. Almost always right.
Hawks on Anthropology - like it says
I, Cringely - sometimes a bit eccentric. I worry about him. Almost always very interesting
Joel on Software
Leonard - economics
MN Bike Navig - local fave
Oatmeal - web comic
Paul Krugman - you know
Pphysics arXiv - best short science
Roger Ebert - intellectual, scholar, humanist
Salmon - business, news, journalist, economics
Shtetl-Optimized - computational physics
Talking Points - cutting edge politics
The Economist: Obituary - almost the only good part of a long dead journal
The Economist: SciTech - the other good part of a long dead journal
The Wirecutter - tech products, only the best
Top 25 - NYT Top 25
Whatever - Scalzi - science fiction
xkcd.com - unbelievably good

They mostly don't know me, but they are my salon. I'm a quiet sort of host. One or two are MN centric. I have Emily's Calendar feed in 'Core' too so I know when she adds events, but obviously there's no need to share that.

Many of my Pinboard/Twitter/Archive shares come from this set.

[1] Yes, Bundles still exist. Surprisingly. The view resermbles the old Reader Share view. There is some bugginess though; the widget for viewing the feed list is broken. I wonder if Google has forgotten this exists.

Global Warming 2012 - Are the Denialists really winning?

This Telegraph article is primarily about a Hansen lecture on humanity's failure to think rationally about climate change, but I found the "Global Warming Policy Foundation" [1] funded response ironically interesting ...

Climate scientists are losing the public debate on global warming - Telegraph

... Dr Benny Peiser, director of sceptical think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, said governments and the public had "more urgent problems to deal with" than tackling climate change.

He said: "People have become bored by some of the rhetoric from the green movement as they have other things to worry about.

"In reality the backlash against climate change has very little to do with the sceptics. We will take credit for instilling some debate but it is mainly an economic issue. Climate change is not seen as being urgent any more."...

Over the past decade it seems the Denialist line has shifted from "it's not happening" to "it's not due to CO2 emissions" to "it's boring and not urgent".

That's a pretty radical retreat, even as public support for reducing emissions has collapsed in the face of the Lesser Depression (which is very severe now in the UK).

Contrary to the tone of the article, I call this progress. In the real world, the bad guys rarely fall on their knees and declare they were wrong. Yes, there were tobacco executives who did publicly repent, often after they or their loved ones developed lung cancer, but by then they weren't tobacco company executives any more. This denialist declaration of victory is, ironically, an admission of defeat.

Progress is very non-linear. The Lesser Depression will make action very difficult, even as it reduces carbon emissions far more than any tax ever could. Even so, I think we're moving into an era when the interesting debates begin. Debates about risks and costs, about climate engineering vs energy conservation, about who pays and who benefits and what is possible when. Those are debates about values and judgment as much as science.

[1] Funded by Michael Hintze, a hedge fund billionaire. Other funders are not known, but one assumes the usual suspects (Koch, Exxon, etc).

Victims of a mass murderer

A US Army sergeant murders16 men, women and children -- and all we hear about is his personal hardship.

This would be enlightened progress -- if Americans were routinely sympathetic to the stresses of adult mass murderers. Alas, I haven't noticed that. In Texas, for example, even mentally retarded or psychotic people are executed for murder.

It's getting so bad that even American journalists are starting to notice. Helpfully, Al Jazeera provides a corrective ...

No one asked their names | Al Jazeera Blogs 

...The dead:
Mohamed Dawood son of Abdullah
Khudaydad son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa Mohamed son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

The wounded:
Haji Mohamed Naim son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja

Whatever happened to the Fuel Cell?

In November of 2001 British Telecomunications published a white paper prepared by two futurists - Ian Pearson and Ian Neild. It's a bit hard to find online now, but there's an html version on ariska.org and the original PDF here. I came across it while running one of my custom google searches across my identity archives.

The two Ians are still in business, but I hope they're a bit more cautious these days. Their 2001 forecasts were a bit ... aggressive. The ones they got right were mostly prosaic - mostly gene sequencing, basic demographics, and internet growth.  They missed the rise of China and were oddly too optimistic about mobile internet access.

Otherwise they were way off. In particular, they were absurdly optimistic about the rise of the AI. It's interesting to look at how far off. For example:

Chat show hosted by robot  2003 
Confessions to AI priest   2004 
AI teachers in school      2004 
Computers that write most of their own software  2005 
Domestic appliances with personality and talking head interface 2007 
AI students 2007 
Highest earning celebrity is synthetic 2010 
AI houses which react to occupants 2010 
25 % of TV celebrities synthetic 2010 
Computer agents start being thought of as colleagues instead of 
tools 2013 
Direct electronic pleasure production 2010 
Online surgeries dominate first line medical care 2010 
Orgasm by email 2010 
Quiz shows screen for implant technologies 2010 
Artificial senses, sensors directly stimulating nerves 2012 
Some implants seen as status symbols 2012...

It's a long list. I kept it because in 2001 it was fun but preposterous. I like to think it was prepared at the local pub with a dartboard and a stack of science fiction novels; I hope British Telecomm published it to confuse their enemies. (It makes my own list of failed predictions seems absurdly prescient. Maybe BT should be paying me.)

One of their big misses is, however, interesting for other reasons ...

... Home fuel cell based 7kW generator 2001...

I remember fuel cells. It wasn't only that we were supposed to have them in our homes. They were supposed to power our hydrogen cars; pop magazines had major articles about Canada's BC Based fuel cell industry. Toshiba was a year away, once upon a time, from methanol fuel cells for laptops.

Obviously, none of that happened. Instead fuel cells are showing up in data centers -- and that's supposed to be news.

So why did the Fuel Cell future fail? Ben Wiens, who worked at that BC based fuel cell company, has a good technical description...

A few years ago it looked like micro fuel cells would soon be powering many portable electronic products. But this has not come to pass. One issue is that batteries have become much more powerful, and electronic devices smaller. Also, it has been hard to fit the fuel cell into the same thin profile of the battery. Another issue is that there is a problem with certain fuels being transported by passengers on aircraft. There are still some technical issues to be solved. The present price of fuel cells is higher than batteries. In my opinion the reason why micro fuel cells haven't penetrated the market however has nothing to do with the above factors....

... Fuel cells produce electricity. This is not the desired form of energy for transportation. The electricity must be converted into mechanical power using an electric motor. The Otto or Diesel cycle produces the required mechanical power directly. This gives them an advantage compared to fuel cell powered automobiles.

Presently Otto and Diesel cycle engines seem to be able to comply with extremely stringent pollution regulations, are inexpensive to produce, produce reasonable fuel economy, and use readily available liquid fuels. Fuel cell vehicles have a much greater chance of being accepted however in the future when fuel prices are higher and liquid fossil fuels are in short supply. However fuel cell vehicles will then be competing with electric vehicles which will be cheaper to operate but have problems with recharging...

Wiens article is the best I can find. Which brings up the real point of this post. Why hasn't there been more journalism on what happened to the fuel cell? Doesn't a failed revolution deserve a bit of an obituary? The rise and fall the Fuel Cell, and associated (extreme) hype and post-collapse silence, would make a great cautionary tale. Reading Wiens' summary, it seems as though a few wee issues in thermodynamics and hydrogen production were overlooked. Isn't it worth understanding why these things were missed? Aren't their lessons there that would serve us well now, as the rationalists among us consider our carbon-constrained energy options?

Journalists, where are you?

Americans Elect - another try at GOP 2.0

Unsurprisingly, given the current state of the GOP presidential primary, people who'd prefer to vote GOP are advocating third party equivalents. This endorsement is from a Marketarian venture capitalist ...

A VC: Americans Elect (Fred Wilson)

Yesterday my partner Albert and I sat down with the people behind Americans Elect. For those that don't know, Americans Elect is an online third party movement. In their words, "Pick A President, Not A Party."...

Fred and  his kin assert the usual 'false equivalence' claim that both parties are equally dysfunctional. Sorry, that's not true. Team Obama is a good representative of a reason (data + logic, including evaluation of political realities) based implementation of social compact ("Branch I") values for a multicultural nation. The 2012 Dems are about as healthy as political parties get in an era where voters tolerate widespread corruption.

The problem, of course, is with the GOP. It has fallen into a political death-spiral where its survival depends on tribes that lack a common framework for interpreting reality. Some cleave to particular religious doctrines, others to secular tribal beliefs. The modern GOP is the party of unreason.

Obviously, this is bad. It's bad because the GOP has quite a good chance of taking full control of government. It's bad because a weak GOP will lead the Dems to destroy themsevles - and we'll have no government at all.

We all need need GOP 2.0, a reason based representation of Branch II values, a party that speaks for the powerful, the incorporated, the status quo, the authoritarian impulse and all those wary of change and disruption. Americans Elect is a part of the process of finding GOP 2.0. I wish them luck; we need this process to succeed.

A GOP blog I can read

It hurts me to read blogs or editorials written by 2012 Republicans. Oddly enough people like Santorum don't bother me as much as the Romneys and Douthats and Friedmans [1].

Santorum doesn't cause me intellectual pain because he's logically consistent. His God has told him that Man should have Dominion over the earth, so environmental objections are the work of Satan and most Christians are thus Satan's pawns. Since his God promised no more Floods, Global Warming can't happen. He's an internally consistent Capitalochristian fundamentalist. Yes, he's crazy, but that alone doesn't bother me. Besides, he makes Romney mad, so he serves a social purpose.

Nothing here I haven't said before of course -- except recently a I found a Republican blog I can read.

Well, at least the author ran on the GOP ticket when I voted for him in 1994 (first and last time I voted that ticket). Now, however, Arne Carlson's blogger profile doesn't mention the R or G words. He probably voted for Obama last time. (The state GOP hated him in 1994 and hates him even more now.)

So maybe he's not much of a Republican by post-Reagan standards. Go back to President Ford though, and he'd have been northern GOP [2]. If America is to have a health democracy with a  reality-based GOP 2.0, he might be mainstream GOP again.

For now Arne is my token GOP voice - whatever they may call him

[1] Friedman isn't technically a Republican - yet. Given the flavor of his reasoning though, he's more than half-way there.
[2] Excepting sociosexual issues. Progress is funny. In the 1970s even Romney's current reactionary statements on Gay and Civil Rights would be unspeakably progressive, and Romney would be almost a mainstream feminist.

See also:

• Greece, America and GOP 2.0 11/2011
• Roots of the irrational in American politics: pre-dementia and religion 7/2011
• GOP 2.0: What rational climate change politics might look like 12/2011
• UnReason: The Republican War on Reason 2/2011
• Why it hurts to read the right 9/2010

The GOP Primary is over now. What will the media cover next?

The 2011 GOP primary has to be one of the most foregone conclusions ever.

Once Perry flamed out, it was going to be Romney. Yes, there was great entertainment from Cain and Santorum and Gingrich and Bachman -- but really, they never had a hope. Maybe Gingrich for VP?

The numbers have fallen in line, and now it's all over but the formalities.

So what will the media cover next? I suppose it will be Romney's VP pick.

Medical fads - are they cycling faster?

We've always had crazy fads in medicine.

I fell for a few when I had wet ears. Magnesium Sulfate post-MI is the one I remember best. That one even made it to textbooks before it died.

It's typical of medical fads that they infest journals, and now newspapers, but usually die before they get to textbooks. Estrogen for osteoporosis wasn't in that class -- that was a somewhat understandable research problem. Medical fads are less forgivable; they really aren't supported by evidence. They're built on easy money and bored specialists.

It feels like the fads are cycling faster. Emily and I thought the Vitamin D craze had another year or two, but it died fast.

Our local minor neurotrauma ("acute mild head injury") craze reeks of fadism. In Minnesota recommendations are being written into law, with little basis in science. As of today, PubMed has precious few studies.

Maybe it will be real. Some cults become established religions, some fads become science.

I don't think this one will make it to science, I do think it will cause significant harm along the way. Labels are powerful.

Hope this cycles as fast as Vitamin D, but putting minor traumatic brain injury into law may stretch its lifespan. Medical fadism is a crime against the vulnerable...

Update: More on the Vitamin D fad.

A few readers asked me for more detail on the vitamin D fad.

Briefly, for a year or two, I couldn't avoid popular articles claiming that Americans suffered from an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency causing a wide range of disorders, and that recommended daily allowances were inadequate. Then, at the end of 2010, the Institute of Medicine published a report declaring that the science wasn't there, and that overdosing was more harmful than expected ... (emphases mine)

... The committee provided an exhaustive review of studies on potential health outcomes and found that the evidence supported a role for these nutrients in bone health but not in other health conditions. Overall, the committee concludes that the majority of Americans and Canadians are receiving adequate amounts of both calcium and vitamin D. Further, there is emerging evidence that too much of these nutrients may be harmful...

In retrospect, within a few months of the IOM report, the media attention ended. The fad moved on.

There's still science to be done of course. Ever since medical school I've wondered about the relationship of latitude to multiple sclerosis, and whether there was some kind of cutaneous immunity/solar radiation component. Today there are many interesting articles on the relationship between vitamin D and MS. That's research though, the fad is over.

Finance 2.0, Oil and Project Syndicate - entertainment 2012!

My, oh, my, it's still a whitewater world.

Ezra Klein tells us ...

America’s top export in 2011 is refined fuel ...

... UC San Diego economist James Hamilton ...  the glut of new shale oil in North Dakota. Since there’s not enough pipeline infrastructure to get all that oil down to the Gulf of Mexico for export, it’s been piling up in Cushing, Okla. That makes it cheap for refineries in the Midwest to refine it and ship it out than to simply ship the oil directly...

Brad Delong tells us that the business of America is Finance (8.4%, healthcare is about 17%, emphases mine) ...

America’s Financial Leviathan - J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate

... In 1950, finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP, according to US Department of Commerce estimates. By 1960, that share had grown to 3.8% of GDP, and reached 6% of GDP in 1990. Today, it is 8.4% of GDP, and it is not shrinking. The Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart reports that the 2010 share was higher than the previous peak share in 2006....

... it remains disturbing that we do not see the obvious large benefits, at either the micro or macro level, in the US economy’s efficiency that would justify spending an extra 5.6% of GDP every year on finance and insurance. Lahart cites the conclusion of New York University’s Thomas Philippon that today’s US financial sector is outsized by two percentage points of GDP. And it is very possible that Philippon’s estimate of the size of the US financial sector’s hypertrophy is too small.

Why has the devotion of a great deal of skill and enterprise to finance and insurance sector not paid obvious economic dividends? There are two sustainable ways to make money in finance: find people with risks that need to be carried and match them with people with unused risk-bearing capacity, or find people with such risks and match them with people who are clueless but who have money. Are we sure that most of the growth in finance stems from a rising share of financial professionals who undertake the former rather than the latter?

Perhaps, then, what we need are 'heroes' who can separate foolish rich people from their money?

Saudi America and Finance still amuck; this world would be more entertaining if we didn't live in it.

Speaking of entertainment, Brad's post was the first I'd heard of Project Syndicate ...

Project Syndicate - the highest quality op-ed articles, analysis and commentaries

... Project Syndicate: the world's pre-eminent source of original op-ed commentaries. A unique collaboration of distinguished opinion makers from every corner of the globe, Project Syndicate provides incisive perspectives on our changing world by those who are shaping its politics, economics, science, and culture. Exclusive, trenchant, unparalleled in scope and depth: Project Syndicate is truly A World of Ideas. As of December 2011, Project Syndicate membership included 477 leading newspapers in 151 countries. Financial contributions from member papers in advanced countries support the services provided by Project Syndicate free of charge or at reduced rates to members in developing countries. Additional support comes from the Open Society Institute...

Lots of the usual suspects there .... Bhagwati, DeLong, Rogoff, Robini, Stiglitz, Joseph Nye, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more names I should probably know. It's not new, Google Reader went back to 10/2010, and there are series posts from 2008. They don't seem to be marketing very seriously.

I don't see any way to explore their archives by date. It's darkly amusing to read Nouriel Roubini's predictions on the Great Recession at the end of 2008 ...

Will Banks and Financial Markets Recover in 2009? - Nouriel Roubini - Project Syndicate

The United States will certainly experience its worst recession in decades, a deep and protracted contraction lasting about 24 months through the end of 2009. Moreover, the entire global economy will contract. There will be recession in the euro zone, the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, Canada, Japan, and the other advanced economies. There is also a risk of a hard landing for emerging-market economies, as trade, financial, and currency links transmit real and financial shocks to them...

... 2009 will be a painful year of global recession and further financial stresses, losses, and bankruptcies. Only aggressive, coordinated, and effective policy actions by advanced and emerging-market countries can ensure that the global economy recovers in 2010, rather than entering a more protracted period of economic stagnation.

The NBER tells us the US left recession in June 2009, though this is a technical determination. I suspect most Americans feel we're still in a recession.

Good thing I don't have enough to read.

Update: Browsing Project Syndicate, I'm finding a fair bit of pompous nonsense (Naomi Wolf?!). I'll probably have to subscribe to individual contributors.

GOP 2.0: What rational climate change politics might look like

"With great power comes great responsibility." Gingrich's inner geek smiled at that one. Certainly they had the power. The Democrats had been crushed by the 2012 elections. President Romney now controlled the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court -- and the filibuster had been eliminated in early 2013.

Gingrich was philosophical about the Vice Presidency; Cheney had taught him what could be done. Romney was happy enough to hand off the big one to him.

Not health care of course. That had been a trivial problem; it took only a few months to tweak ObamaCare, throw in some vouchers and a few distractions, and launch RomneyCare. The GOP base was fine with rebranding, and the dispirited remnant of the Democrats saw little real change.

No, the big one was climate change. Romney and Gingrich had never truly doubted that human CO2 emissions were driving global climate change, but pivoting the base took a bit of work. They'd begun with ritual purges; Hansen was quickly exiled to the lecture circuit. Then came the American Commission on Truth in Science. There wasn't even much tormenting of old enemies; the size of the GOP victory had taken the fun out of that. In short order the "weak mindedness" of the Democrats was exposed and the "honest and rigorous" examination of the Romney administration was completed. It was time, Murdoch's empire declared, for strong minded Americans to face hard (but not inconvenient) facts.

The hardest challenge came from a contingent that felt global warming was a good thing, even God's plan. American drought was weakening that group, but they were a constant headache.

Now though it was time for policy, and Gingrich couldn't be happier. He'd been meeting with Bill Clinton of course; the two rogues loved the evening debates. Clinton's engagement wasn't just for fun, despite the GOP's dominance there was still room for politics. America's wealthy had been irrationally terrified of Obama, but they were also afraid of runaway warming -- and they had considerable power. Trillions of dollars were at stake in any real attack on global warming, and every corporation in America was at the door. The Military was pushing for aggressive management. Lastly, Gingrich knew that power can shift. He'd seen it before.

He wrote out the options, and labeled them by their natural political base ...

• Climate engineering: solar radiation reduction, massive sequestration projects (R)
• CO2 pricing (by hook or crook) (R/D - political debate is how revenues are used)
• Subsidies for public transit (D)
• Urban planning measures (D)
• Military strategy to manage anticipated collapse of African nations (R)
• Military strategy to manage anticipated climate engineering conflicts with China (climate wars) (R)
• Tariff's on Chinese imports to charge China for their CO2 emissions (R/D - but probably tied to American CO2 pricing)
• Massive investments in solar power and conservation technologies (D)
• Massive investments in fusion power (R)

The Climate Wars were particularly troublesome. There were simple things China could do, like pump massive amounts of sulfuric acid, that would alleviate the disaster their scientists had predicted. These measures, however, would be disastrous for the US. On the other hand, war with China was unthinkable.

Gingrich new he had to put a price on Carbon and he had to get China to avoid the most dangerous (for the US) forms of climate engineering. The rest was in play. This was what Great Men were made for ...

See also:

Gordon's Notes

• Why is the modern GOP crazy? 7/2011
• Denialists in favor of a warmer earth 6/2011: This is a common GOP position now - Climate change is not due to humans, it's a good thing, and God approves.
• Global warming: Doonesbury and China 9/11 - another GOP position variant, warming is relatively bad for China, relatively good for the US. This is probably true.
• Global Warming: We're scr***d. 8/2006 - it's too late anyway. Another GOP position, also partly true.
• The rational basis for climate change denialism 20/2010 - God made the earth for us, so the climate is His.
• Greece, America and GOP 2.0 12/2011
• Global climate change: it's time to think radical 9/2006 - climate engineering is coming.
• UnReason: The Republican War on Reason 2/2011
• We're crazy now. We were crazier forty years ago - 9/2010 by historic standards, we're not as crazy as we fear
• Birthers, Deathers and Truthers - the reason behind the madness 9/2009 - maybe the GOP is now in recovery?
• America 2011: exploring the boundaries of democracy and capitalism 1/2011: Democracy is not robust
• Keystone XL, carbon sequestration, and the tax in the closet 11/2011
• A taxonomy of American politics 2/2011 - where values differ, how democracy would work if the GOP recovers
• Climate Change and the Black Plague 5/2007 - disease changes will be disruptive
• Climate Change 2010: Plan B 11/2010 - a Carbon Tariff on China
• Why you should vote for the Tea Party’s coven in the century of the fruitbat 10/2010 - maybe only the GOP can tackle climate issues
• Separated at birth: alternative medicine and climate change denial 5/2011 - Old discussions resurface.
• Thai floods - microcosm of global climate change 11/2011 - the early and biggest impacts are outside of the US and Canada
• Science, the media and the Himalayan glacier. What's wrong? 11/2011 - scientists are cowed
• Tornados and global warming - how do we judge predictions? 5/2011 - Bayes and climate. Evidence is always probabilistic.

Others

• Shibboleths — Crooked Timber 2/2011
• The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney - 2011 book
• Existential threats - Charlie's Diary 6/2011 - fun Stross post on existential threats. Climate change is fairly low in this ranking.
• Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts. « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science - 8/2010 - Why some things are hard to believe (roots of denialism)
• Weather as a weapon: The troubling history of geoengineering. - Slate Magazine 9/2010

American slavery - the Bachman quote

Long ago Emily and I took a guided tour of Jefferson's home. He was described in glowing terms. In those days Jefferson was still a legend.

Historians don't think of Jefferson that way any more. He is recognized as a moral failure, a man clever enough to know the evil he lived with and too craven to deal with it. A man who sired children with his slave and left them to history's discovery.

America is very, very slowly beginning to look at slavery. Peter Birkenhead's Salon article is a minor marker of this process. It has a number of damning quotes from today's GOP, but the best of all comes from Minnesota's own Michele ...

Why we still can't talk about slavery - Civil War - Salon.com 

Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable? But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” –U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann

Oh Michele, you are a classic.

For much more, see TNC (his book is on the way).