The Best and the Brightest

Obama's one-trick wizards: One wants to ask the Wall Street wizards who comprise the talent pool for the incoming administration, "If you so smart, how come you ain't rich no more?"

Failed financiers run the Obama transition team. It used to be that the heads of great industrial companies got the top Cabinet posts. Now it is the one-trick wizards. After George W Bush fired former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who had run Alcoa, the last survivor of the species was Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton. Obama's bevy of talent comes from finance. American industrialists have become figures of ridicule, like the pathetic chief executive of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, begging for a government loan.

History Lesson

JC Penney: As Penney later said, “Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I’ll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I’ll give you a stock clerk.”

In 1959, Penney cast the sole dissenting vote when Penneys board of directors decided to offer credit cards to customers. Penney explained to his fellow board members that he understood the company had to keep up with its competitors, but he did not approve of policies that encouraged customers to go into debt.

If CO2 Traps Heat, How is Cold Beer Possible?

If carbon dioxide traps heat, then how is cold beer possible?

We will not stop carbon taxation and central government control over business with graphs, databases and algorithms. The scientifically ignorant general population will continue to tune it out and trust the scientists that the authorities deem experts. The way to win a political battle is with political strategies.

The public needs to be convinced by their daily experience that carbon dioxide does not trap heat. If we can make each and every encounter with cold carbonated beverages a reminder that CO2 doesn’t trap heat, then every Coke or Pepsi consumed and every Coors, Bud and Miller advertisement reinforces that message. If heat trapping carbon dioxide becomes a public joke, then the foundation of dangerous man made global warming crumbles in the court of public opinion.

If CO2 Traps Heat, How is Cold Beer Possible?

Mama says: Last week an EPA appeals board dumped another coal plant, and said the EPA should develop national rules for CO2 emissions. That ruling is widely believed to have placed about one hundred coal plants in jeopardy, at a time when the US is rapidly running out of electricity. Plants in Utah, New Mexico, Kansas and Georgia have all recently been stopped by legal action.

That leaves the US with no new drilling, no new nuclear plants, no new hydro plants and no new coal plants. In short, it leaves us with no real substantial new energy sources except perhaps plants that burn natural gas. Wind and solar will not do it, nor will biodiesel.

Our Foundation of Promises

Denninger: If you think the stock market is bottoming then you must have some sort of belief that the credit markets are improving. I'm sure you can explain, then, why the IRX (13 week T-Bill) is yielding a whole 1/11th of a percent (annually!) … Barack Obama made the statement that "deficits are not important" on 60 Minutes Sunday.

He is going to get a rude surprise; the President of the United States is subservient to the bond market - specifically, he is subservient to the willingness of foreigners to finance our deficit spending. Embroiled in their own mess this capacity is quickly eroding, and over the last ten years our Treasury has put itself in the unenviable position of shortening the maturity of its outstanding debt (to get lower interest rates) which raises the potential of a rollover funding "emergency".

I have said it before and I'll say it again - President Obama is going to find himself on the wrong end of reality, and be forced into austerity measures that neither he or Americans are going to like one little bit. I wouldn't want his job when he is forced to go on Prime Time TV to tell America that we simply can't finance our profligate spending any more and that serious, real, across-the-board cuts are going to have to be made to our federal budget, entitlements and "promises" - that we simply cannot keep those promises.

Past Performance is the Available Evidence

The Myth of the Clinton Surplus: While not defending the increase of the federal debt under President Bush, it is aggravating seeing Clinton's record promoted as having generated a surplus. It never happened. There was never a surplus and the cold hard facts support that position. In fact, far from a $360 billion reduction in the national debt in FY1998-FY2000, there was an increase of $281 billion.

Verifying this is as simple as accessing the U.S. Treasury website where the national debt is updated daily and a history of the debt since January 1993 can be obtained. … Understanding what happened requires understanding two concepts of what makes up the national debt. The national debt is made up of public debt and intergovernmental holdings. The public debt is debt held by the public, normally including things such as treasury bills, savings bonds, and other instruments the public can purchase from the government. Intergovernmental holdings, on the other hand, is when the government borrows money from itself--mostly borrowing money from social security.

Notice that while the public debt went down in each of those four years, the intergovernmental holdings went up each year by a far greater amount--and, in turn, the total national debt (which is public debt + intergovernmental holdings) went up. Therein lies the lie.

History Lesson

Read This: You can’t really tell someone that you asked him to lunch to let him know that you don’t think of him as evil. Nor can you tell him that you asked him to lunch because you thought that you could trace the biggest financial crisis in the history of the world back to a decision he had made.

Objects in the Air

Dangerous times are here. Be observant. Be cautious.

Killing the P.I.G.

The slaughtering was done by the chief cook himself – a former army cook, middle-aged and tough as iron – while Vasily Petrovich helped. It turned out to be not so easy. The enormous, immobile Mashka, who had been overfed on warm greasy kitchen slops till she weighed over 400 pounds, took to flight like a bird when the slaughterers crossed the threshold of her pen. She had evidently guessed what they had come for, even though the chef hid the knife behind his back.

They had a terrible time throwing her. First in turn and then together Vasily Petrovich and the chef sprawled out on the dirty floor boards, trying to get hold of Mashka’s legs. But with an agility inspired by her fear of death, the heavy sow, almost blinded by fat, kept slipping out of their clutching hands and dashing about the pen with heartrending squeals.

Finally they managed to throw her onto her back. The chef took the long knife and, with a neatly calculated movement, plunged the thin, narrow blade under the sow’s left leg and pulled the knife sharply toward himself. - Yury Nagibin

Assertion and Documentation

From the critical thinking of the right:

How our Marxist faculties got that way: In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon ended the war and Congress ended military conscription. So the Marxist anti-war activists -- activism is now a full-time profession -- had to do something else. Most of them went to work in the real world. But a meaningful number remained in school and opted for academia, especially the humanities and the social sciences. If they got a Ph.D., they might even become university teachers, and many of them did. They then climbed academia's ladder, rising from instructor to assistant professor, from assistant professor to associate professor, and from associate professor to full professor. These last two ranks usually carry tenure, which means a guaranteed job until one decides to retire or is fired for raping little children in the streets.

From the critical thinking of the left:

UW Madison Havens Center: Michael Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of the world -- Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia -- through participant observation. … No longer able to work in factories, most recently he has turned to the study of his own workplace – the university – to consider the way sociology itself is produced and then disseminated to diverse publics. Over the course of his research and teaching, he has developed theoretically driven methodologies that allow broad conclusions to be drawn from ethnographic research and case studies. These methodologies are represented in Global Ethnography a book coauthored with 9 graduate students, which shows how globalization can be studied "from below" through participation in the lives of those who experience it. Throughout his sociological career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late 20th and early 21st. centuries.

El cambio verdadero requiere el cambio verdadero

Usar la misma gente y contar con diversos resultados es insano.

El cambio verdadero requiere el cambio verdadero.

El cambio verdadero requiere dolor verdadero.

Flooded with Lies

Man made global warming is absolutely wrong. That won’t stop the special interest groups from claiming that every weather event is evidence (not proof) of man made global warming.

Environmental group ties floods to global warming: The disastrous floods that ravaged southern Wisconsin this week are consistent with global warming predictions by Clean Wisconsin in a January 2007 report.

The report, "Global Warming Arrives in Wisconsin," forecast that global warming would lead to increased instances of severe droughts, more intense floods and increased snowfall, Clean Wisconsin said in a news release.

Balony. Anthropogenic global warming is predicated on the fact that carbon dioxide can absorb heat. Now is it is true that carbon dioxide can absorb the portion of infrared radiation in the wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µm). This, however, is a very small portion of the “heat” the Earth radiates back int0 space from the energy received from the sun each day.

More importantly, retention of heat energy does not contribute anything getting colder. Anytime someone claims that the ability of carbon dioxide to temporarily absorb the infrared wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µm) leads to more snowfall and flooding, ask them for the source data. When they can’t provide it, explain to them politely that you don’t believe their undocumented paranoia.

Professor Reid Bryson

Professor Emeritus Reid Bryson dies today at age 88. Professor Reid Bryson founded the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1948. This is before politics corrupts the practice of science. Two quotes to remember an intelligent and honest man.

‘You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.’

“If Global warming is a 100 story building, the human influence is equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor” - Dr. Bryson

Truth always wins in the end.

Economic Experimentation

I’ve observed that people will pick up a loose quarter while leaving twenty six pennies alone. Please feel free to replicate this experiment and formulate and defend your conclusions.

Elitist Entitlement Whining

As I’ve said before, money is putting three quarters and a nickel into a vending machine and getting back a pack of peanuts. Getting Goldman Sachs to lend you $600 million dollars to buy a company that “has never posted an annual profit and has lost a total of $194.6 million since it was founded” is finance.

Cash flow through the modern economy is a complex journey through the fusion of market exchange and non-market gifting. What concerns many of us is the size of the grant economy distributing our tax dollars around. Wisconsin is firmly committed to creating a biotechnology economy so it is worth noticing how entitlement mentality develops when government grants prime the pump.

California Scientists Sound Alarms: The California Healthcare Institute (CHI) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) today released a report, "The National Institutes of Health: Fueling Healthcare Innovation in California," urging legislators to support increased funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the backbone of the biomedical industry in California, which employs more than 267,000 people in high wage jobs. Without a sustained commitment of funding, scientists, academicians and leaders in the biomedical industry in California profiled in the report fear the biomedical ecosystem in California, made up of universities, research institutions and industry, will lose its capacity to produce the next generation of inventions to treat and cure disease.

However, as the federal deficit soars and legislators pare back discretionary spending, the NIH has come under intense pressure. In the first true budgeted reduction in NIH funding since 1970, the 2007 budget represented a 0.1 percent decrease from 2006

According to the … Supplement Survey, … the competition for peer-reviewed grants is rising and investigators must revise proposals several times in order to receive grants that are oftentimes lower in amount and shorter in duration than requested. Funding constraints prohibit faculty from maintaining sufficiently staffed labs and limit them from hiring qualified younger researchers.

I can imagine the indignant conversions as researchers sip on fine Merlot and sample award winning California cheese. It strikes me that the purpose of taxpayer financing is ultimately not to sustain 267,000 people in high wage jobs until some product emerges that can be sold to Wall Street. It’s also hard to work up tears just because finances get tight and you can’t have every toy you desire and all the minions you want. There are too many people struggling with unnecessarily expensive gasoline and punitive regulatory restrictions to empathize when academic lifestyles are asked to share the social pain.

Third Wave Technologies Purchase Offer

Madison based Third Wave Technologies, Inc. (TWTI) has agreed to be acquired in whole by Bedford, MA based Hologic Inc. (HOLX) for $580 million dollars. The 180 employees in Wisconsin should be unaffected by the ownership change.

GEN News: Third Wave develops and markets molecular diagnostic reagents for DNA and RNA analysis based on its Invader® chemistry. … The company recently submitted to the FDA PMA applications for two HPV tests.

“Hologic has an established sales and distribution network for women's health as well as extensive relationships with clinical labs and OB/GYN channels,” according to Jack Cumming, chairman and CEO of Hologic. “If and when Third Wave's HPV tests receive FDA approval, which we hope will be in the first half of calendar 2009, we will be well-positioned to take these products quickly and effectively to market.”

Both companies are operating at a loss and Hologic intends to borrow $600 million to finance the acquisition. Because the current market for human papillomavirus (HPV) testing to find the four types of the virus associated with disease is only $200 million annually, someone is convinced this market is going to expand considerably in the very near future. I suspect now that drug giant Merck has an approved vaccine in Gardasil they will continue to market their concern about the need for universal testing. Once you have a preventive treatment, the task becomes finding as many people as possible “at risk”.

Hillary Clinton Suspends Her Campaign

Obama and McCain consider their plans for the United States economy.

The World Can Be Changed

Using the same people and expecting different results is insane.

Real Change Requires Real Change.

Real Change Requires Real Pain.

“It’s burdensome”

Because “progressive” government requires "smart" growth.
Madison grapples with green
Because it takes time for the smart few to outthink the many.

The “Army” Blames the Sun

There is some internet kvetching going on because someone with The U.S. Army Research Laboratory is claiming the temperature of the earth has to do with the sun. Here is a bit of the pdf file with the comments on Global Climate Models (GCM) and total solar irradiance (TSI).

Is climate sensitive to solar variability?: Modeling TSI variability: Earth’s atmosphere, landmasses, and oceans absorb and redistribute the total solar irradiance (TSI) by means of coupled nonlinear hydrothermal, geochemical, and radiative dynamic processes that produce Earth’s globally averaged temperature at a given time.

The variations in TSI are indicative of the Sun’s turbulent dynamics, as evidenced by changes in the number, duration, and intensity of solar flares and sunspots, and by the intermittency in the time intervals between dark spots and bright faculae. That time variation in TSI induces similar changes in Earth’s average temperature and produces trends that move the global temperature up and down for tens or even hundreds of years. Our conclusions depart from those of the GCM simulations. We maintain that the variations in Earth’s temperature are not noise, but contain substantial information about the source of variability, in particular the variations in TSI.

The true believers that mankind is creating unnatural and dangerous changes are in frenzy because he is not a climate scientist. Well, no. Dr. West is a mathematical physicist. In his own words.

Bruce J. West: I have worked on the applications of discontinuous statistical processes (Levy distributions) to all manner of phenomena including quantum chaos, non-equilibrium statistical physics and the statistics of biomedical time series. Most recently I have worked on the development of the fractional calculus for the study of stochastic processes for which the evolution of the probability density cannot be described by a partial differential equation, but requires a fractional propagation-transport equation.

This is not hard to understand. When a mathematician says the math in the Global Climate Models is wrong, it may be reasonable to doubt the programmed conclusions. CO2 does not equal heat so more CO2 does not mean more heat. Make sense?