Whig Zhou

We analyzed millions of book ratings on the website Goodreads to answer an eternal question: Do people prefer James Joyce or Calvin and Hobbes?

The plan, which involved co-operation with some of the continent’s most notorious regimes, was aimed at stopping refugees from Africa reaching Europe.
By Martin Plaut

Source: New Statesman

Detailed plans, copies of which have been seen by the New Statesman, lay out a programme of co-operation with some of Africa’s most notorious regimes. The aim is to curtail the exodus of African refugees, whose arrival in Europe has become such a toxic political question.

The first inkling that this was under way was provided by the New Statesman last November. Now the German magazine, Der Spiegel and the television programme Report Mainz have given details of how this will be implemented.

The magazine says Germany is leading this work, but that the European Commission has warned that “under no circumstances” should the public learn what was said during talks that were held on 23 March. A staff member working for Federica Mogherini, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, warned that Europe’s reputation could be at stake.

The EU is fully aware of just how dangerous these proposals really are. Under the heading “Risks and assumptions” the document states:

“Provision of equipment and trainings [sic] to sensitive national authorities (such as security services or border management) diverted for repressive aims; criticism by NGOs and civil society for engaging with repressive governments on migration (particularly in Eritrea and Sudan).”

The detailed proposals outline a range of requirements for nine African states, from Uganda to Djibouti. But the most controversial involve proposed deals with Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The Sudanese President Omar al Bashir is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court; Eritrea is being investigated by the UN for crimes against humanity; Ethiopia has repressed its largest ethnic group, the Oromo people.

Despite these gross violations of human rights the plans envisage Sudan receiving a range of computers, scanners, cameras, cars and all the necessary training at 17 border crossing points. Two “reception centres” are proposed at Gadaref and Kassala, on Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The Eritreans are promised training for the judiciary and what is described as “Assistance to develop or implement human trafficking regulations.” Eritrean border patrols have orders to “shoot to kill” any refugee attempting to flee across the border. EU funding could fund the strengthening of this policy.

Ethiopia is offered equipment and training to “improve border surveillance”, as well as building the capacity to investigate and prosecute anyone involved in the smuggling.

At the same time the EU admits that the states concerned are riddled with corruption – often involving the officials who would have to implement these policy recommendations.

“Smuggling and trafficking networks in the region are highly organised and sophisticated, often with the complicity of officials…Corruption is reported to be widespread in almost every beneficiary country, facilitating illegal migration and trafficking through the complicity of ticket bureaux, check-in-desks, immigration officials, border patrols, etc.”

Despite these identified risks the proposals have been taken forward.

An EU spokesman, contacted by the New Statesman, denied that they are yet being implemented. “There are currently no plans to provide equipment to the Sudanese Government and there are no plans at all to build reception centres in Sudan.” But when pressed on whether the documents were forgeries, the spokesman made no reply.

The EU’s proposals were discussed in London. The British government is an integral part of these considerations. The development ministry – DFID – confirmed that all EU members were contributing funds to tackle illegal trafficking, but said that the programme was “at a very early stage”. The spokeswoman then repeated the EU’s denials regarding Sudan.

 

 

You read the title right. Instead of wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and waving Che Guevara flags, these protesters are festively burning images of Che Guevara.

Alas, these “protests” are taking place in Brazil--and aren’t really protests. They’re more like celebrations. Brazil’s Che Guevara-loving and Castro regime-financing President Dilma Rousseff, you see, was recently suspended from office by Brazil’s Congress for rampant corruption and will go on trial and probably be impeached. 

Under the former communist-terrorist Rousseff, Brazil was subsidizing Castro’s Cuba to the tune of about $6 billion a year. Sentimental attachment probably played a role in this relationship. Back in the late 1960’s the Castro regime had been among the mentors and financiers of the Brazilian guerrilla (terror) group Revolutionary Armed  Vanguard Palmares (VAR Palmares.)  As a prominent member of this terrorist group, in 1970 Dilma Rousseff was captured, tried, convicted and jailed. 

Naturally the media never refers to Brazil’s financial transactions with Castro’s Cuba as a sentimental subsidy, much less a gift. Instead, they dutifully refer to this enormous cash-flow as an honorarium from Brazil to Cuba for its “doctors.”

Yep. There it is again. Seems you can’t swing a dead cat around the mainstream media without hitting some mention of Cuba’s “free and fabulous healthcare.” In this case the vaunted healthcare was coupled with Cuba’s equally vaunted (and equally bogus) international magnanimity in deploying thousands of her “medical volunteers” to care for indigent peasants in the Brazilian bush and jungle.

Never mind that if an honest reporter actually bothered to investigate Cuba’s “Doctor Diplomacy” he’d quickly call it out for what it is: human trafficking.    

 The “doctors” themselves have no say whatsoever in where they work, for how long—much less how much they earn. The Brazilian government pays the “doctors” wages straight to their slavemasters, the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate (called ‘Cuba” by the media and Obama.)  Meanwhile, as insurance against the “doctors’” escape while overseas, Castro’s Stalinist regime holds their family hostage in Cuba, never letting them travel, and rarely out of the sight of the ever-vigilant KGB-trained secret police.

Needless to add, in liberal eyes none of the above compares to the horrors perpetrated on “transgenders” in North Carolina. Not even close. So let’s move on. 

Now regarding these Cuban “doctors” expertise. Many Brazilians learned the truth the hard way. Perhaps these are some of the very ones burning Che Guevara t-shirts? To wit:  “Brazil has wasted $300 million on a Cuban vaccine that is completely ineffective,” wrote Dr. Isaas Raw, director of Sao Paolo’s prestigious Butantan Institute, specializing in biotechnology some years ago.

Yes, unlike most of the “reporters” lauding it, Brazilians got a birds-eye view of Cuba’s vaunted “Doctor Diplomacy.” An April 2005 story from Agence France-Presse titled “96 Cuban Doctors Expelled from Brazil” reported: “Federal Judge Marcelo Bernal ruled in favor of a demand by the Brazilian state of Tocantins’ Consejo Regional de Medicina (Regional Council on Medicine) that Cuban doctors be prohibited from practicing in their state.” Based on the results they’d achieved with Tocantins’ residents, the judge referred to the Cuban doctors as “Witch Doctors and Shamans. We cannot accept doctors who have not proven that they are doctors.” 

Some hapless Jamaicans also learned. From the newspaper the Jamaican Gleaner:  “Eye Surgery Hopes Dashed; Patients Suffer Complications After Cuba”: “The survey included 200 patients (Jamaicans who traveled to Cuba for eye surgery), and of that group, 49 patients — nearly a quarter — experienced post-surgery complications. According to Dr. Albert Lue, Head of Ophthalmology in Jamaica’s Kingston Public Hospital, the complications causing the patients impaired vision was corneal damage and damage to the iris due to poor surgical technique.”

According to a report by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, more than 75% of “doctors” with Cuban “medical degrees” flunk the exam given by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates for licensing in the U.S. 

“The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind…Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination!” (Che Guevara, 1961.) 

Unlike Che Guevara—to his everlasting regret, no doubt—in 1968 Dilma Rousseff’s terrorist group actually got their hands on an American “hyena.”  Their American victim was a particularly gratifying one: West Point grad, Viet-Nam combat hero and father-of-four Captain Charles Chandler, who was still on active duty but stationed in Brazil while studying Portuguese.

The Castro-sponsored Brazilian terrorists ambushed Captain Chandler and murdered him in front of his wife and children. Now here’s a “human-interest” story that might have interested some American readers, don’t you think? 

Alas, Obama is very friendly with both Rousseff and—lately—Castro. And the U.S. media is very friendly with Obama. So I’m afraid we’ll have to go to a Brazilian source to read an interview with the murdered U.S. war hero’s son.    

Human rights advocacy is an essential check on abuses of governments the world over but lack of professionalism, political agendas, and the credulity of those in the most prominent human rights groups threaten to undermine much of the hard work true human rights advocates do. The problem has gotten so bad that Robert L. Bernstein, the founding chairman of Human Rights Watch, took to the pages of the New York Times in 2009 to call out his former organization for its bias, polemics, and lack of professionalism.

Often the most virulent, ad hominem, and racist trolls on the internet claim to be human rights activists or advocates. When it comes to human rights work, there are, alas, simply no standards.

Back in 2014, I noted how both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, perhaps the two biggest and most famous human rights groups, had incorporated material from Al-Karama, a self-described human rights monitoring group founded and run by a man subsequently designated by the US Treasury Department as an Al Qaeda financier.

While both those organizations might have had egg on their face by being duped by an apologist for and supporter of terrorism, the real problem is that the US State Department too often incorporates Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International material into its own reporting.

This means that terrorists can use the non-governmental human rights advocacy groups to launder their propaganda for a wider audience who will never know its falsity or the agenda which it serves.

Well, at Human Rights Watch, it’s déjà vu all over again. Consider the following action alert put out by the group earlier this week:

UAE authorities should immediately drop all charges against an Emirati academic and a Jordanian journalist that relate to peaceful criticism of Emirati and Egyptian authorities. The Emirati academic, Nasser bin Ghaith, faces charges that include “engaging in hostility against Egypt,” following online comments made before his arrest in August 2014… “UAE authorities seem to believe they have the right to detain anyone who ever expressed any views, anywhere, that they disagree with,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director. “There is no justification for throwing a journalist, or anyone else, into prison for expressing a peaceful opinion.”

Here’s what Human Right Watch omits. On May 1, 2016, the Emirates Ummah Party announced Nasser bin Ghaith as its new leader; its previous head Muhammad al-Abduli had been killed fighting with the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front in Syria. The person organizing advocacy on behalf of Bin Ghaith has been Al-Karama’s own Abd al-Rahman bin Umayr al-Nuaimi, the Treasury-designated Al Qaeda-financier. While Human Rights Watch describes Ghaith as an academic, the secretary of the Emirates Ummah Party calls him the “liberator.”

The Human Rights Watch cherry-picking gets worse. By embracing only what Al-Karama gives it, the group ignores the portion of the charges examining how Ghaith:

…Cooperated with an outlawed secret Emirati organization that has been dissolved which calls for the opposition to the founding principles upon which the system of government in the State is based, and participated in the organization before its dissolution by communicating and meeting with its leaders to oversee the programs and projects of the organization.

In other words, he was working to overthrow the state. In the United States, Human Rights Watch does not object to the imprisonment of right-wing militia leaders who seek to overthrow the government of the United States. When it comes to the United Arab Emirates, the group seems to embrace a double standard. Should Ghaith receive a fair trial? Absolutely. Should Human Rights Watch prejudge such a trial based on allies who happen also to support Al Qaeda? No.
When it comes to the UAE, the group seems to embrace a double standard.
Perhaps if it spent more time addressing the cancer of terrorism and those who would encourage it, they might understand that it is groups like Al Qaeda and its financiers who are responsible for the worst abuses, and not monarchies which happen to have built a largely stable, secure, and tolerant state.

This is not to say human rights abuses do not occur in the Emirates; they do. These should not be ignored; instead, they should be condemned forcefully. But by lending the platform of Human Rights Watch to a group which embraces the most violent of terrorist groups, Human Rights Watch ruins its credibility. That’s a tragedy for an organization which has allowed politics to deviate it from its original mission. It is also a tragedy for the victims of real human rights abuses for they will discover that in Human Rights Watch, they have no credible advocate.

University of Missouri at St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld has had “second thoughts.” Like many academic criminologists, he had pooh-poohed charges that skyrocketing murder rates in many cities in 2015 and 2016 result from a “Ferguson effect” — a skittering back from proactive policing for fear of accusations of racism like those that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

Now, after looking over 2015 data from 56 large cities, he’s changed his mind. Homicides in those cities were up 17 percent from 2014. And ten cities, all with large black populations, saw homicides up 33 percent on average.

“These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” Rosenfeld said. “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect.”

Rosenfeld thus parts company with the liberal Brennan Center, whose analysts argued that the 2015 homicide increase in large cities was not a “national pandemic.” He parts company also with FiveThirtyEight analyst Carl Bialik, who dismissed a 16 percent homicide increase in 59 of the 60 largest cities in 2014 and 2015 as “a less dire picture than the one painted by reports in several large media outlets.”

But a 16 or 17 percent increase in homicides in major cities which account for a large share of the national murder toll is, in historical perspective, very dire indeed. The correct word is not “only” but “unprecedented.” The only double-digit increases in national murder statistics going back to 1960 are 13 percent (in 1968), 11 percent (in 1966, 1967 and 1971) and 10 percent (in 1979).

As anyone familiar with the workings of compound interest might guess, such increases rapidly added up. The total number of homicides nationally more than doubled between 1966 and 1979. The number peaked in 1991.

During those years, most academic criminologists argued that high rates of violent crime resulted from economic distress and — noting that nearly half of murders were committed by blacks — from the endemic racism in American society. Today the Brennan Center echoes this analysis: “Economic deterioration of those cities could be a contributor to murder increases.”

Political scientist James Wilson and maverick criminologist George Kelling dissented from this view. In their 1982 Atlantic article “Broken Windows” they argued that proactive policing and elimination of signs of disorder (like broken windows) could sharply reduce crime rates.

In the 1990s New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton put the “broken windows” theory into effect. Their proactive policing tactics were continued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and widely imitated and adapted around the country.

The result was that homicides in New York were reduced from 2,445 in 1990 to 328 in 2014. Nationally, the number of murders declined 42 percent from the 1991 peak to 2014.

The definitive chronicler of proactive policing, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, spotlighted the Ferguson effect in a Wall Street Journal article in May 2015. She noted that arrests were sharply down in cities like St. Louis and Baltimore because the “incessant drumbeat against the police” across the country had “officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric.”

Those encouraging such rhetoric include President Obama and his first attorney general, Eric Holder—even though an intensive Justice Department investigation of Brown’s killing in Ferguson cleared the officer involved and made clear that charges that Brown had put up his hands and surrendered were baseless.

Obama has since said that “there’s no data to support” a Ferguson effect. That puts him at odds with his appointee FBI Director James Comey, who says that his conversations with police officials around the country convinced him there are “marginal pullbacks by lots and lots of police officers.” And with Richard Rosenfeld who has found clear evidence of “de-policing” in Baltimore and Chicago, where homicides have spiked.

The charge of cherry-picking data and misleading rhetoric can more justifiably be leveled against administration officials and mainstream media, who after the Ferguson killing created the impression of a rising epidemic of racist police shooting innocent blacks. The few such cases have received prompt and stern attention from local law enforcement.

Black Americans were the primary victims of the huge crime increase starting in the late 1960s, and they will be the primary victims again if the Ferguson effect continues to result in more homicides. Can’t we prevent this awful history from repeating itself?

 

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational organization and does not take institutional positions on any issues. The views expressed here are those of the author.

From the WSJ, a somewhat overstated headline: The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago Researchers compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427 against tax data in 2011 and found about 900 surnames still present in Florence By JOSH ZUMBRUN May 19, 2016 8:53 am ET New research from a...

Do you support the green movement? In Sweden this question has gained something of a double meaning, as prominent members of the Green party have been associated with various Islamist movements. The result is a massive scandal which so far has led to the resignation of the Minister for Housing and Urban Development, and put the Deputy Prime Minister and the Education Minister’s positions in jeopardy.

This strange affair started when Barbaros Leylani, the vice president of the Turkish Swedish association, held a speech about the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Speaking to a Turkish audience in Sweden he explained “Death to the Armenian dogs”. The general public were understandingly quite shocked by this exhibit of racial hatred, which lead to Leylani resigning from his post. This incident, which occurred in the beginning of April, might have been the end of the story.

But a Swedish journalist found that Mehmet Kaplan, a member of the Green party and the Minister for Housing and Urban Development, had in the summer of 2015 had dinner at an event at which not only Barbaros Leylani but also Ilhan Sentürk, the leader of the Swedish chapter of the Grey Wolves, had participated. The Grey Wolves is a Turkish organization which is described as deeply nationalist or even fascist. It has carried out a number of attacks on minority groups such as Armenians. As journalists started digging, they found numerous examples of Mehmet Kaplan, himself of Turkish origin, associating with Islamist and Turk-nationalist organizations. Amongst others, a previous interview with Kaplan surfaced in which he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jewish people.

Swedish national public television broadcaster SVT chose this time to report about Kaplan having close ties with the regime of Turkish president Recep Erdoğan. Erdoğan is criticized internationally for his mistreatment and attacks against journalists and minorities, as well as possible ties to ISIS. Such associations proved too much for one Swedish minister. On the 18^th of April, the Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven himself gave an address with Mehmet Kaplan, explaining that Kaplan had resigned from his post.

But that wasn’t the end of the affair.

During recent years two things have been happening in Swedish politics. One is that the Green party has been reaching out to Muslim leaders in the country. In the process, it seems, they have not only established contact with moderate groups, but also with Turkish-nationalists ones and those with an Islamist agenda. Another is that the Green party has become vastly popular amongst journalists. A survey from 2012 has found that 41 per cent of journalists, and the majority of journalists in the public television and radio broadcasters sympathize with the Green party. This can be compared with 7 per cent of the general public who voted for the party in the 2010 and 2014 national elections.

For a long time journalists had not scrutinized the Green party, likely due to their sympathies. Particularly the issue of relations with Islamist and Turk-nationalists groups was sensitive. After all, the Swedish Greens are deeply progressive. Over time the party has shifted its focus from environmental issues to feminism, anti-racism and post-modernism. It sounded strange that Green party representatives would share Islamic and Turk-nationalist values. But once some journalists and editorials started digging on the matter, the scandal kept growing.

A journalist was given a tip about interviewing Yasri Khan, who was nominated to join the board of the Green party. It turned out that Khan refused to shake the hands of female journalists. A Youtube video surfaced from a previous conference in which Khan had been asked: “What is your position, as a Muslim, on Saudi Arabia executing atheist bloggers”. Shockingly, the young politician who together with Mehmet Kaplan has founded the organization Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice, rambled on for minutes without giving a clear answer to the question. After a heated and short debate, Khan left all political positions in the Green party.

It might seem bizarre that such extreme action and views are being associated with a Green party. After all, the main supporters of the party are urbanites with peaceful values. The Greens are so progressive that they don’t even have a party leader. Rather, they have one woman and one man as spokespersons. The two individuals currently leading the party are Gustav Fridolin, the young Minister for Education, and Åsa Romson, the Minister for the Environment and ceremonial Deputy Prime Minister.

The pair have appeared in a number of media interviews recently. However, they have shown quite some reluctance in distancing themselves from the actions of their colleagues, such as Mehmet Kaplan and Yasri Khan. Romson even sparked her own controversy amidst the whole chaos. When discussing the resignation of Mehmet Kaplan on a morning television broadcast, Romson defended Kaplan by saying: “He has been chairman of Young Muslims in tough situations like the September 11 accidents”. Referring to the 9/11 attacks as accidents didn’t exactly put water on a raging crisis. Even international media started attacking the Deputy Prime Minister for her insensitive remarks. More importantly, Fridolin has been accused himself having close relations to Islamist groups.

It remains to be seen how the scandal will finally end. In a sudden press meeting, called on the 25^th of April, both Fridolin and Romson said that they were willing to step down from their positions, if the Green party so wished. The matter will be decided at the party congress to be held on the 13-15^th of May. Although calls for one, or both, spokespersons to resign have been made public by prominent Green party members, the outcome is uncertain. Given that the Green party is the junior member of the government, together with the Social Democrats, and that both Fridolin and Romson are prominent cabinet members, a change in leadership might have drastic consequences for Sweden.

One thing is sure – the party congress to be held in two weeks will likely lead to some interesting discussions. The Greens can be described as a super-progressive movement, with great emphasis on women’s rights, minorities’ rights and peaceful activism. Some Green party members accuse the media of unjustly attacking members of a Muslim belief, reflecting anti-muslimism. Others are questioning how the green of the environmental movement has been allowed to intermingle with the green of Islamism. Some views, it seems, are difficult to join under the same roof.

The post How Sweden’s Green party became tangled with Islamist groups appeared first on CapX.

Kevin Drum observes that the top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13 billion in total, including one hapless dude who made $250 million despite losing money and shutting down the fund.

I will say that I have always scratched my head over asset manager compensation.  The tradition is that they get paid as a percentage of assets managed, sometimes with a percentage of the profits as well but never taking a percentage of the losses.   Perhaps this made some sense with smaller pools of money, but today with huge pools of money, the same old percentages yield ludicrous compensation results.  I certainly understand why the managers would defend this compensation scheme, but why do customers accept it?

This reminds me of real estate broker compensation.  The tradition when I grew up is that the seller paid 6%, about half of which went to the seller's broker and half to the buyer's broker.  For years that 6% was etched in stone and no one broke ranks -- the agents were pretty good at maintaining the cartel, and the government helped by putting the force of law behind broker licensing that helped keep the agent supply down.  But as home prices kept increasing, people started noticing that while 6% of $100,000 may have made some sense as reasonable compensation, 6% of $2 million was absurd, especially since a $2 million home was not even close to 20x harder to sell.   So people, initially savvy high net worth folks, and later everyone, began negotiating the 6%.  I have negotiated this number on every home I have sold since the mid-1990s.

I am not really knowledgeable about the asset management business -- in some sense I have negotiated my commission by choosing to put all my money in low-fee Vanguard funds.  How does the asset management business hold the line on fees, particularly when they are in a business where it is so easy to measure their relative performance, and presumably pay them based on this performance?

Which got me to thinking about the customers of hedge funds.  Aren't many of these customers progressive or controlled by progressives?  Hedge funds have been very successful marketing to university endowments, non-profit foundations, and public pension funds -- aren't these institutions often controlled by progressives, or at least left-liberals?  Aren't a disproportionate share of the very high net worth Hollywood and billionaire types who invest in hedge funds also progressive or liberal?  Heck, Hillary Clinton's son-in-law ran a hedge fund until recently.  So why don't these folks get together and instead of worrying about whether their portfolios are invested in Israel or Exxon or some other progressive bette noir, why don't they agree to a set of principles as to how they are going to pay for their asset management services in the future, and stick to these?  I say that progressives should get together, because they are politically passionate about this, but I can't think of any good reason why good libertarians or conservatives wouldn't happily join in to reduce their fees.

I understand that to the extent that there are black swan hedge funds that beat the market year in and year out, these folks will be hard to challenge as they can probably write their own terms.  But for the other 99% of hedge funds, why not use the power progressives already have as customers before we start talking about various government hammers.

PS-  I will put my two cents in.  I think the new Mother Jones site design is awful.

Reprinted from IsraelNationalNews.com.

“It is important to understand that it is not only feminists who demonize Israel. They are merely part of a global phenomenon in which the world media, academics, government leaders and human rights organizations drive this madness.”

Prof. Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies. She lives in New York City. She is the best-selling author of 16 books including "The New Anti-Semitism" (2003, 2015), "The Death of Feminism” (2005) and “American Bride in Kabul” (2013) which won a National Jewish Book Award. Her latest book is “Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews, 2003-2015” (2016). 

“In 2003, after a rather successful lecture about a feminist topic to an African-American feminist audience at a free-standing conference at Barnard, I was asked --completely off-topic-- where I stood on the issue of the women of ‘Palestine.’ I responded: ‘I think you are asking me where I stand on the issue of apartheid and I oppose it. Islam is the largest practitioner of gender and religious apartheid in the world.’

“I began talking about forced veiling, arranged marriage, polygamy, honor-based violence and honor killing. A near-riot broke out. I was hustled out for my safety. These feminists did not care about ‘Palestine’ but about demonizing Israel. As women of color they identified with Arabs whom they thought were all people of color. They ignored the existence of Arab Jews or Jews of color. Neither had they any idea of the anti-black prejudice and history of slavery that characterizes Arab and Muslim history.

“By the mid- to late 1980s, feminists began to speak -- like many others -- more about colonialism than about women's rights. Under the evil spell of Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Jacques Lacan and so on, they became cultural relativists and abandoned their original belief in universal human rights. They became more concerned with racism than with sexism. They became more obsessed with the occupation of a country, ‘Palestine’ -- that has never existed -- than they were with the occupation of women's bodies in the Muslim world. Faux anti-racism trumped real anti-sexism every time.

“Major feminist organizations, such as The National Women's Studies Association have had plenary panels about ‘Palestine’ and have voted to boycott Israel--not Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, or ISIS. Feminists at Brandeis University were the force behind withdrawing an offer to honor Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an anti-Islamist ex-Muslim dissident. She is a dark-skinned African, yet her critique of Islamic practices is seen as a ‘racist,’ rather than as a theological or feminist critique.

“Once people, including feminists, are infected with a fake but lethal narrative, reason alone cannot prevail. They fear that by criticizing barbaric behavior when committed by formerly colonized men of color, especially Arabs, in particular ‘Palestinians,’ they themselves will be demonized as racist ‘Islamophobes.’

“I have stood against anti-Israeli petitions and boycotts from the mid-1970s on, but am a lone voice-- in terms of Second Wave feminist pioneers. Younger pro-Israel activists, however, may also hold feminist values. 

"It gives me no pleasure to critique feminist leaders of my generation. Once we did hold certain beliefs in common about women's rights and the universality of human rights. However, classical liberals have increasingly become totalitarian-like leftists. Those who were in favor of free speech and academic freedom now condone hate speech, blood libels and junk social science.

“Feminists who once understood that sexist images have a profound effect upon living beings, refuse to view the incitement against Israel as being related to anti-Semitism, or a world Intifada against the Jewish state as constituting racism. The burden of telling the truth is too punitive for many who will be unfunded, un-invited, shunned, censored, and effectively written out of intellectual and feminist history.

“Unbelievably, institutional, academic, and activist feminism today stands with Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, not with Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and Hindus who are being massacred by Muslims—or with the women who are being kidnapped into sex slavery by ISIS and Boko Haram.

“Having lived in Afghanistan I was both an eyewitness and a survivor of the gender apartheid that is indigenous to many tribal cultures. Barbaric customs including the savage subordination of women, have not been caused by Western imperialism or colonialism. They preceded the rise of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and ISIS.

“Most Western thinkers do not comprehend that Islam has a long history of slavery, anti-black racism, religious apartheid, gender apartheid, colonialism, imperialism and conversion via the sword. They also do not realize that Muslims have been persecuting Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Ba'hai—and the ‘wrong’ kind of Muslims—for fourteen centuries. This understanding should be easy to achieve given our daily, horrendous headlines. But no one wants to be the first to say: ‘The Emperor has no clothes.’”

Naturally, economists know a lot about human biology and evolution, just as civil engineers have to know about the properties of timber, concrete and steel. They have a good grounding in psychometrics, behavioral genetics, and quantitative genetics – how else could they do their job? Populations vary in traits that play key roles in economic activity and growth – in intelligence, asabiya, savings propensity, etc – you have to be aware of that variation, else whole continents would be economic mysteries. In the same way they know that those observed differences are a product of selection – which means economic historians think seriously about psychometric changes over time and their consequences, such as the Industrial Revolution. That kind of analysis helps predict where modern economic institutions can be successfully introduced, and where they cannot.

Yet even Jove nods. Sometimes even tenured professors make serious errors on fairly elementary topics. Like anyone else who has made a mental typo, they welcome polite correction.

Deirdre McCloskey has a new book out: Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. I’m sure that there are many good things in it. But McCloskey makes a significant error in talking about genetics. “Know also a remarkable likelihood in our future. Begin with the sober scientific fact that sub-Saharan Africa has great genetic diversity, at any rate by the standard of the narrow genetic endowment of the ancestors of the rest of us, the small part of of the race of Homo sapiens that left Mother Africa in dribs and drabs after about 70,000 BCE…. Any gene-influenced activity is therefore going to have more African extremes. The naturally tallest people and the naturally shortest people, for example, are in sub-Saharan Africa. The naturally quickest long-distance runners are in East Africa. The best basketball players descend from West Africans. In other words, below the Sahara the top end of the distribution of human abilities – physical and intellectual and artistic – is unusually thick. …

The upshot? Genetic diversity in a rich Africa will yield a crop of geniuses unprecedented in world history. In a century or so the leading scientists and artists in the world will be black – at any rate if the diversity is as large in gene expression and social relevance as it is in, say, height or running ability. ”

So by this argument that the most cold-tolerant Africans must be more cold-tolerant than Eskimos: but they’re not. The most altitude-tolerant Africans must be more altitude-tolerant than Tibetans – but they’re not. McCloskey is thinking that a turn to free markets will make Africa rich, and that will give educational opportunities to Africans now denied them – but a fair-sized mostly-African population already lives in the United States, a population that is already much more prosperous than sub-Saharan Africans. How are they doing? How many geniuses are they producing?

The whole argument is flawed. Overall genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci. By itself it tells you nothing about any particular trait. Europeans do have less overall genetic variation than sub-Saharan Africans (~20% less), but they show more variation in hair color and eye color than Africans.

Essentially every domesticated species has less genetic variation than its wild progenitor. Dogs have less genetic variation than wolves. So, does this mean that the tallest wolf is taller than any dog? No – the tallest Great Danes are taller than any wolf. The heaviest mastiffs are heavier than any wolf. Chihuahua are the smallest. Greyhounds are faster than wolves (by a little).

Thoroughbred horses have little genetic variation – their effective population size is under 100. Tarpans, the wild ancestor of domesticated horses, are extinct, but there certainly are horse breeds with much more genetic variation than Thoroughbreds. But they’re slower.

What matters is the frequency of alleles that influence a trait, not overall genetic diversity. If, for example, the variants that tend to boost educational achievement (some of which were found in the just-released Nature study) were on average less common in sub-Saharan Africans than in Europeans – says 5% less common – Africans would tend to do less well in school. Like they actually do. Now Africa is a big place, and some groups are genetically quite distinct from others. Bushmen are genetically more distant from the Bantu than the Bantu are from Chinese. Some African populations might have experienced selective pressures that were more (or less) favorable for intelligence than others. Is there evidence, either in test scores or cultural accomplishment (better than any test), that some African populations may have smarts comparable with, or better than, people in Switzerland or Holland or Scotland?

No. There is no such evidence.

How many real geniuses out of African populations – people like Fermat, or Riemann, or Gauss, or Laplace? Newton? Maxwell? Gibbs? None. How many of the top 1000 mathematicians in the 20th century were of sub-Saharan ancestry? One, perhaps?

McCloskey’s prediction of an efflorescence of African genius is based on an incorrect understanding of how quantitative traits work. It’s also in that interesting, ever-popular class of theories that are contradicted by everything that has ever happened in the history of the world.

Does Ben Rhodes victory lap bragging about how he pulled the wool over the eyes of a stupid and gullible America on Iran remind anyone else of Jonathon Gruber?  Remember these famous words from Gruber?

"You can't do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay? So it’s written to do that," Gruber said. "In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in, you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical to get for the thing to pass. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."

Even the justification is the same -- its OK to break the law and lie about it in order to break up gridlock.  (By the way, my mother-in-law -- who tends to be a reliable gauge of mainstream Democratic thinking -- argued the same thing with me, that extra-Constitutional Presidential actions were justified if Congress did not accomplish enough.   Asked about whether she was comfortable with the same power in a Trump administration, she was less sanguine about the idea).

While political lying is old as time, it strikes me that this bragging about it is a new phenomena.  It reminds me of the end of the movie "Wag the Dog", when the Dustin Hoffman character refused to accept that no one would ever know how he manipulated the public into believing there had been a war, and wanted to publicly take the credit.  In the movie, the Administration had Hoffman's character knocked off, because it was counter-productive to reveal the secret, but I wonder if in reality Obama is secretly pleased.

Fan Hui makes a living by playing Go, a Chinese board game that dates back over 2,500 years with more moves possible than there are atoms in the universe.

The objective of Go is simple: to surround the other player's stones with your own, forcing them to sacrifice their piece.

Fan is pretty good, having been crowned European champion every year for the last four years.

But last October, the Chinese-born Frenchman sat down to play an artificially intelligent computer created by DeepMind, a Google-owned startup in London. Fan lost the match to the AI agent named AlphaGo 5-0.

As Europe's number 1, Fan is clearly talented. But there are still hundreds of players, many of them in Asia, that are better than him.

Following the AlphaGo thrashing, Fan has been practicing. But not against other humans.

He's been training in DeepMind's office in King's Cross, according to a Telegraph article that details the journey DeepMind has been on with its AlphaGo computer, from taking on Fan to taking on the best Go player in the world, Lee Se-Dol.

Training against AlphaGo has reportedly helped Fan to boost his global ranking from 600 to 300 in the last three months.

DeepMind cofounder and AlphaGo creator Demis Hassabis told The Telegraph: "He just won the European pro Go championship in February, and he won with a full score; he beat absolutely everybody."

Fan is on the best form of his life and he attributes it to AlphaGo, The Telegraph reports.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This 309-square-foot micro apartment has a home theater, full kitchen, and even a guest bedroom

From 1820 to 2013, 79 million people obtained lawful permanent resident status in the United States. The interactive map above visualizes all of them based on their prior country of residence. The brightness of a country corresponds to its total migration to the U.S. at the given time. Here’s the source where you’ll find more details about the map and its creator – Max Galka.

The post Amazing interactive map: Two centuries of immigration to the US, 1820-2013 appeared first on AEI.

Labour Party candidate Sadiq Khan, a Muslim, has been elected mayor of London, and the international Left is thrilled. “Son of a Pakistani bus driver, champion of workers’ rights and human rights, and now Mayor of London. Congrats, @SadiqKhan. –H,” tweeted Hillary Clinton. Likewise happy are Islamic supremacists worldwide: members of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the party of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the majority party in the nation’s National Assembly, held up a sign emblazoned: “Heartiest Congratulation [sic] to Sadiq Khan 1^st Muslim Mayor of London who defeated millionaire Jew Zec [sic] Goldsmith.”

Those two messages summed up the dichotomy that characterizes the response to Sadiq Khan, and his own associations and intentions. Khan himself has written about the necessity to “ensure that the perception of Islam is not tainted by those with extremist views.” But his concern about this “taint” is relatively newly-minted: back in 2004, Khan spoke at a gender-segregated event entitled “Palestine — the suffering still goes on.” Also on the bill was Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain; who once led a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day; Ibrahim Hewitt, the chairman of Interpal, which the U.S. Treasury Department has designated a “global terrorist” organization for funneling money to Hamas; Muslim leader Azzam Tamimi, who has called for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state; Muslim cleric Suliman Gani, who has echoed the Qur’an (4:34) in saying that women should be “subservient” to men; Ismail Adam Patel of Friends of Al-Aqsa, who has claimed that “Hamas is no terrorist organization”; and Church of England cleric Stephen Sizer, who has blamed Israel for the 9/11 jihad terror attacks.

Khan and his supporters have cried foul at Khan’s being held responsible for the views of these men. Their hypocrisy is evident, however, since the Left’s various dossiers against foes of jihad terror rely heavily on guilt by association, and then, even more tendentiously, on guilt by association built upon its earlier smears of others. Nonetheless, Khan’s appearance at that long-ago event should really only cause concern if Khan holds such views.

Does he? In a 2009 interview with Iran’s state-controlled Press TV, Khan criticized the British government for working with moderate Muslim organizations, saying: “I wish we only spoke to people who agree with us. I can tell you that I’ve spent the last months in this job speaking to all sorts of people. Not just leaders, not just organizations but ordinary rank and file citizens of Muslim faith and that’s what good government is about, it’s about engaging with all stakeholders. You can talk about articles in the newspapers about what an organization might get but the point is you can’t just pick and choose who you speak to, you can’t just speak to Uncle Toms.” The “Uncle Toms” in question were the Quilliam Foundation, which is a declared foe of Islamic “extremism.”

The ConservativeHome website lists other problematic aspects of Khan’s record, summarized by Raheem Kassam at Breitbart:

• A letter to the Guardian in the wake of the 7/7 terrorist bombings on London, blaming terrorism on British Government policy;
• His legal defence of Zacarias Moussaoui, a 9/11 terrorist who confessed to being a member of Al Qaeda;
• His chapter in a book, entitled ‘Actions Against the Police’ which advises on how to bring charges against the police for “racism”. This is the same police force that Mr. Khan as London mayor would exercise authority over;
• His defence of Islamist extremist Azzam Tamimi. When Dr. Tamimi told a crowd that the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed would “cause the world to tremble” and predicted “Fire… throughout the world if they don’t stop”, Mr. Khan, who shared a platform with him, dismissed the threats as “flowery language”;
• His platform-sharing with Suliman Gani, a south London imam who has urged female subservience to men, and called for the founding of an Islamic state.

All this raises genuine concerns that as mayor of London, Khan will be less than energetic in protecting Londoners against jihad terrorism, or challenging Muslim communities in the U.K. to clean house. But when Khan’s opponents in the UK raised these and other concerns, they were excoriated as “racist.” Even the clueless and compromised dhimmi David Cameron was accused of “racism” for noting Khan’s hospitable attitude toward Islamic supremacists and jihadists. 

This is the way these things always work nowadays: if you dare to mention that there are reasons to believe that a Muslim may be involved in jihad activity or, as in this case, clearly positive toward jihadists, it’s your fault, and a clear sign of “racism” and “Islamophobia,” even if the charges are accurate. 

Leftists and Islamic supremacists have used such charges for years, and have succeeded in stigmatizing any discussion of how jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims as “bigotry” — which is why such discussions are so seldom pursued, and never in mainstream fora.

And so this Reuters story is all about how the wicked Conservatives are “unapologetic” for raising Khan’s ties to “extremists.” Reuters publishes no articles about the possible implications of Khan’s ties to “extremists.” The only concern is how “racist” the Conservative Party is.

In this environment, London marches happily into its brave new multicultural future, led by its Muslim mayor. Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up on them. But it probably will.

For the past 100 years, life expectancy in the US has been on a relentless upward march.  It was 69 when I was born in 1955.  In 1994 it was 75.7.  In 1998 it was 76.7.  In 2002 it was 77.0. In 2006 it was 77.8.  In 2010 it was 78.7.  That’s when Obamacare was passed.  In 2014 it was just 78.8.  That’s the smallest 4-year increase since annual data began (in 1970).

I actually don’t think that’s a very good argument against Obamacare.  But supporters of Obamacare often used arguments that were equally lame, such as the claim that life expectancy in the US is lower than in Western Europe.  Yes, but what does that mean?

To give you an idea of just how misleading life expectancy data can be, consider the case of Hawaii.  This source suggests that Asians in Hawaii live shorter lives than Asians in any other state, in some cases by a wide margin.  (Note Asian life expectancy data is only available for 28 states.)  OK, but how about Hispanics?  Again, life expectancy for Hispanics is lowest in Hawaii, of all the states with data (again 28 states.)  There is no data for blacks in Hawaii.  By now you must have concluded that Hawaii is some sort of hellhole with horrible life expectancies.  And controlling for race it is.  But Hawaii is also the state with the highest overall life expectancy in the entire US.

How is that even possible?  One answer is that whites do fairly well in Hawaii.  But whites are a minority in that tropical paradise.  The real reason is even more bizarre.  Both Hispanics and Asians have inexplicably long life expectancies in the US.

Let’s go back to Obamacare, which was going to improve health by eliminating the problem of people with without health insurance.  The group that is far and away the least likely to have health insurance is Hispanics.  They also have an obesity problem. And yet their life expectancy is 81.8, compared to 79.0 for whites.  Why?  I have no idea. But again, it suggests that health insurance isn’t the issue, something else is going on.

Asians are the biggest group in Hawaii, and they have a mind-boggling 86.5 life expectancy in the US, which is higher than even the richest countries in East Asia (Japan tops out at 84).  And yet Asians in America have a higher poverty rate than whites.  Even if it’s genetic, that doesn’t explain the comparison with East Asia.  Nor does diet.

Once again the state level data might help.  The two longest-lived Asian groups are in New Jersey and Massachusetts, both over 89 years. And it’s pretty clear what’s special about these two states—they both have a lot of recent immigrants who are highly educated and work in high tech (like my wife, who is from China, works in biotech, and will basically live forever, assuming cryonics is perfected within 40 years.)  It’s not surprising that the well-educated live longer, that’s also true of whites.  But nationally there are also plenty of Asians that don’t work in high-tech, so the overall life expectancy is still pretty hard to explain.

So Hawaii is the absolutely worst place for Asians and Hispanics.  But there are so many Asians in Hawaii, and their life expectancy is so mindbogglingly long, that it pushes Hawaii to number one among US states, the very highest life expectancy.  A good example of the need for control variables.

African-Americans present another puzzle.  The black/white gap was 6 years in the early 1980s.  By the late 1980s it had widened to 7 years, and was still 7 years in 1994. No reason for optimism, right?  But then it started shrinking steadily, and was down to 3.8 years by 2010.  As we know, total life expectancy in the US then leveled off, as did white life expectancy.  But black life expectancy kept rising, and the gap is now (in 2014) only 3.4, less than half the gap of 20 years ago.  The gap is still shrinking. Why? I have no idea.  The falling murder rate is one factor, but hardly seems important enough to explain the whole story.  Meanwhile the poor/rich gap is widening among whites, and blacks have some of the same socio-economic problems as poor whites. (Here’s where the Oxy/heroin epidemic may play a role for whites.)

Denmark has the shortest life expectancy in Western Europe.  Diet?  Lots of Danes who moved to the US became Mormons, who adopted their strong communitarian culture.  So Utah has good social indicators, just like Denmark.  Except life expectancy. Whereas Denmark is unusually low for Western Europe, Utah is relatively high for the US.  Another mystery.

My conclusion?  We don’t understand life expectancy very well.  (Commenters: Before giving me your “theory” of Hispanics or Asians, ask yourself if you expected these numbers, before seeing them.)

PS.  After I wrote this I noticed that Alex Tabarrok has a new post on this topic.  His data set stops at 2010, and hence he doesn’t pick-up the leveling off of life expectancy after Obamacare was passed.

PPS.  There are different sources for international life expectancy data, and they do not all agree.

Economist C. Kirabo Jackson has a new working paper studying the effects of single-sex education on students’ academic outcomes and criminal activity. (I’ve done some work on this subject as well.)

The paper is very well done. From its conclusion:

The results show that single-sex education can improve both boys’ and girls’ outcomes. Three years after being assigned to a single-sex secondary school, both boys and girls have higher scores on standardized tests. Five years later, they are more likely to take and pass advanced courses. In the long run, both boys and girls are more likely to have completed secondary school and to have earned the credential required to continue to tertiary education. Importantly, boys are also less likely to have been arrested. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that being in the single-sex cohorts improved test scores and also improved longer-run non test score outcomes such as advanced course taking, high school completion and engaging in criminal activity.

Importantly, Dr. Jackson, a friend of mine, points out that the benefits of single-sex instruction are free to the taxpayer — all you have to do is sort children into the appropriate classrooms or schools. His paper finds that the improvement in test scores from single-sex instruction are “about as large as the effect of going from a teacher at the 6th percentile of teacher quality to one at the 50th percentile of teacher quality.”

Dr. Jackson discusses several reasons why single-sex education might be beneficial. As the product of an all-boys high school — Rockhurst, the best high school inside the Milky Way — I have lived many of those benefits.

 

Republished with permission from National Review’s The Corner. 

In recent years, the Department of Education (DOE) has chosen to send several “dear colleague” letters to all universities in the United States whereby it has presumed to progressively redefine Title IX to include three troubling new directives under the auspices of the 1972 law.

The first directive sets forth the “transgender accommodation” mandate. It specifies that any male student who declares himself to be female must now be given full access to all female facilities and programs.

The second directive specifies how colleges must investigate and adjudicate allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault. It actually requires a process that often circumvents local law enforcement and its corresponding constitutional protections of all involved parties.

A third directive, defines any unwelcome “verbal conduct of a sexual nature” as “sexual harassment.” It, thus, requires a university to investigate and discipline student speech in a manner deemed acceptable to the DOE. Failure to measure up to any of these directives could result in a university being cited as “out of compliance” and, therefore, subject to Title IX penalties.

For reasons I can only hope are obvious to most thinking people, Oklahoma Wesleyan University objects to these decrees.

We object to the DOE’s transgender accommodation mandate. We view this as sadly misguided at best and blatantly misogynistic in the extreme. Title IX was established in 1972, primarily, to give women equal access to athletic programs and facilities. How can we give women equal access to anything if we accept the fallacious argument that a woman is not a biological reality but, rather, simply a postmodern construct of subjective feelings? The DOE’s transgender mandate is anti-woman and anti-science for it denies that a woman is an empirical fact and forces us to celebrate the “female” as little more than an emotional fabrication. This is something OKWU will not do.

We object to the DOE’s denial of the legal rights of our students. All students at OKWU have the constitutional right to avail themselves of the full protection of the law whether they are accused of a criminal act or believe they are its victim. OKWU has always turned over all claims of criminal behavior to the local police and we will continue to do so. To the extent the DOE requires us to convene a kangaroo court that denies our students their due process and legal protections in investigating and adjudicating an allegation of criminal conduct, we will not do so.

We object to the DOE’s presumption that it has any authority to police and/or penalize the protected speech of our students. This is simply beyond the pale. As an educational institution, OKWU speaks openly and “liberally” on all matters of culture, ethics, justice and morality. We teach our students and our community why we find certain behaviors to be moral and why we view others behaviors as immoral. Will the DOE now judge that our “speech” on these matters is a “threat” to those who disagree with us? Will we then be found to be out of compliance with what the government defines as acceptable thinking? Will the thought-police of the DOE now presume to penalize us for our “unacceptable” views? Such state sponsored mind control would make even Orwell and Huxley shudder in their graves.

Oklahoma Wesleyan will not comply with any mandate that compromises the privacy of a woman’s locker room, bathroom and shower. We will not deny our students their right to due process when they are accused of a crime or when they suffer as its victim. Finally, we will not accept the arrogance of any state official trying to tell us what we can and cannot think or say on our campus or in our classrooms.

The DOE’s overreach in these matters is about as unconstitutional and anti-liberal as you can get. This is a university, my land. It is not a police state or a kangaroo court.

Photo credit: Intel Free Press (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved

Dr. Everett Piper is president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

The views expressed in opinion articles are solely those of the author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by Black Community News.

The graph below shows how NASA has been steadily erasing the 1940’s blip, and subsequent 1940 to 1970 global cooling.

1981: 1981_Hansen_etal_1.pdf    2001: Fig.A.ps     Current: Fig.A.gif

Just since 2001, NASA has increased 1880 to 2000 warming by 0.5 degrees by altering the data.

2001: FigA.txt Current: Fig.A.txt

The next graph superimposes NCAR 1974 at the same scale, and shows how Hansen was already erasing the 19140-1970 cooling in his 1981 version.

NCAR 1974

Note above how all of the NASA graphs show renewed warming starting around 1967, yet that warming does not appear in the NCAR graph. Similarly, in 1978 NOAA did not show any surface or troposphere warming through 1977.

Angell NOAA 1978

In 1978, it was reported by an international team of specialists that there is “no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years” They also reported southern hemisphere data was too meager to be reliable, and that the Arctic ice cap was growing. They blamed the expanded polar vortex on global cooling.

TimesMachine: January 5, 1978 – NYTimes.com

In Climategate E-mails, the team made clear their desire to manipulate the temperature record and remove the post-1940 cooling.

From: Tom Wigley <wigley@ucar.edu>
To: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer <santer1@llnl.gov>

So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC,
then this would be significant for the global mean — but
we’d still have to explain the land blip.

It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.

di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt

In another Climategate E-mail, Phil Jones said that much of the southern hemisphere data was “mostly made up.”

date: Wed Apr 15 14:29:03 2009
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk> subject: Re: Fwd: Re: contribution to RealClimate.org
to: Thomas Crowley <thomas.crowley@ed.ac.uk>

Tom,

The issue Ray alludes to is that in addition to the issue
of many more drifters providing measurements over the last
5-10 years, the measurements are coming in from places where
we didn’t have much ship data in the past. For much of the SH between 40 and 60S the normals are mostly made up as there is very little ship data there.

Cheers
Phil

di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/2729.txt

It is 100% clear that the NASA temperature record is complete garbage, and that they are simply shaping curves to match the global warming agenda.

Facebook’s news curators would regularly suppress news stories important to conservative readers and keep them off the “trending” news section coveted by publications, a journalist and former Facebook employee told Gizmodo.

Some of the topics that were allegedly excluded from the “trending” feed included Chris Kyle, the legendary Navy SEAL killed in 2013, the Drudge Report, controversial former IRS official Lois Lerner and comedian Steven Crowder.

The former employee who spoke to Gizmodo said the censoring of news disturbed him to the point that he felt compelled to keep track of topics that were suppressed.

“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former Facebook news curator said.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending. … I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the curator added.

Another source, also a former curator, also claimed the process was “absolutely” biased.

Facebook’s official policy appears to be drastically different than the accounts of the former curators. The social media giant claims the trending list only shows “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

However, news curators were apparently instructed to use a so-called “injection” tool to create their own trending topics when users weren’t reading stories that management considered to be important news.

More from Gizmodo:

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

[…]

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module.

Read the full story here.

—

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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Larry Wilmore didn’t bomb at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He wasn’t trying to be funny.

Comedians bomb when their jokes aren’t funny. But Larry Wilmore, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver and the rest of the gang in the post-comedy clown car aren’t comedians. They’re not here to entertain you. They’re here to scold you. If you’re a good progressive you’ll be allowed to laugh with them at an appropriate target like conservatives or your own white cis hetero privilege.

Not quite comedians, they’re a neological tragedy. Combine edutainment, infotainment and comedy and call it comedunfotainment. It’s not funny, educational or informational. But it tries to be all three at the same time. And, like Larry, it fails miserably.

But it’s also the only form of comedy allowed in campus safe spaces. It’s not controversial, except to the people who don’t matter. It’s also not funny, so it can’t be subversive of anything that matters.

It’s the perfect accompaniment to the final nerd prom of a disastrously progressive administration.

The sad trend got its start when the media decided that Jon Stewart’s snarky remarks about Bush represented the future of news. Today media snarkiness is ubiquitous. But Stewart didn’t bring down Bush. Instead he and his fellow media hipsters became the comedy palace guard for Obama.

And they stopped mattering.

Colbert is flailing badly on CBS. Stewart quit. His replacement has failed. There are a dozen contenders to be the Generation X class nerd awkwardly saying sarcastic things about Republicans on a cable show, (John Oliver is currently in the lead) but everyone in the media is already playing that game.

And the game stopped mattering once Obama won. Even Jon Stewart realized that. If there was ever anything “liberating” about a snarky cable pseudo-news show, it has long since become confining. With the last of the Generation X irony replaced by millennial conformity, all that’s left are topical references combined with identity politics pointing the way to politically safe targets to throw weak jokes at.

That’s what Larry Wilmore’s performance was. It wasn’t funny. It was politically safe. And that’s all progressive comedy can be. It’s every bit as liberating as a roast of the Politburo.

Once you’ve gotten through taking potshots at conservative strawmen, as Colbert did for a tedious 9 years, what’s left? CBS discovered that the answer is nothing. There are no jokes. There are no viewers. There’s just Colbert earnestly interviewing some Obama flunky about how smart he is. CBS is paying Colbert $5 million a year to put on his own late night version of NPR. And it’s less funny than NPR.

What do liberals make fun of once they’ve won the culture war? Nothing. Once the revolution happens, there are no more jokes. There’s just Larry Wilmore telling identity politics dad jokes about famous people to a crowd of famous people. Here’s your comedunfotainment. Laugh or, you’re racist.

Then watch this viral clip of John Oliver advocating some liberal policy that he doesn’t understand with puppets or puppies for the infoedutainment of an audience of overgrown children who have their own safe spaces against workplace microggressions and battle stress with adult coloring books.

Progressive comedy is not about the jokes you can tell, it’s about the jokes you can’t tell. It’s Diet Comedy’s attempt to bring some of the energy of daring comedians to politically safe acts.

Liberal comedians operate in a vast arena of untellable jokes addressing narrow audiences that grow easier to offend each year. The liberal comedian must appear to be daring even while being cowardly. He must shock without actually shocking. His task is impossible. All he can do is fail safely at it.

And that’s what Larry Wilmore did.

Liberal comedy is dead and the liberal comedian is disposable. The star of the White House Correspondents' Dinner was never going to be Larry, but Barack. The job of the liberal comedian isn’t to mock progressive presidents, but to enable them. The punch lines vary, but the message is always the same. Obama was convinced that he was a better speechwriter than his speechwriters. He’s a better comedian than his comedy palace guard because he doesn’t have to worry about his job. They do.

Liberal comedians don’t have to worry about being unfunny. When your politics are rightly on the left, lack of ability at telling jokes or running the country is forgivable. But offending the wrong identity politics group can end your career. It’s safer to bomb than to be accused of being insensitive.

Funny is dangerous. Unfunny is safe.

A brand of comedy that began when liberals were convinced that they were a beleaguered minority in a Bushian America who needed someone to say what they were thinking before the Patriot Act enforcers came to take them away to Gitmo has become about not saying what everyone is thinking.

Funny was a means to an end. Now the end has arrived. Humor was a means of moving a left-wing message. Now that the message enjoys total cultural dominance, the humor can be dispensed with. Why waste time being funny when we can go right to a lecture on the environment or white privilege?

Snark was subversive, but when there’s nothing left to subvert, it becomes counterrevolutionary. The day will come when any joke will offend someone and even laughter itself will be triggering. If it wasn’t for the emotional immaturity of the average lefty, that day would have already come years ago. But so far this revolution only works if all the overgrown children can still pretend that they’re having fun.

That means Obama had to push ObamaCare on Between Two Ferns. Bernie Sanders has to pose for selfies. Hillary Clinton has to pretend that she carries around hot sauce. Fake liberal journalists have to tell jokes to an audience of real liberal journalists. And there must be a hashtag to encompass it all.

Because if the children realize that the revolution isn’t fun anymore, they’ll want to go home.

The journey toward the right side of Obama’s history is a long field trip where the Kool-Aid and the camp counselor’s jokes get staler each year. All the amazing free gifts aren’t coming. Along the way the children will get older, look at the tax bill and demand that the driver turn the bus around.

So the driver goes out on stage and tells jokes. But the real joke is about how much he hates everyone else on the trip to the right side of history. It’s the only kind of joke that a narcissist finds funny.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a celebration of the contempt in which Obama holds his media celebrity supporters, the contempt of his comedunfotainers for the media and his contempt for the comedunfotainment industry which channels his contempt for the media.

That joke is almost funny. But you have to be far enough inside, but outside the media to enjoy it. And the only ones who can really do that are in the White House.

The post The social effects of ethnic diversity, a block-level study from France appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

GM and Lyft will start testing self-driving electric taxis on public roads "within a year," according to the Wall Street Journal.

This comes after GM recently invested $500 million Lyft, and acquired self-driving car technology company Cruise Automation, in a reported $1 billion deal.

The program will feature electric Chevy Bolts and "real customers," who will have the chance to opt in or out, but many details haven't been hashed out, a Lyft executive told the Journal.

“We will want to vet the autonomous tech between Cruise, GM and ourselves and slowly introduce this into markets,” Taggart Matthiesen, Lyft’s product director, told The Journal. The company wants to “ensure that cities would have full understanding of what we are trying to do here.”

News of the rollout largely matches expectations, as GM unveiled the production model of the Chevy Bolt at the Detroit Auto Show in January, and the company has announced the new Bolts will begin rolling off production lines later this year. GM has also been actively developing its self-driving tech for years.

If Lyft wants to compete with the much bigger and better-funded Uber, it will need help. Sidecar, which was once a semipopular alternative to Lyft and Uber, shut down because it wasn't able to raise as much money or grow as quickly as its competition. Uber, Google, and Tesla are also separately working on driverless cars.

Business Insider has reached out to Lyft and GM for comment.

You can read The Wall Street Journal's full report here.

Additional reporting by Alyson Shontell and Steven Tweedie.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This 309-square-foot micro apartment has a home theater, full kitchen, and even a guest bedroom

When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added many new layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, “break the cycle of poverty,” and make “taxpayers out of tax eaters.” Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the “conditions that breed despair and violence,” those being “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.” Of particular concern to Johnson was the disproportionately high rate of black poverty. In a famous June 1965 speech, the president suggested that the problems plaguing black Americans could not be solved by self-help: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,'” said Johnson.

Thus began modern liberalism's vicious and unrelenting assault on black Americans. Dressed up as “compassion” and “social justice,” this assault took the form of an unprecedented commitment of federal funds to a wide range of measures aimed at redistributing wealth in the United States. Since 1965, more than $22 trillion of taxpayer money (in constant 2012 dollars) has been spent on means-tested welfare programs for the poor.

The economic milieu in which the War on Poverty arose is noteworthy. As of 1965, the number of Americans living below the official poverty line had been declining continuously since the beginning of the decade and was only about half of what it had been fifteen years earlier. Between 1950 and 1965, the proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level, had decreased by more than 30%. The black poverty rate in particular had been cut nearly in half between 1940 and 1960. And in various skilled trades during the period of 1936-59, the incomes of blacks relative to those of whites had more than doubled.

Despite these trends, the welfare state expanded dramatically after LBJ's statement. Between the mid-Sixties and the mid-Seventies, the dollar value of public housing quintupled and the amount spent on food stamps rose more than tenfold. From 1965-69, government-provided benefits increased by a factor of 8; by 1974 such benefits were an astounding 20 times higher than they had been in 1965. Also as of 1974, federal spending on social-welfare programs amounted to 16% of America’s Gross National Product, a far cry from the 8% figure of 1960. By 1977 the number of people receiving public assistance had more than doubled since 1960.

The most devastating by-product of the mushrooming welfare state was the corrosive effect it had on American family life, particularly in the black community. As provisions in welfare laws offered ever-increasing economic incentives for shunning marriage and avoiding the formation of two-parent families, illegitimacy rates rose dramatically.

For the next few decades, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families penalized marriage. A mother generally received far more money from welfare if she was single rather than married. Once she took a husband, her benefits were instantly reduced by roughly 10 to 20 percent. As a Cato Institute study noted, welfare programs for the poor incentivize the very behaviors that are most likely to perpetuate poverty. Another Cato report observed:

“Of course women do not get pregnant just to get welfare benefits.... But, by removing the economic consequences of out-of-wedlock birth, welfare has removed a major incentive to avoid such pregnancies. A teenager looking around at her friends and neighbors is liable to see several who have given birth out-of- wedlock. When she sees that they have suffered few visible consequences ... she is less inclined to modify her own behavior to prevent pregnancy.... Current welfare policies seem to be designed with an appalling lack of concern for their impact on out-of-wedlock births. Indeed, Medicaid programs in 11 states actually provide infertility treatments to single women on welfare.”

The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. As a FamilyScholars.org report puts it: “When a couple's income nears the limits prescribed by Medicaid, a few extra dollars in income cause thousands of dollars in benefits to be lost. What all of this means is that the two most important routes out of poverty—marriage and work—are heavily taxed under the current U.S. system.”

William Galston, who served in the '90s as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, estimated that the welfare system, with its economic disincentives to marriage, was responsible for at least 15% to 20% of the family disintegration in the United States. Libertarian scholar Charles Murray has placed the figure at somewhere around 50%. By Murray's reckoning, the growth and increased liberalization of the “welfare complex” have eroded the traditional ethos of working-class communities that once held people who worked at low-wage jobs, and men who married the mothers of their children, in much higher esteem than unwed parents who became wards of the state.

The results of welfare policies discouraging marriage and family were dramatic, as out-of-wedlock birthrates skyrocketed among all demographic groups in the U.S., but most notably African Americans. In the mid-1960s, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was scarcely 3% for whites, 7.7% for Americans overall, and 24.5% among blacks. By 1976, those figures had risen to nearly 10% for whites, 24.7% for Americans as a whole, and 50.3% for blacks specifically. And today, the numbers stand at 29% for whites, 41% for the nation overall, and 73% for blacks. In other words, the entire country is moving rapidly in the wrong direction, but blacks in particular have reached a point of veritable catastrophe.

The devastating societal consequences of family breakdown cannot be overstated. Father-absent families—black and white alike—generally occupy the bottom rung of America's economic ladder. Regardless of race or ethnicity, the poverty rate for single parents with children is several times higher than the corresponding rate for married couples with children. According to Robert Rector, senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, “the absence of marriage increases the frequency of child poverty 700 percent” and thus constitutes the single most reliable predictor of a self-perpetuating underclass. Articulating a similar theme many years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty.”

Children in single-parent households are burdened not only with economic, but also profound social and psychological, disadvantages. For example, youngsters raised by single parents, as compared to those who grow up in intact married homes, are more likely to be physically abused; to display emotional disorders; to smoke, drink, and use drugs; to perform poorly in school; to be suspended or expelled from school; to drop out of high school; to behave aggressively and violently; to be arrested for a juvenile crime; to serve jail time before age 30; and to go on to experience poverty as adults. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes. With regard to girls in particular, those raised by single mothers are more than twice as likely to give birth out-of-wedlock, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty for yet another generation.

The calamitous breakdown of the black family is a comparatively recent phenomenon, coinciding precisely with the rise of the welfare state. Throughout the epoch of slavery and into the early decades of the twentieth century, most black children grew up in two-parent households. Post-Civil War studies revealed that most black couples in their forties had been together for at least twenty years. In southern urban areas around 1880, nearly three-fourths of black households were husband- or father-present; in southern rural settings, the figure approached 86%. As of 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks nationwide was approximately 15%—scarcely one-fifth of the current figure. As late as 1950, black women were more likely to be married than white women, and only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent.

During the nine decades between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1950s, the black family remained a strong, stable institution. Its cataclysmic destruction was subsequently set in motion by such policies as the anti-marriage incentives that were built into the welfare system. As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams puts it: “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do. And that is to destroy the black family.” Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell concurs: “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

The energy industry is the industry that powers every other industry. To the extent energy is affordable, plentiful, and reliable, human beings thrive. To the extent energy is unaffordable, scarce, or unreliable, human beings suffer.

And yet in this election year, the candidates, especially the Republican candidates, have barely discussed energy. Thus, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss my moral evaluation of this administration’s energy policies.

When we evaluate energy policies, such as President Obama’s efforts to forcibly restrict fossil fuel use and mandate solar and wind energy, it is always worth asking: Has this been tried before? And what happened when it was?

The answer is: much, much milder versions of the President’s energy policy have been tried in Europe—and resulted in skyrocketing energy prices every time.

Take Germany. Over the last decade, Germany pursued the popular ideal of running on unreliable energy from solar and wind. But since unreliable energy can’t be relied upon, it has to be propped up by reliable energy–mostly fossil fuels–making the solar panels and wind turbines an unnecessary and enormous cost to the system. As a result, the average German pays 3-4 times more for electricity than the average American. It’s so bad that Germans have had to add a new term to the language: “energy poverty.”

The United States should learn from the failed German experiment; instead, our President is doubling down on it many times over. And, just as ominously, he is leading global initiatives that call for even the poorest countries to be forced to use unreliables instead of reliables. This, in a world where 3 billion people have almost no access to energy and over one billion people have no electricity.

How could this possibly be moral?

The alleged justification is that fossil fuels cause climate change and should therefore be eliminated. But this does not follow. As with anything in life, with  fuel’s impacts we need to look at the big picture, carefully weighing both the benefits and the costs.

And to do that, we need to clearly define what we mean by “climate change.” Because while nearly everyone agrees that more CO2 in the atmosphere causes some climate change, it makes all the difference in the world whether that change is a mild, manageable warming or a runaway, catastrophic warming.

Which is it? If we look at what has been scientifically demonstrated vs. what has been speculated, the climate impact of CO2 is mild and manageable. In the last 80 years, we have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from .03% to .04%, and the warming has been barely more than the natural warming that occurred in the 80 years before that, when there were virtually no CO2 emissions. From a geological perspective, both CO2 levels and temperatures are very low; there is no perfect amount of CO2 or average temperature, although higher CO2 levels do create more plant growth and higher temperatures lower mortality rates.

To be sure, many prominent scientists and organizations predict catastrophe–but this is wild speculation and nothing new. Indeed, many of today’s thought leaders have been falsely predicting catastrophe for decades. 30 years ago, NASA climate leader James Hansen predicted that temperatures would rise by 2-4 degrees between 2000 and 2010; instead, depending on which temperature data set you consult, they rose only slightly or not at all.

30 years ago, President Obama’s top science advisor, John Holdren, predicted that by now we’d be approaching a billion CO2-related deaths from famine. Instead, famine has plummeted as have climate related deaths across the board. According to data from the International Disaster Database, deaths from climate-related causes such as extreme heat, extreme cold, storms, drought, and floods have decreased at a rate of 50% since the 1980s and 98% since major CO2 emissions began 80 years ago.

How is it possible that we’re safer than ever from climate?

Because while fossil fuel use has only a mild warming impact it has an enormous protecting impact. Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe. And the driver behind sturdy buildings, affordable heating and air-conditioning, drought relief, and everything else that keeps us safe from climate is cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, overwhelmingly from fossil fuels.

Thus, the President’s anti-fossil fuel policies would ruin billions of lives economically and environmentally–depriving people of energy and therefore making them more vulnerable to nature’s ever-present climate danger.

Policies that cause massive, unnecessary human suffering, including increased climate vulnerability, are immoral.

A moral energy policy is one that liberates all the energy technologies, including fossil fuels, nuclear, and large-scale hydro, and lets them compete to the utmost to provide the most affordable, reliable energy for the most people.

A moral energy policy is an energy freedom policy.

What common knowledge tells us and the truth of a matter is not always the same thing. Sometimes history is hidden behind stories generated among regular people. One example is the relationship between tulips and economies. The 1000-year history of the tulip, its markets, and its popularity give us the background to understand today’s market volatility and challenges. Understanding the historical contexts in which financial risks are taken makes us smarter risk takers today.

History is full of stories.  A story with some traction is that carrots are good for our eyes.  This World War II propaganda from the UK led generations of children to eat excessive amounts of carrots based on the false belief that doing so will improve their eyesight.

Another false story is that tulips entered Europe from the Middle East in the 16th century, which led to an economic bubble and collapse. People who promote this story tend to believe that it is extremely rational. This story has become so widely accepted in the centuries since that few people even question whether it is true. It is easier to accept and spread the idea than to check the facts.

It is efficient to use a well-known meme to spread misinformation, and, when something has become accepted as a fact, it tends to take a great deal of effort to challenge that authority. Even people who do not accept a story often accept the meme, leading to logical inconsistencies in their arguments. This is a concern regarding market bubbles because people who verbally attack markets do so on the belief that ‘markets are not perfect’. However, nowhere in the economic literature are markets seriously described as perfect; they are identified as optimally efficient compared to other options.

To promote an alternative to a market-based solution, the proponents of that solution need to demonstrate that their solution is more efficient than the market solution. Because they cannot do that, their strategy is to attack the market. ‘Markets are not efficient or perfect’ is a catch phrase that is used over and over again, but no evidence is offered that an alternative would be economically more efficient.

The economic fable of a failed market did not begin in the 17th century; it started with an invented tale created by Charles Mackay [1] in the mid-19th century. At that time, it was not important whether the story was true; what mattered was its impact. Mackay offered no evidence that could withstand scrutiny, but few of us actually take the time to validate facts anyway. Stating that people act wildly when they act together is a good story, and we instinctively enjoy listening to it. The only problem with it is that it isn’t true.

There are several problems with tulipmania [4]. Most important, the effects of the so-called ‘tulip crash’ were not as widespread as they were reported to be. Some of the problems with these forms of bubble theory derive from a misunderstanding of the Broken Window fallacy.  The belief that we can make more money through destruction and capital creation is widespread, but it is flawed.  Foremost is the fact that we have a growing society and capital creation.  At all points, we have more capital than we had in the beginning.  The simple consequence of this is that destruction (such as the crash that follows a bubble) is not the source of creation.  If it were, rational businessmen would tear down their old factories and replace them with new equipment before their depreciation dates.  The simple fact that this does not happen demonstrates a flaw in the argument.

Many errors have been promulgated about the Dutch tulip crash and little has been done to counter them. The contracts used to buy tulip bulbs were one of the first types of futures contract. These contracts were somewhat similar to over-the-counter derivatives because exchange-based contracts did not exist. Tulip bulbs are seasonally marketed, and they are sold only between June and September.

Merchants would market these bulbs throughout the year if it made sense, but that arguably would be risky speculation without a purpose. The reality is far from that contention.

Similar to the way that modern exchanges sell grain futures, the early guilds of the 1630s initiated a futures trading scheme. These early futures contracts allowed farmers to select what they would grow and to hedge against the risks associated with everything from the weather to the vagaries of fashion. Like modern futures contracts, early Dutch merchants traded contracts to buy and sell goods at a future time. Many times, merchants decided not to honour the contracts. Just like a modern breach, the courts awarded the monetary difference and did not enforce contractual compliance. This system worked well during the early 1630s, but problems arose in about 1636 when, recognizing that profits could be made in the international tulip trade, a group of government officials decided to get involved.

However, these officials were less successful than the merchants; they did not buy well and they suffered losses on their investments. Despite the early failures, these officials predicted some changes to the market and petitioned to work with the florist guild. This intervention led to a formally supported announcement that all of the contracts were only options to buy [6]. The penalty for violating this was limited and similar to option prices in a modern futures exchange.  Fortunately, this step was anticipated and the losses were far less than are currently widely believed.

Futures contracts in the 1630s were defined as gambling debts. There were longstanding problems regarding the nobility’s wagering of their estates, it was a long-term practice of the courts to refuse to enforce repayment of gambling debts. For example, the Court of Holland decided that tulip sales were bets under Roman law [7].

All futures contracts exhibit power law distributions. For this reason, they are counterintuitive. We instinctively understand Gaussian mathematics regarding normal distributions, but we fail to understand power law processes. It is intuitive to understand that some people are short, others are tall, and heights are distributed in the shape of a bell curve. But, that does not apply to prices or incomes.

So, it is easy to state a maximum and falsely suggest a mean of a distribution. At its peak in 1635, one particular tulip bulb was extremely expensive. This bulb was the ‘Semper Augustus’, and it was the most prized flower in Europe. Its spectacular red ‘flames’ on white petals made it a remarkably beautiful flower, and it was widely sought by European royalty.

The 12 Semper Augustus bulbs sold for high prices because they were the only Semper Augustus bulbs in existence. At its peak demand, we know that this particular flower sold in the Haarlem markets for 6,000 guilders. This was a phenomenally large amount of money at that time equivalent to the cost of 16 fat pigs, eight fat oxen, or 100 tons of wheat. Prices are extremely different now than they were then, and a comparison is difficult. However, 100 tons of wheat traded for GBP 10,000 in 2014. The purchase of a Semper Augustus bulb included all rights to the flower bulb and all derivatives that immediately came from it. To some people, it might seem to be a phenomenally high price for one flower bulb, but the reality is that it is nowhere near as bad as it seems.

In the modern world, excessively high prices are also paid, even during my lifetime. For example, in the flower world, black is a particularly elusive and desirable flower colour. Whenever something is rare and in demand, we can expect it to command astonishingly high prices. In 1997, Thompson & Morgan purchased three hyacinth bulbs from the yearly show in Holland for GBP 150,000. This sum was more than five times that of any tulip bulb. After eight years of cultivation, the progeny of these bulbs went on sale to the public under the marketing name ‘Midnight Mystic’. In 2005, the company sold the bulbs for GBP 7.99 each.

Even this amount might seem excessive to some people, but the company, Thompson & Morgan, holds all rights to sell and market this flower. In 17th-century Europe, before genetic engineering, propagating slow-growing bulbs, such as tulips, was not reliable as a large-scale process. Thompson & Morgan’s financial records indicate that the company is profitable. As expensive as the initial purchase was, the company has propagated and sold enough flowers to generate a profit.

As the above shows, when we make profits we are happy to stand by our gains.  It is only when we make a loss that it is easy to call ‘foul’ and blame the market for these losses.   It is more honest to follow a practice where we admit our losses.  The truth is that any purported losses and gains that exist on paper never come to fruition and hence do not change the overall wealth of society.

Power laws

A power law system is skewed to form a long tail. This is similar to most commodity markets. In other words, when a range of goods of various quality levels or grades plus a strong desire for limited products exists, aspects of the resulting market create long tail prices such as we saw above regarding tulips.

 

 

 

 

This is different from the traded price. One exercised strike price for a single (exceptional) sale of 12 bulbs did not reflect the entire market. The figure on the right appears to illustrate the tulip bubble. This figure demonstrates the difference between spot futures pricing and the traded, but an exercised strike price of tulips. The first thing to note is that the graph highlights a peak rather than the long term average. More important, what is not reported here is that the price of tulips stabilised and, by 1638, had returned to its 1635 price.

The fallacy in the argument for using exercised strike prices for exceptional goods in a power law system to demonstrate excessive spot prices should be obvious. They simply are not the same. Unfortunately, there is a common but widely held misunderstanding regarding the futures and derivatives market. It is easy to mislead people when they do not understand the difference between a spot price and an unexercised strike price. For example, I could list my house for sale for USD 100 million, although it is worth far less than that, and the house would never sell for that price, but I could use that asking price to mislead people. The irrationality is not in the market.

The plague

A rarely reported side note will inform this discussion: In 1636 and 1637, the Plague was ravaging parts of Europe. Haarlem was hit particularly hard during this period, and as many as one in four people in the city died [2]. Many families in the wealthy nobility and merchant class fled the city. This level of disruption tends to change people’s perspectives [3].

In times of great crisis and upheaval, such as the Plague in 1636, we tend to worry most about survival and are more likely to take risks. In this instance, trade in early futures contracts were widely adopted. In modern futures trading, exchange-based futures contracts require margin accounts to lower the risk of default [5]. This innovation did not exist in the 17th century.

More adversity

As if the plague were not bad enough, the early to mid-17th century marked the period of the Little Ice Age. During this period, winters are believed to have been about two degrees Centigrade colder than they are today. Winters were reported as bitterly cold, and the growing season was shorter than usual.  Food was already scarce, and a significant drop in agricultural productivity caused widespread famine. For many people, gambling on life and death was a common practice. Yet, in many ways, this was a rational reaction because when you do not expect yourself or your family to live very long, there is little reason to be oriented toward the future. Short-term thinking would be the rational response in that context and, in the early 17th century, it was better to chance risky profits now then to build a business over time.

Why tulips?

It is easy to understand why any rare item that is beautiful and in demand would command a high price. But, how did the tulip market begin? For a long time, we believed that the tulip entered Holland some time in the late 16th or early 17th century. The myth tells us that this new flower was widely popular as soon as it was introduced. However, modern science and, in particular, DNA testing and analysis, have debunked this fallacy.

Studies, such as those published in the Journal of Economic Botany and summarised in the journal, Science, describe interesting histories of flowers, such as the tulip, definitively documenting the path taken by the tulip to arrive in Europe. In fact, the tulip arrived about 500 years before the Holland bubble incident described above. The 19th-century theory of a tulip bubble was invented, as noted above, to propagate a meme. It has been widely believed for a long time that the tulip was introduced to Europe in the 17th century, but that was only a way to support a false economic theory. As is often the case, the truth is stranger than the fiction.

Thus, the tulip was widely available in Europe from at least the 11th century and possibly earlier. At that point, the yellow petals on the simple tulip was called the Macedonian Onion. There were no variations at that time. Many people do not know that today it is a common practice to plant tulip bulbs around castles and to hold festivals to celebrate the planting of tulip bulbs.

Many of our current traditions are followed without question or knowledge of how they came about, similar to Morris dancing. Planting bulbs on castle grounds is a common practice in many areas although, for villagers and peasants of the 13th through the 15th centuries, it would not have been an activity meant to increase agricultural production. At the time, the amount of food available could be critical by spring, so any way to increase yields could be the difference between life and death.

So, why would people plant flowering bulbs on castle grounds? The main challenge to answering this question today is our inability to see the world with the eyes of the past. For the feudal villager, the castle represented society and safety, and a large area around the castle was cleared so that the castle guards would be able to see an attack well before it occurred. If the trees were to grow throughout the grounds and close to the castle walls, attackers could hide undercover and launch surprise attacks. Today, grass might be the ground cover of choice because it is easy to plant and maintain. But, nearly 1000 years ago, there were no weed killers and riding mowers was many centuries from being invented. When tulip flowers die down, thick mats of leaves cover the ground and prevent the growth of woody weeds and trees.

Conclusion

A contract is a legal promise. In modern futures systems traded over an exchange, margin accounts are used to minimise risk. But, that does not prevent over-the-counter exchanges and contracts. For these, the risk of default always should be incorporated into the price. It is always important to account for the risks associated with an exchange and account for the risk in the profit expected from the exchange. There is never a scenario in which the counterparty cannot collapse or negate a deal in another way. To the other party, the risk of default might be small. For this reason, when a contract is important, it is necessary to ensure that the other party’s commitment is tangible, not only monetarily, but also regarding time and reputation.

Mackay [1] greatly overstated the losses associated with the collapse of the tulip market after the courts and guilds became involved. When people believe that their exchanges will not be enforced, it is more likely that their behaviour will become more reckless. The risk taking behaviour seems reckless from the perspective of those looking in from the outside. However, we cannot determine that it is reckless behaviour when, due to unforeseen circumstances, it seems likely that one of the parties of the exchange could die before fulfilling his or her end of the bargain. In 17th-century Europe, unexpected deaths were a real possibility because the Plague was an imminent danger.

People who lose in high-risk exchanges often complain that the exchanges were unfair. When their profits are high, they are happy; however, the other side of any exchange is the potential for loss. Many times, loss associated with so-called economic bubbles result from perceived beliefs and fears that the aggrieved party will be ‘bailed out’, that losses will somehow be magically recovered, and that one can gain from the risk when it is positive but not suffer from it when it is negative. This belief incentivises greed. When we reward people and companies by bailing them out of losses, we encourage them to take bigger risks that potentially lead to larger losses. Bubbles are not the result of free markets; they are the result of interventions in the market.

References

[1]	Mackay, Charles. (1841). Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds I (1st ed.). London: Richard Bentley. Retrieved 29 April 2015. Mackay, Charles. (1841). Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds II (1st ed.). London: Richard Bentley. Retrieved 29 April 2015. Mackay, Charles. (1841). Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds III (1st ed.). London: Richard Bentley.
[2]	Ranger, Terence and Slack, Paul, eds., Epidemics and Ideas. Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence. Cambridge University Press, 1992
[3]	DeSerpa, A. C. (1971). A Theory of the Economics of Time. The Economic Journal, Vol. 81, No. 324, 828-846. Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Royal Economic Society
[4]	Calvo, Guillermo A. (1987). ‘Tulipmania’ in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds. 4 vols. New York: Stockton Press
[5]	Garber, P. M. (1989). Tulipmania. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 97, No. 3, 535-560
[6]	Thompson, Earl A. (2007). The Tulipmania: Fact or Artifact? Journal of Public Choice, Vol. 130, No. 1, 99-114. The Tulipmania: Fact or Artifact? Journal of Public Choice
[7]	Gelderblom, Oscar, and Jonker, Joost. (n.d.). Amsterdam as the Cradle of Modern Futures and Options Trading, 1550–1650. Unpublished paper. Utrecht University

 

 

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