Tag: posts

The president ordained yesterday that insurance companies don’t
after all have to cancel the “junk” policies that he had previously
insisted they had no business selling and Americans had no business
buying. Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy offers some

very good reasons why the president’s remedy, meant to honor
his “if-you-like-your-plan-you-can-keep-your-plan” promise, might
be illegal unless Congress — not Obama’s regulators — changes the
Affordable Care Act. (Yet Obama has threatened to veto one such law
that just
passed the House.)

But the more serious problems for Obamacare will occur if the
president actually succeeds in restoring these cancelled promises,
notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia in the
Washington Examiner. This might well set in motion an
uncontrollable adverse selection death spiral that will likely put
the law in hospice by this time next year.

She notes:

Obamacare’s viability depends on its ability to herd the 15
million or so Americans getting “junk” coverage from the individual
market onto the Obamacare exchanges where they’d be forced to pay
more for benefits they don’t need. This would spread premiums
across a bigger population and keep coverage affordable. (At least
in theory.)…

But even if the administration fixes the exchange — a big
“if”– what incentive will these folks have to sign up if they can
keep their existing plans?

Go
here to read the whole thing.

“If you acknowledge that you find something glamorous it makes
you vulnerable because it says something about who you are,” says
Virginia Postrel, author of the new book,
The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual
Persuasion. “But I want people to think about what they
find glamorous and learn from that.”

Postrel, who served as the editor in chief
of Reason Magazine from 1989 to 2000, is an
internationally acclaimed writer, a regular
columnist for Bloomberg View, and the author of two
previous books,
The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity,
Enterprise, and Progress (1999) and
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking
Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (2004).

She sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie for an hour-long
conversation about her new book, which is a meditation on how our
perception of glamour shapes our culture, determines the choices we
make, and reveals our inner-selves. The book is an entertaining
romp, analyzing the deeper significance of the glamorous people and
places that have shaped the last century of American culture.

View this article.

“If you acknowledge that you find something glamorous it makes
you vulnerable because it says something about who you are,” says
Virginia Postrel, author of the new book,
The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual
Persuasion. “But I want people to think about what they
find glamorous and learn from that.”

Postrel, who served as the editor in chief
of Reason Magazine from 1989 to 2000, is an
internationally acclaimed writer, a regular
columnist for Bloomberg View, and the author of two
previous books,
The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity,
Enterprise, and Progress (1999) and
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking
Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (2004).

She sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie for an hour-long
conversation about her new book, which is a meditation on how our
perception of glamour shapes our culture, determines the choices we
make, and reveals our inner-selves. The book is an entertaining
romp, analyzing the deeper significance of the glamorous people and
places that have shaped the last century of American culture.

View this article.

I can’t vouch for the chemistry here, but independent security
researcher Evan Booth has a video up at LiveLeak demonstrating the
construction of a grenade with materials purchased at an airport
after passing through TSA security. This is just the
latest very interesting revelation from Booth, who runs Terminal Cornucopia, a site
dedicated to tapping into your inner MacGyver at the airport. So
far, he’s built blowguns, incendiaries, and crossbows, among other
items the Transportation Security Administration might wish you not
acquire at the airport gift shop. The fragguccino
grenade made with a coffee mug, body spray, and other goodies
is a new addition.

The blurb over at LiveLeak reads:

Security researcher builds grenade in under 8 minutes using
items available in airport terminal. All materials required to
build this weapons were purchased in an airport AFTER the security
screening.

Booth says “All of these findings have been reported to the
Department of Homeland Security (TSA) to help them better detect
these types of threats,” so if, on your next trip, you find that
thermal coffee mugs have been replaced at the airport by
old-fashioned styrofoam cups, you know who to blame.

Then again, if I remember my misspent youth, you can do
fascinating things with styrofoam. Or sugar. Or…

Booth is available for conferences and events. Parties, too, I
hope.

As Barack Obama’s signature
health insurance program implodes, some observers are speculating
that regulatory action on climate change could afford the
beleaguered president a second chance at establishing an enduring
policy legacy. Unfortunately, Obama’s climate policies, like his
health care policies, highlight his fondness for centralized
economic planning. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald
Bailey argues that the Obamacare fiasco should be a warning to the
president and other policymakers that a comparable ClimateCare
program of top-down centralized planning will miscarry just as
spectacularly.

View this article.

As Barack Obama’s signature
health insurance program implodes, some observers are speculating
that regulatory action on climate change could afford the
beleaguered president a second chance at establishing an enduring
policy legacy. Unfortunately, Obama’s climate policies, like his
health care policies, highlight his fondness for centralized
economic planning. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald
Bailey argues that the Obamacare fiasco should be a warning to the
president and other policymakers that a comparable ClimateCare
program of top-down centralized planning will miscarry just as
spectacularly.

View this article.

Al Qaeda-linked fighters in Syria are
asking for forgiveness after mistakenly beheading a fellow rebel,
thinking that the man was a Shiite fighter from Iraq.

After video footage of members of the Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant holding the severed head was released rebels in another
Islamist group, Harakat Ahrar al-Sham, said they recognized the
head as that of Mohammed Fares Maroush, one of their
commanders.

From the
BBC:

An al-Qaeda affiliated rebel group in Syria is reported to have
asked for forgiveness after beheading a fellow rebel in a case of
mistaken identity.

A video recently posted online showed members of the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) brandishing the severed,
bearded head of a man.

They said was an Iraqi Shia caught fighting on the government
side.

But other rebel fighters watching the video recognised the man
and said he was one of their commanders.

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In 1957, John Steinbeck wrote a slim satiric novel called

The Short Reign of Pippin IV. It isn’t one of his
finest works of literature, but there’s a passage in it that has
stayed with me in the three decades since I read the book, even as
I forgot the plot developments that led to it:

“You take a big corporation in
America, say like General Motors or Du Pont or US Steel. The thing
they’re most afraid of is socialism, and at the same time they
themselves are socialist states.”

The king sat bolt upright. “Please?” he said.

“Well, just look at it, sir. They’ve got medical care for employees
and their families and accident insurance and retirement pensions,
paid vacations–even vacation places–and they’re beginning to get
guaranteed pay over the year. The employees have representation in
pretty nearly everything, even the colour they paint their
factories. As a matter of fact, the’ve got socialism that makes the
USSR look silly. Our corporations make the US government seem like
an absolute monarchy. Why, if the US government tried to do
one-tenth of what General Motors does, General Motors would go into
armed revolt. It’s what you might call a paradox,
sir.”

Set aside that semi-syndicalist bit about the employees having
representation in “pretty nearly everything” — there may have been
some truth to that in
Germany at the time, but it’s a stretch to say it about
America. Think instead about this 1957-vintage vision of America’s
biggest corporations as private welfare states. This was a real
trend, and while part of it was a simple matter of employers in a
growing economy offering amenities to attract workers, there was an
element of public policy to it too. In particular, there were the
tax incentives
introduced in the 1940s and ’50s that played a major role in making
employer-provided benefits the dominant means of receiving health
insurance — and, more important still, in making insurance the
dominant means of paying for health care. This was one face of the
corporate state after the dust had settled from World War II: a
public-private partnership where the government set the parameters
and big businesses delivered the goods.

It wasn’t an ideological compromise so much as it was a
jerry-rigged accident. The limits of the vision — particularly
when it comes to health insurance — soon
became clear.

Decades later, Steinbeck’s passage feels less like a description
of an emerging social order and more like a glimpse back at the
discarded hopes of another time. But where it comes to health
insurance, we’re still living in a system erected in that era.
Obamacare is the latest, clumsiest attempt to put some patches on
the leaks.

Several fascinating new scientific papers have
appeared recently that come to some very different conclusions
about the trend in global average temperature and what causes it.
One concludes that fluctuations in the El Nino explain the current
15-year “pause” in warming and cut future increases in man-made
warming in half; a second finds that once missing data are taken
into account there has been NO pause in warming at all; and a third
reports that natural fluctuations in the Arctic explain the “pause”
which could last until 2030.

So first, in a new
article in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric
Science, University of Alabama in Huntsville researchers Roy
Spencer and Danny Braswell use climate models to take into account
the effects that natural variations in the El Nino Southern
Oscillation (ENSO) has on global average temperature trends over
the past 50 years. The ENSO is a phenomenon in which the surface
temperatures over the southern Pacific Ocean fluctuate between hot
and cold phases. According to Phys.org,
they found:

The results suggest that these natural climate cycles change the
total amount of energy received from the sun, providing a natural
warming and cooling mechanism of the surface and the deep ocean on
multi-decadal time scales.

“As a result, because as much as 50 percent of the warming since
the 1970s could be attributed to stronger El Niño activity, it
suggests that the climate system is only about half as sensitive to
increasing CO2 as previously believed,” Spencer said.

“Basically, previously it was believed that if we doubled the
CO2 in the atmosphere, sea surface temperatures would warm about
2.5 C,” Spencer said. That’s 4.5° F. “But when we factor in the
ENSO warming, we see only a 1.3 C (about 2.3° F) final total
warming after the climate system has adjusted to having twice as
much CO2.” …

Spencer said it is reasonable to suspect that the increased La
Niña cooling might be largely responsible for an ongoing “pause” in
global warming that has lasted more than a decade. If that is the
case, weak warming might be expected to revive when this phase of
the El Niño-La Niña cycle shifts back to a warmer El Niño
period.

In contrast, climate catastrophists cite as evidence that things
are worse than they thought a new
study in The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological
Society by Kevin Cowtan from the University of York and Robert
Way from the University of Ottawa (who both also contribute to the
climate science website Skeptical Science).
The two researchers apply some fancy statistical
jiggering to climate temperature data from the Hadley Centre in the
United Kingdom in an effort to figure out what is going on in the
regions of the globe not well-covered by that dataset. They
report:

The widely quoted trend since 1997 in the hybrid global
reconstruction is two and a half times greater than the
corresponding trend in the coverage-biased HadCRUT4 data. Coverage
bias causes a cool bias in recent temperatures relative to the late
1990s which increases from around 1998 to the present. Trends
starting in 1997 or 1998 are particularly biased with respect to
the global trend. The issue is exacerbated by the strong El Niño
event of 1997-1998, which also tends to suppress trends starting
during those years.

The Guardian
reports that the upshot of their new analysis is:

Both of their new surface temperature data sets show
significantly more warming over the past 16 years than HadCRUT4.
This is mainly due to HadCRUT4 missing accelerated Arctic warming,
especially since 1997.

Cowtan & Way investigate the claim of a global surface
warming ‘pause’ over the past 16 years by examining the trends from
1997 through 2012. While HadCRUT4 only estimates the surface
warming trend at 0.046°C per decade during that time, and NASA puts
it at 0.080°C per decade, the new kriging and hybrid data sets
estimate the trend during this time at 0.11 and 0.12°C per decade,
respectively.

In other words, there is no 15-year pause in global warming has
all of the current datasets measuring global average temperature
have reported.

And to make things even more “settled,” there is a
new study in Climate Dynamics by Georgia Tech
climatologist Judith Currry and her colleague Marcia Wyatt that
looks at temperature fluctuations in the Arctic region and finds
that they are driven by natural “stadium wave” fluctuations
produced by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and sea ice
extent in the Eurasian Arctic shelf seas. As Newswise

reports the …

…‘stadium-wave’ signal that propagates like the cheer at
sporting events whereby sections of sports fans seated in a stadium
stand and sit as a ‘wave’ propagates through the audience. In like
manner, the ‘stadium wave’ climate signal propagates across the
Northern Hemisphere through a network of ocean, ice, and
atmospheric circulation regimes that self-organize into a
collective tempo.

The stadium wave hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for
the hiatus in warming and helps explain why climate models did not
predict this hiatus. Further, the new hypothesis suggests how long
the hiatus might last…

“The stadium wave signal predicts that the current pause in
global warming could extend into the 2030s,” said Wyatt,…

Curry added, “This prediction is in contrast to the recently
released IPCC AR5 Report that projects an imminent resumption of
the warming, likely to be in the range of a 0.3 to 0.7 degree
Celsius rise in global mean surface temperature from 2016 to 2035.”
…

How external forcing projects onto the stadium wave, and whether
it influences signal tempo or affects timing or magnitude of regime
shifts, is unknown and requires further investigation,” Wyatt said.
“While the results of this study appear to have implications
regarding the hiatus in warming, the stadium wave signal does not
support or refute anthropogenic global warming.

Interestingly, the study by Cowtan and Way suggesting that
man-made global warming is continuing apace seems to be getting
much more media attention than are the two suggesting explanations
for why warming has paused and why it might not increase
disastrously in the future. Curious.

Heads up: I will be sending in daily dispatches all next
week from the 19th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Warsaw.

When you throw a rock at a pack of wild dogs, how
do you know which one you hit? It’s the one that’s yelping. That
old country saying offers insight into modern-day politics. You can
always tell if a law might make an actual policy difference by the
interest groups that are complaining — and by the intensity of
their yelps. Steven Greenhut says this is exactly the case in the
battle between charter schools and public teachers’ unions.

View this article.