Jim’s Blog

Zooko gives us an interesting pair of searches.  What happens when someone in China does a google search on Tiananmen?

• http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
• http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

(more…)

xkcd gets it exactly right

Bishop Hill explains the Hockey Stick Graph. It is an exceedingly long and complicated story, even in his simplified version, but the short of it is:  The global warmerists lied.

Massive globalization — a major move towards free market capitalism — has brought over a billion people out of poverty, while sixty years of socialist chaos and violence has failed to convince most of the world that central planning is a very bad way to run any economy. (more…)

In the last ten years or so we have been hearing a lot of disturbing reports about Britain - reports of a society of fearful and servile subjects, of criminals acting with impunity, of the British accepting second class status to Islam.  Maybe the gun lobby is exaggerating British submission to criminals, maybe racists and war hawks are exaggerating British submission to Islam, but this story of cowardice and betrayal from Basra fits with what we have been hearing about self defense in Britain and freedom of religion in Britain. (more…)

The boundaries of all the Balkan and Caucasus states are ill defined, one blurs into the other, each contains people who feel themselves outsiders and oppressed. (more…)

My explanation for high oil prices is the collapse of oil states. Arnold Kling argues that instead the problem is that investors fear the collapse of advanced states, so are reluctant to take their money. (more…)

The second national climate assessment predicts that the United States will “very likely” experience rising sea levels and increasing droughts, heat waves, intense storms and resulting illness and premature death over the next century as climate change intensifies.

But, as is the usual practice with climate “science” , the report fails to make available the evidence that supposedly leads to this conclusion, a gross and flagrant violation of normal and proper scientific practice.

And so, the US Chamber of Commerce, not academia, not any scientific body, has demanded that normal scientific standards be upheld.

This republican advertisement is so funny and so true, that I stole it.