Fat, insulin, obesity, etc

Interesting discussion about all the above here.

Egyptian crises -- Obama's role

Conspiracy theorists are going to be enthralled by this piece in which the author makes a case that Obama is consciously abetting the Egyptian crises in order to facilitate the takeover of that country by the Muslim Brotherhood which could or would lead to the likes of a regime like Iran's in Egypt with all that means for peace and the world's economy.  The thrust of the argument here is the studied way in which Obama neglected and downplayed the popular street demonstrations and uprising in Iran of his first year in office, and the activist manner in which he is promoting the uprising in Egypt by calling for Mubarak to step aside while at the same time telling those who are rebelling to bring into the new government all elements of the opposition, which would include the Muslim Brotherhood.  The author goes on to provide a history lesson on the Middle East and the rise of Islamism, including a brief history of the various wars between Israel and the Arab countries over the past half century.  No matter how much credence one puts into the conspiracy aspect of this article, the author's concise history of the events in the ME over the past 50 years is useful information.

The Volt

Anyone wanting to know about the new GM Volt will find a really good description here

Misleading use of charts

I don't usually find much to critique or complain about in the posts published by the Powerline group, however here is an exception.  As long as one is going to show a graph depicting the percentage of taxes paid by various income groups over a given period of time, as is done in this case, it is incumbent upon the presenter to show the percentage of income accruing to those various income groups over the same time frame.  Why?  Because it is possible that the change in income accruing to those group suggests a widening of income disparity over time.  For example there was a time in the recent past (50 years or so ago) when a Fortune 500 company's CEO was compensated 30-40 times the average worker in that company.  That compensation differential is now 200 times and often more.  In other words the top quintile (1% in this case) may now be making infinitely more than they were 50 years ago as a percentage of the total compensation measured.  If there has been stagnation in incomes of the lower percentiles as has been suggested by some (maybe incorrectly) then there is justification for the 1% bracket paying an increasing percentage of the tax load.  After all, they may have the lion's share of the income now.  This is in no way an argument for equalizing incomes or anything like that.  It is an argument for getting the data out there to properly frame the issue.  Powerline owes us an accompanying chart to present the whole picture.

Global warming fiasco

One of the unanswered questions about AGW is how much government money has gone into "proving" all the phony statistics used to make the case.  In any case however much has been committed by the government to prove AGW is too much.  In this post we see how much corruption exists by those using data to make the case for the unprovable.  It is a disgrace that those trained in science, or in the scientific approach, are willing to distort and manage information to benefit their particular slice of the payola pie.  There is probably a case to be made for the government to pay for developing data that might possibly reveal a threat to the safety of the populace, but there is no case to be made for paying for the data and then machining it to come out a certain way.  This is fraud and is what we have here.  Those who took the government grants and the like wanted the outcome of their studies to make the case that there is such a thing as AGW in order to keep the flow of funds coming.  So where is the peer review and other safeguards against this abuse.  MIA, that's where.
















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