The IPCC concerns are still simmering, maybe reaching a boil. I've been noticing a lot of comments on ag lists that are only tangentially involved in any of this but have a certain amount of chatty off-topic posts about life in general, including the climate scandals. And this old post from a year ago about Al Gore's abuse of weather events to advance his climate agenda and the reaction to that abuse by the scientific community . . . none . . . has being getting a flurry of hits. The delay in response is not unusual since there was a concerted effort to cover it all up, and I still expect the storm to pass with little permanent damage, but there are some telling events in the news. Goats will be sacrificed.

Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia scientist whose stolen emails caused the worldwide ‘climate-gate’ kerfuffle, has told The Sunday Times he contemplated killing himself. . .

Jones also told the paper he is now on beta blockers and taking sleeping pills in the aftermath of the email theft. He continues to receive death threats. . .

Meanwhile, a poll for the BBC seems to show an increase in people who don’t believe in global warming. The survey of 1,001 adults found 25% said no when asked “From what you know and have heard, do you think that the Earth’s climate is changing and global warming taking place?” This is up from 10% in November. The proportion saying yes dropped to 75%, down from 83% in November.

However, Richard Black at the BBC thinks this might just be down to the recent weather in Blighty.

“Having to dig your car out of a snowbank and sending the kids out to make a snowman would, you might think, tend to mitigate against belief in warnings of a dangerously warming world ahead,” writes the environment correspondent. “An unusually hot summer - and globally, January was the warmest on record, in case you missed it, and El Nino conditions pertain in the Pacific - and fickle opinion might turn again.”

It's hilarious that Gore's abuse of weather got so little official reaction while the public's equal and opposite response to current weather is criticized. The rational, responsible position would be to speak against exaggeration and misinformation, but that doesn't serve the agenda.

We seem to be living in an era of mediocrity. Those who are in positions of power and authority are not particularly bright or competent. It happens. History has many examples of periods when otherwise advanced societies suffered from incompetent bureaucracies in troubled times. Standards get lax in good times and institutions get clogged with time servers of no particular competence as those who are more capable choose other types of activities, and aren't actually welcome in the ever more ossified bureaucracies in any event. The bureaucrats seek comfort, not competence. But they are not adequate when real trouble comes.

Suicide or murder aren't rational responses, but we do need to make some staff changes to raise the quality of our bureaucracies to the levels required for the current problem set.

An image that keeps recurring to me is of powerful but uninformed groups that have been hunkered down in their bunkers reassuring one another that they are the best and brightest being dragged out into daylight by crowds that pulled the doors off of the bunkers. The self-regarding bunkerites stand blinking in the sunlight, confused and angry that their reveries have been disturbed. It isn't clear to me or to the bunkerites if they have been rescued, freed from confinement, or if they are about to be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.

It's the IPCC that is rapidly melting rather than Himalayan glaciers. It's the stupidity of the command and control fantasies of closeted academics and politicians that are being exposed and ridiculed rather than the pragmatic good sense of the rest of society. It isn't that there are no real problems and threats, it is that the supposed elites have proposed idiotic policies to address them and sought to stampede societies into adopting the bad policies with miserabilist narratives of impending doom.

The bunkerites have failed to grasp that the world has changed. They can't control the narrative because the broadcast age is over. We have a peer-to-peer world now. People talk to one another without intermediaries to shape and spin the stories. The result is that the stupidity of the proposed policies is observed and discussed, society is laughing at the ideas of the dullards in the bunkers, and have set about dismantling the bunkers.

It's a new set of problems. Peer-to-peer communication can have a high error rate, like the old whispering game where some phrase gets garbled as one after another person whispers the phrase to an adjacent peer. After a few iterations the words get garbled, often comically. But there are also error correction systems and feedback. The net effect is that correct communication usually occurs, but that it isn't immediate and a lot of crosstalk takes place.

It's no surprise that poodle pundits who make their livings on the scraps discarded from the high table of the elites have been speaking about the virtues of Chinese autocracy, denigrating democracy, and whining that the US has become ungovernable.

. . . In the old days, the elite media really did control the national political discourse; there were no partisan, splenetic cable news or ubiquitous talk-radio channels and no blogosphere to keep the populists riled up and make them feel the excitement of a mob. Until fifteen years ago, presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations, keep them on reasonable simmer. But the new technologies have, maybe permanently, turned up the political heat to boil.

Apart from the fact that this is false - the wheels came off that wagon 50 years ago and had only been on the wagon for a brief time in the world war era - there is a complete disengagement with reality. The policies being proposed are nonsensical, which really should be widely discussed. The more pressing the problems the more important it is to have good policies. National governance isn't a video game. It isn't a simulated world controlled by a gamer. Real world systems are far more complex and the consequences of simple minded policies can be dire. This is not understood by the bunkerites.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

China is a mess because of the autocracy. It is less messy at the moment than it has been in the recent past, but the autocracy is responsible for all of it, past and present. There is little reason to assume that the current lessening of mess will continue, and good reason to assume that it will blow up in their faces again as it has many times before. It is worth noting that they are working feverishly to suppress the emergence of a peer-to-peer information society since that would likely be the end of them.

Both of these quotes come from Arnold's post: The Progressive Tantrum. He concludes:

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

I place the emphasis differently. The issue isn't that the hordes are insubordinate, it is that the proposed policies are stupid. Insubordination is rational when the orders are nonsensical and immoral. The rational response isn't to decry the mob and try to shout or shoot them down, it is to rethink the stupid policies. Others claim that society can be mollified.

One recent study found that people who had been treated unfairly became more selfish. It’s hard to pass reform programs that depend on a sense of solidarity—like health-care reform or cap-and-trade—when voters are trying desperately to protect what they already have.

The temptation, then, is simply to abandon ambitious plans in an attempt to annoy no one. But a better approach would be to recognize that voters’ anger is less ideological than pragmatic: at heart, it’s the product of the weak economy and the poor job market. (The movement that today’s populism most closely resembles is Ross Perot’s, which arose, similarly, during a downturn.) And while that means that there’s no way to make voters happy without improving the economy, it also means that, if you start creating jobs, people will start to feel better. Obviously, small initiatives that nod to people’s concerns (like the deficit commission) can help. But what matters most is getting the economy moving again—even if doing so means handing out tax credits to businesses or magnifying voters’ frustration with government spending. It may bring some short-term political pain, but the only way out is through.

There's truth in this. Stupid policies such as those now on offer about health care and climate change meet less opposition when times are good and people have secure employment and no sense of impending crisis. The problem is that the policies are stupid and will cause insecurity and crisis, and that they can't be enacted without the elites whipping up a crisis mentality with miserabilist stories of immanent doom. In good times such policies would be calmly appraised and rejected for their obvious defects. "Try again son, you can do better". In hard times like now the reaction is angrier, as we should expect.

I'd like to see us move beyond the petty politicking and think deeply about the situation. There are problems that require our attention - as ever - but the policies championed by the Progressives - who are not actually progressive, just as the Conservatives are not conservative and the Liberals are not liberal - are just silly. They won't do squat about the problems though they will be hugely oppressive and expensive. They should be embarrassed that they have advocated such nonsense. We should name names, point and laugh, and seek to shame them into doing better work. Oh wait, that's what we are doing.

Never mind. Talk among yourselves.

I noted a few posts ago that I write this journal for my own benefit, a way to note things of interest and my thoughts about them, so that I can refer to them again at a later date when something new comes up that is related, or simply as a memory aid. Usually this means searching my archives to find an earlier reference, but I also pay attention to what other people search for here, and check out what they are reading.

This post from almost 5 years ago is getting hits lately.

There’s been a lot of fuzzy thinking about what we mean when we talk about collective intelligence, network, and interaction. I want to parse these distinctions.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, I wrote about the power of groups under certain circumstances to be remarkably intelligent. A model of collective intelligence: a large group of people reflecting diverse opinions offering judgments independently with some mechanism to aggregate the judgments, collectively ending up with an intelligent outcome. . .

The wisdom of crowds works well when there is a true answer, and as long as some choices are better than others. The key is that people are mostly working on their private information, which may not be good, may be fragmented, but it is diverse. Collective wisdom does not emerge out of consensus. The goal is not to get everyone to agree – it’s to tap into people who disagree, into the diverse information everybody has. It works best when people are not paying too much attention to what everyone else is doing. They have some sense – like feedback in the form of odds at the racetrack – but there isn’t a lot of personal interaction. . .

Human beings are not ants.

That's an excerpt of a transcription of a talk by James Surowiecki given at an O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference. At the time he was concerned about his book The Wisdom Of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations being misunderstood and misused. It's full of thoughts that are apposite to our current situation 5 years later. More:

If there is too much interaction among human beings, groups end up being less intelligent than they would otherwise be. The more we talk to each other the dumber it is possible for us to become. The book has quite a bit about small groups. Put a bunch of smart people into a room and they emerge dumber than when they went in. . . The question for all of us is, how can you have interaction without information cascades, without losing the independence that’s such a key factor in group intelligence? I’m not going to come to a final answer. But there are a few things worth thinking about. First one: the best thing to do is to keep your ties loose. You’re better off, and the group is better off, if the ties are looser, because loose ties minimize the influence of those around you. I don’t think Duncan Watts’ model of the information cascade is quite true. I don’t think people are as subject to the influences around them as Duncan thinks. But we are clearly shaped by those influences. One way around that: limit the power of the influences.

That old post began with contrasting quotes, one from Keynes about reputation and one from Emerson about independence. If I was writing today I might contrast Hayek with Keynes as has been done so well lately. As Obama's paleo-politics and paleo-ideology fails ever more spectacularly Surowieki's words seem ever more apt: "Put a bunch of smart people into a room and they emerge dumber than when they went in." They don't know how to think or how to solve problems, no matter how smart they are, or think that they are. It's the same problem we see with the UN, especially its hysterical focus on climate, but that's just the current failure in the spotlight and should surprise no one since it has ever been so on every other issue.

Second, keep yourself exposed to as much information as possible. Injecting some level of randomness into the system is a good thing. Diversity is a good thing. In computer science experiments at the University of Michigan, a researcher, Scott Page, had his agents compete until they differentiated into three groups, Dumb, Intelligent, and Random. Then he had them solve problem as groups. The Intelligent group outperforms the Dumb group, but not by very much. But the Random group almost always outperforms the Intelligent group. Page’s theory is that the reason for this is that even if the less intelligent groups know less, what they know is different.

This has important implications for the way decision making works inside organizations. Make groups that range across hierarchies. The conclusion is that you actually can be too connected, if the connections are of the wrong kind and if they’re reinforcing your existing prejudices rather than altering them. You can pay to much attention to those around you, even if they’re really smart. The flip side of Pascal’s isolation is the cacophony you find on the net; it bombards you with many voices. Isolation and cacophony, interestingly, allow you to arrive at the same place: independence.

What struck me in re-reading this today was how well it demolishes Obama's recent call to Democrats to narrow their inputs, to stop listening to cable news broadcasts, reading blogs or in any other way clouding their minds with independent thoughts. Obama is not interested in problem solving, good solutions or even accurate situational analyses. He wants a dumbed down consensus such as you will find in universities and much of the mainstream media. His goal isn't to do good work, it's to sell shoddy work and somehow convince society to like it anyway.

This is why I like the Tea Party thing. It's a confused cacophony that drives the rigid minded pundits crazy. They can't easily label it, denigrate it, refute it or even understand it since it is such a diverse thing. The Tea People don't agree with each other or anyone else, they are thinking for themselves to the best of their abilities. They can perhaps be better understood as one of Page's Random groups that almost always outperforms the Intelligent group, but even if they are one of his Dumb groups they are all but a match for the Intelligent group and easily pull ahead when you also consider their intimate knowledge of their own values and preferences.

The trick is to find some mechanism to aggregate the independent judgments. It isn't consensus, and it isn't an average or a median. And it isn't that this will find The Answer, since there isn't a single true answer. What is clear is that it is essential that we dispense with the old fashioned ideas of consensus and narrow minded large scale visions. Though we can't know what is right, we can know that this is wrong.

It improves with age.

scientists at Baycrest's world-renowned Rotman Research Institute have demonstrated that when older adults "hyper-encode" extraneous information – and they typically do this without even knowing they're doing it – they have the unique ability to "hyper-bind" the information; essentially tie it to other information that is appearing at the same time. . .

"We found that older brains are not only less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks," . . .

"This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction," said Dr. Hasher, senior scientist on the study. "Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults. As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision- making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults because they have picked up so much more information."

That has been my observation as well.

It's good to be king.

Dr. Martinez and colleagues found that increased social status and increased social support correlated with the density of dopamine D2/D3 receptors in the striatum, a region of the brain that plays a central role in reward and motivation, where dopamine plays a critical role in both of these behavioral processes. . .

"We showed that low levels of dopamine receptors were associated with low social status and that high levels of dopamine receptors were associated with higher social status. . .

"These data shed interesting light into the drive to achieve social status, a basic social process. It would make sense that people who had higher levels of D2 receptors, i.e., were more highly motivated and engaged by social situations, would be high achievers and would have higher levels of social support."

These data also may have implications for understanding the vulnerability to alcohol and substance abuse, as the work of Dr. Nora Volkow, the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and colleagues suggests that low levels of D2/D3 receptors may contribute to the risk for alcoholism among individuals who have family members who abuse alcohol. The current data suggest that vulnerable individuals with low D2/D3 receptors may be vulnerable to lower social status and social supports, and these social factors have previously been suggested as contributors to the risk for alcohol and substance use.

These findings are particularly exciting because they put human neurobiology into a social context, and we humans are fundamentally social creatures. It is in these social contexts that the biological effects on behavior obtain their real meaning.

I wonder which is cause and which is effect?

More about cognition and motivation.

Models describing the origin of ADHD tend to emphasise the relevance of attention processes and of the cognitive functions which guide our mental processes in achieving proposed objectives. Nevertheless, recent research has focused on neural gratification/pleasure circuits, which can be found in what is known as the brain's reward system, with the nucleus accumbens as the central part of this system.

The nucleus accumbens is in charge of maintaining levels of motivation when commencing a task and continues to do so until reaching what experts name the "reinforcement", the proposed objective. This motivation can be maintained throughout time, even when the gratification obtained is not immediate. However, in children with ADHD motivational levels seem to drop rapidly and there is a need for immediate reinforcements to continue persisting in their efforts. . .

Differences in the structure of the ventral striatum - particularly on the right-hand side - could be seen between those with ADHD and those without the disorder. Children with ADHD exhibited reduced volumes in this region. These differences were associated with symptoms of hyperactivity and impulsiveness.

The obtained data corroborate results from previous studies carried out with animals: the importance of the reward system, as well as the relation between nucleus accumbens, impulsive behaviour and the development of motor hyperactivity. This leads researchers to consider that ADHD is not only caused by brain alterations affecting cognitive processes, but also by anomalies which cause motivational deficiencies. This would explain the imbalance in levels of attention and hyperactivity in a child with ADHD depending on his or her motivation when engaged in a specific task and the immediacy of the gratification/pleasure while carrying it out.

Pay them well and pay them often and they will perform better as well as being in good humor all the while.

If it can happen, it will happen.

"Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

Special proteins called light-harvesting complexes are used in photosynthesis to capture sunlight and funnel its energy to nature's solar cells – other proteins known as reaction centres. Scholes and his colleagues isolated light-harvesting complexes from two different species of marine algae and studied their function under natural temperature conditions using a sophisticated laser experiment known as two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy.

"We stimulated the proteins with femtosecond laser pulses to mimic the absorption of sunlight," explains Scholes. "This enabled us to monitor the subsequent processes, including the movement of energy between special molecules bound in the protein, against a stop-clock. We were astonished to find clear evidence of long-lived quantum mechanical states involved in moving the energy. Our result suggests that the energy of absorbed light resides in two places at once – a quantum superposition state, or coherence – and such a state lies at the heart of quantum mechanical theory."

"This and other recent discoveries have captured the attention of researchers for several reasons," says Scholes. "First, it means that quantum mechanical probability laws can prevail over the classical laws of kinetics in this complex biological system, even at normal temperatures. The energy can thereby flow efficiently by—counter intuitively—traversing several alternative paths through the antenna proteins simultaneously. It also raises some other potentially fascinating questions, such as, have these organisms developed quantum-mechanical strategies for light-harvesting to gain an evolutionary advantage? It suggests that algae knew about quantum mechanics nearly two billion years before humans," says Scholes.

It's obvious: when the energy gets to a fork in the road it takes it.

Better barley for malting.

Some of the team's current research into barley enzymes follows up on studies they reported several years ago. In one investigation, Schmitt found that enzymes called serine-class proteases, which break down proteins in the sprouting grain, can also break down beta-amylase, an important enzyme for converting carbs to simple sugars.

The study, a scientific first, was reported in a 2008 issue of the Journal of Cereal Science. The finding might help explain one of the patterns found in an earlier study, published in a 2007 issue of the journal Cereal Chemistry. In that analysis of more than 2,000 North American malting barleys, Schmitt and Budde found that high levels of a desirable, beta-amylase-associated attribute in the barleys correlated to low levels of the serine-class proteases.

Better barley can mean better beer, a boon to humanity.

Attention and cognition are interesting to me. See Skeptical Animus (hyperactive "oh shit circuit" and a hair trigger delete key to erase sensations from memory) and Unicycling Clowns (people who were so distracted by their cell phone use that they failed to see the bizarre occurrence of a unicycling clown passing them on the street) for earlier discussions. Individual variations also seem related to working memory capacities.

What Miller called the informational bottleneck has been recognized as a profound constraint on human cognition. Crudely speaking, there are two ways to manage its effects. One is to "chunk" information so that you can, in effect, pack more material into one of those seven units. As Miller put it, "A man just beginning to learn radiotelegraphic code hears each dit and dash as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters, and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases." That sort of process is obviously central to many kinds of learning.

The second method for managing the bottleneck—and the one that concerns us here—is to manage attention so that unwanted stimuli do not crowd the working memory. That might sound simple. But as the Swedish neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg explains in his recent book The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory (Oxford University Press), scholars are far from agreement about how to describe the relationship between attention and working memory. Does a poor attention system cause poor working-memory performance, or does the causation sometimes work in the other direction?

One common metaphor is that controlled attention acts as a "nightclub bouncer," preventing irrelevant stuff from getting into working memory. A few years ago, Klingberg and a colleague conducted brain-imaging experiments that suggested that a region known as the globus pallidus seems to be highly active when people successfully fend off distraction.

"Why is it that some people seem to reason well and others don't?" asks Michael J. Kane, an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "Variability in working-memory capacity accounts for about half the variability in novel reasoning and reading comprehension. There's disagreement about what to make of that relationship. But there are a number of mechanisms that seem to be candidates for part of the story."

One of those seems to be attentional, Kane says. "The view that my colleagues and I are putting forward is that part of the reason that people who differ in working-memory capacity differ in other things is that higher-working-memory-capacity people are simply better able to control their attention."

In other words—to borrow a metaphor from other scholars—people with strong working-memory capacities don't have a larger nightclub in their brains. They just have better bouncers working the velvet rope outside. Strong attentional abilities produce stronger fluid intelligence, Kane and others believe.

That sounds like the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) functions (The oh shit! circuit and the delete key) from the Skeptical Animus discussion. The difference here is that such mental editing is being linked to stronger fluid intelligence rather than selective blindness to observational data. It's a conflict since too much of either degrades cognition. You have to pay attention to significant inputs while not overlooking unusual insights. The definition of significant changes with learning.

An interesting nanotech application.

The liquid glass spray (technically termed “SiO2 ultra-thin layering”) consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

As with many nano scale applications some worry that these very small particles could have adverse consequences if they become ubiquitous in the environment.

Viruses are simple compared to other life forms. Their life strategy is to be cheap and numerous rather than individually robust.

In a proof-of-principle study published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers have identified an antiviral small molecule that is effective against numerous viruses, including HIV-1, influenza A, filoviruses, poxviruses, arenaviruses, bunyaviruses, paramyxoviruses and flaviviruses. These viruses cause some of the world's deadliest diseases, such as AIDS, Nipah virus encephalitis, Ebola, hemorrhagic fever and Rift Valley fever.

Even better, the compound — a rhodanine derivative that the researchers have dubbed LJ001 — could be effective against new, yet-to-be discovered enveloped viruses. . .

"We provide evidence that the small molecule binds to both cellular and viral membranes, but its preferential ability to inactivate viral membranes comes from its ability to exploit the biogenic reparative ability of metabolically active cells versus static viral membranes," he said. "That is, at antiviral concentrations, any damage it does to the cell's membrane can be repaired, while damage done to static viral membranes, which have no inherent regenerative capacity, is permanent and irreversible." . . .

While the exact mechanism of viral membrane inactivation is unknown, the researchers are pursuing some promising leads that could answer that question.

Additionally, the drug does not appear to be toxic in vitro or in animals when used at effective antiviral concentrations.

That's clever.

Grass fed beef and biochar aren't the only subjects mired in slime bag arguments. Environmentalism in general and climate change in particular are nothing but slime bag arguments by politicans and rent seekers. It's their business - or organized crime at least. It's their careers, what they do for pay and power. That doesn't mean that there are no legitimate controversies for all of these subjects or that there aren't honest arguments about unknowns as investigation ever so slowly proceeds, it just means that they are exploited by opportunists for gain. We can now add biodiversity to the list of hot slime subjects.

The fundamental reason why e-mails were stolen last year from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit was . . . because climate change had reached such a fever pitch of political heat, and if it becomes evident that conserving biodiversity means changing lifestyles, those working in the field must expect debate to reach similar temperatures.

The fundamental reason for Climategate is that climate politicans had over reached and become vulnerable. Had they been honest brokers all of the controversey in the world would not have resulted in public humiliation and a body blow to science that has reduced scientists to the low level of journalists and politicans in the mind of much of the public. They punked themselves. The only way that this sort of thing will happen with biodversity advocates is if they are shown to be dishonest too, which seems probable since many of them are also ethically challenged climate hysterics and not quite intelligent enough to thrive for long in a life of crime.

With this year being declared the International Year of Biodiversity, and with the critical session of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) coming up this October, you'd expect such heated conflict to materialise this year, if at all.

Why declared? This is clearly an empty political gesture and rent seeking ruse. But, there will only be great opposition if the criminals get too brazen. Low level crime is endured but there are limits.

After President Bill Clinton signed the convention in 1993, it went swiftly into Congress for ratification, and the first indications were that it might well pass.

But a number of interested parties began to argue against - organisations concerned with land ownership and land rights, such as the Montana Farm Bureau Federation and Grassroots for Multiple Use, allied with groups opposed in principle to extensions of government and regulation.

Concerns were expressed about possible restrictions on the unfettered access that US pharmaceutical companies had to the developing world's biological riches, and on the nascent technology of genetic engineering.

In this republic laws are made by the people's representatives in the legislature and are constrained by the written constitution. Clinton should not have signed, and would not have signed if he thought that there was any chance of ratification by congress. It's an insult, though one often made in the continuing struggle for executive power against the interests of society. The slimebag arguments against the slimebag arguments for CBD are SOP. Ho hum. That's how these sorts of stupid games are played.

Here's a hypothetical example raised at the InterAcademy panel meeting.

Let's say you want to protect the Amazon rainforest and the rich biodiversity it contains.

One way you might look to do that is by reducing deforestation; and one of the main causes of Amazonian deforestation is clearance for cattle ranches.

So you might choose to campaign among Western consumers, or to lobby Western governments, to reduce the amount of beef consumed on Western plates; less beef equals more trees.

Does the issue look uncontroversial now?

There's nothing about the issue of biodiversity in this slimebag argument. This is just the tired old agenda of miserabilist food fetishists seeking to exploit the issue. If the argument was that agriculture in S. America was expanding to serve world markets, ripping up the grasslands to grow soya and other grains, pushing ranchers into the bush and then following them to rip up that land too in order to grow even more soya, then an intelligent discussion might be possible. Are there places that have more value when not used for agriculture? Did the grasslands that were destroyed for cropping have more value as grasslands, especially since they could still be grazed without loss of value, especially biodiversity? Why so little regard for biodiversity by those who seek to exploit biodiversity? It seems that they aren't actually interested in biodiversity.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the International Year of Biodiversity was not just the same old slime attack by the same old slimebags? The lessons of Climategate (and a variety of other recent "gates") might be motivation for journalists to begin to be journalists rather than just the PR departments for various rent seekers. Wouldn't it be interesting if the sloppy arguments of all rent seekers were challenged publicly? Nah, they're journalists and don't have either the skills or the ethics to do this.

The concept isn't new but they seem to be getting closer to becoming a meaningful reality.

In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers. . .

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

“Hardware is becoming much more like software,” as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it. That’s not just because there’s so much software in hardware these days, with products becoming little more than intellectual property wrapped in commodity materials, whether it’s the code that drives the off-the-shelf chips in gadgets or the 3-D design files that drive manufacturing. It’s also because of the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution.

We’ve seen this picture before: It’s what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.

The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony. This change is driven by two forces. First, the explosion in cheap and powerful prototyping tools, which have become easier to use by non-engineers. And second, the economic crisis has triggered an extraordinary shift in the business practices of (mostly) Chinese factories, which have become increasingly flexible, Web-centric, and open to custom work (where the volumes are lower but the margins higher).

The result has allowed online innovation to extend to the real world. As Cory Doctorow puts it in his new book, Makers, “The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”

A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires and local “hackerspaces.” Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.

In short, atoms are the new bits.

I hasten to add that this change will not be limited to hardware, it also will apply to wetware - biological products - which is a whole different can of worms - possibly literally.

Read the article for a wealth of detail and a good bit of fun as well. It may be useful to think about the issues previously discussed regarding cultural products such as audio, video and print; and the scramble by older businesses to survive the opening up of markets for creation and distribution of competing products.

Another example of the grass fed pushback by anti-meat miserabilists and climate wackos.

• Grass-fed beef is shown to produce more greenhouse gas than grain-fed.
• Critics point out that the pasture used to raise grass-fed beef offers a carbon sink.
• Experts point out that eating vegetarian is far better from a carbon point of view.

. . . The problem, said Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University, is that accurately quantifying how much soil carbon contributes is difficult, and it can vary dramatically from place to place -- even in locations just a few feet away. This uncertainty can swing the calculation one way or another. To Weber's knowledge, no study published in a scientific journal has come to the conclusion that grass-fed beef is better from a greenhouse gas perspective.

"There's a lot of range of what the emissions are from beef, and that is real variability," agreed Rita Schenck, Executive Director of the Institute for Environmental Research & Education in Vashon, Wash., who has also studied this question.

"It is different in different places. It is different in different growing regimes. It's just different. I think the numbers are really close," she said, so the scales can tip one way or another depending on the specific circumstances.

"To some extent, all of this bickering about carbon footprint is missing the forest for the trees," Weber said. ""In terms of air pollution, water pollution and odor, concentrated feedlots are a disaster. In terms of other environmental impact, there is no question that grass fed is better. My problem is that people really play on the carbon footprint angle, when it's really not clear. "

According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

"The take-home message," Schenk said, "is that no matter how you grow the beef, eating vegetarian is substantially better from a carbon point of view."

Not really. The problem is that the emissions from cropping are not counted, and they are huge. Cultivating grasslands to grow crops causes huge emissions and degrades soil in myriad ways. The amount of carbon sequestered by grazed grasslands may vary with location, management and other environmental conditions but cropping always causes huge emissions. Even if you are a complete climate wacko you should prefer grass-fed beef over cropping, and this doesn't even consider the benefits of feeding crop residues to cattle that were discussed in the previous post, a further efficiency gain in the whole agronomic system.

A more intelligent take on the carbon and grazing relationship is that sophisticated pasture management can greatly increase both meat production and carbon sequestration while improving nutrient and moisture management, and providing habitat for wildlife. If you are secretly animated by some sort of naturalist vision of harmonious coexistence of humans and the rest of nature then you will be hard pressed to find any food production system that is even remotely as good. Putting our energy and resources into pasture management improvements rather than sterile pro-con slimebag debates is a far wiser choice.

As grass fed beef became more fashionable in the past couple of years there were more and more naive articles and books written by advocates. They selected, exaggerated, speculated and did their best to be persuasive. This stung the miserabilist anti-meat crowd and the main stream meat industry. These strange bedfellows are now pushing back, repeating their old and largely discredited advocacy but scoring some hits by debunking some of the slimebag arguments of grass fed advocates.

Some of the push back is useful. It doesn't have some wacko or commercial agenda to flog, it just corrects the arguments.

On the PBS website for the muckraking documentary King Corn—a film that roundly attacks industrial agriculture—the following declaration is made: “Before WW II, most Americans had never eaten corn-fed beef.” This claim, which has become a mantra in sustainable agriculture, is more often than not dispatched to rally support for grass-fed beef—a supposedly healthier and more environmentally sound way to feed cattle—which is to say, in accordance with the rhythms of nature rather than the time clock of industry. . .

I simply want to point out that any claim to cows eating corn being a recent development is, to say the least, deeply suspect.

Then several publications are cited which seem to refute the claim that corn fed beef was a post-WWII phenomenon. The comments following the post note that occasional and partial feeding of corn grain and corn silage or green chop isn't the same as current corn-fed practice and so the PBS claim that “Before WW II, most Americans had never eaten corn-fed beef” is still true.

A more useful view sidesteps the grain vs. grass conflict to look at the general farming scenario in which both crops and livestock are produced. If it's tradition that you seek this is it. It was standard practice to feed whatever crops and crop residues that were not sold as produce to livestock. It's efficient. For example my area used to grow a fair amount of wheat and cattle were turned into the wheat fields after harvest to clean up. They fattened nicely on the crop residues, and their dung and urine benefitted the wheat fields. Their grazing and trampling also helped with weed management.

This illuminates a part of my objection to the grass fed marketing standard since its focus is on protecting a marketing claim based on a production method that isn't as sensible as one could wish. The best production standard is a flexible one suited to local circumstances. A national standard for such a huge and diverse nation is idiotic. If your objective is a rational and healthful food production system then you absolutely want crop residues and any other packing house trash that is truly nourishing and healthful to be fed to livestock, especially cattle since they can digest roughage that only bacteria can use if not fed to cattle.

The overwhelming majority of localities cannot graze fresh forage all year long. The days are too short and cold, or too long and hot, or too dry or wet to grow grass every month. Forage that was harvested and stored must be fed at those times. This is the perfect opportunity to make efficient use of whatever roughage is available, and if it has some grain in it that should not disqualify the residues as forage. Turning animals into crop fields to rummage about for standing residues, shattered seed heads on the ground or whatever is sensible general farming which benefits both the cropping and livestock operations.

Those who are concerned about the health benefits of grass fed beef sometimes object to general farming practices since it is only fresh pasture or direct cut grass silage that has the healthful fatty acids they seek in proper ratios. They argue that every bit of non-green-grass forage diminishes the value of the meat and milk. I counter that not all green grass is equally beneficial. If you really care about the precise food value of the meat and dairy then demand lab reports. They aren't that expensive and would become less expensive if they were done more often in volume. Then you would find that there is large variability. Yes, all grass fed beef is much better than grain finished beef, but some are better than others by significant amounts. And you would also find that some of the best meat and dairy is produced on general farms like those discussed above, even if the animals did eat some grain and other crop trash.

I know, it sounds like some sort of disease, maybe something to do with feet and old funky boots or something, but that's what arbuscular (endo) mycorrhizae is sometimes called since it can be so beneficial for growers. I haven't talked about it much for a while though it was an enthusiasm a few years ago. It isn't that it is less interesting than before, there have just been other novelties and enthusiasms to speak of. My bad.

To review, it can be understood by analogy to rhizobia, the bacteria that nodulate in legume roots and live there in symbiosis swapping the nitrates that it fixes to the plant for the sugars the plant photo-synthesizes. The fungus grows inside plant roots but pushes threadlike protrusions called hyphae out into the soil. The hyphae are thinner than even roots hairs of the plant and can penetrate into every nook and cranny of the soil where they find nutrients, even ones too tightly bound to the soil for plants to access, and transport them back to the plant. Phosphorus is a key nutrient that is transported, and it is often tightly bound in soil and otherwise unavailable to plants, but nitrogen is transported too. Like rhizobia, they swap the nutrients to the plant for sugar.

The thinness and extent of the hyphae aren't the only reasons that they are so good at scavenging nutrients. They exude chemicals and enzymes that free bound nutrients and modify soil chemistry and structure in beneficial ways, helping form stable aggregates that improve soil porosity so that air and water can circulate. Importantly, the hyphae soak up water when it is abundant, and share it with the plant when it is not, helping plants to be drought tolerant. They even capture and strangle predatory soil nematodes.

In the past much of my enthusiasm was for glomalin, one the the exudates of hyphae that helps form stable soil aggregates, since it is a stable form of soil carbon, something like humus, which builds over time and does not easily recycle back to the atmosphere as a GHG due to bacterial decomposition. That is still so, but it is just one of the beneficial attributes of farmer's fungus.

It makes sense to inoculate farm land with mycorrhizae for many crops. Not all crop plants form associations, and there are many kinds of mycorrhizae so you need to be specific and use the right inoculant, just as you need the right rhizobia for your particular legume. Tillage, pesticides and high doses of fertilizer can kill off mycorrhizae. They don't spread on the wind so once you've killed them off they are very slow to come back unless you inoculate.

There's also a biochar angle.

The structure of the charcoal provide a refuge for small beneficial soil organisms, such as symbiotic mycorrhyzal fungi.

Bio-char is able to serve as a habitat for extraradical fungal hyphae that sporulate in their micropores due to lower competition from saprophytes (Saito and Marumoto, 2002 as reported in Lehmann, 2006)

Nishio (1996) states “the idea that the application of charcoal stimulates indigenous arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi in soil and thus promotes plant growth is relatively well-known in Japan, although the actual application of charcoal is limited due to its high cost”. The relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and charcoal may be important in realising the potential of charcoal to improve fertility. Nishio (1996) also reports that charcoal was found to be ineffective at stimulating alfalfa growth when added to sterilised soil, but that alfalfa growth was increased by a factor of 1.7-1.8 when unsterilised soil containing native mycorrizal fungi was also added. Warnock (2007) suggests four possible mechanisms by which biochar might influence mycorrhizal fungi abundance. These are (in decreasing order of currently available evidence supporting them): “alteration of soil physico-chemical properties; indirect effects on mycorrhizae through effects on other soil microbes; plant–fungus signalling interference and detoxification of allelochemicals on biochar; and provision of refugia from fungal grazers. (Woolf, 2006)

There seems to be an additive effect. Biochar is better when mycorrhizae are present, and mycorrhizae are better when biochar is present.

Philip says, in response to the assertion in the previous post that "To get it [increased production and sequestration of carbon in soil] started you need manufactured fertilizer and a system to retain the increased production it brings", that "Obviously you don't absolutely need manufactured fertilizer, but for most of us, it is an essential option."

True enough, but it is required for the agronomic system as a whole, which was the point I was working. There may be instances where fertilizer can be avoided and get by, but the system as a whole cannot do so. I think this is important to understand since there is a lot of happy talk about not needing it, and a lot of grumpy talk about those who do use it. This is nonsensical. The system cannot function without it now, and if there are hopes of increasing organic matter productivity it is needed even more.

The reason that I called this "bootstrapping" is that the need diminishes as the soil improves, if it improves. More of the nutrients in the soil become plant available and fewer are lost to leaching or become locked in the soil and so unavailable to life. When coupled with agronomic methods designed to increase nutrient production by soil microorganisms - chiefly nitrate fixation by bacteria but also phosphorus transport etc.- manufactured fertilizers become ever less necessary, though without a closed system there will always be a need for imported fertility of some sort. There's no free lunch, and no perpetual motion machines.

These realities underpin some of my objections to the various marketing standards based on production methods. They make no agronomic sense and do not encourage best practices for the system as a whole, though this is precisely what is needed. I get it that people have unreasonable fetishes and that it's fair and square for businesses to cater to them for the price premiums that can be garnered. But we should understand that such fetishes do not often encourage good agronomic practice.

I think this matters a lot. Organic, for example, is a tiny part of total production. It doesn't matter much at all what goes on with organic. What matters is what goes on with mainstream growers, the ones who work almost all of the land and produce almost all of the food and fiber. It is their methods that have global impacts. They use most of the manures, composts, rock dusts and all other sorts of soil amendments, and they will be the ones whose use of biochar - if it becomes common - will have system significance.

For example, I imagine a grower hauling a tandem trailer load of stover - just a portion of his production - to a pyrolysis plant, and instead of dead heading back to the farm he picks up a load of biochar impregnated with ammonium made from the off gases of pyrolysis, and perhaps fills his tanks with biodiesel also made from those off gases. It's not an even trade - he'd have to pay some too - but his net costs for the year might be lower and grow ever lower as his land improved.

This isn't entirely fanciful thinking since there are a couple of such biochar plants in progress. They make more sense than ethanol plants for the system and nation, and they make more sense for the environment too, though that is a by-blow of the improved agronomic system.

In Yet More Slime I complained that the idea of biochar had merit but that it had been coopted and repurposed by various rent seekers as a way to advance their only tenuously connected agendas, and that opposition to biochar had increased because of it. More specifically:

When land is converted to organic farming the soil carbon increases for at least twenty years. If charcoal is incorporated the amount of carbon in the soil increases even more. Industrial farming on the other hand reduces the land’s ability to retain carbon. . .

Globally, there are 800GtC (gigatonnes of carbon) in the atmosphere. Every year plants capture 58GtC and transfer most of it to the soil. In due course 58GtC is released back to the atmosphere. This is the carbon cycle: every 14 years the entire weight of atmospheric carbon passes through the soil. The longer this carbon remains in the soil the less of it will be present as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at any given time.

Plants, even their leaves, can be charred before they release their carbon. If this charcoal is incorporated into the soil it will lock carbon away almost permanently in the way that forest fires have locked charcoal into the soil. . .

There are two sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Those from fossil fuels - coal, gas and oil - should be controlled at source where the fuels are dug out of the ground. Land-based emissions need a separate regulation. The best one I have found is called the Carbon Maintenance Fee.

Under the Carbon Maintenance Fee proposals, countries would be paid an annual fee for the carbon contained within their borders. . .

Other proposals are based on regulations that would be difficult to enforce, e.g. 'you must reduce emissions by x percent!' The fee approach, however, would work by incentive. If a country’s carbon pool increases, its fee would also increase but, in addition, it would receive a substantial bonus. The reverse would apply to countries whose carbon pool reduces. Countries would therefore have an incentive to encourage organic farming, to bury charcoal and to retain their forests. The fee would need to be substantial so could be drawn from the proposed Tobin tax on currency trading.

This is a tired old redistributive scheme that exploits and misuses agronomic concepts.

Increase in soil organic matter has nothing to do with organic farming. Organic farming is merely a marketing claim based on a production method and does not increase the amount of organic matter in soils. It redistributes organic matter, impoverishing one place to enrich another. It's an accounting trick, cooking the books in order to show a profit in one spot by disregarding losses in another. It's even easier for large scale "industrial farms" to do this than for small scale hobby farms since it involves handling massive amounts of materials, and no one is better able to do this than the very largest heavy metal industrial growers. And so, to get a market premium for their produce some large scale industrial growers have done just that and now supply major retailers with "organic" foods.

To truly increase organic matter in soils it is necessary to produce it on site, not haul it in from somewhere else. The Keeling concept of fairly rapid recycling of atmospheric carbon does indicate an intervention opportunity to shift the balance of carbon from the atmosphere to the soil, but only if done by increasing growth on site and retaining a larger portion of the result.

The idea of a Carbon Maintenance Fee is the same sort of shell game. It merely shifts carbon around rather than increasing total sequestration, but that's the real objective since carbon is now seen as currency. The one and only objective is to redistribute wealth and any excuse will be used to justify the larceny. It's a shame that biochar has been harnessed to haul around this tired old idea since it is a loser. It depends on crooked accounting to show a benefit but if full "green" accounting is done the losses are shown. The fact that it is a loser guarantees that it will eventually be exposed since you eventually run out of other people's money to redistribute no matter how crooked and extensive the bureaucracy. It's a bureaucratic bubble that will eventually burst, leaving the earth further impoverished and the atmosphere further "enriched".

To increase soil organic matter in already exhausted soils, which includes most soils that have been in agronomic production for a while, you need to face reality. It's a slow process that requires a "bootstrap". To get it started you need manufactured fertilizer and a system to retain the increased production it brings. Slowly, over time, soil organic matter will build up. Using some of that production to make biochar retards that process at first since it repurposes some of the organic matter, depriving soil microorganisms of groceries. They can't eat charcoal, that's the whole idea. Over time the charcoal can have beneficial effects that make a better environment for microorganisms so they will make up for earlier losses so long as they have a continuing and increased supply of new organic matter to eat.

The reason to do this isn't that some bureaucrat with only the most cursory knowledge of agronomic systems bribes you to do it, it is to increase the value of your primary asset - your land - and increase your production of food and fiber. The reason to do it is that it is a superior agronomic system with increasing returns over time. The more growers that do this the more productive the whole system. The secondary effect that the atmosphere is being mined of its carbon is largely irrelevant so long as there is plenty. If done assiduously for long enough the atmosphere would be depleted of carbon and some bureaucratic wanker would want to start charging growers for the atmospheric carbon that they take for free, but not soon.

The political imperative to get elected and then retain power noted in the previous post can in some rare cases be a truer force for good governance than ideology. Obama's unblemished string of policy failures has offended ideologues on all sides - some for too little effort and some for too much. His plunging popularity and influence have prompted some to declare him a lame duck after just one year and predict great change in the 2010 elections. The loss in Massachusetts of a safe Democratic Senate seat seems to have forced a change of direction.

I’ll just note this WSJ article noting that Paul Volker, who long appeared to be sidelined in these discussions, while arguing strenuously for a separation along these lines, appears to have won the conceptual day in what amounts to a policy pivot for the administration. It’s a very interesting article describing how that came about.

The policy’s evolution took months, according to congressional and administration officials. Prompted by the cajoling of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and other respected voices, dissenters in the administration—notably Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House economics chief Lawrence Summers—gradually dropped their opposition ....

On Thursday, Mr. Obama proposed a plan that would prevent banks that receive a federal backstop from investing their own money in financial markets—what is known as proprietary trading. He also pushed for new limits on the size and concentration of financial institutions. Both moves echo the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era banking curbs that was repealed in 1999.

The proposal marked the return of Mr. Volcker to center stage in the Obama White House. The 82-year-old chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board consulted closely with Democrats in the House and Senate as they drafted their proposals to address “too big to fail” entities, referring to financial behemoths whose collapse might bring down the economy. Mr. Volcker spoke frequently with Mr. Obama as well.

But he faced a philosophical divide with others on the economic team .... In talks with his financial team, Mr. Obama started letting his frustration show, asking why he was on the wrong side of the “too big to fail” debate.

Obama needs to get on the right side of some debate rather than extending his string of policy gaffes. It's pure political desperation. He's doing the right thing even if he's doing it for the wrong reasons. In this case politics is helping rather than hindering good governance. It will not be painless.

It is also quite important to add here McArdle’s observation that many of the relaxations of the line between these activities were justified on the grounds that the regulations made New York less competitive as a banking and money center globally. She correctly says that reimposition of such lines will make New York less globally competitive:

If we do choose this “something”, Americans should probably be clear that this is going to deal a major setback to New York as a world financial capital. Many of the rules that were undone in the last two decades were got rid of because they were making it too hard for American banks to cope with foreign competition. If we do this, America’s financial sector will shrink, and our banks will lose a lot of business to foreign firms. That means, among other things, that we are going to lose big chunks of tax revenue, because bankers are very disproportionate contributors to federal coffers. It also means that New York’s renaissance will probably slack off–and the people who complain about the bankers will discover how many city services those banker salaries paid for.

Competitive pressures on London might turn out to mean accepting more risk and moral hazard for the sake of remaining a competitive industry that sustains much of the rest of the your national economy. The relative size of the financial services sector in Britain arguably suggests this (I don’t have time now to provide links), at least by comparison to the vastly more diversified US economy.

How does that risk express itself, however? Again, arguably, in Taleb distributions — it all goes swimmingly, so to speak, until you drown. How many times, in order to remain globally competitive as a financial center, can the UK public fisc swallow the occasional disastrous meltdown? Meanwhile, a less competitive, but also less competitively pressured, New York financial center gradually acquires a reputation for stability in the much longer term, fewer political uncertainties because the moral hazard does not exist in the first place ... might work. Of course, might not.

This all brings to mind the issues discussed in the earlier post Disgust.

I think many people, even Sarah Palin’s devotees, might concede under pressure that having a President who has a strong baseline knowledge about the world, about American history, about economics, and so on, is a good thing. Not because we necessarily want an executive who is himself or herself a policy wonk, but because it lets that executive make more judicious choices about what policies to approve or reject. Many of the worst policy disasters under Bush the Lesser can demonstrably be traced back to the bedrock fact that he was easy for his courtiers to manipulate because he didn’t have an independent knowledge of his own on many issues, just a kind of personal appraisal of his staff that appeared to mostly revolve around obsequious loyalty.

The issue isn't knowledge or intelligence. The assumption that a willingness to wear the colors and flash the gang sign of self selected "elites" is a reliable signal of either knowledge or intelligence, much less wisdom, is mistaken. In many ways it is the reverse. Modesty and a willingness to consult are signs of greater real world knowledge and intellectual maturity. When we compare the policy disasters of Bush to those of his past and present opponents this becomes ever clearer.

Obama seems to be a weather vane spinning in the wind of his courtiers, as he must be since he's a politician with only the most rudimentary grasp of the issues, primarily the political implications of the issues rather than the operational governance aspects. Much like Bush.

Update: Another view.

To be sure, Obama is going after a real problem: that banks often take too many risks in their investments. Wouldn't it be nice if we could go after that problem while not destroying the benefits of having large banks?

We can. And the best way to do that is to give those closest to banks a strong incentive to make sure the banks aren't taking undue risks.

One way to do that would be to get rid of deposit insurance. Until Dec. 31, 2013, if a bank fails and you have up to $250,000 in that bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will make you whole. We depositors, therefore, don't have an incentive to monitor banks: it's called "moral hazard." Moral hazard, as you can see, has little to do with morality, but much to do with incentives. With little monitoring by depositors, banks are freer to take risks with "other people's money."

We could also repeal another restriction that prevents any one entity from holding more than a small percentage of ownership in a bank. Allowing concentrated ownership so that one firm or hedge fund could own, say, 10 or 20 percent of a bank's shares would allow the owners to kick out bank managers who are not doing well for shareholders.

If President Obama wants to avoid "too big to fail," he should focus on giving those closest to banks a stake in preventing failure in the first place.

This may be a more sensible approach to the banking issue, but I doubt that it is politically possible. Repealing deposit insurance seems as improbable as repealing medicare though both have the potential to destroy society in future.

Update: Bank Kabuki

If our banking system absorbs trillions in losses you can be sure the government will step in, regardless of whether we have big banks or small banks. And if our banking system isn’t in crisis, then FDIC is perfectly capable of handling an isolated bankruptcy, even at a large bank. In any case, I can’t imagine a future where the US doesn’t have any large banks, but Europe, China, Japan and Canada have lots of large banks. Can you? Wouldn’t it make more sense to try to prevent the banking system from suffering trillions in losses after a bubble bursts, perhaps by requiring sizable downpayments?

But then I read that the FHA is about to set much tougher standards for FHA mortgages—they plan to require borrowers with a 590 credit score to put down at least 3.5% downpayments. As Tyler Cowen recently argued, you knew Congress wasn’t serious about global warming when they refused to make Americans pay more for gasoline. And I would add that you can be sure that the populists who want to “re-regulate the banking system” aren’t serious when all they can do is talk about 3.5% downpayments for bad credit risks. It is so much more fun to bash big banks.

A plague of posers is upon us.

More about the depression of the deluded.

Lamenting that Democratic politicians up and down Pennsylvania Avenue have lost their enthusiasm for radical health-care ‘reform,’ Paul Krugman today maintains that “politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election.”

This notion of politics is absurdly unrealistic. Public-choice economics – pioneered by my colleagues Jim Buchanan (who boasts his own Nobel Prize) and Gordon Tullock – uncovers overwhelming evidence that politics, in fact, almost exclusively is about achieving election and re-election. So to insist that politics should be about something other than what it is really about makes as much sense as insisting, say, that snow should be hot or that donkeys should be bipedal.

I make a distinction between politics and governance. A well designed governance system assumes that politics is almost exclusively about achieving election and re-election, and seeks to blunt the predations of politicians and the interest groups they represent or exploit.

Slimebag arguments - those intended to conceal rather than reveal relevant information - seek to persuade rather than inform. They are just as odious when they support your views as when they oppose them. They fail intellectual, ethical and aesthetic measures of virtue and incite the production of counter-slime from the intellectually impoverished opposition.

For example, not too long ago biochar was interesting to a very few growers, soil scientists and archaeologists. Then climate nutters and various other rent seekers grew excited about its possibilities for advancing their nefarious objectives and made many laughable claims for biochar while advocating a variety of convoluted subsidies and taxes to realize their dreams and line their pockets. The result was an equal and opposite dung-storm from their opponents and a growing distaste for the whole subject.

Something like that is now happening with grass fed beef. Consider the claims about E. coli O157:H7.

For many consumers, the case was closed: To avoid E. coli O157:H7, just eat grass-fed beef. . .

Unfortunately, the scientific evidence tells a very different story. Planck's assertion seems to be based on a 1998 report published in the journal Science. In this study, the authors fed three cows a variety of diets in order to ascertain how feed type influenced intestinal acidity in cows and, in turn, how intestinal acidity influenced the concentration of acid-resistant strains of E. coli. They hypothesized that these strains would be especially dangerous to humans, since they could survive the low-pH environment of the human stomach. It turned out that grain-fed cattle did indeed have a much more acidic stomach than those fed grass or hay. And sure enough, they had a million times more acid-resistant E. coli in their colons.

This was good news for grass-fed beef: Eliminate grain from a cow's diet and you'll keep its intestines from getting too acidic and spawning dangerous, acid-resistant bacteria. There was only one catch. The authors of the Science piece never specifically tested for E. coli O157:H7. Instead, they guessed that the pattern of O157:H7 growth and induction of acid-resistance would mirror that of E. coli strains that are always living in the colons of cattle. If this assertion were true, E. coli O157:H7 would reach dangerous levels only in gastrointestinal tracts of grain-fed cows.

But between 2000 and 2006, scientists began to take a closer look at the effect of diet on E. coli O157:H7 specifically. A different set of findings emerged to indicate that this particular strain did not, in fact, behave like other strains of E. coli found in cattle guts. Most importantly (in terms of consumer safety), scientists showed in a half-dozen studies that grass-fed cows do become colonized with E. coli O157:H7 at rates nearly the same as grain-fed cattle.

There is a legitimate scientific inquiry in progress in which researchers seek to explain empirical evidence, do experiments, replicate them, improve them, and ask ever more questions in a discovery process. But popularizers select some of the data and report it as absolute in order to support their advocacy or even just to sell magazine articles and books. Unfortunately such over the top claims, once released into society, become information zombies roaming the land long after death.

Worse perhaps, the lunatic fringe goes apoplectic:

let us always resist the baffling logic that says “if grass-fed beef is better for the earth than grain-fed beef, then it must be helping the environment.” If punching someone hurts less than stabbing them, is it helping them heal?

Worse than the Time Magazine article was a story earlier in the week, from an environmental news site, blindly praising Niman Ranch for its supposed sustainability and animal welfare standards. Considering that the cows are still killed in the end, and that the methane that ALL cows emit far outweighs the environmental impact of the fuels, fertilizers, and feed for the cows, there is really no way a cow could be raised to “high welfare standards” or “sustainably.”

Every grass-fed “miracle” story emphasizes that cows can actually help sequester carbon by helping grass grow. But they conveniently leave out or downplay the fact that grass-fed cows emit significantly more methane than grain-fed cows (not that grain-fed cows don’t contribute to a host of other environmental problems), and methane is about 75 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a twenty year period. Additionally, these stories all compare raising grass-fed cows to either raising grain-fed cows (omitting the option to just not eat meat at all!), or to growing vast amounts of monocrops for vegetarians (omitting the fact that most monocrops in the US are grown to feed cows!).

Actually, the argument isn't just that grass fed ruminant systems are better than grain fed systems, it is that field and row cropping is destructive, causing far more emissions than other agronomic acts while monotonically degrading the environment. It's not about fossil fuels or manufactured fertilizers, it's about the inherent destructiveness of ripping the earth for cropping. We can't stop doing that until we learn to synthesize food from air and rocks, but we can do it less destructively. Part of limiting that destruction is general farming in which livestock help mitigate the harms of cropping and even heal the land when it is rotated back to pasture periodically.

Some land can't bear the impacts or either cropping or grazing, and some has more value outside the agronomic system even when it is suitable to agriculture. In a few cases you can have both. Natural grasslands can be cropped, but they are more valuable as grasslands. Happily, they can be grazed without reducing that value so long as it is done insightfully.

If your objective is to understand the issues and propose or support behaviors that are least harmful but still adequate to requirements then the absolutist claims of fringe believers are of little interest and have even less nourishment. Unfortunately, we get slime from all sides and little reasoned analysis.

I have argued for both biochar and grass fed meat and dairy products but not in the over-the-top manner of advocates. I'm as likely to take them to task for their errors as I am their opponents. In some ways I regret that biochar and grass fed have become fashionable.

At one point in my cultural education I became interested in Bluegrass music. I came at it from an odd and arguably derivative direction in that the interest stemmed from hearing jazz/classical/Bluegrass fusion music sometimes called Spacegrass or Jazzgrass. I didn't understand many of the references or allusions until I studied the history and origins of such music. For example, the Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs tune "Don't Get Above Your Raisin'" baffled me. Above a rasin? What could that possibly mean? Then I noticed the apostrophe and the accent/language implications. Duh! "Don't get above your raising", be true to your class.

I'd never really thought about that before, but it is clearly a powerful influence in society. It's foundational to tribal loyalty, solidarity, class warfare, social and economic status, belonging and home. Those who reject their milk language and society are largely denied the pleasures of the hearth since they will never be fully accepted anywhere again.

The song title wasn't only about class loyalty since it has a direction vector: above. There's a kind of reverse snobbery that readily admits that the swells are rich and powerful, but not better in important ways. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, mocking the idea that the swells are in fact "above". Inexplicable behaviors such as "poor mouthing" - pretending to be a bit dumb, largely ignorant, unsophistcated in thought and deed, and impoverished - make some sense when seen from this perspective.

I deal with some of these flinty, razor sharp multi-millionaire bumpkins in my life and work. They may wear the exact same uniform of a blue chambray work shirt and jeans every day of their lives, drive utilitarian vehicles, and live in modest homes but they are not what they seem from surface appearances. When we talk about issues and projects there isn't much that I know or say that they don't understand and reason about in context. The parts that are new to them are focused on intensely and worked over for any intellectual nutrition that may be contained. Our language gradually shifts from bumpkin to high-bumpkin to a straight forward uninflected common speech as they focus the speed and power of their knowledge and intellect on interesting and possibly important subjects.

In some ways these people are much smarter and better educated than those who fake it the other way and pretend to be more than they are. In this sense their reverse snobbery is rational. They are smarter and do have a more functional stance. They don't make as many blunders or believe their own bullshit.

This isn't just cultural neeping. Contemplating the malaise noted in the previous post (and many others for a long time) reveals its relevance to our current problem set.

I think many people, even Sarah Palin’s devotees, might concede under pressure that having a President who has a strong baseline knowledge about the world, about American history, about economics, and so on, is a good thing. Not because we necessarily want an executive who is himself or herself a policy wonk, but because it lets that executive make more judicious choices about what policies to approve or reject. Many of the worst policy disasters under Bush the Lesser can demonstrably be traced back to the bedrock fact that he was easy for his courtiers to manipulate because he didn’t have an independent knowledge of his own on many issues, just a kind of personal appraisal of his staff that appeared to mostly revolve around obsequious loyalty.

The issue isn't knowledge or intelligence. The assumption that a willingness to wear the colors and flash the gang sign of self selected "elites" is a reliable signal of either knowledge or intelligence, much less wisdom, is mistaken. In many ways it is the reverse. Modesty and a willingness to consult are signs of greater real world knowledge and intellectual maturity. When we compare the policy disasters of Bush to those of his past and present opponents this becomes ever clearer. It is silly to expect a President to have useful knowledge of the details of governance. No matter how convincing the acting it is just an act. The real test is whether the President is sufficiently smart and intellectually mature to realize this, or if he makes the worst blunder of all and believes his own bullshit.

The problem is larger than just national politics. When we consider the blunders of the self selected "elites" in every facet of life over the past few decades we find similar failures of intellect, education and maturity. They hold fashionably nonsensical views, lack real knowledge of society, and fail to accept responsibility for the adverse consequences of their behavior. Rather than admitting their mistakes and learning from them, they rationalize and deny them, focusing solely on maintaining their false self images and the perquisites of power. It's always someone else's fault. It's sabotage by laggards. Their dreamy unrealistic notions never got a fair trial. They are like a UFO cult that comes down from the mountain when the mother ship fails to appear on schedule, still convinced that it is coming.

It seems to me that this is what is driving the Tea Party phenomenon, though this is merely a tentative hypothesis, not yet even a theory, a just-so story that may with further testing evolve into something with substance. As Obama is revealed as an empty suit, a pseudo-intellectual poser, and his supporters are shown to have been dupes and dreamers lacking insight or even knowledge of real societies, large numbers of people are turning away in disgust and seeking more rational alternatives. Among them are also those who are disillusioned with the very idea of large scale intrusive governments no matter what the composition of the ruling class.

This will not necessarily be an improvement. Disgust is a powerful emotion not easily overcome once it happens. Politicians, the media, and even scientists have now squandered their credibility and it will not be easily regained no matter how scrupulously correct their behavior might become if they truly grasped the issues and worked diligently to improve themselves. There are large scale problems and threats that require close attention and coordination of disparate smaller scale responses, but this seems improbable at this time due to those failures and loss of credibility.

I would be more hopeful if the supposedly educated classes demonstrated some comprehension. Rather than seeing Bush, Palin and other poor-mouthing luminaries (what a contradiction!) as affronts to their class they could demonstrate some education and intellect by realizing their significance and legitimacy. Whatever the personal deficiencies of such pretenders to power they have an arguably more rational approach to governance based on modesty and respect for the complexity of life, a complexity that grows exponentially as the scale of governance increases. They don't have the answers and don't claim to have them, but neither do the arrogant elites. Any partial, contingent, ephemeral answers that are to be found will result from collaboration and mutual respect rather than immature class conflict.

In Market Democracy I asserted that "there seems to be some insights burbling up in the infosphere that relate to the experts/expertise distinctions discussed in several earlier posts", but that more thought was needed. I'm still reading and thinking, lately about some old wisdom that is being regurgitated and chewed some more.

In a review of Elena Gorokhova’s memoir of childhood in the Soviet Union, there’s a quote of her youthful realization about Communism:

“The rules are simple…They lie to us, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

Here in the gathering twilight of 21st Century America, the situation is hardly much different, with one exception: we seem to want the lies, we compete to outdo the power elite with our own tall tales, we luxuriate in the drowning filth of our fabulistic excesses. . .

We lie to us, we know we’re lying, we know we know we’re lying, but we keep on lying anyway, and we keep on pretending to believe ourselves. . .

For our own velvet revolution, for at least a possibility of moving the ball forward past this stagnant, curdled moment in American life, I think what we’ll all have to do is take the risk of authenticity, to develop a grown-up taste for the rough edges and honest imperfections of lives as they are lived. In our politicians, in our public figures, in ourselves. To stop carrying water for liars or telling simplified fabulisms because we think that will serve some end that we deem necessary. To drop our deflector shields. Living and speaking within a world of acknowledged ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection is an end in and of itself.

Otherwise, 21st Century American life is going to amount to just us, the online comments threads, and those wonderful people out there in the dark…a long slow fading as we dreamily revisit over and over again our old glories, waiting endlessly for our close-up.

Said another way:

The Obama administration succumbed, like many others, to a sort of magical climate thinking that promised a painless and even prosperous transition to a low-carbon future with the tools already at hand. . .

... sooner had the president's stimulus program demonstrated that a new way forward on climate change and energy might be possible, then the new administration relinquished its climate change and energy policy to the partisans of the past. . .

Putting Browner, a former Al Gore aide, in charge of climate-change policy was payback to environmental groups and the green donors who had supported Obama's campaign. But it also signaled that, inside the White House, the clean energy investment message that the president had used to such great effect in winning battleground states like Ohio and Colorado was seen as just that: a powerful message to use in the campaign, not a policy priority.

In this, Obama was following two decades of magical thinking among both greens and liberal Democrats about energy technology. In this view, energy efficiency pays for itself, solar and wind power are already nearly cost competitive with fossil fuels, and both can quickly and cheaply reduce emissions. This Pollyanna view of fossil fuel alternatives and efficiency, which makes going green seem cheap and easy -- little more than the cost of "a postage stamp a day" -- has provided the justification for green-policy advocacy that has overwhelmingly focused on pollution regulations and carbon pricing while ignoring serious investment in energy research and development.

The price of Obama's failure to break with green climate orthodoxy is only now becoming apparent. The collapse of international climate negotiations in Copenhagen last month was just the latest evidence that efforts to regulate global pollution output cannot succeed. The Kyoto framework, which imagined that carbon pollution limits could be the primary driver of the complete transformation of the global energy economy, has irretrievably failed.

The real technological obstacles to decarbonizing the global economy today represent an insurmountable obstacle to political efforts to limit carbon emissions. Until policymakers get serious about addressing the central technological challenge, all efforts to control carbon emissions are doomed.

Both of those posts say other things that are worth your attention. Some of what they say supports the argument that I made in Weak Tea about the significance of the Tea Party phenomenon.

The supposedly educated classes believe their own bullshit, mistake rhetoric for reality, maps for territories, models for instantiated systems. The tea people are reacting to the absurdity of the free floating naked emperors because they are for reality, territories and the instantiated systems where real people actually live and work.

The educated classes are dreamy, irresponsible children. We indulge them somewhat since on rare occasion useful truths come from the mouths of babes. The dreamers need to come back to earth a bit and develop a more accurate self image. They are free to dream because there are sober adults on duty to provision and protect them.

Calls for daring authenticity and more realistic thinking express similar sentiments. We have become cultural nihilists.

Lacking any power to effect reality, Copenhagen has thus become a kind of spiritual pilgrimage. But the pilgrimage is postmodern and the faith is bad.

European delegates will pretend to have reduced emissions and other nations will pretend to believe them. Obama will promise to reduce emissions by 17 percent even though he has neither the votes nor a policy to do so. China will issue a promise to reduce the growth of its emissions even though it is identical to business-as-usual projections.

The result is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described over a century ago as cultural nihilism, something that happens when the old systems of meaning -- God, progress, nature, science -- lose their power. We no longer believe in them, but we continue to behave as though we do.

Nihilism is the phenomenon of going to church, saying confession, and sometimes even praying to God, even though you no longer believe that God will do anything for you. Climate nihilism is the phenomenon of going to Copenhagen, promising to reduce emissions and pretending to believe the promises, even neither though you nor anybody around you has any intention, plan or funding to do so. . .

lying would require, as Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed in his essay "On Bullshit," a concern for the truth that is nowhere evident. The nihilist/bullshitter keeps going to his church -- either of God or of Science -- and keeps making promises without care for whether he can keep them.

In a world that appears to be increasingly without meaning, the nihilist can claim that something means anything, and that nothing means everything. As free-floating signifiers in a simulacrum, images and words can be used outside of their original context by the nihilist/bullshitter for whatever purpose he chooses.

There's no sense in me writing about these things. These guys do it better. It's not clear that there is any value in these mashups of excerpts from the writing of others except as notes to myself written in this public journal that I can refer to in future. My apologies for failing to make any creative contributions but one must be realistic. Read the originals.