Problem for Obama:  These bounces quit working after the “new” wears off.

Problem for Bob: Learn the difference between fluctuation and trend, and between stochastic fluctuations and deterministic ones. 

I predicted this bounce before it occurred.  If it was stochastic I couldn’t have done that.

Problem for me: Dressing up something this predictable into something interesting.

# pete best Says:
18 May 2009 at 2:44 PM

Re #707, You are talking about western life but that is not the lifestyle that we need to live now is it. What we need to live is the same as it was in Europe 5000 years ago in the Neolithic where we consumed zero net carbon. Farming was adequate and the population was small and could never grow much more.

The billions presently on the planet will be curbed if the energy begins to run out but even so we will do enough to sustain a global population of many billions just not all watching wide screen TV’s and driving around in cars eating hamburgers for entertainment. China’s and Indias population have been large evne before coal, oil and gas were used.

A new record in the exploration of the Arctic was set on Sunday (April 26) when wheeled cars reached the geographical North Pole. No one has ever been able to do it before.

Two Russian-made Yemelya experimental vehicles have traveled over 1,100 kilometers across drift ice of the Arctic and reached the North Pole.

[...]

“No one else works in this direction – to explore drift ice on wheeled cars. We have proved our advantage yet again,” the specialist added.

A Yemelya car is a rescue in the conditions of the snowy north. Unlike conventional tracked cross-country vehicles, they do not leave any traces on ice, they are very comfortable and fuel efficient.

Experimental Yemelya vehicle.

“We’re seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point - they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn’t ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there’s a lot of tundra that’s being held down by that ice cap..”

I’m pretty sure there’s at least 10 science errors a 3rd grader could spot.

Somebody should check that guy for schizophrenia.

It’s a 2 1/2 hour round trip from the nearest hospital to the resort where Richardson fall.

The hospital choose to dispatch an ambulance to the resort instead of a helicopter because of the high costs of a helicopter ambulance ($6000).

Because of the distances and time scales involved she wasn’t even brought to a hospital with a real trauma center initially.

Replace this with the scenario where you are paying for this instead of the hospital:

Does anybody really think Richardson would decide to spend the lower amount because it was going to cost her too much to be flown to a hospital with a trauma center?

Who is paying the bills makes a big difference on your prognosis.  If it’s the state, it’s all about maximizing your preset monetary resources. 

What this means in practice is there is an inherent conflict of interest between the doctors responsibility as an advocate for the patient and the hospitals need to stay on budget.

And that’s a fundamental problem, not one that gets fixed if “we all could be nicer to each other” or some other socialist nonsense.

Of course in a free market system, the hospital would have more funds available to send an air ambulance even the patient was uninsured if they knew it was going to come out of their pocket:  It ends up as a write off. 

But if you think about it they end up with the same conflict of interest issue between financial statements and their ethical obligations to the patient. 

In other words, being uninsured in a free market system is ethically on par with being insured in a pure socialistic medicine system.

“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating. … If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota, and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of 2 degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there,’ that indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.”

Ironically enough, with that metric, North Dakota is tops in the country.

Speculation on why they show up as highest:

Don Morrison, executive director of the non-partisan North Dakota Center for the Public Good, said it may be that North Dakotans are better at rooting out corruption when it occurs.

“Being a sparsely populated state, people know each other,” he said. “We know our elected officials and so certainly to do what the governor of Illinois did is much more difficult here.”

Morrison said the state has encouraged bad government practices in some cases by weakening disclosure laws. North Dakota does not require legislative or statewide candidates to disclose their campaign expenses.

The analysis does not include corruption cases handled by state law enforcement and it considers only convictions. Corruption may run more rampant in some states but go undetected.

The Republican majority in the House and Senate were never great, most committees had co-chairmen, one from each party, and they were certainly never filibuster proof in the Senate. It is a sign of the weakness of Bill Frist’s leadership in the Senate that given such compelling evidence of malfeasance in 2004, that he was not able to push through the necessary legislation.

But beyond that there should be no doubt which side was pushing for highly questionable loans, and on this tape showing their ignornace of the risk they were putting their own country in, in the pursuit of their “social justice.”

Isn’t it ironic then with the media in the tank for Obama, we really don’t know who Obama is either?  What we have instead is a caricature of him created especially by the liberal elements of the media, with the intent to help him get elected.

Tony Blankley makes this point in his excellent essay “Media Campaigns Hard for Obama”:

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.

While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs—the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.

Unlike with Sarah Palin, regarding these gaps in the media coverage of Obama and ___________ associated with Obama, we have a pretty good idea what to put in there.

And it isn’t favorable to Obama’s case for being president. 

But given that the media is in the tank for Obama, that isn’t very surprising now, is it?

Group question:
  Which photo-shopped image will RBB link as his form of debate on this topic?

H/T: Powerline Blog