How I found what's wrong with economics

I found out that in theoretical economics, fairness just doesn't count.

His work is overturning 50 years of economic wisdom about motivation, showing that most economists have overlooked one of the most important factors determining economic outcomes: our values about fairness.

"I think this kind of thinking played a fundamental role in the recent crisis," he says, "as this notion that people are strictly self-interested has been the dominant mindset for decades. Almost everyone in business, finance or government studies some economics along the way and this is what they think is the norm. It's a biased way of perceiving the world."

Pfizer's payments to censured doctors

THEY are billed as "healthcare professionals who spend years building expertise in their fields". Using materials grounded in science, they educate their peers in the risks and benefits of drugs.

This is how Pfizer, the pharmaceuticals giant, describes the experts it hires to lead forums in which doctors are lectured on the use of its products.

Yet New Scientist has found that some of Pfizer's experts have been disciplined for deficiencies in patient care, while others have been reprimanded for how they conducted drug research trials.

Starships and Spinoza

Abstract:
We discuss a proposal to make small artificial black holes (ABH's) using a huge laser. Because of Hawking radiation, they would be extremely powerful energy sources. We investigate the technical problems of using them to make power plants and starships. The first suggestion is due to Hawking. Next, we consider what challenges the ABH proposal would pose for a future quantum theory of gravity. The form of a theory which would allow us to compute the necessary corrections to classical theory is considered. It is widely believed that every black hole produces a new baby universe on the other side of its singularity. If this is true, ABH technology will involve future humanity in the creation process of universes. Finally, we ponder the effects that the ABH proposal would have on the culture of a future society, particularly if the baby universe theory is correct. The changes in our economic life and understanding of our role in the cosmos would be so profound as to have a "spiritual" aspect.
Comments:
First prize winner FQXi contest "On the limits of Physics"

THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE DOESN’T MEAN THE RIGHT NOT TO BE OFFENDED

Harry Taylor left some cartoons or leaflets in a “prayer room” at a municipal airport, and for this non-crime he was convicted of “causing religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress.” He was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for two years, 100 hours of unpaid work, £250 in court costs, and an anti-social behaviour order banning him from carrying religiously offensive material in a public place.

Criminalizing scientific speech

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute "climate deniers" who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

Goldman Sachs 'misled investors'

Goldman released a series of e-mails from Mr Tourre, in one of which he jokes that he has sold doomed investments to widows and orphans.

Chimps 'feel death like humans'

"We found several similarities between the chimpanzees' behaviour toward the dying female and their behaviour after her death, and some reactions of humans when faced with the demise of an elderly group member or relative, even though chimpanzees do not have religious beliefs or rituals surrounding death,"

PROVIDING INSIGHT INTO CLIMATE CHANGE

While FOS does not do any original scientific research, it does extensive literature research and draws on the worldwide body of work by scientists in all fields relating to global climate change.

Green House Conspiracy

This documentary is a good companion to the latest documentary,"The Great Global Warming Swindle" recently shown on CH 4 UK and is available on Google video. The hoax of Global Warming / Green House was exposed 17 years ago by CH 4 UK in this documentary entitled Green House Conspiracy. Those who subscribe to the rubbish trotted out by Al Gore and his mindless followers are not new they were the same arse clowns who were telling us we were all going to freeze to death 30 years ago.

Cost of the corruption of climate science

Cost of the corruption of climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change(IPCC) is likely a trillion dollars already and there is no measure of the lives lost because of unnecessary reactions like biofuels affecting food supplies.

Global Warming, the Politicization of Science

Whenever science is enlisted in some other cause--religious, political, or racialist--the result is always that the scientists themselves become fanatics (Johnson, 1991, p. 154)

Beating children, spending orphanage money on wine and jewelry

The accused man, Bishop Walter Mixa, was one of the church’s most prominent and outspoken conservatives in Germany, and he aggressively defended himself for weeks against charges of physically abusing children in a Bavarian orphanage.

Accusations have also surfaced of financial irregularities at the orphanage’s foundation. A lawyer hired by the foundation has raised questions about thousands of dollars spent on wine, art, jewelry and even a tanning bed while Bishop Mixa was chairman of the foundation’s board in the 1990s.

IPCC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION

In fact, the most catastrophic epidemic on record anywhere in the world occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, with a peak incidence of 13 million cases per year, and 600,000 deaths. Transmission was high in many parts of Siberia, and there were 30,000 cases and 10,000 deaths due to falciparum infection (the most deadly malaria parasite) in Archangel, close to the Arctic circle. Malaria persisted in many parts of Europe until the advent of DDT. One of the last malarious countries in Europe was Holland: the WHO finally declared it malaria-free in 1970.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

This film by the documentary-maker Martin Durkin presents the arguments of scientists and commentators who don't believe that CO2 produced by human activity is the main cause of climate change. 

Globalists Love Global Warming

A common charge leveled against those who question the official orthodoxy of the global warming religion is that they are acting as stooges for the western establishment and big business interests. If this is the case, then why do the high priests of the elite and kingpin oil men continue to fan the flames of global warming hysteria?

Allegations that skeptics of the man-made explanation behind global warming are somehow doing the bidding of the elite are laughable in the face of the fact that Rothschild operatives and the very chairman of British Petroleum are the ones orchestrating an elitist plan to push global warming fears in order to achieve political objectives.

We have a similar situation to the Peak Oil scam, which was created by the oil industry as a profit boon to promote artificial scarcity, and yet is parroted by environmentalists who grandstand as if they are in opposition to the oil companies. 

Tucker writes that an essential means of achieving global government by consent over conquest, as has long been the ultimate goal of the elite, is by "fanning public hysteria" over climate change, encouraging further integration by forcing countries to adhere to international law on global warming. Such restrictions have prevented the development of third world nations and directly contributed to poverty, disease and squalor by essentially keeping them at a stone age level of progress, as is documented in The Great Global Warming Swindle documentary. 

The common enemy of humanity is Man

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself,” states the report, which can be read in full at the end of this article.

Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal

The images obtained showed that during intercourse in the "missionary position" the penis has the shape of a boomerang and 1/3 of its length consists of the root of the penis. During female sexual arousal without intercourse the uterus was raised and the anterior vaginal wall lengthened. The size of the uterus did not increase during sexual arousal.

Now charlatans will know to beware the geeks

One year on, the Singh case has led to the Court of Appeal issuing the most ringing defence of freedom of speech in living memory. Senior judges, who previously had not appeared to have known the difference between John Milton and Milton Keynes, quoted from "Areopagitica" as they severely limited the ability of libel lawyers to censor scientific debate. The BCA realised that it could not hope to win and dropped its case. The Lib Dems, Labour and the Tories responded to an outcry which was turning into a popular movement and included commitments to libel reform in their manifestos. We're not there yet, but a hopeless cause has become a national issue

National Day of Prayer victory

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb decided in favor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in a rulingthat the federal law designating a National Day of Prayer and requiring a National Day of Prayer proclamation by the president violates the establishment clause of the Constitution's First Amendment.

In her ruling, Judge Crabb wrote: "The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy."

You can promote Islam on the side of US buses, but you can’t oppose it

AN American group established to help Muslims escape the tyranny of Islam have been told that ads they put on Miami buses are to be pulled as they may be “offensive” to members of the Religion of Peace.

A jailed banker explains why banks still run the world

"Where are all the people that are politically connected in Washington that had accounts at UBS?" Birkenfeld asked. "I'm telling you this is a political cover-up. Why is it that the whistleblower is the only guy in jail? I mean, this is insanity," he said.

Tea Partiers take notice: This is the enemy. Not immigrants, blacks, or other powerless minorities. It's not Left vs. Right, Liberal vs. Conservative. That's how they keep us from looking at the man behind the curtain. It's class warfare, and they're cleaning up: They've destroyed our unions; shipped out our jobs; set up a lucrative War on Drugs; scammed us with a housing bubble, then helped themselves to our tax dollars when it burst; and now they've passed legislation that will force us to pay them for worthless private health insurance under pain of fine from the IRS. I challenge anyone to claim that immigrants have done this kind of damage. And these ruling elites don't think they need to pay taxes either. What a racket! This is truly Banana Republic stuff. 

The quest for the perfect female orgasm

Canner soon began to suspect that her employer -- along with many other pharmaceutical companies -- were exploiting women in pursuit of big bucks.

Red Hot Lies

Chris Horner shows us that those events were not coincidences. Environmentalism has become a new ideology that has replaced Stalinism and that is beginning to take over the Western world - a world that has enjoyed freedom and democracy for centuries. You will learn that Greenpeace is reading from Horner's trash, in order to obtain materials that they could find helpful in their propaganda war.




What is fearful, though, is the incident he described at the journal Climate Research, where editors resigned in "protest" of the publication of a non-alarmist paper. I had one in there a few years ago, and I saw the process first-hand. Tom Wigley and a few of his cronies demanded that the paper be withdrawn, and that the process as to how it could have been published be investigated. The message to editors is clear: if you're not with us, we're against you. That creates a scientific climate of fear.

Also touched upon is the unwillingness of scientists to open their data files to others. When Australian climatologist Warrick Hughes asked Phil Jones, the developer of the United Nations' climate history, for the raw data (he wanted to see how the error bars were calculated), Jones responded: "We have 25 years or so invested in this work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it"?

The last I heard, "science" is about finding "something wrong" with what has gone before. But that is not true in a world of Red Hot Lies. 




This is clearly apparent in this thoroughly detailed and carefully documented book about what has got to be the best orchestrated scam (thank you John Coleman for voicing that opinion) ever perpetrated on the good people of the world. It shows many powerful forces complicit in this scam including the UN, the world's governments, the now fat environmental groups, the well-funded internet alarmist bloggers, the mainstream media even in its decline, many academics and universities riding the new grant gravy train and the once professional societies for which the academics are the prime constituents. As Chris documented, Dr. Robert Corell, the Director of the Global Change Program at The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment and a Senior Policy Fellow at the Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society observed candidly and correctly to colleagues at a conference in the early 1990s "we must not miss this golden goose as this field has never before seen funding like that which is going to be involved here." 


Even though I have been close to this issue from the science side for decades, Chris's book has profoundly affected my thinking on how and why this perversion of science has taken place and who the real puppeteers controlling the strings are. It left me more worried than ever about the future reputation of our science when the truth becomes clear. I also have enhanced concern for our collective financial security as the policies under consideration can only make the global financial meltdown worse. And it will not be the heating from greenhouse gases responsible. Retirement seems so far away again. 


http://www.amazon.com/review/R37TS9GQP4W0O3/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R37TS9GQP4W0O3


Dr. Motl was for many years a physicist at Harvard and has been pointing out the scientific shortcomings of global warming theory along with Lindzen at MIT and a host of others (http://motls.blogspot.com/). I can easily provide you with the names of several hundred distinguished atmospheric scientists, paleontologists, statisticians, physicists, biologists and others who take the same view. I spent 31 years with the Meteorological Service of Canada and I do not subscribe to the view that CO2 is driving global warming. You can find a vetted list of more than 31,000 scientists who disagree with Al Gore at http://www.oism.org/pproject/ & http://www.petitionproject.org/. These scientists all signed a petition in 2007/2008 which stated:
"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth. "

Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them

After reading Milloy's latest offering, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, you could safely conclude that modern environmentalism is a regressive, anti-growth, anti-life movement whose end goal is totalitarianism. If you're skeptical of such a harsh charge, read the environmentalists' own literature, as Milloy has done exhaustively, and see for yourself. 




6. Lust for power. Greens want to control the life of everyone in America and on the planet.

7. Work for a state religion. Greens want to make their misanthropic earth worship (sometimes called Gaia worship) the official relgion of the state. They propound their dementoid faith in public schools and other public places. Thus Greens violate the separation between church and state




"GREENISM" is a new religion.




They want you to become extinct. Yes, they want fewer people any way they can get them to go away.




You will also learn about the way they have created an artificial energy shortage, a fresh water crisis, and the coming push to get you on a purely vegetarian diet. Really. Yes, really.




http://www.amazon.com/Green-Hell-Environmentalists-Plan-Control/dp/1596985852

It’s Time for the Left to Get Serious

The impact of neoliberal globalization has, among other things, reshaped the role of the state. In general, the capitalist state cannot operate strictly on repression;therefore there must be some level of consensus. That consensus, at least among significant portions of the population, rests on the notion that the state will distribute resources and will help to sustain the population, particularly during rough periods. But what happens when the state stops fulfilling its distributionist role? What happens when people come to believe that they cannot count on the state? Neoliberal globalization has led to a shifting of the role of the State in that it is now more highly repressive but also much less distributionist. Given the polarization of wealth and overall inequality, there are fewer resources that can be devoted to distributionist activities, but always plenty of resources to devote toward wars, prisons and police. In that situation, people start looking out for themselves and this is when things can become dangerous. While the Left’s response to such a situation is to, among other things, demand a progressive role for the state and, for socialists, to look for a transformation beyond the capitalist state, the political Right can either move in the direction of greater authoritarianism or toward militiatype movements. An extreme version of this can be openly genocidal, e.g., Rwanda, 1994: people murdering one another over increasingly scarce resources.

But we cannot do that without organization. We cannot do that by relying on Facebook, Web sites and e-mails. We cannot do that by relying on speaking to and with those people that we like and who agree with us. It means organization and it means that we have to operate very differently than most of us are comfortable operating. 

Also, Listen:

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#100206

Scientists discover true love

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.


(The fact that it is only 1 of 10 is generally not reported in the media.)

The shock of the old: Welcome to the elderly age

Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now. Meanwhile, women around the world have half as many children as their mothers.

The longevity revolution affects every country, every community and almost every household. It promises to restructure the economy, reshape the family, redefine politics and even rearrange the geopolitical order over the coming century.

In most of Europe and much of east Asia, fertility is closer to one child per woman than two, way below long-term replacement levels. The notion that the populations of places such as Brazil and India will go on expanding looks misplaced: in fact, they could soon be contracting.

Tina Turner took to the stage in London, dancing in heels and a microskirt in her 70th year.

Millions of the middle-class retired continue working at everything from lucrative consultancies to teaching literacy or finally finishing that PhD. They are often more valuable than the young workers the demographers imagine are supporting them: in fact, the growing number of society's most qualified, most experienced individuals is potentially a huge demographic dividend.

This is sometimes called the Horndal effect, after a Swedish steel mill where productivity rose by 15 per cent as the workforce got older.

all the evidence is that "mass longevity facilitates affluence".

About Sam Harris’ claim that science can answer moral questions

As it turns out, there is much that Harris and I agree on, but I think his main target is actually moral relativism, and that he would get more mileage out of allying himself with philosophy (not to the exclusion of science), rather than taking what appears to be the same misguided scientistic attitude that Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have come to embody so well. But let us start with a summary of Harris’ arguments, with extensive quotations from the lecture, proceeding then to my commentary.

A Cyborg Space Race

Transhumanists believe that the development of such technology will lead one day to “Human version 2.0” – an upgrade of the human body that not only eliminates many of the problems that plague us, but improves upon the basic human design. For instance, some transhumanists envision a day when the human brain will be re-wired with computer chips, allowing us to think, learn and communicate with unprecedented speed and accuracy. 

Human beings developed from earlier species of animals?

US National Science Board tries to suppress knowledge of Americans’ scientific illiteracy

The deleted section notes that the 45% of Americans who answered “true” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is similar to the percentage in previous years and much lower than in Japan (78%), Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). A similar gap exists for the response to the statement: “The universe began with a big explosion,” with which only 33% of Americans agreed.

95% of victims of sexual exploitation by clergy are adult women

 One American report states that 'although clergy of any denomination can sexually exploit children, teens, men or women, over 95% of victims of sexual exploitation by clergy are adult women'. Another study found that 3.1% of regular women congregants (women in the congregation) had suffered sexual abuse.

In 2001 the European parliament passed an unprecedented motion, blaming the Vatican for the rapes of African nuns in the 1990s.

we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism

The new Catholic Bishop of Parramatta, in Sydney's west, Anthony Fisher, drew broader comparisons.
"Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot-ery, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships - all promoted by state-imposed atheism," he said.

Green movement is a modern secular religious movement

This paper argues that environmentalism has become a new secular Western religion, which threatens world disorder as well as the prospects of alleviating poverty in the Third World. It critically examines the Green agenda in terms of a number of prospective international environmental treaties: the Kyoto protocol, the Basel convention, the POPs treaty, and the Biodiversity convention, and shows how these pose serious threats to the prospects of alleviating poverty in India.

The Green movement is a modern secular religious movement engaged in a world wide crusade to impose its 'habits of the heart' on the world. Its primary target is to prevent the economic development which alone offers the world's poor any chance of escaping their age old poverty. This modern day secular Christian crusade has exchanged the saving of souls for saving Spaceship Earth. (p. 20)