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More Olympian contempt for the poor from someone who traces all social problems to people’s mystifying failure to be more like him. Great standard of thinking they’ve got over there at GMU.
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Each member of a family, photographed each year, for 30 years.
links for 2007-03-29
29-Mar-07
links for 2007-03-28
28-Mar-07
links for 2007-03-25
25-Mar-07
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Former Irish football coach Brian Kerr describes problems getting his players to sit through video analysis of their own performances. Apparently 20 minutes was the longest he could get them to concentrate. Says a lot, really.
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Interesting graph comparing approval ratings of Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush. Clinton comes out as most popular, slightly ahead of Reagan. And I hadn’t realised Nixon was that popular before Watergate.
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“We humans are now so aggressively fishing, hunting, logging, and growing crops in all parts of the world that we are literally chasing other species off the planet”.
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Astonishing treasure-trove of brilliant music from all over the world, but particularly Africa. I’m still exploring it but can strongly recommend the ‘Ekeja Jo’ and ‘Ambience a Congo’ series.
links for 2007-03-24
24-Mar-07
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Good post on inequality from an interesting looking new (to me) blog
links for 2007-03-23
23-Mar-07
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“… the biggest UK cartel investigation in history. Officials have uncovered evidence of bid-rigging in thousands of tenders for public sector and private contracts, leaving taxpayers and private companies potentially short-changed…”
links for 2007-03-18
18-Mar-07
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Not that I have any clue what Twitter is, but this is great.
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Excellent post by William Connolley exposing the numerous lies in Durkin’s ‘Global Warming Swindle’ docu. Concludes we have to do more to counter such propaganda than “showing people pictures of polar bears standing on ice floes”.
links for 2007-03-14
14-Mar-07
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The 1790 US Census in Google Earth.
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Did global warming help create the conflict in Darfur? Shouldn’t be surprising - droughts mean population movement means conflict over land. David Wheeler wonders when the climate culprits will face their day in court.
Great trips: North from Nairobi
13-Mar-07
For once, I might have something over Tyler Cowen. After a great list of his ten favourite trips, Tyler admits “I’ve never been to East Africa”. Well, I have, and I hereby nominate the flight north from Nairobi towards Nakuru as my Trip To Take Before You Die.
In roughly half an hour you fly in a single-prop Cessna from Wilson Airport over Kibera slum city, the mansions of west Nairobi, a dense patchwork of farms growing the green beans you buy in Tesco, the dizzying plunge from the central plateau to the floor of the Rift Valley, the jaw-dropping splendour of Mount Longonot, the flower farms of fragile Lake Naivasha, ending (if you don’t go all the way to Nakuru itself) with a hair-raising descent over Lake Elementaita to an airstrip grazed by zebras and featuring my favourite departures lounge in the world (one tree, one bench).
links for 2007-03-11
11-Mar-07
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Jaw-droppingly dumb comment of the day: “if Davies is right, and Burnham et. al. are right [about the Lancet figures on Iraq war deaths], then we should be seeing massive floods of refugees”. We are, so maybe they are right after all?
links for 2007-03-08
08-Mar-07
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An examination of plausible political, social and ’security’ consequences of expected climate change, many of them very bad indeed. Note that none of these are included in current cost-benefit calculations of action to tackle climate change.
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Spiegel leaks some of the main IPCC 4th report. Eg, “Some 20 to 30 percent of all species face a “high risk of extinction” if global temperatures rise another 1.5 to 2.5 degrees C above 1990 levels”. Put a cost on that, economists.
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Possibly the best blog ever.
links for 2007-03-07
07-Mar-07
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Very sad news - I didn’t know Chris, but his work for mysociety.org was pioneering, and his blogging was rigorously sensible and unflashy, not a bad example to try and follow.
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Discusses, sceptically, the fanciful and implausible techno-fixes to climate chnage beloved of the Bush administration and various quack economists in preference to people taking responsibility for their actions.
links for 2007-03-01
01-Mar-07
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Either Bryan Caplan thinks this one homeless guy he saw on TV is representative of all poor people in America, or he already thought all poor people in America were “extremely lazy and impulsive, and didn’t want to change”. Which is worse?