Tom Faranda's Folly

Global Warming Update #5

Whew. This one's a doozy.

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial today entitled Global Warming Gag Order, available to anyone on their free site. OpinionJournal - Featured Article . Seems like Senator (D) Jay Rockefeller and Senator (R) Olympia Snowe decided to take ExxonMobil to task. Here's a few excerpts from the editorial:

The letter is so over-the-top that we also wonder if Mr. Rockefeller in particular has even read it. (He and Ms. Snowe didn't return our call.) The Senator hails from coal-producing West Virginia, where people know something about carbon emissions. Come to think of it, Mr. Rockefeller owes his own vast wealth to something other than non-carbon energy. But perhaps it's easier to be carbon free when your fortune comes from a trust fund.

The letter is of a piece with what has become a campaign of intimidation against any global warming dissent. Not only is everyone supposed to concede that the planet has been warming--as it has--but we are all supposed to salute and agree that human beings are the definitive cause, that the magnitude of the warming will be disastrous and its effects catastrophic, that such problems as AIDS and poverty are less urgent, and that economic planners must therefore impose vast new regulatory burdens on everyone around the world. Exxon is being targeted in this letter and other ways because it is one of the few companies that still thinks some debate on these questions is valuable.

Every dogma has its day, and we've lived long enough to see more than one "consensus" blown apart within a few years of "everyone knowing" it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Here's a link directly to the Senators letter, which the Journal published next to their editorial OpinionJournal - Extra and here's an excerpt:

In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth. Further, we believe ExxonMobil should take additional steps to improve the public debate, and consequently the reputation of the United States. We would recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world's largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts. We believe this would be especially important in the developing world, where the disastrous effects of global climate change are likely to have their most immediate and calamitous impacts.

Drug-coated stents and blood clots

The Washington Times has a good brief article on the new fears that drug-coated stents (the little coil that's put into coronary arteries to keep them open) are not as safe as originally believed.

Drug-coated stents might raise risk of blood clots - Nation/Politics - insider.washingtontimes.com

Doctors think these stents may raise the risk of life-threatening blood clots months and even years later unless people stay on Plavix, an anti-clotting drug whose long-term safety in stent patients has not been established.
    Thousands of people are being urged to take the $4-a-day drug until more is known.
    Thousands of others each day who develop new blockages are being treated by doctors no longer sure of what to do. Many are returning to the old metal stents, and some are fundamentally rethinking when to use stents at all and are considering alternatives such as bypass surgery or medications.
    A Food and Drug Administration panel will meet on the issue Thursday and Friday. Medical journals are rushing studies into print, and powerful physicians' groups are reconsidering treatment guidelines. Stents can be removed but only with surgery that mirrors the implantation procedure.
    "It's such a huge public health issue with so many people involved," said Dr. Robert Califf of Duke University, who worked on one study to be presented to the FDA.
    Doctors also worry about overreacting to a risk that appears small -- five or fewer clots in every 1,000 patients.
    "The benefit of having a drug-eluting stent is tremendous," said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Recession in 2007?

I decided to post this press release I received a few days ago from the very economically liberal CEPR (the Center for Economic and Policy Research). I heartily disagee, (Although a slowdown in economic growth is possible. A slowdown in growth is a far cry from the economy shrinking by their predicted 1%.) so we'll see who's right.

Press Release

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U.S. RECESSION LOOMS IN 2007
CEPR’s Economic Forecast Blames Housing Decline

For Immediate Release: November 29, 2006

Contact: Lynn Erskine, 202-293-5380 x115

Washington, DC: Weakness in the housing market is likely to push the economy into a recession next year, according to a forecast by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“Recession Looms for the U.S. Economy in 2007,” by economist Dean Baker, predicts that the economic recovery that began in November 2001 will come to an end in 2007.

“This recovery has been fueled by a housing bubble, just as the late 90s cycle was fueled by a stock bubble,” said Baker. “Now that the housing market has weakened, Americans are looking at a recession in 2007.”

Baker expects that the weakness from the housing market, which is already spreading over to other sectors of the economy, will have an even larger impact in 2007 as consumers lose the ability to borrow against dwindling home equity. With weak consumer demand dampening investment, the economy is likely to shrink by close to 1 percentage point over the course of the year.

Predictions for 2007 (2006Q4 – 2007Q4)

GDP growth	-0.7 percent
Job growth	-1.2 million
Nominal wage growth	3.4 percent
Inflation (CPI)	2.6 percent
Residential construction	-12.0 percent
Consumption	-1.2 percent
Investment	2.0 percent
Exports	4.0 percent
Imports	-2.0 percent
Government expenditures	2.0 percent

Baker also predicts that the Fed will begin lowering rates no later than its first meeting in January 2007 and that unemployment will climb to over 6 percent by the end of 2007.

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The Center for Economic and Policy Research is an independent, nonpartisan think tank that was established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives. CEPR's Advisory Board of Economists includes Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz; Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University; and Eileen Appelbaum, Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.

Center for Economic and Policy Research, 1611 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20009
Phone: (202) 293-5380, Fax: (202) 588-1356, Home: www.cepr.net

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Militant atheism

There's an interesting discussion going on the weblog althouse, right here Althouse: Those contemptuous atheists... why won't they be kind?

Ann Althouse writes about Nicholas Kristoff's NY Times column this morning, quoting Kristoff:

[There is] an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive led in part by [Richard] Dawkins — the Oxford scientist who is author of the new best seller “The God Delusion.” It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for....

[T]he tone of this Charge of the Atheist Brigade is ... contemptuous and even ... a bit fundamentalist.

Ann Althouse's commentary (I presume she's an agnostic) is interesting, as are many of the comments left by readers (including one two from me).

Third world religious faith and first world arrogance

In keeping with the theme of the prior post on Africa and the undeveloped world, here's a column in which a Catholic priest and sociologist - who has been writing for at least 40 years - is kind enough to accept the faith of southern hemisphere believers, as long as they leave the thinking to him.

The Limits of Tolerance is on the the Wall Street Journal's free site OpinionJournal - Taste Here's an excerpt, but it's worth reading the wole column:

"We will depend on them for vitality," Father Greeley predicted. "But they will continue to depend on us for the ideas."

To judge by a murmuring restlessness in the crowd, more than a few audience members were surprised such a remark. It seemed--how to put it?--patronizing. Do people in the Global South have no ideas of their own? Is theirs a faith of pure emotion? Catherine Barsotti, a professor at Centro Hispano de Estudios Teológicos outside of Los Angeles who attended the talk, told me afterward that Father Greeley is, generally, "a voice of sanity in the Catholic Church, [someone who is] trying to get the church to hear people it doesn't like to hear." Which is why, she added, "I can't believe he meant what he said."

When pressed, though, Father Greeley didn't take back his remark. Instead he went further, waxing eloquent about how people in South America have a "whole different approach to religion." He marveled at the way that Catholics in Brazil ask people from "all different faiths" to pray for a sick child. He recommended going to Mexico "if you want to find out what the church was like before Trent." (He was referring to the 16th-century council that codified so much Roman Catholic doctrine.) He claimed that Mexicans "have patron saints for pickpockets and prostitutes." Catholicism in Mexico is "a religion of joy and celebration. We have much to learn from them." Yes, it sounds like a compliment, but the condescension--those people and their quaint ways--is unmistakable.

... But persuading North Americans and Europeans to have more respect for newcomers may be a losing battle, according to Philip Jenkins, the author of "The Next Christendom." Mr. Jenkins laughs knowingly when I ask him about this problem. "Every time there has been a shift in Christianity, older churches have always adopted this very patronizing attitude."

Latest read: The Shackled Continent

This excellent book of 288 pages is an examination of Africa and all it's problems and potential, by a reporter for the London-based The Economist magazine. Robert Guest was one of their African correspondents for seven years, residing for most of the time in Johannesburg, South Africa.

My friend Tom Hardy and his wife Mabvuto recommended the book when I saw them briefly a month ago Tom Faranda's Folly: A quick visit with the Hardys - friends from the UK

Tom works out of England for a publishing company and spends a great deal of time in Africa, and Mabvuto is from Africa.

A term frequently used for Africa is "an enigma." In this book Guest looks at the historic and current reasons why Africa is so poor, and what can be done about it. It is a book about sub-saharan Africa, so the issues of Arab North Africa or of Darfur and the Sudan never come up.

Despite the serious, indeed tragic subject matter, Guest manages humor and a breezy style.

A brief sample of some things he touches on - African Socialism (the failure of) - Mougabe and the gradual destruction of Zimbabwe - Nigerian Petrodollars and Nigerian Tribalism - progress in South Africa - the fall of Zambia, from a promising position the 60's to total basket case - success in Botswana - how first world trade protectionism costs Africa twice what it gets in aid from the developed world.

He tells a funny story about an 18 hour drive with a Guinness brewery beer truck to supply bars in Cameroon. Or rather it should have taken 18 hours, but actually took five days because of horrible roads, corrupt police and third world bureaucracy. (NOTE - despite this, it's still worth it for Guinness to do business in Africa. One thing I learned when I lived in Jamaica is that breweries always manage to turn a profit!)

How does Africa leap into the 21st century? Guest offers some standard answers - eliminate the corruption, improve the infrastructure, don't give foreign aid to corrupt regimes. He points out that Africa, by borrowing contemporary technology, can leapfrog over some problems. For example, why build land phone lines when you can go straight into the cellphone era.

So, a fine book and I learned quite a bit. One example: the mid nineties genocide in Rwanda as Hutus slaughtered 800,000 Tutsi's (and any Hutus who protested). I always assumed there was emnity between the two tribes going back for centuries. Not so. They got along just fine until the Belgians arrived and took over from Germany after World War I. The Belgians literally stirred up rancor between the two tribes.

Another fine book on third world problems and how they have developed and what not to do to solve them (and a few things that work) is The Elusive Quest for Growth which I wrote about here - Tom Faranda's Folly: Latest read - "The Elusive Quest for Growth"

Another loss in the family

Yesterday evening my Aunt Ardis called with the terrible news that my cousin Tim - my oldest cousin, a year younger than me - had died.

Of course a shock, but not a surprise - Tim had been diagnosed in January with thyroid cancer, and seemingly everything that could go wrong did go wrong. He had surgery at Sloan Kettering in early February and an expected eight to ten day hospitalization ended up at about 25 days. He had breathing problems and was trached, and they never were able to close the tracheotomy.

I saw him over the summer at my uncle's summer party, and he was terribly thin, and had just found out the cancer was spreading - it was in his lung.

Things got better, got worse, better again and then the decline. When I spoke with his wife Pat last weekend (Tim couldn't talk), she seemed resigned to a bad outcome. But I didn't think it would be this fast.

Tim and Pat have three grown children and he has two sisters and two brothers. They and his parents are all crushed. He was a great family man. So spare a prayer for my cousin and his family.

Here he is this summer, with our Tim. My cousin always laughed when I pointed out how close the resemblance was!