A Shi’ite Muslim has his child gashed with a knife during a Muharram procession ahead of Ashoura in Mumbai, November 3, 2014. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
What freedom of religion?
What freedom of choice?
Should we blame the little boy for having such a father or
the religion and its high priests for inducing such behaviour?
It has only been a month since the new Red/Green government took over in Sweden. So it is early days yet. Inexperience abounds both among the Social Democrats (the senior coalition partner) and among the Environment party ministers. The Social Democrats are running a little scared and appear to be bent on appeasing far left and Green party demands. The far left party is not in government but has an inordinate influence since the coalition itself does not have its own majority. The Green party has already stopped many development projects around Stockholm (as they usually do) and the Social Democrats have not been strong enough to stop their job destruction.
The Green party does not have party leaders – only spokespersons – which is a wonderful way of evading responsibility. They have six ministers in the new government. The group is very politically correct with 3 men and 3 women. But with ages ranging between 31 and 51, I observe that they have little chance of (and no interest in) reflecting the views of the increasing number of senior citizens.
Any new government must have its share of inexperience and I have no quarrel with that. But incompetence in a minister is not so forgivable. They have not particularly enhanced their reputations so far. Instead many have been demonstrating an inexperience which borders on either an embarrassing level of naiveté or some level of incompetence. I don’t have any great expectations of them.
This group of six do not fill with me any great confidence but it is early days yet.
Maybe they will all grow into their jobs. Maybe they will perform better than my very low expectations.
But as a group they have not started very well. I am left with the impression that they are all a little too light-weight for the responsibilities that they may well fail to carry. There is a real risk that this group of six will only help in bringing this government further into disrepute.
Maybe it’s just my jaundiced vision, but I don’t see the European Commission as being any repository for ethics or good behaviour.
Of course Luxembourg’s economy is dominated by its banking sector. In global competition it depends on its banks and financial institutions having a competitive advantage over other countries. And it now becomes clear that the country’s government did as much as they could to ensure that the country’s laws allowed these institutions to market and exercise this advantage.
Jean-Claude Juncker
It has now been revealed that Luxembourg, its government, its bureaucrats and its institutions have actively marketed their “tax avoidance” services to at least 340 major companies. Much of this was during the time that Jean-Claude Juncker was Prime Minister of Luxembourg between 1995 and 2013. This is the same high-living Juncker who is the new President of the European Commission and declared 3 months ago that he would “try to put some morality, some ethics, into the European tax landscape.” Juncker lives up to my low expectations of EU mandarins.
Of course tax avoidance is legal and not tax evasion. I have little sympathy for politicians who blame corporations for taking advantage of the rules they themselves make to minimise their tax payments. Any corporation would be failing in its fiduciary duties if it did not legally try to minimise its tax burden. For that matter any individual who for want of being familiar with the rules, payed more tax than he had to – even if it was for philanthropic reasons – would be just a fool.
(This has nothing to do with my view that taxes based on wealth generation are fundamentally counter-productive and should instead be based on wealth consumption or destruction).
The Guardian:
A cache of almost 28,000 pages of leaked tax agreements, returns and other sensitive papers relating to over 1,000 businesses paints a damning picture of an EU state which is quietly rubber-stamping tax avoidance on an industrial scale.
The documents show that major companies — including drugs group Shire, City trading firm Icap and vacuum cleaner firm Dyson, who are headquartered in the UK or Ireland — have used complex webs of internal loans and interest payments which have slashed the companies’ tax bills. These arrangements, signed off by the Grand Duchy, are perfectly legal.
The documents also show how some 340 companies from around the world arranged specially-designed corporate structures with the Luxembourg authorities. The businesses include corporations such as Pepsi, Ikea, Accenture, Burberry, Procter & Gamble, Heinz, JP Morgan and FedEx. Leaked papers relating to the Coach handbag firm, drugs group Abbott Laboratories, Amazon, Deutsche Bank and Australian financial group Macquarie are also included. ……..
……. The revelations will be embarrassing for the new president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who was prime minister of Luxembourg between 1995 and 2013. In a speech in Brussels in July, Juncker promised to “try to put some morality, some ethics, into the European tax landscape.” He has insisted that the country is not a tax haven.
Pressure is already building on Luxembourg after the European Commission launched a formal investigation into whether Amazon’s tax arrangements in the Grand Duchy amount to unfair state aid. The Luxembourg tax arrangements of Italian carmaker Fiat’s finance unit are also under official scrutiny by Brussels.
Asked recently if such a crackdown risked damaging the economy of Luxembourg, one senior figure closely involved in the G20 reform programme said: “I don’t care. It is like saying: ‘If you fight drugs there will be no jobs in certain parts of Mexico.’” ……
There are two theories about the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17 and the murder of 298 passengers and crew (where over 60% were Dutch):
The Russian theory was initially ridiculed by the Ukrainians, NATO countries and the western media. But a few weeks ago the Dutch investigators let slip the information that at least one oxygen mask had been deployed and this was much more consistent with a weaker air-to-air missile followed by cannon fire rather than the much more powerful BUK ground-to-air missile. A BUK ground-to-air missile would not have given any time for the oxygen mask to deploy. Moreover a multitude of regular holes were found in the remains of the fuselage. They were too regular to just be shrapnel and their size and regularity were consistent with high velocity cannon fire. Then the lead Dutch prosecutor in an interview with der Spiegel would not categorically rule out the Russian theory.
Now the Dutch Prime Minister has called for a “thorough, independent inquiry” into the shooting down of MH17, again insinuating that the assumed theory of a ground-to-air missile has some fundamental flaws.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Wednesday stressed the importance of a thorough, independent investigation of the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 before any decision on where those responsible should face trial.
The Dutch have the lead role in investigating the downing of theBoeing 777 aircraft, which crashed over rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine in July with the loss of all 298 people aboard, two thirds of them Dutch.
With the crash site too dangerous to access due to fighting, they have been relying mostly on publicly available information to carry out a remote investigation.
“What we now have to do is through the independent safety boards to exactly understand what happened and the public prosecutors have to work on the prosecution which follows from this,” Rutte said, when asked if the International Criminal Court was the right venue for any trial.
“Then it has to be decided at what court it should take place. As we see things now, it is not most likely that the International Criminal Court is most suited to this.”
Rutte was on a one-day visit to Kuala Lumpur to meet his Malaysian counterpart, Najib Razak. Rutte flew from Amsterdam on Flight MH19, re-named from MH17 after the disaster. ….
Kiev blames pro-Russian separatists for the airliner’s destruction. Russia says a Ukrainian military aircraft shot it down.
A report by the Dutch safety board said in September that MH17 crashed after a “large number of high-energy objects”penetrated its fuselage.
The reluctance of the Dutch investigators, the lead prosecutor and now the Prime Minister to just accept the NATO supported theory is, I think, a clear indication that the Russian theory is a much more likely explanation than is being acknowledged.
The results so far seem to apply nationwide and are as clear a “wave” as there can be.
My perception is of an overwhelming urge to vote against Barack Obama first and “for” somebody or something else second. Democratic voters just stayed away. The low voter turnout (c. 38%) is further evidence that it is disillusion with Obama which predominates.
A Red Wave then across the Senate, the House and among Governors. (In most other parts of the world red is the colour of the left and blue the colour of free-market conservatism).
Obama has 2 years left to go and though he has not achieved very much over the last 6 years, even with a Democratic Senate, he will now be reduced to bypassing Congress and issuing Presidential decrees. Increasingly he is going to be irrelevant.
But most likely he will continue his preferred course of “academic inaction”, but even inaction – as we have seen – can do a great deal of damage.
I posted recently about the challenge to the Bollywood union’s ban on women make up artists. The Supreme Court in India has now ruled that this ban is illegal (but in India labour laws are still among the most restrictive in the world though the new Modi government is beginning to address them). The court has given the union one week to delete their own rule restricting women and has assured the petitioners that if the union does not, the Court will.
Indian Express:
The 59-year-old practice in the Indian film industry that bars women from being classified as make-up artists is set to end with the Supreme Court stating on Monday that it would not allow this “constitutionally impermissible discrimination” to continue.
In the film industry, only men are allowed to become make-up artists while women are classified as hairdressers. The trade unions say this is to ensure that the men are not deprived of work.
“How can this discrimination continue? We will not permit this. It cannot be allowed under our Constitution. Why should only a male artist be allowed to put make-up? How can it be said that only men can be make-up artists and women can be hairdressers? We don’t see a reason to prohibit a woman from becoming a make-up artist if she is qualified,” said a bench of Justices Dipak Misra and U U Lalit.
“You better delete this clause on your own. Remove this immediately. We are in 2014, not in 1935. Such things cannot continue even for a day,” the court told the Cine Costume Make-up Artists and Hair Dressers Association (CCMAA). The court said the film industry, as a unit, could not be allowed to prolong this “gender bias”.
The court was hearing a petition by Charu Khurana and other women make-up artists, who were rebuffed by the CCMAA when they sought make-up artist cards. Khurana qualified from the Cinema Make-up School, California, but her application for membership was rejected by the CCMAA in 2009 because she is a woman.
The bench directed the body to come back with a “positive response” within a week. Khurana’s counsel, Jyotika Kalra, complained that Maharashtra’s union refused to delete the clause even after a state government order. “Don’t worry. If they don’t do it this time, we will order deletion,” assured the bench.
In the meantime the new Modi government has initiated moves to rationalise some of India’s archaic and restrictive labour laws:
India’s labour laws are restrictive in nature and hurt investments in the manufacturing sector. The Industrial Disputes Act (1947) has rigid provisions such as compulsory and prior government approval in the case of layoffs, retrenchment and closure of industrial establishments employing more than 100 workers. This clause applies even when there is a good reason to shut shop, or worker productivity is seriously low.
The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act (1970) states that if the job content or nature of work of employees needs to be changed, 21 days’ notice must be given. The changes also require the consent of the employees, and this can be tricky.
While the right of workers to associate is important, the Trade Union Act (1926) provides for the creation of trade unions where even outsiders can be office-bearers. This hurts investor faith and restricts economic growth.
Rigid labour laws discourage firms from trying to introduce new technology, requiring some workers to be retrenched. This deters FDI because of the fear that it would not be possible to dismiss unproductive workers or to downsize during a downturn. Hence getting FDI into export-oriented labour-intensive sectors in India has not been fully achieved.
In contrast, China has succeeded in attracting FDI to export-oriented labour-intensive manufacturing, in part because of flexible labour laws such as the contract labour system implemented in 1995. Whereas in India, employers have taken to hiring workers on contract outside the institutional and legislative ambit, resulting in informalisation of the labour market. This hampers worker well-being. ……
To undo the malady in India’s labour market, some changes have recently been initiated in the three acts that largely govern India’s labour market: the Factories Act (1948), the Labour Laws Act (1988) and the Apprenticeship Act (1961). Amendments to some restrictive provisions of all these acts have been cleared by the Cabinet and are set to be tabled in Parliament. Key changes proposed include dropping the punitive clause that calls for the imprisonment of company directors who fail to implement the Apprenticeship Act of 1961.
The Government is also going to do away with a proposed amendment to the Act that would mandate employers to absorb at least half of its apprentices in regular jobs.
In order to provide flexibility to managers and employers, the amendment to the Factories Act includes doubling the provision of overtime from 50 hours a quarter to 100 hours in some cases and from 75 hours to 125 hours in others involving work of public interest. This is seen by some as being anti-labour as it imposes greater working hours without ensuring their security and welfare. …..
Rational argument cannot penetrate faith.
Ask for evidence and you get model results. Ask for proof that the models are valid and you get hindcasts based on adjusted data. Ask for evidence of man-made emissions causing global warming and the answer is that it must be so for there is no other explanation. There isn’t if you don’t want to see it.
The IPCC believes that model results – even where the models are wrong – provide “conclusive” evidence of not just man-made global warming but that it is due to the emissions of carbon dioxide. It is politics not science. And the politics from India and China have ensured that the IPCC accepts fossil fuels till 2100!!!
For there is – in fact – no actual evidence in the form of data or measurements. There are only model results. There are only model forecasts where the track record shows that every IPCC forecast has been wrong. Fossil fuels – especially gas – will be around and will continue for many hundreds of years unless cheap fusion comes earlier.
Instead of real data showing support for the models, the evidence is accumulating that not only are the models wrong, but also that there are more indications that a global cooling is underway rather than global warming. Real measurements and real data show:
Add to this that a VEI5+ volcano eruption has not occurred since 1991 and is long overdue. It will most likely show up along the Pacific Ring of Fire or in Indonesia. Consider also that the Bárðarbunga volcano in Iceland has been producing sulphur dioxide at a rate which in 9 weeks has pumped twice as much SO2 into the atmosphere than all of Europe does in a year. Bárðarbunga volcano is far from VEI5+ levels and the eruption could continue for months. The SO2 emissions are not all reaching the stratosphere but will surely lead to increased cloud formation around sulphur aerosols and cloud levels will probably be high through at least next year. It becomes increasingly clear that further cooling effects are already in the “natural” pipeline of events. Some new glacier formation has been observed in the Scottish highlands. Some Alpine and Himalayan glaciers have started to increase and while others still decrease, the observation of increase where there has been none before is highly significant. The Great lakes have seen unprecedentedly high ice cover levels. Snow cover in the northern hemisphere is high and is lasting longer into spring than for some time.
But the models and the presuppositions and the misconceptions of the religious high priests cannot be easily denied by the faithful and have an inertia of their own. The IPCC remains delusional and in denial about reality. It continues to play its global warming fiddle but it is badly out of tune and its alarmist cacophony is being overtaken by real events.
It may not be a glacial age that is starting but another Little Ice Age looks like it is on its way.
A new paper reports experimental evidence which shows that misleading headlines do exactly what they set out to do. They direct the reader to take away a conclusion that is not – or not entirely – supported by the content of an article. They are not false but they do succeed in leaving the reader with a “desired” conclusion.
Abstract:Information presented in news articles can be misleading without being blatantly false. Experiment 1 examined the effects of misleading headlines that emphasize secondary content rather than the article’s primary gist. We investigated how headlines affect readers’ processing of factual news articles and opinion pieces, using both direct memory measures and more indirect reasoning measures. Experiment 2 examined an even more subtle type of misdirection. We presented articles featuring a facial image of one of the protagonists, and examined whether the headline and opening paragraph of an article affected the impressions formed of that face even when the person referred to in the headline was not the person portrayed. We demonstrate that misleading headlines affect readers’ memory, their inferential reasoning and behavioral intentions, as well as the impressions people form of faces. On a theoretical level, we argue that these effects arise not only because headlines constrain further information processing, biasing readers toward a specific interpretation, but also because readers struggle to update their memory in order to correct initial misconceptions. Practical implications for news consumers and media literacy are discussed.
The researchers ran two experiments with multiple components, but let’s focus on the part of their study most relevant to the Ebola headline problem. In one test, Ecker and colleagues asked participants to read several short articles. Some of these articles had slightly misleading headlines. Others had headlines that were broadly accurate in the context of the entire article. Take one test article about the safety of consuming genetically modified food. The article quotes a scientific consortium backed by a national science academy as saying that the safety of such food “has been confirmed by many peer-reviewed studies world-wide.” In an attempt to seem balanced, the article also quotes an organic-food advocate (and presumed opponent of GM foods) saying that the long-term health impacts of genetically modified food “remain undetermined.”Some test participants read this article below a fairly accurate (if terribly bland) headline: “GM foods are safe.” Others read it below a headline that wasn’t blatantly wrong but remained slightly misleading or imbalanced: “GM foods may pose long-term health risks.” After reading the articles, test participants answered questions meant to gauge the influence the story might have left on their thoughts or potential behaviors.The study results betray the subtle power of misleading headlines. Test participants who read articles with accurate (or “congruent”) headlines tended to rely more on the content of the article itself when answering questions than those who saw misleading (or “incongruent”) headlines. In the case of the genetically modified food, participants who read misleading headlines appeared more concerned with its safety than those who saw a congruent headline–showing a greater willingness to pay extra for non-GM foods, for one thing. This gap in perception occurred despite the fact that both groups read the same exact article in full. The headline had left its mental mark.
Ecker and colleagues believe the big problem with misleading headlines is that they’re just that–misleading, as opposed to downright wrong. Correcting misinformation requires a lot of mental work. People are perfectly capable of doing that work once they recognize the need, but in the case of misleading headlines, that need isn’t always clear. After all, the misleading headline about genetically modified food is true in a very strict sense: the foods may possess long-term health risks, in the same way the world may end tomorrow. As the researchers put it, misleading headlines may have served to nudge behavior “without readers noticing their slant.”
New Zealand has one of the longest temperature-time series available. In the past it has been reported that this data-set confirms the view of global warming of just under 1ºC per century. But that is now highly suspect. A new paper reanalysing the data has been published and shows that the trend is less than one-third of what has been previously assumed.
de Freitas, C.R., Dedekind, M.O. and Brill, B.E. 2014. A reanalysis of long-term surface air temperature trends in New Zealand. Environmental Modeling and Assessment, do1 10.1007/s10666-014-9429-z.
Abstract: Detecting trends in climate is important in assessments of global change based on regional long-term data. Equally important is the reliability of the results that are widely used as a major input for a large number of societal design and planning purposes. New Zealand provides a rare long temperature time series in the Southern Hemisphere, and it is one of the longest continuous climate series available in the Southern Hemisphere Pacific. It is therefore important that this temperature dataset meets the highest quality control standards. New Zealand’s national record for the period 1909 to 2009 is analysed and the data homogenized. Current New Zealand century-long climatology based on 1981 methods produces a trend of 0.91 °C per century. Our analysis, which uses updated measurement techniques and corrects for shelter-contaminated data, produces a trend of 0.28 °C per century.
Dr. Craig Idso writes:
De Freitas et al. report that, whereas the previous analysis yielded a trend of 0.91 ± 0.30°C per century, their analysis – which used updated measurement techniques and corrects for shelter-contaminated data – produces a trend of only 0.28 ± 0.29°C per century, which is a heck of a lot less than what had previously been believed to have been the case.
The significance of de Freitas et al.’s work is two-fold. First, the authors report that the old, contaminated data with the inflated warming trend has been “widely used as inputs for societal design and planning purposes” all across New Zealand. Second, de Freitas et al. note these data are “extensively used in hindcast verifications for regional and local models.” However, as the saying goes, “garbage in equals garbage out.” Therefore, at best, the corrected New Zealand temperature trend, which is three times smaller than the uncorrected version, calls into question all results, findings, conclusions, and policies built upon or derived from the old contaminated data record. And at worst, it invalidates them.
Given the great importance of starting with the proper baseline, one would hope that with so much at stake in terms of economics, personal freedoms, and governance, much greater care and scrutiny would be applied to ensuring the quality and reliability of near-surface air temperature records. But obviously, such has not been the case for New Zealand. And it begs the question as to where else temperature records might be less than par.
To obtain a “global temperature”, raw temperature data from available sites is massaged, applied to geographical grids, corrected, adjusted, “filled-in” and otherwise homogenised. But the algorithms used to make these adjustments inevitably carry the preconceptions and misconceptions of the adjusters. As raw data is reviewed it is becoming increasingly obvious (in the US, in Australia in Germany and now in New Zealand) that “adjustments” that have been made over the last 20 years have been plagued by “confirmation bias”. Rather than a clear-cut warming record what is apparent is that many data-sets have been adjusted to “cool the past”.
Sarmatian (Amazon) warriior woman (image from RealmsofGold)
The stories of the mythical warrior women of central Asia are largely based on the writings of the Greeks and the stories date back to the 8th and the 7th centuries BCE (Homer’s Iliad). By the 5th century BCE, Herodotus refers to a group pf warrior women taken prisoner by the Greeks, who overwhelmed their captors on board ship and then intermingled with the Scythians to give rise to the Sauromatians (6th – 4th centuries BCE) and who in turn evolved to become the nomadic Sarmatians around the 4th century BCE. The Sarmatians held sway for some 900 years until around 500 CE. If the myths of the Amazon women are based on reality then the reality must pre-date Homer. The original Amazons must then refer to the warrior-women among the ancestors of the Sauromatian peoples who roamed the steppes of southern Russia / central Asia. On horse-back presumably.
By the time of the Sauromatians and the succeeding Sarmatians, the warrior women traditions have also evolved. There is archaeological evidence from the graves of martial, noble women who were interred together with their finery, their weapons and even their horses. Many graves previously just assumed to be those of male warriors have now been revealed by DNA testing to be of women warriors. More than 25% of such graves are now thought to be of women. Such a wide-spread culture must have originated long before.
Adrienne Mayor has a new book out The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World which I have been reading over the last few days. It is a fascinating collection of the various myths surrounding the warrior women though it does not bring any light to bear on who they actually were beyond saying they were Scythians. But she does show that many of the myths are just myths and the reality was probably more mundane than the highly erotic, sensationalised version of the Greeks. In fact some of the Greek writings were clearly the tabloid press of their day. Her book is highly readable but it is a compendium of the writings about the Amazons rather than any new theory or hypothesis about their origins. She herself call it her “Encyclopaedia Amazonica”.
The steely women who cut off one breast to accommodate their archery needs was just fiction. There is no evidence that they were “man-eating” – in more ways than one – as the tabloids of the day were wont to narrate. The idea of man-hating, lesbian, hordes, armed to the teeth and rampaging and pillaging innocent heterosexual communities across the steppes made a good story then as it would today. Equally the vision of bands of warrior-virgins ensuring their own extinction was just pulp-fiction. The Persians like the Amazon were enemies who came from the East and many Persian characteristics were attributed to and embellished the Amazon myths. But in Greek – Amazon interactions, the warrior-woman is always conquered by a Greek hero figure!
But there is little doubt in my mind that around 3,000 years ago the Amazons existed. They were a nomadic community across the steppes of central Asia where women were as likely to be warriors or rulers as men. The had a hierarchical structure but the hierarchy was not based on gender (probably). They were not a horde like the Mongols who came much later. But they were nomadic and they did not allow others to push them around as they rode across their territories. The women were clearly accomplished horse-women. Their economy was based on horses rather than cattle. They used hallucinogenic plant extracts and used tattoos (as marks of status or rank perhaps). They were probably the ancestors of the Sauromatians. They were also arguably the most gender-neutral culture ever to exist – and that includes the present day.
An excellent read.
The k2p blog 