Nobelist Paul Krugman flips on Biden in a New York minute

Paul Krugman used to say illegal immigration hurt poor Americans, but not anymore.

Mother Teresa: Abortion is a direct war, direct murder by the mother herself, the first and greatest destroyer of peace in our time

 

Here, 1979:

I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given into drugs, and I tried to find out why – why is it like that, and the answer was: Because there is no one in the family to receive them. Father and mother are so busy they have no time. Young parents are in some institution and the child takes back to the street and gets involved in something.

We are talking of peace. These are things that break peace, but I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing – direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a mother could forget her child – I will not forget you – I have carved you in the palm of my hand.

We are carved in the palm of His hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget something impossible – but even if she could forget – I will not forget you.

And today the greatest means – the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here – our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us. Our children, we want them, we love them, but what of the millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today.

Because if a mother can kill her own child – what is left for me to kill you and you kill me – there is nothing between. And this I appeal in India, I appeal everywhere: Let us bring the child back, and this year being the child’s year: What have we done for the child? At the beginning of the year I told, I spoke everywhere and I said: Let us make this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted. And today is the end of the year, have we really made the children wanted? I will give you something terrifying. We are fighting abortion by adoption, we have saved thousands of lives, we have sent words to all the clinics, to the hospitals, police stations – please don’t destroy the child, we will take the child. So every hour of the day and night it is always somebody, we have quite a number of unwedded mothers – tell them come, we will take care of you, we will take the child from you, and we will get a home for the child. And we have a tremendous demand from families who have no children, that is the blessing of God for us. And also, we are doing another thing which is very beautiful – we are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning.

Ben Bernanke wins Nobel Prize in Economics for 495 bank failures under his leadership as Federal Reserve Chair Feb 2006-Feb 2014

 

 

The 495 failures were a huge improvement over the 9,000 bank failures during The Great Depression of the 1930s, his specialty of study in the 1980s, experts said under their breath.

The Deep State? It exists, and it's a good thing, too, says Nobel Prize Winner and NYT columnist

Greta Thunberg passed over for Nobel Peace Prize

Trump to dignify a vicious little tyrant by meeting with him, and they're calling it a victory

For the presidency, it's not:

North Korea: Trump's scored a real victory but don’t expect complete denuclearization any time soon

Editorial: On North Korea, Trump is right

Panetta: Trump Meeting "Positive Step," World "Breathing Sigh Of Relief"

Could Donald Trump end up with the Nobel Peace Prize?

Kim Jong Un can spin this any way he likes, but Trump has taunted and tortured Little Rocket Man into blinking first and the world can (temporarily) breathe a massive sigh of relief

Inhofe: The More Aggressive Trump Gets, The More He Gets Done; Brought Kim Jong-un To The Table

Trump’s Meeting With Kim Jong-un Is Another Pledge to Do What Nobody Else Can

Trump says North Korea is ‘sincere’ on reported offer to hold nuclear talks

Michael Mann Of Penn State Claimed He "Shared" The Nobel Peace Prize For Almost Five Years

As reported here. And the guy still won't say in the revised bio to whom the Nobel was actually awarded: "jointly" to the IPCC and Al Gore. The IPCC and Al Gore shared the prize, not the IPCC authors, the IPCC and Al Gore.

"He shared the Nobel Peace Prize"

"He contributed to the award of the prize", but to whom exactly?

Ah, to these, exactly.

These Men Shared The Nobel Prize . . .

. . . these men did not:

Al Gore

Michael Mann

Penn State Alumni Newsletter In November 2007 Bragged That Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Shared In The Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To The IPCC And Al Gore

And worse, the association puts Mann on the same level as a real Nobel winner like Paul Berg who was a named winner who shared the Prize for Chemistry with two others. Michael Mann cannot be said to have shared the Peace Prize with Al Gore and the IPCC, nor can any of the other 2000 members of the IPCC or however many there were be said to have shared it, either. To say this diminishes the achievement of named winners of prizes who may have won them alone or in company with other named individuals.

Seen here:

Five Penn State scientists, all members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize when the 2,000-member IPCC and former vice president Al Gore were recognized for their work on climate change issues.

The five Penn State scientists and IPCC members are: Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences; William Easterling, dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and professor of geography and earth system science; Klaus Keller, assistant professor of geosciences, Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology; and Anne Thompson, professor of meteorology.

They join the select company of Paul Berg ’48, the only Penn State alumnus to win a Nobel Prize. Berg, the “father of genetic engineering,” shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Harvard Professor Walter Gilbert and Cambridge Professor Frederick Sanger. The Nobel committee recognized Berg for his groundbreaking construction of the first recombinant-DNA molecule—a discovery that paved the way for scientists interested in understanding the interactions between the chemical structure of DNA and resultant biological structure, or function, of an organism.

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Al Gore can claim to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the IPCC can claim to, but none of the individual panel members can claim to have shared in the winning of that prize. Michael Mann did not win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. Mann has had to retract his own claims to the prize as reported here:

Disgraced Penn State University (PSU) climatologist, Michael Mann, concedes defeat in his bogus claims to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mann’s employer this weekend began the shameful task of divesting itself of all inflated claims  on university websites and official documentation that Mann was ever a Peace Prize recipient with Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Thanks to a tip off from respected climate researcher, Dr. Klaus Kaiser, myself and Tom Richard (who scooped the original Nobel story) obtained “before and after” copy images from PSU websites as records of this damning retraction. (follow the link above for the screenshots)

Evidently alumni sites have not been purged.

Unlike Some People Caroline Baum Still Believes in American Exceptionalism

And she notices its Anglo-Saxon character, too, here:

What about other indicators that challenge the notion the US is going the way of empires past? Students from across the globe flock to the US for college and post-graduate education. Six of the top 10 universities in the world are located in the US, according to US News & World Report. The other four are in the UK, that other emblem of Empire Passe.

US students may score poorly in math and science, but somehow they manage to overcome that handicap to become world-class researchers. The US can claim more Nobel Prizes than any country: 320 versus 116 for runner-up UK. In areas such as physics, chemistry and medicine, the US has two to three times as many Nobels as its closest competitor, which is either the UK or Germany. ...

The number of patents issued to US residents in 2009 (93,727) was about the same as those issued to residents of all other countries combined (96,395), according to the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Let's ask Great Britain to send that statue of Churchill Obama didn't want in the Oval Office to Caroline.

She's marvelous, and she's right.

The Parable of Old Butch the Rooster

From the blog Too Much Liberty:

A Parable

John was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens) called 'pullets' and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs. He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced.

This took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.

John's favorite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this morning he noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, could run for cover.

To John's amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He'd sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges. The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention?

Vote carefully next year, the bells are not always audible.

Posted by Sean G at 04:27, Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Keynesian Moment: "Markets Can Stay Irrational Far Longer Than You Can Stay Solvent"

Very thoughtful and wise words of warning today, making sense of the nonsense, from Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture. For the original as it appeared go here.

What Does the Economy Have to Do with the Market?

Posted By Barry Ritholtz On October 6, 2009 @ 7:33 am

“There’s a lot of risk going ahead of some big bumps. There’s a very big risk that markets have been irrationally exuberant.”

-Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz

Far be it from me to challenge the 2001 economics Nobel prize winner, but sometimes, indeed, quite often, markets decouple from the economic fundamentals.

I can show you many eras in history when the economy was awful, and nonetheless markets rallied strongly.

There have also been times when earnings did not matter, and profitability was irrelevant. There are times when animal spirits run the show, when irrational exuberance was in charge.

Such is the result of giving two million primates lots of money and keyboards and a belief they can make a living based on numbers and letters moving around — on a screen, in a futures pit, on an exchange floor, or even under a buttonwood tree.

Most mainstream economists — with notable exceptions like John Maynard Keynes, Richard Thaler, and Robert Shiller — have traditionally paid little attention to this reality. To a trader or investor, rationality matters far less than what the tape was doing.

Indeed, prices matter a great deal more to traders than theories or annoying things like “Objective Reality." To a trader, prices ARE the objective reality; to them economic theorists are peripheral players trying to rationalize reality.

I believe you can describe and explain what the market is doing, but in doing so, we must acknowledge Keynes' terribly accurate observation that “Markets can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent.”

I’ll have more on this later in the week . . .