The Solar KO's of AD 775 and 994 would disable the modern world.

The solar explosion in 2012 missed us and the Carrington Event in 1859 that started fires in telegraph offices was tiny compared to the solar storms now confirmed from AD 775 and AD 994.  Ice cores from Greenland to Antarctica show those solar storms "far exceeded any known events observed by instrumental measurements on Earth".

Forget about carbon dioxide (which is plant food, after all) and worry about this.  No tax money can be diverted to make the sun behave although money should go to hardening our com lines, data bases, and power grids.

Carrington event won't be benign in 2016

Gatekeepers Are Losing Control

The cost of reaching for the levers of power has come down by an order of magnitude.  Carson and Trump are cruising on earned media and Trump doesn't have to cuddle up to money bags.  Canada would have more choice in leaders if voters weighed in on who gets to be PM as well as who represents the riding.   The LPC, CPC and NDP party gate keepers have more control on who gets to be boss here than under a presidential CEO system.

Digitally-powered emails, blogs, facebook, twitter, texts and a proliferation of channels and websites have multiplied the doors into the public eye and brought the cost of contact to pennies-per-thousand-people.  Blogging Tories is part of this revolution.

Carson has been a neurosurgeon and manager but never part of inner circle politics but here he is leading in recent Iowa polls.

Money Bags Or Small Donors: Who Backs Whom And The Outlook For 2016

Last time the candidate with the most small donors won. Obama beat Romney.  The three who fit that bill this time around are Carson, Cruz and Trump and, oddly, they are the front runners.  The trend is to favour thousands of small over dozens of large.

Three data troves show it:  The ratios October 16th for all Republican candidates, the historic ratio of big donors to small ones for the last five presidential contests, and the ratios for all congressmen in 2012.

In the second chart, Romney had seven times more fat than lean donors while his opponent, Obama, had three times more lean than fat.  Obama won.  So far this cycle in the first chart, only Carson, Cruz and Trump raised more money from little guys and Trump is asking his to be ended.  Oddly, they are the front runners.

"Small donor" means $200 in the first chart, $2000 in the second chart, and increments of not more than $200 in the third.
It's worth noting that money bags played a bigger role in past presidential elections than they do now, thanks to digital media and on-line funding. (2nd chart)
It's sad to note that the congressmen chart  (the 3rd one) shows that fat money plays an outsize role in who gets elected, only 1/6th of the candidates being more popular with the common citizen than with the insiders.  The big givers are 1% of the 1% in America.

Story at Huffington Post October 16th

Posted at scout.com

Posted by The Sunlight Foundation

"Arctic waters unpolluted". 31 Bits of Plastic.

Partisan headline:  "Plastic Litter Taints The Sea Surface, Even In The Arctic"
Alternate headline:  "Arctic waters unpolluted"

The sky is falling.
One plastic floater every 180 miles

Researchers found what they looked for after peering from the bridge while covering 5600 km by boat in the arctic.  They concede "the number sounds low".  The people from the Wegener Institute spotted 31 bits of plastic debris, less than one old Javex bottle or fishing float every 180 kilometers. That is so low, a better report would say, "Arctic waters unpolluted".  They point out plastic can break into smaller pieces too small to see from a boat.  They remind us that there is more on the bottom than on the surface and there are six known clumps of garbage on the world's oceans.  But give me a break and stop pushing the alarm button to get attention and research money.

First Past the Post in 2020

Three things are equal in influence:  A leader who thinks he is right, a majority of the governing board, and a majority of the voters. We got two out of three this time around: Trudeau has the big hat and Liberals hold 184 out of 338 seats in the House of Commons. The voters will have no great influence on Canada's next five years unless they rally to a flag. 

The scales are tipped to favour the majority in Justin's head and the other one in the House of Commons.  As Wikipedia posts on the election: Harper won last time with 39.62% of the popular vote (An outrage that 60% of Canada was opposed to) and Trudeau won this time with 39.47%  (A sigh of relief for all of Canada and a repudiation of Harper).  [These numbers were posted at smalldeadanimals but the post has disappeared]

The leader was picked in a 50% plus one convention.  The MP's were picked in a first-past-the-post ballot.   Despite Trudeau's boast, the next federal election will be decided the same way as the last one because the Liberals would have won 49 fewer seats in a proportional system. 


June 17th headline at the National Post: TRUDEAU ANNOUNCES PLAN TO KILL FIRST-PAST-THE-POST BY THE NEXT ELECTION.   This promise just passed it's Best-Before date.
October 19th results re-cast proportionally, as published in the Vancouver Sun:

"Whatever you do to my daughter"

From PJ Media, "Whatever you do to my daughter, I'll do to you".

"Harper - The Accidental PM". and "Empty Suit worse than Mulcair". An American View.

From Dillian's investment newsletter :

"Harper, in some ways, had an accidental 10-year reign. Canada is about 60% left-wing and 40% right-wing, but has two left-wing parties (the Liberals, who are center-left, and the NDP, who are allegedly far left) that have been splitting their votes in every election.

Canada is slipping into recession, and Harper, sort of a Canadian Sean Hannity, has worn out his welcome over time with his hawkishness/paranoia.

Trudeau, I think, is a little further left than people give him credit for, with a clear authoritarian streak.

Canada’s budget—which is basically balanced—will, in a few years, reach a deficit of 10% of GDP.  That’s not good for the Canadian dollar, which has been in a two-plus-year bear market. And I am aggressively shorting it.

Trudeau has a reputation of being somewhat of an empty suit, a know-nothing—and these are the sorts of things that his own supporters acknowledge. Canadian investors have told me privately that they believe this outcome to be even worse than if Mulcair had been elected, which is really saying something."

Jared Dillian's newsletter is an occasional top up to the free weekly newsletter from John Mauldin.

Defeat the Media Party before the next election, never mind Trudeau fils.

We always have LIV's but who steers their vote?  Low Information Voters are swayed by the same Media Party that registered to campaign against Harper in the election, the Media Party that slants news and opinion every day of every year, not just 78 days every fourth year. ( The journalists reporting our election belong to a union registered to lobby for the other side.)

The premier equalizer is the speed-of-light internet with blogs, twitters and facebook posts that creep every day past the gatekeepers of the news.  Videos of what politicians actually said today and in the past are accessible.  Blogging Tories is one tool that weaponizes conservative citizens to be heard widely despite having no war chest filled with lucre.

The late journalist, Liebling, came up with
the freedom of the press quote.

Scarcely ten years have passed since the smartphone revolution and politics-as-usual will be shaken to its core for at least two more decades. The government scene must yet bend to accommodate some millions of new voices.

 Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" is the old truth.  The new truth is that any citizen with a will to be heard can publish freely and cheaply. The market price of political influence is dropping as competition is added.

Cheers for Blogging Tories and behind the scenes to Stephen Taylor and Craig Smith.

Modern man gets less sleep? UNTRUE.

I was convinced we sleep less at night than pre-industrial man ..... that the electric light, phones, tvs, and busy schedules shaved hours off every day's rest. It appears to be untrue.  Sleep time is a species characteristic more than a cultural one. 

Jerome Siegel of the University of California (Los Angeles) decided to measure sleep time in three hunter gatherer tribes, two in Africa and one in the Bolivian jungle. The lean men pictured from the San tribe in Namibia don't look like world wide web people.  Sleep averaged out six to seven hours!  People didn't go to bed until several hours after sunset and generally got up a little ahead of dawn.

Conrad Black: Time for a Time Out.

He co-founded the National Post to help Conservatives win but says Conservatives failed to renew themselves and deserve time out Tuesday.  

After making the best summary I've seen of the great good done by Stephen Harper at home and away, he follows with a harsh take-down.  The consolation prize is that Justin Trudeau may grow in office. The prize is small.

Politicians need a new incentive to leave money in your pocket.

Bureaucrats are penalized if they don't spend their budget every year.  Politicians are one step up the food chain and are rewarded for spending all the money they can collect from you.  Why would they stop before you squawk when they are praised for spending money in the riding?  Tax collection is a rigged lottery.  Everyone buys a ticket but not everyone gets a prize.  Winning tickets go to the fixers, not to the lucky girl and boy.

Friction is a bug in a motor, reducing efficiency.  Friction is a feature in government because it feeds those who make a living doing government stuff.  How can you expect those civil servants and MP's and lobbyists to ask for less to live on? Sadly, the more friction there is, the more you need a fixer to tweak the tax code or cut a cheque, to get by the obstacles of government.   Greater spending is rewarded and inefficiency keeps people employed.  Better incentives are needed.

I'm viewing lawmaking separately from redistributing money  to make this argument.  (It's worth remembering that some countries with lots of oil don't rely on taxes.) We have a wonderful job in our country, "The Receiver General", defined by his ability to receive any given amount of our money.  He should be rated the same as charities: What percentage of funds raised goes to administration?  In some programs, administration is the main benefactor.  In others that mail a redistributed cheque to every parent or every pensioner, the "pay to the order of" party is efficiently favoured.

Ask for more taxpayers to participate in the government market

The starting point for reform is to increase the influence of taxpayers on spending and to simplify the redistribution of the take.   The layers of management needed to get a job done has shrunk in business, not so much in governments.   Remember when you needed a bank but now just need a bank app in your pocket?

The incentive to leave money in our pocket is competition from the taxpayers.
The fall-back is to bribe politicians with rewards into the millions of dollars when Canadians prosper and unemployment plunges.
In short,
open the market to more tax-payiing customers
or create a legal market in kickbacks for pols.

ISIS warriors get a haircut

Jihadis have been shaving off their beards and running from Aleppo for the Turkey border. See striking photos.  Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are changing the rules with force and can prevail in much of Syria.  The Saudis will then have to defend their role as Keeper of the Holy Places.  

Trumpaholic II

I think I'll have another drink.  

Exhibit 1   Does he negotiate well?
Trump called his top rival Carson and they co-signed an ultimatum to CBS to limit debate to two hours and include opening and closing statements. The other Republicans were grumbling that they hadn't been consulted, the debate was too long and there were no statements.  Trump recruited an ally and leveraged his advantage (eyeballs watching CBS for advertising revenue) while the rest wimped out. The Art of the Deal.  CBS blinked.

Exhibit 2  Did he treat past winners well on his Apprentice show?

"When Fortune surveyed most of the winners from the original, pre-celebrity series, they praised his loyalty, attention to detail, and willingness to share practical advice once they came to work for him. One described Trump as “a guy who held up his end of the bargain,” adding, “he truly took me under his wing.”

Exhibit 3   Will he be hard to bribe?

"One odd thing about the Republican presidential race is that the strong front-runner, Donald Trump, isn't fundraising. Soliciting contributions takes a huge amount of the time for most candidates, and the quarterly reports of how much they have raised and how much cash they have on hand become carefully-watched measures of their campaigns' viability. None of that applies to Trump".

    (He has received a little over $5,000,000 unsollicited.  His biggest expense is T-shirts & hats with use of his own airplane coming second.   He phones, he tweets, people come to his apartment and he earns a lot of free media.)

Signing his income tax return, posted on Twitter by himself.

Dem debate snapshot

The popular vote by a landslide goes to Sanders with Webb 2nd and Clinton a distant 3rd. (400,000 voted at Drudge). Sanders raised a ton of money immediately after and gained 35,000 twitter followers..   Despite this, Bernie Sanders "went face first into the tank for Hillary on her emails" and you know he'll drop out before the finish line if he won't attack her sneaky character and judgement error.  This fetched an unfeigned smile from Hillary.  As Trump (who tweeted and was bored by the whole thing but picked up 70,000 twitter followers) said, "she did what she had to do". It was a good night for her. Then she made herself a target by saying she was proud of making Republicans her enemies.  That looks after half the country. When Sanders said we should stop talking about Clinton's emails, the press cheered.  Most also stayed in their seats when the national anthem was sung, confirming why Instapundit calls them "Democratic operatives with bylines."   In evidence, CNN is deleting critical comments by Sanders supporters from its post debate site.

Fifteen million watched compared to twenty four for the GOP.  This is being mocked on line but is a Dem record.

Big Government Is Your Destiny

Despotic altruism with other people's money is baked into the pie.  Lefty policy keeps coming out of the oven and is always inedible.  You can blame having more parents per kid than ever before.   Where two parents may have cared for four kids, now it's possible for four parents to be caring for one kid (on alternate weekends), an eight-fold increase in supervision.  Kids hardly play without a controlling adult present and enter college ready to cry about micro-aggression, choosing tattling over managing.  That ratio of supervising adults to children is trending higher for the foreseeable future.  Today's children will become adults who think it normal for the state to micromanage all citizens, treating them as children.

Baked in

Policies that give government more say will be popular with them.  It's baked into the demographic pie.

Remember too that singleton children grow up differently than we did.  They don't run around squabbling, building forts, taking turns skipping rope, playing pick-up baseball, and learning how to get along with dozens of other free-range kids in the neighbourhood.    Instead they went to T-ball and art class and swimming lessons in Mom's car.  They were sent to summer school, tutored and taken on escorted tours to Europe for spring break.  In China, because of enforced abortions, they raised a generation known as "Little Princes".  We're next, producing an entitlement generation that will vote for entitlement politics, preferably using someone else's money to secure their own comfort.

"Demographics is destiny".  There is a hopeful corollary.  These same new adults are going to be extraordinarily long-lived with 130 being a normal life-span.  They are going to be more conservative voters because they'll have something worth hanging onto: a little property, a network of relationships and values they have counted on for decades.

Does despotic altruism with OPM work?  It's baked into the pie for the foreseeable future and will continue to emerge and re-emerge whether it works or not. 
There you have it: two conflicting trends, both arising from demography and more deep-seated than questions of High-Information-Voters versus Low-Information-Voters.

Making shit up and calling it Behavioural Science. UPDATE

Of 100 published papers recently tested, only one third could be reproduced.   One of the duds had been cited 2000 times.  Replication is the bedrock of science and it is sand in Behavioural Sciences.  Data from tiny sample sizes of white American college students (often paid to participate) is massaged to find significant correlation by professors who vote 95% Democrat, occasionally cheat, and gain nothing reporting negative results.

Over 270 researchers, working as the Reproducibility Project, had gathered 100 studies from three of the most prestigious journals in the field of social psychology. Then they set about to redo the experiments and see if they could get the same results. Mostly they used the materials and methods the original researchers had used. Direct replications are seldom attempted in the social sciences, even though the ability to repeat an experiment and get the same findings is supposed to be a cornerstone of scientific knowledge. It’s the way to separate real information from flukes and anomalies. These 100 studies had cleared the highest hurdles that social science puts up. They had been edited, revised, reviewed by panels of peers, revised again, published, widely read, and taken by other social scientists as the starting point for further experiments. Except . . . Nearly two-thirds of the experiments did not replicate, meaning that scientists repeated these studies but could not obtain the results that were found by the original research team.”

Statistical significance works in large random samples but not in small non-random ones. You can always find some connection, like "sixteen amazing parallels between Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy", if you keep sorting for significance.  This is like the joke that  an infinite number of monkeys typing forever would eventually tap out the entirety of Shakespeare.

More than 70 percent of the world’s published psychology studies are generated in the United States.  Two-thirds of them draw their subjects exclusively from the pool of U.S. undergraduates, according to a survey by a Canadian economist named Joseph Henrich and two colleagues. And most of those are students who enroll in psychology classes. White, most of them; middle- or upper-class; college educated, with a taste for social science: not John Q. Public. This is a problem​—​again, widely understood, rarely admitted. College kids are irresistible to the social scientist: They come cheap, and hundreds of them are lying around the quad with nothing better to do. Taken together, Henrich and his researchers said, college students in the United States make “one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens.”

Publication bias, compounded with statistical weakness, makes a floodtide of false positives. “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue,” wrote the editor of the medical journal Lancet not long ago. ..... The literature, continued the editor, is “afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance.”

The WeeklyStandard article is well worth reading in full.

UPDATE: Economics papers don't replicate either.  This puts half into fake or slovenly territory.

"Economics research is usually not replicable."
That's the conclusion of economists Andrew C. Chang and Phillip Li in a new study released as part of the Finance and Economics Discussion Series at the Federal Reserve. Analyzing research from thirteen top economics journals, Chang and Li were able to replicate the findings of just 29 of the 59 papers they scrutinized, and that was with the assistance of the original authors.

Elections Canada Cock-Up - Six times slower

You've seen Canada-wide reports of long lineups for the early bird polls.  It's an enormous cock-up brought on by Elections Canada rule changes.  A poll worker told me that last election, 30 seconds would advance one voter but now it's three minutes.  That's a six-fold reduction in efficiency for a phantasmagorical gain in security.  Yesterday my aunt stood in line for three hours.  An older neighbour drove to the poll station three times Friday and five times Saturday before giving up and joining the line up.  Since I had to vote early, I picked a quiet time on Saturday and stood in line for an hour and a half.  Thirty people managed to vote in that time.

If your car put out one sixth of normal power, you'd have it towed to a mechanic.  How can you tow Elections Canada anywhere?  I've never in my life heard anyone talk about illegal voting in Canada and never in my life have I for a moment thought there were dirty tricks in the polling booth I attended.   How can this new layer of handwritten copying and a rule that the voter ahead must  vote and leave before you can check in  be justified?  How can this possibly be that you are not allowed to check in before the person ahead has finished and left.   Fast food drive-throughs have had this figured out for half a century.  You check in at one location and do your at a second station.

If we were talking about our American neighbours, this would make more sense.  Many jurisdictions ask for no ID,  there are stuffed ballot boxes,  dead people voting,  out-of-date voting rolls that let people vote from two different addresses, entire precincts in Philadelphia that vote 100% for one candidate only.  We're not America, thank God.

Unfortunately, we are what we are.  The polling booths I heard about near Victoria had only one ballot box and the same complaint.  If you're lucky, come October 19th there will be six times more staff manning the ballot boxes than last time.  Keep Hoping.  And do vote.

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/early-bird-voters-incensed-by-long-waits-new-rules-1.2082629

School rules are a joke on most reserves.

First Nation kids get a bit more school funding than other Canadians but, except in Nova Scotia, their parents may not get value for it and are liable to being ripped off by Band politics.  Wouldn't you want your kids to graduate?  The Fraser Institute has this (shocking to me) summary:

Many Canadians would be surprised to learn that schools on First Nations reserves are not statutorily required to provide the same services and functions as provincial public schools in Canada—they do not have minimum number of attendance days, no requirement for teacher certification, no required curriculum, and they are not governed by overarching legislation or a school board that allows students on reserve to achieve a recognized high school diploma following the completion of Grade 12. This lack of structure and comparability with provincial public schools has resulted in a system on reserve that is failing First Nations children.

Average per student funding on reserves: $13524
Average per student funding off reserves: $11646

Read more at the Fraser Institute link

Nova Scotia just renewed their agreement.  Words about culture and consultation are less effective than rules for finance and governance.  PEI has an agreement, too, but it seems to be the squishy stuff.

Yukon First Nations school graduates 2009
Wouldn't you want your kids to graduate?

President Obama Wins Participation Award

Unearned:  The Nobel Peace Prize
Earned:  Participation award.

Obama voted the USA "Present" and the bullies are taking over.
The blood of innocents begins to flow.

Business Would-Be-Presidents Are The Only Ones Getting Bang For Their TV Buck

The outsider crowd leading Republican polls spent next to nothing on TV but own 49 % of the republican vote (see below).  I picked up this story from people examining the butt end, namely who had spent the most.  I'm looking at the head end of a revolution where strong candidates capture the news cycle instead of buying it.

The two executive types burnt through 1/10th of 1% of the TV total. Revolutionary.  The neurosurgeon spent a bit over 1%.  Half of the thirty million came from Clinton, Bush, Rubio and Christie. (Even Kasich spent almost triple the front runners.)

Source

Real Clear Politics polls average Sept 30th: