James Wimberley

Here you go again with this nonsense. Compared to the last round, there’s one big plus: Obama has said he won’t negotiate this time and has proposed scrapping the wretched thing: I will not play that game, because we have got to break that habit before it starts. He also won the election, which counts […]

Chuckles all round about PPP´s poll asking for opinions on the nonexistent ¨Panetta-Burns¨ deficit reduction plan (8% for and 17% against) and whether defunct ACORN stole the 2012 election (49% of Republicans think so). Perhaps this is more than a nice once-off gag. Double-blind clinical trials of new medicines calibrate them against placebos and white […]

The insulting treatment of Susan Rice by John McCain and other Republican senators over the real Benghazi tragedy, and manufactured scandal, has worked in her favour as a candidate to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The complaints about her abrasive temperament don´t stand up either. Niceness is an overrated quality in diplomacy. A […]

In his keynote speech last Thursday to the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist party, retiring President Hu Jintao said: Energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP as well as the discharge of major pollutants should decrease sharply. Source: Leslie Hook for the Financial Times (paywall); summarised here. This wasn’t a toe-dipping […]

Joe Romm nails it: The only people who will pursue real adaptation are those who understand the latest science and are prepared to take serious political action based on that understanding. [….] But if you accepted the science, you’d obviously pursue mitigation as your primary strategy, while using some of the proceeds from the climate […]

Paul Ryan, in the debate with Biden: Let’s look at this from the view of the ayatollahs. What do they see? They see this administration trying to water down sanctions in Congress for over two years. They’re moving faster toward a nuclear weapon; they’re spinning the centrifuges faster. (My emphasis.) I suppose we have to […]

The letter “summarising” the Romneys’ tax returns from their tax preparer, PricewaterhouseCoopers, states: The lowest of any annual “effective federal personal income tax rate” for any year during the period is 13.66%… The average of the annual “effective federal personal income tax rates” as computed based on the returns as prepared during the period is […]

A statistic you probably don’t know is SAIDI, system average interruption duration index. It means the average number of minutes per year for which the customers of an electricity network are deprived of power, not counting short interruptions of 1-5 minutes, planned interruptions, or “extreme weather events”. It’s one of the two main internationally agreed […]

Yours truly, blogging in January on the political geography of renewable energy, and particularly the wide distribution of its sources in the West, South, and Midwest: If the Democrats play this right (especially ensuring that landowners and local communities benefit) and the Republicans wrong (following denialists rather than Schwarzenegger), the situation offers an opportunity for […]

Barack Obama will certainly be nominated by his party and probably reelected President. The polls, Intrade and Nate Silver agree; so it seems do such conservatives as David Cameron and Boris Johnson; even Rupert Murdoch is unenthusiastic about the GOP slate. So does common sense, weighing Obama’s reasonable-to-good record against an outstandingly poor Republican ticket. […]