Newmark's Door

Arnold Kling needles the global warming "consensus":

My concern is with how "scientific consensus" is reached. In economics in the 1960's, there was a "scientific consensus," embedded in sophisticated macro-econometric models, that inflation reflected a competition over income shares, and that government policies to interfere with wage- and price-setting were the solution. Milton Friedman's contrary views were outside the "scientific consensus."

. . .

Milton Friedman's dissenting views of 1967 are close to the consensus views today.

I wish that climate-change models did not remind me so much of macro-econometric models. I wish that the contempt that the Left expresses for dissenting views in climate science did not remind me of the contempt that the Left expressed for Milton Friedman.

Rich Karlgaard, borrowing from Virigina Postrel, writes that there are two types of politicians: problem-solvers and "opportunity seekers". Opportunity seekers don't fix typewriters; they invent word processors. And

Republicans will continue to win elections if they appeal to opportunity seekers. They'll get trounced if they overreact to today's polls and decide they must trade their opportunity-seeking philosophy for problem solving. America wants its political leaders to be optimistic about the future. We want to be shown the possibilities and opportunities--bold races to the moon, shining cities on a hill and bridges to the future. Politicians lose when they focus on problems.

Recent notes about the blogosphere.

Technorati claims that the number of blogs is still doubling every six months.

The Boston Globe states, "Blogging is good for your career" and provides no fewer than eight reasons.

Jupiter Research claims that bloggers and Internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society. (Yeah!)

Jason Calcanis, he of the multimillion dollar blog deal with AOL last year, says

The fact is that the "long tail" of sites is largely unmonetized. Over the next five to 10 years, Google AdSense, Weblogs Inc., Yahoo Publisher Network, AOL's white-labeled version of AdSense, and Microsoft's "AdSense killer" will enable the monetization of a lot of those smaller sites.

(Double yeah!)

Finally, Harvard Law is hosting a conference on "How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship".

Thomas Bray, Detroit News:

The President "lied" us into war. Much of the pre-war intelligence was wrong. The civilian defense chief was detested as "brusque, domineering and unbearably unpleasant to work with." Civil liberties were abridged. And many embittered Democrats, claiming the war had been an utter failure, demanded that the administration bring the troops home.

Guess which president Bray is referring to.

One of Claude Lelouch's most famous films only circulated "underground" until a few years ago when a DVD was released. Now you can see it for free on the Web.

Lelouch strapped a camera to the bumper of a Ferrari and had an Formula One driver drive it through Paris at high speed.

The driver does not stop for red lights. Or for anything else.

With the help of National Georgraphic, you can "explore your own genetic journey".

"New Trends in Online Traffic". Social networking, blogging, and local information are hot.

Sidebar: the Top Web Domains.

Usually reliable economic columnist Daniel Gross temporarily runs out of ideas and writes a colunn about the amazing inverse correlation between presidential poll numbers and the Dow Jones Index.

It's really high and reliable and thought-provoking . . . except for all those times when it isn't.

Here's a discouraging study: "Psychologists Are Better Stockmarket Speculators Than Economists".

Brendan Nyhan, whose blog was mistakenly deleted by Google, is asking for help getting reindexed by Google. A worthy cause. You might want to help if you can.