Archive for 2017

CARBON LIMITS FOR THEE, SPARE PRIVATE JETS FOR ME: Why People Hate Big Business. “Perhaps it might have made sense if Immelt delivered stellar returns for GE shareholders, but GE has been one of the worst performing blue chip stocks of the last 15 years. In fact the value of GE stock fell by half during Immelt’s 15 years as CEO, and is down 25 percent just this year alone.”

UPDATE (From Ed): Immelt was likely flying around with his spare private jet during the period that ended in 2013, when GE still owned MSNBC and NBC, which frequently hectored (and still does so) its viewers on global warming — including this infamous moment in 2007:

GOOD QUESTION:

EVENTUALLY, LEFTY POLITICS CORRUPT EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH: Corrupting the National Book Award? “Democracy in Chains has been testing the proposition that there is no such thing as bad publicity. There has been an explosion of documentation that MacLean gets facts wrong, misunderstands her sources, and invents quotations or pulls them out of context to mean the opposite of what they said. You can find all this easily if you just google the book’s title. It is hard to avoid the inference that the book’s defects are outweighed, in the committee’s judgment, by the book’s eloquent denunciation of the Kochs. . . . MacLean’s central historical claim is false. That claim is that the economist James Buchanan devised the “master plan” (xviii) by which the Koch brothers are now subverting democracy. Buchanan devised no master plan, and there’s no evidence that the Kochs’ political actions were influenced by anything he wrote.”

It’s the comparison with disgraced fraud Michael Bellesiles, though, that hits hardest. Bellesiles also presented desired fiction masquerading as history, and won a prestigious award (the Bancroft Prize) before his falsehoods were exposed. (Via Jonathan Adler.)

WELL:

SIDE EFFECTS: Why Millennial Women Are Rejecting The Birth Control Pill. “Last year, the results of a study conducted by the University of Copenhagen of more than one million women over the course of 13 years confirmed a significant link between hormonal contraceptives and depression. Women taking combined oral contraceptives were 23 per cent more likely to be treated for it; those on the progestogen-only pill (known as the mini-pill) were 34 per cent more likely. Teens taking the combined pill were discovered to be at greatest risk, with an 80 per cent increased likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants. And yet governing bodies and health professionals are quick to lay blame at social media’s door for the atmospheric rise in mental-health issues, suggesting a ‘digital detox’ as a possible cure.”