We Have Moved! We Have Moved!

The template and hosting service we began using in early December did not offer everything we needed, so we have to moved to a better neighborhood.  We are very excited about the new and improved home for Paper and Other Absolute Truths, but we must ask you to sign up again for automatic email and RSS updates. Please go to www.absolute-truths.com and sign up in the lower right portion of the new site. Your current email sign-up, or RSS feed will no longer allow you to receive posts from Paper and Other Absolute Truths.

The current host is WordPress and their name is in the url, but that will no longer be the case with the new site. Therefore, if you have added our web-site to your “favorites” or “bookmarks” you will have to go again to www.absolute-truths.com  and bookmark this url.  

The design of the new site has some similarities with the old, but we are now much better organized. You will see that the top of the home page has a section for a Weekly Feature. Important “Feature” posts will remain in this area for a week. Other posts will scroll by date as has been the case previously.

In the right sidebar, posts are archived in a number of convenient ways. Please take a few minutes and look around. We have retained our Strange But True and Quote boxes. We are still fine-tuning the new site, but most of the work has been completed.

Once again, your current email sign up, or RSS feed, will no longer allow you to receive our posts. Please go to www.absolute-truths.com and sign up for automatic updates through RSS or email.

Thank you.

Verle Sutton

The Massachusetts Miracle

Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley today by a wide margin (53%-46%) and for the first time since 1972, the state of Massachusetts will have a Republican Senator.  

Ironically, today was a spectacular day for the Democratic Party.  Party leaders may never admit this or fully understand it, but this defeat in the bluest of blue states has provided them with a second chance. Today, the party is being  forced to face the truth; the majority of Americans have a visceral hatred for the type of heath care plans both houses of Congress have passed.  In fact, for many Americans, health care is so crucial that it is the issue that will decide their vote.

 If Senator Kennedy had not died, there would have been no special election in Massachusetts, and the health care bill would very likely have been passed. That would have been lights out for the Democratic Party.  It would have been crushed in November 2010 and 2012. The Democratic leadership will, if it has an ounce of intuition, take a big step back and try to regain the confidence of the American people. It worked for Clinton in 1994, and it might work again this time. 

Our Weekly Feature article offers great ideas for health care legislation, but the philosophy expressed is pretty much the opposite of President Obama’s, so I suppose a really good health care bill is still not in our future. There is some good news however, in that he bill that is ultimately passed will be less damaging than the pending House and Senate bills.

The following three minute video clip of a Massachusetts focus group is very interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T67ZaUinlS4

Health Care – How To Get Out of the Mess We’ve Created

It’s doubtful that I will wholeheartedly recommend a large number of articles written by eastern Democrats who also graduated from Harvard – but I certainly do in this case. David Goldhill has carried out excellent research on health care in America, and written an outstanding article, full of important insights.  If it were in my power I would require every man, women, and child living in the U.S. to read and critique this article.  Politicians and their staffs would have to memorize it, all 18 pages.  

Mr. Goldhill’s interest in the U.S. health care system was stimulated by a personal tragedy when his father died unnecessarily of a hospital-borne infection.  The article was printed in the prestigious Atlantic Journal.  The magazine can be blamed for selecting such a provocative title, “How American Health Care Killed My Father.” The title is unfortunate and not reflective of Goldhill’s primary message.

We have, in Reel Time and this Blog, expressed frustration over both the content of the current health care bill working its way through Congress and with the fraudulent deal-making that has accompanied it.  Our criticisms, however, should not be interpreted as support for health care status quo.  David Goldhill does a great job of analyzing why health care costs are so high and what we can do about it.  I don’t agree with everything in this report. For example, Goldhill does not address costly lawsuits and other legal issues that have greatly impacted medical costs.  Nevertheless, we can all learn a lot from this report, How American Health Care Killed My Father.

High Waste Paper Prices, China, and Trade Issues, Part one

Supply and demand for waste paper grades was more-or-less in balance in the ‘90s.  Demand was sufficient to consume all the waste paper that was being recovered.  The situation changed radically on the ‘00s, however.

Demand has increased substantially in recent years due to pressures exerted by environmental organizations to include recycled fiber in grades for which it is not well-suited.  These “environmental” initiatives are costly and harmful to the environment, but they are good fund-raisers for Greenpeace, Forest Ethics, etc.

Health Care Bill Feedback

The U.S. election in the fall of 2008 was truly historic. Not only did the electorate select a black president for the first time, but Republicans were trounced in Congressional elections.  Republicans had controlled the Presidency for eight years and maintained a majority in Congress for most of that time, but the electorate was ready for a change – a big change.  The Democrats even gained a 60 seat super-majority (including sympathetic Independents) in the Senate.

Is Being Uninsured a Health Hazard?

While attending  graduate school, and studying psychology, our professors did not try to hide the disdain they felt for the academic studies carried out by medical doctors. Our professors pointed out that MD’s did not receive the kind of training necessary to design a study properly and then conduct valid statistical analysis. Critiquing scientific studies was a central part of our education. For our Masters thesis, we were given the opportunity to design and implement a controlled study; an opportunity most MDs never experience.

The Truth About Trees

Humans and trees  both have a death rate of 100%. That fact quite often gets lost on environmentalists who imply that a tree saved today is a tree saved forever. Bernard Heinrich, in a December 20, 2009 article titled Clear-Cutting the Truth About Trees, confronts this and other misinformation. Heinrich is a retired PHD Professor of Biology from the University of Vermont.

Another Marriage Penalty in the Health Care Bill

Looking on the bright side, if  your marriage is hanging on by a thread, Uncle Sam may provide you with an economic incentive to cut that final strand. If you are considering marriage, but equivocating, this new policy is something to weigh in the balance. However, if you love your spouse, you are screwed – economically speaking.

WEEKLY FEATURE: A Government Subsidy that Saves Jobs and the Environment

 I have given the subject of government subsidies a great deal of thought and now realize that I have been wrong, very wrong. We can’t just allow our industrial base to shrink away; Congress must come to our aid. The problems with the $10 billion black liquor subsidy of 2009 were that (1) it only assisted part of our industry (harming others in the process), and (2) it did not save jobs (as the recent IP closure announcements proved). With help from Congress, however, there is a solution to the problems we face in the forest products industry.

This is what we do. First,

The Weather Outside is Frightful

We will soon be posting serious reports that consider, from a science perspective, the global warming claims made by the climate scientists and many politicians. We are still working on a re-design of the Blog, however,  and would like to finish that first. In the meantime, we will pass on interesting items from time to time that relate to the topic.

We are not offering the following cold weather stories as proof that global warming is a myth, but they are interesting. If climate was as sensitive to atmospheric carbon as the theory claims, then over time, we should see higher temperature highs and higher lows on a more-or-less routine basis.  And weather patterns should not revert to colder periods of 20-30 years ago. (AP Photo, Ben Czerwinski)

In early January of 2009 the canals in the Netherlands froze hard for the first time in 12 years. It was big news at the time. Skate purchases raised the GDP of the country a half point or so – well that part is not really true. Now, in early 2010 the canals are frozen again, but it doesn’t seem to be as much fun this year. The weather in Europe is actually not fun or funny, as stories from The Guardian in England ( Food Costs To Soar As Big Freeze Deepens )  and Al Jazeera  ( Severe Snow Causes Chaos in Europe ) point out. The first of these stories suggest that the winter in England is colder than any in the last 30 years, and the second claims that this could be the coldest European winter in 100 years.

Meanwhile in the U.S., AccuWeather Agricultural Meteorologist Dale Mohler, predicts that the hard freeze tonight in Florida will be the worst since December of 1989. Mohler expects a 6 to 10 percent loss of the total 2009 orange crop after tonight’s freeze.

While perusing the weather news, I also ran across an interesting survey of meteorologists. It seems that 50% disagree with the IPCC (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 25% are neutral and 25% agree. About 33% called the IPCC conclusions not just wrong, but a scam. On the other hand, all Climate Modelers, as opposed to Meteorologists, are convinced that Global Warming is a threat - otherwise they would be out of work.

Stealth Care Reform

We cover the health care issue where ever it leads and today’s post, Stealth Care Reform , leads to The Daily Show.

Coated Paper Petitioners Delay the Process

The coated paper trade dispute was the subject of our lead report in the December Reel Time. This post provides a brief update.  As we followed this story last fall, press releases indicated that countervailing duties/tariffs and anti-dumping duties would begin to be collected from Chinese and Indonesian exporters  to the U.S. (of coated paper grades in question) immediately after the ITC found in favor of the petitioners. This favorable ruling took place on November the 6th. However, there has been no confirmation of duties being collected in the trade news and it now appears that this will not occur until the Commerce Department weighs in on this issue. The verdicts of the Commerce Department were scheduled on December the 17th (countervailing duty) and early March (anti-dumping duty).

Maybe I was the last to know, but we have learned

China Calls for a Newsprint Holiday

We heard from a source today that China will shut down all its newsprint machines from February 5th to February the 28th.  Isn’t that interesting. Wonder why.  Energy issue? Profitability concern? High domestic inventories?

This newsprint holiday will take roughly 300,000 tonnes of newsprint out of the market. Some buyers of Chinese newsprint from outside the country have already begun to place additional orders with North American mills, so this event will be of some help to domestic newsprint companies.

Coated Update: The Subsidies Are Over So Is Coated Pricing Moving Up?

Shipments and Inventories: For months we have been promising Reel Time subscribers that it would finally happen in November. And it did. U.S. coated shipments (both grades) were higher in November 2009 than in the year-ago November. It has been a long time coming! For coated free sheet it has been exactly two years since the last monthly (y/y) increase, and for coated groundwood, 17 months.

Orange Bowl Played in Near Record Heat

We have a guest post today from Dr. Cash Ingin, a renowned climate scientist.

One of the problems with global warming skeptics is that they don’t recognize the difference between raw temperature data and adjusted temperature data.   “Raw data” are the actual recorded temperatures.  These raw data are seldom accurate, however, for a variety of reasons too complex for non climate-scientists to understand.