90% of the methane produced by cows is from eructation not flatulence, according to AGU Blogosphere:

This may come as a surprise, but 90 percent of cow methane comes from their front ends. Octavio Castelán-Ortega measured that in an experiment he and others conducted in Mexico. He works at the Autonomous University of Mexico State in Toluca, near Mexico City.

Castelán-Ortega, a veterinarian, and Luisa Molina, an atmospheric scientist, monitored the respiration of cows and found steep reductions in methane when cows were fed a diet enhanced with certain plants. They presented their results in an eye-catching poster (featuring a cow with its head in a chamber that resembled a voting booth) at the recent fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

In a study at four sites in Mexico, Castelán-Ortega and Molina found cows that fed on grasses mixed with the leaves of delicate tropical leucaena trees belched about 36 percent less methane than those on a straight grass diet. The cosmos flower, with the Latin name Cosmos bipinnatus, reduced methane emissions 26 percent when it was added to feed.

The diet including leucaena tree leaves also improved the cows’ milk production. Both plants contain bacteria-killing tannins that disrupt fermentation without interfering with a cow’s digestion. Too much of the plants would be toxic, but a small proportion seems to be beneficial. We drink tannins all the time. They are the bitter compounds in coffee and tea.

I wonder about the impact on the flavor of the milk.

I’m broadly in agreement with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s measured reaction which I’m listening to right now. I think that the Trump Administration has bungled, as Sec. Gates called it, the “roll-out” of the executive order. And, based on what I know of the executive order, it’s overly broad. Exceptions should have been made for present legal immigrants (“green card holders”), those who worked for the U. S. military abroad, and others. I’m on record as supporting increased immigration from those who’ve helped us.

Framing it as a “Muslim ban” is inflammatory. The EO bans, what, maybe 15% of Muslims? The press didn’t similarly recoil when President Obama declared a hiatus on refugees from Iraq.

I’m more concerned about the issues of temperament revealed by the EO than I am about the policy. And that’s why I didn’t vote for Trump in the first place.

If even half of what L. Todd Wood reports about his former alma mater, the Air Force Academy, in OpsLens is true:

Inside the noon meal, all former military decorum and training at the lunch table had been vaporized. There was nothing. The freshman cadets didn’t even have the civilian decency to serve their alumni guests first, not to mention any military bearing. They just took the food and ignored everyone else at the table.

It gets worse: after lunch, my colleagues walked into the academic building. Before my eyes, where there used to be formal lecture halls, was a Dunkin’ Donuts. My jaw hit the floor and I actually took a picture– I was that amazed. This was no longer a military academy; it was UCLA in uniforms.

We then visited the dorm rooms. We nonchalantly walked into one cadet’s room who had the door open, which was the custom. We asked them a few questions. They didn’t get up. They didn’t greet us formally. They just sat there. These were fourth classmen. I guarantee you that in the past, if an alum had walked into a fourth class room, the residents would be at attention within seconds and the “sirs” would be flying like birds on a high wire.

Finally, before the football game and other class-specific events, we headed to Arnold Hall to listen to a briefing from the Superintendent on what was going on at the academy. Literally, one of the first things we heard was, “Things are not as tough as they used to be.”

it fully justifies my opinion that, rather than increasing its size and budget, as President Trump has proposed, we should drastically reduce the size and budget of the USAF.

At Forbes analyst Anders Corr outlines the case for war with China:

Defensive military options short of war, such as naval blockades and acquisition of nuclear weapons by Japan and South Korea, entail risk of uncontrollable escalation into military confrontation. So, states considering these risky steps should consider whether such risk of war is justified.

Just war theory finds that states have a responsibility to protect the territory of their citizens, uphold international law, and defend justice. Wars should have a just cause, be the last resort, have right intentions, possess a reasonable chance of success, and have a means proportional to the end.

Consider one example — China’s continued occupation of Mischief Reef, which is in the Philippine exclusive economic zone (EEZ) as recognized by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The Philippines has an obligation to defend the territory of its citizens, such as maritime territory , so should do that to the best of its ability, including by requesting assistance from the U.S., its treaty ally. This satisfies just war theory’s recognition of the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens and territory.

Dr. Corr misstates the requirements for just war somewhat. Just cause alone is insufficient. For a war to be just the war must be waged with a just authority and by just means as well. Waging war without United Nations Security Council approval, which would clearly not be forthcoming, without Congressional approval, and without exigent circumstances, e.g. in the absence of an imminent threat, would not be just. Nuking Beijing would not be just.

And war must always be a last resort.

IMO there are many, many steps which should be taken before going to war with China. Among them are removing China’s Most Favored Nation trading status and spearheading a movement to oust China from the World Trade Organization. China has never lived up to the requirements under which it was admitted to the WTO and, as I have documented here, the record of the claims filed against it is a clear indication that China is unwilling to live up to WTO standards.

We didn’t invent the partisan divide and our partisan divide isn’t nearly as extreme as it is in other places. Compare and contrast these two pieces from British newspapers. From the Torygraph:

Sometimes when British prime ministers go to Washington it is uncertain whether or not the president will even mention the special relationship. Mr Trump began by talking about it. It is, he said, “one of the great forces in history” – and he is absolutely right. Bonded by blood spilt in war, the two nations have stood side by side for a century, and this story clearly means a lot to Mr Trump, who is himself half-Scottish. A bust of Winston Churchill has been returned to the Oval Office; an invitation to visit the UK has been delivered on behalf of the Queen. The prospect of royal recognition is key to understanding what Mr Trump gets out of this.

Mrs May confers credibility upon the new regime in Washington. The British Government understands why he won, she said, and that he wants to defend the interests of working people. And yet Mr Trump has faced isolation at home and abroad – people have challenged the legitimacy of his election win and suggested that he does not govern for all Americans. To be seen standing with Mrs May proves that his movement is understood by someone of importance, and that his status as leader of the free world is in no doubt. “I’m delighted to be able to congratulate you,” said the Prime Minister, “on what was a stunning election victory.”

and from the Grauniad:

In normal times, you’d say everything went swimmingly. Sure, the American president seemed a tad unsure how to say the name of his guest – whom he greeted as Ter-raiser – slightly reinforcing the White House’s earlier failure, in a briefing note, to spell the British prime minister’s name correctly, dropping the “h” and thereby suggesting Donald Trump was about to receive Teresa May, who made her name as a porn star.

But other than that, the PM would have been delighted. In the press conference that followed their Oval Office meeting, there were no bombshells: Trump managed to get through it without insulting an entire ethnic group, trashing a democratic norm or declaring war, any of which might have diverted attention from May’s big moment. He was on best behaviour, diligently reading the script that had been written for him, attesting to the “deep bond” that connects Britain and the US. May received all the assurances she craved that her country’s relationship with the US remains “special”. Why, he even, briefly, took her hand.

However, these are not normal times. May and her team will be pleased with the optics and indeed some of the substance – artfully, May got Trump to confirm, on camera, that he is “100% behind Nato” – but the underlying truth is that this dash to Washington was mortifying.

I wish the major media outlets would stop perseverating on fake news, alternative facts, lying, and so on, not because it harms Trump but because it doesn’t. What it actually does is undermine their own position. It’s like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.

They don’t seem to recognize that a cottage industry has grown up around identifying fake news, alternative facts, and lying on the part of the major news outlets. It’s not difficult. It’s like shooting a sitting duck.

Where did the idea of a factual, non-partisan press come from, anyway? For the first 100 years or so of Columbia’s existence it was assumed that the press was partisan. It never stopped being partisan. But it also responds to market pressures and a half century ago both parties were more centrist than they are now.

What can be done about the situation? Either the major media outlets should just openly accept their status as partisan journals or they should take steps to stop being partisan journals. Here are a few suggestions.

Stop endorsing candidates or policies. You can endorse principles without being partisan but not candidates, laws, or policies.

Report more stories on more subjects. As I’ve mentioned before there are multiple ways of grooming the news including what you report, how you report it, and what you don’t report. If you get all of your news from American news media, you might be hardly aware that Africa, South America or, indeed, much of Europe even existed. When I want to know about Africa, I must turn to French media.

Change their style books. Use factual characterizations rather than Orwellian circumlocutions. “Illegal immigrant”, if hurtful, is factually correct. “Undocumented immigrant” is an Orwellian half-truth. “Climate denialist” is loaded. It should either be eschewed or balanced by referring to the opposing view as “climate alarmists” or “warmists”. Better not to characterize at all. Just report the facts in a balanced fashion and let the reader and/or viewer draw his or her own conclusions.

Decide that criticizing non-white or female politicians isn’t ipso facto racist or sexist. If you disagree with a position or action taken by a white, male politician, you should disapprove of it when taken or held by a black or female one. Doing otherwise is either partisan or bigoted or both. News coverage during President Obama’s presidency felt like the end of The Red Shoes.

Abandon the point-of-view style of news writing and return to the five Ws style.

Given the proliferation of sources that has led to the decline in influence of the major media outlets, that may be too little too late. But at least it’s a step in the right direction.

At Hedgeye economist Daniel Thornton lays out his case that neither president nor party does much to produce economic growth:

These data and analysis support my belief that the party of the president has had little to no effect on economic growth. Individually, presidents and their policies can affect growth, but the ultimate effects of these policies may not be reflected in growth during their term in office. We would need much more data and many more changes in the political party of the president to have any reasonable chance to say whether one party is more pro-growth than the other.

But even if we had such data, I’m inclined to believe that we would find it difficult,if not impossible, to attribute the effect to the party in power. We would have a better chance to attribute the change in growth to a particular action taken by a particular president or party, but, even here it would be difficult to separate the effect of this action from the effects of other factors that determine growth.

Note that Dr. Thornton’s essay does not claim that policy does not influence growth. His data suggest that Democrats and Republicans alike have pursued policies that have produced weak results. Check out the “Washington consensus”. If that’s what they’re pushing on developing countries, what is the likelihood that their advice is better domestically?

Is it possible that we could have greater economic growth without producing adverse effects on the environment, income equality, etc.? Who knows?

I think the real issue is that you can’t produce greater economic growth without having an adverse effect on incumbency.

Don’t construe that as my thinking that Donald Trump’s preferred policies (cuts in the personal income tax, infrastructure spending, more military spending) will produce more economic growth. I don’t think that will be the case unless wealthy individuals and businesses start investing much more vigorously in the U. S. economy. Whenever you read the words “productivity growth”, you should think “business investment”. They’re the same thing.

And, as I’ve been saying for more than a decade, the problem with the U. S. economy isn’t a consequence of inadequate consumer spending which is what the policies putatively address. It’s inadequate business investment.

At The National Interest I believe that Ted Galen Carpenter correctly identifies three of the basic problems with U. S. foreign policy:

• Threats are exaggerated
• We can’t establish priorities
• Our ability to do cost-benefit or risk-reward analysis is out of whack

The first of those should come as no surprise. I believe it’s a result of the nature of our political system. The penalty for understating a threat is higher than for overstating it so our politicians are predisposed to overstating threats. That’s what caused us to make so many wrong decisions with respect to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Abetted by bad information from the Central Intelligence Agency, the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union was systematically overstated until by the end of the 1950s, it actually was a threat.

I’m glad to see that he mentioned the last of those. One of the things I noticed and pointed out during the George W. Bush administration was that I couldn’t relate at all to GWB’s notions of risk and reward. He failed to notice risks that I thought were obvious and saw rewards that I thought were illusory.

Where I think that Mr. Carpenter is wrong is that I don’t believe that Donald Trump can do anything about them for two reasons. First, they are clearly products of our political system and, second, Donald Trump’s highly transactional and impulsive approach leaves no room for the sort of dispassionate analysis that would lead to ordering priorities appropriately or doing a solid analysis of cost-benefit.

A new article in Nature highlights an intriguing finding. It’s no particular surprise that the “wisdom of crowds” doesn’t always pick the right answer to a question but this might come as a surprise:

The team asked study participants to answer a given set of questions. Then the researchers asked those respondents to guess how other people would answer. The algorithm then looked for answers that were ‘surprisingly popular’, or more popular than most respondents thought they would be. In most cases, the answers that exceeded expectations were the correct ones.

My interpretation of that is that when operating in a social context people more frequently arrive at the right answers than they do when operating in isolation from each other. It’s something of a scientific validation of the jury system. In the jury system rather than being isolated from one another the jurors deliberate within a social context. It’s not clear to me what practical importance the finding has other than pointing the way to a different and possibly more accurate strategy for taking opinion polls.