The relief rally today after yesterday’s great sell-off made all of us at Gropestone feel better. Until we reviewed the cruel math of the recovery curve.

The Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was a study in contrasts, in sheer scale and virtuosity the greatest show on Earth. Like the great circus, it relied on image and illusion.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal raised the hackles of the greens the past week by arguing that availability bias, information cascades, and money shape our perceptions of climate change as much as real science.

Informed citizens once thought it civic duty to read a morning paper and watch the evening news on television. The newspaper is now stale by 9am. And television news is mostly entertainment, as Jibjab so cleverly illustrates.