Author: VD

When default isn’t default

The pretense of Greek solvency continues:

Talks between Greece and its creditor banks to slash the country’s towering debt pile broke down on Friday, with the Greeks warning of “catastrophic” results if a deal to swap bonds is not reached soon. The sides remain divided over the interest rate Greece will end up paying, which determines how much of a hit banks take….

The stumbling block in the negotiations was the low coupon, or interest payment, offered on the new bonds, one source familiar with the matter and one banking source said.

“The main problem was the (European Union and International Monetary Fund’s) insistence on a coupon lower than 4 percent on the new bonds,” the banking source said. It could mean an accounting loss of more than 70 percent for banks on their books, far more than the actual 50 percent cut in the original value of the old bonds laid down in the original deal.

The reason for the charade is that the banks are desperately attempting to avoid the Greek default triggering all the credit default swaps they have made with each other. In order to avoid a complete meltdown, it is necessary to pretend a 50% – or 70% – loss on a failure to repay a loan is somehow not a default.

To grasp how absurd this is, keep in mind that homeowners are in default when they fail to make a single mortgage paymentfall 120 days behind on their mortgage payments, never mind when they openly admit that they can’t make interest payments without taking out a loan to do so or repay more than half the principal of the original loan.

The hidden costs of socialized medicine

It doesn’t even sound good in theory, and unfortunately, it gets even worse in practice:

Doctors in America are harboring an embarrassing secret: Many of them are going broke. This quiet reality, which is spreading nationwide, is claiming a wide range of casualties, including family physicians, cardiologists and oncologists. Industry watchers say the trend is worrisome. Half of all doctors in the nation operate a private practice. So if a cash crunch forces the death of an independent practice, it robs a community of a vital health care resource.

The good news is that government is limiting the cost of medical treatment through its various policies and programs, especially Medicare. The bad news is that the outcome of this trend is that while medical care will be free, you won’t actually receive any.

And the combination of doctors going broke while bailed-out banksters receive massive bonuses would appear to suggest that we’re going to see more graduates going into the financial rape industry and fewer into medical care. That should work well.

Mailvox: a request

Beau is scheduled for surgery:

Please mention this as a mailvox for the regulars: I’m heading in for another heart procedure in a few hours. Having just celebrated the happiest Christmas in several years, being blessed in marriage, family, ministry and good friends, the peace experienced right now is so palpable as to be near indescribable. I am in good hands.

Being easily tired, lurking has its benefits – except of course expression. If I had one final thought to give to the Ilk, it would be a word of encouragement writ bold at the top of my lungs, “Jesus!”

Beau is the best of the Ilk; he puts into daily practice what far too many of us only believe to be right and he does so without rancor. He feeds the hungry, devotes his time to the poor and outcast, and he shares the Gospel with everyone, especially those who need it most. I encourage you to pray that he recover fully and stick around to continue doing the Lord’s work for years to come.

UPDATE: Beau writes post-surgery: “All is well. Instead of another iteration of open heart, the exploratory work revealed the recent October re-plumb is in fact functioning fine. Thank God and thank you all for the words of prayer.”

Mailvox: science and free will

CG asks about the implications of time delay in decision-making:

I have read a number of scientific papers asserting that free will doesn’t exist. The Libet experiment, where a person pushes a button, but the brain registers the signal 7 seconds before the time the person made the choice, is one of the more well-known studies. What do you make of these scientific assertions that free will doesn’t exist? You didn’t really address it in The Irrational Atheist or on your own blog.

No, I didn’t bother, because the sort of experiments cited are not evidence that free will doesn’t exist. In fact, any scientific assertion that free will does not exist on the basis of these experiments does nothing more than demonstrate that scientists receive insufficient training in basic logic.

To make this argument, they are assuming that free will relies solely upon “the person” and not “the brain”. Or to put it more precisely, that “the person” is the conscious aspect of the mind and “the brain” is the unconscious. But the unconscious part of the mind is a part of the same mind as the conscious one! Relying on this false distinction is akin to insisting that because I reacted reflexively to movement out of the corner of my eye before I realized it, I did not move.

But clearly I did move. And I decided to move. I merely did not consciously decide to move. The observable fact of the matter is that we make unconscious decisions every single day, and they are an important aspect of our free will. To demonstrate that free will does not exist, it would be necessary to demonstrate that all humans exhibit the same unconscious reactions to the same stimuli; any variance in the reactions would indicate that humans are agents possessing the ability to make choices even if they are not consciously aware of the choices they are making.

The core mistake they are making here is to assume that everything unconscious is therefore determinate. That is an observably false equivalence.

There is nothing even remotely remarkable about this experiment. Having been a 100m sprinter, I’ve always been perfectly aware that the body moves before the conscious mind realizes it. I was usually in the middle of my second stride out of the blocks before I realized I was already running. In most of my races, I never even consciously heard the gun.

And every martial artist knows that if you’re thinking about your next strike or block, you will be too slow. By the time you consciously see the window and decide “it’s open, therefore I should attack it”, it’s already too late. The fundamental goal of martial arts training is to train your body and free your mind so that you enter a state where you are making the correct decisions without thinking about them. This is the state that most athletes recognize as being “in the zone”.

I do hope he’s lying

I don’t understand why Rick Spielman would assure Christian Ponder, and the rest of the NFL, that the Vikings are not going to draft a quarterback with the third pick in the NFL draft. Now, perhaps they want to prevent teams from feeling the need to trade for the #2 pick, which belongs to St. Louis, who are unlikely to draft RGIII, assuming the Colts draft Andrew Luck, since they have Sam Bradford. In which case, we can hope that they are simply lying in the interest of misdirection.

While it’s true that the Vikings need serious help on the offensive line and USC OT Kalil would be the obvious choice, the most valuable asset in the NFL is a first-rate quarterback. By all the significant metrics, RGIII has much higher potential upside than Christian Ponder, who isn’t bad, but appears unlikely to ever be more than a solid, non-elite starter. That’s quite acceptable, considering recent past history, but given that the jury is still out on whether Ponder can even reach the middle ranks of the NFL quarterbacking fraternity, while RGIII looks as if Vick-level performance is probably his floor, combined with the fact that it’s no longer necessary to mortgage the franchise in order to sign a high first-rounder, why not select RGIII, then start picking offensive linemen, and presumably, defensive backs?

RGIII needs time to learn the NFL game, so he can sit for a year behind Ponder. If Ponder unexpectedly shows signs of reaching elite status, the Carson Palmer trade and Matt Flynn interest shows that RGIII can be dealt for draft value. And if Ponder ends up being mediocre, or as his rookie season suggests, injury-prone, the Vikings can give a very promising, hard-working, and intelligent young quarterback his shot.

Anyhow, if the publicly announced retention of Christian Ponder as the undisputed Vikings starting quarterback is genuinely the first move of the true Spielman era, this doesn’t bode well for its long term results. The Vikings blew it by not picking up Drew Brees when he was available, as I recommended at the time, and I’m hoping that the prospective passing on RGIII doesn’t turn out to be a similarly epic catastrophe.

Hope and Change: Republican style

Mitt Romney’s top ten campaign contributors:

Goldman Sachs
Credit Suisse Group
Morgan Stanley
HIG Capital
Barclays
Kirkland & Ellis
Bank of America
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
EMC Corp
JPMorgan Chase & Co

At least Obama had the decency to lie to America and pretend that he wasn’t going to hold her down while the bankers took turns raping her. If the Republicans are foolish enough to nominate Mitt Romney and he wins the general election, he is going to permit the pillaging of the American economy in a manner that hasn’t been seen since the Roman legions pillaged Carthage.

The evil of denominations

The Church is the people, not the buildings and property. But as these former Episcopalians are learning to their chagrin, and as other churches that made the mistake of joining a denomination have learned, the wolves in sheep’s clothing who presently run the dying denominations don’t hesitate to steal anything of value on which they can legally place their rapacious paws:

Tuesday night, the Fairfax Circuit Court issued its ruling in favor of the Diocese of Virginia and the Episcopal Church in litigation seeking to recover Episcopal church property, according to a report from the Diocese of Virginia. “Our goal throughout this litigation has been to return faithful Episcopalians to their church homes and Episcopal properties to the mission of the Church,” said the Rt. Rev. Shannon S. Johnston, bishop of Virginia.

The court ruled that the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia have “a contractual and proprietary interest” in each of the properties subject to the litigation. The court ordered that all property subject to its ruling be turned over to the Diocese.

The problem is the “accession language” in the contracts through which a church joins a denomination, which means that a denomination which hasn’t contributed a single dime towards the acquisition of a property or the building of a church claims complete ownership of both, contra the interests of the church members whose contributions paid for them and who actually attend the church on a regular basis. This is why no church should ever join a denomination – perhaps demonination would be a more precise term – simply because its theological principles happen to be more or less in line with those presently professed by the denomination.

This isn’t the reason that I describe myself as a Christian, not as anything else. Like every other earthly institution, church denominations are susceptible to corruption, infiltration, and the eventual abandonment of the professed mission. The Episcopal, Lutheran, and Methodist denominations not only don’t appear to be Christian anymore, they can’t even be reasonably described as “churches” in any reasonable manner.

Romney underperforms

39% Romney
23% Paul
17% Huntsman
10% Gingrich
9% Santorum

Lost in the inevitable media hype about Romney winning New Hampshire and Iowa is the fact that he actually performed rather poorly in light of his supposed inevitability. Here are the winning percentages of the last three meaningful New Hampshire primaries:

1996: 27% (Buchanan)
2000: 49% (McCain)
2008: 37% (McCain)
2012: 39% (Romney)

The fascinating thing is that Romney only got 7% more votes in 2012 than he did four years ago, assuming that the present numbers hold up, despite campaigning there ever since the last primary. And he performed about as expected; the two final polls had him at 37%. This is pretty bad for a candidate who is supposed to have the nomination sewn up already, in fact, it indicates that most Republicans simply don’t want to vote for him. The Huntsman vote is probably the largest collection of pure anti-Romney votes, as there is no reason to see them as anything but a protest given the ideological similarities between the two Mormons.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, outperformed. He was supposed to win around 17% of the vote versus 15% for Huntsman. Gallup had him as low as 12%. Instead, he got 23%, which in consideration of Santorum’s very poor performance, puts him in a strong position as the alternative to Romney. So, Perry is done, Huntsman isn’t a player but can pretend to be for a little while, and both Gingrich and Santorum should be done but won’t quit before South Carolina.

We can be confident that Paul did much better than expected in New Hampshire because National Review’s Corner has assiduously, and bizarrely, avoided discussing him in 20 posts about the primary, despite devoting several apiece to Huntsman, Gingrich, and Santorum.

New SEC champions!

Apparently Alabama beat LSU last night in the second SEC championship game of the season or something. I don’t know, because like most of you, I didn’t bother to watch it. But it is certainly amazing to see a conference hold two championship games in a single year; what a pity there was no national championship game because neither Alabama nor LSU proved they could beat the Big 12 or Big 10 champions. Alabama has not proved it could beat the Pac 12 champion. LSU beat Oregon, but that was at the beginning of the season, long before LSU beat Alabama.

Yes, the SEC is the best conference, and yes, both LSU and Alabama are good teams, and perhaps both of them should be able to beat Oklahoma State, Wisconsin, and Oregon. Of course, Pittsburgh was supposed to be able to beat Denver, and a few years ago, Ohio State was supposed to be able to beat Florida. But that’s why you play the games! Now all we know that LSU can beat Alabama and Alabama can beat LSU. In the immortal words of Derrick Coleman, “whoopty damn do”.

About the only good thing about this BCS debacle is that the college football world is so dissatisfied with it that there is little chance they’ll be able to put off a playoff system much longer. And in closing, I quote this Oklahoma State fan:

“What in the hell, people? I bring you many earnest what in the hells. That was it? That was the immovable wall of Technicolor fearsome that Oklahoma State and Stanford had no chance of competing against? That was your big reveal? We are now in the position of crowning a national champion that couldn’t convert the extra point after its solitary touchdown of the game. You’re seriously telling me that our poor little old Big 12/Pac-12 selves didn’t deserve a glance at this business?”

UPDATE: Just to prove that playing a second conference championship game instead of a national championship game was as stupid as I said it would be, here is the empirical evidence:

The nation largely ignored a rematch of SEC foes, giving the BCS national championship its lowest overnight rating ever. The overnight ratings for Monday’s BCS Championship Game are in and they are not good. In fact, they are historically bad, as Alabama’s 21-0 win over SEC-rival LSU drew a 13.8 rating on ESPN (via LA Times). That was the lowest rating championship game in the 14-year history of the BCS.

Intra-conference “national championship” games are a horrendous idea and will clearly harm NCAA football. Historically bad ratings at a time when the NFL is racking up historically high ratings strongly indicates that there is something rotten in the structure of college football. The BCS absolutely should have banned teams that did not win their conference championship.