Author: VD

Scientific projection

Have you noticed that the globocaustals always insist that scientists who are skeptical about the “science” of global warming must be in the pocket of Big Oil? As is so often the case when criticism is coming from the Left, it’s merely an assumption that their critics must be doing the same thing they are:

It recently came out that James Hansen, one of the two or three most prominent global warming alarmists on whose work the IPCC reports rest, “forgot” to report $1.6 million in outside income, as required by his government contracts. Is that significant? Well, yes: A handful of scientists, including Hansen, have gotten wealthy on climate alarmism. They have an enormous financial interest in the faux science they have done so much to perpetrate. It is more likely that the Pope would renounce Christianity than that Hansen, Michael Mann, etc., would change their minds about global warming, regardless of the evidence. (I say that because the Pope has far more intellectual integrity than the climate alarmists.)

Al Gore has gotten rich off his “warnings” of nonexistent global warming. James Hansen has gotten rich off his “warnings” of nonexistent global warming. And yet none of the Bezemer 12 happened to get rich off their warnings of a global financial crisis that actually happened. I haven’t either.

Now, why would it be more profitable to provide warnings of something imaginary than it is to provide warnings of something real. And why would anyone assume that either Al Gore or James Hansen, neither of whom are actual scientists, are neither corrupt nor motivated by the pecuniary gain they have demonstrably realized?

Mailvox: the dangerous Ron Paul

The cognitive dissonance at work in N’s email, written in response to yesterday’s column, is remarkable:

I like Ron Paul but I don’t like him closing all our bases around the world and bringing our army back home. This isolationist view is DANGEROUS and will only empower and embolden our enemies and actually bring us closer to WORLD WAR, this time right at our DOORSTEPS!

Is that what you want???

If Reagan said America was that “shining city on the hill”, dimming it around the world with an isolationist view will only make stronger the darkness of this world. We need to keep shining that light shining everywhere, bud. The cost of peace ain’t cheap, but war is a hell of a lot more expensive!

Yes, that is precisely what I want. All military bases closed, all American troops back in the USA. To argue otherwise is indicative of a shockingly stupid perspective which is not only illogical, but blatantly ignores both the historical record and the observable reality of present U.S. foreign policy.

First, the argument about “the cost of peace” is a non-starter. America is presently engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Iran. (Don’t kid yourself, there are already CIA and most likely special forces in Iran right now.) It may still be active in Libya. That is hardly peace.

Second, the USA is bankrupt. It can’t afford ANY military operations at all. Thanks to the expected failure of the Congressional supercommittee, automatic defense cuts must be made. As the global economic contraction continues, the U.S. military will have to shrink.

Third, it is American military operations that have not only brought enemies to our DOORSTEPS, but have brought them into the country. The Saudis who attacked the Two Towers on 9/11 were angry about the U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and were “studying” in the United States. There are far more Somalis in the USA than there were before U.S. troops invaded Somalia and more Iraqis than before U.S. troops invaded Iraq.

Isolation is not dangerous. American strength and wealth waxed during its isolationist period and has declined steadily ever since, just as both the Roman and British empires declined once they started attempting to police the world. As I wrote in the column, the irony is that the one Republican presidential candidate whose policies would strengthen the American military and best protect American interests is constantly attacked by stupid and ignorant Republicans who wrongly believe that the more troop deployments that take place, the stronger the nation is.

No wonder they also fall for the Neo-Keynesian argument that the more money you spend, the wealthier you become.

The end of the casino

I don’t think we’re actually quite there yet, but perhaps we can hope that the end is in sight:

CNBC is reporting that there are now clients running out of the markets entirely because they do not believe their customer funds are safe.

That’s the end of it. The belief that there are more MF Globals has now taken hold. The thieves have pushed it too far and now we’ve got the start of a global liquidity run, and with good reason.

The authorities both in the regulatory side and on the prosecutorial side have reufsed to put a stop to the thievery and now the risk factors have turned into realized risk.

The market is done folks. You can be right but if you make your bet in the markets, are right, and then get screwed anyway when someone steals the money and nobody goes to jail there comes a time when people begin to understand that it can happen to them and will unless they depart the market.

We’re there folks.

This accompanies news from ZeroHedge that Corzine and the banksters at MF Global legally stole more than $1.2 billion of their clients’ money and “invested” it on MF Global’s behalf prior to losing it. I’ve been saying Wall Street is a casino, not an investment market, for years and recommended staying away from it. But if you’re putting money in the market now, with the knowledge that you can lose your money even if you bet correctly, you’re just stupid.

Ironically, small businesses will probably find it much easier to find investment once the casino is abandoned en masse, since investors will tend to go back to investing capital in actual companies instead of paper instruments leveraged to fictional paper assets.

Mailvox: ah, innocence

Evil Kirk has a touching faith in the technocrats:

Evil Kirk: 11/21/11 6:47 AM:

The crash already came and went. If you view crashes in the 1929 sense or the “It’s a Wonderful Life” sense, you’re out of date and just worrying over a bogeyman. You aren’t going to wake up tomorrow to bank runs and general panic. We are largely in a post-radical economic discontinuity age. Too much is known, temporary technocratic leadership is too readily accepted, and people in general are too savvy and suspicious to tolerate radical discontinuity.

I just had to post this publicly to ensure it was on the record. It is indeed amusing and indicates the mindset of someone who I suspect doesn’t track a single economic statistic, let alone the ones I do. And here I’d thought the public mocking of the concept intrinsic in Reinhart and Rogoff’s best-selling book had finally killed off the theme “this time it’s different”.

WND column

There is only one

Last week, Joseph Farah expressed a certain degree of frustration with the Republican candidates for president. Like clockwork, one candidate after another has demonstrated fatal flaws that serve to completely disqualify him, or her, as the case may be, from the White House.

Mitt Romney is still the nominal front-runner, as he has been from the start. However, he is only a front-runner because of the huge quantity of corporate cash he has collected, which is hardly a positive in an election cycle when the electorate is keenly aware of the huge amount of corruption in the Wall Street-Washington axis. He has no conservative grassroots support because he is not a conservative. Not only is he a religious cultist and an architect of the precursor to Obamacare, but he is downright notorious for his lack of principle. While it is possible he could defeat Obama, there is no reason to believe he would govern in a manner that is materially different than President Goldman Sachs. Both Romney and Obama are post-ideological, in that neither appears to believe in anything but himself.

VPFL Week 10

85 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-3-0)
84 Moundsview Meerkats (6-4-0)

69 Bailout Banksters (6-3-1)
61 Macau Marauders (3-6-1)

57 RR Redbeards (4-5-1)
41 GroverBeach Quixotes (4-6-0)

87 MS Swamp Spartans (5-5-0)
56 Cranberry Rhyneauxs (3-7-0)

67 Bane Sidhe (5-5-0)
39 Green Reverends (5-4-1)

Two weeks, zero defensive points. That cost me first place last week; even a mediocre performance would have been enough to win. It was particularly galling since the White Buffalo got THIRTY (30!) out of his Chicago defense. Unbelievable, especially since I picked up KC vs Denver in preference to Chicago vs Detroit.

This week, I have to hope that Nate doesn’t make me regret dropping Denarius Moore after Carson Palmer’s dreadful debut. I really like him as a receiver, but after Campbell got hurt, I figured there wasn’t anyone to throw him the ball.

Rope for the troll

A few of you have been wondering why I tend to leave the atheist TruthOverFaith’s comments when he regularly launches wildly inappropriate and off-topic attacks on Christianity. Below are the three of most recent examples made in the previous three posts:

TruthOverfaith 11/20/11 2:18 AM
And then Jesus said, “Sorry about that, fellas! But when the Son of Man needs to fart, he fuckin’ farts!!”-Jesus F Christ.

TruthOverfaith 11/20/11 2:24 AM
And then Jesus said, “How in the hell does my barbaric blood sacrifice fit in to this fucking conversation!! You need to talk about my precious, fucking blood sacrifice for your goddamned sins!!”-Jesus Christ

TruthOverfaith 11/19/11 5:09 AM
“neutrinos are the Tim Tebow of the physics world”

And I thought Tim Tebow was the anal sphincter of the physics world!

Oops, perhaps I’m confusing Tim Tebow with Kirk Cameron. Which one of those nutbags was on a stupid sitcom in the 1980’s?

“And then Jesus said, “Praise me, praise me, praise my holy name. The rest is total donkey sh*t. Amen.”-Jesus Christ, aka Mr. Messiah, aka Mr. Big Dick.

The reason I don’t delete these is that they demonstrate more cogently and convincingly than I ever could one of my major points about atheism, which is to say, that it is indicative of psychological disorder. Now, obviously not all atheists exhibit this incessant vulgarity, intellectual immaturity, and general social autism. But there is a sufficiently strong correlation than more research into the potential causal relationship is indicated; I note that the initial research into the subject has already offered scientific support for my original hypothesis of a link between atheism and Asperger’s Syndrome.

Just as people judge Christianity by the Christian, atheism is judged by the atheist. And that it is why it behooves us to permit the public face of atheism to exhibit itself rather than sweep the ugliness under the carpet. There is no need to respond to this sort of comment, as it speaks sufficiently for itself.

Mailvox: thinking Tebow through

castricv is skeptical that the Veer can work in the NFL:

Tebow is a great person, a stand up leader, and will always give his all. However, there is no way he is starting for any team past next year and though he may remain as a great backup or a pinch runner/QB, he will never be able to keep pace with the Brees, Brady, Rodgers of the league.

I said much the same thing after watching the Miami game. And I still THINK that’s the case now that the Broncos are 4-1 with Tebow at the helm, compared to 1-4 when starting Orton. (So much for Coach Fox’s ability to correctly calculate his team’s chances to win.) But I’m no longer so certain it can’t keep working in the long term, because there is the possibility of a running-heavy game being very effective for a team in an era when the entire NFL has gone passing-mad for two very important reasons. Turnovers and game time.

The Broncos simply don’t turn the ball over in the Tebow offense. In six games, he has one INT and one fumble lost. That is absolutely huge in the day of the frequent pick-six. Let’s look at the three elite quarterbacks castricv mentioned. Drew Brees has 7 INT 0 FL in the last six games. Brady has 5 INT 1 FL in the same span. So, you have to factor in Tebow’s turnover rate of .333 compared to 1.16 and 1.0. Part of Aaron Rodgers incredible value as a QB comes from his low turnover rate of 0.333, the same as Tebow’s. I think this is an aspect of the position that analysts are leaving out of the equation and helps explain why the Broncos are winning despite everyone’s expectations.

Imagine if the Broncos acquired a very good running back to pair with Tebow, one that can break a stacked box like Adrian Peterson. The quarterback being a runner helps address the stacked box issue because there is an additional blocker. I’m not saying this definitely would work, I’m simply saying that I can imagine that it COULD work. And it has a lot more potential than throwing another mediocre quarterback with a turnover rate of 2+ like Orton out there.

The lack of turnovers is particularly significant since a running team reduces the number of possessions for both teams from 12 to 9. Since the average points scored in a game by one team is 21, the average number of scoring possessions is around 3. (Keeping it simple here.) An average NFL quarterback turns the ball over twice per game, so in normal game he’s got to lead his team on a scoring drive three times out of ten to give it a reasonable chance to win, but three times out of seven when playing Tebow and the Broncos. How many quarterbacks can be expected to score every other drive?

Tebow, on the other hand, only has to generate a scoring drive one out of every three drives. Throw in the field position advantage provided by the nearly two turnover advantage, and you can see why the approach might theoretically work so long as Tebow can continue to avoid turning the ball over. He’ll never be able to keep pace with Brady, Brees, or Rodgers, but then, he doesn’t necessarily have to. Remember, this is not all that different from the approach that Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick used to beat the superior K-Gun offense of the Bills in Super Bowl XXV.

The three things that struck me when watching the final Denver drive to beat the Jets were as follows:

1. Tebow has excellent vision and patience when running the ball. It’s really striking. This makes stopping him much harder than it looks. There must have been four or five times when a Jets defender would have had him if he hadn’t seen the opening and taken it at just the right moment. It also explains why he is so much more effective towards the end of games when the defenders are a little tired and slow.

2. His teammates have his back. Champ Bailey has been the most openly supportive, but after the last touchdown, when Tebow returned to the bench, one of the Denver cornerbacks, Cassius Vaughn, bent down, hugged him, and the microphone caught him telling Tebow “You keep turning it on! We love you, boy.” In the ultimate team sport, this is more meaningful than most spectators understand.

3. The coaches can’t believe what’s happening and really don’t know what to do with him or about him. There were more similarities than differences between the reactions of Fox and Ryan. After the touchdown run, Fox had his hands on his head, happy, but with a look of incredulity on his face. Ryan looked equally incredulous, but totally disgusted too.

But the NFL has to be loving the situation. A mediocre Denver team has somehow become must-see TV for NFL fans around the nation. Not only was the Denver stadium shaking with the chanting of the fans, but I have seldom heard the TV commentators more intrigued with the last five minutes of a 13-10 non-playoff game. They were actually laughing after Tebow scored. The whole drive was so awesome and ugly that I had to watch it twice. Make that three times.

Now, I can’t see it happening. I honestly can’t. I could see Denver winning the AFC West and perhaps even upsetting New England in the playoffs, but I can’t see them beating Pittsburgh or Baltimore. But just for the fun of it, can you imagine how utterly insane it would be, how totally nuclear the sports media would go, if Denver were to face Green Bay in the Super Bowl?

Keeny is a very technical boy

I’ve been reading the second edition of Debunking Economics by Steve Keen and I’ve been reading it very slowly and carefully because it appears to be one of two things. If his criticisms are generally correct but his proposed alternatives are generally incorrect, (which is what I would presently conclude on the basis of a still-incomplete reading, but I am reserving judgment for now) this is the most important book on economics since Paul Samuelson’s 1948 textbook.

If, on the other hand, he is generally correct across the board, it is the most important book on economics since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. Either way, it does to neoclassical economics what Mises and Hayek together did to socialist economics. It’s not a critique, and to call it a deconstruction would completely fail to do it justice. It’s a one-man gang bang. In prison.

On the casual level, my first impression was “Damn, I was right! I knew I was smarter than all those clueless PhDs babbling nonsensically about equilibrium and rational consumers with perfect information.” And my second impression was “Damn, I didn’t know the half of it. Keen is a freaking genius!” Needless to say, I will be writing a very detailed review/critique of it in a month or two. In the meantime, it’s highly recommended for those who grokked RGD and want to go deeper. There is a surprising amount of synchronicity between Debunking Economics and The Return of the Great Depression even though he is a professional academic coming from a left-wing perspective and I am an amateur

And just for the record… I should mention that Dirk Bezemer told me he probably would have included me with Keen, Baker, Shiller and the others on the famous list of the Bezemer 12 who saw the 2008 crisis coming had he known about my predictions prior to assembling it. But I’m hardly the only one; Investor Home has expanded the list to 45, including Ron Paul, Nassim Talib, and rather less credibly, Paul Krugman. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to learn Dutch academics aren’t regular readers of the WND commentary page, but it is really a pathetic commentary on the state of economics to note that less than 50 people, out of all the various academics, analysts, and financial media talkers, managed to notice the global debt tsunami.

What is fantastic about Keen’s book is he explains, in great detail, exactly why nearly all academic and professional economists didn’t see it coming in 2008 and still don’t see it coming now. They literally cannot see anything of the sort due to their theoretical blinders.

Still faster than light

The second neutrino experiment appears to confirm the previous result:

One of the most staggering results in physics – that neutrinos may go faster than light – has not gone away with two further weeks of observations. The researchers behind the jaw-dropping finding are now confident enough in the result that they are submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal.

“The measurement seems robust,” says Luca Stanco of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Padua, Italy. “We have received many criticisms, and most of them have been washed out.”

Stanco is a member of the OPERA collaboration, which shocked the world in September with the announcement that the ghostly subatomic particles had arrived at the Gran Sasso mine in Italy about 60 nanoseconds faster than light speed from the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, 730 kilometres away. Theorists have been struggling to reconcile the September result with the laws of physics. Einstein’s theory of special relativity posits that nothing can travel faster than light, and many physicists believe the result could disappear in a puff of particles.

The result also unsettled those within the OPERA collaboration. Stanco was one of 15 team members who did not sign the original preprint of the paper because they thought the results were too preliminary.

One of the main concerns was that it was difficult to link individual neutrino hits at Gran Sasso to the particles that left CERN. To double check, the team ran a second set of measurements with tighter bunches of particles from 21 October to 6 November.

In that time, they observed 20 new neutrino hits – a piddling number compared with the 16,000 hits in the original experiment. But Stanco says the tighter particle bunches made those hits easier to track and time: “So they are very powerful, these 20 events.”
More checks

The team also rechecked their statistical analysis, confirming that the error on their measurements was indeed 10 nanoseconds. Some team members, including Stanco, had worried that the true error was larger. What they found was “absolutely compatible” with the original announcement, he says.

Fascinating stuff. It’s tremendously amusing to see all the physicists pooh-poohing the reports and producing literally dozens of why what has reportedly happened couldn’t possibly have happened. It would appear supraluminal neutrinos are the Tim Tebow of the physics world. Anyhow, if there are subsequent confirmations of faster-than-light speed and the scientific consensus of the physics world mutates once more, I have little doubt that the atheists of the future will be one day be arguing that the Bible is wrong because it implies nothing can move faster than light. They’ve done this with both Ptolemy’s geocentric theory and the Flat Earth theory, so there is no reason to believe they won’t eventually blame Einstein’s mistakes on God as well.

The experiments also serve to substantiate my critique of the “extraordinary claims” argument. Traveling faster than light is every bit as extraordinary a claim as the existence of the supernatural; it is actually more extraordinary because claims are far less frequently made for it. And yet, the experiment has been repeated once, will be peer reviewed, and will probably be replicated once or twice in the relatively near future.

If this is “extraordinary evidence”, then science is in much worse shape than either the science critics or the science fetishists imagine.

But let’s not forget the most important factor here: supraluminal speed is just cool.