Author: VD

The Miracle of Tebow

I have to admit, despite my unshaken belief that he does not in any way meet the necessary qualifications, I am genuinely enjoying the unlikely career of Tim Tebow, Starting NFL Quarterback:

For most of the night, I was looking for a reason why. Why Mark Sanchez (who, for all his problems, has led the Jets to consecutive AFC Championship games) was getting nothing but shade from Plaxico Burress and hot, angry breath from offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer while Tebow, who was playing quarterback with the grace of an ice-skating Bambi, was getting the undying support of his teammates.

For the answer, go back to 3:55 remaining in the fourth quarter. Tebow, barely bothering to look upfield, cradles the ball and takes off like a Greyhound bus driven by a meth head. There on the horizon, he sees the usually unwelcoming vista that is Revis Island. And what does he do? Does he trot out of bounds and save some clock and spare himself the contact? Nope. He barrels over Revis like a hurricane, stays in bounds, and gets that much closer to the end zone.

That’s why you block for a guy like that. That’s why you run route after useless route and try to save play after broken play. That’s why, if you’re on defense, you are just trying to keep it close, just trying to ding Sanchez up enough to make him jumpy, just trying to frustrate the Jets receiver corps enough to make them give up on their game plan.

Because at the end of the game, it might just be 13-10 and you might just have a shot. You might just be 20 yards out and your quarterback might just be able to run like Mike Alstott. And with the home crowd losing their minds in the thin air, and the terrifying Jets defense on their back foot and everyone in America watching because your very average AFC West team has become the center of the football universe, your quarterback might just do the one thing he was put on Earth to do: make a perfect read on a safety who is overcommitted to the inside and take off with only one destination in mind. He might do what he said he would, what he asked you to believe he could do. He might just win the damn thing for you.

Dr. Pangloss was right. This is the best of all possible worlds. I assumed Tim Tebow would fail as a starter because he is not capable of throwing the ball at an NFL level. This was a basic failure of logic, because as Mr. Tebow has demonstrated, winning in the NFL does not actually require a quarterback successfully throwing the ball. He is literally adding a new dimension to the game, which is not merely interesting, it is awesome.

I love Tebow’s success to date for exactly the same reason I exulted in the failure of Real Madrid’s “galáctico” approach to international football. For those troglodytes who are unaware, a few years back Real Madrid spent umpty gazillion euros doing the equivalent of starting Peyton Manning (Zizou), Tom Brady (Luis Figo) and Drew Brees (David Beckham) in the same backfield, in addition to acquiring the best English striker (Michael Owen) to pair with the best Brazilian striker (Ronaldo), backed up by the best young Spanish striker (Raul). They spent $210 million just to acquire the rights to FOUR players. Everyone – and I mean almost everyone in Europe except me – assumed that Real would dominate the La Liga as well as the Champion’s League for years.

They won three titles, all of them before Beckham and Owen arrived. This compares to the four they had won in the six years that preceded the galáctico era. It was a complete failure and remains a proverbial example of the limitations of pure talent in team sports.

I still find it incredibly hard to imagine a Tebow-led NFL team winning the Super Bowl. But at this point, I can’t count it out entirely, because Tebow is all about the team rather than the talent. And that is as awesome and inspiring as it is amusing.

We are bad Churchians

An actual email dialogue:

“I have something else from the bible that I feel is a word for you. Proverbs 27:14.”

“I just feel so blessed by your sharing….”

He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.
– Proverbs 27:14

I don’t know about you, but anytime someone uses the word “blessed” about themselves, Matthew 6:5 insensibly comes to mind. Particularly when they use it multiple times in a single conversation. They tend to strike me as the sort of Churchians who think prayer is a means of communicating with other people in their religious circle.

Jane Galt quits the markets

Barnhardt Capital Management shuts down. Ann Barnhardt explains her belief in “the inevitability of the collapse of the global financial markets, the overthrow of our government, and the resulting collapse in the rule of law.”

Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.

I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm….

And so, to the very unpleasant crux of the matter. The futures and options markets are no longer viable. It is my recommendation that ALL customers withdraw from all of the markets as soon as possible so that they have the best chance of protecting themselves and their equity. The system is no longer functioning with integrity and is suicidally risk-laden. The rule of law is non-existent, instead replaced with godless, criminal political cronyism.

Well, I tried to warn you that Wall Street was nothing but a casino anymore. There is no more genuine investment or financing of capitalist activity on Wall Street than there is in Las Vegas. It’s nothing more than borrowing – or stealing – money to place it on red… then scream for government bailouts when you lose.

The interesting question, which no one has even begun to answer, is how many other capital management firms have been gambling with their clients’ money. And how many have lost it all. I assure you, there is no chance Corzine’s MF Global was the only one.

UPDATE: it looks like the eurocontagion may be getting out of control rather quickly. This may be why Mervyn King of the Bank of England went public with his concerns about a credit crunch. The London Stock Exchange is becoming the lender of last resort for many banks in Italy as concerns over the country’s debt levels squeeze liquidity out of the Italian financial market. With cash increasingly hard to come by, Italy’s banks are turning to CC&G, the L.S.E’s Italian clearinghouse, for short-term lending. That includes some of the country’s largest financial institutions, including Unicredit and Mediobanca, according to a person close to the situation.

The first of many

This six hundred-count indictment is exactly what the Obama administration was hoping to prevent with its $20 billion wrist slap of the banking industry:

The 606-count indictment alleges that the two title officers, Gary Trafford and Gerri Sheppard, directed employees under their supervision to forge their names on foreclosure documents, then notarize the forged signatures, so that it appeared that the pair actually signed the documents.

The pair then allegedly directed the employees to file the fraudulent documents with the County Recorder’s office in Clark County, Nevada. The grand jury found “probable cause” that the alleged scheme “resulted in the filing of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents … between 2005 and 2008,” said Nevada Chief Deputy Attorney General John Kelleher.

This is all the result of the banks attempting to fraudulently fill in the blanks caused by their attempt to evade the county title system. And, as Karl Denninger has noted, this should be the first of many, many more prosecutions of banking executives and their employers.

Noch einmal

The Bank of England is warning that we’re back in two-two-two thousand and eight:

The eurozone crisis has left UK banks unable to raise the funding they need to make loans to businesses, evoking the spectre of the crunch that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers. And on one critical measure — the cost of insuring banks against going bust — lenders are already facing tougher conditions than at the height of the crunch, the Bank said.

For the benefit of those who don’t speak Central Bank, “on the brink of a credit crunch” means “we expect there to be a serious financial crisis within months”. In the spring of 2008, the bankers I knew were all talking endlessly about the tightening of credit and the senseless calling of major credit lines. And we all know how that turned out in the fall.

Speaking of wholly owned

Goldman Sachs conquers Europe:

As Greece, Italy and the European Central Bank appointed new leaders in the midst of the worsening Euro crisis, observers rushed to find something that might link the cost-cutting crusaders. And it seems the scrutinisers have found a connection in the form of Goldman Sachs. The new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Monti, and the new Greek prime minister Lucas Papademos all reportedly have the US investment bank as a common denominator.

And Monti has just set the whispers going by refusing to appoint a single elected official to his new cabinet. So, Italy now has an unelected leader buttressed by an unelected consigliere. Fortunately, Goldman has no such undue influence in the United States… wait a minute.

The banker’s president

Who would have thought Obama would turn out to be as wholly owned as John McCain?

President Obama dearly wants to seal a deal in which the nation’s largest banks toss over a few bales of cash — $20 billion to help with foreclosure relief — and the state attorneys general agree not to pursue sprawling and explosive legal cases against the banks.

Mr. Schneiderman and Attorney General Beau Biden of Delaware, joined by a few others, say no. Banks, they say, should disgorge more documents, testify more precisely and prove more completely that they own millions of mortgage notes. These rebel attorneys general want the banks to hand over more than $200 billion, which would enable the government to write down tens of millions of mortgages.

But in the end, their argument is elemental: Wouldn’t the nation benefit from knowing the truth about the behavior of banks and bankers?…

[T]he Obama administration has Shaun Donovan, secretary of housing and urban development; the economic adviser Gene Sperling; and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. dialing liberals, activists and bloggers, urging them to pressure the rebellious attorneys general to forgo emotionally satisfying inquiries and take the deal.

Take the deal? It’s absurd on its face. Notice how desperate the banks are to close the doors on their past actions. Anytime someone is delighted to pay a $20 billion fine, you have to ask yourself what they are so eager to put behind them. It’s not just mark-to-market or Europe that will cause them to implode, it’s also their criminal activity. This combination of factors means that the big banks are eventually going to go down sooner or later, the only significant question is which blow will prove to be the lethal one.

It’s fascinating to see this perspective being presented in the New York Times, of all places.

Multiple police

McQueary says he stopped the rape and that he did talk to police… and not merely the university official in charge of the campus police:

Mike McQueary, the Penn State assistant football coach under fire for his reported lack of action in an alleged 2002 rape of a boy by Jerry Sandusky, said in an email to a former classmate that he stopped the assault in an athletic facility shower and discussed it with police.

In the email obtained by The Morning Call, McQueary wrote that he “did have discussions with police and with the official at the university in charge of police” following the alleged incident between Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant coach, and a boy.

The interesting thing is that despite what many have assumed, this doesn’t contradict what is reported to have been in the grand jury transcript – I haven’t and don’t intend to read it – but it did catch my attention that all the reports about it only said McQueary had not spoken with the University Police. But that says absolutely nothing about whether he did or did not speak with the State College police or some other police department. It seemed to be a strangely specific negative comment.

Asked about McQueary’s statement in the email that he had discussions with police, Penn State police told The Morning Call they were deferring to the university public relations office, which did not return a call Tuesday afternoon. Pennsylvania State Police in Harrisburg, which is heading the investigation, did not return a call…. The State College Police Department did not return a call for comment.

If McQueary is telling the truth – and there is no reason to assume he is not – then this will be a second example of the police receiving an eyewitness report about Sandusky raping a child and doing absolutely nothing about it. I’ve been convinced that if there is something sinister going on in Penn State, it goes well beyond the football program and the police have known about it for years. Remember, the police are not paid to protect and serve the public, they are paid to protect and serve the powerful. This has always been the case.

The police are not a magic talisman. They are a notoriously corrupt institution. Anyhow, the Penn State scandal appears to be getting curiouser and curiouser.

The irony

Why should one assume that homosexuals know anything more about science than they do about history?

Frontline, which is based in a former Army barracks in Wavertree, has been condemned by gay rights campaigners as trying to ‘repress’ people’s sexuality with ‘Dark Ages’ views.

The national Lesbian and Gay Foundation’s Andrew Gilliver said: ‘The issues about “childhood pain” are nonsense. The pain is often caused by people who don’t understand what they’re going through. We are born gay, but we learn prejudice. This is Dark Ages stuff.’

In response to which I quote the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica: “[T]he contrast, once so fashionable, between the ages of darkness and the ages of light have no more truth in it than have the idealistic fancies which underlie attempts at mediaeval revivalism.”

Roissy has an article today about the way in which feminists are increasingly caught with their pants down by science. It’s a cogent point, even if his definition of science includes things that are definitely non-science, such as evo psych. The same is true of the homosexual community. The “born gay” hypothesis has already been heavily damaged by genetic science and the more malleable human sexuality is determined to be, the more it becomes clear that even if initial sexual orientation is not a conscious choice, dynamic abnormalities are at least partially susceptible to normalization as various ex-gay ministries have claimed.

And even pride paraders should be entirely supportive of the idea that homosexuality can be cured. Because the rapidly declining number of girls being born in China and India indicates that if the “born gay” hypothesis was correct, there will soon be very, very few homosexual individuals permitted to live once a method for prenatal orientation screening is developed.