Author: VD

The problem isn’t the marketing, gentlemen:

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language.

This is such classic left-wing thinking. They genuinely believe the majority of people will cheerfully engage in Holocaust 2.0 so long as “kill the Jews” is properly marketed as “an innovative solution to the very serious problem of global overpopulation.” The sad thing is that they believe it because so many of them are capable of falling for it themselves.

So much for the multiculturalist theory of inevitable, unstoppable, one-way migration:

Consider Ireland’s capital, which earned the nickname Dublinski after roughly 180,000 Poles, Czechs and other Eastern Europeans went there in search of work after the European Union expanded in 2004. Now, a stunning rise in the unemployment rate, currently 10.4 percent, is making even the most recent arrivals rethink their plans.

“Since 2000, there has been a resurgence of intra-European migration,” said Rainer Muenz, a migration scholar who is head of research and development at Erste Bank in Vienna. “To a certain extent, that’s clearly unwinding now.”

Between April 2008 and the end of this month, as many as 50,000 workers are likely to have returned home from Ireland, mostly to Eastern Europe, according to Alan Barrett of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin.

Of course, it would be deeply racist for anyone to believe that Mexicans should follow suit and return to Mexico. Poles, Czechs and Romanians may be many things, but it is undeniable that one thing they are not is Mexicans. And since, as has often been asserted by the pro-immigration set, some Mexicans are good for the economy and the nation, it is obvious that more Mexicans would be even better. And therefore, it logically follows that the optimal situation rests upon the maximum number of Mexicans migrating to the United States as soon as possible.

I, for one, am convinced and I will not be satisfied until every last Mexican is happily ensconced within the borders of the United States and the entire nation of Mexico is an empty, windswept land inhabited solely by vultures and gila monsters. Una nación azteca! Sí, se puede!

While many are starting to believe that the worst is past, I wouldn’t put any stock in all the prognostications of recovery later in the year. I recently met a European executive and we spent some time talking economics over several espressos. He told me that steel shipments have come to an almost complete halt around the world. In Germany, for example, the export market has collapsed so completely that not only have orders dropped to 10 percent of previous levels, but their inventories haven’t changed much since January.

And this is subsequent to the previous reports of huge declines: “In the European Union, there were production drops of 31.6 percent in Germany, 35.7 percent in France, 35.7 percent in Spain and 39.9 percent in Italy. Brazilian steel production decreased by 39 percent last month from February 2008 totals, and both Russia and Ukraine saw steel output fall by 32.1 percent and 33.6 percent respectively.”

Since steel is a leading economic indicator, this bodes very, very poorly indeed for the world economy.

I can’t imagine how issuing legal dictates to doctors ordering them to kill people could possibly go awry:

Physicians in Montana could be facing “kill-on-demand” orders from patients who want to commit suicide if a district court judge’s opinion pending before the state Supreme Court is affirmed. The case has attracted nominal attention nationwide, but lawyers with the Christian Legal Service have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the pending case because of what it would mean to doctors within the state, as well as the precedent it would set. The concern is over the attack on doctors’ ethics and religious beliefs – as well as the Hippocratic oath – that may be violated by a demand that they prescribe deadly chemicals or in some other way assist in a person’s death.

Enough with the preludes already! Really, government can be such an infuriating tease at times. I’m sure everyone is wondering when Obama and the courts are going to stop faffing around with unborn children and the useless elderly and get on with the important business of the American Endlösung.

It’s hard to imagine anyone, on either side, lamenting David Souter’s retirement. And it’s telling how few Republicans are even bothering trying to pretend that McCain’s appointment would have been conservative; I will be personally disappointed if Obama doesn’t name a black lesbian Muslim to the Supreme Court. From Kenya.

Two guys wished me a Happy Commy Day at the gym yesterday, which made me laugh. Whether they’re socialists or anti-socialists, it seems Europeans are much more cognizant of Labor Day’s true meaning. On a related note, it’s interesting to see the socialist New Statesman echo Daniel Hannan in pointing out the intrinsic left-wing nature of the British National Party:

Public anxiety about immigration may have helped fuel the BNP’s rise, but the party is about more than racism and xenophobia. Under the leadership of Nick Griffin, it has worked hard to develop a full manifesto of policies – a strategy that it hopes will pay dividends by improving its image and broadening its appeal. But who exactly is the party appealing to? A brief skim through BNP manifesto literature brings to light proposals for the following: large increases in state pensions; more money for the NHS; improved worker protection; state ownership of key industries. Under Griffin, the modern-day far right has positioned itself to the left of Labour.

How, one wonders, can the far right position itself to the left of a socialist party? The political spectrum is not a circle; the concept of two wings meeting at the extremes is nonsensical. The reality is that it’s just more of the same anti-right propaganda of the sort Jonah Goldberg explicated so thoroughly in Liberal Fascism. After all, when the Left engages in an internecine struggle, both sides usually call the other one “fascist” and “right-wing”. And, one of them is even correct, but only in relative, not absolute, terms.

The corporate parasites protect their own:

After months of anger at Bank of America (BAC) chairman and CEO Ken Lewis, shareholders voted to fire him as board chairman yesterday at the company’s annual meeting in Charlotte.

Lewis had a terrible year in 2008, as did everyone in the banking industry, but he had the added baggage of having withheld material adverse information from his shareholders about the forced merger of BAC with Merrill Lynch late last year. After shareholders approved that merger (which was instigated by government authorities), it came out that Merrill’s losses were going to be considerably worse than anyone knew. To add insult to injury, Merrill’s recently-installed CEO, John Thain, found it prudent to accelerate the payment of Merrill’s annual bonuses by a month. This meant they would be largely complete before the BAC merger completed, making it impossible for BAC’s shareholders to nix or reduce them…. It gets interesting at this point, because even though shareholders did what they think is the right thing, the rest of the company’s directors unanimously voted to retain Lewis as CEO, the top management position.

What the board was saying in effect was: Lewis is the best guy for the job; we’re not going to easily find anyone as good; and his malfeasance in withholding information about the Merrill deal was not sufficient grounds to dismiss him.

Speaking as an entrepeneur, let me state unequivocally that one of the biggest problems in corporate America is the fact that the professional executive class is the most useless bunch of thieving scum in the country. (The Human Resources departments are useless too, but at least they’re not thieves.) Most corporate executives are not businessmen, they’re not capitalists, they’re simply parasites busily engaged with siphoning off as much corporate money as they think they can get away with. Every single member of that board should be fired. If Lewis hadn’t violated his responsibility by keeping his mouth shut about the massive devaluation of the company that the Merrill merger would entail, there’s no way it would have gone through.

It’s sickening the way that the parasites chant “increasing shareholder value” like a mantra while doing their damndest to reduce it in every way. Lewis is a parasitic poster boy; he was willing to sink the entire company rather than risk – risk – the chance that the U.S. Treasury would try to break the law and fire him.

If you’re going to compare the effect of interest rates on GDP and housing prices, would you use the Fed Funds rate, the Discount Rate, the Prime Rate, or the 30-year mortgage rate?

Please note that I said “interest” query, I didn’t say it would be an interesting one….

So much for the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction:

Supporters of the Chicxulub impact theory suggest the impact crater and the mass extinction event only appear far apart in the sedimentary record because of earthquake or tsunami disturbance that resulted from the impact of the asteroid. But Professor Keller said: ‘The problem with the tsunami interpretation is that this sandstone complex was not deposited over hours or days by a tsunami. Deposition occurred over a very long time period.’

The scientists also found evidence that the Chicxulub impact didn’t have the dramatic impact on species diversity that has been suggested. At one site at El Penon, the researchers found 52 species present in sediments below the impact spherule layer, and counted all 52 still present in layers above the molten droplets or spherules.

‘We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,’ said Professor Keller.

I always thought that the asteroid extinction event was a rather dumb idea. And I particularly enjoy the attempted explanation which involves nonexistent earthquakes and tsunamis to explain away the problem of the sedimentary record. Even more amusing will be the typical reaction of scientists, who always rush to remind everyone that it is scientists who have dismantled the previous scientific consensus… even when that’s not actually the case.

The problem is that even when it is true, such a reaction completely misses the point. The relevant point is that what scientists were previously telling us that we were stupid and ignorant to doubt was, in fact, false.

Now, I understand it can be troubling to have to rethink your basic assumptions. For the first time in twenty-five years, I find myself forced to seriously question the basic assumptions of the Smith-Ricardian free trade theory, and I increasingly suspect that national protectionists, such as Pat Buchanan, are correct in certain circumstances. But whether one has doubts about a particular theory or not, there’s simply no cause or excuse for the attempted intellectual bullying to which so many scientists and science fetishists are prone, and such behavior does nothing but increase the rational observer’s doubts about the theories they are advocating.

UPDATE: Mendoscot points out that part of the reason for the hissy fits may be that scientists really don’t want anyone looking too closely at their, ah, very strict peer-reviewed “science“:

“Experts in the field contacted by Nature have been taken aback by the extent of the methodological errors getting through the supposedly strict peer-review systems of the journals in question.”

I finished John Derbyshire’s fascinating book about the Riemann Hypothesis yesterday, Prime Obsession, and a particular passage towards the end got me thinking about my own doubts about Darwin’s famous hypothesis. With all due apologies to Derb, I’m afraid this post doesn’t have anything to do with the subject of his book per se, about which I shall definitely write another time.

Setting aside their search for a proof, how do mathematicians feel about the RH? What does their intuition tell them? Is the RH true or not? I made a point of asking every mathematician I spoke with, very directly, whether he or she believed the Hypothesis to be true. The answers formed a wide spectrum, with a full range of eigenvalues.

Among that majority of mathematicians who believe it true (Hugh Montgomery, for example), it is the sheer weight of evidence that tells. Now, all professional mathematicians are that weight of evidence can be a very treacherous measure. There was a good weight of evidence for Li(x) being always greater than π(x) until Littlewood’s 1914 result disproved it. Ah, yes, RH believers will tell you, but that was merely one line of evidence, numerical evidence, together with the unsupported assumption that the second log-integral term -½Li(x½) would continue to dominate the difference, which would therefore always be negative. For the Hypothesis we have far more lines. The RH underpins an enormous body of results, most of them very reasonable and – to bring in a word mathematicians are especially fond of – “elegant.” There are now hundreds of theorems that begin “Assuming the truth of the Riemann Hypothesis….” They would all come crashing down if the RH were false. That is undesirable, of course, so the believers might be accused of wishful thinking, but it’s not the undesirability of losing those results, it’s the fact of their existence. Weight of evidence.

Other mathematicians believe, as Alan Turing did, that the RH is probably false. Martin Huxley is a current non-believer. He justifies his nonbelief on entirely intuitive grounds, citing an argument first put forward by Littlewood: “A long-open conjecture in analysis generally turns out to be false. A long-open conjecture in algebra generally turns out to be true.”
– Prime Obsession pp 356-357

The salient question, then, is if the present ND-TENS more aptly analogous to analysis or algebra? I am an evolutionary skeptic for a number of reasons, but my intuitive reasoning on the matter is essentially similar to Huxley’s. Moreover, the fact that mathematicians manage to peaceably disagree about the truth or not-truth of the Riemann Hypothesis while biologists cannot bear to hear the least little criticism of Neo-Darwinian theory without throwing a hissy fit also tends to invoke serious doubt about the latter in the rational observer.

There’s no question that Riemann possessed a far more brilliant mind than Darwin. The RH is elegant while NDT-TENS is tortured and crude. If I were pressed by the likes of Derbyshire and had to declare one way or the other, I’d have to side with the RH believers and the Darwin doubters.