Author: VD

Minor upset and major upset yesterday. The Ravens knocking off the Titans wasn’t shocking, the Cardinals blowing away the Panthers was. I’m 0-2, but I still like New York and Pittsburgh. I mean, home teams have never gone 0-4, have they?

George W. Bush on his presidency:

“I’m better than fine — I am proud of the accomplishments of this administration,” he said. “I know I gave it my all for eight years, and I did not sell my soul for the sake of popularity. And so when I get back home and look in the mirror, I will be proud of what I see.”

George W. Bush is, in my estimation, one of the four worst presidents in U.S. history, exceeded only by Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. He may, however, be the most delusional about his place in history; the full extent of his ineptitude should become apparent once Afghanistan and Pakistan heat up and the temporary gains in Iraq vanish again.

It’s interesting to note that he was aware of how terrible the political price of the Iraqi Occupation was. Perhaps the many Occupation apologists at National Review, Pajamas Media, and other nominally conservative places can begin to admit that this was, in fact, the case despite their staunch denials at the time.

The game of the round is definitely Titans-Ravens. The combination of nasty defenses, good special teams and mediocre, but passable offenses is a classic championship recipe. I tend to lean towards the Titans here just because I expect their defense to give the Baltimore offense more trouble than the Dolphins defense could. As long as Fisher doesn’t lose his patience and decide that Kerry Collins has to beat the Ravens secondary with his arm, they should be able to slug it out and walk away winners in a low-scoring game.

Everyone loves the Panthers over the Cardinals, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t. But you can never entirely count out an explosive offense or be entirely sure that a quarterback like Kurt Warner won’t suddenly get hot. More likely, they’ll hit him a lot, cause three fumbles, and win by 14 or more. The Giants shouldn’t have too much trouble with the Eagles given that they actually have a quarterback to go with their running game, while I’m one of the few people who isn’t getting on the Chargers bus.

The synchronicities are now coming fast and furious; one could almost think to pass this week’s quiz by paying attention to the financial headlines. Chapter 11: The Hoover New Deal of 1932, for next week.

Perhaps Brad Childress will sign an excellent quarterback and the Vikings will take it up another level to be able to compete with the NFL elite. But it appears very, very unlikely based on this unhappy news of stability in the Vikings staff:

Minnesota Vikings coach Brad Childress plans to retain his entire staff. Special-teams coach Ferraro to stay on…. Ferraro came under perhaps the most scrutiny during the 2008 season. The Vikings’ special teams allowed seven touchdowns, an NFL record in the modern era.

It wasn’t just the touchdowns allowed. It was the fact that a team set up to play field position football was giving away every hard earned net yard on the majority of exchanges. It would be unbelievable if we hadn’t seen so many of these common sense-defying decisions already during the Childress Reign of Confusion.

SA sent this along under the subject “words fail me”. That pretty much sums it up. “Doomed” doesn’t even begin to describe this nation of bankrupt and overweight idiots:

I’ll start off by saying how I noticed a lot of men here complain about not getting messages. Therefore, I decided to take it upon myself to message men in my area who I found interesting. This one in particular was creative, intelligent and handsome…or so his profile led me to believe. We messaged each other on and off through here and IM for about 3 weeks before we met. It’s amazing how much of a connection you can make with someone just by talking to them online. We had a lot in common and a lot of the same outlooks. I could not wait to meet him in person.

Three observations. First, no woman who weighs more than 200 pounds can ever be described as hot, let alone HOT! This is science. Second, if women truly wish for men to stop behaving like pigs, it would be wise to stop providing positive incentive for men to behave like pigs. As long as women have sex with men who are pigs and turn down the boring nice guys, guess what? Some men who aren’t completely clueless may actually notice this and behave accordingly on the off chance they happen to be interested in having sex at some point in the future. Third, if you do something spectacularly dumb, DON’T COMPLAIN ABOUT IT ON THE INTERNET.

Paul Krugman unwittingly explicates it for our edification:

Given sufficient demand for its output, America would produce more than $30 trillion worth of goods and services over the next two years. But with both consumer spending and business investment plunging, a huge gap is opening up between what the American economy can produce and what it’s able to sell….

Even the C.B.O. says, however, that “economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential.” This translates into $2.1 trillion of lost production. “Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity,” declared Mr. Obama on Thursday. Well, he was actually understating things. To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.

Now, keep in mind that the economic growth estimates which go into these calculations AVERAGE a revision of more than 100 percent from one quarter to the next. Even if one assumes the variances are not stackable, this still means a probably variance from the CBO estimate of at least $4.4 trillion, probably on the down side based on the track record of past estimates. Yet this enormous variance which renders the calculation useless doesn’t slow down Keynesian true believers like Krugman, or prevent them from making very specific policy recommendations that wholly depend upon the accuracy of these estimates. When the measures fail, as there is a very high probability that they will, Krugman will no doubt lament that it was too little, too late rather than reject his worthless economic model.

And, of course, the chattering class will throw up their hands and declare that no one could possibly have known that these expert-concocted plans weren’t going to work.

Arnold Kling perceives a rather unpromising historical analogy:

I was reminded of the Battle of the Somme, one of the worst policy blunders of all time. Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was….a really big offensive. Just as Feldstein and Stiglitz pay no attention to the on-the-ground the housing market, the British generals ignored the impact of machine guns on men advancing over open fields.

My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media…. The arithmetic is mind-boggling. If 500 people have meaningful input, and the stimulus is almost $800 billion, then on average each person is responsible for taking more than $1.5 billion of our money and trying to spend it more wisely than we would spend it ourselves.

Considering that it was some 89 years ago that Ludwig von Mises first demonstrated the Impossibility of Socialist Calculation, it’s stunning to observe that Americans are collectively dumb enough to intentionally repeat one of Mankind’s greatest economic blunders. I mean, I am perfectly aware that most people are idiots, repeating that as a mantra is about the only way one can watch the news with equanimity these days, but come on!

I know some of you have been requesting a blog post, and one will eventually be forthcoming. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with listening to me discuss the issue with Jerry Hughes on his Straight Talk radio show at 4 PM Eastern. You can listen live if you like.

Jamila sends us a timely reminder that questioning the blind dogma of scientific consensus can actually be a sound basis for proper science:

Findings reported by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists have reaffirmed a recently disparaged “law” that says a species trait, once lost to the sands of time through evolution, can never be regained. Nineteenth-century Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo argued that once natural selection for a complex functional trait is relaxed — such as when a species moves into dark caves and loses its need for sight — mutations that degrade the genes needed for the trait accumulate, and the sequence of mutations is unlikely to be exactly reversed.

But over the past two decades many biologists have challenged Dollo’s Law, often by using statistical tools to reconstruct trait evolution and ancestry by looking only at existing species and their present-day traits. Boris Igic, assistant professor of biological sciences, and Emma Goldberg, a post-doctoral student in Igic’s UIC laboratory and now at both UIC and the University of Maryland, became suspicious of those methods — which they also had used in evolutionary studies of plant fertilization. They found the methods flawed, prompting them to examine the challenges to Dollo’s Law.

“We used computer simulations to demonstrate that this methodology consistently gives incorrect results when the loss of a trait truly is irreversible,” said Igic. Fifteen years of studies have relied on these procedures to show that Dollo’s Law is frequently violated, Igic said. “But they used what we found was faulty methodology.”

Biologists using faulty methodology… this is hardly a surprise. Not only are many biologists borderline innumerate – as French mathematician Marcel-Paul Schützenberger demonstrated was true of Richard Dawkins – but they tend to be devoid of even the most basic education in the broader liberal arts. And, of course, it is the faulty methodology inherent in the backtesting approach that underlies most, if not all, evolutionary “predictions” that is the one of the foundations of my skepticism about the multitudinous iterations of the Darwinian model.

From the linked article: “Assessing the validity of Dollo’s Law shows the difficulty in reconstructing evolutionary histories using limited available data….”

You don’t say.