Author: VD

Rhone writes:

FACTS, not personal attacks, should be the basis for any ‘argument’.This is why i objected to Coulter [at the risk of offending Vox regarding one of his personal icons] because she wastes so much time on them…. Pointing out shortcomings in arguments, or going completely overboard like Mogambo Guru did today is one thing: personal attacks for personal attacks sake turns thinking people off.

Right, that’s why Ann Coulter is the most popular, best-known political commentator in the country. That’s why polemicists like Al Franken, who don’t harbor a single original thought and whose works consist of nothing but ad hominem insults and pointing out trivial objections, are best-selling authors. This is what I consider to be the Coulter Myth, which is that Ann would be “more effective” if only she wouldn’t [fill-in-the blank]. And of course, if Ann had been dumb enough to take the advice, no one would ever have heard of her. I will grant you, however, that the unrelenting nature of the single-minded attacks on the same targets can get just a smidgeon tiresome from time to time.

Facts should be the basis for any argument. I try to use them as a basis for mine whenever they are available, with logic as a strong alternative. Ironically, Rhone is stating this in defense of O’Reilly, whose argument can be accurately summed up as the notion that it is the facts that should be off limits in any discussion of Kerry’s military record.

Furthermore, the facts are that people love personal attacks, people love insults, people love cruelty and watching the suffering of others. All humor, it is said, is based on pain. Why do you think women indulge in the emotional pornography of Oprah and Jerry Springer? Why do you think men bet on everything from crickets to pit bulls to human beings tearing each other apart? We love blood sports, intellectual and physical. So much so that the concept of inhuman as the word is commonly used is inherently oxymoronic.

I also reject Rhone’s theory that the purpose of attacking people is to demonstrate my intelligence. I daresay that those esoteric columns that cause a good part of my readership to give up halfway through do a much better job of that, not that it’s the point in either case. The purpose of attacking people is to destroy the credibility of those who repeatedly make false arguments and ludicrous assertions. Some commentators deserve credibility, many, in my opinion, don’t. As to my own credibility, I have no problem leaving that for others to decide.

Bill O’Reilly proves that he’s not only a coward, but synaptically-challenged to boot:

What should we on the sidelines make of all this? Well, it’s a judgment call. It is absolutely wrong for Americans to condemn Kerry’s war record because he demonstrated provable valor. However, those who distrust him do deserve to be heard, although facts, not emotion, should be demanded.

I think the Swift boat political advertisement calling Kerry a charlatan is in poor taste, and if this kind of thing continues, it might well backfire on the Kerry haters. Most Americans are fair-minded, and bitter personal attacks do not go down well with folks who are not driven by partisanship.

So, it is wrong to condemn Kerry’s war record… how could it possibly be wrong to condemn something that shows every indication of being largely fictional? Kerry is a proven liar, he has a few sycophants supporting his story versus hundreds who dispute it – including some veterans that Kerry was using as part of his campaign until very recently – and if he’s the officer who wrote himself up for some of those awards, as has been alleged, then the war record should not only be condemned, but corrected as Kerry is made the national laughingstock that he so richly deserves to be.

And as for Mr. O’Reilly, we are once more inspired to burst into song:

Bravely Bold Sir William did pucker up his lips

He was not at all afraid to bend over at the hips

He was not in the least bit scared to kiss John Kerry’s ass

Brave, brave brave Sir Bill won the Brownnoser First Class.

The Washington Post is running a little competition. I won’t be nominating any, since registration is required and you probably know that I am little inclined to voluntarily submit to data-mining. But for those of you less registration-averse, you can submit nominations here.

Notice, by the way, that the link is under a marketing directory. In other words, don’t use your real email address.

You have to read any discussion that starts off with a mention of a Matrioshka Brain in the header. The man has a gift, a gift, I tell you!

Elliott Wave theory states that financial markets move in identifiable patterns, driven by waves of cumulative human emotion. It is utilized in both market analysis and socionomics, a new analytical concept conceived by Bob Prechter, which suggests that a) if the patterns are identifiable and somewhat predictable, and b) if the markets can be used as a measure for the mass social mood, that the markets can be used to broadly predict the probabilities of general future events.

The correlation of skirt length and stock market performance is well-known. Women’s skirts tend to be short when the market is doing well, and long when it is doing poorly. But there is also a large degree of historical correlation between bear markets and war and a host of other social ills, even disease; whereas explanative causality tends to say that the market fell because bad thing X happened, socionomics turns this causality on its head and states that because the social mood is deteriorating, the market fell and bad thing X happened. In other words, there is no causal link between X and the market, they are occurring in tandem. This latter assertion is largely supported by historical research, as even the movement of oil prices and interest rates can’t be demonstrated to affect the markets in a reliable manner.

As for the Elliott Waves themselves, the theory states that mass human emotion, and therefore trends, move in five-wave motions, with odd-numbered waves moving with the trend and even-numbered waves running countertrend. Countertrend movements tend to have three-wave patterns, usually noted as A-B-C, where A and C are trend and B countertrend.

These waves are thought to operate at all levels. The Primary waves span years, while the minute waves span only hours. To put this in more familiar terms, the market movement that is now known as the dot com bubble of 2000 is identified as a bullish Primary Wave 5, while the bear market decline from 2000 to Oct 2002 is identified as a trend shift into Primary Wave 1. The Iraqi war rally from March 2003 to early 2004 is seen as Primary Wave 2. Prechter and the theorists at Elliott Wave International now assert that we are in the first leg of Primary Wave 3, which will take the markets down for the next year or two.

Q: The Nasdaq-100 fell 83 percent in the Primary Wave 1 bear. It has dropped 19.5 percent since the end of the Wave 2 bull in January. How far do you expect the Wave 3 bear to extend downward?

A: Sometimes first waves can be extended. That may be the case here. Wave 3 will never be the shortest, so you’re certainly talking somewhere in the 60 percent range minimum, assuming a mild third wave. Otherwise, 80 percent is possible.

Q: The Dow has held up pretty well compared to the SPX and the NDX. Do you expect that to continue?

A: No, definitely not. The blue chips usually give way last in a bear market. A classic example is the first half of the 1970s. The overall decline started in 1966 but the blue chips held up and even made a new high in January 1973. Then, in two short years, they dropped 45%. The Dow Industrials will eventually catch up to the S&P 500, but not the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq is in a class by itself.

Q: What are the implications for the housing market? It seems to have shaken off Wave 1 rather nicely.

A: Yes, and that’s also typical. Pete Kendall studied the coincidence of real estate and stock market tops going back 200 years and found that there tended to be a lag, typically about two years between the two peaks. This lag has now been four years, which fits our thesis that the top is of larger degree than anything we’ve seen in the past 200 years. What we’re seeing is how people give up on one [investment class] and say the other will save us.

Q: I understand your currency analyst did rather well in a competition recently.

A: Yes, Peter Rehmer. He won a currency competition. Reuters, I think it was. You can read more about it at Elliott Wave International.

Q: Some people believe that diversifying into foreign markets will protect them. Do you think that’s a viable strategy?

A: No. It’s a very bad idea. One of the things I discussed in “Conquer the Crash” is what a burden foreign diverification can be when it’s time to get out of your positions. All equity markets will suffer, but North America and Europe will get hit most severely.

Q: What do you think of bear funds such as RYVNX and BEARX? They did pretty well from 2000 to 2002. Would you expect them to do well in 2005 and 2006?

A: Definitely. I think for the average investor, those are excellent ways to make money in the bear market. You avoid the time decay of options as well as the open-ended risk of being short an individual stock.

Q: Mainstream commentators often mention the election cycle as a means of assuring that the markets will go up. That hasn’t played out too well this year, do you expect a significant move upwards into November?

A: Quite the opposite. I’m looking for a down into the election, probably a downward acceleration into the election.

Q: Is it possible that the market tanking will actually support the dollar, as foreigners want to get out of equities but will be reluctant to change out their currency holdings?

A: I’m not sure I agree with the logic of that, but I certainly think it’s probable that as the markets go down, the dollar will strengthen. I think we are about to enter a deflation of historic magnitude which equates to a contraction in the overall supply of dollar-denominated credit. What do you do when you have to pay off your credit cards or can’t make your mortgage? Right, you sell whatever investments you’ve got. As people have to pay off their debts, they’ll be selling everything.

Q: What’s to keep the Fed from just inflating? They don’t need to print it anymore, they can just stick a billion dollars in everyone’s bank account?

A: Whose bank account? Yours? Mine? And what do bond holders do the second they catch wind of that? Right, they sell. That would destroy the credit markets faster than anything. The Fed can’t print faster than people can sell.

Q: What are some of the more unexpected socionomics trends that you expect to reveal themselves as Wave 3 plays out?

A: A lot of them have already begun. We told people several years ago that there would be religious conflicts and foreign attacks on US soil in At the Crest of the Tidal Wave. That’s old news now, but it wasn’t then. As for things that haven’t happened yet, two things I expect to see are secession movements and labor strikes.

Q: FDR seized the nation’s private gold in 1933. Do you expect similar behavior from the federal government by the time Wave 5 of (3) hits bottom?

A: Let me answer that in a more general way. Do you remember how you felt on Sep. 11, 2001? That was a level of fear that you felt on a first wave. Third waves and fifth waves bring about higher levels of fear. We will feel less secure in 3 and 5 than we did in 1.

Q: How are you attempting to improve the art/science of assigning wavecounts and making socionomic predictions?

A: The biggest step towards increasing our accuracy is the work I did for “Beautiful Pictures”. Anectodally, we’ve always seen more Fibonacci relationships than you would expect by chance, both by time and price. But I decided to give it a much deeper investigation, and the most interesting thing about it is that Fibonacci relationships appear in places that require some work to discern. Most people try to take the easy road and apply them to retracements, but that only tends to work within corrections. Still, there are other places that they do work unexpectedly well. Even in “The Elliott Wave Principle”, chapter 4, we steered people in the right direction, but here I think I’ve demonstrated it.

Instapundit notes that the media wall defending Jean-Francois’ bizarre alternate history from public view is cracking:

Kerry himself bestowed immense credibility on his “Band of Brothers” when he used a picture of some of them in his campaign ad titled “Lifetime.” Essentially, Kerry made Vietnam, and these men, the centerpiece of his campaign. Of course, that was when he thought they’d support his candidacy. No matter that he’d never bothered to ask their permission to use them to promote his political career.

Now, however, the Kerry campaign is on a search-and-destroy mission to attack the credibility of these same men — calling them liars, all 60 of them, and saying they didn’t serve in the military with him. Really? Then why’d Kerry use their pictures in his ad campaign?

These are the same men who Kerry hailed as his “Band of Brothers,” who he implied knew him well and could vouch for him as a wonderful soldier and man. These men, who Kerry inferred that we, the American people, could trust to tell us that he would make a great president, are suddenly liars. And why? Because they aren’t saying what Kerry wants them to say. Because they aren’t puppets. Because they’re insisting on speaking the truth, a concept with which Kerry obviously isn’t familiar.

Could this attack on their credibility be related to the fact that they’ve announced that he’s unfit to serve as president? Looks to me like he wrote the wrong names down in the reference column of his resume.

I don’t think it will be necessary for the neocon Busheviks (love that word, EN) to cancel the election. I’m beginning to suspect that Kerry will be forced to step aside, as 25 years worth of well-documented and self-serving lies are going to finish him. Bill Clinton has the charm to get away with lying. Jesse Jackson has the complete lack of shame to get away with lying. An arrogant and eminently unlikeable jerk like Kerry not only doesn’t have what it takes to get away with lying, but is going to have people tearing into him like starved wolves piling on a hamstrung moose – and that’s just the Democrats!

As you like….

I’m sorry about the bad stream link yesterday; according to Space Bunny, it didn’t work and you had to go directly to the Patriot 1280 site in order to find the correct one. The link posted was the one I was given and I simply passed it along without verifying it.

The show went well and St. Paul even said that he thought it was the best one we’d done yet as there were definitely some differing opinions being discussed this time around. I think I made some coherent points – that or they were simply being polite and pretending to concede that there are genuine threats within as without – and it’s always good to have the chance to chat with genuinely intelligent and informed individuals. Time flies when you’re having fun, though, and we didn’t even manage to get to our second topic despite having an hour to do so. So, the outraged suffragettes will just have to wait to get their knickers in a twist.

As it stands, I’ll be visiting the Northern Alliance again in September, if not sooner, and hopefully I’ll have the correct link for the live streaming next time.

Space Bunny flawlessly put one over on me today. We went to church this morning, as we generally do, and I had no idea anything was going on behind those deceptively guileless blue eyes. After the service was over and we walked out, she told me that the pastor had told her that he needed to see me about something. I went back in and the pastor explained that he wanted me to meet someone.

He led me over to a tall blond man who was standing with his back towards me, and my jaw just about hit the floor when the man turned around, as the Perfect Aryan Male, seeking refuge from the hurricane, had flown in from out of town for an unexpected visit. Space Bunny had arranged the whole surprise of course, and although I’d noticed she’d disappeared for a while during the service, I hadn’t really thought anything of it. It turns out that she’d run out to pick up our friend, who arrived at the airport this morning.

So, the lesson for today is: watch out for the pretty blonde ones. Notice how they always laugh at the dumb blonde jokes? The truth is that they’re not laughing at the jokes, they’re laughing at you, because you’re buying into the picture they’re painting for you.

I made the mistake of turning on Fox News for a few minutes and heard the hostess saying that the Red Cross would prefer that people not donate supplies, just cash, and that donating supplies would be “causing a problem”. What kind of scam are they running there? Based on some of the things I’ve heard of how the Red Cross abuses those it purports to help, I’m wondering if the organization has outlived its usefulness.