Category: Uncategorized

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.

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.