Category: Uncategorized

Courtier science

I have repeatedly pointed out that the profession of science does not create wealth, but is utterly dependent upon societal wealth and the willingness of the people to spend money on it. Scientistry is basically a potentially more useful National Endowment for the Arts. This action by the Turkish government will likely mark the first of many reminders that modern government-funded science will no longer be deemed important enough to justify its existence as the economic contraction continues to reduce tax revenues and the ability of the average individual to pay his bills:

The decree, issued on 27th August, which was just after the start of a nine-day holiday in Turkey, says that one-third of the members of the academy will now be appointed by the government and a further one-third by the Council of Higher Education, which is also a government body. Only the remaining one-third will be elected by current members. The president and vice-president of the academy will in future be appointed by the government rather than by sitting members. In addition, honorary members will lose their voting rights and the age at which members are deemed honorary will be reduced from 70 to 67.

TÜBA has issued a statement that says the government’s decree effectively ends the Academy and replaces it with a new Academy of Sciences that will be under the control of the government. They add: “There is no science academy in the world where the majority of members and the president are appointed directly by the government.”

The academy has been given no reasons for the changes, but the government has the right to make changes to the academy’s structure because the academy is publicly funded.

The Turkish scientists aren’t upset because they are losing an imaginary independence that never existed in the first place, they are upset because those who hold the purse strings are finally exercising the control they have had all along. This should prove an object lesson for science fetishists who have long dreamed of a war between religion and science, imagining that government would naturally side with the scientific elite.

This was always a ridiculous notion, since both the money and the popular support upon which government depends are generated by the religious masses. Scientists had better pray that the coming years don’t bring about a genuine war between religion and science, in the Muslim world or in the West, because it is readily apparent that the scientific world not only can’t hope to win, it can’t even support its own existence and is dependent upon access to the wealth of the other side.

Voxic Shock: Whiskey Zulu India

In which I revisit scenario Whiskey Zulu India with the help of my producer, Vidad. In related news, Greece appears to be in full meltdown. Consider the current yields for the 2-year bond. Today: 55.388%. Last week: 32.766%. Last year: 10.576%. As the Market Ticker has warned, it looks very much as if a Lehman event is on the way.

Mailvox: bad script

GS and others using IE have written to tell of a problem:

Since Sept 7th I have been repeatedly getting the message “A script on this page is causing your web browser to run slowly….” and locks my browser on your web/blog page. I am not having this problem on other pages. I have internet explorer 8.0 on windows 7.0 professional 64 bit.

I just removed one Facebook “pagetracker” script from the template. The other possible culprits are Mises, CoComment, and Google Analytics, but there aren’t that many scripts on the site. If you’re using IE and getting the “A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly” message, go to this Microsoft site and click the “Fix it for me” link. Please let me know if that takes care of the problem.

Education and the Iron Law

In which millions of university students are going to learn that they should have taken economics in high school:

MILLIONS of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university—and accumulating huge debts in the process—will boost their chances of landing a well-paid and secure job….

The supply of university graduates is increasing rapidly. The Chronicle of Higher Education calculates that between 1990 and 2007 the number of students going to university increased by 22% in North America, 74% in Europe, 144% in Latin America and 203% in Asia. In 2007 150m people attended university around the world, including 70m in Asia.

It’s not rocket science. If supply is increasing faster than demand, then wages for university graduates are going down even as tuitions rise. Any given university degree may or may not still be worth buying, but it is as stupid to attempt to determine if going to college today is worth it or not based on your experience of 20 years ago as it is to think you’re going to get a gallon of gas for $1.14. Value isn’t merely subjective, it’s dynamic.

The PZ Myers Memorial Debate update II

Announcing the judges:

Christian: cl aka The Warfare is Mental

Agnostic: Alex Amenos

Atheist: Scott Scheule

Dominic has confirmed that he is fine with all three of them. So, while Dominic and I compose our initial pieces, which we will send to each other in order to allow for the writing of the initial responses, it would be a good idea for the judges and everyone else to discuss how the scoring system will work.

To recap, Dominic and I are each writing an initial piece, then will compose a response to the other’s initial piece. Those four pieces will then go to the judges, who will score the initial round as per the system decided here. Judges, please email me to confirm that you are good to go so that I’ll have your email addresses and can provide them to Dominic as well.

UPDATE – Okay, my initial piece is done and off to Dominic. I’m not sure it won’t convince anyone I’m not off my rocker, but at least it should prove interesting.

Drugs are terror

The real nature of the Patriot Act:

Dinh was an assistant attorney general under John Ashcroft and was tasked on the morning of September 12 with writing a bill to fix whatever laws might impede investigation. The scholarship provided little guidance for how to make terror investigations easier, so Dinh sent an e-mail to the nation’s U.S. attorneys and FBI agents, asking for ideas. G-men are not constitutional lawyers, and excesses were rife: Someone wanted to send neighborhood watches in search of sordid types. The attorneys at Justice made piles, winnowing as they went: “Crazy Ideas,” “Quarter-Baked,” “Half-Baked.”

In those patriotic weeks, partisan conflict dissipated easily. The Democratic Senate and the Republican House each had their own bills, and Ashcroft, smiling, said every idea in each of the drafts would be adopted unless it conflicted with another provision. Jim Sensenbrenner, the bombastic, rotund Wisconsin Republican, leaned back in his chair and said his bill was called the USA Patriot Act. There were no conflicts with that; the name was in.

Delayed Notice Search Warrants

1,618 Drugs
122 Fraud
15 Terror

Of course, the average neocon will look at that and assume that 15 9/11 attacks were stopped or averted, therefore it was worth it! Of course, surely we can solve all of the nation’s pressing problems at once by declaring the War on Anthropogenic Drug Poverty Terror Change stimulus package.

Disturbed gang-bangs Taylor Swift

This is Game set to music, the perfect juxtaposition of naive young female delusions about bad boys and the predatory male perspective. One cringes at the lovely little lamb’s attitude about how it will safely lie down with the poor, misunderstood, and very hungry lion. Disturbed and Taylor Swift are like one of those couples where you look at them and figure she’ll be lucky if she ends up in the hospital instead of the morgue. It’s also unusual in that the mash-up is arguably better than either song that goes into it. If whoever put it together could have only somehow pulled a Rock Sugar and mixed in the psychopath’s manipulative line from Decadence as well, it would have been perfect.

“If I scare you now, don’t run from me. I’ve been hiding my pain you see.”

The insurmountable gap in understanding between these interwoven lyrics had me laughing out loud:

Swift: If you could see that I’m the one who understands you. Been here all along so why can’t you see, you belong with me?

Draiman: Come inside now I implore, do you think you can restore the crucial pieces missing from my brain.

Swift: Hey, isn’t this easy!

Draiman: What seems to be the matter dear? Why do you cry and shake with fear?

Quelle surprise

The Magic Mustache decides he won’t run; NRO and VP are the only two sites to even notice:

NR favorite John Bolton, a former United Nations ambassador, has decided against a presidential run. “It was a very difficult decision,” he said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. “My view has not changed one iota that we need a much more robust discussion of national-security issues as part of this presidential campaign.”

The assertion that John Bolton was electable as U.S. president while simultaneously claiming Ron Paul is not is arguably the single dumbest argument to ever appear in National Review. It seriously raised the question about whether the magazine had not only devolved into mindless neoconservatism, but outright retardation. John Bolton not only has a smaller following than Ron Paul does, he has a smaller following than I do. He has a smaller following than the average high school cheerleader.

As for foreign policy, it doesn’t mean jack squat when you’re bankrupt. Foreign policy is entirely irrelevant now, except in the sense of European sovereign debt bailouts.

Questions for evolutionists

It should be interesting to see the answers to these questions presented by the Question Evolution campaign, assuming of course that an evolutionist who is capable of responding to substantive questions with answers that do not boil down to “you are stupid and ignorant of science to even ask me such a thing” can be found.

How did the DNA code originate?

How did sex originate?

Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years, if evolution has changed worms into humans in the same time frame?

How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence?

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?

The last question is of particular interest to me. It is my contention that evolution is, from a scientific perspective, an almost totally irrelevant sideshow. The number of scientists who have actually used evolution for anything over the last 150 years is dwarfed by the number of scientists who are still desperately trying to provide a scientific foundation for TENS. The only reason evolution is assumed to be of such presumed importance is due to its philosophical usefulness to materialist philosophers and pedopropagandists like Richard Dawkins.

Germany chickens out

Faced with a clear and open violation of the German Constitution, the German Supreme Court unsurprisingly caved rather than risk undermining the supports that are propping up the banks of the European Union:

In a widely followed ruling on Wednesday, Germany’s Constitutional Court upheld the legality of Berlin’s rescue packages for debt-stricken euro zone countries, but said any future bailouts must be approved by a parliamentary panel…. The court rejected three appeals against the legality of earlier bailouts, which have stirred a furious political debate among Germans. The suits had been brought by a coalition of German lawmakers, economists and business executives who argued that Germany’s participation in loans and support funds for Greece undermined Parliament and infringed constitutional provisions underpinning the country’s democracy.

In other words, there is no longer any more law in Germany than there is in the United States. That should work out well. All this worldwide government kowtowing to the banks in a futile and desperate attempt to keep them from going under has done is to make it perfectly clear to all and sundry that there is no law. The law is now a transparent fiction. All of the words written down on paper are entirely meaningless. Read the English translation, it is a masterpiece of legal weaselry.

The world is rapidly entering into a literally Satanic state where do what thou wilt truly is the whole of the law.

And clearly, going to mark-to-fantasy should fix the whole thing. After all, it has worked so well in the USA. “My gnome, high above the Alps is hearing that the EU is considering suspension of bank mark to market acctg.”