Category: Uncategorized

AGW/CC exploded

Those pesky Swiss just cut the legs out from under the global warming fascists:

The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a “heliocentric” rather than “anthropogenic” approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth….

Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature: “[I]t is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours [sulphuric acid and ammonia] and water alone.”

So the globalists will be expected to provide substantially revised versions of models that already didn’t work in the first place. Is that the familiar spinning sound of scientific epicycles that I hear off in the distance?

Answering the NYT questions

I’m not a candidate, but Bill Keller’s questions are interesting and it would be informative if the candidates would actually answer them:

1. Is it fair to question presidential candidates about details of their faith?

Absolutely.

2. Is it fair to question candidates about controversial remarks made by their pastors, mentors, close associates or thinkers whose books they recommend?

It’s fair, but don’t be surprised when the candidates don’t agree. I respected my pastors, but I never completely agreed with any of them. No one who has ever been to a Bible Study believes that Christians don’t think for themselves.

3. (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or “Judeo-Christian nation?” (b) What does that mean in practice?

Of course America is a Christian nation. It was founded by Christians on predominantly Christian concepts and most of its citizens are Christians. No other nation is described by virtue of what its constitution says about religion or anything else, so why would we describe America that way?

4. If you encounter a conflict between your faith and the Constitution and laws of the United States, how would you resolve it? Has that happened, in your experience?

Work towards changing the Constitution and the laws. Isn’t that what elected leaders do? Isn’t passing new laws pretty much all that Congress does?

5. (a) Would you have any hesitation about appointing a Muslim to the federal bench? (b) What about an atheist?

Yes. Sharia is intrinsically incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Depends on the atheist.

6. Are Mormons Christians, in your view? Should the fact that Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons influence how we think of them as candidates?

They can be, but being a Mormon doesn’t make one a Christian any more than being a Catholic does. Group identity is not a perfectly reliable guide to religious faith. That being said, I do think their Mormonism should influence how we think of Captain and Lieutenant Underoos.

7. What do you think of the evangelical Christian movement known as Dominionism and the idea that Christians, and only Christians, should hold dominion over the secular institutions of the earth?

Nothing. It’s more fringe than the Mormons or the atheists and it’s inept theology. Satan holds dominion over the Earth until Jesus comes back. And nobody gets a vote on that.

8. (a) What is your attitude toward the theory of evolution? (b) Do you believe it should be taught in public schools?

Skeptical. Of course it shouldn’t be taught in public schools. Worry about teaching an minor aspect of biological science AFTER you are able to successfully teach reading, personal economics, and math, which is not presently the case.

9. Do you believe it is proper for teachers to lead students in prayer in public schools?

Of course. A public school isn’t Congress and a prayer isn’t a law. Even under the mostly fictional “separation of church and state” doctrine, this is perfectly permissible. If either the kids or the parents don’t like it, let them pull their kids out and homeschool them.

Corruption USA

This is unsurprising, but seriously bad news even so:

Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal.

In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement, said the people briefed on the talks….

Not surprising, the large banks, which are eager to reach a settlement, have grown increasingly frustrated with Mr. Schneiderman. Bank officials recently discussed asking Mr. Donovan for help in changing the attorney general’s mind, according to a person briefed on those talks. In an interview on Friday, Mr. Donovan defended his discussions with the attorney general, saying they were motivated by a desire to speed up help for troubled homeowners.

In other words, the White House is attempting to shut down the joint 50-state investigation in order to whitewash literally years of massive criminal wrongdoing by the mortgage banks, then change the laws after the fact so that all of the titles they shredded in MERS are magically returned to the banks. Their problem is that they need to get the 50 state attorney generals to sign off on the deal. Obviously, most of these champions of the law have already agreed to be bought, so they’re leaning on the last few holdouts now.

This clearly demonstrates that there is not only no law in the USA anymore, there is barely a pretense at it. Instead of shutting down the criminal organizations and imprisoning the executives responsible, they will agree upon a small fine and cover up their crimes, which include but are not limited to stealing thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of houses from homebuyers.

And the reason they need to get a deal done and let the banks off the hook? To help homeowners. Seriously. That’s the line they’re selling.

Beware the Nones of September

Germany is indicating a potential disinclination to play the Fed game:

“I regard the huge buy-up of bonds of individual states by the ECB as legally and politically questionable. Article 123 of the Treaty on the EU’s workings prohibits the ECB from directly purchasing debt instruments, in order to safeguard the central bank’s independence,” [German President Christian Wulff] said….

The blistering attack follows equally harsh words by the Bundesbank in its monthly report. The bank slammed the ECB’s bond purchases and also warned that the EU’s broader bail-out machinery violates EU treaties and lacks “democratic legitimacy”.

The combined attacks come just two weeks before the German constitutional court rules on the legality of the various bailout policies. The verdict is expected on September 7.

It’s hard to imagine that the German court won’t just rubber stamp the blatantly unconstitutional, overtly illegal actions of the EU and ECB in the same way that the U.S. Supreme Court has seen no evil in the illegal actions of the U.S. Congress and the Federal Reserve.

However, the Germans aren’t always predictable, they do tend to be sticklers for the letter of the law, and there is no question that if the letter of the law is respected, the bailouts will be pronounced illegal. The possibility the court will do so may explain this recent market development:

Insurance on the debt of several major European banks has now hit historic levels, higher even than those recorded during financial crisis caused by the US financial group’s implosion nearly three years ago. Credit default swaps on the bonds of Royal Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Intesa Sanpaolo, among others, flashed warning signals on Wednesday.

Interesting times, interesting times….

Addio, Mr. Apple

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO:

In a resignation letter to the board, Mr Jobs, who has fought a long-running battle with cancer, wrote: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know.

“Unfortunately, that day has come. I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

I have an admire-hate perspective on Steve Jobs. I hate his technofascistic vision, but I love his passion for design perfection even when it falls short. I hate OS/X, I hate Macintosh computers, I hate Apple attitude, and I especially hate Macintossers, but I loved my Apple II and I still have some affection for my original Macintosh. I hate Apple’s cynical and dishonest marketing even as I am amazed by its sheer effectiveness. I especially hated the Jeff Goldblum commercial for the iMacs; I blame him and Steve Jobs for the opening of the Internet to the technologically pig-ignorant.

But Jobs had a hugely influential run during an exciting time for technology and even an inveterate Mac-hater couldn’t possibly deny it. Here is hoping he will enjoy the time he has left to him.

VPFL players

HUTSONDC: Bane Sidhe 10-4-0
BISCH: Valders Quixotes 9-5-0
STILICHO: Blackmouth Banksters 7-7-0
ATOWN: Meigs Marauders 5-9-0
ZEK: Judean Rhyneauxs 7-7-0
TOZ: Winston Reverends 4-10-0

Send me an email so that I can send you an invite to the league along with your roster from last year. I must receive it by 12 NOON FRIDAY or your place will be given away. The draft is SATURDAY AUGUST 27. You can keep up to three of your players on the roster, but you don’t have to keep any. You must send me your keepers by midnight Friday.

I recommend that you only change the first part of the team name for continuity reasons, except the Bane team should retain Bane for obvious reasons.

Darwinist demands Darwinian litmus test

In other news, Roger Clemens today announced that “throwing like a girl” should disqualify a politician from the presidency.

A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

Richard Dawkins again demonstrates that he is an unmitigated moron. Perry may be an “uneducated ignoramus”, but Dawkins is nothing more than an educated one. But what is always amusing is his narcissistic myopia. The entire world is in the midst of an economic meltdown that threatens the global financial system, so naturally he is very, very concerned that the next U.S. president must be a True Believer in the Cult of Darwin.

If Dawkins actually cared about science, he would be enthusiastically supporting a snake-handling fundamentalist who believed the world was created exactly 6,000 years ago so long as said Creationist was cognizant of economic reality, which none of the current presidential candidates except Ron Paul happen to be. The ongoing Great Depression 2.0 will do far more damage to science than an outright ban on the teaching of evolution in the public schools ever could.

The fact is that neither the president nor anyone else actually needs to know a damn thing about evolution or the intrinsically unscientific principle – it is based on logic, not science – that is “natural selection”. Even biologists who are performing cutting edge work in genetic science don’t necessarily need to know anything about either. Almost no one does.

Moreover, Dawkins is a liar. He lies, and he knows he lies, when he says: “Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science.” Let’s see the scientific experiment that demonstrates that “fact”, then see it replicated three more times for good measure. Other scientists can manage this effortlessly, so why can’t Mr. Dawkins? Because, obviously, evolution is not a fact – which Dawkins admits in his most recent book – nor is it anywhere nearly as securely established as a plethora of scientific hypotheses. And that is a fact. An actual, verifiable one.

The Cult of Darwin must be getting desperate indeed if they are resorting to attempting to pass off outright lies in this manner. Moreover, three years after getting spanked on his embrace of the stupid Red State argument, Dawkins still clearly knows nothing about the American political system. It is not the Republican Party that depends upon the uneducated vote, but the Democratic Party, as CNN exit polls have shown after the 2008, 2004, and 2000 presidential elections.

“Voters with postgraduate schooling were only 25 percent more likely to vote for the Democratic Party presidential candidate in 2004 while those who did not complete high school were 90 percent more likely to identify themselves as Democrats. Since there are 75 percent more Americans who never completed high school (16.4 percent of adults over twenty-five) than possess an advanced degree (9.4 percent), this means that despite their reputation for being the party of the most highly educated, a Democrat is nevertheless more than twice as likely to be someone who has dropped out of high school than an individual with a master’s degree.”
– The Irrational Atheist, pp 18-19

Dawkins concludes: “The ‘evolution question’ deserves a prominent place in the list of questions put to candidates in interviews and public debates during the course of the coming election.”

Absolutely it does. I would LOVE to see it given a prominent place in the debates. Because wouldn’t it be amusing to see the look on Dawkins’s face when all the Democrats he admires stand up and deny evolution in perfect lockstep with all the Republican candidates! And it would be an excellent method of keeping those potentially deadly atheist utopians out of high office.

Statistical evidence of economic depression

Readers here are aware that I have staunchly maintained the U.S. economy has been in an economic depression since 2008. I have done so despite NBER declaring the “recession” over in 2009 and in the face of seven straight quarters of positive GDP growth statistics because I don’t believe that either the agencies or the statistics they report have much, if anything, to do with the observable economic reality.

To give one example, the U3 unemployment rate is presently reported at 9.1%. But this is a heavily massaged number which not only depends upon survey-based employment estimates, but upon the subsequent manipulation of the raw data. Since it’s not possible to radically alter the number of reported “employed” without looking as if they are blatantly manipulating the numbers, the BLS manages to keep the official unemployment rate artificially low by reducing the size of “the labor force”, chiefly through reducing “the participation rate”.

However, is it reasonable to believe that people are any less inherently willing to work in these difficult economic times than they were in the year 2000? I don’t see any justification for it. The suggestion that something is amiss can be seen when comparing the labor force participation rates with the employment population ratios (EPR) for 1973 and 2000 versus today. Given that the percentage of women participating in the labor force has methodically risen from 44.7% in 1973 to 59.2 in 2009, and that this increase has outpaced the exit of elderly men from the labor force since 1973, the current overall participation rate should be significantly higher than it was in 1973. But this is not the case, according to the BLS.

Dec 1973 Participation rate 61.2 EPR 58.2 U3 4.9
Jan 2000 Participation rate 67.3 EPR 64.7 U3 4.0
Jul 2011 Participation rate 63.9 EPR 58.1 U3 9.1

Now, if we simply compare the present number of reported employed to the present size of the civilian, non-imprisoned population, but calculate the labor force based on the 2000 participation rate, we get an unemployment rate that is 50 percent higher than the currently reported rate of 9.1%. Note that numbers given are in thousands as per the BLS.

239,671 Civilian non-imprisoned population x.673 participation rate equals

161,299 Labor Force minus
139,236 Employed equals
22,063 Unemployed

22,063 divided by 161,299 equals 0.13678

This means the current U3 unemployment rate according to the BLS metric should be 13.7%, not 9.1%. Note that this is higher than the “unemployment rates” reported in the first two years of the Great Depresion, 1930 (8.9%) and 1931 (13.0%). Please also note that the two historical “unemployment rates” are estimates made well after the fact as the BLS didn’t track unemployment statistics until 1948. Finally, one also must take into account that the current rate would be considerably higher were it not for the 2,868,000 more people that are now employed by the federal government than were employed in 1940, much less before the New Deal of 1933. Including these extra 2.8 million government workers in the unemployed list, as one must do in order to make a reasonable comparison between 2011 and 1930-31, indicates a comparable “unemployment rate” of at least 15.5%.

A second sign is the woeful state of the housing market. “A telling sign of how bad things have gotten for the housing industry: Prices have dropped more since the recession started, on a percentage basis, than during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And it took 19 years for prices to fully recover after the Depression.”

Of course, we can always apply Paul Krugman’s reasoning and launch an alien war to solve the economic problem. If we can simply arrange for 30 million people to be slaughtered by the aliens, that will reduce the labor force and lead to full employment overnight.

Next up, locusts

I think we can safely drop the idea that God has any particular affection for America now:

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake centered in Virginia forced evacuations of all the monuments in Washington and rattled nerves from the southern state of Georgia to Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island in the northeast where President Barack Obama is vacationing. No injuries were immediately reported.

And across the South, a single thought echoed throughout a million minds as if they were one. “Only 5.9? Come on!”