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WND column

National No-Fly Zone

Although they don’t realize it yet, the will of Americans is being tested by the federal agency known as the Transportation Security Administration. Not being content with forcing air passengers to leave their deadly nail clippers and water bottles at home, the TSA now wants them to submit to full-visual X-ray examination machines that are now being installed as standard security devices at airports around the nation.

Addendum: Beezle emails to report that my conclusions about the TSA’s Orwellian long-term intentions appear to be correct. If you have been feeling uneasy about having to be X-rayed by a Transportation Security Administration goon who can look under your clothes every time you fly, consider this: at least you can say no, and agree to be subjected to an old-fashioned full-body search. No opt-out for the latest in anti-terror technology though, with reports just out in Forbes Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor that the Homeland Security Department has purchased 500 mobile X-ray vans called ZBVs that can scan cars, trucks and homes without the drivers even knowing that they’re being zapped.

VPFL Week 9

98 Moundsview Meerkats (3-6-1)
54 Bane Sidhe (5-4-0)

89 Judean Rhyneauxs (5-4-0)
76 Meigs Marauders (4-5-0)

84 Greenfield Grizzlies (3-5-1)
44 Blackmouth Banksters (6-3-0)

68 Valders Quixotes (7-2-0)
52 Winston Reverends (4-5-0)

53 MS Swamp Spartans (3-5-1)
42 RR Redbeards (4-4-1)

Sometimes you have a bad season because you just don’t have the horses or you make poor decisions about whom to start. Well, I didn’t have the horses – had only one player worth keeping after some desperate roster shuffling in a futile attempt to win the first-round playoff game last year – and I drafted not one, but two worthless top ten-rated running backs with my second and third pick. Then I left Arian Foster on the bench when he had his huge 29-point day against the Colts. And yet, this has actually been one of my best roster-shuffling jobs I’ve ever done; after that awful draft, I made what have turned out to be some really good pickups and have put up only three less points than the VPFL leaders. And yet somehow, I’m still FOUR AND ONE-HALF GAMES BEHIND with the worst record in the league.

The clueless incompetent

One of the hallmarks of the incompetent individual is that he doesn’t realize his own incompetence; he tends to significantly overrate his own capabilities. In his piece entitled “American Narcissus“, Jonathan Last provides an interesting quote taken from a New Yorker article about Obama/Soetoro/Soebarkah:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

We are informed that Valerie Jarret thinks Obama has never really been challenged intellectually and he has been bored to death his whole life. But that doesn’t indicate what she believes it does, that he’s extraordinarily intelligent. It actually tends to indicate that his intelligence is only moderately above average and he has been permitted to skate completely unchallenged by those around him his entire life. Malcolm Gladwell asserts that expertise of the highest level can only be developed by thousands of hours of practice; while the assertion is, like so many of Gladwell’s other ideas, almost surely incorrect, it must be admitted that Obama possesses an exceptional expertise in selling himself to the gullible. This is not only something he has spent his entire life doing, it appears to be the only thing he actually knows how to do.

No wonder the man is so bored. Even as president, he’s still doing exactly the same thing he was doing as a pompous law student. And the combination of his clueless narcissim with his incompetence is what makes his presidency and its inevitable fallout so damned entertaining.

Et tu, Brauchli?

My track record of political predictions is, admittedly, less than perfectly reliable. But I would encourage you to keep two things in mind. First, I make my predictions very far in advance of most opinion writers. Second, even when I am wrong, the results usually show that I correctly anticipated the general trend. For example, I was wrong about Hillary winning the 2008 Democratic nomination, but recall that I said she would win it back when the consensus was that she would stay in the Senate.

So, this unexpected editorial from the Washington Post is therefore rather interesting in light of my supposedly crazy prediction that Obama is not going to be the Democratic nominee in 2012.

This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012…. We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed.

He certainly has. And if he’s lost the white independents, he’s lost the unemployed youth, he’s lost the Washington Post, and he’s losing the New York Times, how can he possibly expect to beat the Lizard Queen when she shows her true colors? His only hope is to turn on the banks and ride the wave of popular discontent, but given the number of Goldmanites he’s appointed, I assume he’ll look for a golden parachute instead.

UPDATE: Whispers from Washington: “I’m not claiming to know anyone important, just a bunch of old denizens of DC. Mostly they’re mid-level retired military who’ve found themselves a cozy life (that means $100Gs plus and their pensions) in the bureaucracy. Other “Ilk” will probably confirm what’s being said. I’ve been hearing for six months that Obama is erratic, irrational, and paranoid (he may have reason for that last one). It’s rumored the Democratic Leadership and the press have been covering this up since the night he was elected (something happened that night and there’s lots of different stories) but he’s gotten much worse. Every word he utters is canned and without a trace of spontaneity and this is being attributed to his use Anti-depressants… and worse.

Last week I heard that the NYTs (not the WP) was going to do an editorial asking him not to run in 2012. Running off to Diwali after the huge defeat was seen as the last straw. Apparently he’s not met with anyone from the Democratic party since the election debacle and refused to until this coming week. This has allowed Pelosi and her crew to make a move. A reasonable head of the Democratic party, Obama in this case, should have stopped that. But he didn’t to say the least. He left the party twisting in the winds of fate…. The most fantastic charge of all is that Joe Fucking Biden stays as far away from Obie as possible (and not the other way around as I’ve always assumed). Less surprising is Biden has brought up the 25th amendment. Not surprising in the sense that Biden wants to be prez and will never be elected.”

Initial impressions of The Moral Landscape

I tend to do a lot of light reading while I travel, but amidst gorging on a cornucopia of PG Wodehouse novels I also managed to bookmark my way through Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape. It was every bit as disjointed, illogical, and rife with incompetent and incoherent arguments as his first two books would lead one to expect. It was also disturbingly petty in parts; I don’t think he has any idea how bad his quixotic public jihad against Francis Collins has made him look in the scientific community. Despite the plethora of reflexive anti-religious cheap shots, the book is actually much more an attack on the greater part of the secular scientific community, (especially Jonathan Haidt and Scott Atran), than it is on the theistic community. While the Nobel laureate’s minor scientific achievements do tend to render one of Sam’s core arguments laughable, that doesn’t suffice to account for his decision to devote nearly an entire chapter of a five-chapter book to a completely irrelevant attack on single individual.

Here is one example of classic Harrisian illogic of the sort that litters the book from a recent Wired interview:

WIRED: [H]asn’t religion made some people behave more morally?

HARRIS: The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good. Is it better to alleviate famine in Africa because you think Jesus Christ is watching and deciding whether to reward you with an eternity of happiness after death? Or is it better to do that because you actually care about the suffering of your fellow human beings?

First, note that Harris doesn’t answer the question, except to implicitly accept it. Second, observe that he fails to make the rational response that a) it doesn’t matter why you do something, the morality is primarily to be found in the act, not the intention, and b) there is no reason to believe that the two motivations are mutually exclusive, in fact, there is substantial evidence to indicate that the two usually coincide. It’s a false and irrelevant dichotomy. And third, you really can’t understand the degree to which this response demonstrates Harris’s inimitable incoherence if you haven’t read his section declaring himself to be a consequentialist. Apparently he is that rare breed of consequentialist who doesn’t care about the consequences.

Sam is to be congratulated, however, for being a man about the disappointing results of his neurological research. I helped him refine a few of the religious questions for the fMRI experiments he discusses, and as it turned out, his hypothesis that there would be an observable difference in brain activity when contemplating factual beliefs versus religious beliefs was incorrect. This was Sam’s conclusion: “Our study was designed to elicit the same responses from the two groups on nonreligious stimuli (e.g., “Eagles really exist”) and opposite responses on religious stimuli (e.g., “Angels really exist”). The fact that we obtained essentially the same result for belief in both devout Christians and nonbelievers, on both categories of content, argues strongly that the difference between belief and disbelief is the same, regardless of what is being thought about.”

What Sam neglects to mention is that it also indicates that there is no difference between the two categories of belief, thus removing from his potential arsenal what he had hoped would be a substantive scientific argument in his war on faith. If he had been able to show there was an observable material difference between the two types of belief, he would have used that to make a case for the superiority of one over the other; I surmise that was the primary motivation for the experiment. However, his experiments did produce some interesting results, including the fact that it appears to give atheists a sense of pleasure to deny religious statements. So, ironically, Sam Harris would appear to have produced the first scientific evidence in support of my hypothesis that it is often the assholery that causes the atheism rather than the other way around. On which note, I would be remiss indeed if I did not quote to the following comment from the appendix:

“Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been quite disconcerting to see the caricature of the overeducated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren have not been paying attention.”
– Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape, Chapter 1 Note 2

Anyhow, I don’t intend this to be either a review or a critique of the book, I merely intended to pose a question to those of you who are interested in this subject. How would you like me to review The Moral Landscape, in an overall summary, a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction, a thematic critique, or a simple list of the erroneous arguments I noted in the course of reading the book. I can tell you right now that I’m not going to write an entire bloody book as I did with TIA; the book doesn’t even begin to justify that sort of time and effort. I’m not a big fan of the chapter-by-chapter approach since most people who use it make the mistake of anticipatory criticism since they don’t read the whole book before jumping in, but in this case that wouldn’t apply since I have read the entire book as well as the notes. On the other hand, the book is only five chapters and the chapters don’t really stick to coherent themes, so it may not make sense anyhow.

Heh

WHAT WORRIES ME IS THAT THEY’VE CODE-NAMED IT “CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN:” Quantitative Easing 2 Sets Sail Friday: Central bank’s latest $600 billion plan gets going with first round of Treasury purchases.

Now THAT is amusing. Of course, you really have to know your Stross to understand why….

Mailvox: true owners

BG queries about who actually owns the home:

I am a recent convert to your blog. I enjoy your unconventional, but unfailingly thoughtful, opinions.

Here is something for you to ponder. Assume that the evidence shows that the putative owner of a mortgage is not the actual owner of the mortgage, due to improper transfer procedures in the securitization process, such as a failure to properly endorse and record the necessary transfer documents. The implications for foreclosures may be profound, as you and others have indicated.

But think about this from a different point of view for a minujte. Wouldn’t this logic imply that a nondefaulting homeowner, who has been making all of the payments on his home, has in fact not been paying the proper person? Could the true owner of the mortgage sue the homeowner for not making payments to the true owner? The true owner might want to do this because the banks, servicers and other intermediaries might soon all be broke due to the foreclosure problem.

It does imply that the wrong party has been paid, in fact, this is exactly why multiple banks have been foreclosing on some houses. The problem is that in the case of a broken line of mortgage transference, it is not only difficult to ascertain the true holder of the debt, but in many cases the connection of the debt to the title is cancelled by virtue of the note proving the claim being destroyed in the process of the transfer. In such cases, the debt may still be owed to the “true owner”, but it is no longer secured by the home.

So, to answer the rest of BG’s questions, yes, the true owner of the debt can sue the homeowner but is very unlikely to because he has no claim on the house. The reason it makes no sense for the true debt-holder to sue the homeowner is that a bankruptcy filing on the part of the homeowner will discharge that debt without relinquishing the house.

Ender’s Game

I am increasingly beginning to feel like Leopold Mozart. After a spate of ASL games, Ender decided to design some game rules for his little football men. These are the NFL teams used the old electric vibrating football game; I used to break the flat bottoms off and play with them in the carpet when I was a kid. I didn’t do anything particularly fancy with them, I would just line them up and run little plays, then record the “results” in a notebook. Of course, I created a whole fantasy league with teams in places like Norfolk; both Minneapolis and St. Paul had their own teams.

Ender takes a much more systematic approach than I did. He doesn’t break off the stands nor invent his own franchises, but instead got his mother to make him a paperboard football field for which he makes paper logos that go in the middle of the field for the designated home team. Then he wrote up 10 double-sided pages of rules in which the offensive play call and the defensive call combine to create a modifier that is applied to dice roll on the play result table for the appropriate formation. It’s essentially Maddens meets ASL, or more to the point, a simplified version of Avalon Hills 1959 Football Strategy, but it’s surprisingly entertaining and produces pretty reasonable results despite the fact that absolutely no statistical analysis went into the formation result tables.

My one suggestion was to add a dynamic element via special rolls. “Heat of Battle”-style rolls triggered by net results below 2 or above 12 provide for fumbles and interceptions versus big gains and touchdowns, and blitzes against passes give either a -2 (1-2) for the defense or +3 (3-6) for the offense. Those elements backfired on me last night as I fumbled twice inside his 30-yard line.

It’s bad enough to have been surpassed on the literary side. But playing this last night, I suddenly had the alarming impression that it would make for a pretty good Facebook/Android game.

Ignoring the elephant

In which the New York Times is astounded to discover that poverty isn’t to blame for substandard intellectual achievement:

An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another. But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.

Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency….

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

It is truly remarkable what lengths some people will go in order to avoid the conclusion that is not so much staring them in the face as smashing in their teeth. While there are sociological factors involved – that 72% illegitimacy rate probably doesn’t help foster the development of black mathematicians – it’s more than a little absurd to insist that every group across the human race has precisely the same intellectual capacity. They don’t. This is an observable fact and would be an accepted scientific fact as well if scientists would focus on science instead of politics.

The current state of science is such a joke that it borders on parody. All the charlatans who want to pontificate about the holy theoretical mechanism behind the origin of the species are deathly afraid to admit to the obvious conclusions dictated by that mechanism while sociologists search desperately for an alternative to the completely obvious. If you’ve got one kid who is reading Tolstoy at five and another one who can’t sound out the word CAT, there is a very high probability that the first kid is significantly more intelligent than the second one.

The ultimate s-test

If you fail this one, don’t be surprised if the operation turns out to be superfluous:

It’s almost always the woman who suggests a vasectomy, says Duncan Harriss, consultant urological ­surgeon at the Park Hospital, ­Nottingham, who performs vasectomies and vasectomy reversals….. Women are used to being in control of contraception and it’s often difficult to let go of that, even when it’s their husband’s fertility, not their own, in question.

‘The number of vasectomy reversals is increasing and that’s a sign of how relationships are breaking down in this country,’ says Duncan Harriss. He sees five to ten men a week who regret their vasectomy — or, to be more precise, whose wives regret it. ‘The most common situation is that a man has had ­children, had a vasectomy in his 40s and then the relationship has broken down.

Imagine that. Now, I’m not saying that men shouldn’t have vasectomies if they want although I have been told they are much more potentially problematic than most guys tend to assume. But if your wife is demanding that you literally demasculate yourself because she is feeling insecure about the possibility that you might be able to build another family without her, then it is probably safe to go ahead and schedule a few family court appearances, a wedding, and an eventual reversal to go along with the initial operation if you are foolish enough to accede.

Any man who has even the least awareness of Game will understand the disastrous consequences that are likely to result from failing this extreme form of marital s-test.