Category: Uncategorized

RAW on the New Atheists

This excerpt from Prometheus Rising is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the Dawkinsian rational materialist, in light of how it was written by a non-theistic scientific mystic 27 years ago:

Rationalist robots, like the other robots, may be totally mechanized or may have some slight flexibility, or “freedom” built into their circuitry. The totally robotized make up the vast horde of the Fundamentalist wing of the Materialist church and the other True Believers in the scientific paradigm of 1968, 1958, 1948 or whenever their nervous systems stopped taking new imprints.

These are the people who are perpetually frightened and dismayed by the large portion of human behavior mediated through Circuit II mammalian politics. They think that because this territorial-emotional (“patriotic”) behavior is not Rational, it should not exist. They accept Darwin as dogma, but are nervous about “Darwinism” (because it accepts mammalian politics as an Evolutionary Strategy that has worked thus far) and are repulsed by the data of ethology, genetics, and sociobiology. They don’t like the rest of the human race much, because it is not guided by their favorite circuit, and they are uneasily aware that the rest of the human race does not like them much….

The totally robotized Rationalist, the one whose nervous system has stopped growing entirely, can be recognized by two signs: He or she is constantly trying to prove that much of the daily experience of the rest of humanity is “delusion”, “hallucination”, “group hallucination”, “mass hallucination”, “mere coincidence”, or “sloppy research”. And he or she never thinks that any of his or her own experience would fit into any of those categories.

Substitute “religious” for “patriotic” and “religions” for “politics” and he could have written that today.

Changing odds

It wasn’t all that long ago when I wrote of my assumption that the Republicans were going to take the House and might take the Senate as well, thus leading to Obama’s eventual implosion in the 2012 Democratic primary. More than a few critics said that I was crazy. Of course, once it happens, everyone will believe that it was practically inevitable.

Typically cautious Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is rocking the political world with a new “Crystal Ball” prediction: The GOP will win the House, making Ohio’s John Boehner speaker, might get a 50-50 split in the Senate, and will pick up some eight new governors.

The winds at Republican backs are more favorable than they were in 1994. If the idiot Republican establishment can merely avoid falling over their own feet and embrace the anti-government mood instead of attempting to tamp it down, they’ll clean up. But never underestimate Republican self-destruction.

It’s just about that time

Football Outsiders offers a refresher course in NFL statisticology:

You run when you win, not win when you run.

The first article ever written for Football Outsiders was devoted to debunking the myth of “establishing the run.” There is no correlation whatsoever between giving your running backs a lot of carries early in the game and winning the game. Just running the ball is not going to help a team score; it has to run successfully.

There are two reasons why nearly every beat writer and television analyst still repeats the tired oldschool mantra that “establishing the run” is the secret to winning football games. The first problem is confusing cause and effect. There are exceptions, usually when the opponent is strong in every area except run defense, like last year’s New Orleans Saints. However, in general, winning teams have a lot of carries because their running backs are running out the clock at the end of wins, not because they are running wild early in games.

The second problem is history. Most of the current crop of NFL analysts came of age or actually played the game during the 1970s. They believe that the run-heavy game of that decade is how football is meant to be, and today’s pass-first game is an aberration. As we addressed in an essay in Pro Football Prospectus 2007 about the history of NFL stats, it was actually the game of the 1970s that was the aberration. The seventies were far more slanted towards the run than any era since the arrival of Paul Brown, Otto Graham, and the Cleveland Browns in 1946. Optimal strategies from 1974 are not optimal strategies for today’s game.

And yes, I am very, very nervous about going into the 2010 NFL season with The Tavaris Jackson Experiment as the confirmed backup QB to a man who is on the verge of entering George Blanda territory. Come to think of it, I’d be more comfortable if it was George Blanda backing up Favre and he’s 83 years old.

VPFL UPDATE: It shouldn’t be necessary to worry about the exclusions in the VPFL draft tonight. Yahoo has added the ability to specify keepers and I have done so for everyone. Blackmouth is not keeping anyone, the Meerkats have only one keeper, and Winston is keeping two. The other seven teams are all keeping three.

Applying science to string theory

What a novel idea!

String theory was originally developed to describe the fundamental particles and forces that make up our universe. The new research, led by a team from Imperial College London, describes the unexpected discovery that string theory also seems to predict the behaviour of entangled quantum particles. As this prediction can be tested in the laboratory, researchers can now test string theory.

Of course it seems probable that if the prediction is incorrect, the string theoreticians will follow the example of the Darwinists and insist that string theory is still totally scientific and totally accurate even though every attempt to utilize it to make predictions keep showing it to be reliably incorrect. When even Richard Dawkins feels the need to start using qualifiers in his would-be magnum opus in defense of the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection, henceforth TEpNS, only the most fanatic Darwinist could fail to recognize that there is a very real possibility that the theory’s future lies with space aether, phrenology, and phlogistons.

Double bubble trouble

A number of people have asked me what “the education bubble” means. While it’s not actually a true investment bubble since purchasing a college education is not a bona fide investment, the ever-rising cost of a college degree does have frothy and bubblicious aspects that can be seen very clearly in this chart from TaxProfBlog that compares CPI inflation vs the increase in US home prices vs the increase in college tuition.

In combination with the huge increase in students attending college, the value of a college degree is presently around one-third of what it was in 1990. I had previously estimated it was 28% of the value… but in either case, this assumes you are one of the 50% of college attendess who manages to successfully complete a college program and receive a degree within five years.

The real religious threat

James Delingpole explains that it comes from the radical Gaians brainwashed by years of public school propaganda:

It’s time we woke up to the threat posed by this mass brainwashing of the younger generation. We worry, rightly, about those Muslim children who are being indoctrinated with the extreme Wahaabist version of their faith. Yet we seem astonishingly complacent that every day, in schools of every kind throughout the Western world, our children are being taught by well-meaning teachers to view their world and culture through exactly the same anti-capitalist, anti-human, anti-growth eyes as James Lee and the Unabomber.

The modern environmental movement is not kind, caring or gentle. It is a series of ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in our face.

If it weren’t for the fact that Western economies are collapsing anyhow, one could make a serious argument that the Gaians are a greater threat to humanity than the most expansionist imperialists of the Dar al-Harb. The lunacy of James Lee is a clear warning sign.

Another banking bailout

In AFGHANISTAN?

As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan’s biggest bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a major shareholder in beleaguered Kabul Bank called on Thursday for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.

“America should do something,” said Karzai in a telephone interview, suggesting that the U.S. Treasury Department guarantee the funds of Kabul Bank’s clients, who number about a million and have more than a billion dollars on deposits with the bank.

Kabul Bank handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers. It has scores of branches across Afghanistan and holds the accounts of key Afghan government agencies. The collapse of the bank would likely spread panic throughout the country’s fledgling financial sector and wipe out nine years of effort by the United States to establish a sound Afghan banking system, seen as essential to the establishment of a functioning economy.

Good luck selling that one to the American people. Even the most rabid neocons won’t want to touch it. It’s insanity squared.

VPFL draft

Your live online draft is set for Sat Sep 4 7:00pm CDT

We’re still missing Greenfield (White Buffalo), Alamo City (Clay) and Bane (Red). Get thee hence to Yahoo and register! Everyone else, make sure you’ve got your three keepers selected as your top three rankings. If you aren’t keeping three, then make sure that your third choice is NOT someone else’s keeper.

Hiding the decline

Karl Denninger is alerted to potential fraud in the housing price statistics:

I have a very disturbing email that came in this evening. It alleges out-and-out fraudulent reporting of home sales in one of the regional MLS systems. That is, prices paid that are in fact much lower than the “sold” prices reported in the MLS.

The person in question claims to have seen over 100 of these in his area. I have copies of two, and it appears, from the evidence that I have, that at least for those two the claim is accurate.

One in particular I was able to pull the auction data on. It “sold” under reserve, is listed as sold in the MLS at ~25% higher than the “sold” bid, and the premium is disclosed as 5%. This property also has a 90-day “anti-flip” provision on it, implying that the paper may be held by one of the GSEs. (It’s a nice-looking place, incidentally.)

Here’s the problem, obviously – Case-Schiller and other “home statistics” numbers related to price paid are all computed off these numbers provided by the local Realty boards (via NAR.) If the data in the MLS is bogus then so is the so-called “median sales price” and so are Case-Schiller’s numbers! These are not small discrepancies either – in both cases the “over-reporting” is by approximately 25%!

This would explain why housing prices have been mysteriously moving up while the number of home sales continues to plummet. It’s as if it’s not enough to cook the GDP, CPI-U, and U3 numbers, things are getting so bad that they have to create fictional statistics for practically everything in order to “hide the decline”.

Hey, it worked for the climate scientists. For a while.