Category: Uncategorized

There’s no need for circus theatrics, the bishop has it right and the best way to show your disapproval is to not show up. As the newspaper and cable news channels have learned, a simple refusal to participate with the Left is the most effective form of dissent by non-leftists:

The University of Notre Dame has a tradition of inviting new presidents to speak at graduation. But this year’s selection of President Barack Obama has been met by a barrage of criticism that has left some students fearing their commencement ceremony will turn into a circus. Many Catholics are angered by Obama’s planned appearance at the May 17 ceremony because of his decisions to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and international family planning groups that provide abortions or educate about the procedure.

I had no qualms about skipping my own college graduation; I was out of there less than 12 hours after taking my last final. Sitting through ridiculous pablum and watching people collect expensive pieces of paper for hours is a waste of time anyhow, but watching your university sell out its core religious principles is really more than any good Catholic should accept. The problem isn’t that Obama is there, as a university should be an intellectual battleground. The problem is that he is being honored by what still purports to be a Catholic institution despite his abhorrent, anti-Catholic attacks on the sanctity of human life.

Mickey Kaus sheds a little light on the secret Internet media clubhouse:

From: Jonathan Chait Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:27:59 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:27 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist

Perhaps, if his work is going to be brought up here 2 or 3 times a week, he should be invited on the list. Or is the point of this to create a forum where certain people can be criticized (or, more precisely, called names) without the criticizer having to fear a response? I do recall Eric Alterman going after Eve Fairbanks, and then — when Eve mounted a defense — confessing that he didn’t know
she was on the list, and only criticized her because he thought he was speaking behind her back… There seems to be a junior high quality to this list with regard to TNR, where if you’re not on it you get sniped at constantly, but if you are on it you’re mostly safe.

What I find particularly amusing is the way Chait’s response highlights something that we have seen time and time again at left-leaning sites. It’s increasingly clear that very few individuals of a left-liberal persuasion have any ability to distinguish between criticism and name-calling. This explains why I can write a detailed critique ennumerating the specific flaws in Richard Dawkins’s central argument and his defenders will describe it as nothing but an ad hominem attack. It also explains how diatribes directed at my posts and columns which consist of little more than “LOL… so stupid… pwned!” and don’t address any of the relevant points are genuinely regarded as comprehensive and effective rebuttals.

I like engineers. On average, they’re smarter, more pleasant, and more useful than most. But engineers, more than any other type of human being on the planet, occasionally fill me with the desire to wrap my hands around their throats and strangle them. There is no other profession that seems to combine such amazing technical ability with an awe-inspiring capacity for missing the relevant point.

Years ago, Chris Taylor and I came up with the idea to use my company’s 3D hardware for games. Since the company was designing a 3D chip that would do shading, I lobbied hard to have texture-mapping included in it after seeing the two Johns demonstrate what could be done with software-based texture-mapping in Wolf 3D. I must have had ten conversations with the lead engineer in which I told him exactly what was required for the game industry at that time, namely, perspective-correct texture-mapping running 1024×768, 16-bit graphics at 30 frames per second. I could tell he wasn’t really listening and didn’t want to look at the information I was providing him, all he would say was “yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what texture-mapping is, I know what I’m doing.”

The chip came out months before NVidia had their first chip done. Jensen Huang even used to call me, posing as a game developer called “Jensen Software”, in order to find out what we were doing and how far along we were. Big Chilly and I had prepared a 2.5D game demo, a sort of sci-fi Wolf 3D that used pictures of me wearing a flight suit and a swimsuit model friend wearing a wolfshead mask as enemies. The frame rate was great, but everything looked wonky. When I asked what was wrong with the perspective-correction, the engineers looked blank and said: “Perspective-correct? We didn’t know it had to be perspective-correct!”

I could have killed them.

That chip ended up being successful in the CAD and Windows-acceleration markets, but the lack of perspective-correction ruined all the deals that were in the works with the various board manufacturers, and the company eventually disappeared as the CAD and Windows-acceleration markets dried up courtesy of the technology curve. All because a very smart engineer refused to pay attention to what the non-engineers were telling him.

For the last year or so, I’ve been working on a new project which I’ve mentioned a few times here and there, and we’re getting a lot closer to being able to speak intelligently about it. It’s going really well, the development team has done an excellent job and the engineers were just testing the last important feature before going into production mode. This feature is not absolutely necessary, but it will significantly add to the utility of the product, at least as far as I’m concerned, and add an additional degree of unique functionality.

So, I was extremely annoyed when I was surprised with the bad news that this special feature wouldn’t work because it was too slow. But, drawing upon more than two decades of doing technological development with engineers, I elected to ask a few very specific questions rather than go peacefully into the dark slough of despair. How slow was too slow? How was the speed measured? The interrogation revealed that the “delay” was measured in nanoseconds, more importantly, that delay meant that it would run at exactly the same speed as related features in every other product of its type around the world!

Translated into non-engineering terms, this means that the feature works just fine. I swear, sometimes I think they do it on purpose.

Forget what the experts say, you’re better off thinking for yourself:

One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise. There’s evidence that what matters in making a sound forecast or decision isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment — or, to be more precise, the way a person’s mind works.

This is the sort of thing that would-be experts like Orac, who despise being questioned by non-experts, never seem to understand. They refuse to grasp that their degrees and experience are often far less significant than an ability to properly assess the situation and its variables, and to then use that assessment to find familiar patterns upon which a judgment can be made. (Anyhow, how much trust could you reasonably place in an expert whose reaction to being shown to have been repeatedly in error is this sort of silly posturing.) An expert is only as good as his track record and past success is no guarantee of future performance. As Passport has taught me, there are enough random variables at play in the success equation, most notably the fact that it occurs at a unique moment in time and marketplace, that one should never get caught up in thinking one’s own efforts or abilities are solely responsible for success, even if one was the only individual directly acting on the matter. Blindly attempting to repeat what led to success in the past is a fairly reliable means of ensuring future failure.

Kristof happens to mention an idea I’d had a while ago myself, which is setting up a system to track pundit predictions. I think this would be a valuable tool to keep track of who said what and whether they were correct or not, as I’m already building a massive database tracking a very different subject. I even already have a scoring system in mind. I don’t know if anyone here would be interested in helping with a pundit-tracker, but if you are, let me know.

On an entirely unrelated note, let me just say that I think a lot of you are really going to enjoy the column next week….

Daniel Hannan rebukes Gordon Brown: “You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the Party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense!”

What in the name of King Alfred are the Tories doing wasting their time with the hapless David Cameron? This is the leader they have been looking for since the Iron Lady stepped down.

I almost forgot… I’ll be on the Jerry Hughes show at 2 PM Eastern today. Click here if you want to listen live. I think we’ll be taking calls if you’ve got any questions or whatever; the call-in number is 866-222-2368.

There’s no chance it will work. I’m not even sure it’s intended to, as it could merely be intended to pave the way for eventual nationalization. But Michael Barone offers what is perhaps the most succinct explanation of its inherent inconsistency:

I have noticed what I think is a paradox in the Geithner plan. He is asking the most unregulated parts of the financial system—hedge funds, private equity firms—to bail out the most regulated part of the financial system—the banks…. Democrats like Barack Obama and Barney Frank, at least on the campaign trail or in sound bites, have portrayed the financial crisis as the product of deregulation. The solution, they say, is more regulation. In that vein Frank, one of the brainiest members of Congress, is proposing that the Federal Reserve become a regulator of systemic risk, with the power to regulate firms that because of their size or strategic position are of systemic importance.

My American Enterprise colleague Peter Wallison has argued powerfully that this is a bad idea. Neither the Federal Reserve or other regulators identified the systemic risk which caused this crisis. Neither did most financial institutions or investors.

And yet, this systemic risk was obvious back in 2002! Of course, it wasn’t exactly difficult to know that any system which relies upon a combination of leverage and permanently rising home prices was going to blow up sooner or later.

“[T]here can be little doubt that the implosion of the equity markets will soon be followed by the pricking of the credit and real estate bubbles. As great financial houses such as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, it is well within the realm of possibility that the triple whammy of the equity, credit and real estate implosions will lead to the collapse of the entire global financial system.”

Except in Orac’s case, it should apparently read as follows: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupid. Like most individuals who are more intelligent than the norm, Orac simply doesn’t know what to do when he’s in over his head and doesn’t understand something, so he throws his usual hissy fit and declares that everything is stupid because he isn’t capable of grasping it.

Amusingly, he’s still hung up on the erroneous notion that if one merely REFERENCES National Socialist Germany’s undisputed TRANSPORTATION of millions of people, this is somehow synonymous with ADVOCATING the MURDER of millions of people. It’s certainly true that WND did edit the phrase out – although I have never and will never retract what was a simple statement of historical fact – but they only did so because they didn’t wish to waste their time dealing with the misplaced hysterics of logically handicapable individuals such as Orac and Michael Medved. Now there’s a pair of towering intellects for you!

Orac responds to my recent post on his reference of a recent scientific scandal in exactly the same overwrought and dishonest manner we’ve come to expect of him. He ignores the central points and instead tries to nibble away at the edges in an attempt to justify an ad hominem dismissal of my arguments. Consider, for example, his attempt to evade the fact that scientists are less trusted than one would expect given their ability to appeal to the supposedly unbiased and objective method of science. Orac weirdly asserts: “We scientists do not claim to rely on a “completely objective system.” Well, that’s certainly a surprise to anyone who has spent more than five minutes reading practically anything on scienceblogs. And It would seem strange, too, that as far back as 1983, Nature published a report called “Just how objective is science”. Of course, Orac is merely playing word games by saying that while the system isn’t “completely” objective, it just “tries very hard to minimize human biases as much as possible”. Ah, well, that completely eviscerates the point that scientists aren’t considered significantly more credible than a number of other professions despite their bias-minimizing method, doesn’t it… nothing like the old adverbial distraction.

The usual pattern applies throughout the post. Orac is quite willing to say whatever will permit him to falsely impute stupidity to someone else regardless of any basis in fact; does anyone seriously believe he’s likely to accept an argument based upon the inherent subjectivity and bias of science when he’s arguing about vaccines or religion?

That’s how Orac rolls. His arguments are almost always dependent upon assigning a false interpretation to something I’ve written, then attacking that false interpretation while avoiding what is actually there. He writes: “Vox is also full of crap when he claims that scientists rely on arguments from authority–as if that’s all we rely on.”

Of course, I neither wrote nor implied that. Scientists present a wide variety of arguments based on a various foundations, and I was specifically pointing out that when scientists SUBSTITUTE appeals to scientific authority, or peer review, or democratic consensus, or statistical review, for actual science, they jeopardize their credibility. Since appeal to authority was only one of three things I mentioned in that very sentence, it’s quite clear that the only one full of crap here is, again, Orac.

I don’t demand that anyone respect my authority, nor do I make arguments that rely upon this fictional authority. And I certainly have no need or desire for Orac’s respect. My reliable track record vis-a-vis the experts merely serves as a powerful basis with which to combat illogical appeals to various legitimate authorities. Orac is flat-out wrong when he writes: “arguments from authority are not in and of themselves a logical fallacy if the authority is legitimate. It’s arguments from dubious or false authority that are logical fallacies.” The inherent logical fallacy has nothing to do with the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the authority.

Just yesterday, in fact, the new housing report had the median price at $165,400, which tends to fit the “175k or below” zone I predicted a year ago rather better than “flat at 218,100 in 2008 and increasing in 2009 as the housing experts had it. Man is a pattern recognition machine and I just happen to be a particularly good one. Science, like every other human endeavor, is subject to discernible patterns and foolish scientists ignore that, not only to their detriment, but to science’s as well. Still, to his credit, Orac admits that the scientific method is not hard to understand, which refutes approximately 45 percent of all arguments ever made by a Pharyngulan. However, he doesn’t grasp that it really is not necessary – although it could certainly be helpful – to know the background behind the scientific work in order to detect a familiar pattern of deception, unreliable assumption, or simple error. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize familiar patterns at work among the scientists who subscribe to various beliefs in ideas such as TENS, AGW, or the inherent safety of vaccines. I’ve seen it before in the adherents of the Labor Theory of Value and we’re seeing it again in the second coming of the Keynesians.

As for extended blather about ethics and the Helsinki Declaration, obviously I’m aware of the issue or I wouldn’t have been able to correctly predict that vaccine defenders will hide behind it in order to justify their refusal to further examine the issue. Personally, I think a non-blind study would be better than nothing and there are obviously no shortage of parents quite willing to forgo vaccinating their children, but then, as others here have pointed out, there would be more room to explain away any indication one way or the other. In the meantime, I see no reason why researchers can’t shoot up infant chimpanzees with the full U.S. vaccine schedule and see if it harms them at all. Perhaps this has already been done; if so, I haven’t heard about it.

Orac never gets around to addressing the main point, which is that scientists are losing the public opinion battle and more chest-thumping about how wonderful science and scientists are is not going to serve the vaccine defenders’ objectives in the slightest. The public doesn’t depend on science or scientists, science and scientists depend on the public. If scientists wish to continue arrogantly flouting public opinion, lampooning very real parental fears, and advocating idiotic ideologies that insult both the intelligence and the experience of the observant public, they’ll richly deserve the reduced funding priority that will likely be their eventual reward in a globally contracting economy.

In closing, I note that there’s a beautiful comment from one of Orac’s readers that serves as a perfectly apt summary of the relationship, such as it is, between critics like Orac and me. The usual pattern is this: an individual with an above-average intelligence and a reasonably expensive education sees something from outside their knowledge base that doesn’t fit their assumptions, fail to understand what I am saying, and therefore conclude that because they don’t get it, I must be incorrect and/or stupid.

“VD’s blog title “Vox Popoli” shows that he can’t even quote properly a well known Latin phrase: it’s “Vox populi”, with one “o” and one “u”.”

While it’s true that “populi” is Latin, it is also true that “popoli” is Italian. “Vox Popoli” is a mix of two languages rather like, well, “Vox Day”.

UPDATE – It occurs to me that I forgot to mention that the poll Orac cites, in which scientists were asked if they had committed
scientific fraud or not, is not exactly the most convincing evidence that scientists are not committing fraud. In related news, a similar poll found that 100 percent of the convicted felons questioned anonymously in Stillwater State Prison did not commit the crimes for which they are presently serving time.

A Democrat seeks to salvage the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party:

With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks….

A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs. Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies. Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Yeah, because it’s the endorsements that are the problem… prohibiting the op/ed sections would be more credible. I have no doubt whatsoever that the media is EXTREMELY interested in this bill, as it’s one of the few things they’d actually like better than a public-funded sports stadium. Of course, journalists are far too short-sighted to understand that the passage of this act would cause half the country to go from merely holding them in contempt to full-blown, outright hatred.

Although I suppose that the national media has been little more than the federal government’s PR agency for the last three decades, so at least this would put it all right out in the open for everyone.

While I am a peaceful gentleman, I have been known to wax wroth on occasion when sufficiently provoked. As longtime readers know, I am largely impervious to words, but I am rather less inclined to suffer physical assaults with equanimity. And I have been subjected to more than most over the years, largely as a result of my speed and my position on the soccer team.

For an individual who spent most of his life playing soccer, I am an exceptionally unskilled individual. What I do possess – or rather, did possess – was exceptional speed. Since the number of people in the state capable of beating me could be counted on one hand, there was never a defender on the soccer field who could hope to keep up with me. Their one hope of staying with me was to foul every time I started to move, so at times the sport seemed more like wrestling than anything else, and one can understand if the idea that soccer was supposed to be a non-contact sport never made much sense to me.

Since I was always perceived as the most dangerous attacker – which was actually seldom true – I was inevitably man-marked and often double-teamed. Over the years, I eventually developed a catalog of various tricks and maneuvers designed to keep defenders away from me, ranging from adroitly timed elbows to smacking their locked elbow with my forearm when they grabbed my jersey. When intentionally tripped, I would get up and blatantly kick both feet out from under them as the ref followed the action upfield… this led to more than a few yellow cards for the other team when defenders would get enraged at my doing openly what they were doing surreptitiously. Most seasons, I collected nearly as many red and yellow cards as I scored goals.

When I returned to the soccer field after spending four years at college and six years doing martial arts, I had forty pounds more muscle and a much larger arsenal of tricks at my disposal. Suddenly, I discovered that defenders were unable to force me off the ball, which was a pleasant surprise. I became a more effective striker and managed to average a goal per game the last year I played in the States. Playing in Europe was a very different experience, however, as the skill level of the players was so much higher that I felt like a chimpanzee trying to play chess with Russian programmers. While the defenders still clutched and grabbed, the level of general violence was much lower, with one very notable exception.

Most teams in the elite veterans league with which I played had a lot of very good players. There were a number of retired professionals, and one team even boasted a former national team member, which was rather intimidating although I did have what turned out to be my best game ever against them. But there was one team that was easily the dirtiest collection of cheating, nasty, sour-tempered losers I have ever encountered, and I’ve played everywhere from the US to Europe and Japan. The year we took the championship and won promotion, we were beating them three-nothing, which seemed to enrage their keeper and their sweeper. The two of them started trying to commit fouls every time one of our strikers got near them. It was getting increasingly chippy, and after I nearly scored a fourth goal, the sweeper sidled up to me, grabbed my testicles, and squeezed as hard as he could.

Now, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I very seldom feel any pain when my adrenaline is up. So, it didn’t hurt in the slightest. In fact, the only thing I thought was “uppercut”, as with his left hand down doing the dirty work, I had a perfectly clear shot to his chin. But then I thought, is it really worth it? On the one hand, if I power the uppercut with a hip twist I can definitely break his jaw and quite possibly knock him out as he eminently deserves. On the other hand, what purpose is that actually going to solve? Is it really right to seriously injure him when, despite his best efforts, he’s not actually hurting me? He looked a little confused when I didn’t react by doubling over, but merely forced him to release his grip by shoving him away and breaking out wide to receive a pass from our left midfielder. Then, not five minutes later, there was an open ball in front of goal, the goalie went after my knee instead of the ball, and ripped it open with the toe of his shoe. Again, I didn’t feel anything thanks to the adrenaline rush, but a few minutes later, one of my teammates brought it to my attention that a flap of skin was hanging out over my knee and I was bleeding like a well-stuck pig. I thought about confronting the goalie over what was clearly malice aforethought, but again, decided to let things slide and tried not to bleed on the interior of my friend’s Maserati as he thoughtfully drove me to the hospital to get stitched up.

When we played them again about two months later, I was wondering how I should repay the two ill-mannered brutes for their indelicate assaults. But, as it turned out, any action on my part was rendered moot before I even got into the game. Not five minutes after the game started, there was an open ball in the goal area for which the dirty defender was fighting our best striker. The dirty goalie came out, and as we’d learned was his wont, went for our striker’s leg rather than the ball. However, the defender chose just that moment to foul our striker by pushing him out of the way with both hands, and for his efforts he received a full-force kick to the side of his head that knocked him out instantly. It was absolutely brutal and I almost laughed myself sick at the horrified expression on the idiot keeper’s face. It was just PERFECT! After waking up, the defender had to be helped off the field and taken to the hospital; I have little doubt that he received a nice little concussion.

The referee and the opposing coach were a little offended at the enthusiasm with which my team applauded the incident, until our coach pointed to my knee, which still looked ghastly, and explained that justice had been swiftly served from on high. It was a beautifully satisfactory result, although my coach did tell me at the end of the season: “Next time, just go ahead and hit them. I will do the explaining.”