Corruption USA

Another pass at a banking whitewash:

A multistate settlement with five large U.S. banks over foreclosure practices would include as much as $17 billion in mortgage debt forgiveness and loan modifications and take three years to complete, according to a letter describing the deal. The draft letter to stakeholders from state attorneys general outlines an agreement among large mortgage servicers, states and the Department of Justice, which are continuing talks to finalize the proposal.

Servicers, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), and Wells Fargo & Co., would also have to provide as much as $3 billion in refinancings, enabling borrowers to secure new loans “at today’s historically low rates,” according to the letter. Another $1.5 billion would be distributed to about 750,000 borrowers who have lost their homes to foreclosure, according to the letter.

States that sign on to the agreement would get “immediate payments” to fund consumer protection and foreclosure prevention efforts.

All 50 states announced almost 16 months ago they were investigating bank foreclosure practices following disclosures that faulty documents were being used to seize homes. Officials from a group of state attorneys general offices and federal agencies, including the Justice Department, have since negotiated terms of a proposed settlement with the nation’s largest mortgage servicers.
‘Robo-signing’

The agreement holds banks accountable for “wrongdoing on robo-signing and mortgage servicing.” It allows state and federal prosecutors to continue to pursue securities cases and other claims. Individuals would not be barred from filing their own lawsuits, and the settlement includes “absolutely no criminal immunity for any individual who violated the law.”

In other words, a slap on the wrist, a few new loans, and the attorneys general will magically make all the title fraud go away. This costs the banks nothing, as most of the “mortgage debt forgiveness” consists of bad loans the banks were going to have to write off anyhow. The net result is rather like telling a bank robber that he has to repay a few dollars each time he holds up a bank… except the behavior of the banks is far more criminal than that of the average bank robber.

The real point of the loan modifications and the new loans is to generate new paperwork and ensure that the banks have proper title to the properties to replace the titles they destroyed in utilizing the MERS system to avoid local taxes. If you figure an average county transfer fee of around $750, that means the local taxes successfully evaded by the banks were around $562,500,000 for the foreclosed properties alone.

The Calvinist challenge

Markku mentioned a theory that one reason the Calvinists tend to look like such contortionists here is because I am usually asking the questions. He thinks that the non-Calvinist position will look just as contortionist if it is the one being targeted. That’s addressed easily enough, as I will entertain five questions from the Calvinists here. But choose them carefully; I don’t want any complaints that I took the easy ones and if only I’d had to answer hard ones the results would have been completely different.

So, Team Calvin can use this thread to discuss the questions amongst themselves in order to settle upon the chosen five. Be sure to specify them at the end.

Access issues

Difster has a solution for worldwide readers:

Some people are having trouble reading comments on your blog from other countries. Those outside of the US who are being routed to a country code and want to read comments can append /ncr to the end of your blogger address: http://voxday.blogspot.com/ncr

Also note that if you type in wwww before the blog address, you’ll go to a different location that is missing all of the comments. I don’t know how to eliminate this problem since I don’t know how it arose in the first place. Based on the link statistics, about 10 percent of the blog readers here are on the www location rather than the proper one.

A tale of two persecutions

Conrad Black notes that 100,000+ Christians are annually murdered for their faith:

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments.

It is not generally appreciated that over 100,000 Christians a year are murdered because of their faith.

On the other hand, the Financial Times laments the plight of “persecuted” atheists in the USA:

In Dallas, five of them took turns to list examples of the constant pressures of living in a religious society. One was a businesswoman in Plano, a city that’s part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis and was ranked as the fifth most conservative in America by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. She insists that, if she came out, she would lose her business. “I’ve worked for years to get these people to trust me, to want to do business with me.” So she constantly has to bite her tongue when Plano City Council opens its meetings with prayers, which it does in defiance of the constitutional separation of church and state….

The most extraordinary story I heard was from a woman in Tuscaloosa county, Alabama. She grew up in nearby Lamar county, raised in the strict Church of Christ, where there is no music with worship and you can’t dance. She says her family love her and are proud of her, but “I’m not allowed to be an atheist in Lamar County”. What is astonishing is that she can be pretty much anything else. “Being on crack, that was OK. As long as I believed in God, I was OK.” So, for example, “I’m not allowed to babysit. I have all these cousins who need babysitters but they’re afraid I’ll teach them about evolution, and I probably would.” I couldn’t quite believe this. She couldn’t babysit as an atheist, but she could when she was on crack? “Yes.” I laughed, but it is hard to think of anything less funny.

One’s heart bleeds for these poor American atheists. While their godless counterparts are among those murdering large quantities of Christians in a number of foreign countries, dreadful Christian bigots are not letting them babysit their children and forcing them to bite their tongues. And note that the would-be babysitter even admits that the parents are perfectly justified in not permitting her to spend any unsupervised time with their children.

I also found it fascinating to learn that the Plano City Council opening its meetings with prayer is somehow supposed to be the equivalent of Congress passing a law to establish religion. This, in a nutshell, illustrates why many people quite rightly despise atheists and want nothing to do with them. If you consistently attempts to take a mile every time anyone gives you an inch, you shouldn’t be surprised when people learn to stop giving you any benefit of the doubt.

There is still no global warming

I hope the readers here will never, ever forget how the AGW/CC story has played out, especially the next time that the usual suspects start babbling about another “scientific consensus”.

The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

I hope you will also remember this the next time that critics complain that I think I am smarter and more likely to be correct about a scientific matter than the scientists who actually specialize in the subject. How can I possibly assert that I am correct when all the experts say otherwise? Because, as has been chronicled in some detail, I was the last time. And the time before that. And the time before that….

What people often tend to forget is that scientists are people. And while one may not have the wherewithal to examine the actual scientific experiments or assess the relevant facts, one always has the ability to observe the behavior of the individuals citing them as evidence. There are a plethora of indications that an individual is not telling the straightforward truth, be it in person or in print. An ability to read those signs is all that is required to recognize when scientists are attempting to skate on their perceived authority rather than on any actual science, in which case one can always safely conclude that their claims are false. Observing the behavioral patterns was how I was able to correctly conclude that Man is not causing global warming because there is no global warming.

Scientists spend an awful lot of time being stunned because they are some of the most naive, credulous, and easily manipulated beings on the planet. That’s why they tend to inordinately fall for every nonsensical philosophical and political ideology that crosses their paths. The average reader of The National Enquirer probably has a better and more-developed sense of skepticism than the average scientist.

UPDATE – Even some of the former champions of global warming are now turning against the fake science.

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

Exploring the evasions

Since there are few things more amusing than the fevered dancing of Calvinists in their attempts to evade the obvious readings of various Bible passages, I’m interested in hearing how they will attempt explain away what is merely one of many, many examples that contradict their assertions of perfect and complete divine foreknowledge and predestination:

Genesis 18:20-32

Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[e] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

The LORD said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

Questions:

1. The Lord clearly states that He does not know if what Sodom and Gomorrah has done is as bad as the outcry that has reached Him. Is He a) lying about His lack of knowledge, or b) telling the truth about it.

2. Does “if not, I will know” indicate that He does not know at the time He is speaking?

3. Do “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it” and “If I find forty-five there, I will not destroy it” mean exactly the same thing?

4. Did did God change His mind in response to Abraham’s requests to reduce the number of righteous men required to save the city from 50 to 10?

5. Did God already know how many righteous men there were in Sodom when He said “if I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake”?

My expectation, of course, is that the Calvinists will resort to their usual intellectual contortions and deceitful word substitutions instead of accepting God’s Word at face value. The ironic thing is that in attempting to shore up their futile case for their concept of comprehensive Divine perfection, they transform the Biblical God into a shifty, unreliable deceiver in their own image.

Some have theorized that my contempt for Calvinist Churchianity is because I have some arrogant psychological need to justify my own autonomy. This is precisely backwards. I have no need to justify the readily observable. It is because a) I know I am autonomous, ala Descartes, b) I know my will is not in perfect accordance with God’s, and c) I know I will be held responsible for my sins that I reject the convoluted, responsibility-evading dogma of Calvinism.

The contradictions between Calvinist Churchianity and Biblical Christianity are vast in number. But the key one is this: if God genuinely wills salvation for everyone and yet everyone is not saved, then it cannot be reasonably denied that God’s will can be thwarted by His autonomous creations. I strongly suspect the core problem with Calvinism is similar to a problem that atheists often manifest with regards to Christian theology; neither group understands the significance of the difference between potential and action.

A Creator God no more has to permit His creations to thwart him than the NFL has to make a touchdown worth six points. And yet, we readily observe both. Calvinists arguing God’s will cannot be thwarted due to divine sovereignty are presenting an argument that is every bit as ridiculous as trying to argue that a touchdown cannot be worth six points because the NFL has the power to arbitrarily make a touchdown worth any number of points it prefers.

The Responsible Puppet emailed me to remind me of our previous discussion, so I’ll address one of his points now. I asked him the following question:

Exodus 3:7-10. In verse 9, God’s statement that “now the cry of the Israelites has reached me” clearly implies that it had not reached Him prior to that moment. I ask TRP, did God previously know about their suffering prior to hearing that cry?

To which he responded:

I would say that God knew before creation the exact amount of suffering the Israelites would experience. He had concern for it throughout their suffering and this quote from God states that this is the time that he is going to do something about it.

Now that’s a lot, but I suspect that you are thinking that there was some suffering that God was unaware of it until this point (if not, just correct me). If you need proof that this is not the case I’ll go back to the same psalm –

Psalm 139:4 – Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

This says that God knows what we are going to say, before we say it. Assuming that any Israelite vocalized his dissatisfaction of his treatment at the hands of the Egyptians, God knew it at that point at the latest.

This is very typical of the Calvinist attempt to claim that X is not-X. As TRP has previously done, he is simply answering with another variant of “we read X to mean the opposite of X”. It is simply false to claim that a statement that something that “is happening now” means that it happened before the time specified. He then compounds this error with another substitution of the general for the specific. David is only stating that God knows what he, David, is going to say before he says it, which is presumably the result of God having searched him and knowing him, however, this knowledge is not necessarily the case for anyone else less beloved of God than the Psalmist, particularly since David specifically mentions those who are wicked, hate God, and are in rebellion against Him.

Everybody hates Captain Underoos

The more inevitable Mitt Romney looks, the less Republicans like him:

“In Missouri, Romney lost by 30 points and did not win a single county. In Minnesota, Romney finished third behind Ron Paul and did not win a single county. And in Colorado Romney kept his loss within five points, but finished 35-points behind his 60 percent 2008 total.”

I was, of course, amused that in at least one National Review post, the second-place finisher in Minnesota was unidentified. I do find it remarkable that so many Republicans would turn to Santorum as the anti-Romney candidate, however. Republicans apparently really, really, like their central banks and foreign wars.

Mailvox: the case for the Singularity

Agnosticon presents his argument for his Singularitarian faith, or as I prefer to think of it, the techno-apocalypse:
In response to whether exponential technology will continue, whether immortality is feasible, and the compatibility of transhumanism with Christianity:

Technological Singularity doesn’t only rely on continuous exponential growth of separate technologies. If you look at the history of technology, there hasn’t just been a single exponential curve that keeps advancing each technology. For instance, vacuum tube technology gave way to transistor technology that gave way to integrated circuits with shrinking scale and increasing speed.

The Kurzweilian Singularity is composed of a series of S shaped curves, each having a gradual initiation and leveling out phase and a middle exponential growth phase as technologies come to fruition and then lapse into obsolescence. The combined effect of technological paradigms appearing and then shifting to new ones are observed as Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, Moore’s Law being just a special case. The LAR posits that complexity leverages itself to create more complexity.

The exponential nature of technological advance, particularly in anything that becomes an information science leads to what is now becoming a common pessimistic fallacy across a number of fields. The example Kurzweil gives is of the Human Genome Project which began in 1990 as a fifteen year project to sequence all of human DNA. Halfway into the project only a tiny portion of the genome had been completed, yet by the year 2000 nearly all of it had been finished. What researchers hadn’t realized, due to our inborn tendency to think linearly, is that gene sequencing had become an automated information science, amenable to exponential increase in efficiency.

If we consider the prospects for material immortality today, a similar distortion clouds our perception, namely you cannot extrapolate by linear means into the future and expect to come anywhere close to a realistic target. Not only is this because biology is now an information science, but also because the sophistication and intelligence of computational tools will also grow exponentially in the future.

The single greatest stumbling block for Singularity is the poor performance of software and artificial intelligence in the last half century. While Kurweil can confidently claim that the most powerful supercomputers today are roughly equivalent to the computational power of the human brain, and that by 2020 personal computers will share the same distinction, he cannot project a similar track for AI, which is crucially important. Most people interested in Singularity don’t believe it can happen without I.J. Good’s predicted Intelligence Explosion, whence intelligent machines are able to parse their own code and are smart enough to improve themselves recursively. It is possible that from that point onward, machine intelligence will explode in a positive feedback loop, giving rise to intellects many orders of magnitude beyond ours. The complex interdependencies of biological networks may be beyond our ape’s brains, but very likely they won’t be beyond the superintelligences that arise from the Intelligence Explosion.

The relatively poor performance of AI’s today, and the inability of narrow AI’s to generalize on their own to other domains is somewhat disheartening; however there is cause to be hopeful that things will change in the coming decade, mostly because research is now focusing more on general AI, and it is now known that narrow AI does not lead to insights in general AI. No matter how well DARPA gets a Hummer to cross the desert, that skill is not transferable to other domains.

Along with investigating general AI, the Singularity Institute is investigating means to ensure that superintelligent machines will not destroy us. Friendly AI is the new field that seeks to use decision theory and ideas about mind architecture to create minds that share our own values and retain those values perpetually throughout the intelligence explosion. The overall principle is summarized in the statement: “Gandhi does not want to commit murder, and does not want to modify himself to commit murder.” By grabbing any mind at random out of all of “mind space” the chance of picking one of benevolence is very low. However, by guiding the process onto favorable paths as the Singularity process initiates and unfolds, the theory is that we will be able to avoid those minds that are indifferent, or even hostile, to our existence.

Summarizing and putting all the pieces together, the hardware Singularity is already in progress, the software Singularity has been less spectacular, though there have been significant flashes of brilliance. Software systems in general have steadily increased in complexity. Showcase systems like IBM’s Deep Blue chess player and Watson Jeopardy player have impressively beaten human players, but like the DARPA challenge, are still hampered by being narrow intelligences. This may seem like cause for pessimism, but remember 1998 during the genome project. Remember that we humans suffer the myopia of linear thinking.

The prospect of material immortality? I, for one, am doubtful we will ever get there alone. If there is one thing that we know for sure, it’s that human intelligence is not part of the exponential explosion. Humans are pretty much as smart, and as dumb, as we were thousands of years ago (give or take a Flynn Effect). But imagine, if you will, an intelligence a thousand times greater than ours working on the problem, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Imagine something as far beyond us as we are beyond a gnat.

Is transhumanism incompatible with Christianity? This depends on how you interpret the Singularity. If you recast the quest for material immortality just as the attempt to extend lifespan, I don’t see why you can’t regard it as another medical procedure, albeit an unusual one. Many things about the Singularity can be regarded as only methodologically materialistic and not as pure materialism. However, it would be disingenuous not to recognize that most Singularitarians are probably strict materialists. Things like mind uploading, which contradict doctrines about the human soul, are probably Christian heresies; however, I don’t see much problem with cryonics, nanotechnological resuscitation, and a very, very long life.

There is some question about what and who will be allowed into the post-Singularity “heaven.” If our AI’s are made to be friendly, it might be presumed that evil human intention won’t be allowed into the Singularity either, at least not into merged or uploaded minds. On the other hand, since vintage, unaugmented minds will probably be quite innocuous considering the superpowers that inhabit the Singularity, they may be relegated to a quiet, pastoral existence on a preserve of some type, should they choose to remain human. But even that type of human existence will probably be different than our lives today — or perhaps they will cater to nostalgia. You may be able to return to childhood and relive your life as many times as you want. By this time, human qualia will be understood as neural/cognitive processes; the capacity to feel happiness and reward, or erotic pleasure will be beyond the crass boundary provided us by evolution. Conversely, the ability to inflict arbitrary horror, anxiety and pain on a cognitive agent could conceivably be without bound. The post-Singularity Hell could make Christianity’s look like Disneyland.

If our minds are to populate the post-Singularity on equal status to the potencies of those around us, whether merged with us, or as individual identities, are we ready and willing to relinquish those aspects of ourselves that are inimical to a collective existence? A similar question could be asked of the Christian afterlife. How much of “you” can you afford to lose before you become “not you”?

Said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn : “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

If you desire to live in full post-Singular status, you might face a similar quandary, and this may be the final answer to the question of immortality. Stealing a thought from Buddhism, it is change that defines the central aspect of our lives. It is unclear whether anyone ever lives beyond ten years in any actual sense, because after that interval we have changed beyond equivalent identity.

If we met our ten-year-ago selves, would we share any intimate empathy with them at all? We are engaged in a continual process of birth and becoming and death and dissolution. What we feel as nostalgia is the dim remembrance and mourning of a deceased relative who was ourselves. To achieve true immortality, we may need to reselect from “mind space,” this time choosing one capable perceiving an integrated experience throughout time. For human beings, immortality may be pure illusion.

There is no perfect plan for you

Haley summarizes the Churchian message about marriage:

It seems to me that Christian media sets just as high a bar a fantasy for Christian women as the mainstream media does, if not higher just due to the fact that a staunch Christian woman is far more likely to hold out for “God’s best.” I feel like we are constantly assured that God is going to give us his Best if we just have faith and wait for it. This especially includes marriage. Don’t settle for less than God’s Best. Do you want to have a good, God-honoring marriage? Then hold out for His Best. You’re 25? You have time. You’re 30? Keep praying for God’s Best. 35? Keep trusting God to bring you his Best. 40? God’s Best doesn’t have a timetable. 45? Nothing is impossible for God, who is writing your love story. God will bring his Best to you in his perfect timing. 50? Sometimes God’s Best doesn’t include a husband, but that doesn’t mean it’s not God’s Best for you.

Whether one calls it “God’s Best” or “God’s Perfect Plan”, it is readily apparent that one could just as easily, and accurately, express the same concept using the term in sha’ Allah. As evidence, I point to the fact that inshallah-dot-com is “Muslim marriage site, serious and respectful as imposed by our beautiful religion: find love, get married.”

What many Christians, especially those of the Churchian variety simply hate to admit is that God’s Will manifestly does not control every petty detail concerning every single person on Earth. This should be obvious from the way in which Jesus Christ taught his follower’s to pray: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven”.

Either there is no need to pray at all, which contradicts the entire point of Jesus telling his disciples how to do it, or God’s will is not presently being done on Earth. His will prevails in Heaven, as it does not on Earth, just as His kingdom reigns in Heaven, as it does not on Earth. This conclusion also has the benefit of being in accord with the evil we see around us and within us on a daily basis, rather than forcing the sort of intellectual gymnastics of the sort quoted above.

The Bible is not AC/DC. Christians do not pray for the coming of something that is already there. And while it may frighten people to know God doesn’t have a Perfect Plan for them, it shouldn’t. If God trusts you enough to provide you with free will and the ability to act on your own, shouldn’t you trust that He knows what He is doing and accept the responsibility for your own decisions and deeds?

Dept of Defense deceit

Keep this sort of thing in mind when you assume, incorrectly, that mindless support for foreign military interventions is synonymous with support for the American soldier:

During the incident in question, a Dustoff helicopter was approximately three minutes away, parked at Forward Operating Base Pasab. Both Dustoff and Pedro aircrews report being able to be airborne within roughly six minutes of receipt of orders.

However, because there were no Apache gunships available, the Dustoff flight for Specialist Clark was delayed. Official records state that he was delivered to hospital facilities 59 minutes after the MEDEVAC flight was requested by his unit—one minute from falling outside DoD standards, and within the “Golden Hour” from the moment of injury. But the military deceives here. Their fictitious Golden Hour does not begin at the moment of injury, but from the time the 9-line casualty report is received. This deadly deception was revealed in Golden Seconds.

Pedro helicopters also sitting at Kandahar Airfield could have completed this mission in less than 35 minutes. If Pedro or armed Dustoff had been stationed at Pasab, Chazray Clark could have been delivered to the trauma center in roughly 24 minutes.

The official record states that it took 59 minutes to deliver Chazray Clark to the combat support hospital. Video shot by Michael Yon provides conclusive proof that the military has deceived the Congress. Patient delivery took about 66 minutes from the time of injury, and about 65 minutes from the time of first report. There is no argument on this point. This clear deception brings in question all other military statements on this issue.

The death of Specialist Clark attributed to these delays is not an isolated incident.

It should be very obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the military itself does not appreciate being thrown into every hellhole that the Administration and various Members of Congress want to flex their muscle. And American soldiers are treated very, very badly by many historical standards; unlike Roman legionaries, few American officers can expect to retire wealthy as many centurions did.

I should say that the least Americans can do for their troops is ensure that their medical needs are being given priority over political concerns about long-abandoned aspects of the Geneva Convention. And any Pentagon officials who are proved to have been lying in order to play CYA games need to be fired at once.