Positivity and Ender’s game

Some readers complain, not without reason, that this blog tends to be rather negative. And yet, as most regulars know, I am not a negative or pessimistic individual. As a matter of fact, I quite enjoy my daily life and I am thankful every single day for the small joys that fill them.

One of them was today. The last three soccer seasons have been rough on Ender, as our small, but successful club merged with two larger ones, he had to learn how to play for coaches to whom he was not related, (and more problematic, were considerably less disciplined and brilliant), he was injured, he was ill, and finally, he transferred clubs. His injuries cost him an entire season, which set him back badly, and the preference for giant adult-sized goalies meant that he had no choice but to move to a position on the field for which he was ill-prepared if he wanted to continue to play soccer.

But he has stubbornly persevered throughout. Last year, he made the change from third-string goalie who wasn’t on the game squad to utility midfielder who only got to play in one indoor tournament and one friendly. This year, thanks to the short-term ineligibility of a starting midfielder, he was named to the game squad and brought in as a defensive substitute at halftime of the first game. He made many mistakes, but even so, managed to completely shut down the opponent’s star striker, who had scored three goals in the first half.

After a long, post-game family lecture on the concept of “contingency” utilizing the white board – a defender must mark his man until a more imminent threat to goal presents itself, at which point the defender must immediately leave his man in order to attack the threat – he improved enough in the second half of the second game to merit starting the third one. After each game, we reviewed his mistakes and successes, then discussed how those mistakes could be avoided in the next game.

By the fourth game, he was not only starting, but returning in the second half to play central defense when the defensive captain needed a break. There were, of course, ups and downs as the season progressed, such the frenetic and ultimately disastrous melee in front of goal that inspired this in-game dialogue.

Vox: “You’re panicking under pressure. Look where you clear the ball, don’t just kick it. You have to calm down.”

Ender: “You’re not HELPING!”

But despite a few setbacks, Ender’s performance improved to the point that the opponents began to focus their attack down the other side and he began being able to start moving forward to support the attack. On more than one occasion, he managed to take the ball from the opposing attacker, beat a midfielder, then hit a friendly attacker with a long pass leading to a corner kick or a goal. By the end of the first half of the season, he was not only starting on the defense’s left side, but playing most of the second half as well, being recognized as the team’s second-best defender.

Still, things did not look good for his team leading up to the last game in the championship. They had lost two games in a row to the first- and second-place teams, and the defensive captain first got into a fight with Ender, then got into a (very foolhardy) fight with the (very oversized) first-string goalie before being thrown out of the last practice by the coach, who also happened to be his father.

But the final game of the autumn half got off to a good start today as Jet, the team’s best player, uncharacteristically managed to finish cleanly in the first minute of the game. The opponents came right back, however, and attacked down the right side, passing the ball past the outnumbered central defender to a striker running onto the ball. The striker had a very good angle to beat the goalie and took a hard shot… only to have it blocked by Ender coming off his man at exactly the right moment.

Ten minutes later, his team had scored twice more and the game was all but over. At one point, a speedy attacker beat him around the left side, the defensive captain moved over to help, and Ender immediately peeled off to cover the captain’s vacant position in the center. The captain won the ball, passed the ball up the field, and the two boys smoothly switched positions again. The coach just shook his head.

“Those two don’t like each other, but they sure play well together.”

Over the course of the game, Ender created two goals and three corners with his passing, and more importantly, shut down nearly every attack attempted down the left side. (This is significant in youth soccer, since most kids are right-footed and it’s much harder for them to score if they can’t attack from what is their right.) The final score was 12-0, which meant that his team not only finished the first half of the championship on a positive note, but in fourth place as well. They may not be able to compete with the two best teams, but they are in no danger of relegation and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they claimed third place by the end of the season.

It is a warm and sunny autumn day. Ender is happy and proud of himself. I am proud of him too, not just because he played well, but because of the character he has shown in overcoming adversity. These may be small joys, they may be small and trivial successes, but they are no less joyful for all of that. And I am no less grateful to God for the opportunity to see and share them.

They just never learn

Keep in mind that the following assertion is from the same individual who five minutes later departed the scene with the following Parthian shot: “Arguments from ignorance galore – ah, how I love Vox day. Anyways, enough of arguing with people of IQ below lima beans. Ciao. Just a Random Atheist wrote:

How about the fact that a molecular tree of life and a morphological tree of life has over 99% congruency? Do you think anyone would take evo seriously if the case was different?

There is not much that needs to be said except that “the fact” is clearly nothing of the kind. And yes, it is entirely obvious scientists will still continue to take evolutionary theory seriously despite the fact that the case has been determined to be different, as the fifth search result for “Darwin tree of life” shows that this is already the case. Consider the following statements.

The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 – whose pioneers believed it would provide proof of Darwin’s tree – opened up new vistas for evolutionary biology. But current research is finding a far more complex scenario than Darwin could have imagined – particularly in relation to bacteria and single-celled organisms.

Dr Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, said: “For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life. We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality.”

“It’s part of a revolutionary change in biology. Our standard model of evolution is under enormous pressure.”

“The tree of life is being politely buried – we all know that. What’s less accepted is our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.”

So, precisely whom is arguing from ignorance here? Now, note that it was me, the evolutionary skeptic, who predicted that this would happen, that the standard model of evolution, the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, would not only come under enormous pressure due to advancements in genetic science, but eventually be junked entirely. That hasn’t happened yet, of course, but the trend is clear and the predicted outcome has become increasingly likely. It is also worth noting that it is evolutionary true believers like Just a Random Atheist who are simply not up on recent developments in biology, in part because they erroneously assume that the standard model is not only correct, but infallible and unquestionable.

That is not scientific thinking. That isn’t even theological thinking. That is pure, unquestioning, religious dogma.

Fuck the Police

Thus sayeth the United States Marine Corps after the Oakland police attack on Marine veteran Scott Olsen:

As God is my witness. I will fight tooth and nail to restore the decency this country was founded upon. The politicians, banks and large corporations have ruined this country. I find it difficult to notice any sense of politeness on the streets anymore. But it goes farther. As a Marine and a citizen I am outraged. I am sick to death of the world my children are being raised in.

So I ask all of you, can you too sense the tipping point? When will enough be enough? If not now, when? I feel the problem is that the average Joe citizen is ignorant and comfortable. These, in addition to selfishness have become the standard for the majority of the population. As long as people are comfortable they remain silent. Well, I’m really fucking uncomfortable and I’m sick of seeing this sort of shit happening. The Occupy protests that are going on are our first glimmer of hope. If we can take this and move it further, get every lazy ass off their rocker and open their eyes; then maybe, just maybe we have a chance.

Semper Fi brothers, and remember who you are. Protectors of a great nation, not politicians or wealthy money grubbing bankers and the like. When it comes time, I know we’ll stand strong.

So, the Washington-Wall Street Axis of Corruption have the police, the media, and the Mexican gangs to whom they are selling guns and with whom they are laundering drug money. We the People only have the angry veterans of the USMC on their side.

I like their odds.

The U.S. Constitution is to be defended against ALL enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC. And there isn’t much question about who the domestic enemies of the Constitution are.

The problem with explanatory models

This critique of economic models might be helpful in explaining why I am so strongly skeptical about TE(p)NSBMGDaGF as well as the various dating methodologies. As I have mentioned on several occasions before, scientists in many fields simply don’t realize that the conceptual tools they utilize on a regular basis are significantly less reliable than they assume. The foundations upon which their “evidence” rests is much shakier than they understand, for the most part. This is understandable, since very few biologists, geologists, or astronomers have any actual training in history, logic, statistics, probability, higher mathematics, or even spreadsheet use, but that doesn’t excuse their stubborn and willful ignorance when errors, or even the likelihood of errors, based on these factors are pointed out to them.

Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality–he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn’t. It turned out that there were many different sets of parameters that seemed to fit the historical data. And that made sense, he realized–given a mathematical expression with many terms and parameters in it, and thus many different ways to add up to the same single result, you’d expect there to be different ways to tweak the parameters so that they can produce similar sets of data over some limited time period.

The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward–and sure enough, his calibrated model produced terrible predictions compared to the “reality” originally generated by the perfect model. Calibration–a standard procedure used by all modelers in all fields, including finance–had rendered a perfect model seriously flawed. Though taken aback, he continued his study, and found that having even tiny flaws in the model or the historical data made the situation far worse. “As far as I can tell, you’d have exactly the same situation with any model that has to be calibrated,” says Carter.

I first realized the nature of the problem when a perfectly straightforward question about the average speed of the evolutionary process was not so much mocked as greeted with complete confusion. And yet, if a process has taken place more than once over time, logic requires that there must be both various measurable speeds as well as an average speed. It doesn’t matter if the process measured is from mutated state to mutated state or from species to species, there must be an answer if the process is occurring. It wasn’t the lack of an answer that was the red flag, but rather, the inability to understand that there absolutely had to be an answer even if the answer was unknown at the present time.

The calibration problem that Carter is pointing out is tangentially related to the “backdating” problem I have hitherto observed. Economists and finance guys are keenly aware of the precarious nature of their models because they are forced to see them tested rigorously in real-time. For example, the administration economists who estimated a 1.6 multiplier effect in 2008 already know they were wrong. (They may not find it politically feasible to openly admit this, but they definitely know it, which is why they’re not proposing another stimulus package on the same basis.) And investment models blow up literally all the time, sometimes in a spectacular, system-threatening manner.

But that same sort of performance pressure simply doesn’t exist in many of the various sciences that concern past events. This is why we can be confident, if not entirely certain, that in the absence of successful predictive models, they have gotten it so substantially wrong that their core concepts will not survive the eventual corrections when they finally arrive.

To give another example, if evolution were a real science, biologists would be able to predict what the next species to evolve would be, as well as which population groups within a species were more evolved than the norm. They would be able to discern the connection between race and evolutionary development in humans. In fact, given the pressure that human activity is putting on various environments, we should be seeing more and more species evolving every more rapidly in comparison with the more sedate natural changes in various environments over the years. But that does not appear to be the case.

And appeals to time don’t wash either. Homo sapiens sapiens is supposed to have evolved to full modernity 50,000 years AGO, a process that is said to have taken 150,000 years. But since there are 59,811 species of vertebrates, even if we assume that the complex human evolution is the norm, we should be seeing a new vertebrate species evolve once every 2.5 years, (and a new mammal species every 27.3 years) even without the increased selection pressure of human habitat modification.

Now, there have been a number of new mammalian species, mostly lemurs and monkeys, discovered since 2000. So, perhaps there is some evidence for this process, if any of those species can be determined to be newly evolved rather than merely previously undiscovered. But the observable fact remains that evolutionary biologists, and many other scientists in other fields, simply don’t even think in a systematic manner that would allow them to perceive the logical holes in their fundamental models.

The candidates on Hollywood

As if you needed another reason not to vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama/Soetoro/Soebarkah:

Herman Cain: The Godfather

Michele Bachmann: Braveheart, “or maybe Saving Private Ryan”

Newt Gingrich: “Probably” Casablanca

Rick Santorum: Field of Dreams

Ron Paul: “I don’t watch many movies”

Gary Johnson: Dr. Zhivago

Mitt Romney: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Rick Perry: Immortal Beloved

Barack Obama: Casablanca, The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

My translation of their answers:

Herman Cain: Heh heh, get it?

Michele Bachmann: I would have said Notting Hill, but that wouldn’t have looked manly enough.

Newt Gingrich: What movie would sound the most intellectual without sounding too avant-garde for hoi polloi?

Rick Santorum: I’m just a regular guy who drinks beer and watches sports. And dreams.

Ron Paul: I actually read books.

Gary Johnson: I actually like movies.

Mitt Romney: I am the dorkish prick you thought I was. And I have a dreadful sense of humor.

Rick Perry: I’m quite not as dumb as I look and sound.

Barack Obama: Since that all things to everyone worked so well in 2008. (Seriously, what sort of jerk has not one, but four quasi-film buff favorites.)

Personally, I think Ron Paul gave the ideal answer, although I would also consider voting for a candidate who cited either Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Grosse Pointe Blank.

Die another day

The EU puts off the inevitable. But not for long:

Very quickly, there has been much loose talk about EU fiscal union. What was agreed at 4AM this morning is nothing of the sort.

It is a “Stability Union”, as Angel Merkel stated in her Bundestag speech. Chalk and cheese.

“Deeper economic integration” is for one purpose only, to “police” budgets and punish sinners.

It is about “rigorous surveillance” (point 24 of the statement) and “discipline” (25), laws enforcing “balanced budgets” (26), and prior vetting of budgets by EU police before elected parliaments have voted (26).

This certainly makes sense if you want to run a half-baked currency union. As the statement says, EMU’s leaders have learned the lesson of a decade of self-delusion. “Today no government can afford to underestimate the possible impact of public debts or housing bubbles in another eurozone country on its own economy.”

But none of this is fiscal union. There is no joint bond issuance, no move to an EU treasury, no joint budgets with shared taxation and spending, no debt pooling, and no system of permanent fiscal transfers. Nor can there be without breaching a specific prohibition by Germany’s top court, a prohibition that could be overcome only by changing the Grundgesetz and holding a referendum….

EMU break-up is Verboten, fiscal union is Verboten, full mobilization of the ECB – either to lift the South off the reefs through reflation, or to back-stop the system as a lender-of-last resort – is Verboten. Germany will have none of it. Instead we have the summit conclusions – EUCO 116/11 of October 27 2011 – and a great deal of coercion.

Please tell me what exactly has been solved.

I get the feeling that the politicians are desperately trying to play musical chairs, hoping that the collapse occurs on the other side of the Atlantic first. History being a perverse little bitch, this naturally tends to suggest that it is going to start in Asia.

On the other hand, it didn’t stop Obama

Marc Rubio is not a viable candidate for president, in 2012 or afterwards, because he is ineligible for the office:

Rubio is ineligible for the office of President. That’s how it is. I don’t care if you like it or not, that’s how it is. It is because his parents held allegiance to a foreign nation at the time of his birth and therefore so did he.

There’s no way to cure this other than through Constitutional Amendment.

If you don’t like this fix it the right way. All this BS, strum and furor doesn’t change facts – Rubio was born to two foreign nationals; neither was a citizen at the time he was born. And he was not the child of two people “fleeing Castro” either – his parents came to the United States before Castro took power in Cuba.

In addition to being ineligible he’s a damned liar.

It’s interesting to see how many Republicans who like to wave the Constitution around suddenly became silent about what the Constitution says concerning “natural-born citizens” once questions about Obama/Soetoro/Soebarkah arose. If Rubio puts himself forward as a presidential candidate in spite of knowing of his Constitutional ineligibility, he won’t merit a single vote from anyone loyal to the U.S. Constitution. And yet, the conservative media keeps talking him up… what logical conclusion can we draw from this?

Juxstaposition

It makes no sense, but I somehow feel as if I wrote the story just in time. I was reading the news when a pair of familiar names leaped out at me.

FINO A IERI Monterosso era una delle perle della Liguria. Case colorate incastonate tra le montagne e il mare nel territorio delle famose Cinque terre. Meta preferita di tanti vacanzieri che oggi guardano increduli le immagini di un paese semidistrutto, tagliato in due un fiume di fango e detriti.

Until yesterday Monterosso was one of the pearls of Liguria. Colored houses set between the mountains and the sea in the territory of the famous Cinque Terre. A preferred destination by many vacationers who today looked on with incredulity at the images of a half-destroyed area, cut in two by a river of mud and detritus.

Villages all but wiped out as storms batter Italy’s ‘Cinque Terre’. The walking trails and picturesque fishing villages of the Cinque Terre attract hundreds of thousands of international tourists, but two of them – Vernazza and Monterosso – were severely affected as rivers of mud poured down from the hills behind them. The mayor of Monterosso said the fishing village had all but been wiped out.

“Monterosso no longer exists,” Angelo Betta told an Italian news agency.

From “The Deported”, published in the October 2011 issue of Stupefying Stories:

“It was the fourth day of our summer holiday in Vernazza, a little fishing village in the Cinque Terre. We had spent the morning on a charming hike through the hills, lunched in Monterosso al Mare, then enjoyed a languid afternoon in the sun on the beach there. After hiking back and taking a brief but restorative nap, the six of us had reconvened for the evening on the terrace overlooking the sea. We were well into our second bottle of prosecco as Francois attempted to convince Bertrand’s wife, Michèle, that one could not genuinely claim to be an atheist and yet still believe in ghosts.

What a tragic pity. I’d merely intended a homage to Maupassant, but I fear it turned out to be far more of a ghost story than I’d ever intended. Prega per noi peccatori.

Filling the spiritual void

My, I wonder how and why that could be?

Halloween taps America’s spiritual void

The holiday just keeps getting more popular. Seven in 10 expect to celebrate it in some way this Oct. 31, up from about six in 10 last year, according to a National Retail Federation report. This is the most in the nine years the NRF has been tracking…. Christmas and Easter may be secularized these days, relative to their past, but they remain Christian holidays. People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

But as much as we’d like it to be, Halloween isn’t secular. It is Pagan. There’s nothing else to call a set of ceremonies in which people utter magical phrases, flirt with the night and evoke the dead.

I always enjoyed Halloween as a kid, but we don’t celebrate it since it is virtually unknown in continental Europe. I don’t see anything wrong with kiddy trick-or-treating and I don’t think that most people are actually celebrating it per se. That being said, as the pagan world continues to encroach upon Christendom, don’t be surprised as the celebrations grow darker and more serious.

Pagan worship primarily concerns propitiation. In other words, they are religions based on pure fear rather than repentance, contract, or submission. The West is at most mildly nervous now, the real pagan revival is unlikely to seriously begin until it reaches a state of genuine fear and desperation. And Halloween celebrations will likely prove to be a good means of tracking its development.