Obama gets it done

Give credit where credit is due. Obama is pulling the troops out of Iraq and leaving no US bases there:

President Obama announced Friday that the United States will withdraw nearly all troops from Iraq by the end of the year, effectively bringing the long and polarizing war in Iraq to an end.

“After nearly 9 years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” said Mr. Obama. He said the last American troops will depart the country by January 1 “with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops.”

It would seem there is a silver lining in every failed presidency. And notice how the “Tea Party” candidate, Michele Bachmann, actually opposes the pullout. Because foreign occupations are so eminently consistent with small and frugal government.

Admitting the obvious

Inside the NFL concludes that the Tebow hate is nothing more than anti-Christian bigotry:

”Inside the NFL” analyst and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth concluded that much of the hatred against Tebow was based on his religious beliefs. Responding to a question from fellow host James ‘JB’ Brown, Collinsworth showed his disgust for Tebow’s treatment: ”It’s unbelievable, though, JB, that one of the best kids – just pure kids that’s ever come into the NFL – is hated because of his faith, because of his mission work, because of the fact that he wears it on his sleeve, because of the fact that he lives his life that he talks about….”

Brown and Collinsworth concluded that much of the hatred against Tebow was based on faith. Brown pointed out: ”There’s a number of guys who come into the league with a big marquee, fat paychecks, a lot of attention, and folks don’t seem to hate them with the same intensity that they hate Tim Tebow.” Collinsworth concurred with Brown: ”I couldn’t agree with you more. And it’s kind of a sad commentary, that, you know, if someone is out carousing every night, the Joe Namath thing, or whatever, they’re American heroes, and Tim Tebow, who’s working in missions in Asia somewhere, is a guy that we’re going to vilify.”

Now, I don’t think much of Tebow’s chances to be a star quarterback in the NFL. I wouldn’t completely count him out because I wouldn’t completely count any quarterback prospect out. I do think he was probably drafted too highly, the “mechanics” metric is overrated, and that if the coaches and analysts had the position down to a science as they would like to pretend, we wouldn’t see first round draft busts every single year.

Maybe he does have an odd throwing motion. So does Philip Rivers. Perhaps he’s not a proper pocket passer. Neither is Michael Vick. The thing is, it is readily apparent that Tebow is a better quarterback when leading his team on the field in an actual game than Kyle Orton. The fact that his head coach has serious reservations about him is almost entirely meaningless considering how long Fox kept starting Jake Delhomme once he had turned into an interception machine.

At 1-5, it would be absurd for Denver to refuse to accede to the Denver fans wishes, start Tebow, and see what he’s got. They are finally doing so two games later than the fans would like to see, but then, the same thing is happening in Minnesota with Christian Ponder. Most Vikings fans wanted McNabb benched at least two weeks ago; I wanted to sit the wormburner down in favor of Joe Webb after Week Two although I thought it was reasonable to give him one more shot in Week Three just to be certain he was done.

But it is absolutely bizarre how many people in the media are actively cheering against Tebow. This, of course, just strengthens his support, not only among those who have cheered the man since his days at Florida, but among people like me who otherwise couldn’t possibly care less about the Broncos or the fate of their second-string quarterback.

The week in alpha

This week’s round-up of posts at Alpha Game

Stalking the Virgin: Yohami’s amusing glossary of approaches plus the Sigma approach.

It’s not her fault. It’s not her fault: In which we are informed that 80% of women involved in car crashes are not responsible. At least, if you ask them.

The Orbital Leapfrog: A tactic to enable gamma orbiters to land on the planet. It will usually involve crashing and burning, of course, but even that’s better than remaining in perma-orbit.

Don’t talk to single women: An explanation of why volunteering conversation is usually counterproductive for the interested man and why a refusal to submit to qualification is intrinsically attractive to women.

Given that we increasingly appear to be living in interesting times, there is no shortage of topics that merit discussion here, so I’m intending to keep my Game-related posts over at Alpha Game. In unrelated news, I hope to wrap up my part of Round 4 and send it off to Dominic by the end of the weekend. We’ve both been traveling, hence the delay.

Explaining the banking bailout

Karl Denninger walks skeptics through the application of TARP and explains in detail why TARP did not represent Washington imposing its will on Wall Street, but rather elite Wall Street bankers rescuing the big banks by utilizing the federal government as a tool:

You realize that what you feared – a call to announce that the regulators were seizing all of your firms as they all had no mathematical way to survive isn’t what was going to happen at all! Instead, you were going to be given some $250 billion between you and the FDIC was going to take all credit risk on your new bond issues for the next year. In addition you were briefed on the TLGP which will guarantee your customers won’t run your bank as it provides their demand accounts with unlimited FDIC insurance protection. This is to be “free” for the first 30 days, and after that there’d be a fee, but compared to trying to keep your deposits and issue cheap debt it was for all intents and purposes zero cost. Finally, Ben was going to let you have basically unlimited Fed credit at near-zero interest rates for the next year, meaning there would be no issue as to whether you could fund routine operations or not.

Your firm was being saved and the taxpayer was going to cover the risk – whether he liked it or not.

You were going to be asked to do a few things, however. The public would never sit for being looted like this unless it looked like it was going to hurt a lot and there was simply “no alternative.” As it was Treasury and Bernanke were not sure that the public would buy it. Congress already had bought off on it, effectively; after all, Ben and Hank had corralled them into a room and threatened them with martial law if they didn’t pass TARP to begin with. But it was important to make it look stringent, so there’d be no big bonuses until you paid the TARP money back and dividends would have to be cut to effectively zero.

All in you were getting a screaming deal. Not only are you getting cheap capital, all things considered (the 5% preferred coupon with that FDIC backstop when your CDS spreads are being quoted in points up front literally saves your firm!) but the FDIC insurance on both senior debt issues and deposits – that is a pure windfall of unbelievable size.

You roll the numbers around in your head. There is roughly $850 billion in deposits throughout the system that would be covered by the FDIC “unlimited” deposit insurance, and the majority of it was in your bank and that of your TBTF friends. You figure that you and your buddies in the room could issue some $300 billion in “super insured” debt through the FDIC program and the surcharge from the FDIC is only 50 to 100 basis points; with the credit condition oncoming long rates will be headed southbound fast, so the odds are you’d see a 10 year in the 2.5% or so area soon. That makes the deal damned attractive; you figure between you in the room this will easily save you $15 billion a year in the first-year financing costs (about 500 basis points on that $300 billion) or more than the coupon on the preferred stock!

It doesn’t take long before the light comes on – this is a zero-cost option for you. The capital costs a coupon on the preferred but the savings on the bond issues more than make up for it and the FDIC deposit insurance makes sure nobody runs your bank.

For all intents and purposes you’re being paid to take the taxpayer’s money!

When you walked in the room you were sure you were going to be nationalized – or at least expropriated in some fashion, as you were dead flat broke. Now, well, let’s just say that it’s good to have friends in high places.

You wonder how the press is going to spin this one. This finance stuff is pretty tough for mainstream reporters; so long as nobody noodles on the numbers they probably won’t figure it out. Never mind that the bonds won’t all issue at once and most people will simply applaud the unlimited deposit insurance without thinking about the fact that it’s essentially a gift – the 10 basis point fee (0.1%) is a bad joke. $8 billion across the entirety of the system to provide unlimited coverage on $800 billion in deposits? This much is certain: Nobody’s going to be allowed to fail as that’s wildly lower than the actual risk premium on that transaction.

What’s not to like?

TARP was one of the most egregious breaches of capitalism in the history of the United States and no one who defends it, for any reason, can be considered even remotely pro-capitalist. Corporatism is not capitalism and Wall Street banksterism of the sort we have endured for the last three years has far more in common with royal mercantilism than it does with capitalism.

Do read the whole thing. The chances are very high that you will not only learn something, but you will be able to understand what actually happened in the fall of 2008.

Thus spake Yohami

On intelligence:

If intelligence makes you win, its fine.

But if intelligence makes you isolated, a freak, awkward, unadapted, if intelligence makes you score high in IQ tests but low in social life and low in the world, then your intelligence is a pile of crap. In other words, intelligence on its own means nothing. Its how you use it in your own advantage, and in advantage of the people around you, what makes it valuable.

Or, as I would put it, intelligence is merely firepower. More specifically, it is your mental caliber. To effectively utilize intelligence, you still require the ammunition that is information, whether acquired via formal education or autodidacticism, as well as the wisdom to know where to direct it. A well-placed .22 round is more effective than a 152mm artillery barrage that is miles off target.

This is why the possession of high intelligence is little more meaningful than the possession of academic credentials. It’s all just potential, and potential should never be confused with actual accomplishment. This is why even a moderate amount of wisdom merits far more respect than very high intelligence.

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that it is as foolish for the average individual to challenge the highly intelligent in an intellectual arena as it is for the average individual to challenge the extraordinarily strong in physical competition.

He bravely ran away, away

Richard Dawkins is still running as fast as he can away from William Lane Craig:

Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either. Perhaps he is a “theologian”. For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused, in the spirit, if not the letter, of a famous retort by the then president of the Royal Society: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine”.

What a disgusting coward! As I have repeatedly noted, Dawkins is simply not very intelligent. He clearly doesn’t understand how contemptible this makes him look to those who are not disposed to mindlessly cheer his every action. His paltry original contributions to the catalog of atheist arguments are both trivial and defective; of all the various atheist apologists currently extant, only Sam Harris is more easily refuted. He is only comfortable “debating” elderly English churchmen, who are too genteel and polite to directly engage his flawed arguments; one need not be a believer to expose their copious logical and factual flaws.

And his rationale for ducking the debate is just intellectually appalling. Given that I am much more famous around the world than nearly everyone who comments here, should I similarly decline to address anyone’s arguments who does not look good on my resume? If I followed his example, I would be rightly castigated my cowardly pomposity. Dawkins, it is now eminently clear, is more a propagandist and a social climber than a genuine intellectual. He has sold quite a few books, to be sure, but then, so did Bertha Runkle.

Who is Bertha Runkle, you ask? Precisely.

UPDATE: The Fowl Atheist comments: “So Richard Dawkins has taken the time to explain why he refuses to debate William Lane Craig. It’s a terrific put-down. I’m going to have to steal from it next time that importuning dweeb Vox Day starts pestering me to debate him.”

I find it amusing that you’re still desperately trying to justify your cowardice, my chubby little atheist friend. And there is one small problem with your attempt to utilize what shall henceforth be known as “the Dawkins Defense”. I am more famous and successful than you are. You’re a professor at a community college. I’ve assisted Sam Harris on his most significant neuroscience project, interviewed John Julius Norwich and Umberto Eco, worked with most of the top entertainment companies, written four Billboard-charting singles, and published seven more books than you. My readership is bigger. One can even reasonably argue that my contribution to science exceeds anything you have done now that my hypothesis concerning atheism being a form of autism has been supported by the research being performed at Boston University, to say nothing of my modification of the core mechanism underlying the operation of the Austrian business cycle.

So, how on Earth is debating you going to help my resume?

Herman Cain is pro-choice

And thus endeth the Cain bubble:

His views on abortion, he said, should be seen this way: “I can have an issue on a opinion without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn’t be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.”

This is not the kind of bright-line language that social conservatives who oppose abortion – and who have been trying to elevate it as an issue amid an economy-focused presidential cycle – general like to hear.

Cain was always an unlikely candidate – and a terrible one at this particular financial juncture – but there is no way he can hope to win the Republican nomination without the social conservatives who have up until now been all but wetting themselves over the chance to win a get-out-of-racism free card by supporting a real live black Republican who talks a conservative game.

I wonder if Cain feels the same way about rape and murder. Personally opposed, but not something that the government should be trying to tell people to do or not.

Wrong and wronger

Both the liberal orthodoxy, as represented by Paul Krugman, and the conservative orthodoxy still completely fail to understand the financial crisis. That is why they have not even begun to successfully address it:

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.

O.K., I’m exaggerating a bit — but not much. Mr. Frank’s name did come up repeatedly as a villain in the crisis, and not just in the context of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which Republicans want to repeal. You have to marvel at his alleged influence given the fact that he’s a Democrat and the vast bulk of the bad loans now afflicting our economy were made while George W. Bush was president and Republicans controlled the House with an iron grip. But he’s their preferred villain all the same.

The demonization of Mr. Frank aside, it’s now obviously orthodoxy on the Republican side that government caused the whole problem. So what you need to know is that this orthodoxy has hardened even as the supposed evidence for government as a major villain in the crisis has been discredited. The fact is that government rules didn’t force banks to make bad loans, and that government-sponsored lenders, while they behaved badly in many ways, accounted for few of the truly high-risk loans that fueled the housing bubble.

First, Krugman is totally and completely wrong about “the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades”. The last I noticed, the US financial system was still a government-mandated monopoly in the grand tradition of the East India and Hudson Bay companies. To claim that a nation which requires the reporting of all cash transactions over a certain amount to the government and where even cutting hair requires special permits is a “free market” is totally absurd.

But one cannot reasonably claim that the government is the primary villain in the financial crisis either. The government did put pressure on the banks to make bad loans, but the fact is that although they are certainly a serious probem, it is not the problematic banks loans are actually the major problem. Consider the following facts. The two total amount of money presently loaned out by all the commercial banks in the USA is $6.8 trillion dollars, down from a peak of $7.3 trillion in 2008. The total amount of debt presently owed by the financial sector is $13.8 trillion, down from $17.1 trillion in 2008.

This is the Wall Street Casino to which I have referred. It is sometimes referred to as the “investment” side of banks, which is nothing more than them borrowing money and gambling it in the form of derivatives on the different currency and equity markets. This is no more productive or capitalist than Grandma’s bingo night or Uncle Joe’s day at the horse track, it is simply gambling on a larger scale.

So, it should be readily apparent that anyone who is still attempting to frame the problem in terms of bank loans and not bank debts simply does not even begin to comprehend either the nature or the scope of the crisis.

There are serious economic problems, to be sure, but the core of the financial crisis would be better described as Bingo Night Finance than Rabbit Hole Economics.

On the radio

I’m going to be on WNJC 1360 AM from 3:10-4:00 PM Eastern today, a Philadelphia radio station. The two hosts have visited the Occupy Wall Street protests and they have invited me on the show to discuss it with them. You can listen live if you happen to be interested.

Crazy and ignorant

Crazy Eyes Bachmann appears to be almost astonishingly ignorant when it comes to foreign policy:

6:38PM Bachmann: “Israel is our greatest ally.”

Whether or not you think Israel deserves our help — and I think it does — that’s just a silly statement. Israel has fought shoulder-to-shoulder with us… where?

Israel is not America’s greatest ally. In fact, Israel isn’t America’s ally at all. If Israel goes to war with Turkey, which actually is an American ally, America will be obligated by treaty to wage war against Israel.

Bachmann isn’t merely an also-ran, she’s a never-was and never-will. And with good cause. The amazing thing is that her supporters actually believe that Ron Paul is the one who is a foreign policy naif. And yes, Michele, Libya is in Africa… then again, she probably thinks Chad is the guy with a popped-collar upon whom she had a crush in college and the Toyota Wars had something to do with Japanese auto makers establishing factories in the American South.