Addio, Mr. Apple

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO:

In a resignation letter to the board, Mr Jobs, who has fought a long-running battle with cancer, wrote: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know.

“Unfortunately, that day has come. I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

I have an admire-hate perspective on Steve Jobs. I hate his technofascistic vision, but I love his passion for design perfection even when it falls short. I hate OS/X, I hate Macintosh computers, I hate Apple attitude, and I especially hate Macintossers, but I loved my Apple II and I still have some affection for my original Macintosh. I hate Apple’s cynical and dishonest marketing even as I am amazed by its sheer effectiveness. I especially hated the Jeff Goldblum commercial for the iMacs; I blame him and Steve Jobs for the opening of the Internet to the technologically pig-ignorant.

But Jobs had a hugely influential run during an exciting time for technology and even an inveterate Mac-hater couldn’t possibly deny it. Here is hoping he will enjoy the time he has left to him.

VPFL players

HUTSONDC: Bane Sidhe 10-4-0
BISCH: Valders Quixotes 9-5-0
STILICHO: Blackmouth Banksters 7-7-0
ATOWN: Meigs Marauders 5-9-0
ZEK: Judean Rhyneauxs 7-7-0
TOZ: Winston Reverends 4-10-0

Send me an email so that I can send you an invite to the league along with your roster from last year. I must receive it by 12 NOON FRIDAY or your place will be given away. The draft is SATURDAY AUGUST 27. You can keep up to three of your players on the roster, but you don’t have to keep any. You must send me your keepers by midnight Friday.

I recommend that you only change the first part of the team name for continuity reasons, except the Bane team should retain Bane for obvious reasons.

Darwinist demands Darwinian litmus test

In other news, Roger Clemens today announced that “throwing like a girl” should disqualify a politician from the presidency.

A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

Richard Dawkins again demonstrates that he is an unmitigated moron. Perry may be an “uneducated ignoramus”, but Dawkins is nothing more than an educated one. But what is always amusing is his narcissistic myopia. The entire world is in the midst of an economic meltdown that threatens the global financial system, so naturally he is very, very concerned that the next U.S. president must be a True Believer in the Cult of Darwin.

If Dawkins actually cared about science, he would be enthusiastically supporting a snake-handling fundamentalist who believed the world was created exactly 6,000 years ago so long as said Creationist was cognizant of economic reality, which none of the current presidential candidates except Ron Paul happen to be. The ongoing Great Depression 2.0 will do far more damage to science than an outright ban on the teaching of evolution in the public schools ever could.

The fact is that neither the president nor anyone else actually needs to know a damn thing about evolution or the intrinsically unscientific principle – it is based on logic, not science – that is “natural selection”. Even biologists who are performing cutting edge work in genetic science don’t necessarily need to know anything about either. Almost no one does.

Moreover, Dawkins is a liar. He lies, and he knows he lies, when he says: “Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science.” Let’s see the scientific experiment that demonstrates that “fact”, then see it replicated three more times for good measure. Other scientists can manage this effortlessly, so why can’t Mr. Dawkins? Because, obviously, evolution is not a fact – which Dawkins admits in his most recent book – nor is it anywhere nearly as securely established as a plethora of scientific hypotheses. And that is a fact. An actual, verifiable one.

The Cult of Darwin must be getting desperate indeed if they are resorting to attempting to pass off outright lies in this manner. Moreover, three years after getting spanked on his embrace of the stupid Red State argument, Dawkins still clearly knows nothing about the American political system. It is not the Republican Party that depends upon the uneducated vote, but the Democratic Party, as CNN exit polls have shown after the 2008, 2004, and 2000 presidential elections.

“Voters with postgraduate schooling were only 25 percent more likely to vote for the Democratic Party presidential candidate in 2004 while those who did not complete high school were 90 percent more likely to identify themselves as Democrats. Since there are 75 percent more Americans who never completed high school (16.4 percent of adults over twenty-five) than possess an advanced degree (9.4 percent), this means that despite their reputation for being the party of the most highly educated, a Democrat is nevertheless more than twice as likely to be someone who has dropped out of high school than an individual with a master’s degree.”
– The Irrational Atheist, pp 18-19

Dawkins concludes: “The ‘evolution question’ deserves a prominent place in the list of questions put to candidates in interviews and public debates during the course of the coming election.”

Absolutely it does. I would LOVE to see it given a prominent place in the debates. Because wouldn’t it be amusing to see the look on Dawkins’s face when all the Democrats he admires stand up and deny evolution in perfect lockstep with all the Republican candidates! And it would be an excellent method of keeping those potentially deadly atheist utopians out of high office.

Statistical evidence of economic depression

Readers here are aware that I have staunchly maintained the U.S. economy has been in an economic depression since 2008. I have done so despite NBER declaring the “recession” over in 2009 and in the face of seven straight quarters of positive GDP growth statistics because I don’t believe that either the agencies or the statistics they report have much, if anything, to do with the observable economic reality.

To give one example, the U3 unemployment rate is presently reported at 9.1%. But this is a heavily massaged number which not only depends upon survey-based employment estimates, but upon the subsequent manipulation of the raw data. Since it’s not possible to radically alter the number of reported “employed” without looking as if they are blatantly manipulating the numbers, the BLS manages to keep the official unemployment rate artificially low by reducing the size of “the labor force”, chiefly through reducing “the participation rate”.

However, is it reasonable to believe that people are any less inherently willing to work in these difficult economic times than they were in the year 2000? I don’t see any justification for it. The suggestion that something is amiss can be seen when comparing the labor force participation rates with the employment population ratios (EPR) for 1973 and 2000 versus today. Given that the percentage of women participating in the labor force has methodically risen from 44.7% in 1973 to 59.2 in 2009, and that this increase has outpaced the exit of elderly men from the labor force since 1973, the current overall participation rate should be significantly higher than it was in 1973. But this is not the case, according to the BLS.

Dec 1973 Participation rate 61.2 EPR 58.2 U3 4.9
Jan 2000 Participation rate 67.3 EPR 64.7 U3 4.0
Jul 2011 Participation rate 63.9 EPR 58.1 U3 9.1

Now, if we simply compare the present number of reported employed to the present size of the civilian, non-imprisoned population, but calculate the labor force based on the 2000 participation rate, we get an unemployment rate that is 50 percent higher than the currently reported rate of 9.1%. Note that numbers given are in thousands as per the BLS.

239,671 Civilian non-imprisoned population x.673 participation rate equals

161,299 Labor Force minus
139,236 Employed equals
22,063 Unemployed

22,063 divided by 161,299 equals 0.13678

This means the current U3 unemployment rate according to the BLS metric should be 13.7%, not 9.1%. Note that this is higher than the “unemployment rates” reported in the first two years of the Great Depresion, 1930 (8.9%) and 1931 (13.0%). Please also note that the two historical “unemployment rates” are estimates made well after the fact as the BLS didn’t track unemployment statistics until 1948. Finally, one also must take into account that the current rate would be considerably higher were it not for the 2,868,000 more people that are now employed by the federal government than were employed in 1940, much less before the New Deal of 1933. Including these extra 2.8 million government workers in the unemployed list, as one must do in order to make a reasonable comparison between 2011 and 1930-31, indicates a comparable “unemployment rate” of at least 15.5%.

A second sign is the woeful state of the housing market. “A telling sign of how bad things have gotten for the housing industry: Prices have dropped more since the recession started, on a percentage basis, than during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And it took 19 years for prices to fully recover after the Depression.”

Of course, we can always apply Paul Krugman’s reasoning and launch an alien war to solve the economic problem. If we can simply arrange for 30 million people to be slaughtered by the aliens, that will reduce the labor force and lead to full employment overnight.

Next up, locusts

I think we can safely drop the idea that God has any particular affection for America now:

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake centered in Virginia forced evacuations of all the monuments in Washington and rattled nerves from the southern state of Georgia to Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island in the northeast where President Barack Obama is vacationing. No injuries were immediately reported.

And across the South, a single thought echoed throughout a million minds as if they were one. “Only 5.9? Come on!”

They CAN give America four As

S&P readies a belated upgrade to U.S. debt:

The ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said late on Monday that its president, Deven Sharma, who has become the public face of the firm in the wake of its historic downgrade on the United States’ long-term debt rating, will step down and leave the company by the end of the year. The decision by Mr. Sharma to resign comes as the ratings agency is under pressure from several fronts, including an inquiry by the Justice Department into its ratings of subprime mortgage securities and a push by activist investors to break up its parent company, McGraw-Hill….

His replacement, Mr. Peterson, 53, is currently the chief operating officer of Citibank, the banking unit of Citigroup.

I note that the one thing the New York Times does not assure us was that the management change was not the result of the recent downgrade of U.S. debt. No doubt Mr. Citibank already understands that an review of that decision and eventual restoration of AAA status is in the best interest of his continued employment.

Unless, of course, it is decided the time is right to debut the new, super-safe, guaranteed AAAA rating.

Neocons worry about future credibility

Or rather, the lack thereof. Didn’t anyone ever read them the tale of the boy who cried wolf?

In itself, the Libya intervention was “small.” Yet coming in the wake of two substantial wars that have stretched our military capacity to its limits, Libya felt to many like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Our military was skeptical about this war from the start. A palpable public shift of sentiment against interventions, even among conservatives, has been precipitated by an action in Libya that seemed only loosely tied to America’s security interests.

This is a shame, because the transformations in the Arab world are taking a decidedly dangerous direction. Quite possibly, we will someday face the need to intervene in situations in which our security really is under threat. Let’s hope the public hasn’t been so exhausted by then that it hesitates to support what must be done.

Translation: dammit, we’re not going to be able to sell America on invading Iran! Anybody around here speak Chinese?

Now that’s just CRAZY talk

Talk of Obama’s resignation is heating up:

Democrats will be looking at a massacre in the Senate, and that’s not even including already-endangered seats in Nebraska, Missouri, Montana, and New Mexico, which just elected its first Republican woman governor last year. Democrats could wind up losing enough seats to give Republicans a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate if Obama chases away the white working-class vote that he’s been alienating for the past two years on ObamaCare and now his disastrous economic performance. If unemployment starts rising and growth remains low in the next few months, Democrats may insist on Obama finding a graceful exit before the primaries.

And guess who that leaves with an open path to the Democratic nomination? Hillary Clinton. She can step into the void with promises to return America to the economic policies of her husband. The Left may not have much love for Hillary any longer, but she was winning the very working-class Democrats in the 2008 primaries that Obama is losing to the Republicans now. States like Pennsylvania and Michigan would snap back into place for Democrats, and perhaps Wisconsin as well. Having Obama off the top of the ticket would take some of the downward pressure off of some other Senate races, and Hillary would likely be a plus in most.

If Hillary took Obama’s place in 2012, Republicans would face a much tougher electoral map. They would still have the advantage of running against Obama’s record, but the GOP may not capture that disaffected Democratic working-class vote if Hillary also ran against Obamanomics and promised a return to Clintonian prosperity.

That prediction from last summer isn’t looking quite so wildly insane now, is it…. Of course, if I do turn out to be correct, the only logical explanation will be that I have a Five-Pound Brain.

WND column

The Summer of our Discontent

This has been a most peculiar summer. In the U.S. it has been blazing hot, while across Europe the weather has been unseasonably cool. Despite an increasing number of momentary flashes of societal breakdown, from Athens and London to Philadelphia and Vancouver, the social mood has been relatively calm. In fact, it has been almost too calm, as if the usual instigators of unrest are concerned that creating the usual sparks might set off a conflagration that would threaten to engulf them as well.

The markets are in a precarious state, too. The Dow is behaving erratically, with giant movements both upward and downward, but predominantly down, in much the same way that it was behaving in the bear market that ran from October 2007 to March 2009. That downward slide took more than 50 percent off the Dow, and a repetition of similar magnitude would be expected to bottom around 5,000. Should that happen, we can reasonably anticipate that gold, which has risen from $320 in 2002 to $1,850, will be approaching the 1:1 ratio that Robert Prechter predicted back when the ratio was 50:1.