NFL draft

It was certainly interesting. And for Vikings fans, a little disappointing, because I would very much have liked to see the Vikings draft Tim Tebow. Unfortunately, Denver’s unexpectedly bold move means that they may have to get by with Clausen, assuming that they go for a quarterback with the second pick in the second round. Obviously Tebow has some doubters, but as Cold Hard Football Facts points out, if you don’t buy into the “mechanics” voodoo, Tebow has been the best SEC quarterback since Peyton Manning and cannot possibly be as likely to turn out a bust as JaMarcus Russell was.

I trust passing accuracy, character, and championships a lot more than the dogmatic insistence on a model that has regularly produced the likes of Russell, Leaf, and Harrington. The scouts didn’t think much of one Francis Asbury Tarkenton either, and he only retired with every major passing record in the books. Bradford was probably the right pick for the Rams, but it was a high risk/reward pick that they had little choice regarding. Quarterback is simply so much more important than every other position in the modern NFL that if there is even a 20 percent chance that a quarterback is genuine long-term starter material, a team has to take it.

Which means Clausen even though I suspect he is a little prick of a prima donna. Which is all right, since he’ll be nicely suited to step into Brett Favre’s when old Number Four finally retires for real after next season. Or maybe the season after that. Prior to the Sheppard signing, I’d expected the Vikes to draft a cornerback, but despite Sheppard’s loss of elite status, he’s still a definite upgrade to the secondary once Griffin returns. I would like to see them pick up Clausen with 2(34) and Myron Rolle at S with 2(62), assuming he’s still available. And, since Pat Williams won’t be around much longer, it would be interesting to see them pursue a trade with Washington for Haynesworth.

The Ark-B economy

Greece exemplifies the inherent unreliability of government economic statistics:

Financially-stricken Greece had an even bigger budget deficit for 2009 than previously thought, official figures showed Thursday — at a time the country is considering whether to tap a bailout facility from its 15 partners in the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund.

The European Union’s statistics office Eurostat said that Greece’s budget deficit in 2009 as a percentage of economic output was 13.6 percent — that’s up from the previous estimate of 12.9 percent and nearly double the 7.7 percent recorded in 2008.

Fictional numbers informing the deployment of fictional money by fraudulent financiers. I have a sneaking suspicion that the people of the far future are going to look back on our time as the Idiot Ages. We are the telephone sanitizers.

There goes global warming

Without the ability to hide the data, there won’t be much room for sustaining the manufactured “scientific” consensus:

Scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast have been ordered to hand over 40 years of research data on tree rings after a three-year battle with climate sceptics. The ruling by the Information Commissioner sets a precedent for scientists having to comply with the strictest interpretation of the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. It suggests that in future academics will not be able to avoid handing over data by claiming that the task would be too onerous or that it would breach intellectual property rights.

No doubt we will soon be hearing great lamentations about how open data and independent verification is anti-science.

The cross of Goldman

The Republicans are determined to crucify themselves upon it:

Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight committee, is demanding a slew of documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission, asserting that the timing of civil charges against Goldman Sachs raises “serious questions about the commission’s independence and impartiality.”

Issa’s letter, addressed to SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro and signed by eight other House Republicans, asks whether the commission had any contact about the case, prior to its public release, with White House aides, Democratic Party committee officials, or members of Congress or their staff.

“[W]e are concerned that politics have unduly influenced the decision and timing of the commission’s controversial enforcement action against Goldman,” Issa writes.

Beautiful! Simply beautiful! The Republicans are so astoundingly stupid, so uncompromisingly idiotic, that they are actually going to take on the SEC in defense of Goldman Sachs! Apparently they learned absolutely nothing from giving away the presidency in return for the banking bailout, now they’re threatening to get Obama re-elected on behalf of the Vampire Squid… who gave more money to Obama and the Democrats in 2008 anyhow.

No wonder they’re called the stupid party.

The intellectual poverty of the New Atheists

It would appear I am not the only one who has noticed. David B. Hart’s highly amusing essay at First Things pours disdain on the best efforts of a murder of atheists to rationalize their neurosociological shortcomings in public:

Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors….

The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

You really have to have read several of the New Atheist books to fully comprehend the astonishing lack of intellect, knowledge, and reason on offer. And I note with great amusement that the utter speciousness of Richard Dawkins’s “unrebuttable” argument does not go unremarked.

“But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness…. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.
“
It would be rash indeed. The “unrebuttable” Ultimate 747 argument, which Dawkins himself declares is the central argument of The God Delusion isn’t just wrong, it is provably wrong at multiple steps along the way. To say that it “scarcely rises to the level of nonsense” is almost too kind. This is precisely why so many intelligent individuals, religious and irreligious, have contempt for Richard Dawkins and why Dawkins has largely abandoned all debate. Having fooled a number of moderately intelligent people into thinking that he knows what he is talking about, he is now desperate to avoid being exposed for the charlatan and logical incompetent that he quite clearly and demonstrably is.

McCain flip-flops on immigration

Now that citizens and cops are dying in Arizona, he’s given up on his push for increased immigration and is talking tough instead:

Arizona Sens. John McCain and John Kyl, both Republicans, called Monday’s news conference to announce a 10-point plan to secure the border between Arizona and Mexico. They are requesting the immediate deployment of 3,000 National Guard troops and a permanent increase of 3,000 more Custom and Border Protection Agents along the state’s border by 2015.

McCain, who faces a tough primary election against conservative Republican JD Hayworth in September, sponsored an immigration-reform bill in 2000 that would have established a guest-worker program and a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants. The bill was opposed by many conservatives. He also supported immigration-reform bills in 2006 and again in 2007.

All I can say is that any Arizonan who is dumb enough to vote for McCain again in any primary or general election deserves to be overrun by murderous Mexicans.

This is my email

Big Chilly: Read the product description. This is a real book available on Amazon.

How You Can Be An Asset
Ralph Johnson
Price: $7.99
Product Description
At Blankety Blank Publishing all of our books are blank, that’s right, each and every epic volume is blank. We don’t waste our time on content, just titles! As you read the titles say to yourself, hey, I get it! The books are empty, the title plus the blank pages equal a joke!

The White Buffalo: 7.99 seems like a good deal for such an impactful title.

Big Chilly: I clicked on the link to say that I’d like to read it on the Kindle.

The excellent NHS

In addition to demonstrating the superlative nature of the UK’s NHS, this tale of an intrepid immigrant surgeon should serve as a warning regarding the way in which the shortage of doctors under Obamacare will be resolved:

Dr Sulieman Al Hourani was only supposed to cut out a cyst, but removed the whole right testicle instead. … A month later it is alleged that the doctor, who qualified after studying at Jordan University of Science and Technology, stole two boxes of dihydrocodeine from a treatment room on a ward at the same hospital. An investigation was launched and the doctor was dismissed by his employer, Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which ran the hospital.

The GMC was told of another incident in August 2006, when Dr Al Hourani had consulted a colleague and was advised to inject a patient with 10 milligrams (mg) of midazolam, a powerful sedative drug. He then gave the patient 8mg and injected himself with the other 2mg, the hearing was told.

I love the fact that he injected himself as well. Shades of Steve Martin as dentist.

Mailvox: the other side

JB looks at Changing Your Mind from the reverse perspective:

I think “Changing Your Mind: The Steps” could suggest a model of persuasion. The lessons I draw from the list for the persuader are the following:

1. Expect to be initially regarded as crazy, and defend yourself against that accusation effectively but unemotionally.
2. Continue to make the case; time will cure the “he’s crazy” phase.
2. Make points that will be objectively verifiable as valid.
3. Expose the poor behavior of the other side.
4. Highlight division within the ranks of the other side.
5. Leave room for opponents to defend you.
6. After exposure, give a person time to begin to adopt your viewpoint.
7. Don’t be so needlessly offensive you prevent the person from doing so.
8. Don’t inhibit admissions of error with gloating or demands for further change.
9. Point out the inconsistencies in the positions of the partially persuaded.
10. More people agree with you, and to a greater extent, than will say so.
11. Keep pride in check, because for every proclaimed convert, there are still 10 in the previous phases.

This is why a blog is so much more effective than a book at changing minds. A book loses the time and interactivity components of the above steps. Also, a book is usually narrower in scope, while people’s opinions are tied into their entire worldviews.

I think JB’s steps 6 and 8 are particularly important. It is difficult enough for people to change their minds, so adding to their degree of difficulty by making it personally uncomfortable for them to do so is inherently counterproductive. Now, I could quite reasonably be accused of violating step 7 on a regular basis, but it should always be kept in mind that I do not expect the vast majority of people to change their minds even when they are presented with an open-and-shut, 100 percent conclusive case.

It’s true, I could theoretically be more persuasive if I refrained from needlessly upsetting so many people. But that’s only true in theory, because if I gave a damn about what people happen to emote and rationalize in lieu of actually thinking, I would never be able to ignore the mindless protestations and spurious condemnations in pursuit of the most accurate truth I am able to comprehend.