Warning: feminist committing historical analogy ahead

You have to know a bit about Rome to understand how amusing this clueless female attempt to draw upon history is:

When the Roman Empire was broken, Diocletian fixed it. He completely revamped the imperial government, discarding centuries of tradition in favor of a new organizational structure designed to meet the challenges of the day. You can do stuff like that when you’re an emperor. It was sort of a one-man Constitutional Convention.

Considering that Diocletian’s economic reforms were a complete failure – his Edict on Maximum Prices is a byword for futility among economists – he was responsible for the bloodiest Roman religious persecutions since Nero, and his abdication led directly to an empire-wide civil war, it should be readily apparent that the historical example of Diocletian is not the ideal one for a would-be reformer to cite. It’s almost impressive that the woman managed to outdo Thomas Friedman and his wistful dreams of Communist Chinese autocracy with this historically illiterate analogy.

Although I have little doubt that given his dithering over Afghanistan and the warnings of a Dubai default, it’s not going to be long before abdication will look more than a little attractive to Obama.

UPDATE – the poor woman still doesn’t realize how dim-witted her attempt to look scholarly by citing history was:

You know what they think is the most important thing about Diocletian? Price controls. I’m serious. The Edict on Maximum Prices: that’s what they think is the big deal. The second thing they know about him is the Christian persecution. Not one of them even mentions the division of the empire, which by any measure was one of the most critical and formative moments in history (one we’re still living with). None of them mentions the Tetrarchy. None of them is aware of what I would have thought was basic knowledge: that Diocletian fundamentally restructured the Empire and reformulated its constitution.

First, Diocletian didn’t fix anything; most of his policies were failures. As the Cambridge Medieval History writes: “It is natural to think of Diocletian as the projector and of Constantine as the completer of a new system of government for the Roman Empire, which persisted with mere changes of detail until it was laid in ruins by barbarians. But in reality, the imperial institutions from Augustus onwards had passed through a course of continuous development. Diocletian did but accelerate processes which had been in operation from the Empire’s earliest days….” Of course, “the new type of monarchy” which Diocletian and Constantine established between them was a more centralized, more absolutist one, so it should come as absolutely no surprise that a feminist would find inspiration in it.

Second, she simply doesn’t understand that the salient point isn’t that Diocletian restructured the Empire, it is that the form his restructuring took was absolutely insane and led to precisely the sort of violent power struggles that could easily have been predicted from the failures of the First and Second Triumvirates, to say nothing of the four wars of the Diadochi that preceded them. After Diocletian’s abdication in 305, the Tetrarchy lasted precisely ONE year before the inevitable civil wars began; these lasted 18 years until Constantine managed to defeat Maximian, Maxentius, and eventually Licinius in 324.

Also, Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices is the most important thing about his rule today; it is far more intellectually significant now than the fact that a Roman Emperor elected to centralize power and establish a fundamentally flawed administrative scheme that failed on numerous occasions in the past. Sure, the division of the empire affected the course of history, but then, so did the foolish decision of Perdiccas to marry Alexander’s sister and in a very similar manner.

Today, there is no one pushing the notion of four co-presidents and persecutions of American Christians are mostly limited to refusing to let Boy Scout troops meet at schools and refusing to say “Merry Christmas”. Price controls, on the other hand, are still being enacted around the world despite the fact that Diocletian’s Edict offers powerful evidence that not even an autocratic government with a determined and violent dictator at the helm can successfully debase the currency or enforce predetermined price levels.

All that being said, note that I am definitely in favor of a third party, a fourth party, and a fifth party. Regardless of whether you are on the left or the right, you should be able to recognize that America badly needs alternatives to the present bi-factional party ruling on behalf of the banks rather than the liberal or conservative bases its two factions purport to represent.

A crack in the denial

Even a credulous, skeptic-smearing Warmist is capable of seeing that the response from the CRU-defending camp has not been even remotely credible:

Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

The amazing thing, of course, is that this guy still believes that science is on the side of the AGW/CC charlatans and that the fabrication, fraud, and deceit are on the skeptical side. But now that the smoking howitzer has been found, it should be relatively easy to unearth and expose the many other dishonest actions of the so-called “climate scientists”.

The problem faced by true believers like this guy is that grasping reality and refusing to permit non-science to replace genuine science will destroy the entire AGW/CC industry.

Dubai and debt-deleveraging

I expect the fears of a Dubai World default to be the first indication of many debt-deflationary shocks to come. The reason for what would appear to be a big overreaction to what is a relatively small problem is that everyone who is anyone in the financial world is thinking that if the legendary sovereign fund of Dubai can’t afford to service its debts, then who possibly can?

On Wednesday, Dubai World, the government investment company behind some of the emirate’s most ambitious projects, said it was seeking to delay repayment on a tranche of its debt.

The company has $60bn (£35.9bn) of liabilities from its various companies including Nakheel, the property firm behind the Palm Jumeirah, the world’s biggest artificial island, and the Nakheel Tower, the world’s tallest building at 1km high. It also owns DP World, the ports operator that bought P&O Ferries. Nakheel is due to make a $3.52bn Islamic bond repayment, plus charges, on December 14. The company also unveiled a restructuring programme, to be headed by Aidan Birkett, Deloitte’s managing partner for corporate finance.

Traders feared that the request for a six-month standstill was a sign that the Dubai Government was struggling with its other debts – and that the full impact of the financial crisis globally may not yet be over.

As I wrote at the beginning of RGD, it is not over. It has only begun. It may be worthwhile to remember that Austria’s Creditanstalt bank didn’t declare bankruptcy until May 1931, 19 months after Black Tuesday. It has been less than 14 months since the U.S. Congress created the Office of Financial Stability in order to establish the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Happy Thanksgiving

Today, we give thanks to God for that with which He has blessed us.  We thank Him for our families, for our fortunes, and for our freedoms.  And in doing so, we should remember that to those whom much is given, much is expected.

RGD on Kindle

Now that Amazon has finally gotten their act together on making the Kindle edition available and getting the price right, it appears that RGD is an even better bargain on Kindle than I had hoped.  While the retail price is $1.99, Amazon is selling it for only $1.59 in the USA; the international price is $3.59.  It will be interesting to see if more people give it a shot than they would have at the usual $9.99 price.  Personally, I don’t think any ebook should be sold for more than $4.99; higher prices are merely an artifact of old pricing patterns that should soon disappear.  If you have a Kindle, why not go ahead and give it a shot… it’s less than a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck!

In the meantime, Clint has posted a review there which should suffice to answer the frequently asked question of whether the book is suitable for non-economists or not:

I am not an economist. I do have a basic understanding of economic principles, but tend to glaze over when I start looking at economic charts and in depth analysis. In this book, there are various explanations and scenarios that are presented. I was able to follow each and every one of them. Not only that, but there was an appropriate amount of humor injected into the text to keep a non-economist entertained.

Here are the strong points from my vantage point: The highlights of various schools of economic thought were covered in an effective and fair manner. Potential outcomes for our current economic crisis are presented, with a “Vox-style” handicapping of each scenario presented. Historical data from not only the Depression of the 1930s, but similarities with the Japanese economic condition of 20 years ago and even other comparable situations were presented and explained in a way that helps to see why he draws the conclusions that he does. I know more about economics now than ever before because he does not rely upon any one economic school (Keynes, Austrian, etc) to dominate the conversation, but draws upon them all….

Conclusion: I highly recommend the book.

I know how it can be difficult to write an intelligent and meaningful review of a book, so I very much appreciate the time and effort spent writing them.  If you have one, don’t forget to send the link to me so I can post it here, and sooner rather than later, at the RGD book site as well.

UPDATE: RGD is now the 6th best-selling economics book on Kindle. Chalk up another one for price elasticity and the law of supply and demand.

More climate fraud

This time, it’s in New Zealand:

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre. In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend…. But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result.

Worldwide fears? More like worldwide conclusions. I’m not at all surprised. The strong probability is that it has ALL been more or less faked, so the more closely the climate data is examined, the more likely it is that some amount of fraud is going to be detected. This is why no “scientific consensus” that does not involve genuinely observable and replicable science should ever be considered science. Today’s scientists held a position of public respect that relied on the successes of their predecessors but they have been shown to be unworthy of it with their stupid and shabby attempts to pass of non-science as science.

Science is not, and never will be, “what scientists happen to believe now”. That’s merely opinion, and often it’s not even informed, educated, or honest opinion.

Incredibly, the snake-oil salesmen are still trying to sell their con job to the public: “Tuesday’s report said no credible science supports an alternative hypothesis for the warming trend. Each year this decade has been among the top 10 warmest years since instrumental records began, the scientists said. ‘The science is quite decisive,’ said Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State University. ‘There is a very robust consensus about the reality of climate change and the need to confront it quickly.'”

That, by the way, is the very Michael Mann who created the “hockey stick” fraud. And unless instrumental records only began ten years ago, each year this decade has NOT been among the top ten warmest years on record. The hottest ten years according NASA’s GISS are:

  1. 1934
  2. 1998
  3. 1921
  4. 2006
  5. 1931
  6. 1999
  7. 1953
  8. 1990
  9. 1938
  10. 1939

The increasingly useless Wikipedia

It’s no myster why fewer and fewer people are bothering to contribute:

The research found that in the first three months of this year the English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period last year. Such contributing editors are vital to the integrity of Wikipedia, which relies on volunteers to create pages and check facts.

The study, conducted by Felipe Ortega at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, analysed the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages.

They’re all being driven off by a small cabal of privileged editors who camp on sites and attempt to push their left-wing ideological agenda. From what I’ve seen on the transformation of the page about me over time, they appear to be mostly college students who have plenty of time on their hands and a complete inability to understand the either the concept of objectivity or an encyclopedia.

Look at the difference between the page for Sam Harris and my page, for example. My page is little more than an attack on my views and attempts to minimize anything that might be viewed as positive, whereas Harris’s resembles a defense lawyer attempting to exonerate his client. The part about “conversational intolerance” is hilarious. On my page, for example, it’s very telling that the editors go out of their way to inform people about certain members of my family and not others, even though the positive story was a much bigger one in the global media than the negative story. Of course, it’s not at all Sam’s fault that his defenders are overly enthusiastic propagandists, but the difference between the two pages is indicative of the intrinsically flawed nature of Wikipedia and its uselessness with regards to anything even remotely controversial.

“Mandatory reading”

Steveo reviews RGD on Amazon:

Nagging doubts about the economy? You can either trust those same bought & paid for priestly economists that the government trots out every day or you can read Vox Day’s book, “The Return of the Great Depression” and find out what’s in store.

On a tangential note, the FDIC is now reporting what I was saying six months ago. The DIF is insolvent and the reserve ratio is officially negative. Based on their third-quarter figures, actual losses are still exceeding estimated losses, but by a ratio closer to 1.5 than the 1.95 reported in 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. I suspect the reason for this declining ratio is not due to the assets of the banks that failed in the third quarter being in better shape, but because the recognition of actual losses to the FDIC are being delayed through the increasing use of loss-share agreements with the banks taking over the assets of the failed banks.

The smoking howitzer

As bad as they are, the hacked CRU emails are actually turning out to be less damning than the comments made by the unfortunate programmer who was saddled with the responsibility for trying to transform the morass of data collected by the climatologists into something that was actually coherent and usable.

This is not good — the existing program produces a serious error when it’s run on what is supposed to be the old, working data. Harry presses on, finding a solution to that bug, going through many more issues as he tried to recreate the results of these runs for the data from 1901 to 1995. Finally he gives up. He has spoken to someone about what should be done:

AGREED APPROACH for cloud (5 Oct 06).
For 1901 to 1995 – stay with published data. No clear way to replicate process as undocumented.
For 1996 to 2002:
1. convert sun database to pseudo-cloud using the f77 programs;
2. anomalise wrt 96-00 with anomdtb.f;
3. grid using quick_interp_tdm.pro (which will use 6190 norms);
4. calculate (mean9600 – mean6190) for monthly grids, using the published cru_ts_2.0 cloud data;
5. add to gridded data from step 3.
This should approximate the correction needed.

Catch that? They couldn’t recreate the results, so they’re going back to their published data for the first 95 years of the 20th century. Only …

Next problem — which database to use? The one with the normals included is not appropriate (the conversion progs do not look for that line so obviously are not intended to be used on +norm databases).

They still don’t know what to use for the next several years. Harry gives up; it’s easier to write new codes.

22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim’s labyrinthine software suites – let’s have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

This kind of thing is as fascinating as a soap opera, but I want to know how it comes out. Near the bottom of the file, I find:

I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.

The file peters out, no conclusions. I hope they find this poor guy, and he didn’t hang himself in his rooms or something, because this file is a summary of three years of trying to get this data working. Unsuccessfully. I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work. It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.

The appearance of these comments is particularly interesting in how it shows that the so-called “scientists” involved in the Great Global Warming Scam are not only committing blatant scientific fraud, they’re technologically incompetent to boot. Compare this fiasco with the emulator scene, where old and outdated software from decades ago, which is almost surely more complex than mere temperature data sets, is reliably supported by each new generation of hardware… at zero cost to the taxpayer or anyone else! The AGW/CC “scientists” are contemptible on several levels; only the completely clueless or totally corrupt would permit these dishonest bumblers any input whatsoever on globally significant matters of climate, economy, or government.

Am I that good?

Or are they just that predictable?

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the third quarter of 2009, (that is, from the second quarter to the third quarter), according to the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP decreased 0.7 percent. The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was 3.5 percent (see “Revisions” on page 3).

You may recall my warning that the 3.5 percent figure in the Advance report would be revised downward on the day it was published. Now, according to the BEA’s newly revised estimate, only 1.3 percent of GDP growth was NOT provided by Cash for Clunkers. So, if you consider the even larger stimulus provided by the $8k housing credit, which is not separately accounted for, it is quite obvious that economic activity is still contracting even if the GDP statistic is not. This won’t be the last revision for 3Q09… and I’m not talking about the scheduled third report, formerly known as the Final one, either.

UPDATE – And in the “Why I should never be allowed on the radio” category, we have tonight’s performance on a national show. I explained how the economic pain of a contraction shouldn’t be confused with the actual cause of the problem by using the analogy of a sexually transmitted disease. Halfway through, I stopped and said “Okay, that’s probably a terrible analogy.” The host concurred and said that he preferred to compare a contraction to chemo. In retrospect, I don’t think that actually works as well, however, because the salient point is that the damage is actually done during the good times and the resulting pain is merely the natural consequence of the damage.