Vox Popoli

I love the NFL. I am delighted with the league right now, not because both the Vikings and Meerkats are 2-0, but because their customer service has been excellent. Last week, NFL Game Pass slowed down so much that the early games became unwatchable partway through the second quarter. I assumed it was my Internet connection, which I’m planning to change at the next opportunity.

However, on Tuesday, I got an email from the NFL taking responsibility for the problem, apologizing for it, and giving a one-sixteenth refund. It was totally unexpected and very well done. So, someone in the NFL organization clearly understands customer service. And perhaps whoever that is should be put in charge of dealing with the developing problem of head trauma, because this is an ugly situation that the NFL has, unfortunately, not handled well for fear of lawsuits from former players and their families:

[Dr. Omalu] wrote a paper detailing his findings. He titled it “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player” and put it in an envelope and sent it to the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Neurosurgery. He thought NFL doctors would be pleased when they read it. He really did. He thought they would welcome a finding as important as this: scientific evidence that the kind of repeated blows to the head sustained in football could cause severe, debilitating brain damage. He thought they could use his research to try and fix the problem.

“I was naive,” he says now. “There are times I wish I never looked at Mike Webster’s brain. It has dragged me into worldly affairs I do not want to be associated with. Human meanness, wickedness, and selfishness. People trying to cover up, to control how information is released. I started this not knowing I was walking into a minefield. That is my only regret.”

Nothing was welcoming, nothing was collegial, about the NFL’s reaction to Omalu’s article that appeared in the July 2005 edition of Neurosurgery. In a lengthy letter to the editor, three scientists, all of whom were on the NFL payroll, said they wanted Omalu’s article retracted.

“We disagree,” they said.

“Serious flaws.”

“Complete misunderstanding.”

The scientists, Ira Casson, Elliot Pellman, and David Viano, were all members of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee. In tone their letter to the editor struggled to remain calm, but everyone could read the subtext: We own this field. We are not going to bow to some no-name Nigerian with some bullshit theory.

There’s a few lessons that can be drawn from this article. First, it proves that the next time anyone tries to snow you with talk of scientific purity, they’re nothing more than lying science propagandists. Scientists are bought as easily as anyone and far more often than most. Second, it’s apparent that for all it is pretending Dr. Omalu doesn’t exist and his theory is “flawed”, the NFL knows he’s probably correct and are attempting to do as much as they can to solve the problem without being sued into oblivion by every ex-player who ever knocked a helmet against another player’s helmet. Third, it completely destroys Sam Harris’s ludicrous and entirely unscientific theory about how those who engage in what he calls “magical thinking”, (in other words, all religious individuals), are somehow rendered incapable of properly performing science.

And fourth, it should help those of us who are fans of the league to understand why the league is encouraging the refs to throw flags on what look like normal helmet-to-helmet action. I’m as opposed to turning the league into two-hand-touch on the quarterback as anyone, and there’s nothing better than seeing a DB lay the smack down on some diva WR, but I really don’t want to see any more players ending up like John Mackey either.

I find it a bit tiresome when people leap in and start pontificating about supposed certainties that some of the best minds in the business aren’t sure about, so here’s an easy way of helping us keep track of the single most important economic question of the day. If you’re an inflationist, then provide everyone with one definite consequence of the inflation you expect. If you’re a deflationist, tell us one obvious consequence of future deflation.

For example, if there is inflation, I expect the US dollar price of gold to increase to beyond its inflation-corrected 1980 peak of $2,325. If there is deflation, I expect total credit market debt outstanding to shrink and total credit market debt/GDP to fall below 200 percent. If everyone who has an informed opinion on the matter contributes and we all agree upon the indicators, we’ll have a nice, detailed list of checkboxes to contemplate as the situation unfolds.

My feeling is that the initial indicators have favored the deflationary scenario, since I would have expected much higher CPI and gold prices with the explosion in M2 and interest rates at effective zero.

And for the pedantic, inflation here is defined as “a general increase in the money supply. Often confused with its primary symptom, an increase in the general level of prices. The Consumer Price Index is the primary statistical measure of price levels, not inflation per se.” Deflation, obviously, is a general decrease in the money supply.

Steve Sailer suggests that the Atlantic Monthly 50 is less than authoritative, at least from an Internet perspective.

The Atlantic Monthly has put together a list it calls The Atlantic 50, which it describes as “the columnists and bloggers and broadcast pundits who shape the national debates:” At a reader’s suggestion, I looked up on Google Trends the number of searches for each name on this list. “steve sailer” came in ahead of 19 of The Atlantic 50.

I have to admit, I was a little surprised that I managed to edge out Steve by his alternative metric. But then, I am remarkably handsome, so if you take out the women who come merely to bask in the radiance of my arrogance and the Queer Party Friends, I’m sure he’d have the advantage.

The budding scandal about the disappearing global warming data doesn’t surprise me in the least. The whole thing has been an obvious scam from the beginning. What it demonstrates is that science hasn’t merely been corrupted, it has been co-opted. It is rapidly becoming obvious that due to the increased dependence upon government funding by scientists, they can be expected to provide information of approximately the same reliable quality as employees at the Department of Motor Vehicles provide service.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”…

Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

I think Vox’s Second Law applies here: If a government agency says X, then Not-X is true. I’m just wondering which would be considered the bigger science scandal. The AGW/CC fraud or the so-called Moon landings if the discovery of Moon water turns out to prove that Man never landed there.

On a related note, assuming Krugman’s Keynesianism doesn’t destroy his reputation once it becomes clear that this second stimulus plan has failed because economic theory is over the average NYT reader’s head, this conclusion to his column today should eventually suffice: “The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth about the economics of climate change is that it’s relatively easy being green.”

I’m sorry, but if you still haven’t figured out the need to keep your children out of the clutches of the NEA indoctrination squads, you deserve what’s going to happen to them. The sad thing is, they don’t. The creepiest part is the line about how everyone is “equal in his sight”.

It has taken a while to show up, but the long-expected contraction of total credit market debt outstanding has finally begun. The effect is disguised somewhat due to the GDP revisions that reduced Debt/GDP from the previously reported 375 percent to 373 percent, but the raw debt figures show a clear, albeit small, decline.

Q1 2009 373.2 percent $52,915 billion
Q2 2009 373.3 percent $52,793 billion

To put into perspective how even such a small decline such as this $122 billion one is unusual, the Fed’s Z1 report shows how debt rose to the present level from $13.8 trillion in 1990 by increasing more than $500 million per quarter and at a quarterly rate of $921 million since 2004. Debt expansion even continued through 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, although it slowed to a rate of $579 billion per quarter.

This decrease in total credit market debt may be the first sign of the debt-deleveraging process that Steve Keen of Debtwatch has already detected taking place in Australia now starting to roll in the USA.

“We are currently deleveraging at the 4% rate, and debt has fallen from 165% of GDP in March 2008 to 159% today–a 6% fall as a percentage of GDP, as noted above.”

Note that this $122 billion decline in total debt has taken place despite a large $390 billion increase in state, local, and federal debt and another $40 billion increase in corporate debt. However, it is NOT the household sector that is driving the deleveraging, although households did shed nearly $133 billion of debt in the first half of the year. The primary contributor is the financial sector, which has reduced its debt burden by $562 billion since peaking at the end of 2008, most of it in the second quarter. This suggests that the next stage in the global economic contraction is on deck and ready to begin in earnest once the markets turn south again.

It is science:

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon…. Finding water on the moon would be a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel.

The novel had many flaws, but it’s still lightweight fun. My favorite scene is Aboard Assault Shuttle LST(N)-14, 7 November 2069, 06:00 GMT. The OC and I would write a much better book were we to do it again, but nevertheless, it has its moments.

Speaking of books, I just learned that Summa Elvetica is now available on Kindle, in case you’ve got one. My fiction writing would appear to have improved a bit in the twelve years that separate the two novels, as the latest review gives SE five stars: “There have been a few fantasy authors who have “role reversed” fantasy races (Orcs as protagonists, Dragons having just cause against humans) which I always enjoy, but I haven’t read an author yet who elevates the intrinsic meaning of the races in this manner. Not even close. Aside from an unfortunate naming convention, the work is unburdened, brisk and deep. But I guess if LOTR could survive the Saruman/Sauron “confusion”, Summa Elvetica will have no problem rising in standing over the years. Especially if Beale follows it up with more tales of spiritual controversy in the realm of “true” medieval fantasy. A riveting tale, well-told and driven by, and to, greatness.”

I’m delighted, of course, to discover that some readers regard the book so highly, and very much appreciate the time that they have taken to post reviews on Amazon. However, I would also like to point out that the naming convention to which I think the reviewer is referring, however unfortunate, is not of my invention. The confusing similarity between the two major characters’ names merely reflects the fact that one owns the other. Roman slaves were often named in the possessive form of their owner, for example, Caesaris belonged to Caesar.

And scientists don’t lie about science:

The head of research at one of the world’s leading scientific institutions, in Switzerland, has resigned after it emerged that data about hydrocarbon structures had been tampered with…. The science world is no stranger to scandal – in 2002, a committee from Bell Labs in the USA found Jan Hendrik Schön, one of the rising stars of physics, guilty of 16 charges of misconduct after he manipulated and misrepresented data in his research on microelectronics and superconductivity. It emerged that none of the most significant physical results of his experiments had been witnessed by any of his co-authors or colleagues.

Prof Victor Ninov from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California claimed in 1999 to have discovered chemical element 118, before he was fired amid allegations his data was faked.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, the scientific frauds that have been discovered and admitted to are almost surely dwarfed by the number that have successfully eluded the “rigorous” process of peer review. And it tends to indicate that attempting to construct an objective moral standard for Man based on science would not merely fail, but prove downright disastrous.

R wonders what would qualify:

I’d very much appreciate it if you would elaborate on what you would consider a falsification of Christianity.

There are numerous possibilities, including:

1) The discovery of Jesus Christ’s body.
2) An intact Temple in Jerusalem.
3) The end of war or poverty.
4) The elimination of the Christian Church.
5) Immortality science.
6) A demonstrated ability to avoid Biblical sin.
7) The destruction of the Jewish people.

These are all material things, easily and objectively observable. It is incorrect to claim that religion is magically beyond scientific observation. God may be, but it’s readily apparent that most religions, including Christianity, are not.