Vox Popoli

The Chairman responsible for the tax code is a tax evader:

First there is the Washington Post’s revelation that Rangel inappropriately claimed a tax break on his D.C. townhouse by claiming it was his primary residence. The five-year charade only netted the congressman from Harlem about $1,500, which is relatively small potatoes. But it nicely dovetails with two other Rangel escapades of late: That he failed to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from his luxury beach villa in the Caribbean because he—ahem—didn’t know it was income; and that he scored several rent-stabilized apartments in New York, each of which he must claim as his primary residence. Taken all together, it looks like the top tax-writer in Congress is a tax cheat.

So, what are the odds this guy will get more than a decade in jail?

There can be no question:

The man charged with providing the President-Elect with information about the US media regulator spends his spare time fighting monsters and completing quests on the fictional planet of Azeroth…. He has invested so many hours in the game that his “Tauren Shaman” character has reached Level 70, one of the higher ranks.

For the Alliance!

It would be very interesting to see if Obama and the Democrats are truly dumb enough to call the Roman Catholic bishops on their threat to shut down one-third of the hospitals in the country:

The bishops are not bluffing when they say they’d turn out the lights rather than comply. Nor is Auxiliary Bishop Robert Hermann of St. Louis exaggerating, I don’t think, in vowing that “any one of us would consider it a privilege to die tomorrow—to die tomorrow—to bring about the end of abortion.”

Whatever your view on the legality and morality of abortion, there is another important question to be considered here: Could we even begin to reform our already overburdened health care system without these Catholic institutions? I don’t see how.

I don’t see what’s the problem here. Surely Richard Dawkins and those millions of caring, selfless atheists will gladly step into the gap.

Here’s a science skeptic’s prediction that I notice those who have enjoyed hammering me for my errant expectation of President Rodham haven’t seen fit to mention. In March, I put my intellect up against the foremost professional housing experts and their science:

According to the “scientific” forecast, housing prices were to stabilize in late 2007 and hold firm in 2008. Here’s the November 2007 forecast for 2008: “Existing-home prices are expected to decline 1.7 percent to a median of $218,200 for all of this year and hold essentially even in 2008 at $218,300. Wow, what precision! To a tenth of a percent! The February report comes out this week… let’s just say that instead of $218k, I’m expecting a decline that would project to $175k or less by the end of the year. But what do I know, I’m not an “expert” paying close attention to the “science” of the housing market, after all.

So, you’ll understand if this story caught my eye yesterday. Nov 24, 2008: WASHINGTON (AP) – With nationwide sales of existing homes falling more than expected last month and the median sales price plunging to $183,000, the U.S. housing market keeps getting worse. With more bad news likely on the way, industry groups pressed President-elect Barack Obama to help stem the damage.

I can’t help but notice that 183 is a lot closer to 175 than 218. And I’m reasonably confident that home prices won’t be increasing in November and December.

It’s bad enough when Keynesians run amok in government. But it’s worse when they seemingly can’t even figure out how to correctly apply their own economic model:

Britain’s highest earners face paying a new 45 per cent top rate of income tax, which is to be announced by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in the pre-Budget Report. Those earning more than £150,000 a year will fall into the new band, which the Government plans to use to claw back money to pay for an unprecedented £120 billion borrowing bill.

The Keynesian model calls for spending increases and tax CUTS to stimulate the economy out of contraction. Darling, supposedly an avowed Keynesian, is doing exactly what Paul Krugman faults FDR for doing during the Great Depression. But that’s merely how it appears on the surface. The reality, of course, is that this is little more than an easily evaded political measure meant to counteract the reduction in VAT and disguise the fact that UK budget deficits are going to soar.

UPDATE – Not that it’s significantly less crazy on the other side of the Atlantic: “The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.”

We would be better off being governed by a group of individuals randomly selected from the phone book than by the collection of graduate degree holders currently in office:

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday. Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone insist that they are more intelligent on the basis of their university degree. A college degree – especially from an elite school – increasingly becoming stronger evidence of ignorance than intelligence and often represents a combination of the two. The fact that one might possess a superior intellectual capacity in no way dictates that it has actually been used in any way, much less to obtain accurate information.

So, I estimated the bottom for what appears to be an incipient depression. Before you discover what it is in Monday’s column, go ahead, take your best shot, and offer your rationale for it. I want to see US GDP and year… alternatively, if you don’t see a contraction ahead, explain why not.

As has probably been apparent by my complete ignoring of it, I have zero interest in the so-called “Emergent Church”. I’ve yet to hear anything interesting or positive about it, and I’m not in the least bit surprised to hear that they’re little more than intellectually immature, emotional Episcopalians in the process of moving away from Christianity in favor of a New Age unitarianism:

One of the key leaders of today’s most cutting-edge church movement has opened an Internet discussion on the issue of same-sex marriage with the bold proclamation that he believes “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and queer” individuals can and should live out their sexuality in – and blessed by – the Christian church. “I now believe that GLBTQ can live lives in accord with biblical Christianity (as least as much as any of us can!),” writes author and church leader Tony Jones, “and that their monogamy can and should be sanctioned and blessed by church and state.”

Based on that picture, I don’t find it at all hard to believe that Mr. Jones will be announcing his own incipient homogamy in the near future. And based on his blog, the guy appears to have the reasoning capacity of a chipmunk. Look, Florence Nightingale, the only way one can reasonably connect an AIDS death with the church is if one’s friend was getting overfriendly with a gay priest. Seriously, what is wrong with these cretins?

“I want to do that!”

“Don’t do that.”

“But I want to… you can’t stop me!”

“Dude, just don’t. You’ll be sorry.”

“Waaah! Look what’s happened to me! It’s all your fault!”

“WTF? I told you not to, you moron.”

“You made me do it with your hostility and oppression and disapproval!”

“What part of ‘don’t do that’ did you not understand?”

This attempt at a critique of my refutation of Richard Dawkins’s “Ultimate 747” argument in TIA by Touchstone of Debunking Christianity should amuse some of you. Microphone Jones correctly pointed out the primary flaw; I added some additional points on the 21st comment. I have to say, there are few individuals I find funnier than those who attempt to defend an argument by saying that if the argument had been different than it actually is, it would be correct.

This is the best part:

Dawkins does not spell out a formal definition of organizational or algorithmic complexity in his book. But you don’t have to be a super-genius to get familiar with the concepts as they are used in science and information theoretic application. I haven’t read Day’s section of “theistic bodycounts” from wars versus “atheistic bodycounts”, but Day’s supporters on my list regale me superlatives of Day’s phenomenal research capabalities. If he’s got such capabilities, he shot all his efforts in previous chapters; Day simply punts here and decides to equate complexity with information.

Oops. That’s a really major blunder. Just in casual terms, complexity is a description of the “number of discrete and differentiated parts”, and information is “reduction in uncertainty”. Complexity and information are related on some level, and those terms do often occur together in computing and information theoretic contexts. But complexity is not information, any more than mass is acceleration.

It is a really major blunder. But the problem here is that the idea of equating complexity with information did not originate with me. You see, I’m not the one who wrote that Richard Dawkins’s Argument from Improbability is rooted in “the source of all the information in living matter”, or brought up the problem of “continually monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe”, or referred incredulously to “bandwidth” contra simplicity. That would be, well, Richard Dawkins.

One can only criticize the existing argument. If Dawkins has something besides sheer quantity of information in mind there, I should very much like to know precisely what it is. But until he offers a convincing definition of complexity that fits his argument, the Ultimate 747 simply will not fly.

UPDATE – This has turned out to be even funnier than I’d thought! When posting my comment at Debunking Christianity, I skipped right over this rather telling bit written by Touchstone in the comments there: “Dawkins is pointing out a structural deficiency in the argument from complexity, that’s all. It’s not an argument for the non-existence of God, just pointing out the poverty of one of the arguments *for* God’s existence.”

“The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.”
– Richard Dawkins, TGD p. 113

“[T]he argument from improbability – the “Ultimate 747″ gambit – is a very serious argument against the existence of God.”
– Richard Dawkins, TGD p. 157

Touchstone not only reads what isn’t there, he obviously can’t read what actually IS there. There is no theistic “argument from complexity” and* Dawkins not only asserts that the Ultimate 747 is an argument for the nonexistence of God, he vows that he has “yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer” to it. (Technically, that may still be true; I’m not a theologian.) Just as Petrarch reversed the metaphor of the “dark ages”, Dawkins is explicitly attempting to reverse the argument from improbability to argue for the non-existence of God.

Touchstone admits he hasn’t read TIA and I suspect he hasn’t really read The God Delusion either. Regardless, it is readily apparent that he is not competent to serve as a reliable interpreter of Dawkins’s poorly articulated intentions.

*I am told that Touchstone meant to write either the Argument from Design or Irreducible Complexity here, both of which certainly exist. However, both are only tangentially related and neither indicate that Dawkins’s argument is not what Dawkins claims it to be, an argument for the nonexistence of God.

67 Mounds View Meerkats (8-3-0)
45 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-6-1)

54 Burns Redbeards (7-4-0)
39 Black Mouth Curs (3-8-0)

77 Judean Peoples Front (5-6-0)
47 Valders Valkyries (5-6-0)

66 Winston Reverends (4-7-0)
41 Masonville Marauders (3-7-1)

52 Alamo City Spartans (8-2-1)
52 Silver Spooners (5-3-3)