Job's Goat

Government Jobs

2011-07-10T21:35:00.001-07:00

Assume we have a percentage of the labor force in the Private sector and the rest in the Pulic sector. Assume we have balanced trade accounts, flat taxrates, and equal pay throughout no matter the reality. For our purposes the Public sector labor force includes things you wouldn't normally consider, such as anyone who derives their income from welfare programs of any nature. What then is the minimum tax rate necessary to pay for government without incurring a defecit?

The trick is that any income tax paid by the Public sector is the same as if they had not paid any at all, taking instead a salary reduction equal to that amount. Such that the tax rate times the percentage of the labor force in the Private sector need equal the percentage of the workforce in the Public sector less the tax that's 'reclaimed' from them. Sparing all the work it simply works out as being identical to the percentage of the labor force in Public employ. It's just a nice linear line. No government means no tax. Nothing but government yields nothing but tax. And a 50/50 split requires the same on tax. A nice linear line and what we should expect from things.

Taking some very rough ballparks to include contractors and Social Security -- though excluding unemployment bennies and the rest -- we would then expect a 35.2% total tax rate for the US in 2006, at all levels, as long as the rest remained otherwise the same. Though, to remind, This is a terribly loose ballpark and not terribly interesting. What is interesting is what happens when the average pay between the two sectors is not equal. There's no difference when looking at no governement and nothing but government; they're both 0% and 100% rates in every condition. But when Public sector pay exceeds that of the private sector you need a higher tax rate than otherwise. And lower rates for less pay.

Sure, that's a 'duh' moment.

We can either pay more or less, as a matter of taxation, for a given quantity of folks in the Public sector at a given wage. And because it's no longer linear there are going to be points of peak difference between our given curve and the linear relationship when payrolls are equal. As the wage for the Public sector increases so does the inefficiencies. But the peak inefficiency starts at a 50/50 Public/Private split and moves south, to lower percentages in Public employment, as the wage rates diverge in favor of the Public sector. It's entirely reversed in all manners when the Public wage is less than the Private wage. The peak efficiency begins at 50% Public employment and moves north towards total government as the wages diverge in favor of the Private sector. This is all first-order effect nonsense and has nothing to do with GDP or effects on the median household income, etc.

That said, we don't even consider paying welfare beneficiaries at anything near the average wage of proper government employees. And decent numbers to make a reasonable calculation here are tougher than stuff to come by. For 2006 we know that there were 7.2 million folks that received an average of, effectively, $5460 per year while there were some 33.94 million that received $14124. Excluding the 14.6 million contractors and the State and Local folks leaves us with an average of $68,294 per year (2008 numbers) for only those 2 million folks in the Executive branch. Sadly I haven't dug up Congress, the Judicial, Postal workers, or the rest. That leaves things shy by some 9.8 million folks included in the original ballpark. No Medicare, health care, or other bennies are included in this. Or an average of $15189 per year if we ignore all the missing heads not counted. If we assume all the missing heads are paid at the same average wage as the Executive then we instead get $34374 per year. No matter the case the ballpark averages here are less than the rouhgly $47,200 per year over all per capita income.

And that's a bit of a surprising outcome. To find that we have a pretty efficient and cheap government provided for by massive income inequalities produced by and for Congress; riding on the backs of the elderly and infirm.

Through if you take note of the average bennie packages it gets significantly different though, in 2008, the Private sector tally is $9,882 while the Public sector tally is $40,785. I don't have the foggiest how to fold in Medicaid/Medicare so I'm just going to leave this one hang for now mentioning only that this brings things up to $50316 on the Federal side against $57082 on the Private side. With Medicare/Medicaid folded in I imagine we'd get the numbers would get back close to the flatline with roughly equal per capita considerations. If the State and Local levels hold similarly then we're right back at considering life in the ballpark of 35% taxation on income across all levels of government. No government programs; just the bodies paid for by government.

The back of this envelope is too dirty for any good use; this is simply a quick, loose sketch and idle curiosity that cropped up what with all the doom of default flowing out of Tim Geithner's pie hole.

Endless Descent

2011-07-09T19:34:00.001-07:00

I've been too tied up in entertainment to post much lately. Found a joint with a fine mix of odd cats with a great range of notions. Been a long time for that and I've been in sore need to knock the rust off. Odd bit about that was coming across an argument rustier than I am. It's been years back from when I was still Agnostic that I last saw it trotted out. It used to be a common argument no matter how terrible it was but perhaps it's gaining favor again. Sadly comment threads are no place to do it justice at all from either side.

I've written before about the hollow place Agnosticism leaves one in the endless descent for Truth™. I'm a bit too lazy at the moment to dig up old links for those, so you'll either remember them or not. The gist of it is all simple enough to do without the excess color commentary however. Roughly put we can't know anything that we don't know. And what we know is only by the rolling around inside our own head. And we know the brain is a crafty bastard that is well capable of lying to itself. So the result is that we can know nothing with assurety at all. Truth™ can be no more firm then our own slippery ability to make ourselves self-smug about what we're not sure we've ever seen or heard.

If it's the first time you've heard those notions then be assured that there's nothing unusual about it, since I'm entirely sure that I know that the Sophists hit on it back in the day from the various dribblings I'm entirely certain I read about their writings. It's a total reduction of the universe to Truth™ that only exists as the truth we can know by our own lenses.

Or roughly: For every Truth™ we're certain of there's a truth more basic that explains it or confounds it. We can then forever dig without hitting either it or China.

And this is all well, True™, and beyond question by all right-thinking folks. Save those that take it seriously and note that truth can never be known. Not even the statement that there's Truth™ in the Truth™ being impossible to find or state. (Though I can't remember for the life of me which Greek school it was for that. But Greek it was by my own lenses.)

That's the backstory in short, and certainly easier than digging through the archives. And that, my friend, is the truth.

Now, the rusty argument with teeth knocked off the blade is known as the Duhem-Quine Thesis and it goes halfway to this truth while stating that it's completely untrue in the same breath that it proclaims the True™ Truth™ of unattainable Truth™. That'll make all sorts of sense in a minute.

The Duhum-Quine Thesis takes as given the Agnostic worldview I just spooled out and then asks what science can do in the face of this horrible contradiction: That science provides Truth™ that cannot be known to be True™.

Let's start with the basics. Quine has less chops then Russell but takes rhetoric to a more rarified artform. Both of them are breasted tits that are unique for their proficiency in sound-bites and utter immunity from rationality. (Which has no rational basis anyways. True™) What Quine does to warrant adding his name to the notion is to expand it to logic and mathematics. And a good deal of salesmanship.

Duhem is the man of interest here. His claim is that of Agnosticism: That there is an endless descent into nonsense and that the truth cannot be otherwise known. Fares so far as it is. His solution is then to state that no knowledge can be gained, and no theories can be falsified, save those that have been. And if you're wondering just how we can falsify anything when we cannot falsify anything? Then you're right up there dictating the modern morass of science that Karl Popper went on about wrongly.

Duhem's line is roughly this: When we have a theory we are implicitly folding in axioms unstated from other disciplines or from assumption. Futher, that when we are performing an experiment we are testing all the above as well as all the above that applies to the theories that led to the creation of the instruments we are using for measurement. And so if a prediction fails under inspection we know something is false. But we cannot say whether it is our theory of Cosmology or our of Telescopes.

This is all perfectly correct under Vituperative Agnosticism such as I had a history of professing. As well as a number of people that are respectable and who spanned some two and a half millenia of thought on the problem.

Duhem's solution is only compounds the fundamental problem you might already notice. His solution was to state that we cannot throw out the theory we are measuring as we are also measuring the theories of the instruments themselves. Further, that while we may have two contradictory theories, that we cannot throw out either since our Telescope is more akin to a Horoscope. And thus both theories must stand. Quine, back to him, simply stated that we should keep believing what we believed despite that there's nothing that can be believed, because the Hubble is the progeny of the Prince of the World and cannot be trusted.

Which, under purity, is correct. If we can know nothing then we can know nothing. But if we can know nothing then we cannot know the agreement with the hypotheses we meant to test and the Truth™ either. "Induction is terribly wrong and for this we cannot know the falsehood of things. But via induction? I'm right, Biatches!"

There's no cogent manner to make this work unless we're cherry-picking the results that confirm us. More properly, Duhem and Quine are simply trying to excuse the injection of superstition into experimentation. Walk the line of things we cannot know now or ever and suss it out.

If it's impossible for us to distinguish between a failed theory we're testing and a failed instrument we're using then it's likewise impossible for us to distinguish between a successful theory we're testing and a failed instrument we're using. Every theory is then all of true, false, coherent, and unfalsifiable; all at the same time. Which is even deeper nonsense than putting on rhetorical sideshows in the Colleseum.

This is all True™ however.

But with which there is, and can be no notion of science at all. It's simply not rational (Which has no rational basis anyways.) We're all descended of monkeys created by Darwin via a mechanism invented by God while he sat on an infinite stack of turtles contemplating reincarnation into a caterpillar with 8 arms for the purpose of flogging Scandanavian boatmen with the skin of a horse.

Or, perhaps, you could take a lead from common sense and Bronze-Age Mediterranean pederasts and Violent Agnostics and note that if your instruments aren't proven then you're not testing the theory you're purporting to test at all.

You're testing the instruments.

To stop the Endless Descent you have to stop somewhere. The Truth™ doesn't matter a whit as long as you get on about trying to make an accurate model for the things you can't know described in a language that came from nowhere that's spoken by people that don't exist. But to state anything we have to stop and make a claim first about what measurements we can't know we're making before we accept the coherence of a theory we are prohibited from measuring.

Dirty Bastard

2011-07-03T02:13:00.000-07:00

So what's the deal with this? I've written ages back that it's a simple affair to print and sterilize by raising the reserve ratios as the offset. But Ron Paul has something a bit different in mind. Just grab the Fed Res by the short hairs and burn the US Treasuries they hold. And why not? It is, as he says, just the US owing itself it's own obligations.

Because it's Ron Paul talking about the Federal Reserve. If there's anything to this, it all involves brimstone for Bernanke.

As a matter of pure accounting this works just dandy if the T's are wiped off the asset side and the previously printed dollars are wiped off the debit side of the books. In essence it works just like a POMO and leaves the currency that's out there, out there. If it's not done in this manner exactly then the Fed's assets go even more south then they already are, the dollar takes a swan dive into parking block, and it's Goodnight Gracie.

But done in this manner means that the Fed no longer has any assets to account save swap lines -- which we are assured are responsible and money good -- and the various holdings along the lines of MBS's -- which we are assured are responsible and money good. Of course the various assets pulled in are not money good as you should be well aware. That requires a fast action on Bernanke's bit other than leaping out the nearest tall window.

And certainly you need not accept that this is the case. All you need know is that the banks do not believe they are money good and cannot have these things littered about on their balance sheets.

In either case this empties Bernanke's bazooka and he's going to need to restock on a boatload of US T's to get his house in order. Aside reserves his only policy possibilities are securities, T's, and lucre. And he'll be fresh out of T's. Which puts the Fed Res bad on paper and the dollar takes a swan dive with him in the fireman's seat.

Solving that for things requires that he unwind the loans made that are using the MBS's as collateral to get cash back on the coffer. This then needs to be turned right back around to wind the cash out and pull the unburnt T's back in from the banks. The cash stays where the cash currently is, in the vaults. But now the Too Big Too Fail is now faced eating that which cannot be eaten. Which is nicely nasty as this puts an even larger smoking hole in their balance sheets than exists already.

And that starts blowing things up, Lehman style.

Moreover, while this is all perfectly neutral, I'd lay a good wager that this would count as a credit event for all those CDO's that might be out there. Which leads to all manner of possibly crazy consequence and unwind that has us again rollin' like the Lehman Bros. And that one is completely unstoppable if it gets out the gates faster than Geithner can find the right entry box in Turbo Tax.

If things go beyond this and raise the reserve ratios as a consequence of keeping lids on for the sake of sterility in the money supply then it's far worse still. Not only do the banks get to eat their MBS on the balance sheet again, they can then use less of what little asset value their is to satisfy their Capital reserve ratios. And *BAMF* it's all down to bank holidays and the like.

If this comes to pass, and it won't unless they push a panic vote on the thing, then Bernanke will pursue the course mentioned here and damn the torpedoes. If he does not then the Fed Res gets mated in one. No matter how many sets of books he tries to keep. The alternate is to push it all back onto the banks, finagle around a CDO unwind, and cook the books at BAC and Citi even more than current. All to keep the Bair at bay and prevent utter destruction of everything.

The last possible alternative is that Congress turns around to immediately issue $1.6 trillion in new T's to sop up the problem at the Fed. Which has the same consequence on the dollar valuation regardless in the short term. It's a sweet bit of Machiavelli and really puts the pedal to the metal in collapsing the current monetary and banking system if it goes through.

It all boils down to how desperate the D's and R's currently are about keeping the checks flowing out on August 1 and beyond.

Romans 13

2011-07-02T01:54:00.000-07:00

Nice tear from Arielle here lately, though one para has had me fingering the navel for a bit:

What does it matter if people experience greater personal freedom and happier earthly lives living in so-called Christian democracies if their hearts remain dark and their eternal soul remains in jeopardy? What kind of priorities do we have when we make people's physical freedom take precedence over their eternal salvation? Why would we want to help craft a nation of whited sepulchers?

I probably ought hazard that this is out of context and you should read the post before you get all Jacksonian. As well it helps to know that she's hitched up so the only tyrannizing she's like to engage in is over NFL and Nachos with her old boy. But this is a big quandry I've seen batted about over the years from many folks when it comes to Christianity.

The normal course of things is to point at Romans 13 where it's "OBEY, biatches." Quoth Paul. But that's hardly the end-all be-all of things as there's plenty other notice to be had that obeisance to Fallen sorts is predicated foremost on honoring God first rather than in the breech. Whether it be to do your bit and wind up in the gulags. Or do your bit and have the Tokugawa shogunate drop your locks in a basket. Or do your bit and have a very personal experience as a Veterinary Orthodontist for the King of Beasts. Historically it seems Christianity isn't much of an HMO plan as every you time you turn about you find some Single Payer putting believers to the sword for being... Well, nice. Or weird. Or intersected with politics.

Currently the group Food Not Bombs is in a bit of a scuffle with the law in Orlando due to feeding Travelers sans official permit that they're not allowed to acquire. Which, to normal folks, means that Food Not Bombs is having a picnic with their friends in a public place. Where those friends merely happen to be absent a Federally approved postal address due Capitalistic inadequacies. Granted it is Florida, so they might be lacking an address due local or Federal law rather than the vagaries of societal interactions involving bits of paper with dead Presidents on them. This is all a straight up loaves and fishes riff that even non-Christians should recognize easily.

Now Food Not Bombs is as classic Hard Left as you can possibly get, blindly passing off phrases as 'revolutionary movement' and 'autonomous' as well as cuddling cozy with Amnesty International in their mission statement. And they only do Vegetarian meals. Which does beg the question as to what is possibly humane about inflicting the destitute with rampant flatulence. Regardless they are flipping Saint Paul the bird and handing out loaves, if not fishes. No matter, we should not mistake that this is a storied and successful tactic of the Hard Left in breeding virulent altruism. Or if not altruism, a second look at their politics.

If we ignore all the political apparatus and the cloud of falafel death lingering over the public spaces then this is simply an acme of Christian motion and behaviour. Right up to and including the point at which a finger is put in Government's eye and folks are a bit stuffed for getting stuffed in a Lion's maw. Civil disobedience is still disobedience. The very act of disobedience to the law is one of politics, and the two can't be separated. But if propriety under Christianity is illegal then Christianity is political by definition.

There's an odd, and at odds, bit here. The Hard Left also has a penchant for being the ones to restrict freedom so that they may come in with disobedience to alleviate the yoke from others. All as a point of a membership drive. People are simply most open to options when they have none. It works beautifully and is the go to solution so long as the ends matter more than the means. The difficulty is that morality, broadly, is defined as the means being primary; the ends are simply what they are. If the moral onus is loaves and fishes then you're handing out sandwiches. And getting arrested. And we're straight into politics anyways.

There's something a bit obscene about speech and action in that none of it can escape politics. For if we hand out falafel-burgers we're into politics. And if we speak Truth to Power about handing out falafel-bugers we're into politics still. There's simply no manner around it as laws are simply when society, as defined by the folks with the gun, exercise speech and action on our personal behalf. Whether we want, or agree, with it or not.

There's a slang screed that kicks about: "Don't push your religion on me!" And there's an aphorism that kicks about: "You can't legislate morality." Of course you cannot legislate morality qua a positive enforcement as law can only operate after the fact. So while a law itself cannot create morality it can certainly punish the dickens out of immorality. And every law does so. Now we largely lay it on Hume's head for things about the ought/is dilemma, but it remains that morality comes from God. Or, to give a nod to poly and a thesists: From our derriere. So it is correct to say we cannot legislate morality as our only option is to punish immorality; where immorality is defined in law by legislators as to who gets the short-end. But it is completely fallacious to claim that law is anything other than pushing a religion on someone as the moral domain comes from, for the a theists, pure fiction.

Threading the needle ain't easy here. But for my part, fuck Paul, I'm handing out ham sandwiches. The Bible is silent on the matter of grains and legumes but I'm still taking my own charge on a lack of flatulence. Whether or not I get the dock for sitting at the front of the bus is irrelevant; it's as much a propriety as it is a political statement by the commission of a crime.

That doesn't cover all the bases, but it accounts the lint I've found in my navel so far.

Doom-Bunnies

2011-06-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

Having a discussion with JV at JD's joint when out popped the Darwinian Doom-Bunny and VD's rejoinders about it. I love the Darwinian Doom-Bunny just for the Flying Circus appeal of the whole thing but does a find of a rabbit fossil in precambrian rocks do a thing to the theory of evolution?

No. See? Easy. I was about that short there for etiquette but it really does deserve a better treatment and so here we are.

Let us assume that we have such a collection of rabbit shaped sediment in our possession and that there's no argument whatsoever as to its validity, location, or age. That there are no claims of shenanigans in play whether worldly or otherwise. Then we have what we must accept as a valid collection of remarkably rabbit-bone shaped rocks.

If we then play the Queen of Hearts and declare that as it is remarkably rabbit shaped that it was a modern rabbit we get all sorts of fun consequence. And there's no reason not to as there are an incredible number of modern animals that have remained morphologically invariant over millions of years in the standart view of things. But given this presumption we must accept that there was a patch of land for it to be about on eating dandelions and such. And there must be more of its kin for we all know what rabbits are quite good at. Doesn't mean that we'll find their remains, but that they had to be there. Given this then it's then strictly true that we've severely underestimated the age and breeding success of the rabbit lineage.

That alone tells us nothing about the Theory of Dice whatsoever. Oh sure, it will upset a bunch of apple carts amongst the stakeholders that are already quite flustered every time China digs up the same ol' bones in the entirely wrong place and age of rock. But one assumes they're used to it by now. For if Dice is spot on all the find tells us is that we're missing more animal shaped bits of rock then we would have preferred and that the age of things pushes back a bit. But it neither implicates random material processes one way or the other and says nothing about common descent.

It's all an issue of history seen through a dirty mirror. And we're perfectly free to have our looking glass another way about entirely. We may claim, on whatever basis, that our Darwinian Doom-Bunny was indeed a bottom dweller and breathed through gills installed in its tail; much like arthropods. We are also completely free to state that it is not a rabbit at all but simply a remarkably rabbit like creature unrelated to rabbits. All we have, after all, is simply some fancy quartz bits that we're quite in awe over.

Though being who and what we are when it comes to matching like with like by our eyeballs we're more prone to take the Queen of Hearts route anyways. It's responsible, typical, and has good success rates when dealing with other interesting bits of rock such as the Solutrean and Clovis toolkits, various Tells in the Middle East, the migration route in the Poetic Edda, and the city of Troy. Each one of which has caused a great stir when their evidence first started coming in.

The difficulty here is that the cache of the Historian is not in science but in narratives. Fairy Tales largely. Now this upsets a great many Historians, Archaeologists and Paleontologists while others still will tell you this is entirely correct. Their jobs largely exist of finding queer random bits of things and then attaching to them a good jaw for the salesmanship. Nothing at all is in error by doing so but it's far different than stating your priors, your expected posteriors, and then slapping the cadaver on the table to see if lightning will get you throwing little girls in a well. They can all, natch, thwart each others narratives but showing a neat bit of rock that causes a contradiction. But the discussion is limited to that rock alone.

An example suffices better than anything here as to the limits. Let us suppose that the Cultists of Dice find the fossilized remains of the Materialist Creator. The prime mover, seed of everything, and first proto-bacteria that gave rise to it all. In elation they carve out the sandstone backing and install it in the Smithsonian, situated directly behind a very impressive magnifying glass, so that school children can come from far and wide for the sole purpose of pressing their faces against the lense to witness a single discolored grain of sand.

The majesty of it all might have overwhelmed you a bit and you might take a moment to catch your breath as you need. After which ask yourself this alone: What was its genetic code?

In witnessing this grain of sand we are not looking at an organism. Nor are we looking at its remains. We're looking at what remains of the absence of its remains; what became of the hole in the mud left behind by its remains no longer remaining. Now we can do a whole mess of fun things with the remains of the remains that are demonstrable and supportable. What we cannot do is a paternity test.

Our entire historical narrative relies solely on the visual connective between rocks that we describe as either organic remains or as being produced by organisms, such as with various tracks and burrows. Which gets us right back to the Darwinian Doom-Bunny. And a little bit of steamy Greek action.

If I told you that, for all mornings the sun will rise, then I've told you a falsehood if for only one single morning the sun does not in fact rise. I have made a universal claim of what happens in the morning and only a single thwart of that is sufficient to defenestrate things. That's all happy Greek stuff right up until I try to state "I w1n" because it is a morning on which no one can verify that the sun did or did not rise. A step further still if we can never verify that the sun did or did not rise as we're all permanently in the deeper parts of the Bastille and I simply reduce my claim to: For all mornings.

The first case is a proper claim and can be falsified. The second case is a grotesque logical fallacy. The third case isn't even a claim to begin with. The sun comes up in the morning. In the woods the Pope will shit. Zombies have a taste for brains. Those three all get reduced in this manner to: Morning. Shit. For brains.[1]

Now we're all, I assume, agreed to consider that fossils are the remains of life and so may be treated fairly as life itself. Then the claim from Dice is: For all life, genetic mutations occur. Or, as we're absent paternity tests for trilobytes and Doom-Bunnies: For all life.

[1] That's a bald lie, really. It's properly "Morning. Woods. Brains." You can suss out the difference yourself if you like biting the heads off bats.

Addenda: Just before posting this I figured I should satisfy my hunch that the Darwinian Doom-Bunny was one of Dawkins' bits; it's certainly reachable at his cognitive level. It is not, but it is used by him, so I suppose that counts as half-credit. The Wiki page on the deal also mentioned Popper and the notion that historical narratives can be falsifiable. Yarp, and I should likely stress that this can only occur when your historical narrative doesn't include every possible rock a priori.

Bratz Ballet

2011-06-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Libya nonsense has taken for a round of gold until the 5th but the current state of affairs is worth a run through for the fine political sausage made. Not by Jughead Rex, who's been as hamfisted as ever, but by folks that know what they're doing.

The first and best is the constant lay down on the War Powers Act and its supposed questionable Constitutionality. Flying about the pair of claims go that the War Powers Act doesn't apply and even if it did it's of questionable legality so it doesn't apply anyways; with the questions only coming from Nixon and other pouty men of stature.

This is our first and finest bit of slick in the teen girl clique game. Ya'see the WPA only states two things of interest here. That the President may only act unilaterally when necessity and circumstance doesn't provide time for the TOTUS to hop on his Blackberry and consult Congress on the affair in advance. The second that if he wants his war pony he may either ask in advance or provide justification within a reasonable window of time as to why he got all stabby without prior consent.

But thing is the WPA is a 'me too' law that simply cribs the Constitution itself on matter if you put aside the idea that it might be keen to find out why our first Black president has a hard-on for bombing Africans. The Constitution itself makes the same allowances directly and so our fun claim is in fact that the Constitution doesn't apply and even if it did the Constitution is probably unConstitutional so it doesn't apply anyways.

That, my friends, is a fine piece of politik. Of course the notification requirement may well be considered to properly be unConstitutional but it certainly can't be claimed that we lacked the time to get Congress in the loop before the Libyan army finished floating their armada of Jeep Cherokee's across the Atlantic for the sake of razing DC. And it's not like DC is one of the 50 states and so it wouldn't apply as a hostile action anyways.

Now I suppose that one could claim that Congress moves at such a glacial rate that there's no reasonable belief that our fine representatives would do their job in a prompt manner. But that doesn't wash at all. Nancy Pelosi's wound her reflexes so tight on a Botox bender that she could break the spine of large rodents by a giving a slow wink across the aisle to Boehner.

More fun than that is Jughead Rex making the statement in 2007 that the WPA does apply to such things and that the president must seek Congressional approval as required by the Constitution and dittoed by the WPA. Given his good status as a Constutional Scholar it's probably just as well to take him at his word on the matter. But you'll not see a great deal of mention on that subject as it not only means that he's impeached himself as a war criminal at home, but that he's engaged in the extrajudicial killings of a swarthy of African natives abroad. Otherwise known as premeditated mass-murder of an ethnic group. Which is also a fun bit of politk.

However, the real question for the administration was delivered by the Secretary of State, former We the President, Mr. Clintons jilt and paraphrased lightly as "Are you with us or are you with Q/Kh/G-adaffi.?" And who would be? If it weren't for his former antics on the international stage, borrowing airplanes by use of bombs, it's that he sleeps in a Yak skin tent. By preference. And here in the land of Axe body spray no man may be spared the phosorphous kiss if they dare smell of a Yak. So of course we should all side with the fun liberty infused rebels who are likewise of a kind eye and possessed of a keen wit.

Now it's merely an unfortunate trifle that we knew from the beginning that these lovable scoundrels were Al Qaeda. And that our plan going in was to nation build in Libya. Bringing Democracy at the point of a gun by deposing the Yakman for our own terrorists. The one's that we are currently at war with under the aegis and consultation of the Congress. The administrations plea is question with a demanded answer that we should kill for the very people that are killing our people at the same time. And that's another fine bit of politik.

But despite the C-in-C being a Constitutional scholar who states that what he's doing is unConstitutional only if the Constitution applied and wasn't unConstitutional and if the Constitution applied to fighting a war on behalf of the enemy we're demanded Constitutionally to fight by the people elected as representatives under the Constitution that doesn't matter -- and did you know you can get bonafide derriere paper with the Constitution on it? -- it all pales to the politik of today.

That being that Congress denied Obama the authority to continue but that the bastards didn't defund the mass murder he doesn't have the authority to continue with. Obviously our representatives are confused children that don't realize that by demanding that the POTUS cease and desist with the mass murder of Africans that they were, in fact, telling him to do so by not also telling him he couldn't spend money on the mass murder of Africans that he's not allowed to keep murdering. This story being repeated far and wide by the entrenched media companies as the gospel truth and there is in this a presumption that the fine people of America will blame Congress rather than our mass murdering monarch with a hatred of his homeland. And that too is fine politik.

Because it's been working brilliantly all day.

The first bill, from Hastings, sought to seek an ex post facto authorization of things. So that, in passage, his future killings were legal as a State policy and so that his past murders were thus legal as well. Which is a perfectly sound notion as ex post facto laws are unConstitutional and we're already aware that Nixon and other presidents up through Jughead Rex question the Constitutionality of the Constitution. This, natch, was voted down and we may now forget about the previous killings that never happened because the law was never passed that allowed them. And that is not fine politik. That is just how folks work when faced with discomforting things.

But a fair feint, to put a suitably calisthenic term on it, is the second bill that sought to defund the murders that haven't been done as they aren't allowed. That one too was voted down. But the bill didn't defund things whatsoever. It states that it defunds everything except for:

(1)search and rescue;
(2)intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance;
(3)aerial refueling; and
(4)operational planning.

Search and rescue in a warzone requires killing things with fire from helicopters and drones. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance require boots on the grounds killing things and -- in the drone era -- loitering about with a predator and dropping anti-tank missiles on things. Aerial refueling is a pretty sweet deal if we let Dassaults nuzzle the fuel muzzle. And we'd still be running the whole show.

Or, to put it otherwise, less F18's. More helicopters and drones. Lots a bombs and a bevy of clandestine boots that are on the ground now and later but don't exist anyways because it's a State secret.

Not only did the bill that Boehner support and not vote yay, nay, present, or teleprompter not defund things but it specifically authorized the very thing that Congress just denied authorizing. Such that the entire current narrative is that Congress didn't authorize the shindig it likewise didn't authorize the shindig. Which is fine because our Constitutional teleprompter assures us all that what he's doing isn't Constitutional if the Constitutional was Constitutional, which it isn't, and wouldn't matter if it was. All of which is entirely beside the point as being the lackey of the people that are killing our children never happened because neither bill passed anyways. That is the most beautiful distillation of unicorn tears out of the girls highschool locker that I have ever seen. That is politics at it's highest and finest.

And the sucker's are buying it.

A bit outta touch

2011-06-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

Hopah! It's a kind thing to be back in the midst of the land of electricity and I'm something of the notion that I ought apologize for my sudden and lengthy absence.

But that's a load of crap.

Life is what it is as well as circumstance and I got saddled with a blessing that would have Mike Rowe crawling in tears at his mother's hem. (Dockers' rather than skirt as Rowe was spawned from nothing shy of the brokeback of a roughneck and a cattle man.) Now don't get me wrong in things as it's hardly the first Stygian pit that I've swilled through for cash, having been one of the State's wards and rented out by the county for the yearly tidy in the pens at the fairgrounds. But this one was so beyond the pale that I've got little in mind but to take a bath in stink-pretty and crawl inside a garment bag until I can be accepted again as a proper member of polite society.

Right down to it though, status is second place to ignorance and I'd love to sorely cure my absence from the news cycle more than find bliss in a vinyl closet of parfumed Frenchness; even newspapers having been hard of late to come by. But for all that I think I'm worse off for catching up on Weiner's peener than I was otherwise.

Nor has any of the nonsense recent over Libya been helped by Boehner unzipping his trou and swinging around with his namesake. I'm hardly current and I hope someone's put forward what I haven't yet seen:

Is the AUMF valid of not?

If it is not then both of Presidents Obama and Bush The Deuce -- as well as all service members that follow orders like a good drones -- are traitors and should be hung like the dogs that they are. And if it is valid then Obama -- as well as all the sevice members that follow orders like a good drones -- are aiding and abetting the enemy by the actions involvubg Libya, thus Traitors, and should be hung like the dogs that they are.

I've my own point of opinion on which is which that is entirely irrelevant to consequence. Fuck Bush. The only answer under Law is to swing Jughead Rex by his neck from a branch alongside all those good Southron Boys that followed suit in whichever treasonous affair you choose. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't hang a white Yale cheerleader alongside Her Majesty's half-black fellow so it doesn't seem too antebellum; but that it makes not a difference to Law or melanin what the proper outcome is for the current occupant of the White-house.

Or there is no law.

There is convenience of course. But in accepting our own convenience we have denied the propriety of things. We have denied Mister Rowe's matron to crawl inside a garment bag for the sake of fantasies of how things ought be rather than how they are.

I've been back in town long enough but my boots still stink far past the heel; as they should. How hard are those you know abusing their own with a stiff brush?

Hornet's Nest

2011-05-15T03:50:00.000-07:00

Lot's of folks I keep tabs on are a-tizzy over Aspy Central making an argument of a difficult to follow construction hinged on an utter mouth-breathing ignorance or open deceit of his opponents positions. Or, ya know, it must be one of the seven days of the week again.

So what's the tempest in the clay pot about? Calvinism, natch. The whipping boy of... Well. Everyone. Even Al Gore's chakra use Calvinists as the poster children of insanity. And that's an odd thing as, when you get down to it, the Calvinist worldview has more agreement with Atheism than most Atheists find capable of stomaching. The entire dogma is shot through with a mechanical fatalism that has Creation running about in the same manner as a light switch being randomly thrown by the master of Physics. Complete and total sway. That, qua Richard Dawkins night-terrors, we are all mechanical meatbags. Just at the sway of a micromanaging creator putting on a puppet show by Himself for His own entertainment.

Which is surely the most evil and incorrect notion of things to ever pox this planet.

Ok, sure. I'll go with that. Now ask yourself: Is it wrong? And if it is, why?

No, I don't really care how it offends your worldly sensibilities. I don't give a stuff about your notions of Libertarian Free Will, Open Theism, or how many Virgins can dance the head of pin. At this point in the conversation I don't care what your answer might be. Right now, your answer is only relevant to yourself and how honestly you tackle it. Because your feelings only matter to you.

If Calvinism is entirely correct, you wouldn't be able to tell. You couldn't prove or disprove it. You would be a cog in Deus' machina playing His assigned part and your disagreement would strictly be His fault.

See? Pure evil. It sanctifies every evil action by every soulless meatbag hanging Luciferian jewelry off their pecs at the Gym.

Yeh, but everything is His fault no matter how you come at it. Puppet? All Him. Moral Anarchist? On His head. Libertarian? His choice entirely. The very notion of existence we bother nattering over is His fault. He is the Father of Time and the Bearer of Everything. He is the Father of the Father of Lies. It's all His fault and you're either really distressed about this or singing Hosannahs.

The discussion is not about whether He's to blame or not. It's about how He's to blame for it all. And you can go Jailhouse with it in any extreme:

"God made me bang a hooker."
"God understands I banged this hooker by accident."
"The Devil made me bang a hooker."

If your safe harbor on the doctrinaire sea goes any farther than "Shit happens, I'll deal with myself" then you're going to have a flock of flies at least one of the above. None of which says anything about whether you're in the wrong port or not.

But the question isn't whether Calvinism is correct: It's whether it's wrong. Proofs are one of those sublime things that only go one direction. You can't prove the truth of a thing to someone else, but you can sure throw falsehoods down the well. And Calvinism boils down to a single claim only. That God can make the puppet dance His tune.

Oh, TULIP trippers, make the stronger claim that God "does." But that's unnecessarily a bridge too far. For strapping the Calvinists on the chair and seeing if they float all that needs dealt with is whether or not God "can." Because, if He can, then there's no manner for us to establish how often He does.

And that gets us back to Aspy Central. Because the claims made there are restricted to this tiny little corner of things at most. And in a fantastically round-about manner by using the 'trust' one can have if God doesn't, or doesn't want to, know the future. All of which is simply trying to sneak Libertarian Trojans in the gate without acknowledging it.

Wait, what?

Yep. If God can be trusted then he must be able to keep His word. Flawlessly. Under Calvinism that's a pretty easy claim unless He has a habit of successfully deceiving Himself in His endless micromanagement. Door closed. But under Libertine notions of Free Will, what then?

If God allows it then He allows outcomes of which He is not yet aware; by choice or otherwise. And, go figure, He's made some claims about various earthly circumstances. So it's not an abstract notion of delayed gratification on the other side of the coil. If He allows Himself to be surprised then, whoops, look there. That can't be allowed or His word will be violated. Which requires He get all Master of Puppets to ensure that his Word is Law.

Oh, you can claim that God foresaw it all from the beginning and so He doesn't need to do so actively now. But then that's a Calvinist argument. Bad harbor, that one.

The only manner in which to accept any strength of Libertine Free Will, and the notion that God is trustworthy in the same breath is to acknowledge that He needs to get cranky and throw down on the Potter's Wheel from time to time. To accept Free Will is to accept that the Calvinists might be right after all. If you throw out the Potter's Wheel, you also have to claim that God is or will be made a liar.

Or you're just confused. Now the Supernet Intertelligence made the claim that it was the Predestination set that are the one's calling God a car salesman based on their take of things. And that sort of argument trips everyone up generally. So-and-so states X, therefore they are claiming Y as a logical consequence. And therefore they are calling God a liar.

But if you state that the Predestination set -- who can't really help themselves anyways -- are flat-ass wrong then you've thrown the Potter's Wheel out the window and so are calling God a liar yourself. Which ought put a finer point on the notion that you should trust God just like you trust people. People are well-known liars too.

So sure, the Calvinists are off their rocker. It's a good argument for Anton LaVey to trot out during recruitment drives. But sneaking in your Libertine notions by yelling that you're blacker than the kettle should hardly be persuasive to anyone.

Now ask yourself again: Is Calvinism wrong? And if so, why?

Me? Yeh, it's wrong. That's just how I feel about it. But you don't care about my feelings.

Applause for honest men

2011-05-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

A massive caterwaul is shaking the mighty pillars as it reverberates around the world at the speed of light. That today Lady Liberty is freshly in the gutter with her dainties around her ankles. A sodomous and violent act perpetrated by US Jurists against her. That we are now a Fascist State. A Communist State. It's the end of our Rights, just today. A violation of concepts that go back to 1215 and the penning of the Magna Charta.

Where do people find pharmaceutical grade Hopium anyways?

What we have here are proof that one can find, in the vast flotsam of lawyers, at least 3 of them with a streak of honesty. Three men only that are willing to plainly state: Suck it, they've been breaking into your homes for ages. And you have let it pass. There is no fresh ruling, precedent, or legislation from a bench here. Just an acknowledgement of the truth from men in black robes too exhausted or terrified to cross their blue betters with a revolutionary act more painful than mere honesty.

Hey, mebbe they're evil.

And they might very well be. But the ruling from the Indiana Supreme Court provides no greater offense than to treat the Constitution as a mere trifle of British Common Law. And Common Law, being what it is, has nothing to do with what was written ages back on moldy documents. It is strictly about what is practiced today.

And for decades the police have been able to walk into your house for any reason or no reason. And for decades we've had only scant accident that gave the victims of the police redress.

Oh, it's very fashionable to pretend otherwise. There's this soft-headed notion of lofty circles that a thing is only true if someone acknowledges it. That a tree that fell in the forest never fell, even if someone were to witness it. No, that reality is dictated strictly by what hushed words are passed at cocktail parties.

Years back when first married we got a good deal on a condo in the gay district. Awkward. Everyone for blocks around, save the wiff and me, was either retired or a member in good standing with the Bathhouse Battalion. They were all old or queer and you know everyone was a smoker that camped out on the stoop at night for social interaction. On one of those regular nights I found myself having a fag and camped out with a fellow coming home from the bar in his boa and pancake makeup when the police swept a traffic stop on the street in front. It should have been an entirely common thing save that it wasn't, and I made the startled observation of how respectful the police were in this neighborhood.

"Oh honey, you're so cute!"

"Fuck you, Jonathon"

Jonathon raise his arm a dagger to the west and leaned low tones close to my ear: "Do you know how many lawyers are gay? Go three blocks that way."

And if that's not the best argument you've ever heard for gay rights then you're blessed to have never dealt with the police. The poorer sorts have long known that the only safety from the King's Men was to find a hovel as close to the Rainbow neighborhoods as they can. Outside that Knight's fee was the hinterland overrun with blue wolves.

And if you still don't get it: The vast bulk of politicians are lawyers. Do the math.

If you're going to fault the Jurists in Indiana then fault them as you like for treating the Constitution as Common Law. Just know that if they didn't, that they never would've been appointed by the Governor and State Assembly in the first place. But it's a mark of low men to kill the messenger. And despite that I'm a low man I'll still applaud these Indiana fags for finding enough crimson in their flag to have a moment of refreshing honesty.

Bits of things

2011-05-14T06:50:00.001-07:00

That's been oddly bugging me since it got put forward. It's an affront. An offense. And just how do you explain computer programming to someone that doesn't do these things?

Ya know, it's a bit of a stumper. I've never thought much over it as it's something I have done since I was yay high. It comes to mind as trying to explain breathing. Though with less consequence if your explanation is in error. But that hardly explains how to do it and neither will this. But, do you have a dollar store calculator?

The easy part

It's got all the basic math bobs; add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Maybe even a square root button. It almost certainly has a memory store and memory recall button that no one uses. Which means it's only missing one bit. So here's a Todo list for you and your calculator:

1. Add 5 and 3.
2. Multiply by 4.
3. Is the answer larger than 100?
a. No, jump back to step 2.
4. Subtract 3.
5. Done.

Brainless, eh? But your calculator can't follow the instruction sheet on its own. More importantly, it can't jump backwards to step 2 and repeat previous steps. And that makes all the difference. To turn a calculator into a computer you need to be able to hop to a different step in the list whenever you need. Which means nothing if the calculator isn't reading the instruction list itself. And so we do that.

Write the Todo list on a sheet of paper. Hand your eldest kid the calculator and the instructions and tell him or her to get crackin'. You have now created your first general purpose computing device and may be good for a few patents. Eh wot? It's a sustainable computer built from biotechnology. Of course it's good it for a patent or two.

But that one little hitch at step 3 where we either needed to hop somewhere else or keep truckin' along is the keystone in the whole affair. What nerds call a Branch has the Lit Crit sorts pulling out Frost and taking the road less traveled. It's all just the ability to have a fork in the road and do something sensible with it. Without which we're just as well off with slide rules and abacuses. Abacii. Beads on bars. As notwithstanding Everquest and Porn, computers are all about random left turns. So long as understand this you get the gist of it all and it only gets more tedious from here.

Just another nibble

This is remarkably unimpressive until you want more than just the one Memory Store button. You want 8 billion of them and a pencil sharpener for your eldest. So now let's make a Great_Todo list:

7. Let i = 0
8. Do Todo list.
9. Store the results in Memory button number i.
10. Let i = 1 + i.
11.Is i equal to 100?
a. No, jump back to step 1.
12.Done.

Which is a great bit of pants, really. All we'd really like to say is "Do Todo list 100 times." But that doesn't tell anyone where to stick the results so they can be found in a reasonable manner later on. Or even if they should be kept at all or used as nourishment. As nourishment is very important for budding teens one simply can't tell what's going to happen unless you're very precise.

Just like before we're looping back on ourselves and doing the same thing multiple times. Unlike before we're now hopping to some named bob -- the original Todo list -- rather than rewriting the same instructions right here in the new list. Which is quite a bit of cheating on my part since we've got this whole 'i' business going on. Just what the heck is 'i' and where does it come from?

Anywhere you want really. If you walk it through we're using Memory buttons 0 through 99. Which is 100 of them, natch. (Programmers love zero, it is absolutely the best number in the world.) But since we know we're using those already we know we can't put 'i' in any of them or very strange things will happen. Other than that we don't really care where it gets off to. We've got 8 billion memory buttons available and we don't need it for anything but making sure we do the Todo list 100 times. So we'll just say we're stuffing that in Memory button 1012 and call it a day.

All that matters is that someone, anyone, knows where it got off to when and while they need it. This works for you, and it works for me, and your child most certainly doesn't eat glue sticks. But Intel does. The computer isn't a mind reader and doesn't have moments of reflection on its place in the universe. Which is why you can totally get a patent on your child.

So we can either rewrite the entire Great_Todo list to be painfully specific about which Memory Button to use for this throwaway value or we can write a tool that will do it on our behalf. Which is what programmers have done because it's a fantastic way to be constructively lazy. Programmers call it a compiler and you're going to call it your spouse. So hand the instruction list to your better half and tell them to assign all the random names you used a proper memory button, rewrite the list to reflect that, and give it back to you. Now you hand your proper set of instructions to your Green computing device and we're back in business.

But when code monkeys get on about variables this is what they mean. They don't mean high school math such as: 10 = 5 - x, solve for x. They mean that it's a handy name to give to a repeatedly used value as a refererce to the postal address it will eventually get; especially when we're really unconcerned about what postal address that might be. You always can, as we did with the results of each run through Todo, specify that address directly by number. And everything always will get a numbered address at some point. It just makes life cleaner to not care when we don't care. If not, then what was the point of getting married in the first place?

Byte me

The whole affair is about being painfully explicit at every step of the way because we are dealing with nothing more than a glorified teenager with a calculator. And it should start to seem a great deal like the nonsense forms you have to go through when filling taxes as part of your Spring rituals. So explicit in fact that you'll notice I've breezed right by another problem. We hopped from Great_Todo to Todo in step 8 but as we've no memory unless we stuff something in one of 8 billion buttons... So how did we get back to do step 9? There had to be magic, or it had to fall from step 5 to step 7 and restart everything from unfortunate scratch... Or your spouse did something you didn't expect when they translated the instructions from 'shopping list' to 'angst.'

If anyone can jump into Todo, or really any step, from anywhere then how do we know how to get back to where we want to be next? You've got a memory button for that. We want to do Step 9 after Todo is done, so we only need stuff a 9 somewhere in one of the random addresses before we hop from one to the other in step 8. All that we need do is rewrite Step 5 to pull up what's stored in the same button and jump to the step it finds numbered there. Poof, done. We can store any value in that button and when Todo gets done it'll haul up that value and hop to that step next. Which is, for what it's worth, much more pleasant than trying to follow IRS forms. Programmers used to call this a subroutine, then a function, and now a function is literally anything and everything to the language wonks. But subroutine will do. The only notion here is that, instead of simply stopping when done, it will haul up some stored location and continue things from there.

By this point, if you're not crafting Voodoo dolls, you might be asking why you're reminded of Amnesiacs and Alzheimer's patients. It's a blessed bit of our existence that we can take the notion of short term memory for granted. It just works. So we can worry about greater and grander things than labelling the kitchen drawers with Post-it notes. But it's the same sort of consequence when you hand a child a calculator. Nothing will be remembered unless you force it to be remembered. Not even if you want to remember where you put something to remember. The totality of existence is a Film Noir plot involving a bump on the head.

A great deal of the time you can just suss this out by handing your spouse the list and letting him/her deal with the fiddly details. But with all that jumping around here and there it becomes quite common to be absolutely unaware of where you're supposed to go next, where you came from, and who Billy is. As a consequence, and for those times, you just need a special memory button that doesn't act like a single value at all. It simply needs to keep a breadcrumb trail for you. Such that when you put a new crumb on the trail it keeps all the other crumbs nice and tidy underneath. And when you're done with the current crumb you simply eat it for nourishment so that the next crumb is ready to go. Which is the stack, so called, and allows you to remember as much or little as you like in only a single named place. Well, for various values of 'much.'

This blissfully blank-minded existence is a foreign concept outside the nursing field and is without question the hardest thing for folks to wrap their head around. We're all accustomed to some minimal exhibition of cognizance from the inhabitants of a universe and have our habits to suit. Tell your dog to 'heel' and they'll sort out the little details to get it done. If they don't pull it off properly you can correct them until they do. They are able to learn as they go. Glass computing devices are more akin to a 2 year old that never ages. They are horribly literal, have very little comprehension, and zero capacity for remembering things. Everything else is just a dollar store calculator.

Billy!

The preferred solution to all this isn't to use that minimal cognizance to learn how to deal with Alzheimer's patients; it's to get a new spouse. Hey, this is America, man. And there's some reasonable justification for that as programming generally involves writing a Todo list and then watching the machine burp up garbage for a bit. Thereafter you furrow your brow and dive into the code in a quest to figure out just where you made an assumption that neither your spouse nor your child caught onto like you desired. And since you're stuck with the child you're stuck with? Well, a new spouse ought work.

But the forgetfullness is so pervasive that the glass even does the math backwards. Mathemticians, and the rest of us for being taught this way, are very happy writing out things in bog standard form as: 5 + 3. None of us really think about it a great deal but we end up parsing the thing from the outside in. Which is par for the course as that's how your brain runs about while reading the words in this post. So long as the words are all the right length and the first and last letters correct it matters very little what the rest of them are:

Ygu chn rjhd tkjs sasdlkbe.

Slow, painful, and doable. We take each word boundary and bracket it out. Thereafter we take the first and last letter and bracket out what the rest ought be. And only then do we bother with the middle for confirmation. And without catching on to things we have to remember what we're doing at each step of the way. Such that when we see '5 + 3' we bust it out from the outside in, stocking back the 5 and 3 before we ever worry about the whole '+' part.

With a bit of inspection it ought really seem the most natural way to go about things. After all it doesn't do us to stock back the '5', and then the '+' before finally looping around after the '3', reordering everything, and doing it right. It makes sense to say we ought take the '+' first and then know we need two numbers and it makes sense to say we need the two numbers before the '+.' It likely seems most sensible to you to state that it ought be '+ 5 3' rather than '5 3 +.'

But you do not have a bump on the head. If we take the '+' first we need to remember it all along until we're complete. If we take the values first we never need care. The values simply go where they've been sent. And the '+' only need do the same thing every time without further need for reminisence. When it shows up it simply grabs any pair of values that happen to be where every value is expected to be in advance and chuck the answer out directly in one swell foop. If you're old enough you'll probably remember that adding machines worked in exactly this fashion as well. If you're not that old then you've either used an HP12C calculator or you're scratching your head at this point. What's odd here is that mechanical calculators have always performed in this manner; even back to the Stepped Reckoner some few centuries ago.

But to really 'get' computer programming beyond the idea of a Todo list is to accept that everything works backward from what you expect. The glass is running forward in reverse wearing a hockey mask on gigahertz. By fixing the locations that the adder will pull up the values to perform addition on we turn the entire discussion from one of performing addition on a pair of numbers to simply adding whatever happens to be there. The numbers exist or don't but the addition is happening full tilt regardless. You don't add numbers, you just take the results of an addition and like it.

If you haven't had a moment much like discussing cutlery with a bald kid camped in a New York flat then you'll want to go through it again.

It's a bit philosophical and not perfectly accurate, but that's hardly the point when picking out wedding rings. Just consider that the computer never stops constantly adding. Subracting, multiplying and all the rest as well. You don't particularly command the computer to do anything so much as you formally state your acceptance of whatever particular result it has generated this time around. Because it's an amnesiac and doesn't know anything else; not even what it's adding.

So when you want to add something on purpose you need sneak the numbers in and then allow the computer to pour the results into you. When you want to jump from here to step 9 you don't tell the computer to jump. You simply sneak the step number into the program counter and the allow it to pour the instructions in. This is all terribly wrong from normal perspectives in that we are the one's in control of the computer. And we are of course, I'm not putting forth some Digital Calvinism as the way of things. But one does not dictate the computer to add 5 and 3. One puts 5 and 3 in the right place and then accepts the sum. It's entirely backwards and everyone is Billy.

And it really makes the programming even less sexy than it already is as not even the Germans get fetishized kicks out of dressing in vinyl for a pocket calculator. (Rule 34, they do now.) But the proper definition of computer programming is not to perform math, or to make the computer perform math and leap through the code while Swan Lake plays. It's to don a gimp suit and move data around inside the machine so that things happen in your desired order.

Lots of folks that make a living at this will gripe about the description. Probably because of the Germans. But putting aside random cockups all bugs can be traced to a misplaced belief that the glass remembers things. And the greatest driver for new spouses is the notion that this one, this time, will free us from the need to order and remember things that the glass can't. If you've had your spoon moment and don't require such a crutch then the only thing a spouse can do is prevent you from moving the data around; which is hopefully benign. If you haven't then you're still waiting on a spouse that craps rainbows and smears you with sex appeal.

This last section was far too Unibomber Manifesto for good conscience or public sight. But it's here anyways, so what the heck. Everything from here, and the near totality of the Comp Sci field, is centered on how to move that data around in a manner that is pleasing and allows you to remember where you put your memories without being able to remember things. Which is mostly harmless but generally uninteresting. And it requires lots of drawings that I haven't bothered with. No really, none of it is intelligible without a whiteboard.

It's just like that

2011-05-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

Hopah! In between a glorious amount of remunerated exhaustion and the efforts at trying to recover backups I haven't had time to stick my head through a small copper wire for the sake of peering about the globe. The discerning individual might wonder how in the Sam Hill I possibly have backups. To be fair, they're mostly old and cranky as it seems that DVDs take a dim view to being used as a pillow while taking an impromptu backpack tour of flyover America. So the general process involves dumping the thing to disk and then wandering off as the machine remains unusable for hours while it attempts to get back bytes that refuse to be recovered.

The whole thing's a bit like peeking inside a leaky time capsule to see what folks thought were important back when they though it was pretty swell to stuff meat inside their Jello treats. It's a stomach turning mess. In the course of it I've tripped over a number of old code drops that I'd have preferred forgotten. Code drops that remind me precisely why I despite computer programming.

See, there's precisely two kinds of programmers in the world. And they have one point only in common: They both have a bust of Niklaus Wirth in their workspace. Now the one kind tends to smile off into space while rubbing their crotch on it while the other kind simply uses the thing as a handy place to keep knives when they're not busy peeling an apple. If you're a sane individual with a reasonable social life this means nothing to you. To understand you first need to cotton on to the basics of how a computer works. Bear with as it's all quite simple and involves nothing more than a high school, a linebacker, and a fishmonger.

All computation with glass requires that we do one thing, and one thing only: We jot down notes on bits of glass that we stash here and there about the place. We can pull them back up when we need and read or change what we've written, but we can only do that for a single piece at a time. In the oldest days this was a pretty simple affair. All we had was the lunch lady, two stacks of stoneware plates, and a grease pencil. The fishmonger would simply yell at the lunch lady to either move plates from one stack to the other one plate at a time. Or the fishmonger would yell at her to take the grease pencil and jot notes on those plates. As a bonus, we were all told by the G-men from IBM, the lunch lady wasn't too shabby at basic math as well. So the fishmonger could also tell her to take two plates, add or multiply them, and throw them away. She'd simply take a new plate on which she'd write the answer and then place on top of one of the stacks of dishes.

This, of course, is really slow. So the first thing we do is hire a dishwasher. The dishwasher has the ability to lift up a bunch of dishes in one go so that the lunch lady can read what's written on a plate buried underneath. No one can get the plate out mind you. But she can read what's there and jot that note on a new plate which she can throw it back on top. That's all the dishwasher does and it saves a great deal of time shuffling plates one-by-one from place to place.

This is all still quite slow and so we get the keen idea that we have this football time lying about. So we employ one of the linebackers to run plates from the cafeteria to the football field where he'll put the plate on one of the yard-marker pips. Or take a plate from there back to the lunch lady. And now our fishmonger is starting to get in business. The fish monger can yell at the lunchlady to do what she's always done, or yell at her and the dishwasher to peek at what's jotted on a plate deep down, or can monger the football star to run plates back and forth between the football field and the stacks of dishes.

Now you might get the idea that the linebacker is doing the most work while the dishwasher is a slacking a bit. And it really is still a bit slow waiting for the fellow in safety gear to run all over campus. But it's a school, we have cubby holes! So we install a large set of cubby holes and hide the lunchlady and her abacus on one side. The dishwaher and linebacker may now stuff plates on the dish stacks or in a cubby hole. The lunch lady does her bit only on plates in particular cubby holes as directed by our friendly fishmonger. And, as benefit, we no longer need two stacks of dishes as one will now suffice.

So the fishmonger is yelling at the linebacker to run dishes in and out of the cafeteria, the dishwahser to run plates between the remaining stack of dishes and the cubby holes, and the lunchlady to do whatever it is she's doing with the plates on the other side. It's all a bit chaotic at this opint isn't it? But that's how these things work.

And as it's all about power and control, the flow of operations, and dictorial fiat of the fishmonger? You already know all manner of folks are drooling at the chance to make a social program out of it. Just as well you already know that they've no interest in actually doing the deed and being any of the cast of characters. Most certainly not the fishmonger as they smell a bit funk anyways, ya know?

No, they wish to install themselves between the fishmonger and the rest of the cast of characters. A happy vizier only here to help the fishmonger manage the chaos, you see. Some folks bought this readily despite the vizier sporting curly shoes and a monocle. And sound folks already realize nothing good can come from stuffing Commondant Klink in the middle of all this.

Which is where are dear fellow Wirth comes in. Not as a vizier mind you, because pointy shoes clash with monocles; it's all very bad fashion sense. Wirth comes in as the vizier to the vizier; with wingtips and a monocle. Despite that he's dead the current vizier's still genuflect to him and follow his advice. So now our process is such that the fishmonger yells at the vizier to get things done. And the vizier, for his part? Does whatever the hell he feels like doing and in accordance with the wishes of the departed Mr. Wirth.

The first consequence of all this was that the vizier pretends there is no stack of dishes. The fishmonger needn't worry about it at all. To such a degree that the vizier will firmly insist that there is no stack of dishes to begin with. Naturally, as this is a social program, you can make the safe guess right now that the vizier isn't really very good at managing things on his own however. And in truth the well-meaning vizier often has the dishwasher stack the dishes so high that the entire thing falls over and the plates shatter on the floor.

The rest is a bit Dead Parrot as the fishmonger starts asking why there's bits of stoneware all about while the vizier insists that there's no stack at all and if there was it would be just fine and ignore it all won't you please?

Now you've probably gotten the idea already that the vizier has taken the same tack with the cubby holes as well. Proving that you're already one up on the vizier as he doesn't tend to be real savvy managing the dishwasher whatsoever. Of course, since this is all the dishwasher's job, the vizier just has the dishwasher put the dishes on the stack. Which is all a bit of face saving kabuki that just exacerbates things.

And it wouldn't be so problematic if the stack of dishes was the one central piece to all of the rest. Without that stack of dishes there is no computer and there is no stack and it certainly didn't tip over and it's just a head cold anyways. But that's the current state of computer languages, our happy viziers, mucking about and making a mess of things.

Oh wait. Language and social programs? You didn't think you were escaping this without pulling in the undergrads did you? If we merely call it a 'language' then it certainly must be just like a language. In fact I bet, as I sit here in my linear algebra course, that I could go hit on the English Majors that don't shave their armpits! If only it weren't for those damn football jocks slipping out from behind the vizier.

So the comp sci geeks making a social program out of all this are busily trying to club the linebacker with a marble bust and set the field on fire. All for the sake of hitting on women that ride fish to school. This is a bit of a problem since the stack of dishes is the only way to get things done, and there's no such thing as a stack anyways, so we find that our intrepid fishmonger is abusing the linebacker to simulate a stack of dishes out on the football field.

These budding viziers are all wandering about clowning on that we really should stop abusing the linebacker for such things as he's going to get into heat stroke doing all this. And won't the fishmonger just let them manage the linebacker to ease up on things. If you're skeptical there's no need to be. They brought the Lit Crit club with them and some shoddy math explaining to all that a cast of highschool characters and a lunchlady with an abacus is just like Dutch verb conjugation if you squint just right.

The vizier's for their part, have been so successful that there's really no way around them at all in this day and age. No matter where you go in your attempt to program computers you are stuck up hard against one of these gatekeepers mandating Esperanto for Great Social Justice. That's just the way it is and why I cannot stand programming a whit. The solution, natch, is to kick them in the Djikstra and get on about creating a computer language that lets you get at all the things you need to get after without whispering in the dishwasher to much. But I'll be damned if it's going to be me as I'm pretty sketch on the proposition that I'll be better off dating hairy women that stuff their articles.

I found it much more pleasant to finish restoring my backups to the trashbin so I have more time to peel apples.

Changin', But Where's The Hope?

2011-05-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

Full Keystone Kops on the Blotter as the Orambo administration pens their... what, third version of things? And that's just for today. Heck with trying to recount it since this swell sort already did. Awesome list; be sure to read it and don't miss the photo at the bottom.

Oh, the photo is fake of course. From before they got their hats of pizzazz shopped on their noggins. Sans the royal headgear that's the wonderful photo of them watching the live video that, as of this moments narrative, doesn't exist and wasn't being watched. The whole thing was just a staged PR op. Nice play on We the President's part with the mouth cover while Jughead sulks in a short chair in the back corner.

Sadly, we're still waiting for Biden to dribble out the answer to the all important question lurking here: Do the Navy Seals source their kit from the same company that manufactures dashboard cams for the LAPD? Or did Robot-Nixon run off with the missing minutes of tape?

The world may never know.

No matter here that the only evidence of success remains the unshakable word of a man that's only surpassed his count of broken campaign promises by his score on the back 9. What's really important is that we're not going to release the photos that the Watergate Eraser hasn't run off with because you wouldn't believe they were real anyways. Apparently public documents are now a mystery cult. You can't see the evidence unless you already believe you've seen the evidence.

It's a laughable claim and would be a tragic exemplar of idiocy if this wasn't the SOP for the PR team currently infesting the Oval Office. So c'mon guys, release the damn photo and shake the fence sitters loose. Hell, if you want a slam dunk just limit your composite cut n' paste to 8 images. After all, some people bought your birth certificate and that was made out of nine.

Snoopy Dance

2011-05-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

Unless you're living in a cave you can't avoid knowing that Obama got Osama. No, you couldn't avoid it even then. Amercian cave dwellers know Republicans, and the Republicans are out dancing in the streets like Palestinians watching a skyscraper fall. S'alright though as you'll note we're no longer in a war, the economy is showering rainbows over retirement funds, and the US President has bested Putin in a contest of Pec flexing. So now we're all doing the marionette cheer:

America, Fuck yeah! Baby oil and protein shakes on the house, Baby! That Bald Eagle by on the barstool there? That's not his ditty bag he's layin' on the bar. Go on over with a ruler and see for yourself.

After 8 long years of letting po' farm boys repair their dignity the New Yawkers finally have their revenge againt the Dude of Doom. They're not slowing down for you. And they're not going to pause a nonce to ask just what they're celebrating.

That the British Subject Jughead Rex, under his authority granted by the American Citizenry and the US Constitution, violated a Nuke Club Country to assassinate one of their icons -- who never killed a 'Merkin -- after sitting on actionable intelligence over 8 years and across a pair of US Beauty Queens.

Read it twice and read it slow. Go check your notes if you need. Osama simply facilitated the planning that others did to mangle a rough 3500 Yankee meatsuits because they inconvenienced the actual murderers. That's the same moral cover and far smaller scale than every American that's ever voted for a Pro-Kill-My-Kid-Because-My-Figure-Will-Be-Ruined candidate running for the local board.

Butbutbutbut... It's Different!?

Bullshit. Charles Manson is rotting in prison longer than the trigger-pullers for dong more than giving moral support to some folks that laid some Actresses low; and Actors aren't real people. Osama was involved only in round table discussions about the thing, and it's not like New Yorkers are a real human being even if you add 3500 of them together. If that's worth getting all Hitler at Barbarossa against a nuclear armed country then we should have long ago turned California into a glass parking lot simply for the notion that Nancy Pelosi lives there. Or even beat Bin Laden to the punch and had some Nat Guard reservists loiter on one end to capsize Long Island.

There is no difference between discussing the killing of a human being because you find them inconvenient and discussing the killing a human being because you find them inconvenient.

That's right, we're not even talking about the beneficent act of getting all Seal Team 6 either. Just the mission planning for Seal Team 6.

As for the conspiracy theorists? Screw 'em, they're loopy. There's no way that we did this on 8 years of intelligence we ignored, that Wikileaks invented fresh a week ago, that was in a college dissertation from 2 years back. It's all pure, clean fun.

And it's absolutely certain we got killed again the guy we killed in a mountain cave years ago. We have the DNA from his sister that couldn't match his sister against his sister provided -- apparently -- 2 hours too early from the PCR machine that the US Navy installs on all its boats. Which doesn't matter as we've got pictures and live video from the action that proves beyond a doubt that it's him; that we can't release because his face was blown off by a bullet that wouldn't have blown his face off. And there's no way we'd have thrown the body overboard before we got positive identification. Besides we're talking here about the President of the United States of America and the wet dreams of his electoral opposition.

President Bill Clinton was, in comparison to Jughead Rex, a real Man. A man of virtue, contemplation and sober consideration. And when he wanted to change the media conversation about his tastes in oral sex and the Freudian Cigar he toted around? S'right, he murdered women and children manufacturing medicine in Africa. Hey claimed they were turrists, natch.

Well, he only planned it. The US Navy did the deed.

But that puts Mr. Clinton squarely between Manson and Osama in the scale of people that planned the murders of others they found inconvenient. That remains true even when you add in the children he found useful to incinerate in a basement. So I think you'll see my it's the depth of moonbattery to give any credence to the claim that Jughead Rex, Boy King of Narcissus, could ever rise or stoop to such lofty levels as we expect out of the mature members of the American political class. Be assured Winston that we have always had an honest government.

And on that note and in good moral standing within the American milieu? Imma start drawing maps of Abortion clinics and mail them off to Seal Team 6. Or they're Commander in Chief. Then we can all dance atop the doghouse.

Bottle of Awesome

2011-05-02T04:48:00.000-07:00

Nono, Ol' Duct Tape still rides; I've just been up to my elbows the last couple. Which is just as well since I really needed the time to collect my thoughts anyways. Jartstar wanted to know what I thought about the Resurrection; and, really, I'm fine with textual analysis but everything else I mostly keep under my hat for being bran' spankin' new in these parts. He mentioned the notion of 'cradle Christians' which comes with the converse implications of Linda's tasty quote from CS Lewis a while back: Waking up tomorrow to a world of immortal people. The undead.

Think about that beyond the fine craft Lewis makes out of the language. Fookin' undead people. Not "I'll see you Monday, Bob!" when you've got "I'll see you in hell, you bastard." rolling through your head. No, try this one:

"I'll see you forever."

Contingent on a great many things beyond and not beyond my control or yours? Dude, we're gonna be hanging on the couch jawing about Plato. Forever. You're so screwed.

But cradle Christians -- love that phrase -- I doubt have this as much in mind. It's never been something they picked up one day while browsing things at Borders. From their earliest memories they've known that this is simply how the world is. How it works. Nothing interesting about saying that since that's how we are with everything that runs around the inside of our skulls. Water's wet. Jesus rose from the grave. Sofa shadows on the wall for all time. Two and two is four.

No surprise then that some come off a bit crotchety about the whole deal then. Stalking around with bits of wood looking for folks that can't do addition. "2+2=3!? What's my name, Bitch!"

And bang, a bagger. Totally normal. And just perhaps, a bit jaded to the entire wonder and majesty in the whole deal. And just how stark raving bad-ass it is. Which is probably why everyone knows who the Jailhouse and Born-Again types are. The one won't let it rest for excuses and the other won't stop bubbling on so optimistically that you're fondly looking to tempt the insufferable prick off the track with rented women, Nigerian bank accounts, and anything else you can catch onto.

But it's a sober deal isn't it? All these sorts getting randy on their outlook for life shouldn't be treating it all like a new toy, should they?

Growing up we all had Christmas as a cultural... 'thing' here in America. It's just a deal we all do that's gone and got itself about as much religion as President's Day. We all just grew up with it as that one day. There's always that lurking notion that there's this really important stuff lurking under the surface. After all, there's this thing about Christ and some others going Gaia and dancing naked under the moon. Naked. In the snow. Oh! And burning large bits of lumber, can't forget that. It's very important when people are stalking around over addition.

And even though you know what's under that paper. Even though you know what day it's on. Even though you're just putting on the graces for a family event. You open it up, and it has blinking fucking lights! The whole wonder and amazement just pours into you and you're stuck in random bouncing elation that has people checking your personal effects for illicit substances. So yeh, it's totally like a new toy. For eternity.

But wait, that's wrong isn't it? The whole God package isn't sitting in some little box of butcher paper. It's about the day, man. Nope, that's all misplaced priorities. It's just a day. It's about the celebration, the wonder, and the gift. Did I just call Jesus a Jewformer with blinkin' freakin' lights? You bet your ass, I did. Follow the instructions right and he transforms into Salvation.

No sense in fooling
We're covered in dreams
Having too much fun flying to land
Floating waste high in tendrils of green
We're so small but we feel oh so grand

And this all has precisely what to do with the Resurrection?

Absolutely everything. Coming in from the outside it's one thing to 'get it,' and it's something entirely different to understand it at your core. The old hands glowering around with their cricket bats come at things the other way. The Resurrection occurred and that sets everything else in motion. It's just addition.

But then not even the supporting cast in the play took stock in their own prophecies or they'd have been standing over His grave with some mattocks and batons to settle the score properly. Here now, today, some prominent naysayers try to do the same on the nightly news as daily fare. That's all a bit of ignorance though. One cannot pull Christ out of his tomb sitting in front of the TV , on some given night in Hoboken, anymore than one can put Him back in the dirt the same way. For old hands it's a proof of it all. For the new hands the incident itself is ancient history. It was just a day. A ground-shattering one, but just a day.

And then the totally random occurs. Complete throw of the dice. Evolution if you want to be cheeky about. Just a freak event out of the clear, blue sky. To set the scene let's say you're...

Let's say someone you know, distantly at best, is whiling an afternoon off in the company of an Atheist, a Retro-Druid, and a closet Lutheran while Men Without Hats is playing on the stereo. This someone, most certainly not myself, is running around the Raccoon City Police Department in high dudgeon and reasonably well armed. This individual bolts through the door into a narrow hallway that leads to the staircase. The staircase leads to the closet below. And the closet below is where the typewriter ribbon will put our protagonist in a state of permanence -- until the memory card dies. There's just one catch for this anonymous, schmuck. Between him and the stairs is one of the shambling undead. Slowly he lifts his revolver up and lines up for a head shot. A shot taken numerous times on this very same hulk of pixels over a decade. And he freezes as I suddenly... he suddenly realizes that that things right there. That thing he's been slaying for ages?

That's the good guy. And he lowers his gun and walks forward.

"Come get me, Jesus!"

Yeh, delivered with all my... his characteristic tact. See? Evolution, it's totally like that.

The Lutheran liked it, but that wasn't the point at all. The Retro-Druid hit the bricks shortly after since the Atheist and I were going rounds on the Zombie theory of Christianity. And how queer is that really? When an Atheist takes the plate to defend the sanctified sobriety and required Victorian trusses of classical Christianity while I'm rapidly winding into drinking a bottle of awesome over Christ, the undead. I've cracked light on it before to be tiresome when I was still trying to balance on that fence. But no, it's correct.

Christ is a zombie. Trump and shout, lake of fire? Shit-tons of zombies. Your mortal shell going in the dirt and you going on? Fuckin' zombie. The horde crawling the earth to get into everyone's brains and gain converts? Mormons. George Romero got it. I was late to the party.

All those folks I know that skulk around with bits of wood... Well, they're likely sharpening up those 2 by 4's right now. But that's vampires, not zombies. And that's the Resurrection for people that start with the notion that you came from dirt and that going back to dirt is a pretty certain finale to things.

The Dude popped out of the grave!

How can that not be staggeringly cool? Yeh yeh, addition. Where's my lumber?

Screw the proof notion, that was for His contemporaries. The proof is all around us in this very day. We're drowning in it's majesty and quantity. (Heh, I say that like I always saw that. I have no shame.) Yet the wood-walkers are carrying on about dry days, the engineering necessary to roll boulders, and judicial consequences for inattentive Praetorians.

Nerds.

Thing is, CS Lewis is in good form as an understated Brit. He's right, and goes right past everything since we're not talking about 'a' Resurrection. So skip the History Channel and just try yourself out. Pull up a picture of Arlington Cemetery and start counting crosses. Now put faces to each, because you're going to be spending a lot of time with them on Monday.

But I play one on TV

2011-04-28T18:31:00.000-07:00

It's not going to be vacuous it it?

"The President wants a constructive and civil debate on the need to fix the broken immigration system so that it meets America’s economic and security needs for the 21st century," a White House official said in a statement. "To do that we need to elevate the debate, and folks like these and those who met with him last week can play an important part in bringing this debate around the country, rising above the politics and false debates that too often dominate when the issue comes up, and really address why it matters economically and for other reasons in a constructive way."

There's nothing more tired then the "we need an amnesty" argument or the "immigration system is broken" variation. If you enforce the Federar immigration laws then there's no need for an amnesty. And if you have an amnesty then there's no point in the Federal laws as you've commuted the sentence of all those millions of criminals. However, given that we only pay lip service to enforcing the Federal law on these issues then the only 'broken' around is the Executive of the United States who refuses to do so. That's not simply Jughead Rex but includes The Cheerleader, Freud's Humidor, The Oilman, The Gipper and The Peanut. There's more I should think, but that's an unbroken chain of things as far back as I've cared to consider the matter. And I'm sketchy on the Peanut. Ignoring him that's a 21 year run of willful refusal to uphold the law as passed by Congress.

Impeachment? Revolution?

Well, it's not so simple. Congress has the authority and requirement to pass 'an uniform Rule of Nautralization' and after 1808 were allowed to prohibit States from migrating or importing whomsoever they saw fit. That is, only after 1808 was Congress allowed to say 'thou shalt not.' It never had the authority to say 'thou must.' Which is generally meaningless as it only takes a single State to allow the importation and residence of persons not banned for enough time as they may fall under the uniform Rule that Congress is supposed to have on the matter.

Thus if Congress doesn't prohibit the importation of Brazilians? California can go hog wild bringing them in on tour buses chartered by the DNC. That was true and remains true. That Amendment only moved one bit of that Uniform rule into a separate Constitutional measure outside the grasp of the States and Congress alike -- and that's birthright citizenship. This is not only the history untaught in civics classes paid for by tax dollars but damnably explicit in the very wording in the unammended Constitution itself. It was to be a 'Rule' not a 'Law.' It was a constant guideline that the States themselves were to follow to the letter and implement, not the Executive itself.

The limit of the Executive's interest in immigration law ends at ensuring that States aren't playing hookie with the requirements for the recordation and procedure. That's the beginning and end of it. If Congress bars Coolies and Missouri tells the feds to pound sand? Now the Executive has cause for action. If Congress doesn't bar Coolies and Missouri does? The Executive gets to pound sand.

Congress is allowed to dictate that States shall not import persons x, y, or z. And it is allowed to require that the States process persons x, y, or z that have met whatever qualifications it so stipulates to record the Naturalization of that individual. And once a Coolie performs that process in Nevada then there's not a thing under the sun that Missouri can say about it.

This is a staggeringly stupid construction, but it is and always has been the legal one. The current Federal laws on this regard are not broken; they are illegal and unjust in a completely different manner than people soundbite about. Congress has made it a rule of law that the rule of man shall prevail. That all persons are barred from importation unless they meet the qualifications. Quotas are fine here but it is the codification in law that the Executive may abstractly allow any random person to be admitted in variance to that as a result of the personal whim of the current Executive that is manifestly unjust and against the character of sound government. It is as well a further example of handing over law making power to the Executive. And in this case a lawmaking power that treads too close for casual comfort to a power Congress itself is barred from: The Bill of Attainder.
Where it's manifestly illegal is that Congress has disbarred the States from implementing the Rule themselves. This is not within Congressional powers to do. Congress may freely bar any race, noationality, or creed and may even put class or total quotas on things as they see fit. What they cannot do is force the Executive to implement what is a mandate put upon the States. Nor can they force the States to allow the importation of people that are not US Citizens. So no, it shouldn't per se be impeachment or revolution against the Federal government that Jughead Rex and his predecessors haven't been doing what they shouldn't be doing anyways. That particular prize belongs to each of the 50 State governments that are busily trying to pass the buck on the issue.

But for the rest with the Executive and Congress? Well, we currently reserve Federal political office as a matter of Social Justice. Because even the mentally handicapped need jobs. Just take Jughead's Hollywood invitations to speak on the issue of the importation of foreign citizens. Top listing was a chick born on US Territory because she presumably has a nigger in the woodpile. Or, in her case, an injun. S'right, she's qualified to direct the nation and inform the Executive of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world, not because of her relevant qualifications for pursuing a career in which she is photographed after being dressed by others. But because she's a wise non-white character, or something.

This should end well.

Abbie Normal

2011-04-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

Ah tribulations. So the drive actually does still work. It's just that there's the fat fingered codger that possess all the fine motor skill of Michael J. Fox on the DT's. Seems these teeny little flat wire thingies are pretty particular about getting but in their snaps. Helps if it wasn't stuck in the grave so long as to find a place to piggyback a 9mm drive. Or someone that would trust an old codger to break their drive enclosure open to give it a spin. No matter. It's alive! Again.

Though it's a bit on the downside that I didn't get a more timely second coming what with getting absolutely jazzed about my first spin past an Easter with more weight than the sweet prey of bunny ears in the wings. I'm still stoked further and tweaked high on sleep fumes and joe tar to boot. Seriously, no seriously, it's a mind bender to gin onto Dawn of the Dead being a philosophical tract rather than a commercial exercise in sudden colors and demonic fetii. Fetuses? I'm surely lacking all necessary gravitas when I state that it is supremely nifty to render ZOMG service to the originator of the genre, the Zombie OG and Leper Lifter: My Lord and Savior. What an absolute trip.

Probably better as it is though given it's an upender I'm still in crazed giddified awe. About right up there with LARPing a ninja to hoist crayons from your kid sister so you can ink in the numbers on your TSR branded d20s. Yeh, well. I don't have a sister and I should probably let that one go right there.

And wonder of wonders, just this morning, the man who released his bith certificate that was burnt in a fire that he wouldn't release even to send a man to jail finally released his birth certificate. Again. Since the topic just wouldn't die after he did/didn't/couldn't/wouldn't release the first time around. Loads of folks refighting over a whether a tampered document is forged or not forged. It's tampered. And none of the arguments are persuasive to either side. It's got all the right stuff in the right place certainly and while I've never been one to accuse Jughead of an Immaculate Conception this digital dropping just doesn't cut it. It looks like a color fax encoding ought with JBIG2 for the black work and JPEG for the rest. But if that's the standard of quality for evidence then give me 20 minutes is MS Paint and I'll be his dad. That'll certainly prove it; and no worries that he's 13 years older than me. 3 years from now I'll Quantum Teleport myself back in time and sow the seeds of destruction by spawning with his mother: The famous Ayn Rand impersonator.

Ooh... Dear Liz T. just recently got on to better things didn't she? Shoot, give me 2 days with MS Paint and I'll be their bastard love child and inheritor of their estate. Glory, fame, money, and power. And a free ride at Columbia like Paps. That's what we used to call him, Paps, when being sarcastic and having Dreams of my Father. In any case they've only ensured that the issue will now never stay buried. Which would be nearly as awesome as Easter if their were more cricket bats.

If God is dead...

2011-04-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

EaaS offered up a link to an interesting video that makes two claims. The first that put options are insurance and the second that selling such insurance on your own product is fraud. Maybe. The first time I've considered the notion is right here as I type this.

One of the great difficulties for folks looking into the financial sector from the barren weeds in the outfield is that the language spoken between the pitcher and catcher isn't simply a bit of reasonable jargon. It's what you get if you leave mechanical engineers in a strip-joint too long. You get things like double-reverse-Bangkok-side-straddles and other such nonsense.

You might think I'm being tongue in cheek, but it's long and valued tradition in the financial world to try to sell someone on an old scam with new terms. That's perhaps unfair as it's a long standing tradition of sales-wonks. But in the financial world this tradition is indeed settled and centered on the notion that you put your mark's peepers about three foot low and three foot back from a randy girl doing gymnastics on a chromed piece of pipe. That's how it is.

As for options there's very little interesting about them as can be seen if you put in them in a normal business context. IF you make a contract with a business to lock-in a future unit price on their product then you've engaged in a call option. In the future, if their product price is more than your guarantee then you have the leverage via the contract to force the price agreed upon. However, if the unit price of the product is less than what you'd contracted to then it's highly likely you'll forget all about the contract and take the better price offered.

A put option is the same thing from the other side of the trade. Rather than the purchaser you're the seller. And such a contract gives you the ability to force the purchaser to pick up your product at a price agreed to by contract. Admittedly it looks a little odd at first blush, but for a corn farmer this is the normal course of things when dealing with purchasers looking to lock in production and exclusivity from their suppliers, the good folks of Iowa.

In the financial world we just head on down to the local skin-joint and apply the same concept to options as to everything else: That it's directly tradeable and has a market value. This is the single key difference between the financial world and most sensibilities. No item belongs to anyone but the current bearer of it. And everything can be traded.

It's a singular difference and a reasonable one for anyone who agrees or disagrees. Normal folk far from the gilt halls of finance consider a contract to be between the individuals that were party to that contract. Only. Financial folk consider the contract to be an open-ended bit between whichever random parties happen to have possession on one side and the stern looking policeman forcing the other side to take responsibility for it.

There's a legal principle that a contract is a meeting of the minds. That it cannot be valid unless both parties gain something by it through the compromise. It's a bit gauzy as a notion but it's a storied concept in Western legal traditions. In extrema this means that no contract is tradeable as a market good as it only applies to the signatories of the contract. If that's your sense of it then most financials are fraudulent on their face. They purport to be contracts with no signatories.

It's only when we start carving exceptions into judicial practice that it gets a bit messy. There being so many current exceptions to things that it's best only to say that it's not a valid contract unless it makes direct reference -- in the letterhead -- to the particular case law being used as guidance for the ability to settle the matter in court. Written law doesn't apply here, natch. Jurists having long ago given up any pretense at their abilities to reading comprehension.

But can you consider options to be insurance? Why not, I consider keeping around two 9/16 box wrenches insurance also. But that's risk management, a hedge, rather than an insurance policy. An insurance policy is based on the notion of paying someone else a premium for a contract that states that they will make you whole to face or replacement value should an object be lost or damaged inadvertently. It is correct to state that you can use options as a risk management metric -- a hedge -- but it is incorrect to state that someone will reimburse you par value of the bond for holding an option contract against the bond.

It is distinctly different. Though should I sell you an options contract while purporting it to be an insurance policy? That's absolutely fraud. If I told you bearer options contract was invalid historically, that would be fine. If I told you that we ought hold it the same today, then that's fine also. However, if I told you that courts wouldn't honor options contracts then that would be fraud also -- if I were trying to sell you something else.

As a particular matter I don't see options contracts as being valid despite that the only money I've made in the markets is by playing them. But that's a matter for the electoral polls as the courts most certainly will honor them. However they are not insurance policies either, and it is incorrect to call them such. They are simply bets indistinct from internet poker despite being treated in a far different manner under inked law and by the bathrobe set with their toy hammers.

Now one can certainly claim that it's still illegal for the Federal Reserve to buy and sell options against US Treasuries. And that's certainly correct by the ink on the page regarding the creation and operation of the Fed Res. But then we're all far beyond the quaint notion of a neighborhood tough that it's only illegal if you get caught. It'd be nice if we were only beyond that into the notion that it's only illegal if you get convicted. But for that we have to see someone be charged first; and that ain't gonna happen.

But is it generally fraud to offer to buy back your own debt at a discounted premium? I can't see why it would be unless you maintain that you should only be in debt if you must be. Rather than utilizing debt as an option to avoid emptying the kitty in one go. The entire notion, sans the tradeable contracts, underlies the notion of short sales in the real estate market. And certainly, there's nothing fraudulent about a debtor forgiving a portion of their debt. Which is precisely what happens when we're discussing put option contracts as in the video; the whole notion is just done in advance at predetermined levels.

So options are not insurance despite that hedging your bets -- betting against your own bets -- shares some similar features. Nor is it fraud to offer to buy back your debt at a discount; even if it is a bit unsavory to sell potential future debt forgiveness at a profit to your creditor. It most certainly is a violation of the Federal Reserve Act despite that no one will ever cross such a high hurdle as to have a tense conversation with anyone from the Department of Justice.

But the only real question is whether the Federal Reserve is allowed to announce the price they will pay for US Treasuries. Let's say the Fed Res didn't actually sell the put options. Instead they just published that they would buy a certain number of US Treasuries at a given price. That would be perfectly legal and, if you accept the existence of the Fed Res in the first place, morally fine as well. Functionally, it's not far different from how they buy the blasted things in the first place; despite that their a bit more coy about the price they will pay.

But that makes the video's remaining notion out to be that it is illegal for the Fed Res to announce that it is willing to buy the only thing it is legally allowed to purchase. Not the fellow's point, but it's all that remains. Options contracts are legal whether they should be or not. In either case it doesn't rise to the level of fraud to sell them, even against the debt you owe. (Though it's technically the Fed Res selling purchase options against the debt you == personally -- owe. With all due gratitude of those that receive your Congress(wo)an's graft, natch.) This all despite that it's clearly a violation of law that will never see conviction since charges will never be brought.

TLDR: So there's the end of that stream of consciousness. And far too much seriousness paid to the wrong problems. After all, it doesn't matter which laws would be theoretically violated when it's plainly clear that we have no laws at all. So if you're at all concerned about such things it is worth reminding Eric Holder of this while you're anally raping him with a framing hammer in some dark D.C. alley. After all, that's only illegal on paper also.

Ol' Duct Tape rides again

2011-04-16T18:02:00.000-07:00

We toss about all manner of aphorisms without thinking too deeply into what they mean. It's usually unnecessary to do so as we use them most for bits of common wisdom. An undercurrent of intent lays underneath all of them that suffices to carry the right meaning through. They are slogans.

Which works until it doesn't. One that plagued me as a Boo Radley child was the classic: "There's a silver lining behind every cloud." The first time I'd ever run through that phrase is when I was challenged as to what it meant. Which obviously means the sun must be behind the cloud causing the edges to light up. Right?

As long as we're all running loose in the land of symbolism and secret handshakes that's a fine statement with little to disappoint. But when folks take it as a literal affair it all goes out the window. It's a hazard of all such things.

Another favorite of mine and lately of lots is the withered hand: "We need to increase taxes or reduce spending." As long as we're all on the same page we all understand it to be a simple statement of balancing your checkbook. That income has to come up or spending has to come down. A fine sentiment and wise if one doesn't want to be in the dock for bounced checks as that happens to be a criminal offense in many jurisdictions. But the literal reality is quite at odds with the literal take on the statement.

At the government level all appropriations are necessary for the purpose of enacting and enforcing the laws of the land. Certainly there's graft and corruption as with anything else large and opaque. But the concern is over the broad picture in the budget. If the government is, and intends to, enforce the laws they have enacted then they simply need whatever they need in terms of resources to accomplish that task. Laws being laws and on the books they are supposed to be executed faithfully by whomever is tasked with the police powers in the relevant jurisdiction.

The accurate statement here then is: "We must raise taxes or repeal laws."

One could say that this is more accurate to boots on the ground than the normal version, but that would likely be in error. It's without doubt that poll after poll comes out showing that the bulk of the American electorate -- and any other country in a similar fiscal spot -- wants all the same laws. Just cheaper. It's a nonsense notion, but it is what some people have in heart when they trot out the trusty, rusty saws.

One more that's seeing a great deal of current usage is some variation on: "No poor man ever gave me a job." Certainly if you were raised chewing on silver spoons and have only received paid servitude from those chewing on gold spoons then this is true both literally and in Dan Brown's land of steganography. But the general sentiment is that the rich create jobs out of thin air by random consequence of the quantity of ink spilled over their avant garde social habits.

In fairness most folks define a job as being the happy butler on a steady payroll in some cat's personal fiefdom. But to the degree that such is true then the rich -- the owner's of capital -- do not themselves have jobs. That they are simply the productive unemployed leveraging their packrat habit. And if that's the sentiment we prefer then we ought say: "No employed man ever gave me a job." But that's so contradictory to things that none let it pass their lips.

So can it be salvaged?

A little tale about the Duct Tape Frankenstein that keeps me connected here virtually with the world in a sea of ASCII. Ol' Duct Tape decided that it had simply had quite enough of it's old hard drive and handily ate the bearings in a fit of pique. The repairs required both a new hard drive and a set of screwdrivers tiny enough to make a watchmaker smile.

The screwdrivers I acquired in trade for labor with a lady in worse financial shape then myself. Which is really saying something extraordinary. But that job I got from a woman one step closer to a park bench then a currently well-installed sofa surfer. Which is the poor getting a job from the destitute.

The hard drive I acquired with cash paid on the barrel head for in trade for skills to a small business owner. Which might suit the desired definitions of our studied platitude if it were not that he was making less income as the owner of capital then his own employees. None of whom were more than scratching at the bottom side of the middle class box to begin with.

An objection can be made that the business owner had wealth defined as gadgets, bits, and bobs collected and so should and could tally those as what someone else thinks that owner "ought" be able to sell them for right now. If he were to sell them in a mythical market of the Armchair Captain's preference. But if disposing of wealth made us wealthy then we'd all be richest when penniless and with nary but a single change of close. While very Zen-like it simply doesn't pass the laught test. And it ignores that even those earning minimum wage very often are the owner's of captial themselves via their 401k's and other retirement vehicles.

Ol' duct tape rides again, not because the wealthy looked fondly on me for great economic justice, but because 'jobs' are the natural consequence of having different skills, capital goods or time available then the person on the other side of the trade. Indeed, most jobs out there exist for no better reason than that the poor trade with you or your employer for want of those things that they do not otherwise have. To the degree that one believes that jobs can be 'created' is the same degree at which one wants to dispossess others of the ability to own capital themselves.

To actively assist in the 'creation' of trade one must actively dispossess others via the law. Be it by guilds, cartels, monopolies, currency devaluation, licensing, or various property laws. Or simply by encouraging a professional class of the ignorant via public education that focuses on birth control and biology over math and vocational skills.

Or, natch, by a massive paperwork production under a regulatory compliance scheme. Such as Sarbannes-Oxley or the annual genuflection to the IRS.

The only salvage here is to rewrite this common bit of common wisdom to reflect our desire to generate a national codependent class. Which I do believe a Mr. Marx has covered quite well even if not much ink is spilled on the parties he attends these days.

Best man for the job

2011-03-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

Let's see if I have this straight: Qaddafi, tent-dweller par excellence, is making better progress in the last several against Al Qaeda -- while we bomb his toys -- than we made against Al Qaeda while we bombed their toys. Over the last several years. And a pair of presidents.

Obama ought really consider hiring the dear General to manage all of our wars. Sorry. Kinetic calisthenics. Not only could we leave the Air Force at home and save on the fuel and munition costs, but we could bring our boys home in time for this year's Independence Day celebration.

Babelfish

2011-03-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Every now and again another piece of philosopher will attempt to trot out some possible agreement between Materialism and Morality. Something far beyond a blind watchmaker to a clockwork universe in which the gears have the ability to exercise individual choices over their linkage. A pure oxymoronic sensible only while breathing green fumes and inhaling orange cheese doodles.

It's a nifty headwrencher that requires folding in some definition of random. Not random as physics has it where there's a centered fuzz due miniscularity and measurement error in dealing with the clockworks. But random in pop jargonal Douglas Adams form. Where firing geese through small tunnels to measure their De Broglie wavelength causes Welsh hares to sprout wings and bomb Westminster Palace with flower pots. Random as a notion of a complete absence of causality.

And so there is no morality but we should prevaricate politically against the death penalty because killing people is immoral.

It makes perfect sense if you're strung out on bacon flavored peyote buttons, but it's a bit dense otherwise. If there's no causality anywhere then one cannot create causality by begging bigger sperm whales. Adding more perfect disorder to existing perfect disorder can not spontaneously generate summer fashions. Which all leads to the perfectly bizarre notion that these tenured philosophical chairs have less in common with empiricism than the color of the sounds that Timothy Leary tasted.

The issue they don't grubble is that causlity is the maternalism of Ronald McReagan's trans-oleinic blatherskite mesas. Whithout skirp the general marpan lost paychits en verde gravitas.

Which is the end of all discussion on this matter.

Or, if you have half a brain, you'll probably better accept the notion that universal causality is the causation of Materialism. Without the former the latter won't follow. Though stating things as such is a little bit hard on the paycheck. Since Materialism is the only scientific principle to base things on it simply means that there is no morality. Not moral responsibility. Morality.

The entire field of discourse becomes a nonsensical hallucination in which things cannot be other than what they are. Have been what they were destined to be from the birth of the universe. And will be exactly what they will be. That anyone thinks different is simply an artifact of the way the atoms lined up as a macroscopic ensemble of well-ordered physical laws. But to acknowledge this is to have the entire field disappear in a puff of logic.

So we have the Materialists who deny any notion of Morality. The various religious sorts that postulate varied degrees of Morality and causality violation within the physical universe. And university professors who are entirely sure that there paycheck depends on the notion that I am wearing a breakfast pastry.

Proof of Competence

2011-03-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

Proof that we know exactly what we're doing:

"Yemen is particularly worrying… because we know that al-Qaeda has been particularly active in Yemen," he said.

"For the Yemen to collapse into instability, for there to be yet another failed state into which al-Qaeda and other elements of transnational terrorism might be drawn, would represent a very potent threat.

We've been in Afghanistan for 7 years running putting the screws to the explosive goat-herders. We're desperately worried about the explosive goat-herders getting a toehold in Yemen. And we're helping them acquire the State of Libya.

Waitaminute.

Don't fret none, we've no intention to arm them. Unlike the US did when the Russki's were rolling over the explosive goatherders. This is proof that the NATO set can learn. Why arm Al Qaeda when you can give them an entire country so that they can manufacture their own weapons? This whole sordid affair is the Transnationalist equivalent of eminent domain.

Nato: "Ah pox! That cave there, mate? That cave there is a right sight and unfit for habitation by humans or goats. So I'll cut you a deal. Why don't you get your laurels up off those poppy fields and peep on this nice Mediterranean Villa I found for you.

Very nice, it is. Beach, surf, sand, and a lot of women that need telling about the niqab. Best yet you don't have to leg it half-way around the world to get close to the airplanes you like borrowing. It's just a short jaunt across the Med on your fancy new yacht."

Goatman: "Allahu Akhbar!"

Nato" "Oy, I have no idea what that means. I know you're just prepping lunch but it still makes me nervous if you're excited when wave that pigsticker around. Be a good chap and come with me. I'll show you some Greek ruins that need defacing."

Funding Sources

2011-03-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

The same ol' refrain:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week released a report that said taxing people based on how many miles they drive is a possible option for raising new revenues and that these taxes could be used to offset the costs of highway maintenance at a time when federal funds are short.

If you're not up on this the current proposal is based on the notion of tracking the vehicles through an installed GPS system. Any professional driver could run on a lavish rant about the technical ignorance of this idea and how trivial such systems are to defeat and defraud. But the point here is just why this proposal is being floated again.

It's tempting to put the blame on CAFE standards and Federal subsidies for hybrid vehicles. Tempting, but misplaced. Certainly there's a lot of truth behind stating that spending tax dollars to fund private purchases of vehicles that don't use gasoline will reduce tax revenues received from gasoline sales. But that condition can happen with or without government subsidy and incentive borne against purchasing decisions. The central issue is that government is funding itself on the basis of the pace and scale of economic transactions.

There's a truism here that anytime the usage of a given taxed commodity declines the government dependent on that revenue will attempt to raise the per unit tax on that commodity. We make a special distinction here for taxation but it's no different than any normal company either. If the quantity of sales declines faster than its ability to shed fixed costs the per unit price will have to increase for the company to stay profitable. That is, in business; and no less is true of any of the different levels of government. It's just how the math works out.

A current fashion in speaking political funding is to break things into differing taxation structures. Sales, excise, duty, income, capital gains, etc. But they are all variations on the same theme that we're taxing the economic transfer of goods between two parties. Even modern property taxes fall under this rubric, based as they are on the estimated economic transaction value. The size of government becomes directly based on the quantity of transactions.

This leads to the blinkered outcome that taxes go up when the quantity of sales, or the sale price, decreases. Neither Left or Right is any disagreement about the notion that increasing the per unit consumption mordida of government the less sales -- and/or profit -- will be made in that sector. So we have the outcome that the size of government must decrease when the economy does. Or the size of government must stay at least static by raising the taxes and further crushing the economy underneath it's weight. This is, in popular granola buzzwords, an unsustainable model.

Yet this is the entirety of government funding in most Western countries. With it is the implied notion that government is only as indispensable as economic growth. That when we're doing dandy we need ever more intrusive government and when we're putting catsup on boiled leather we need none at all. This may not make any difference if you're a fan of Rightside economic theories, but it's directly contrary the various Leftside visions of things.

However if you're not waving the Black Flag around then you accept some variation of the argument that government is a necessity in some regard. Or at least what government provisions is necessary, be it social welfare through wealth distribution or by maintaining a sufficient military force. This doesn't seem to be too related. But the concept is that government is necessary, period. Not that government is only necessary for wealthy countries. But that latter is precisely the implication of funding government based on variously obfuscated sales taxes.

Certainly it's unfashionable and unfathomable to suggest that government be funded on per capita or poll taxes. Though this was precisely the case for the US Federal government prior the passage of the 16th Amendment and gives light to one of two reasons for having the Census Bureau around. If what government provides is crucial then it is too important to pin to the schizophrenic vagaries of the business cycle.

There's no question whatsoever that a flat dollar figure applied per head plain or per head at the voting booth is a regressive tax in the truest sense. Or, if you're a fan of the service model, it's a regressive pricing model. Libertarians will be the first in line to scream that it's a forced purchase at gun point; and they're right for what it's worth. Government has all the worst features of both monopolies and Cosa Nostra protection rackets. On none of these points can anyone raise a credible disagreement.

None of which are good answers either. Rent and subsistence substenance are both regressive pricing models as well. That's just the nature of things and it's generally accepted that both must be paid for even by the poor. If what government provides is truly necessary then this is no less true. Beyond which government will always have a regressive effect no matter how the tax structures are muddled up, hidden, or prevaricated about in how we label them in legislation. All these games only serve to obfuscate the cost of it so that voters can feel morally clean about things.

If you cannot justify the cost of government on the basis of a flat per capita dollar figure then you cannot justify the size and reach of that government.

As a closing note and a memento of good faith for any on the Leftside. Screw it, let me be honest, it's a manner to let the Leftside and the Libertarians have after one another. But this is about general revenue. You're perfectly free to claim I stated that a wealth distribution program is kosher here so long as the funding for that program is taken via a per capita tax. That it works out so long as the distribution goes directly from rich to poor without any skimming in the middle. That's not my argument here, but it would fall under it. Knock yourself out, kid.

Sign me up

2011-03-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

You know someone's knee deep in their own argument when they embark on a campaign of wordsnitchery for PR purposes. Simply witness the newest snowjob in the lingua franca of war coming from the the Whitehouse: (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds)

Now, White House officials are referring to the war in Libya not as a war but as a "kinetic military action." As common as "kinetic" might be among those in government, it still seems likely to strike members of the public as a euphemism that allows the Obama administration to describe a war as something other than a war.

That's right Dames and Dandies, it's no longer war. Oh sure, we've still got the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Christmas. But the decades have seen us go from War War to Police Actions, to Humanitarian Cruise Missiles, on past to Preemptive Democracy, to... Calesthenics. Because the proper way to break things and kill bad guys is to line up on the beach in Digi's and do jumping jacks for the camels.

This is a new low that should be entirely unexpected. After all Al Qaeda is on our side in the Libyan Festival. You knew that when you heard the French were spearheading this little shindig. Or if all you knew is that the only recent State support for Osama and the 40 Thieves was all on Uncle Sugar's dime.

When you see a government fuck-off sinking for a full-on swan dive in a cement bathing suit you know you're probably living under a dictator installed by the US. Or, as it turns out, just the newest installment of a US President. These sorts of realizations get people into heated discussions of the necessary and proper reach of restrictions on Liberty. This typically involves a lot nationalism by those that wish they were in their country and those that wish they were in another.

Simply because I like bandwagons I'll throw my hat in the ring with the People's Republic of China. A fun-filled place where they've installed execution chambers in minivans to help the circuit judges with their case loads. From whence we find out?

Chinese health authorities are renewing a push to ban smoking in indoor public places, adding more venues like hotels and restaurants as of May 1, though still excluding many workplaces.

That they're trying very hard and very sincerely to catch up to the level of micromanaged control that we take for granted here in the US of A. This is far more hazardous then it seems as they're getting pretty close to making a twin of Bloomberg and no one, but no one, fights more nasty than close siblings. While they aren't there quite yet we can expect a nuclear exchange to occur once they close the gap by refuse to bring charges against law breakers. Though, honestly, I can't see why they don't now to save on fuel costs for their death vans.

But the topic that really gets people in a Spring burr is taxation. April 15th... Ah, wait. It's the 18th this year since we can't get the trains to run on time; there's a van for that. Anyways, April 18th is getting closer and so the tax reform advocates are getting louder. A fun time when we're told a flat tax is a regressive tax. That our current structure is regressive. Wait, progressive. Let's just call the camel humped thing reprogressive. And everyone is kindly disinclined to mention the non-deductible 15.3% income tax that everyone pays for SS. Well, not everyone, you can get out of it if you make enough. But all of these are small-freedom-fries to the hairy Parisian in the middle of the room.

Sales taxes. Where some sods think that 10% of a lesser quantity of money is a larger percentage than 10% of greater quantity of money. Fun stuff that. But what they're trying to argue is that the strict dollar quantity has a greater effect on the purchasing decisions of those that can't purchase anything to begin with. They're entirely correct mind you but they can't say that because they wordsnitched the argument out of existence a while back.

At any rate this is why most sane places exempt food and rent from sales taxes. It's not a bad plan and does give good work in helping the poor get more things in the hatch. Though for whatever reason they don't seem keen on making the same general exemptions for shampoo, toilet paper, or feminine hygiene products. And why should they really? Let the silly bint bleed on the grass at the highway off ramp while she's pestering people with a cardboard sign requesting beer and charity. It's not like she has a job or anything.

Aside from a fair argument about public sanitation when you're packing more fiber in one end without an economic recourse to taking care of the excess on the other, this is just the tapestry of the land. General statement. There's some fine places like Omaha, Nebraska where they have a bit more care about avoiding feedlot parfum near low income housing. Though this won't last long if Mayor Jim Suttle gets his way.

Mayor Jim Suttle went to Washington Tuesday flush with ideas for how federal officials could help cities like Omaha pay for multibillion-dollar sewer projects.

Among the items on his brainstorming list: a proposal for a 10-cent federal tax on every roll of toilet paper you buy.

No I didn't mention his party affiliation because I'm writing a serious piece of journalism here. Which requires that thou shalt not name Democrats. Ah crap, pretend I didn't say that last; I'm trying to buck for a spot at the Whitehouse pressers. Suttle, not being keen on sibling rivalry, is going to make sure that China stays number 2 in the world by taxing number 2 here. Naturally he took the piss on this and wants the Feds to tax your ass in his stead. To be fair its not like Nebraska has any trees on which to levy a tax. And all potty humour aside it's plain that the whole country is going to shit.

While not perfect there's still more Liberty and actual, if harsh, rule of law in People's Republic of China and one might suggest that I quit bleeding down my leg, stop flying a sign, and get the hell out of Obama's great patriotic wasteland. It's a fair point: Love it or leave it, they say whenever it's their guy at the top.

It's a fair cop and they've certainly got the jobs there. Heck, they even preferentially hire white-ish guys over there for various white collar positions; a criminal offence over here. But Unfortunately it's illegal for me to get a passport, emigrate from the country, or relinquish my citizenship. And that's all aside the necessary bravery to dodge a rain of Hellfire missiles for pointing out the President's thin skin; a topic General Qaddafi is becoming keenly acquainted with. So I'm not going to start building ultralight aircraft out of roofing tin until Communist China offers asylum to political refugees escaping the Land of the Free. So for now I think I'll simply hide squatting behind a bush if I wish to think deep morning thoughts and have a cigarette in peace.

Selection Bias

2011-03-23T06:09:00.000-07:00

NRO has a piece up giving quick summary of a bit of the latest fun out of academia. A pair of studies that claim that there's no discrimination in academic culture along political lines. The all perceived disparity in hiring between Leftists and Rightists is strictly an artifact of self-selection on the part of students and those interested in becoming faculty. So more wasted money on deep and interesting studies to determine if water is wet.

Of course it's selection bias. So what?

Auto mechanics are typically male for the same reason. Strippers tend to be female for the same reason. Those interested in revitalizing blighted inter-city zones tend to be gay. Nurses and teachers tend to be women. Middle managers tend to be White. Asians tend to create monocultural economic zones. Blacks tend to like chicken.

But don't dare, as a black chef, put chicken on the menu on any day honoring a Black of any stretch or you're guilty of anti-Black bigotry.

Racism, Misogyny, and every other form of bigotry are always the result of self-selection. When self-selection is institutionalized we get institutional bigotry. And the podium pounding about why the State must coming in swinging Police batons to make it stop.

Why that last?

There's a central notion that you'll find in various Leftside academic fields that we like those that are similar to us. Those that are similar to us in appearance, views, tastes, hobbies, socio-economic status. Race. Gender. Gloryhole. Politics. This notion is shot through Sociology, Psychology, and Gender Studies. You'd think it might be pervasive in Psychiatry despite that it isn't; the personal preference there being drug usage.

The entire reason is due to feedback. If we are hiring people we tend to hire people similar to us. People we like, or think we will like, based on a very short time in front of us. The hiring regime generates a monoculture based on the interviewer. If it's pervasive to a career then those that are on the outs will self-select out of pursuing that field.

From the other side, if there exist any disparities in interest in a field to begin with then whatever suspect class dominates becomes more likely to do the hiring. And then we have our feedback in place and the whole thing accelerates into Little China.

This is a 101-level notion that gets trotted out to every student of the Soft Sciences. And it's the very notion behind putting in State sanction for those that violate this norm of human behaviour. Various Right-wing sites are accusing the study authors of white-washing -- Oops, `glossing` rather -- over this to claim that academia isn't bigoted.

Of course it is. That's exactly what these studies show. Consistent with all good science of the social dimension we are a Mississippi summer away from segregated drinking fountains in the halls of Harvard. One for Social Scientists. And a garden faucet for Conservatives. The science is settled.

And really, screw science. If you don't know this as a token of common wisdom then you are a pathological Autistic that was chained to the wall of the root cellar and schooled by Hyenas. A not unheard of manner to raise children within city limits.

Now you can claim that these studies exonerate Academia from claims of bigotry. And certainly Academics are free to claim this also. But only if they retire from the field as they're obviously doing something other than science.

Or they were never doing science to begin with.

The heart of science is the ability to slay mythologies by repeatedly poking testable tenets of some given blinkered belief about the manner in which the world works. Given an adherence to science then the political and religious beliefs of the participants are merely unfortunate at the worst. Such personal biases, held by everyone, can only create self-selection effects in what topic is chosen to be put to the rigorous fires. But they cannot change the outcome of those tests. So the only question is whether or not we should hire Young-Earth Creationinsts to teach Biology or not.

Wait, what?

It's loudly and proudly claimed by Darwin-fans that a YEChead simply cannot teach biology properly due the religious bias involved. That the belief in things proven false by science prevent the YEChead from ever performing science on that subject. Fair enough.

Mathematics and Computer Science have shown that planned economies are not-computational tractable and that Capitalist-style random walks provide better heuristic outcomes. Sociology has shown that Socialism only works under high social trust and stout racial, sexual, religious, and political monocultures. Psychology has shown that humans are stoutly non-rational. Psychiatry have shown that we're all drug-addled morons. And Economics doesn't make testable predictions.

Yet Left wing ideology states that we can have successful planned economies in a melting pot culture since we're all rational animals; and that this can be managed by macroeconomic incentives.

Which is all directly contrary to actual science. So if we hold that YECheads can't reasonably teach biology then we must also hold that Left-wingers should be banned from teaching all soft sciences except PoliSci. And that this violation of the Freedom of Association is justified by State funding and a compelling State interest in a scientifically literate citizenry.

So yes, there is nothing but a self-selection bias involved here; as they the study authors have shown. This having turned the education of the Soft Sciences into a Federally funded religious seminary and a stout violation of the 1st Amendment. So I'm sure the academics will be the first in line to prevaricate for Federal law to restrict curricula and hiring in their field.

The Fallacy of the Fallacy

2011-03-22T03:57:00.000-07:00

Coming up on the heels of Japan's offshore rock n' roll festival was bound to be a raft of daft on Bastiat's glaziers. The Broken Window Fallacy gets trotted out yet again by two camps making a Fallacy of the Fallacy. Essentially the Keynesians and the Austrians.

The Neo-Keynesians make a mockery by stating that Bastiat didn't account for aggregate demand and the circulation of money. They are Neo-Keynesians however. So you know now that you don't need do more than crib Wikipedia to put these economic ignorants under the bus:

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

The Austrians make a mockery by stating that Bastiat claimed that a broken windows wouldn't result in an increase of aggregate demand and the circulation of money. They are Austrians however. So you know now that you don't need do more than crib... Oh hell with it. You already know the punchline.

The Fallacy of the Broken Window Fallacy is treating money as wealth and nothing else. Wealth qua wealth is simply the creation and maintenance of artifacts through human industry. But what about land? Humans don't create land.

No, but they create deeds for that land.

Bastiat's point is only and ever about the creation and maintenance of the artifacts themselves and not the exchange of existing artifacts. That if you replace a broken window with a new window you end up with the same amount of windows you began with. Bastiat's only assumption is that the 6 Francs would have been exchanged for something else entirely absent vandalous children.

That opens up only one valid critique, and a Keynesian one at that: That if destruction pulls money out of savings and causes it to circulate it can result in creation of more artifacts than if it had not. But for this to be the case the one broken window must lead to the production of a new window and a new pair of shoes. But that's only true if the destructively forced circulation of money encourages humans that otherwise do not produce artifacts to start producing artifacts.

So either the lackabouts need to be forced into slave labor by the State or the they must be encouraged by increased scarcity of labour pushing the exchange price of their labour upwards. Skipping the gulags this requires this requires that demand always exceed the currency supply if we're to pretend we can avoid business cycles. That the shopkeep earns more money than he earns so that he can spend more money than he has to drive up closed prices on the shoes he can't otherwise afford to purchase.

That's simply not going to happen unless you crank up the printing press. However, in the very short term, it is possible to have this happen if and only if money is liberated from savings and circulated. Once the reconstruction burns out the demand will fall until the price of labour declines below the appetites of those that will again check back out. But it requires savings. Printing money simply devalues the money relative itself; it's a net zero. Savvy sorts should recognize the short-term notion is Keynes counter-cyclical spending argument rather than the Neo-Keynesian pablum.

So why do governments focus so deeply on the Keynesian notion of monetary circulation? Why is it that they consider the velocity of money to be crucial to wealth?

Taxes. It's crucial to the government's income -- future wealth -- and not the wealth of it's society. Sales, Income, Excise, Capital Gains and Duties are all well recognized as the same thing. Less well understood is that the Estate tax and Property taxes based on aggregate sales prices are exactly the same thing. Every normal and modern taxation source is predicated on taking a nibble out of transferring an artifact from one person to another. Or simply taking a nibble out of your refusal to transfer an artifact to someone else at a value set by others.

Yet measuring wealth in such a manner has nothing to do with producing artifacts. Only the real or imagined transfer of them as judged by the State's ability to take a fraction of them whenever it chooses. So long as that remains true then those that wish to make the State wealthy at the expense of its own citizens will always judge forcible dispossession and destruction of artifacts to be the health of the State. That is the Fallacy of the Broken Window. And that is how the GDP is measured.

Life is funny that way

2011-03-22T00:52:00.000-07:00

Just when you think the POTUS comedy hour is tapped out we get the fierce moral urgency of Libyan Death Camels. It's a Monty Python skit in which Al Jolson plays the part of the US President sitting Swami on Napoleon's coattails for the sake of engaging in European Colonialism in Africa due the price of commodities.

For decades it's been preached from high academic towers that Caucausian American citizens ought carry a genetic guilt trip since Euroweenies have a habit of raping and murdering the denizens of the Dark Continent while marching snappy to a fife in passing by. Gold, Diamonds, you name it. Bow your head, Cracker! The French are on the march for oil.

There's no mistake that this is, unlike Iraq, a true war for oil. Hardly shocking and brought to you by the same countries that were perfectly happy letting the Lockerbie bomber loose to secure light, sweet crude from the same African coast a short time back.

So what? Wars are always and ever about resources or retribution.

The pregnant pause coming mid-screech from the Abortionist Left is simply icing on the cake. But it's not near as humorous as Obama playing Uncle Tom to Sarkozy. No greater mockery can be made of the American Left, and America itself, than for the crypto-Kenyan Golfer in Chief to make all his tough decisions from a beach in Rio. To spill American blood in Africa for European mercantalism. And then claim credit for the whole thing. An eminently French bit of cheek.

What is not entertaining is that our historic president, half-born in the last and 57th State of Hawaii, found Congressional approval -- as required by law -- of less weight then the color of paper umbrella in his drink. This is not the same as dickering over whether an AUMF is a proper declaration of war or whether it's a handy onomatopoeia on televised Batman serials. It's a flat-out Clintonesque affair that one really ought have come to expect from the American Left.

"Oy look! They's be chillins over there! Get the tanks and torch 'em!"

However it cannot be accepted or allowed that the very people that have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution are getting happily kinetic in the Mediterranean in knowing violation of that oath. From the Joint Chiefs all the way down to the guy running buckets of steam there exists a requirement that they tell Al Jolson to sod off until he can get properly Mr. Smith and back legally cleansed with lye-soap made from the fat of the most Socially Just Lawyers.

Or even young adults schooled on the public dime. I'm still assured that even they can manage a 4th Grade reading level.

For all those that rely on the good graces, culture, and sound oaths of them good ol' Southron boys to never turn their musket barrels your way? This is the end of that argument for all time. When you have a mercenary Army you get mercenaries. Apparently this is too shocking for those folks that thought Fukushima was Karmic payback for Roosevelt allowing Pearl Harbor to happen.

So with any luck my good humour can be restored by finding a Left argument about how the spent American blood and treasure will serve the South right. That there's poetic justice in farm boys putting life and limb out in the killing of African natives to secure good prices on Italian gasoline. Because, Abraham Lincoln.

With a bow on top

2011-03-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

At least we start to get final conformation of internal discussions about the Daiichi Disaster. Not the plant, the handling of the plant in its death throes:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) told the government on March 14 that it wanted to withdraw all of its workers from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, it has been learned.

TEPCO's suggestion came two days after a cooling system failure caused by the March 11 quake and tsunami triggered a hydrogen blast at the plant's No. 1 reactor. Though Prime Minister Naoto Kan rejected the proposal, the finding suggests that the power company was aware from an early stage that damage at the plant could develop into a nuclear disaster exposing workers to high levels of radiation.

Translation: TEPCO knew the plant was not salvageable with their personnel and equipment on hand. They also knew it had reached the point where death would be dealt in curing the problems.

Shortly after 4 a.m. on March 15, Kan summoned TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu to the Prime Minister's Office and told him pulling out was not an option. He added that a joint countermeasures headquarters would be set up.

Afterwards, the prime minister visited TEPCO's head office in Tokyo and said, "This is not a matter of TEPCO going under; it's about what will become of Japan."

Tranlation: Kan pulled an Obama. You'll note, for all the platitude, that the JDF didn't show up until long after.

"Saying, 'I won't allow you to pull out,' is like saying, 'Get exposed to radiation and keep going until you die,'" one member of the company commented.

That's called an occupational hazard. Suck it up, boys. If you want to gripe start asking where the JDF got itself scarce to.

You knew this was coming

2011-03-19T00:26:00.000-07:00

No clairvoyance needed here or any statements about the Fed Res, unjust government, or anything else. Bob von NotHaus, a man with an extremely cool name -- got convicted for his activities setting up the Liberty Dollar shtuff.

The fun bit, if you go through the scribbled notes from the trial is the Numism... Numatist... Numismaticatistatron... Eh, `Coin Dude` is that the silver Liberty Dollar design was too similar to US Coinage based on the currency symbol, currency word, motto, face on the obverse, and torch on the reverse.

Torch?

I'm not a coin buff by any stretch by I'sa useta have some old copper and silver bits and I never heard of a freakin' torch. Fair cop as it turns out. You'll find the image of the Statute of Liberty's hand and torch, Olympic Torch, and Wavy lines; which are supposed to be Olympic Flames. Who knew?

After all these 3 reverse decorations are hidden in a list of 221 different coin designs produced by the US mint from 1982 on. Or rather, at least 3. Since the US Mint has produced so many designs that they can't even provide images for all those that they still consider standard and current money. And that doesn't even cover all the older coins that are still considered legal tender.

For basic design and decoration issues the best we can say is that you are going to be utterly incapable of distinguishing US coinage from any other round chunk of metal if it contains any of: A portrait, bust -- crowned or uncrowned -- person, collection of people, abstract symbology, olympic rings, earth, wind, and fire. Water, seas, lakes, leaks, torches, fasces, Greek deities, maps, animals, architecture, memorials, monuments, or industrial scenes. Which goes a long way to explaining why I keep getting Canadian pennies from the bank.

Another point from the coin dude is that the word `dollar` as a reference to a unit of quantity is too close to that unique word used for currency by the United States. Someone should probably inform Australia, Bahama, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei, Canada, the Cayman Islands, the East Caribbean States, Fiji, Guana, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Kiribati, Liberia, Nambia, New Zealand, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Surinam, Taiwan, Trinidad, Tobago, Tuvala, and Zimbabwe. Apparently they're not aware of our American uniqueness and the military capability of the US Treasury.

Yet another interesting point from the coin dude was the confusing use of the double struck `s` as a sign for currency. However, that particular symbol is used only by the Brazilian Real. The US has only used the single struck `s` and, confusingly, an `s` that only has serifs for the strike without carrying it through. Again this is a high point of American uniqueness not only trampled by the countries listed above but also: Argentine, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Cuba, the Domican Republic, Mexico, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Tongo.

In the spirit of being good neighbors we really ought let them know about their crimes before Obama decides to ride European coattails into a military exercise against them.

Nonetheless this was a fair cop. Quite strictly, if the US Mint can't figure out what it's own coins are then there's no manner in which the general public can either. If it's round and decorated it's simply counterfet. End of story under 18 U.S.C. § 485

Lots of folks are certain to disagree with this notion. They need only come up with a different answer for why Canadian pennies are still in common circulation as US currency despite proudly stating 'Canada' on the reverse.

Which runs directly afoul of 18 U.S.C. § 486 as uttering or passing. No intent needed here. You hand out a Canadian penny and you're good for up to 5 years in the dock. NotHaus ran afoul of this properly as well.

For your end this is true even if you and the other guy intend to transact in Canadian currency. After all it's got a bust, motto, numeral, uses the word `cent,` has a year, a picture of a plant, and is about the same size and composition of a real coin.

Yeh, but it says `Canada,` eh? So what, this one says `Korea.`

There's this wall

2011-03-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

It's all nice and dandy to talk about this wall between church and State. Right up until you try to erect that wall formally.

Sec. 51.979. PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON
RESEARCH RELATED TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN. An institution of higher
education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner,
especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty
member or student based on the faculty member's or student's conduct
of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other
alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.

This has all the Cultists of Dice is a right tizzy. Some simply exhibit no apparent awareness of civics:

Intelligent Design was determined by the United States District Court to be creationism, which is a religious activity rather than a secular one. Since, based on the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution, the government (including federal, state, and local) cannot endorse or otherwise allow the government to be seen to be promoting one religious practice or faith over another.

As written, this bill is illegal by precedent of the federal courts.

While others have taken to the Mother Jones talking point by outright plagarism or, more mildly, by blind acceptance:

Texas, you are a wonder. You don't have any protections against workplace discrimination on the basis of sex or gender — that might hurt bidness, you know — but you're considering a bill to protect creationists from discrimination.

It is a pretty ignorant bill in a general sense as it's already a no-no to discriminate against religion in Federally funded academia. At worst Texas is bolting a `me-too` onto local institutions that are not Federally funded. Though I admit I haven't bothered to dig up their statutory definition of `higher education.`

Naturally this is not about general workplace protections either. It's strictly about preventing punitive measures on the basis religious and academic issues amongst students and faculty alone. Which is why this simply cannot continue to stand. If stalwart pursuers of science cannot fire telescope peepers for not hewing to the current biology fad then whither the New Synthesis?

Darwin proper qua Lamarckism, RNA world, Iron-Sulfur, and Stromatolites be damned so long as we can put the Flagellates in the dock.

Robbin' Hoods

2011-03-18T06:22:00.000-07:00

Denninger has a bit of high dudgeon going on that Obama may, or may not have, placed constraints on US aid to Japan. Perhaps. Skip any notion of legality and simply ask for the morality of the notion from the ground on up.

Can it be called moral to mug one person to pay for the resources involved in forcing a slave to do your bidding for the sake of your claims to personal morality in charity to third parties?

If you consider that moral then what possible justification do you have calling it immoral to engage in voluntary horse-trading with the third party that's to be the nominal recipient of your empathic largess?

It's a queer notion. That it's all dandy if we rob someone at gunpoint, force someone into harm's way at gunpoint, so long as the recipient of our largess accepts these proceeds unconditionally. But it's beyond the pale to engage in voluntary transactions with the intended recipient of our previous crimes.

This isn't navel gazing in a theoretical manner. We extract taxes by force of law and threat of imprisonment. We use those funds in maintaining a military force that must obey orders under force of law and threat of imprisonment. Notionally those taxes are to be used in the maintenance and defense of the nation. Likewise, those in the armed forces swear an oath to the maintenance and defense of the nation.

Japan is a completely different nation. And there's something blinkered about pointing a gun at the Japanese and stating: "Take it without strings, Damnit! Or I can't be held responsible for my actions!"

Slave labour

2011-03-17T01:43:00.000-07:00

Doing taxes for a fellow up the street and an odd thing occurred. He'd worked in two states with an income tax and had to pay on both. But he'd only been resident in one for the duration. That's a new one on me, and one simply doesn't appreciate pain in the tax code until such things start happening. For all the varied pain with 1099 R's and MISC's, Schedule's C, SE, and NFL?

Nothing beats trying to wade the morass made by two States trying to take as much of the pie as they can without stepping too hard on the toes of the other. Especially when each return relies on the other and they each want a copy of the return filed elsewhere. It's a ridiculous bit of Sisyphus.

It's been favorable of late for States to levy a `use tax` on items purchased outside their jurisdiction. Like the Federal Income Tax they're completely voluntary affairs. With a mandatory penalty if you don't choose to volunteer your money. They are, in every respect, duties on imports. To be Constitutional such taxes must be authorized by Congress and only cost such as to cover the cost of inspections. All inadvertant profit from which belonging to the US Treasury.

One can, of course, simply call them property taxes. But in so doing the State makes the odd claim that they have two tiers of tax on the same property. Differing alone on the status of the owner or the property. If the owner then it becomes a clear violation of the 14th amendment. Otherwise accepting such a claim requires that we recognize the property tax as being decided on whether the property was natively procured or whether it was imported. And so we're right back to the first problem anyways.

Moreover the States that levy use taxes on imported goods do not pretend to inspect them with, or without, Congressional approval to do so. So all the revenue gained in such a manner is legally the property of the US Treasury.

It's also been catching fancy lately to try to place a tax on goods being sent out of State also. Which entails all the same arguments applied to exports rather than imports. It remains just as illegal.

Which has what to do with income taxes?

Since the early 19th Century the Supreme Court of the United States maintained that selling labour across State lines was, in fact, interstate commerce. No different than buying a toaster via eBay or Fingerhut. As such an income tax levied in a State in which you are not a citizen is an import duty. While an income tax levied on those dollars in the State your are a citizen of is an export duty.

I wouldn't suggest anyone obey the law here. That's an ass-rapin' in the Land of the Free with the Rule of Law at hand. But it's an interesting note anyways.

Samurai's wear Yellow

2011-03-16T12:19:00.001-07:00

I have a lot of respect for Japanese culture. Not for midnight karate flics or teen J-rock goth fads; and I'm sorry, but Pocki ain't all that. It could be that I'm all starry eyed for selling beer in vending machines but I doubt it. Just raw respect for family cohesion, work ethic, and a craftsman's pride in his work. Which isn't to say that it's a pinnacle of human achievement. Every culture has its high points and barbarisms, which are often the same thing.

In Japan's case we've the famous notion of the Samurai, the Bushido code, and the general predilection to fall on one's own sword. To get the job done or because you failed to get it done. Stories of this abound through history, up through WWII, and even into today's news.

Unless we're talking minor issues like a runaway nuke plant.

Make no mistake that this began as a minor issue. For all the spooky magic behind roundstock of rock that emits heat based on it's own furitive emotions, a nuclear power plant is nothing more than an exercise in basic plumbing. There's the control rods as anyone that remembers Chernobyl knows. But the a nuke plant lives and dies on industrial pipe flanges. For all the hysteria about radiation they're nothing but glorified steam engines. Little different than a geothermal plant or the cast-iron horses that tamed the American West. If the pumps fail, the valves stick, the pipes leak, or the intakes are clogged you're in for a world of hurt.

There are literal miles of plumbing inside the Dai-ichi plant to keep all those reactors going.

And if you've got something on the order of a record setting earthquake and/or tsumnami you need to go hitch your pants down for some proud plumber's crack and go inspect all the fiddly bits. The Japanese response to this moderate scale problem was to evacuate some 750 out of its 800 plant personnel right off the bat. At various times in the interim they've had the remnant 50 hit the bricks and come on back later on.

The Japanese have produced no mythological tales of heroism in this episode. For that we have to turn to the member's of a failing Communist State running bucket brigades of sand into a hot, open, reactor. The Japanese have instead traded in Bushido for the petrified terror of pedestrians when Mothra shows up.

Heck, they're just now talking about opening a road up with bulldozers so they can get fire equipment in. This is notionally a memento of sage concern and sober handling of the circumstance they let get out of hand. Unasked and unanswered is why the JDF hasn't loaded up fire engines on their LST's to dump off at the breakwater's surrounding the Dai-ichi plant already. Likewise why there isn't a host of Japanese first responders being flown in with the nation's helicopter fleet to form bucket brigades of beach sand.

Not shocking, I suppose, given their current notion of proper pipe inspection being to get out of dodge.

Without question there's a lack of wisdom involved in placing a nuke plant smack on a beach known to receive office building sized waves every now and again. There is also a lack of wisdom involved in not giving such a plant the capability to bootstrap its own electrical production. Which might seem a little odd, but most civilian nuke plants are not able to produce their own power for the purpose of spooling themselves up from a cold-start. But making scarce all the boots on the ground you need to deal with plumbing issues is remarkably incompetent. Especially when hours count and we're days and waiting. To ice this cake there's rumblings on that they may now ask for US military assistance.

No.

If they need heroes to run wheelbarrows of sand they can start with their own children.

I would have said differently a few days back when this was only beginning to be a serious and lethal problem. One then still easily fixed by bringing kit to shore, generators, pumps, and meat suits. Now that it's become an issue of guaranteed high lethality through their ham-fisted handling they can put their own kids on the line to die.

Now I've no problem if the US volunteers up equipment. And I've no problem if the US asks for volunteers amongst its servicemen to go assist. But in that latter case the Japanese government needs to fork over the Okinawan islands as US Territory to be distributed amongst the surviving family of our own heroic lemmings.

The Japanese can take it or leave it and remember how to cry Banzai!

Factions

2011-03-15T01:39:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin has turned into a microcosmic case of precisely why the Founding Fathers warned against Machine Politics. The old codgers called them Factions; but it's all the same thing. We first had one faction flee the State to prevent the Senate from doing its business. And now we've got the other faction disallowing the first from participating in State business. On both sides we've got adherents to the Factions trying to overturn elections ahead of schedule on the basis of Faction affiliations of the elected folks.

If the Republicans blink they simply reinforce that the winning strategy for the Democrats is to hold the State legislature hostage in the future. If the Democrats blink then they'll be throwing away electoral support from the voting bloc they've carefully crafted with legal exclusivity and graft; the Civil Servant Unions.

There's flatly no excuse for the behaviour of the Senate Democrats during the course of this. Nor is there any excuse for contempt without cure being provided by the Republicans. The latter amounting to an expulsion sans the required two-thirds vote on the matter.

The only sane cure is to gut the Wisconsin Senate by recalling the lot of them and giving it another go with fresh faces throughout. But because the focus is not good governance of the State this cannot occur. Due Factions and the Soccer Hooligan framework of governance in play it only results in the Faction with the less mature members taking the win. No matter which Faction you claim that might be.

The remaining alternative is to accept, not applaud but accept, that the new normal for Wisconsin politics begins to be defined by these choices. That winning an election as a member of the minority Faction in the Senate becomes an informal tax-payer funded vacation/exile to another State. That Wisconsin governance is no longer about the State of Wisconsin but about which interstate corporation in the business of funding elections takes the Stanley Cup this round.

That these tactics are informal is of little consequence. Simply assume a law was forwarded that would force the exile of the minority party from the Senate Chamber and ask yourself if that would bear any passing resemblance to what we expect of governance in America. That this must be done informally due the stakes placed by both Factions makes little difference whatsoever.

If the two Factions in question differed politically on only a 0.5% difference in some tax rate or another it might be of little concern or consequence. But these Factions are diametrically opposed mirrors, cartoons of the broad political opinions of America. Each with little relation to Wisconsin itself. Such that we face Wisconsin vacillating between the extremes of maximal and minimal government reach and intrusion every 2 years or so. No matter your preferred political persuasion there's only poverty and bloodshed down that line.

The only other possible consequences are that one Faction or the other loses support; unlikely given that they're interstate corporations. Or that this whole sundry affair fades from public consciousness; which no-one seems very keen on.

Chernobyl Blossoms

2011-03-14T06:15:00.001-07:00

So yep, the Daiichi plant did about what should have been expected from taking twice the level of ground shaking that is was designed for and getting the diesel generators in the basement a bit soggy. Reactor #1 popped the roof pretty nicely, #3 had a spiffy bit of show with some proper fire and smoke, and we're all waiting for the same to occur on #2. Naturally there's been an outbreak of hysteria about nuclear power safety, cancer risks, and far reaching concern about environmental effects.

Yeh, whatever.

Perhaps I'm a bit blase about it all having grown up in Colorado. A picturesque state famous for its granite splendor; a notable radioactive material lately fashionable to build your entire kitchen with. And of course there was always the childhood fun of picking up interesting rocks and putting them in your pockets. A boyish task that geography guarantees has the State's youth running around with Uranium ore stuck next to their testes.

Then there's the old Rocky Flats Plutonium trigger plant, Fort St. Vrain nuclear power plant, the oil refineries, fossil fuel power plants, and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. And let us not forget the altitude and the increased solar radiation that's especially acute when crawling 14'ers or simply engaging in a bit of downhill skiing. Then there were the fun childhood days of dismantling fire detectors for giggles. Cigarette smoking. Working with used motor oil bare handed. Welding and a preference for outdoor work.

According to all the latest studies I have 42 metastasized tumors and died of lung cancer 2 weeks ago. Any kind words for my passing is greatly appreciated as there's nothing more depressing than bad eulogies when attending your own wake.

But as long as the plants in Fukushima don't turn into marvelous bonfires there's simply little concern to be had. It's guaranteed to make a mess of the local region regardless. After all, the spent fuel rods were stored in the upper stories of the reactor sheds; the parts that blew off from stray hydrogen. And, natch, the #3 was carrying MOX rods. Which is Plutonium to you and me. With nothing more than the minor pop-off they've had, and will have on #2, it's simply a non-issue. We wring our hands a great deal about soil exposure but it is a manageable issue. Large scale, but manageable as can be seen by the bevy of Superfund sites.

If you're in Hawaii you simply need enjoy the air-conditioner for a few days. Which, if you are at all concerned about radiation damage, you already do to avoid the baleful eye of the Sun. While the Fruits and Nuts in California already receive far more radiation from the bananas in their healthy diet. So there's no need for...

Panic! Ye cultural greats of Lower California: Panic! Waste no time digging a hasty foxhole in the nearest basement! Live like Morlocks for the next 90 years until the radiation levels are safe for your pasty re-entrance into surface society! Save yourselves from mutant Cornhuskers!

Update: I didn't see that one coming. Reactor #4 caught fire, in normal industrial fashion, for a bit before a pop-off seems to have put things out. Still minor enough to be otherwise unconcerned with.

Windowseat bird watching

2011-03-13T01:50:00.000-08:00

Hooray for doublethink:

We need building codes that take into account the risks of various natural disasters for each area. But what we also need, worldwide, is more economic development, so that what is built is built well.

We may not be able to guard against a freakishly big event like “the big one” in Japan, but we can begin to harden areas such as Haiti, where even minimal building standards and halfway decent infrastructure would have hardened the island against Mother Nature’s wrath.

The only way I know to do that is through rule of law, democracy, and lavish doses of capitalism.

The last sentence is a nonsense and a huge give-away: The only manner in which to afford Strategic Statism is through Tactical Capitalism. It's true for what it's worth and one need only look at China to see an exemplar of this philosophy. Though China is not known for its `rule of law.` Which is an absence of corruption as far as any ought be concerned.

This is a doublethink fondly engaged by those that wish to force your hand over your property by diktat without them incurring personal monetary expense or admitting to State fellation at social events. To do so they are attempting to define Capitalism as an economic structure that mandates what you must do with your property in case they ever wish to exercise a personal choice to use your property however they see fit.

Of course they need a lack of legal corruption for this. And of course they need Democracy. Not a Constitutional Democracy. Not a Constitutional Representative Republic. Just pure Democracy as 2 wolves and a sheep. Or a cooperative and benevolent dictator; either one.

It's a more sophisticated deception than the idea that we can outlaw poverty by manipulating the minimum wage; but it's exactly the same argument. That we can outlaw poverty. That this will erase janitorial staff from the face of the planet in a puff of democratic magic by raising barriers to entry in various markets.

Yet poverty cannot be erased; it can only be alleviated. To do so one must allow for economic mobility. Which requires that we allow for the acquisition of capital goods. Which requires that you have some place to house your capital goods. Moreso than the minimum wage, the fastest way to make poverty a social institution is via raising the barrier to entry on housing via building codes.

To the extent that you're a Capitalist this is all self-obvious. To the extent that you're a Class Warrior this should also be obvious. One cannot reduce poverty by the forcing of regressive price structures. It's only when you're a hardcore harpy peeping in the windows of your neighbor's property -- that you are quite certain is yours anyways -- does the argument presented make any sense at all.

Great balls of fire

2011-03-11T13:56:00.000-08:00

Ah, it's just an earthquake. I've seen piccies of those from Cali. A little road damage, some dodged building foundations, and a lot of entertaining footage of folks trying to fight store shelves upright against the earthen sway.

And then you go look lately at what's rolling out of Japan.

Good word. I ain't even gonna bother with pics, vids, or other links to the disaster porn. It's enough to say that it's unfathomably bad. Not least with a fusillade of aftershocks the size of normal humdingers. They've been hit so hard their eyes slant the other way now.

Bugger all that though. It just wouldn't be Japan without a painstakingly slow opera about a nuclear disaster in the works. As I write they're sitting kabuki over Chernobyl blossoms. No good word on how serious it might truly be. Just enough to say that their spewing scads of radiation, over pressure on the reactor, and looking to get the cooling system up to snuff before the clock runs out.

It's too early to know how bad this will be in the end. But it's not to early to have a moment of silence and pass some prayers for the poor souls Far East on the Western edge of the Pacific Rim. God be with them.

Two in the bush

2011-03-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

I dread even mentioning this. But as it's the first attempt at putting data behind the quality versus quantity conundrum I know the Gameboys will be doing their level best to make great hay of it. So here's to Darwinian psychological science and the distinctly valid sample size of two.

Yes, two.

There's not a soul that picks through studies of this and that who doesn't lament the modern curse of proving every corner of human psychology on small sample sizes. But this new piece of sound methodolgy sets a new bar. If you bother to read the paper you'll note that they make a passing attempt at justifying things by noting they had 76 men participate and make it into the data set. This is depressingly small but not far out of line for the standard fare in proving the grip of Dice on human mating behaviours.

However, all the statistics are weighted and judged on the basis of picking a winner and loser between two men simultaneously vying for a single woman's attention. Every last nook and cranny of human psychology is based on their sample of two women's preferences.

This is the first study of its kind and strictly exploratory as noted by the authors. And they do some odd things with APIM that are non-standard. Which they note, but do not provide methodological justification for. Nonetheless they claim all three of their hypotheses are borne out.

Their three hypotheses are that testosterone is positively correlated with dominance behaviour. That dislike of the male competitor is likewise positively correlated with testosterone. And that testosterone is positively correlated with how much one of the two women "clicked" -- scare quotes and term as per the paper -- with each participant.

Let's skip the APIM and go for the raw correlations with an eye to the Game Claims.

If we take only those items that are statistically significant then yes, women went most strongly on the basis of dominance behaviours. Point for the Gameboys. Dominance behaviours were only correlated with testosterone. Point against the Gameboys.

We can salvage that by ignoring statistical significance. If we pretend that randomness is indeed good for determinant decisions then a high need for social dominance is next in line for dominant behaviours. But not as strongly as the negative correlation for being manly. If we ditch statistical standards the most important ordering for dominance is to a) Have a taint the size of a 4 lane highway. b) Have the facial structure of a Thai crossdresser. c) Be terrified of your own inadequacies.

There's simply no salvage here.

Second in line for the preference of these two women were a positive correlation between the winner and if the winner was currently attached. Point for the Gameboys. There's no statistical significance for anything on the attachment count. If we ditch that anyways then first up is having a man's jaw and brow while second up is not having a need for social dominance. Which, I suppose, means these two girls are happy with single queers and attached lumberjacks. In this light of statistical nonsignificance it doesn't seem like a clarion call to throw out the flannel to get the lolli.

Last up is a significant correlation between precompetition testosterone levels and which of our competitors these two girls liked most. Point against the Gameboys here. There's a distinct need to be able to quarry marble by beating your forehead against the rock face to get the girl. And a need as it's correlated with testosterone as mentioned on the first point. Of course it's also correlated with generally being a sore sort and disliking your competitor as well.

Though, dipping into nonsignificance again, testosterone was negatively correlated here with masculine facial features. So who knows what pool they were fishing in. But on a sample size of 76 the first two hypotheses hold. On a sample size of 2 the the last holds. Nothing shocking about any of that.

Where the whole bit gets interesting is in the APIM bits. I don't disagree with their particular usage but it's not necessarily sound methodology and they don't go into detail on the point. But it's worth mentioning, even with our whopping sample of two, just for how it confounds things.

You can find the figure on Page 6 of the report if you're interested. But the long and short of it is that men that had little psychological need for social dominance had no effect from their testosterone level. What's queer about this is that as their testosterone increased their opponents aggression increased. Beyond their own, and yet they still won out despite being less dominant. For those men with an acute need to be at the head of the pack it gets to be a crap-shot. When they had high testosterone they would be more aggressive than their losing opponent. When they had low testosterone they would be less dominant than the loser in the competition. And vastly so.

So for the Gameboy notion that dominance plays are everything and can be learned by any and all that wish to win? It ain't gonna work a whit unless you're preternaturally endowed with so much testosterone that you would lactate the tears of orphaned children if it were possible for you to feel sympathy. In all other cases you're best off ignoring the pecking order entirely.

According to our valid sample of 2 girls, 19 and 20 years old. The study is bollocks naturally. But for those that wish to bite down on this scat for proof of their Penthouse letters of human mating? You'll need hormone supplements to make it work.

Killing with Kindness

2011-03-10T23:18:00.001-08:00

A political pet peeve of mine is the notion that America has needed more socialized health care than it has had. And more, certainly, then it currently will under the story arc of Obamacare. All of us should have the basic narrative down by now:

Nations with properly nationalized health care industries pay less on health care and have longer life-spans. Thus we need to take our Marx and enslave healthcare professionals and the citizenry by removing Liberty from the sphere of discourse.

The first bit of that is largely true. Even when controlling for a bevy of various factors the difference just won't go away. It's gets passing teeny, but it just won't go away. Let's all agree that this is true as a basic diagnosis.

The counter narrative being the trade-off is that stingy, Lenin-happy, setups yield worse access to worse outcomes. This is well supported by all the folks that flee to the US for emergency treatments they need in claimed weeks but cannot access natively for mere months. Thus the status quo ought be retained.

Here's the rub: Both narratives are entirely correct in their basic diagnosis. But it's politically uncomfortable for the pundits to acknowledge any degree of obviousness. Pundits have bills to pay too, you know. But how can that be and how can they be put together if they're contrary?

They're not contrary. You will live longer avoiding the worst doctors then you will by camping out in the living room of those that are best in the world.

The gains from having the best emergency care in the world are offset by the disastrous outcomes of visiting the world's best doctors for anything else. Whereas, in Canada, having a near complete inability to be ransacked by the bone-butchers is offset by the near complete inability to attain good emergency care.

If you're truly in search of Statist political solutions to medical problems then the only sane cure is to put in a legal ban on anything except emergency care. Heck, Canada's almost there. If they went full monty by shifting expenditures they'd be even more insufferable by refusing to kindly die off.

Hab SoSlI' Quch!

2011-03-10T19:24:00.001-08:00

Evo-Devo is an awesome scaffold that is becoming increasing popular as the Grand Unified Theory of biology. It endeavours to cram everything from your preference in curtains to role-playing games under the Dicta of Dice. The newest fun addition being that monogamy is the result of genetic deletions that removed from us sensory whiskers and penile spines.

Penile what?

Penile spines. Take an everyday sausage roll and impale a single end with bamboo skewers that are pointed back towards the unadorned end. In the small it seems less medieval and we're talking more along the lines of the texture of a cat's tongue. This then, the loss of our Klingon penis, is why we are monogamous.

It simply must be; Dice dictates it.

The notion here is that men find sex less pleasurable if their tender bits aren't kitted out with all manner of barbs, protruberances, and anime embellishment that otherwise increase his sensation. So, by reducing his sensation he will need to put in more effort in less enjoyable sex. Which proves he gets more pleasure from worse sex and thus why we're monogamous.

Yeh, that last sentence skipped a rail. But that's the argument.

It goes both ways of course. If one has ever lived near a city and had the option to trot into one of the low rent bookstores they're sure to have found an entire wall dedicated to silicon replicas of siege equipment. I assure you that this is all intended for those in the SCA and other historical re-enactors that put on demonstrations of the proper manner in which to tear down castle walls. Nonetheless, these RTV castings of barbaric tools have found good truck in off-label usage as marital aids. All the various nubs, rubs, bits and bobs being quite handily repurposed for her increased stimulation.

So from both sides of the fence we have the same Dice borne conclusion: Bad sex is the causal reason for monogamy.

Don't think about it too hard; it's science.

Unforced error?

2011-03-09T17:20:00.000-08:00

The Wisconsin Democrats have been destroying Democracy with a play on one of King George III's tactics that got called out in the Declaration: Thwarting the business of government by playing shenanigans with who attends and where.

Now, the story goes, the Wisconsin Republicans have gotten tired of waiting and done the contentious bit without further allowance to the antics on the other side of the aisle.

Oddly enough they did it in a roughly similar take on the same tactics of King George III. Wisconsin law requires that they have waited 24 hours after announcing things unless there was no possible or practicable manner.

In which case they are allowed 2 hours.

This being what they have done. However, one has to ask what possible 22 hour rush had to be applied on a 20 day stalemate. Put this in front of a real Judge and it's struck for this reason alone. Put it in front of a normal Judge and it'll be struck with some pasty-faced vomitcous about thwarting Democracy by ignoring those thwarting Democracy. It'll be the same outcome in either case.

After long discussions about this option there is simply no manner in which a credible claim can be made that the Wisconsin Senators doing their job didn't know this. It's just a manner for them to save face while snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Or this is part of a grander deceit. Now that the fleebaggers have started a mad dash back to do their job they'll be sure to raise Cain on this very issue when the Senate gets back to normal business. Mentioning quite forcibly that the bill was illegally passed and has no force. One can smile if the response to such would possibly be:

"You're quite right. And so we are all agreed that it was never split from the budget nor passed. And the budget bill stands as it did. So while we're all here and the exits are blocked? Why don't we take a vote on it."

If anything otherwise, then I wish all success to the pending recall efforts against the Republican Senators.

Who are you to...

2011-03-09T14:13:00.000-08:00

Another bit of Gameboy nonsense from elsewhere. Though it's hardly unique or restricted to them it's the context here.

Who are you to have opinions about what other people do? Who are you to have opinions about what gets other people moist?

Who am I? I'm responding to the bankrupt moral ideology that you saw fit to let run down your chin and into the public sphere. That's who the fuck I am.

Here's a little piece of advice for all the soft headed morons out there. Once it leaves your parted lips it is part of the public discussion. And that gives you two choices.

You can deal with it like a Wisconsin Democrat and cry foul, flee the state, and otherwise have your Tijuana sex change in public. Or you can suck it up and deal with the topic you introduced.

This ain't no idle thing as every Christian has the onus on them to witness the Lord. Not behind curtains or under the bedsheets but right out there in front. In public. And deal. No less a charge is placed on every member of the electorate that leans over the fence to chew fat about politics.

Certainly no less a charge is placed on those sundry sorts that find passing fancy in proudly proclaiming their sexual conquests on the internet. To the full view of 6 billion compatriot meat suits.

Yet there's this judicial notion of Lawrence v. Texas that what you do in the sack is no one's business but your own. Even when you're prancing around naked in a cage on rainbow parade float.

Is it anyone else's business that you publicly claim your wife gets wet if you jerk her chain?

Is it anyone else's business that you publicly claim your wife gets wet if you put a loaded gun to her head?

Is it anyone else's business if you publicly claim your wife gets wet if you strangle her?

Is it anyone else's business if you publicly claim your wife gets wet when you murder in her view?

"Madam, we've already established what you are. Now we're just haggling over the price."

Every choice and deed has full weight on your immortal soul. Every choice and deed has full sway under the worldly electorate. Every choice and deed is the business of those that would do business with you. Every choice and deed is the business of those that have any association with you.

If that's too much for your slender shoulders then go hide in a cabin, mail bombs to people, and shut the fuck up. Though you'll still have to deal with the law if you like to fist livestock in your off hours.

Anything but that

2011-03-08T02:27:00.001-08:00

Federal authorities are seeing an increase in the number of foreclosed and unoccupied homes in metro Atlanta being seized by members of an anti-government group.

"I'm not sure I can connect it with the economy, but we've seen a surge of these in the last year, in particular," Stephen Emmett, special agent in the Atlanta field office of the FBI, said Saturday. Emmet said federal and local authorities increasingly are running into confrontations with members of a sect known as "sovereign citizens."

There is absolutely no way a rise in squatting is due the aggregate currency mediated barter which shall not be named.

"We're trying to identify other sovereign citizen cases in the county," Mitchell said, noting local law enforcement is working with the FBI to target group members. ... The FBI has listed Sovereign Citizens as a domestic terrorist organization. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which also tracks the group, estimates the sect numbers more than 300,000 nationwide.

Fabulous, kooky legal theories and frivolous court filings now constitute terrorism. If there was any seriousness to that notion the President would be golfing in Gitmo.

Certainly, there's a host of folks that buy into the Sovereign Citizen notions that are damaged, violent, and prone to engage in fraud. This is true with any and all small or marginalized social groups. You can find it in everything from... Look there, it's Dennis Kucinich!

The important thing is that the government never acknowledges that this is due to the failing economy. Oops, now I'm a terrorist. I meant to say: due the failing aggregate currency mediated barter which shall not be named. As things go on there will be rash of folks that fall in with the repetition of various pro-squatting notions from random left-wing ideo... Wait, isn't that Bernie Sanders!

None of this should be a surprise to anyone. There is a more troubling aspect to this push by the government to round all dissenting political and legal positions up as Terrorism; small, warted, beasts of stout measure that dwells under childrens' beds. Under the current state of affairs a Terrorist, as a citizen, is free from trials and habeus corpus. May be held indefinitely, incommunicado, and in solitary confinement even if exonerated. And may be assassinated if visiting Quebec on a shopping trip.

All in a Liberty filled effort to make sure that the word `economy` is never mentioned to the pro... Holy crud, there's White Nationalists listening to Ron Paul!

Though Predator drone strikes on vocal squatters would manage the housing inventory overhang very nicely; if you like broken windows.

Walk the Line

2011-03-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

I'm singling Denninger out here despite that he's hardly unique in the ATF Gunwalking furor. The lament and loud that an American was killed by an American firearm. Apparently these folks have never heard of such solidly Chinese companies as Auto-Ordnance. A little glib on my part as they're specific screech is that the guns were sold in violation of law by the ATF; the very agency overseeing those laws.

Problem is that the 2nd Amendment lays out Rights. Sovereign Rights. Those things that the State and Federal Government may not infringe, regulate, dictate, or otherwise interfere with. Naturally there's a lot of people on the other side of the fence. There entirely certain that the 14th Amendment and the Incorporation Doctrine were soundly needed to dictate the States recognize legal options. Not mere privileges mind you. No, the 14th Amendment was forced on the States so that the States would recognize that they had the option to rescind the Bill of Rights at whim and on command.

The text and tradition is clear: Tommy Guns should still be sold in hardware stores. Not that pansy `budda budda` WWII fantasy flic nonsense but the full on ripping cloth sound of the Valentine's Day Massacre. Sure, lots of folks wet themselves over the thought of it all and worry about the gutters overflowing with blood. No worries, it will sort itself out when people get the idea that a bit of decorum in public isn't such an olde fashioned idea after all. The rest will simply beg for answers: Why does anyone need a Tommy Gun?

Fishing.

But ignore for now that these laws are illegal as the ATF certainly believes otherwise. This is yet again the mantra of breaking the law to uphold the law. Or destroying Capitalism to save it. Or exporting Tyranny to grab Democracy. Or any of the other recent and popular Mini-Truths talking points passed about. When those that are charged with upholding the law violate the law?

Then there is no law.

People can come up with all manner of excuses and pretend exceptions to this notion. It's so simple that they cannot excuse themselves from doing so. But the farthest the Constitution goes is only to delay prosecution in those cases where it would be used as a political weapon. But it does not exempt the political elite from its reach. And most certainly not minor perfunctories in a regulatory agency or the local constabulary.

There's a more serious note to be struck in the latest round of ATF assisted civilian killing in that this was strictly a matter of foreign policy. The ATF helped import weapons into a foreign State. Weapons that were illegal in that State. And without that State's knowledge.

That's Cassus Belli.

It's an Act of War against Mexico as brought to you buy the same Executive that enjoys fingering children flying from Des Moines to St. Louis. Which is only less onerous then it might be if the Executive hadn't refused to uphold the law and import Mexico's male population of military age over the last 25 years or so.

Shell shocked

2011-03-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

Althouse writes on responses she's received to her complaint over access restrictions to the Wisconsin Capitol during the great Labor Union camp out. Lawyers and Propaganda Scientists being what they are none can seemingly get the point.

There is precisely one manner in which a civilian can `assist` the LEO set. Either the gate keeper had been duly deputized or he had not. If he had then he then was legally bound to give up his ID, cred, superior and such other sundries when asked. Or he was in violation of the law.

Regardless of whether he was or not it is entirely improper for him to represent himself as a "Marshall." The scare quotes are intentional as anyone that would be fooled by duct-tape text on a safety vest have some significant cognitive difficulties. Notwithstanding such, he was representing himself in the manner of an impostor. Which is illegal in its own right.

No matter what the case is there's one dimension in which a non-deputized citizen can exercise force in the pursuit of law enforcement. Citizens arrest. Now I don't know the particulars as to Wisconsin on this count. But I've not been in a State where it is not allowed to physically detain an individual caught in the commission of a crime while waiting on the police. Including and up to death if it become necessary.

So skip the political spin. The correct response by Althouse, Meade, and anyone either in the line or without was to restrain this fellow. With torches and pitchforks as need be. Until the police carted off the offender.

There can be no defense of any of the parties involved. Either the lawbreaker violating the Rights of the citizens of Wisconsin or those that allowed to continue. It is understandable as to why Althouse and others were shocked into compliance by the Chutzpah. Likewise it's understandable that the Felon used Chutzpah for his con. But there is no defense to any involved that this fellow isn't currently fitting out his brand new dentures.

Roissy goes full Mangina

2011-03-03T11:44:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Glenn again for this. This is what happens when the light shines to brightly on a narcissist. In the danger that their supply of accolades and self-greatness will evaporate under the heat they resort to all manner of back-pedalling, quote-mining, question-begging, and self-refutation. Sadly they all engage in a shotgun approach of nonsense to bury their bullshit in noise. It's awesome how much wrong the Gameboys can deliver in a single post let alone an opus.

Roissy delivers the Gameboy charade in true depth on this count:

For instance, no Chateau author claimed that love is a “pretty lie”. In fact, just the opposite has been written: that love is the only thing in this world that isn’t bullshit.

Of course he did. But he's merely wordsnitching so folks won't bitch. If I may quote him directly on this count:

"I notice she decided not to quote more pertinent passages from that post, which would add context and shore up the argument presented ..." -- Roissy puling

The trick is that he's leaving out his own context both at that post and one of its follow ups. It's "grimy Dirt and DNA all the way down," after all.

The trick is that love, as defined by Roissy, is a fleeting temporally and conditional affair. That warm feelings or wishing the best for another is not `love` if there's someone else that you have warmer wishes for. The DNA garbage is just a hamster-wheel patina over the emotional maturity of a six year old: That love does not exist if you are temporarily cross with someone or if you are not the pinnacle of their existence. It is the emotional maturity of a narcissist.

The DNA riff is just a gloss to hide the ugly innards from coming to closely under the light.

I mean, how can you demonize a Darwinian playboy who grasps the true nature of female sexual desire and the raw deal that is Western institutional marriage, but who also genuinely loves women and loves being in love with women?

And then on to the base assertion; begging the question of whether this is correct or not. And it is not. Anyone but the narcissist in question can trivially demean a vainglorious moron with a crippled ego that rationalizes all the faults of his life in some monotonic stereotype of himself projected on an entire gender that he uses as a mere object to hide his own lack of worth on the justification that he, theoretically, can deliver orgasms.

Hymowitz’s hatred of evolutionary psychology is evident, and no wonder — it really does explain, rather elegantly, the behavior of men and women in the sexual marketplace.

Evo-devo is an interesting field that grew out of the need to tack the word "Darwin" in somewhere to get grant funding. He states the obvious that knowledge is a powerful thing so it's only right to speak plainly of the knowledge we actually do derive from evo-devo, rather than what he pretends to get from science.

For starters the Pareto rule of evo-devo is 60/40. That, for any given psychological facet, you're near guaranteed to get that split in heritability to one side or the other. Without knowing the specific facet being measure the best you can do is average the wash and call it 50/50. Which means that 50% can not be explained by heritability under any circumstance. While, on the other hand, the absolutely maximum that can be possibly attributed to DNA is 50% as well.

And this is variances in the trait measured. Or, in other words, that there are differences present that we are measuring. Yet the Gameboy hamster wheel declares that science has shown that it is an entirely genetic affair without variance for all women. This is not a claim made by the field of science providing creation myths that they purport to use. And since we know that heritability includes natal and gene expression beyond DNA there is absolutely no manner in which one can claim the usefulness of Game -- as an evo-devo matter -- for more than a minority of women under any circumstance.

Any broader claim is a known falsehood at odds with the science.

Game means that it is no longer simply a matter of dumb luck when men get sex and love.

By the science of evo-devo, Game is forcing yourself into dumb luck. Not the other way around.

Hymowitz, of course, can’t help but slander “Darwinian playboys” as wounded exes, geeks and mistrustful players. Do some men who learn about game fall into one or more of the above categories? Sure. But you could say the same for any group of men following anything.

Another classic: The political dodge. Certainly the same can be said for anything -- hardly a worthy statement of a man possessed of the knowledge of statistical sciences.

The question is whether or not a majority of the people engaging in interpersonal affairs with the emotional maturity feral sprogs are accurately described in this manner. Sure, why not?

But the entire point of Game qua Roissy is the creation "mistrustful players" so the whole dissension is a meaningless dodge. It's an attempt to appear reasonable by fleeing Wisconsin for Illinois.

A proportion of white knighters and manginas who would agree with Hymowitz are emo geeks and limp-wristed hipsters who have to beg for table scraps from women. They sublimate their ineffectual effeteness into rage against “the Man”.

Another round of projection. It is the Gameboys that propose Black Knighting as the `scientific` way to beg for their table scraps. Where they gather in small crowds to egg each other on in their study of cloning the mannerisms of the sterotypical narcissistic woman as rage against "the Woe-man." It's not an idle claim as one can easily read Roissy's views on behaving as Women to get his entitled due from Women -- all part of tearing down what's left of Western society.

He is, by his own terms, the very lip wristed weeping emo geek mangina begging for butter at his Better's table that he decries.

The fact is that the majority of men who learn and use game are well-adjusted and successful in life, and simply want the tools to meet, seduce and bring more pleasure to beautiful women, or to meet and seduce that one perfect woman, fall in love with her, and minimize the chance that infidelity will tear them apart.

Another bold and bald asseriton. The better bit is the hamster wheel he hides at his "perfect woman" link. His perfect woman is the flawless source of narcissistic supply. He admits these not only don't exist but that they are not truly perfect unless:

"She has to have at least one flaw you can exploit to keep her feet on the ground and her head out of the clouds." -- Roissy

They can be exploited as a disposable tool for self-gratification.

Is Kay prepared to say these goals aren’t noble, or aren’t in men’s interests? If not, why not?

Again the mindless reversal that Gameboys will -- properly -- attribute to politicians and the kind of women you want to avoid. Again, Roissy and the Gameboys have long decried these very things as ignoble. Yet advocate that the proper manner of things is to engage in them exactly and directly as some rationalized sexual and social terrorism.

And have you never heard of long term relationships? I’m a big proponent of them, occasionally spiced with the varied fling.

Another bout of wordsnitchery. Here the notion that a long-term relationship involves infidelity. Or, alternately, that a long-term relationship is just extended casual sex. On or the other despite that neither is what people consider the term to mean. Again the narcissistic head runs the hamster wheel around: Sex for me but not for thee.

Douchebags aren’t hopeless with women. Just the opposite. Douchebags are pricks and assholes — usually gauche and lower class — who inexplicably do well with women.

More of the same. None of the Gameboys dare answer the question of Quality versus Quantity. Especially in regards long-term relationships and marriage where the data is in and routinely stacked against them. While he acknowledges the `lower class` here he still ignores that the survey data says: Poor Blacks.

Of course one can't build a rationalized mythos of narcissism on top these notions if you simply direct your sycophants and bitter clingers to act like Eazy-E. Or worse, to note that while young Black men are more likely to show narcissistic traits they are also more likely to show extroversion.

So you have to ignore the Quality versus Quantity bubble getting slaughtered on the simple notion that if you don't talk to people? You won't meet people.

Third, game isn’t just about picking up women at bars. For fuck’s sake, this is a lazy, half-brained meme that needs to die already. The reality just doesn’t bear it out. My last three girlfriends were met, respectively, on the sidewalk, at a convention and during a bike race. That’s the beauty of game; it’s suited for every environment.

This is simply false on its face. Game, so called, is derived directly from the seduction community -- the PUA set -- which did all of their organization, refinement, and "testing" within bars. Roissy isn't a fucking idiot here. He absolutely cannot acknowledge, ever, that this is where the entire mess comes from or that drunk people are sexually promiscuous.

The obvious destroys his fame and sycophantic accolades.

But he does trot another bag of tricks common among Gameboys: The iron anecdote. This is not simply the expansion of a personal anecdote to universality that one should expect of women. But the creation of a Law of Physics based upon it.

In the same vein: Guy I knew back in the day got reliably laid while cleaning the bathroom. Beyond simply Penthouse letters on his behalf this was independently verified by some of our crowd that used the bathroom while he was... using the bathroom. Awkward. In our defense we were eating free food and hanging out while we waited for him to get off work. This then is iron proof that the reliable manner to get laid is to perform janitorial duties for Taco Bell.

Which should be a great relief what with the mancession going on.

The bar meme is silly in another way. The bar is no different in actuality than many other venues for meeting the opposite sex. Online dating, for instance, is nothing but a dry bar.

Last time I mentioned that the DC Bar Hopper had terrible advice about bars. Now he's claiming that alcohol has absolutely no effect on an individual whatsoever.

He's not that stupid of course. This is simply another attempt to claim moronic things in defense of a completely lost point. A point so lost that the impairment of judgement and increase in sexual promiscuity related to alcohol can be found with Near Beer as well.

All that's required is the social circumstance in which other people are drinking and you get a similar, though lesser, effect than the real McCoy.

But it's not enough to simply deny the well-studied reality of beer goggles and beer ankles. He has to castrate himself further:

So the bar has become the go-to meeting place for people with a lick of social savvy who prefer face to face contact over ASCII courting.

By acknowledging that it's almost exclusive to the bar scene. So it's not random luck, bar-fly's, booze, or the social proof of Near Beer. It's his own unassailable greatness at acting exactly like the women he despises and endeavours to emulate.

Bars are where a lot of men run game because *that’s where the greatest concentration of young, single women are*. It has nothing to do with the kinds of women who go to bars or the supposed artificiality of bars. It’s simply an opportunity calculation based on target demographic

In which he finally admits that it's just a simple numbers game; emphasis mine. So spare yourself the vapid nonsense of the Gameboys and just roll the dice faster. It beats the hell of false mythologies, acting like Lucille Ball, or questionable morality.

Hell, it doesn't even have to be a real drink. For that matter wandering around with an empty works just as well.

Breeding Tits

2011-03-02T19:20:00.001-08:00

And there we are. I'm now firmly convinced that Dice is real, accurate, and unassailable. Not for fish or birds, mind you. But that random selection is how Dice cultists conjure up papers about Dice.

Climate change may accelerate evolution in some species – but that doesn't guarantee that threatened populations will cope in the long run. That's the message of a study that suggests the changing environment is hitting fast forward on evolutionary adaptations.

Yeh no. Mutations, in the gametes separately and through their combination, are the notional operator. Any acceleration is then due an increase in the number of offspring. Climate is not some intelligent agent that directly interferes with the tits as a rapid mutagenic agent. Second-hand smoke perhaps, but not good weather.

Increasingly warm springs over the past four decades mean the songbirds' biological rhythms are out of sync with nature. Plants are blossoming, fruits are blushing and caterpillars are gorging themselves earlier. Great tit chicks that hatch too late in the season miss out on this unusually early peak in food – especially the abundance of caterpillars – resulting in fewer surviving youngsters and second clutches.

Plausible. If the food-sources are diminished and the tits aren't altering their breeding times then we should expect exactly this. However:

The analysis confirmed that rising temperatures have strongly selected for great tits that hatch earlier: chicks that enjoy spring's early-bird special went on to produce more chicks of their own.

It didn't happen. Not just that, but:

What's more, they found that the statistical correlation was strongest for the warmest springs. This, the team says, suggests that increasing temperatures are speeding up the bird's adaptation to warm springs.

It didn't happen in spades.

But wait, there's more!

It's not all good news, though. Despite this potential coping mechanism, the population overall is producing fewer and fewer offspring, leading the researchers to question whether the birds can adapt fast enough to keep pace with climate change.

It happened despite not happening!

Timothy Coulson of Imperial College London explains that the songbirds are probably experiencing markedly accelerated rates of microevolution – change in gene frequency from one generation to the next – as opposed to long-term evolution, which spans many thousands or millions of years.

And we didn't even measure it!

So our proof of a genetic hypothesis for Dice is to avoiding testing the hypothesis while coming up with validation and invalidation of our own predicted population changes as a result of the DNA variations we avoided wholly.

All of this proves that Phillip-Morris tainted Carbon Dioxide is an intelligent agent of evil that teleologically formulates mutagenic alterations to perform abortions on great tits. Obviously through the mechanism of Closed Time Circuits in General Relativity and via suicidal time-shifting photons under Quantum Mechanics.

Ah well. Fortunately we don't teach religion in publicly funded schools.

Off to see the Wizard

2011-03-02T18:18:00.001-08:00

That settles that:

Large-scale purchases of longer-term securities are a less familiar means of providing monetary policy stimulus than reducing the federal funds rate, but the two approaches affect the economy in similar ways. Conventional monetary policy easing works by lowering market expectations for the future path of short-term interest rates, which, in turn, reduces the current level of longer-term interest rates and contributes to both lower borrowing costs and higher asset prices. This easing in financial conditions bolsters household and business spending and thus increases economic activity. By comparison, the Federal Reserve's purchases of longer-term securities, by lowering term premiums, put downward pressure directly on longer-term interest rates. By easing conditions in credit and financial markets, these actions encourage spending by households and businesses through essentially the same channels as conventional monetary policy.

Emphasis is mine. There's been a long running argument in various economic camps as to whether the Federal Reserve actually tinkers the economy with the Federal Funds Rate or whether it's a complete psychological ploy used against useful idiots.

According to Bernanke, himself, in his prepared statement for Senate hearings the Fed Funds Rate is pure propaganda-mill pablum.

I don't doubt the useful idiots will continue to proclaim otherwise since they've been immune to all contrary evidence thus far. But it's good to keep this about for the purpose of clubbing the little babe seals in the future.

This is, natch, why the Fed Res never lets the Fed Funds Rate get too far away from the Effective Rate. It would throw open the curtain on the wizards.

Zeno's Arrow

2011-03-01T04:49:00.000-08:00

Zeno, the ancient Greek, was the world's first Internet Troll. He made good practice turning thought on it's head just to cheese off the philosophers. Simple statements to drive the deep thinkers off a deep cliff.

One of his most storied set of paradoxes is that of the arrow. If, at every time step, an arrow moves halfway from where it is to where it will be: Then how does it ever get there? No matter how small the distance it can only get halfway to the goal in the next move. It simply cannot ever get there. This led to the notion of convergence as a dodge around continuous notions of Diophantine issues. And it had a great deal to do with calculus. That things will get infinitely close to a given value without ever crossing it.

In marriage we find that half likewise end in divorce. Assuming nothing else we should expect that Zeno's arrow always gets us halfway from where we are now to a society that's fully married off. But that can only occur if the reasons for divorce are likewise half-n-half as coffee creamer. Yet divorce in the US is filed twice by every woman for the man that does so.

If we maintain with a principle of equality then this puts our terms as one man per one woman. And one women that cannot countenance it for whatever reason. One of two things may be true. If society still ends up at full marriage then the result is that women are not choosy enough. If society does not end up at full marriage then women are too choosy.

It's an easy call. If women are not choosy enough they will marry pricks who got a decent woman. If they are too choosy the bitch will never be satisfied with a decent man.

Without splitting hairs it has to lye on one line or the other due the excess of women putting on their Sunday finest to head to the Statehouse.

In either case we find that keeping a principle of equality violates the principle of equality. Either women cannot suffer society or women cannot suffer society. As compared to men.

That's a harsh statement.

A full 3 out of 6 single women have no such problem by example. 2 out of the 6 will have no such problem but poor taste; divorcing or being divorced against. And only a single woman out of 6 will have no taste or judgment. That's just the way the numbers break.

Since I've got outie parts, or so I claim, I'll take the rest as having outie parts. At my age there's equal odds that every women I meet is compatible with me, incompatible with me, or incompatible with no one. The rest are married. I've got a one in three shot at it.

Let's say I put on airs to be something I'm not. Then I've still got a one in three shot. One chick will match with my falsehoods, one won't, and one never will.

But if I am the opposite of my pretense then my odds go to zero in three if I slip.

The woman that would have been compatible with me wasn't for my falsehoods. The broad that was compatible with my bullshit isn't with me. And the third is kosher, as always, with no one.

Engaging in deceits can only gain me the extra risk for extra effort. All morality aside. I can choose to have the arrow get me one third the distance or none at all.

True Faith

2011-02-28T23:59:00.000-08:00

Does modern life stop evolution?

What a stupid question. Does modern life prevent all mutations? Or course not.

For starters, the older you are the more mutations are like to arise in any given gamete. This is particularly pronounced in men and gets particularly haywire after about age 35 or so. So in Aristotle's day we had middle-aged men and youthful women. This continued on for ages until we had young men and young women. Now, in the West, we have middle-aged men and women. If anything else we're outstripping the low-brow bronze age set for our ability to crank out mutations per child.

Add to that the ability of modern medicine to deny fatality or detriment in production of our leaking little mutants and we lack a great deal of other external constraints.

Throw in gene expression and we get some more fun. Via Socialist programs of all manner and the general increase in the standards of living we will find a greater number of genes that are never expressed, so present no issue as to their maintenance. That is, we are currently able to rack up more genetic drift across more genes than has ever previously been possible.

And this is all naturally an ensemble process. The more children, by raw number, the more opportunities you have. We have never had a smaller population of homonids and we're still over the replacement rate in terms of children produced.

At no point in the past have we been capable of spitting out X-men as we are now. So much so that one should demand that we have King Vultan sprouting his wings no later than a couple decades from now.

The only thing that might possibly put the skids to this are all the cack-brained notions of transhumanism and designer children. Once we get that all locked in solid we're well on our way to getting under genocidal pressures from the common cold. At least in scyfy if you're kind to H.G. Wells. But that's for a future then. For now our latent natal pre-selection is restricted to the Down's kids and wymmyn-chillins.

Seriously, if you actually understand the notion of evolution rather than passing it vomitous as a liturgical tool for tax-payer funded occupations, then you already grok that we're so primed for uber-mutants that it is an absolute certainty that we'll turn into cats with forebrains the size of an innercity bus any day now. Most likely in India somewhere.

Yet the best the pro-Dice intelligentsia can manage is to trot out a Yale prof for the third year running to claim the correctness of Lamarckianism under shrouded terms since a measurement that can't get out of it's raw error bands, or even half the width of knit socks, can be thrown through 3 and 4 levels of extra uncertainty. This then proves that we're evolving shorter at twice the width of the tip of a ball-point pen with every generation from here to 2409.

"And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have their streets joined together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen." -- Mark Twain

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at all this. But certainly it's an accident of the ages in either case.

More Financial Imagineering

2011-02-28T20:32:00.001-08:00

The newest tizzy is that folks are selling credit default swaps against GM bonds. When GM has no bonds to sell credit default swaps against. It's a bit misplaced really. A CDS is both an insurance policy and an options contract for how you want to book it. And neither for when the regulators start asking questions. If insurance regulators ask why it's not insurance you claim it's an options contract. If the options folks ask about things you claim its insurance.

Notionally, a CDS works like car insurance. You pay a premium every so often and, if something awkward occurs, the insurer takes possession of the insured bond and gives the claimant the par-value for the bond. Given that these are bonds the notion is that the CDS matures at the same time the bond does, or on a proper claim being paid.

But it is not insurance for a number of reasons. Quite strictly the most important is that you do not have to own the bond to insure it. In which case you are paying an annuity to keep the option open as to whether or not you can forcibly sell a bond to the CDS provider at some future date. If you purchase a CDS today that has a total payout of $10 then you only need two things. A bond coupon less than $10 and a triggering condition that allows you to exercise your option. If the coupon is $15 and the option can be exercised then you're instantly $5 up on the deal.

With the GM thing thrown in the mix we have the purchaser attaining an option just in case GM issues bonds in the future. Nothing more nor less. It's simply an option issued against a possible future par-value worth of bonds that may, or may not, possibly exist. A lot of hulabaloo about it but not any different than most non-financial contracts in which a possible future service is contracted against a possible future payment. Such things are flat ignorance to engage in without Debtor's Prison to backstop things appropriately. But there's no reason an inidividual investor should be prohibited from approved gambling. Institutional investors are a different question naturally as they're structured in other manners and under differing laws covering how they should conduct their business as commercial enterprises.

The essential problem here is the same as has always existed with CDS issuance. Both parties to the contract have the ability to book it as an asset. As a purchaser I can book it as an asset against risk-weighted impairments to bond valuation or as a tradeable; both based only on the last single payment made to keep the CDS alive. The seller likewise gets to book the totality of future payments as an asset under the notion that they'll never pay.

This violates the entire zero-sum requirement of financial transactions and allows a claim for more asset valuation then can possibly exist or be transferred.

If I make a bet with myself for a $5 total then I will be moving a fiver from one pocket to another when it resolves. If I pretend that my pockets are independent of one another then each pocket must contain five bucks for the bet to be good. Before the bet, during the bet, and after the bet I still have only $10 in assets. And most regulation of financial instruments are built with this concept in mind.

With a CDS, however, I can buy insurance from myself for 4 payments of $1 against a possible loss of a $5 bet against myself. When I take the bet I get to book a win of $5 and a single $1 payment for one pocket. My other pocket is able to book a $4 asset and no $5 loss. I am able to take my $5 of assets and give it to the GAAP as $8 worth. Declining $1 on each payment made until I'm stuck acknowledging that I still only have $5.

It's as silly as it is inconsequential until you start selling these things or using them as collateral against loans. It's obvious here why using them as collateral is no different than check kiting. What's not obvious is the issue of selling them. But changing ownership will not change the amount of money involved at any point in the system.

This is more in-your-face than traditional fractional reserve banking where the debt is conjured out of nothing as offset by a real asset. Here we're conjuring book assets twice out of nothing and then treating each as real assets despite the impossibility of such.

This will remain a problem with accounting for Credit Default Swaps until and unless there exists a standardized risk-weighted model that both parties agree to use in advance. It's not strictly required that they are under regulation to do so. Simply that both agree to the same sliding metric as to whose ahead and by how much in each of these horse races.

Absent this condition neither end of these objects should find their way onto corporate balance sheets.

Progressive Taxation

2011-02-27T22:45:00.001-08:00

Folks are drawn into their normal camps over Holder, and so Obama, not going to bat in defence of DOMA. The usual suspects claiming either that he shouldn't for conscience or that he should by the Constitution.

The Constituional necessity claim is a bit specious. Certainly the President swears an oath to faithfully execute the law. None of the administrations I've been alive for have ever done this. But defending a law's validity under the Constitution as a response to a court case is not the act of executing, carrying out, that law. The argument is not then one of the President's requirement to defend a law in court by the decency and good judgement of avoiding such.

If one considers that the US system is to have three separate and co-equal brances of government then things are a bit different than what one might want. The Judicial and Executive branch are distinct and on the same level. If you demand that the court hear the Executive's case then it is quite plain that the court is either subordinate or incompetent of performing judgements. It cannot legally be subordinate. And while the Supreme Court has proven itself to be completely incompetent when it comes to basic language, let alone law, the fault lies in who we've robed. Of course discarding incompetents warming the legal bench is the onus of the Congressional branch.

A more savvy take here is the notion that the Federal Government is not, for the time being, allowed to consider Lucille Ball Impersonators under legally documented cohabitation as unmarried. The floor debates for the 14th Amendment encompassed the issue of marriage. In which it was stated that any class distinction in law between a married and unmarried woman would be a violation. I mention this specifically as it was brought up in the debate specifically as the limits and reach of the proposed amendment.

Therefore, under the Constitution as we have and understand it there can be no Federal or State difference in law for heterosexual and lesbian marriages. Jack and John are free to be a special class if we restrict ourselves soundly under the topic. But only Jack and John.

It is often forgotten outside Deseret when the Federal government got involved in marriage directly. For those that don't know: The income tax was ruled, by the court, to be Unconstitutional unless it accounted for a difference on marriage. This is a ruling right up there with Dred Scott in its ignorance because it goes directly contrary to the 14th Amendment.

So what the heck. Hold them to it and require that income tax can only be collected by Bears, Otters, and Bachelors.

Facepalm

2011-02-26T23:21:00.000-08:00

You can thank Glenn Reynolds for the newest trip into the Chateau of Ignorance. Rather then simply fisking the vapid drool rolling off this Gameboy's chin I really want y'all to read it. Fully. And then come on back.

Roissy is kvetching about a chick, natch. Hey, it's his ouvre. In this case about a narcisisstic incubator giving out tips for women to get free drinks. So does the DC bar-hopper even know his own Game within his own scene?

Some chick has posted (as of last week) a how-to guide for, presumably, cute girls to score free drinks from ~~suckers betas heedless horndogs virginal aspies~~ men. (Ugly girls have to buy men drinks to get any attention.) ...

It’s hard to fault these unscrupulous whores for taking advantage of willing dupes. You’d do the same if you were a hot chick in her prime surrounded by buffoons.

Nope. Though a nice sleight of hand from `presumably cute` to not blaming a `hot chick.` Here's the thing about `hot` chicks: They don't need tips, tricks, or otherwise. The mere presence of their symmetry within a bar has free booze flowing in their direction straight from the pocket of hopeful men.

If you've ever been around bars you already know this. Despite that the Gameboys are building their entire monolithic world view on the backs of corn liquor Roissy can't even manage to grasp this single point at the core of his own erstwhile Penthouse letters.

Not that there aren't very attractive women that pull these stunts. But the bulk of this nonsense flows out of women of average genetic and disease proxy measures. Or, in terms that Gameboys and men that fingerpaint the cave walls can understand: This is what homely women do.

And the more homely the more they pull these things. Right down to the level of "Where did your glass eye get off to this time?" It's without question that Roissy writes his Penthouse letters on the basis of his own bar experience. He shows here that he hasn't even learned a lick from that.

So let's put it in real simple terms for the enamoured: This chump doesn't even know how to get laid by drunk women. A sport less difficult than fishing with dynamite.

Here I want to switch up quickly and note what the bint is suggesting for the rest of her entitled vaginal peers. It will come up later.

Scoring free drinks is easier than you think. Give these fail-proof ways a try, and enjoy night after night of free drinking. Just remember, picking the right guy is crucial. You can’t go for a guy who is there with his girlfriend.

This is Roissy's quote of the innie in question. All you need ask yourself right now is whether this is correct or not. Of course it's correct. It's as easy getting free drinks at a bar if you've an outie. The first thing is a common language and the second thing is chutzpah. No less true of randomly asking bar folk in skirts if they'll take a half-naked trip to the alley dumpster with you.

It's a shotgun theory. Odds of success versus time spent. Depending on balance one will get more bites in a given time than the other. Just like Game; but with less magic underwear.

Back to the simpering Beta of Internet Fame:

Nice. But times are changing. If these frat brothers had any sense they would mercilessly mock their bro for buying a drink for a girl he’s not banging.

These are `frat bros.` There's only a single reason they chill at the bar, and that's to hit on the bartendress. Read: They're morons. The chick is spot on here that they're prime targets. If they had a lick of sense, per Roissy, they wouldn't be hanging at the bar proper.

Notwithstanding all this the better tack, if free shots is what you're after, is to simply chat up couples at the bar. Those are the regulars and hard drinkers. And they hate drinking alone no matter what crotch parts you plant on the stool. Those sorts buy friends with beer; it's simply pub tradition.

She’d do better making eye contact with ugly guys. They would be more grateful for the female attention and thus more amenable to getting thieved.

Lest I seem unfair, this is entirely correct. This chick, despite her advice, hasn't figured out the difference between speed and odds. Doing the wrong thing real fast still gets reasonable results. It's precisely these items that let you know that you're advisor par excellence is so endowed with intellectual prowess and self-awareness that they are beyond approach.

Any man who has an ounce of pride and self-control (a male trait which is very attractive to women, btw) can stare at a bodacious rack all night without feeling a compulsion to open his wallet and buy drinks for the biological package scaffolding the tits.

Another awesome sleight of hand. I agree completely with this singular statement. Yet the entire point of Game is not to avoid compulsion for adiopose tissues. It is to revel in it and be slave to it. To adorn yourself and measure your societal worth by it. As a cheapskate.

And look, there's nothing wrong with being a cheapskate. All the homeless boys in Nashville made good lolli finding white collar execs to swan dive onto for zero dollars.

But that's not pride and self-control. It's poverty at best and ingratitude at worst. In either case you're still after fat distribution for no better cause than fat distribution.

Her post is interesting for a glimpse into the sheer number of shit test permutations that women can wield. If you get this line, acceptable shit-test busting answers are: “Are you the IRS?”, “I found a loophole”, “You’re right. Can you cover me?”, “That’s what she said”.

And this is precisely why Roissy got his ass handed to him by Lady Rayne. He doesn't have the first clue what he's doing. The only need for coy here is that you're after a known narcisisstic incubator for the sake of a rack. Contradicting his immediately prior notion of pride and self-control.

And hey, maybe she's just curious. Hedge your bets, or discard your aspie, and simply answer "yep." Then go about your business. If she's a narcissist she's gone since you're uninteresting. If she's not a narcisisst you didn't piss on her leg by playing the dick. Roissy's answers are only suitable if you're actively seeking a what he says you should avoid.

If she manages to get her hand on your glass, push it away and ask her if her parents raised her to be a grub.

Yep. 'Nuff said, here. In straight-laced boy culture that's an ass-whoopin'.

Do bartenders really fall for this? They tend to be a savvy lot, so it’s doubtful many girls get away with this. Anyhow, this is a risky move for a girl at her regular bar. If the bartender calls her out on her lie, she could be kicked out.

Idiot. Bartenders `fall` for this if they think the chick's a booze hound. Because drunk women are good for getting men laid. And getting men laid is good for business. Then there's the notion that they're men. Bartendresses avoid that last notion and are far more mercenary at ensuring that boozehounds with an innie get sauced for squat then their outie counterparts. You want to get Gameboy at a bar?

Make good platonic company with a bartendress. She'll feed you more trim than anything save a poofter mixing drinks.

This is yet another example of the DC Bar-Hopper knowing nothing of his own hunting grounds.

The only way to get axed on this issue is if you're already drunk and are irritating the heck out of the mixologist.

Older men are wising up to this as well. Game knows no age limit. But as a personal observation, it seems younger men are more prone to fall for the free drink ruse. Horniness tends to cloud judgement.

Yep, old fashioned bar manners. The coots at the bar are old soggy salts keeping company with their bar maiden. They'll happily drill the well with a suitably sodden bint if it comes along. But they're also old hands at the narcisisstic ploys as well.

Another permutation of the same old same old shit test. Good answers: “I don’t buy drinks for strangers”, “I didn’t know I was planning on hitting on you” (very subtle neg), “That’s small potatoes. Ill give you a thousand to hit on you for a week.”

The idea is to undermine her free drink angling with the insinuation that she’s not far removed from a common street whore, without coming right out and saying it.

And their goes the pride of the `Dark Lord.` Despite the open knowledge of her proof avarice he's got the advice for coon-hounds that you ought chase it anyways. This is precisely why he couldn't keep his own house in order.

He's a beta heedless horndog virginal aspie.

There's nothing surprising here. Game is betas writing Penthouse letters to other betas about how they're no longer beta.

Roissy, meet facepalm.

Again this is horrible. Any bartender who falls for this is not worth his mixology license or his badboy tattoos.

Same ignorance we should expect singly and separately from either Gameboys or the Political Class. A complete unawareness of business or marketing.

And as any man who’s lived a day knows, buying drinks for girls is counterproductive to the goal of getting laid. No woman in the world has slept with a guy because he bought her a drink, unless he had compensating alpha factors that nullified the betaness of buying the drink.

"Dig up, Stupid!"

Drunk women will mount a donkey in the fashionable style of Catherine the Great for an audience if the BAC crosses a proper level. Men too. Buying drinks for a woman that gets drunk is always profitable on this count.

So far Roissy has shown himself to be unaware of the bar business, sober women, drunk women, as well good guidance on what women to target in a bar.

Though we are all to fall at his feet for his success in `ad-hoc engineering.` It seems you'd do a lot better -- even by his own notions -- to sidle up to the vet at the bar and ask for advice on women than to listen to this Penthouse blowhard.

If you have a lick of dignity and a smidgen of understanding about women’s sexual processes, you won’t be asking a girl if “that’s all you’re drinking?”.

Foolishness. Women that are prone to these shenanigans are more open than a set of pocket doors. It's fine if you don't take my word on that. Simply ask me how many women of this sort would trade a $3 cab fare for sexual favors and I'll start dropping memories.

If she's drunk, it's on. If she's not then you discard her. And that's via Game proper rather than Roissy's misplaced appeal to his own authority in getting poon.

Good answer if you just want to have a laugh at her expense: “How about we screw, and I’ll leave the tip?”

This, within Game, I agree with. The only reason for any person to offer this is to pay less than you. Unless this is a long-standing back-n-forth with your buddies? It's a scam. Throw it on the floor where it belongs.

Never buy drinks for girls. That rule goes double for girls in birthday or bachelorette parties.

Eh? Again he doesn't have a lick of sense. Birthday and Bachlorette parties are quite strictly the most trivial way to find your Levi's around your shoelaces. All the moreso when it's a wad of crap as the only point there is for the chicks to get soused. The odds are far better when it's legit if you know so and tailor your approach for it; but who's couting?

The way to counter this tactic is to offer a “best out of five” suggestion. Example: “How about we do best out of five, but I get to ask the last question.” Few girls know much about the hobbies of men. Ask her a question about tube amps or Call of Duty.

Again a man that trolls bars that doesn't understand the etiquette. If you take a bet in a bar you're in for a world of hurt. This has always been true and the only point for doing after your first time is simply to see what entertainment follows.

Regardless that, Game is all about variously plumping and flagellating her ego. This, of all things, is a cost-free ego feed to keep the dance going. If you're trying to get laid under Game then it's all give and take. Not the narcisisstic and constant take of a man that acts like a low-woman as Roissy would provide here.

Let's wrap this overlong dissection of pablum up with a quote first from the deluded innie then the deluded outie:

It’s not hard to get free drinks; guys just can’t help themselves (the poor schmucks). Try these techniques, strut your stuff, and you’ll be set. Don’t feel bad; they want to talk to you. And hey, maybe you’ll end up going for them.

True. Betas can't help themselves with sober women. The old hands know what to do with drunk ones.

Buy her a drink and you will go home the celibate monk you arrived as. But pass her shit test and don’t buy her a drink, and her eyes will sparkle with growing attraction for your demonstrated alphaness.

True. If you only buy her `a` drink you're getting nothing. But then a man with any awareness of the bar scene knows that `a` drink is not the course nor cause. If one would hazard to guess it's that Game qua Roissy is so repellant that they won't suffer him long enough to down a pint and practice procreation in the parking lot.

For what it's worth: That Roissy doesn't know his ass from his own finger is not the question. I don't recommend that anyone pursue the correct course of life that I've pointed out either. But if you're going to bang bar-flies at least have a better sense than this helpless fuck-up dripping his green genital discharge across the fora.

Free Will and Grace

2011-02-25T16:40:00.000-08:00

Feh. I haven't had the time to go through everything proper. So this is half an argument put forward so that the Calvinists can savage me with abandon. Better that than I let something interesting go stale. And I guarantee the Calvinists will savage me despite that I don't hold with Arminianism either.

Can Free Will lead one to Christ or is it necessary that Grace be delivered from outside in advance?

Dunno. There's two parts to this story; one prior Christ and one after. It the Old Testament there's the two obvious examples of Job and the Pharaoh.

With Job the wager doesn't make a lick of sense unless there's Free Will involved. By itself it means about nothing. But with the Pharaoh thrown in we're stuck for saying: Free Will matters, but less than what the Comptroller may dictate. Which is a pretty obvious position if you look down and lack sack.

I don't hold there's a cogent position you can derive that states that there was no Free Will under the Law. But now, and now what?

That's the sticky bit. There's no question the coming of Christ placed a new order to things. The question here is only whether or not the presence of the Son of Man has upended the equation.

The Aminianins say `no` while the Calvinists say `yes.` And that's the part I haven't gone through properly to my own measure. The only thing that occurs abesent full reference it that there was a chick that acknowledged herself as a dog despite asking for beneficence. Was this an example like Job or an example like the Pharaoh?

The whole discussion breaks over this notion. So far as I see it. But then I'm nothing but a new outsider.

Profligate Austerity

2011-02-22T23:18:00.001-08:00

Yet another teat leech appears:

Germany’s economic growth surged in the middle of last year, causing commentators both there and here to proclaim that American stimulus had failed and German austerity had worked. ... Well, it turns out the German boom didn’t last long. ... This country would now need to suffer through a double-dip recession for its gross domestic product to be in the same condition as Germany’s.

Is there any validity to this? No. Let's skip all the horseshit numbers that economists -- and in this case, an Applied Mathematician -- throw about. All we need know is the rate of change in the national debt for the two countries. From 2009 to 2010 the annual rate of change for German debt increased 39.73%. At the same time in the US the annual rate of change decreased 58.44%.

On this fella's graph he's got the GDP of both countries going straight the heck up. So let's not pretend that deficit spending has anything to do with anything. Both certainly spent more in hock than the prior year, but Germany was doubling down at the same time the US was? Doing the equivalent of austerity measures.

You'll never hear a peep of that confluence from any of the Keynesian cheerleaders. Archeo or Neo.

So why the national debt rather than the politically massaged and reported budget deficits? Because their propagandist crap for cover. The real annual deficit of any nation can be seen in the total year-to-year increase in its national debt. By definition that increase is the spending in excess of the governments revenue. Simple, pure, proper, and requires no college degrees for creative inventory. It's also the correct measure to use when discussing Keynesian counter-cyclical spending.

The immediate problem, however, is the fragility of the economy. Gross domestic product may have surpassed its previous peak, but it’s still growing too slowly for companies to be doing much hiring.

Is this correct? Certainly the GDP has increased and is stated to be above 2008 levels. But again this is a generally crap number worked over by political whips for public consumption. But we don't need GDP as we only need Federal tax revenue. That comes mostly from personal and corporate income taxes, natch. So here's the queer thing you'll never hear: Tax revenues increased from 2008 to 2009 by 1.5%. However, they decreased from 2009 to 2010 by 11.8%. If we consider the old notion that Federal revenues are 16.5% of the GDP then we have a pretty severe problem here as the difference between 2008 and 2010 ought be a gap of $1.69 Trillion in the GDP. With 2010 wallowing at 2008's feet.

Again, no massaging, or collegiate creative counting degrees. Just a plain simple inventory with a well-known series.

So no, the GDP hasn't recovered in any sense important to those outside banks. It's specifically worse in the only sense important for the US government itself.

But this does point to a possible, and valid, anti-austerity argument. I can't say for Germany as I haven't found the numbers for them on this count. But for the US we find that a 181.4% increase in the debt rate correlated with a Federal revenue increase of 1.5% while the following 58.44% rate decrease correlated with a 11.8% drop in revenues. Keep this in mind and see if it holds after:

Let’s start with the logic. The austerity crowd argues that government cuts will lead to more activity by the private sector. How could that be? The main way would be if the government were using so many resources that it was driving up their price and making it harder for companies to use them.

Yes, let's start there. Through 2009 and 2010 the US national debt increased $4.123 Trillion. But the M2 only increased $0.637 Trillion. Folks, that means that $3.486 Trillion dollars is out there floating around over-seas or otherwise outside deposits. Right off the bat we can, for the 2010 numbers, cut $834.7 Billion dollars right off the US spending without changing, at all, the yearly increase in M2. It's only after that when we begin to talk about gnawing into Keynesian debt-driven counter-cyclical issues.

And here we have the Republicans wringing their hands over $60 Billion in spending cuts while Obama threatens to shut the government down over similar. This is all entirely unserious as none of that debt spending, in excess of that hitting the M2, is of any consequence whatsoever to the US economy.

But is the government spending driving the price up on resources? Dunno, what's wheat, corn, cotton, oil, iron, at today? The trick here is that a great deal of that non-deposit debt spending that the US government performed went straight to the banks balance sheet. Where it will rot under inflation. There is precious little else that the banks do but drive up prices in commodity speculation.

So not only is $834.7 Billion per year being devoted to anything but Keynesian counter-cyclical spending? It is being used to destroy input prices, corporate margins, and thus Aggregate Demand. Love Maynard or hate him, but it's a nice image to think of his ghoulish form kicking-ass on the idiots that are cheerleading this idiocy.

Finally, despite the decline in the rate of US debt growth in 2010, the M2 picked up the pace over 2009 by 1.44%. And that's the only metric that should matter to those trotting out Briton's bones. There simply is no credible argument against Austerity at this time.

Hox Paradox

2011-02-21T22:21:00.000-08:00

Paradox? First I've heard of it. Though it seems to be trivially correct to acknowledge beyond O'Leary's brief mention as links pop up all over the place in both the Dice and Design camps. Perhaps I'm just dense or spent too much time in the basement with C and Unix scripts, but I've always considered this a requirement long before I'd ever heard mention of Hox. In fact, both camps require it under their respective notions.

From the little reading I've done on ID it seems clear to me that the Design camp is quite comfy with, and indeed expects, to find common subroutines and other signs of reuse throughout the kingdoms. This is, after all, how humans go about tackling large and fiddly projects with lots of commonality; so it's all a bit intuitive.

But why the Dice camp should ever have found a paradox in Hox -- or that the Design camp would claim it is a paradox for Dice -- bothers the heck out of me. Dice should precisely expect, and be comfy, with Hox and other common subroutines. That this has been found to be unexpected, ever, is just another example of the Imams of Dice showing that they neither believe nor understand their own myth of Creation.

So let's get down with Kipling and make our own evolutionary just-so story to show why this is so strictly necessary.

For now let's just toss out all the nasty little bits and assume only mutation and common descent, as that's all we need for this. In some warm, little pond somewhere aeons past we have a bunch of bacteria busily stabbing each other with pili and swapping genetic material. Which is quite obviously the start of both rape and the innie/outie sexual dimorphisms. During the course of this they get the ability to coordinate multicellular signaling on a time constraint and with their own offspring. Whom they have a tendency to not push their pilus into until a satisfactory time has passed. From this one bacterium hiding in a dark alley the dna for temporally discriminate cytoplasmic spit swapping gets spread about. Eventually we get all manner of nifty things from the Piltdown man to Pterosaurs.

To get all this multicellular magic we need a single mechanism. The ability to clone ourselves and then run a different program both in the parent and child thereafter. Otherwise we'll be poking our offspring before we can physically adhere and coordinate with them as a proper multicelled critter. Now, anyone that's ever toyed with Unix style systems just said, "fork(2) you, I know the answer."

In programming we've got a nifty little subroutine called `fork` that reserves a new chunk of memory, clones the current program into that memory space, and then allows for each copy to now do whatever it likes. Same thing it was doing or something entirely different and there's no requirement they do the same thing. Each copy can proceed from there to do something entirely different.

We've known for literal ages that an embryo develops by cloning itself up as a happy little ball for just a bit before the various cells start doing different things entirely than their neighbors. To get this done, with everyone doing their own bit, we require a mechanism precisely like fork() to get it all done. Without speaking of computer programming this has always been a logical requirement. There is a critical need for control flow to be decided on the completion of the act of replication.

As a necessity the control mechanism for differentiating cells must be more highly conserved than the bits and parts that it runs thereafter. This is a key notion of both common descent and complexity defined as graph topology.[1] We should, in fact, expect to find several such mechanisms and it ought be considered highly irregular to both Dice and Design if we do not.

For a rough minimum in our warm, little pond we need a fork() program that runs adhesion during growth and differentiates only one to carry about a pilus after the adhesion process is completed. But specific to Hox in the linear layout of the organism from head to tail, with the rest following thereafter. Bilateral symmetry is a nice thing to talk about, but the linear description of a body plan is the absolute precursor of modern life under Dice. If we look to Precambrian biota such as Spriggina or Yorgia this requires us to have such a forking genetic regime in place no later than 550 million years ago under normal fossil dating regimes. By the rise of the earliest vertebrates, commonly dated as no later than 500 million years ago, we had to finalize Hox and be well on our way to subsidiary forking programs for the necessary generation of organs, bones, the notochord, circulatory structures, and nearly all other modern organ tissues. The next 500 million years providing, well, lungs; and about nothing else of any interest. But from the late Edicarian period through the entirety of the Cambrian the necessary bits for embryonic growth need to find their completion and then be relied on for the next 500 million years.

Which goes straight to the Dice aphorism of: "Find something useful, make it necessary."

To find a control program as highly conserved as Hox should give rise to no paradox at all under Design or Dice. Given that Hox is strictly a body plan issue we should find like conserved items that give rise to internal morphological organizations for the internal organs under either theory as well.

And this has always been one of the dirty secrets of Dice. For Dice to be an operable theory it cannot simply appeal to a Gambler's Fallacy, it has to explain the near entirety of necessary multicellular evolution within a 50 million year window. And then the near complete absence of Dice for the next 500 million years. The only paradox here are Cultists of Dice that don't understand their own myth well enough to grok the necessity of Hox being precisely as we find it.

[1] Complexity in graph topology goes right back to the previous discussions of what defines complexity and why the DNA itself is a very bad metric. Unfortunately there's simply no good agreement for this within graph theory without a direct relation to the particular topology and the requirements involved -- whether we're asking a decision or function problem. And what kind of function problem that should be. The best rough metric is simply the connectivity of the graph, the edges divided by the vertices. Which is a decidedly non-linear scale. As a connectivity of roughly 1 can be represented as a list or binary tree, while a connectivity approaching the triangular number of the vertices gets us squarely into exponentional territory. When the edges/transitions in the graph are typed we can go well beyond the connectivity of a full graph and get into vigorous stupidity reaching beyond the heat-death of the universe to fully answer. But without the actual graph topology we're at best making rough excuses over the unknowns.

Land of Milk and Honey

2011-02-21T19:03:00.001-08:00

Nice to be gone, nice to get back with a wallet that makes me smile. The Boss was good enough to me that I'm able, and tempted, to get a pair of shooters and a can of coke to celebrate my good turn. Though I really ought just but them for the guy up the street; retired bloke that beers me up for company and minor bits and bobs he needs done around the house.

But I'm square for noodles and a couple hamburgers for the next month. That's bit of fiscal security has nothing coming from me but the biggest grin and a great deal of hossanahs to The Boss for the blessing. This is a much better condition than the usual fair. Normally, I can't find better than trade in kind; pure barter. True a fence post for a meal. Clean a p-trap for a pack of cigarettes. That sort of thing.

Despite being mostly a cash-free consideration it's still the Second Law of Economics. Resources flow from those that have them to those that don't. Both ways in every trade; even if that resource is simply time. That's just how it works and you have to look to the law, or the abuse of it, to put barriers in the way.

If you're doing work of any kind it is that time you're trading. It is your committing time to some purpose to another's benefit that makes it a job. I have a great deal more time than I want, so it is a cheap commodity for me. When I pushed a hack I had an adage: "I can spend my time in the car making money, or spend my time out of the car spending money."

It paid horribly, but it was a great gig as I could manage the value of my time direclty. When I needed to pop out of the car to buy groceries, deal with the vagaries of life, or unwind with friends I simply did so. When there was a trade more valuable to me than the money I could earn in the same time I simply turned off the hat and traded for my alternate choices. But then it wasn't just my time as I owned 741 outright; I brought time and a kitted Chevy to the table. Both were my resources.

Back then I was operating in Denver where the Public Utilities Commission put a fixed price on what a cabbie could charge. It was illegal for me to trade my resources for more or less than what the government had dictated it was worth. It's not fashionable nor common to understand this for the Venezuelan price-fixing that it is. It seems a pretty sweet deal that law disallowed anyone to undercut my price, until times got tight and you really needed to take what you could get. But taking a passenger off-flag, without the computer recording things, is a Felony crime. So you're just stuck. On the other side of things I couldn't raise my prices when demand was up; but that has obvious problems. Both cases are a restraint on trade.

Now some may hem, haw, and cadge about that it's a copacetic thing to have such price-fixing in law as I had a bonafide automobile in use. And there's all sorts of hyperbolic paranoia and bag-breathing from various sorts about stranger crimes. Even when that stranger is a highly visible member of the public in a canary yellow car festooned with reflective stickers.

But what about now? In my current condition I bring nothing to the table but time. It's fashionable to state that employer's won't hire individuals if the minimum wage is too high or if there exist too many hidden costs of employment involved in FICA, Worker's Comp insurance payments and the like. But those are all sorely misplaced notions.

Like with a cab, I'm simply not allowed by law to trade my time for less than a statutory minimum value. It is a simple price control placed on my breathing meat suit. While you may or may not be all joyous about the concept, it is worth noting that at least FDR had the good sense to have the government wander about and mow down industrious dairy animals with Tommy guns when he put the same price controls on milk. If you're not advocating the same for the unemployed then you're entirely unserious about the issue.

Without nepotism and network effects you're stuck in this current environment to operating under table and outside the law. Where it gets really ignorant is when you look at the government's studious refusal to uphold immigration laws. Ignore any possible position you might hold on what immigration laws and enforcement should be. Strictly, illegal immigrants are essentially free from any boundary of law due the long-standing catch-and-release program the US has managed; even for felony crimes.

So if you're already breaking the law by selling your time for less than you're allowed. And the guy on the other side of the trade is buying you're time for less than the legal minimum, we now have two criminals. But if I'm a citizen I can run him through the wringer in court and get a fat lump-sum payday. As a proximal consequence of his resources flowing to me in a consented trade I can acquire all his resources by dicta of government. Because all the legal consequences for my violation of the price-fixing of my time falls on the other guy.

Despite the notion, there very much is honor amongst thieves. Lawbreakers are sorely prone to do nothing to one another as they're both on the dock for it. So if I break the price controls on my labor the other guy gets all the civil and criminal dock for it. But in hiring an criminal immigrant the guy on the other side is coupled with another law breaker. And while the criminal immigrant has almost nothing in the manner of severe penalty, dealing with ICE is still a bit of a bother. With both parties paying possible penalty for snitching the other you do find honor amongst thieves.

As an ironic consequence of the monoethnic nature of illegal immigration the only manner in which an employer can deal with employees that are violating the price controls on time is to take a quick peak at the color of their skin and the kind of shirts they wear. Blacks need not apply. Nor white, asians, indians, and so on.

The various laws attached to pay levels are all restraints on trade applied to the poor. It's bargain basement nonsense you might remember from Stalin's time with the Kulak's. Which is still true if you're defending price controls on labor employed at twice the per capita rate, for a nine month work period, to teach students in Wisconsin.

There are only two manners to successfully manage such individual restraints on people's time. Repeal the price controls. Or eat the homeless.

Pick one. I'm going to eat a hamburger.

Strength in numbers

2011-02-17T21:28:00.001-08:00

Apparently we're on a roll with the plague-esque spread of protests against the abolition of `collective bargaining.` From cheeseheads to cowboys we've got the politicians and protestors on the move in Spock-with-a-goatee inverse parallel Egyptian universes. In Egypt we found the rabble out in the street trying to get the oligarchy to shove off while here we've got the oligarchy out in the street in a sham protection racket for defense of their industry.

Of course one cannot simply note that industry-based oligarchy is a form of governance known under a vast number of euphemisms. A testament to how often pushers of Nazism, Fascism, Corporatism, Labor Unions have to create new brand loyalty after the marketing veil wears off the last one.

Though the most shameful part is the meme replication that collective bargaining is being outlawed by pending legislations that break the back of the unions. It is not; it is being restored.

Lest one forget: Democracy is collective bargaining. It is only those Oligarchs immune from collective bargaining that are pissed about its possible revival.

Cogito ergo err

2011-02-16T16:22:00.001-08:00

The Inductivist has an interesting bit of data up again. Not much more than putting numbers over common sense known by flatfoots for ages. But it's his preface that's really worth mentioning:

While it is not easy to find good ideas in sociology, it's not impossible. One useful concept is called "exposure" (I'm not sure a discipline really invented it. It's common sense). It's simple: behavior depends a lot on ease and opportunity. Why am I good friends with the professor next door, and not the guy down the hall? Simply because I bump into my neighbor all the time. Why are children often beaten by women--the less aggressive sex? One reason is because men are around kids less.

One can't have been long in conscious life before getting down with the notion that we're a collection of habits. But do we have Free Will?

Near everyone has a pet tapestry they've woven here; and the lot can be roughly boiled down to two questions:

1. Can you make a choice?
2. Did you make a choice?

To allow Free Will we have to be capable of making a choice -- not necessarily the same as last time -- as well as actually contemplating things before making that choice. If you assume we're rational creatures then your focus is on the second question. If you assume we're rationalizing creatures then your focus is on the first.

Neither of those are quite right. Free Will is nothing more than a habit itself.

For giggles go have a Free Will conversation with someone. Rather than just flowing on autopilot make a dedicated point to stop and consider each statement you might make properly and in depth. It's real slow. Not surprising as our brain runs about ours skull no faster than a horse drawn cart.

Often life simply happens much faster than our ability to retain Free Will and respond in reasonable times. When ease and opportunity come with speed we will simply run on whatever default humanity we have.

And that, quite often, gives very ugly outcomes.

Any Free Will, any decisions we have decided to make, must have been made in advance of these times. We have to be in the habit of choosing our habits.

The POMO Pump

2011-02-14T14:02:00.000-08:00

Fractional Reserve banking relies on a single deceit. That every bank account balance dollar can be exchanged, at any time, for an actual dollar. To make this fiction work we have to pretend that non-cash assets held by the bank can be trivially converted from whatever they are to the amount of cash the bank states it is worth. For the sake of argument let's just state that this conversion is possible and correct. Given such a lossless conversion we then state that the bank accounts are fully backed by actual dollars.

The current problem is that the banks are not fully backed by dollars once that conversion is performed. Even if we assume that all their current loans will become performing there are a vast number of loans they are holding on book as an asset they own -- that they do not legally own. And because a bank makes a loan by simply crediting the recipients account with a larger IOU it cannot loan it's way to health.

To fix the banking system the banks must acquire more cash without acquiring more account balances. If we're talking actual money then they need to receive freshly printed dollars directly from the Federal Reserve without those dollars being a customer deposit. If we're talking assets we pretend may be converted to cash then they must purchase durable goods out of pocket and sit on them or sell them for a profit.

The last is a key notion. If they simply sit on the asset then it's notional market price, if it increases, will cover the shortfall in their books. If they sell that asset to their own customer then they lose both the asset and the IOU; accomplishing the same thing. Such that, should the asset increase in price 5%, then they will have gained 5% book to cover or can sell it to gain that 5% margin to cover.

There are no other mechanisms without doing strange things in legislation. But any mix of these two mechanisms is reasonable.

But if everything is on a downtrend then it is necessary to spike inflation to make available the ability for banks to profit by normal investments. Which gets us to the POMO pump.

In fractional reserve banking the only product a bank can create is money. In the US banking system, in which normal banks may not produce paper money, the money created is simply fictional account balances. The Federal Reserve is the only bank that can create new paper money to back the fictional money create by the private banks. It is certainly true that laws are for little people in this nation of laws. But there are still limits to how visible and virulent the rule-breaking may be by the financial and political elites before the peons get all stabby.

So, within legality, the only manner for The Bernank to get fresh dollars into the hands of the private banks is to purchase US Treasuries from them and then let them mature. The private banks, for their part, need to purchase the Treasuries from the US Government and then sell them in a POMO to The Bernank for a profit. The US Congress, on its end, must sell a boatload of Treasuries.

At the limits and if, for argument, we have a $2 Trillion dollar shortfall in the balance sheets that we're hiding and 20 years to cover it then we need gain a mere $100 Billion dollars in every year in excess of our normal operations to get back to normalcy. If the private banks are buying T-bills at a 5% coupon and selling them to The Bernank in a POMO at a 2.5% coupon then the US Government will have to sell $4 Trillion face of US Treasuries every year for 2 decades. Every year for the same two decades The Bernank must commit to $3.9 Trillion of POMOs per year to pump the cash into the banks hands.

If the average maturity of these issues is 7.5 years then the US Government will have to increase the money supply by $28.5 Trillion, and keep it at that level, to allow the banks to cover $2 Trillion without admitting to their previous and current frauds.[1]

This accomplishes three things. Wet-ink dollars go straight in the banks hands which helps cover the numerical shortfall. Also, the circulation of government spending increases both the assets and accounts which reduces the percentage shortfall. Lastly, and notionally, the increase in bank account balances should theoretically increase economic activity, then wages, and then prices. The last allowing the banks to buy and sell assets as a normal investor. This being a necessity to reduce the amount of printing necessary to paper the losses by POMO alone.

Why is 20 years the magic number? Because that's the normative length of a mortgage. It's one thing to book a mortgage at face value when it's been in default for 2 years and you will not foreclose as you would take up to a 70% loss on the principle. It's another thing to book that same mortgage when you have no legal claim to it. But it's beyond sanity and squarely in pitchfork territory to book such a mortgage belonging to someone else 2 years after the mortgage term has expired.

So there's the theory of the POMO pump. Have the US Government increase spending -- the Keynesian notion of aggregate demand -- at the same time that you're providing the banks with actual paper dollars to go gamble with. Since they cannot purchase assets like a normal investor otherwise. Poof! Virtuous cycle and we're good.

If you ignore all the possible flaws and accept the POMO pump as the manner out of the hole there's still the problem that this is not what has done until recently. Instead, various short-term loans were made to the banks by the Fed Res, which they used to gamble in the markets. Since yields on bonds were crap and the market was played out poorly they put their cash in commodities. Which does what it always does: Crack-up boom.

As food, specifically food, gets more expensive people spend less on other items. As the input costs for non-food goods are also increasing as the sales volume decreases you find that profits go in the sink. And as fixed costs are stickier than employment levels you end up cutting your work force. And so on back around from the beginning. This is quite the opposite of a virtuous cycle.

From a systemic view, to get the POMO pump working you have to keep the banks out of durable goods and other investments until after the economy has turned a corner and inflation -- as seen in wages -- is back up on the upswing. The repeal of Glass-Steagall has allowed the banks to play in the markets again, but there is nothing there to limit them to when they may play. This, I guarantee you, has The Bernank pulling out what little remains of his stately hair.

More critically, and quite outside The Bernank's control, is the sale of US Treasuries and how that money is spent. Congress retains control over the first part and the Republicans are making quite a bit of noise about getting the budget a bit more sane. Which is entirely contrary to the needs of the POMO pump. And, of course, politicians are vapid. To get an increase in wages it is not sufficient to simply spend the money; it must be spent correctly. Recent studies have shown that government spending tends to reduce employment in an area rather than create new positions. To get wages and prices to go north it is necessary to put money in people's pockets. And, qua Keynes, they must believe it is employment rather than a windfall or they'll be prone to sit on it. Traditional pork-spending isn't going to cut the mustard here. What's instead necessary is WPA style projects that do long-term employment for large projects; putting money directly in a large number of people's pockets. Forget the Republicans, not even the Democrats are willing to do this correctly; preferring instead for political graft for favored sons.

[1] As a point of reference the coupons are too high and it would actually take more effort than this. But for comparison the M2 is currently $8.8 Trillion and this would represent a 324% increase in the depositor base over 7.5 years. This is the upper limit, the lower limit requires that the government replace -- IIRC -- 20% of the 2008 GDP on an annual basis. Which is about $3 Trillion minimum to get the POMO pump operating and $3.9 Trillion to do it alone without recovery in the economy. If, and only if, the banks get out of the commodities market and we throw down `green` hydroelectric dams all over the place again.

Update: I missed this:

$26.3 trillion — Total new debt, including entitlement obligations, predicted by 2021.

That's $2.63 Trillion a year average for an increase of the money supply of $19.73 Trillion on the basis of a 7.5 year roll. I haven't bothered to include the last 2 years' fun to square it up proper with my estimate of $3 to $3.9 Trillion -- but it's pretty close for a back of the envelope notion. So there you are.

Remember that free markets are about proprietary information. Broad knowledge is slim profit.

Tithe by two

2011-02-13T19:43:00.000-08:00

There's a notion that the rough Federal cut of everything is about 16.5%. That the State and Federal cut lays out even at roughly 20.5%; and has for decades. If you're interested in such things you already know the graphs.

So let's bang on the Papists a bit, being yet a Sunday still. Under Biblical notions you ought toss a dime for a dollar at the church. It's well attested and comes up far more under the Jewish notions where Church and Governance were the same then it does after the zombie rugrat of the Bronze-Age Sky-Daddy started creeping around. Again.

Yeh, it's a bit flippant. But there's only one thing everyone ought put their laser focus on: Under a Christian governance there's a limit of 10% put to things.

Such flippancy under the Papist sect good for being strapped to a bit of wood and set you alight if you were shown to be a little bit curious in your particular heresy. But that would otherwise let the Lord deal with your lapse of remittances.

Yet it is considered that honest transgressions being left to God while deceitful ones are accounted for by man, here and now, are beyond the pale. That even leaving what violates decent notions of how man ought treat man applies to how the Creator ought treat his Irrational Puppets and that this is beneath good comfort to acknowledge.

In the Land of the Free it is considered that Governance by itself, free of the shackles of gilded cathedrals, can only be countenanced under the very moral notion that you must allow your betters to abscond with more the twice what a vicious and immoral Bronze-Age cultural control myth laid claim to.

The alternative being that you shall be removed from friends and family, placed in a small box, and raped repeatedly for years due your unconscionable transgressions of good secular sense.

Euphemistically we call such morality surpassing the myths of small men: Tax Courts.

Now being possessed of an outie, I'm somewhat saddled in secular society for the continual purchase of sharp bits of tin to keep my face free of natural bristles. For that alone I've a 10 point almost 5 percent cut alone at the local level of my governance free of insidious Papistry. That I do not pay the whole again of this amount on the basis of my time spent at others' whim paints me out as a tax cheat.

Therefore I am either one half percent free of Papists stapling me to a bit of hot wood if I both cheat and jest. Or I am 10% shy of not getting raped in a small box. I am more Free under the hot hand of the Vatican than I am under the tender graces of Governance aside God.

How Free are you in the Land of the Free?

Normalized

2011-02-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

Math! Weep ye women and knit doilies! Or something. Ah, it's that bad really, it's just statistics. And all the Asian dudes just put the ruler down.

Don't fret, this isn't a class on how to use statistics. It's about the flaws overlooked in using them. About how you can put your nasal passages to good use in rooting out bovine excrement. It's about the bell curve. Not the book, mind you; just the graph.

Bell curves, largely, are based on the notion of a bunch of unrelated things that can each indepedently effect some simple score by the addition of the lot of them. This is true whether we go full blown Gaussian or box ourselves by Binomials. No matter the case they all have the same basic shape and notion. Starting at either end of things they're about nothing. After slowly increasing for a bit they turn the corner and take off like a rocket as we get nearer the average. Once we get close enough to the average they round-off until it turns horizontal at the average. And then we're doing the other side in reverse of the path we just came.

Now let's pretend that you have gainful employment as an Actuary. Long considered one of the best jobs in the nation based on a number of arguable notions. An actuary is the bloke that determines what you shall pay for your car or home insurance every month such that the insurance company remains in the business of business. Making money.

So let's mention your first job requirement: Destroy the bell curve.

I mean devour the thing. Take any form of distribution that seems to look bell curve-ish and kill it with fire. Slaughter it wholly and desecrate the ashes scattered in the wind over a sewage plant.

What? Why?

Because every normal distribution of every stripe is based on a very large set of unrelated random variables. It takes the form it does strictly because we are ignorant of the variables that make it up. We know they are largely independent of one another, but we don't necessarily know what they are. And that's bad business sense.

Let's say our competitor bothers to dig a bit. He'll find that black women have more accidents than any other trivial class. He'll also find that white men have the most expensive accidents compared to anyone else. So our competitor does what? Lowers the rate of cheap but virulent black women and raises the rates of white men. Profits are estimated to stay the same for him. But now he steals all our black customers that have ovaries. As a result our cheap, numerous, and profitable claims just left the building faster than Martian Elvis hearing about a discount on chicken wings.

Ugly?

Sure. It's also good business sense. There's a massive set of various things we can try to pare and prune on but one thing remains sure. Our distribution is only a `normal` distribution when we lack explanatory power for why it is a `normal` distribution. This is a key thing that gets missed in the discussion for precisely why scientist types ought use a normal distribution. It is only normal when we're far from explaining what the heck is occurring.

The binomial distribution is the easiest to deal with and understand. It's `normal` in the sense that it's a limiting case of what a `normal` distribution may be. Assume we flip a fair coin and tally singly heads and tails. If we give tails a zero and heads a one we'll find that we get nearer and nearer having a 50/50 shot between them as we perform more tests. If we simply draw a line between our data sets we get?

A straight line.

There's no curve as we cannot get less than tails nor more than heads. But what if we do the same for a pair of flips? There is precisely one way to get zero; we add one tail to one tail. Heads are the same if we're looking for how to get two. But for the summation of one we can flip a head then a tail, or a tail then a head. Both cases give us a one for an answer and so there are 2 ways to get that answer. And so we go from 1/4 to 1/2 to 1/4. It's an upside down `v.`

If we use a standard 6-sided die instead we'll find the same thing. We have a 1/6 chance to show any face on a single die. On a pair of die, summing the pips, we'll get an upside down `v.` The more coins or dice we consider at a single time the more 'normal' the distribution will become. But here's the thing:

Each flip of the coin is completely unrelated to any other flip of the coin.

So what's your job as an Actuary? Find those singular things that, in summation, make the greatest difference. Characterize them, catalogue them, and haul them out of the distribution. Control them.

That's pretty easy with black, asian, white, or other. You're not allowed to by law. But you are allowed to look at sex. As in you were born with whatever chromosomes and not a reference to your preference in partners or underwear. So one is either male or one is female; a straight up Bernoulli test. A flip of the coin. And it does make a difference so you haul it out and get two different distributions.

Now here's the key bit. If the two new distributions are absolutely identical in shape and variance, differing only on the average as explained by sex? You've now got a single set of independent variables to split things over. If the two curves are now different in shape or variance you have dependent variables remaining that you have yet to account for. Lastly, the less like a bell curve the data takes the closer you are to the root of it all. An insurance company that hires incompetent Actuaries will soon go out of business if they ignore this foundational notion.

Science, especially as funded by the government in academic research and childhood propaganda, has no such restraint.

Don't take this as being hard on scientists as scientists are not statisticians due the way we train them. We don't train scientists to understand why they should apply standard deviations to things. We don't even make a good run at having them understand when they need to start looking at things with a bit more jaundice in their eye. We simply teach them the most basic grasp and tell them it's the `best practice` before turning them loose on society. Certainly the normal layfolk get less training than this still.

This gets notorious when we start talking about confidence intervals and statistical significance. Neither makes any difference unless applied to a bell curve. So both can state no more than: "We've tested enough individual things to be certain beyond mere accident within the limits of what we define as an accident that there are a vast number of things we don't understand."

So here's the BS detector: If any sciency type ever declares statistical significance they are merely stating their own surety about their own ignorance.

If they define a variable that can be quantized to anything other than a normal distribution they have a point. If they are simply measuring then they have either done it wrong from the outset or they are explicitly stating their own ignorance of a vast system of unrelated parts.

Games in the GAAP

2011-02-11T13:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes Karl's on the money. Other times he has to be beaten savagely by a roving gang of feral rugrats armed with cricket gear until he comes around.

One of the following two things therefore must be true:

Those who claim that "Armageddon" and "inability to pay depositors" would result from these monster banks being liquidated are lying.

OR

These banks are being allowed to carry their assets at roughly double to more than double their actual value, and their balance sheets, reported quarterly results and alleged financial information is an outright work of fiction. In that case their actual shareholder value is zero.

Pick one.

Uh... yeh. Karl, after a slow start, has gotten all over the fraudclosure issue and noted that he's never seen a good note; specifically as part of MERS. (Others on his site in the biz have stated that some 85% of notes have a broken chain of provenance.) He's repeatedly noted prior, and in the comments here, that haricuts on loans and leases are 40%; and so the overvaluation is roughly double. Likewise he's made common mention that the balance sheets are necessarily fictitious since the numbers for the balance sheets and Fed Res collateral don't match up; that the banks must be double counting. And that's all aside his general pulpit pounding about mark-to-myth problems.

So Karl himself is flatly in camp #2. And yet, in the post, comments, and repeatedly in the past he's claimed to be in camp #1. Good job, Denninger. See this cricket bat?

But what precisely does happen if a bank as large as BAC liquidates for fair value? BAC is roughly 10% of all deposits and cannot be considered, in any sense, a market-taker in liquidation. It is `Too Big Too Fail` precisely because it would be a market-maker and depress the prices of its own assets in a sell off. The assets and liabilities he's using are in his post and I'll just crib some notes from there.

He's entirely correct to say that Goodwill is often a zero. It is, by definition, a zero; it's how much you previously overpaid for some asset. In a liquidation constraint no one gives a fig, and they're not much more impressed in making buyout offers either.

I disagree with him on zeroing intangibles, but it's so small that it doesn't make a difference either way; let's go ahead and include it at par rather than imagineer haircuts out of a hat.

However, the first two lines in liabilities he's got wrong for what's being discussed. `cash and cash equivalents` are cash and non-cash assets -- including commercial paper and Treasuries of all things. In a similar vein `Time deposits and other short term investments` are? Not cash. A notion here: `Cash and cash equivalents` are the Basel Accord bits to get your reserve ratio in order; the leverage to cash being there a rough 132:1 despite that the banks currently have a lot of borrowed cash on book from the Fed Res.

The rest of it is largely blah blah save the loans and leases. By average haircut under loss-sharing agreements with the FDIC and other indicators we'll end up discounting this 40% under normal circumstance. Well, current rather than normal; and Karl notes this. However, we also know that BAC is in a world of hurt for provenance on its notes. Under numbers tossed around on his forum of 85% (Example from Countrywide, IIRC) means that we'd be taking a 40% haircut on 15% of the assets. The other 85%? That's a toughy. It ought be flat zeroed for the same reason that I didn't zero any of the intangibles. There's simply no good manner in which we can know how many of those have bad Deeds in Trust and how many are flat zeros for lacking provenance on the note. But for the sake of fairness and sanity, and since this is a large number, we'll start with 12 cents on the dollar; going rate for collections. And take a 50% haircut on that due sheer size of each note and provenance.

All things being equal secured creditors are paid before unsecured creditors. And deposits are unsecured. So we necessarily must haul out all the noted assets that are pledged as collateral. That's $487 billion dollars worth. Let's stop there and see what remains.

$990,260,000 are left on the asset side of the ledger. Notably a great deal of which is not marked at fair value -- you'll note that these are specifically mentioned. So there are additional mark-to-myth issues not here being accounted for. Yet BAC's depositor liabilities are $977,322,000. So we're only north by $12.938 billion when including $10.402 billion in intangibles an some $47 billion in unsecured notes that they don't own and cannot collect on.

This is all based on numbers known and that Karl has written about in the past with some sauce thrown in to help make his case that deposits will be covered in liquidation. With generosity, ignoring mark-to-myth and any market-maker effects on liquidation (which will depress fair-values fairly valued as well) we can give him this with $13 billion to spare.

If you haven't been following along with a calculator that simply means that BAC's balance sheet is still overstated by $1.349 trillion. Yes, trillion dollars. And we still haven't made any effort to deal with double counted collateral pledges that Karl's previously written about.

Without all of this consideration for Karl's #1 statement over his #2 writings BAC is seriously in the hole by what we do know. And with market-maker effects in liquidation it would be obscenely in the hole.

Now consider that we don't liquidate BAC and have the FDIC smoove things over instead. We have to find rubes, lots of rubes, that will take this turd on as well as all the expectations of future loss and liability due the various lawsuits flying about already. Could the FDIC convince any one to take it on? No, they're too big to be a singel course. Could the consider several of the very large ones to do so? Not without paying them serious coin to do so.

The more likely answer is that the FDIC would simply assume BAC, or any of the other TBTF's, outright and sit on them. Because that allows the balance sheet games to get a punt. And it certainly beats wiping out 401k's, Roth IRA's and the rest under a pure liquidation.

No matter the case the FDIC will not refuse to cover deposits above the $250,000 cap. For the simple reason that, in BAC's case, it's a ballpark 10% of the payroll accounts in the nation.

So despite Karl's rhetoric of deception for the #1 option whilst he still takes a #1 and #2 on his mutually exclusive proposition? They can and are both correct sans the deception hook. The unstated third option is continuing to play hide the sausage with basic inventory and putting the garbage on the FDIC's balance sheet instead.

Which is your tax paying wallet. You get to bail BAC out by paying yourself the money they owe you. With Uncle Sugar taking his cut of the action as you shuffle fivers between your own pockets.

Addenda: Since someone's bound to ask. Yeh, not even a chance for work today. It's good to get to read some.

Soft food

2011-02-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Yet another academic throwing into the political food fight:

Now, first you have to calibrate social science a little. There is no objective measure of 'outrage talk' in the science sense readers here will accept as valid, so instead Tufts Assistant Professor of Sociology Sarah Sobieraj and Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Berry basically watched TV, listened to the radio and read political sites (take that for what you will, since their bias is unclear) for what they call 'outrage talk' in leading talk radio and cable news analysis programs, political blogs and newspaper columns.

Time Cube, right? Nope, this call for civility comes from the Obamacare debate age.

So we have a scientific paper that scientifically quantifies the qualitative emotional state of 4 social scientists. This then, is supposed to tell us about Dem and Pubs. Scientifically.

Almost 9 out of 10 cases sampled, or 89.6 percent, contained at least one outrage incident. One hundred percent of TV episodes and 98.8 percent of talk radio programs contained outrage incidents, while 82.8 percent of blog posts incorporated outrage writing. In some cases, outrage speech or behavior occurred at a rate of more than one instance per minute.

Let's get something real clear here: If it's done by a majority of the culture then it is the culture. Basic sociology that Sarah Sobieraj, prof of soc, apparently skipped while gaining expertise in her field.

About the only thing one can say here is that these fashionable sciency types have proven is that academics, safe in their fortress of knowledge, are completely protected from the taint of American culture.

"Our data indicate that the right uses decidedly more outrage speech than the left. Taken as a whole, liberal content is quite nasty in character, following the outrage model of emotional, dramatic and judgment-laden speech. Conservatives, however, are even nastier."

Nice judgment, jackholes.

So according to failed sociologists making judgments about the nastiness of judgments in a culture they are part of, but not part of, that they're not supposed to judge since all cultures are equal? Conservatives are teh ebil because they have more culture than Liberals.

Of course we can't report on such things as teh ebil of judgment without throwing some blame right?

The researchers blame today's model of outrage-oriented political commentary on content providers facing an incredibly competitive environment who are desperate to attract audience members and advertisers. If Rush Limbaugh is successful, it must be because of 'outrage', product planners insist, so they hire people of both sides to be more outrageous.

Of course. Limbaugh is the happiest fat man I know that votes. Scratch that. Second happiest; Santa Claus is registered in Cook County.

Ah dang, that was `outrage speech.` True. But still, I guess I'll have to remit myself to the reclamation facility to be reprocessed into a milquetoast.

Camel's nose

2011-02-11T09:21:00.001-08:00

That about wraps that up. I haven't had much to say about Egypt since there hasn't been much curious yet. A couple surprisals but it's gone the way I'd figured, albeit 5 days later than I expected.

For face the military gave Mubarak a speech to preen his own feathers while acknowledging, late, his own exit. This was a foregone conclusion despite all the hyperventilating over the brotherhood of Muslim ninjas.

"In politics, nothing happens by accident." -- FDR

An item to keep your eye on now are the flow of US funds to the Egyptian state and military run commercial enterprises. The other is the Google guy. Native son and spankin' fresh hometown hero.

No matter the case or undercurrents there's a well deserved round of applause due the Egyptian military's handling of all this. Certainly a sight better than how we dealt with the Bonus Army back when. One wonders how the US would fare today if a massive swarm of people marched on the White House or camped on The Mall for a few weeks.
Would modern US government institutions show as much restraint in the Land of the Free as was shown by Muslim ninjas operating for a despot?

Quod et demonstratum

2011-02-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

I'm fond of Euclid's precisely because it's the exemplar of what the scientific method ought be. Create the axioms and then walk them forward to see what you can get from them. There exists only one minor difference from science in that math is a strictly abstract enterprise. Whatever follows from its axioms is the the consequence of the axioms and that's the end of that. It may be useful or not, but it simply is the system as defined. Placing this into the natural world as a tool of science requires that we pick the axioms, develop the system, and then match them to what we can test. If the match fails then the axioms are necessarily incorrect by consequence. The math, the model, may or may not be useful but it has no relation to what we are trying to attach it to.

It's that last at which modern science goes wildly astray despite the gnashing teeth of modern scientists.

Given the mismatch with reality, and correct logic, then at least one of the axioms underpinning everything is strictly incorrect or we could not have reached our failed expectation. This gives us three options. We can add an axiom of exception for our failed case. We can remove axioms. Or we can replace axioms with different ones. In every case we have created a different set of axioms, and so a different theory then we had previously. Simply, the old theory is false and needs cast out by logical necessity. I'm not a fan of Cantor and hold a fond wish to desecrate the graves of Zermelo and Frankel but this is a necessary and correct application of basic set theory. If you change the members of a set you have a new set, full stop.

There's hardly anything interesting about that notion but it is precisely what modern science denies. Specifically modern science is prone to add an axiom of exception, generating a new theory, and then denies to the utmost that a new theory has been generated and that old one remains valid in all its particulars as if the exception did not exist at all. This is most curious as an axiom of exception is the worst of all possible solutions.

If we are simply to remove axioms we need only walk the chain of consequence back to the axioms, recording each of those that were used in the chain of logic that led to the failed case. It's not necessary to throw them all out; indeed, that's a very poor choice. Ideally there's a single axiom, used only once and in our failure, that we may cast out to generate the new and correct theory. If that cannot be done then we should preference that single axiom that causes the least damage to the consequences; the one most thinly used. However, in doing so, every consequence that required that axiom must be cast outside the theory as we can no longer get there from here. None of which invalidates prior measurement or testing performed on orphaned items. They are simply no longer a portion of the theory.

If we replace an axiom outright then we not only must discard and orphan the unprovable items we must then rebuild the system with the new axiom put in place. As a general preference this ought attempt to keep as many old results within the theory as can be managed. When possible this is the obvious preference to affairs as our new theory still covers as much of the old as may be possible.

The worst possible solution is adding an axiom of exception. It certainly keeps all old data within the fold. As well it has a great utility in tracking failures as we go along with new tests that have yet to be performed. It also explicitly acknowledges that the theory in question is not universal. This last being paramount as it explicitly notes that there is a property in effect which we do not yet know and for which we have yet to account or describe.

All three cases explicitly note that the old theory was a failure. But only this one denies a search for the differences between the sets as a result of the unknown property. If we delete, or replace, an axiom we must necessarily walk the chain of known results and attempt to describe the differences between the old theory, new theory, and the exception that gave rise to it. By simply fixing an exception to the old theory with bits of glue and string we are making an explicit avoidance of all of the subtle alterations that can arise in old explanation due to the unknown property.

There's certainly nothing wrong with an axiom of exception as a stop-gap measure and an indication that we need crank up the testing regime on those untested items we believe might be related as well as revisiting old notions. But it is not a palliative for doing the work or denying that the old theory was a failure. Those are the retreats and deceits of cultic priests.

Granted, we could scrap it all and go commando with hypothesis non fingo if we liked. But science without dreams is a patent application.

Bayesian inference

2011-02-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

There's the notion that Bayesian inference is well used in weighing the credibility of a hypothesis. Under traditional notions of the scientific method we hold that the hypothesis is a Bernoulli trial, a simple pass/fail measure. And so our data previously collected is simply the frequency of passes to fails. This leads to all sorts of shenanigans in science.

First off, there is no need to believe the hypothesis. If the hypothesis is that there are no black swans, I may freely hold absolute contempt for the notion yet still test it. I simply write a paper that begins with this hypothesis and then show a picture of a black swan. In the conclusion I reject the hypothesis and go on my merry way. Likewise I can put forward the hypothesis that there are swans that are not white and then show the same picture, thus substantiating my hypothesis. Both forms are identical as they are mutually exclusive. More to the point they are both existence proofs.

There are no statistical notions involved. If I state that 100% of swans are white then showing that one out of two are black means that only 50% are white. There are those out there that would claim that a 50% failure is a 100% proof of correctness to the hypothesis put forward. Which isn't how it works.

All means all, and we're relying on the absence of a single refutation. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the data already collected as each test is an independent test from the others. Or it better be. If I'm counting the same swan twice then I'm simply repeating what's already been done. Confirming that this particular swan is, or is not, black. But finding a black swan doesn't change the color of unique swans already accounted for. They do not change hue based on the later failure of the hypothesis, a human guess.

Bayesian notions are simply based on what we've already seen and using that to update our notion that what we will see. Prior to taking the picture of any swan we have no prior data and so Bayes is right out the window. Once we've collected a single piece of data we have a prior notion and can begin to use Bayesian inferences to update things.

But it remains an existence proof over independent tests. No matter how many swans we count we cannot state that this gives proof to what the next unseen swan will be. This is where the little bit stupid creeps in.

For if we've counted 99 swans then certainly the next must also be white. And if not white then we're only 1% wrong in our absolute statement of 100% Truth. But the trick is that if we already knew that there are now, and could never be, non-white swans then we wouldn't be looking to begin with. Because we'd already proven it.

The notion of testing a hypothesis is that we don't actually know yet. We assume, certainly, but we cannot know without special knowledge. That doesn't mean that we're not correct as to our claims of special knowledge, only that it remains for us to prove that we possess it. An individual that claims no such cultic information cannot rationally give more than a 50/50 shot to each new test under the hypothesis. Any skew from there, no matter which direction, is a matter of religious claims regardless the truth or falsity of the claim.

One cannot simultaneously lack knowledge and make a claim to it.

So why do we try to sneak Bayes in the door? To allow those pushing religion as science to state: "I lack perfect knowledge of my subject which is why I know everything about it. Therefore it is science because I haven't seen a black swan."

Or, perhaps preferably, "I'm ignorant of my ignorance, therefore my ignorance is science."

Such making the entire notion of science a field devoted to substantiating the worth of arguments from ignorance. Which science, as a field, considers bollocks.

Which gets us back to the hypotheses of swans. A hypothesis means nothing unless it comes with its rationale. "I hypothesize there are no non-white swans because I have never seen one." is as classic a cock-up. But with the rationale in place its alternate seems a little less ignorant on face.

"I hypothesize there are non-white because I haven't seen them all."

Neither seems really appropriate as a hypothesis as they put forward no causal issue beyond personal knowledge. Perhaps it would be better to state:

"There are no non-white swans because the allele variations that give rise to feather pigmentation cannot mutate to a different chromaticity without killing the bird."

Yet, that's still as much an argument from ignorance as stating.

"There are non-white swans because an initial allele variation could allow for a secondary allele variation providing non-white chromaticity without killing the bird."

While a bit dressier neither of the new formulations exist as a pass/fail issue. They are both coulda, woulda, shoulda notions of how those with special knowledge think things ought go in line with their special knowledge. It is here that Bayes shines as we can allow the mutually exclusive hypotheses to be both correct and both false in the same breath. All theories are correct and none are wrong despite that only one, and one alone, can logically be true given their construction.

This is not to say that Bayesian inference is not useful for dealing with noisy data points over replicated tests of a single hypothesis or that it is not useful as a modeling tool to assist in dividing sets into subsets so that we may look for, and hypothesize about, the hidden properties that divide those sets.

But if we have mutually exclusive sets that are all simultaneously true and false we have a small problem. We are no firmly out of the domain of show-n-tell and into personal beliefs of Religious Truth as a scientific endeavor.

I'll skip the nasty bits of the math, but if we personally believe that all hypotheses save our own are false then our belief in our personal hypothesis is complete. Every possible test of a different hypothesis, standing as a research paper by itself, will yield a 0/n posterior probability for all those hypotheses we have already rejected subjectively. That is, zero divided by something, and so no number of tests -- whether consistent or inconsistent with our opponent -- will sway our personal belief. Dependent on the number of consistent tests, even if they're mere replication, bolster our a priori belief. And random tests that refute our belief make little difference whatsoever.

As a point of psychological tactics we only need repeatedly show white swans while simultaneously claiming there can not be black swans to create a vast number of positive tests in our favor and create skeptics against in the same manner. This allows us the ability to create believers underpinned by, seemingly, endless new tests and create perfect skeptics. Even if the believers stray they are improbably likely to ever accept our opponent either since they will always discard our opponents hypothesis in pure mathematical form.

Assuming, of course, that our own beliefs function in this manner. It's sloppy naturally, but there are good reasons to accept this as a rough model of things. Yet this entire notion presumes that propaganda defines reality. That black swans will disappear in a puff of logic because we drumbeat against them hard enough. Sure, some might decamp for brown swans; but never for the black ones. This is all the better as it allows us to avoid showing our work; simply claim correctness to a given hypothesis rather than demonstrate it.

But this only works if we allow claims of Ignorance to pass as causal factors and claims of Special Knowledge as proof of holding the One True Truth of science. Being crass and in the same order, the Retard and Religion theories of Science.

Some double down to claim that it works exactly the way they don't understand in all cases no one has seen. This can be seen throughout the fields of biology, psychology and economics; especially when any of them meet. Such things being the Retarded Religion theories of Science.

Peace be upon Nada

2011-02-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of recent notions about teh ebil religionist types and genetic survival. The recent one from Rowan about Amish World Domination, some others I've tripped on past, and the one EaaS dug up about religious `primes` and punishment games. Maybe it's been going on for a bit and I've simply checked out owing to past conceptions of the world. But there's a steadfast implication that runs throughout all of these that religiosity, generically defined, is the explanatory value in place. This is a completely unsatisfactory answer.

Prior to getting the privacy fence unwedged from where my legs attach I considered all of Christianity, Atheistic sects, Buddhism, Shintoism and the rest to be religions of various stripes. All of them being, so far as I was concerned, unsubstantiated as to their claims of credence. Now that I'm off the fence I consider one correct, the rest incorrect, and all religions still. But the wealth of difference in what are commonly accepted as religions puts an odd notion to considering them to all have an identical effect of various sociological dimensions. Taking extreme cariactures of some it seems a bit daft to consider breeding rates to be elevated by those that won't move for terror of bending a blade of grass, those that studiously get alternate sides of their head slapped rather than defend their wives and issue, and those that decapitate all parties that don't spot their prose every few words with the genuflection `Pbuh`. Some papers are better than others in noting that this is likely a simple proxy for agreeableness or various other metrics of go-along-to-get-along cultural needs so that we're not running around sawing off limbs of anyone so absent minded as to forget to spit on the street repeatedly while ordering Halal waffles.

And there's the last odd notion that many of the studies -- that I've seen -- show a positive correlation with church attendance rates until you get to the single and last category: "Church!? Why would I gather with strangers to stand in awe and praise of Italian cuisine in flight? There is no Italian Space Agency!" Seeking solace in that last little corner we often find a hook north to buck the trend.

All of these studies are dodging a central point in their notions; that they are not measuring religiosity, but participation rates in a cultural touchstone of socialization. Certainly, by anecdote, some of the most pious and fire-breathing Christians I've ever had the chance to meet avoided church as if it were a plague of locusts for that very reason. As well Atheists, noted by some and lamented by others, have no such social institution outside ecstasy fueled raves and ad-hoc bits of violent peace activism. That's not entirely fair. The counter-culture religious reactionary Atheists also have Nothing User Groups where they congregate and have their two-minutes hate for social bonding purposes. And really, if you want to get the crazy in the sack for a bout of angry sex I suppose it's far better to be furious jointly at someone else rather than pick a fight with your spouse. Though it's going to make successful socialization with the broader public a bit more difficult; just ask the Wahhabists.

Yet that's the central theme that runs through all such studies. Those that participate in cultural rituals that reinforce the norms of their group go onto to have a stronger sense of fairness, retribution, and are less prone to snuff out their own culture by devouring their young. Put the flip side, those that are antisocial tend to be antisocial. Which is so stutteringly unobvious that we simply require more taxpayer funded grants for research into this counterintuitive affair.

The great trick is to wonder if Atheism, no matter which sect, can ever mold itself into something distinctly social? Certainly they've had good success at Secular Sharia by getting U.S. schools to push their deconstructionist dogma into small minds by taking ownership of the term `science.` But they've also hamstrung themselves thereby. How far can one get when instilling morality via a ritual social institution get when the arguments inevitably become: "Cannibalism? Because chimpanzees do it too." Or, if they want to keep their view of Dice more contemporary: "Intolerance has worked well for Islam. So it's because The Nothing (Pbun) wills it."

Perhaps I'm simply thick, but I still can't grasp how one can move from cultural terrorism to socialization while remaining a cultural terrorist. Especially when defending your cultural practices on modern religions and genetic cousins. But it would be nice if the Atheist set could expand their hackneyed notions of biology into sociology, and at least catch up with a slightly less soft science before they get too far down the rabbit hole.

WMD

2011-02-02T11:51:00.000-08:00

The EPA went ahead and decided to regulate milk as oil anyways. This is fabulous. Just for the entertainment coming with the new green movement against lactation.

No doubt we'll soon be paraded with pictures of the ecological horrors of milk:

That will serve as a rallying call for hippies everywhere to congregate at beaches, dairies, and daycare centers to save the poor wildlife via sponge baths.

And of course we should expect to be accosted with pictures of greedy milk-pushers photoshopped into various Fascist cariactures.

If the moustache wasn't the first thing you noticed then you should probably avoid dating in city centers or Italy.

At any rate, I can't wait to see the social justice types going on marches about breast pumps: Weapons of Mammary Destruction.

Mental

2011-02-01T20:53:00.000-08:00

Apparently, chicks that flo-bee the tumor don't have significantly higher rates of psychiatric care in the 12 months following compared to the 9 months prior. While women that instead gave birth near double their rate of drug-induced psychologic attendance post partum. This isn't very surprising as I would have expected new mother's to tap the Xanax at a greater rate than that given that sleep dep lights up the limbic system some extra 60%.

Look, anyone that's compared a military vet to new parents knows the score already. Murder might screw with your head long term but nothing has you clawing bugs out of your skin faster than the time in which your nights are sleepless for nothing more than a feces production machine that parasitically attaches to your chest like a medicinal leech.

It really sucks. For others anyways, I sleep like the dead when I sleep and got off easy. She forgave me for it, despite what she says when wielding cutlery at family functions.

But this is being billed in press as birth being more stressful than murder. Well sure, in the short term anyways. But the notion left unstated, if you subscribe to psychology, is that abortionettes are almost 4 times as crazy as expectant mothers to begin with. As roughly 15 out of 1000 that went on to evacuate their birth canal with scissors sought psychiatric care compared to only a rough 4 of 1000 that didn't go the Gosnell route.

So crazy people stay crazy after murder. I shall certainly upend my entire notion of the correctness of the world on this new data.

Shoot, next thing someone will try to tell me that cancer therapy providers are prone to help child sex traffickers skirt the law.

Whatever.

"You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us." -- Colonel Kurtz

Is there a Darwinist in the house?

2011-01-31T22:27:00.000-08:00

Tripped over the site Uncommon Descent today, though I'm sure I've probably seen them before. Their fellow O'Leary was relatively unimpressed by a paper recently published despite some favorable press of the bit. It's behind a paywall so I've got no more than the press and some quotes.

But here's the thing: The quotes from the paper make me immensely crotchety. So it's time to do evolution 101 for Darwinists.

In nature, it turns out, many new traits that, for example, enable their bearers to conquer new habitats, start out as blunders: mistakes made by cells that result in altered proteins with changed properties or functions that are new altogether, even when there is nothing wrong with the gene itself.

All new traits are blunders or we're talking Intelligent Design. Point blank, period, finito. This is something that crops up endlessly among the lay trying to get laid; but there's no excuse here for someone that makes good money pouring dicta into vacuous collegiate heads to make this error.

This is not simply hyperbole; it is the very definition of Dice itself.

Under the dogma of Dice, Darwinian or otherwise, we have only two notions. Cock ups and sex. New traits occur by cock up and spread by sex. That's it, the whole theory wrapped up simply. If you ever divert from these notions you are heretic and Dawkins shall abuse your children for sport with a clean conscience.

Not that biologists breed, of course, they know how messy things are.

The next thing the Dice cultists need to pound into their skull with a used railroad spike is that there is no such animal as Natural Selection. There is good sex and bad sex. This is the enrichment and totality of existence under Dice. Good sex makes the babbies while bad sex makes dumpster deposits and mutants that star in Hollywood splatter-flics as antagonists to blonde women in lingerie.

Though it seems to have evolved into brunettes lately.

"But Natural Selection kills the unfit!"

Shut up, Hitler. You either die outright or live on to have good sex or bad sex. If you're Wilt Chamberlain or Genghis Khan you get to found a species. If you're Rosie O'Donnel you get to adopt Asian children. No one gives a stuff about a bad mix; the only thing that matters is how sexually promiscuous you are as a mature meat-sack.

Do not even begin to claim that the environment causes mutations. Or you will be taught with a piece of framing lumber.

In the paper noted, this credentialed cell inspector goes on to babble about `pre-selection.` It's always pre-selection. This is Dice in action as the furiously productive randomizer. The mutation always occurs first. The sex happens later. Usually after several drinks and a show starring a local Indy band.

Some might object as she was talking about crypto-evolution. Yes, it's properly called cryptic genetic variation; it means the same thing.

But we can't get there yet until you dig into Darwin's dirty secret. The Cambrian explosion.

Darwin himself noted that the Cambrian explosion would trounce his theory soundly if they could not find evidence in the fossil record. This being that it should be expected that the kinds and varieties of life should be ever more exotic and numerous than what was known from the Cambrian fossil record.

This was absolutely true and necessary because Darwin's theory was founded on Lamarckism. And Darwin was smarter than you. He was also active in the church and community as a kindly sort. A gambling Santa as it were; perhaps Dawkins can take a hint from that.

Under Lamarckism every stretch, pull, exercise, or distance should alter the issue of good sex in the same manner. But this is quite obviously not how it works and so? Wrong. Not only that, but the fossil record is doing a vicroty dance on the corpse of the Beagle's Botanist. Get off the Wheel of Fortune.

It is absolutely necessary for the Cult of Dice that Darwin was an opium addict. Get over it.

Under the gene centric model we should precisely expect that the variation of life will diminish over time. Ballsy claim, and you might think I'm attending a show later on with a lady of some repute.

Evolution detests evolution.

Because evolution must roll 20s and get good sex as preference to bad sex or the whole circle of life stops. Disney animators have a good cry at the cantina and no one else cares. The reason is simply that natural selection is garbage; it's all about good sex.

To most successfully propagate yourself, as a fine and dashing member of the bacterial elite, you must prevent spelling errors when you copy off the blueprint for your most excellent chin. And since we're absent God or biologists the Dice must do this for you, in advance.

The dark cornered dreams of Dice that none dare put light on is that evolution will prevent evolution. Once it reaches a given point it will simply stop. As more good sex is had, Dice will ensure that the genome stays put in working order as a preemptive accident so that good sex continues.

But for one little detail.

Rapid mutation under environmental stress. This is no different than how the immune system operates really. When it sees a new nasty it goes into high gear throwing Dice at the wall 'til it sticks. If you are under the notion that Dice is all, then Dice can create this mechanism. All you need do is go find it, flying in the face of the repeated failures to date.

The paper at hand tries to take a dodge and run into the notion of `pre-selection` attended by decision rather than Dice. That unexpressed genes, for generations, may be tested at random to ensure their continued correctness. That decision may be placed on these genes such that they may be conserved and later expressed for great justice.

That's not how it works.

A gene that is not expressed has no bearing on good sex and so may not contribute here. Under the notion that a gene under Dice may be partly expressed on a trial basis requires that the organism know in advance what good sex will be. Whether it be cohabitation or permissive age-of-consent legalities. If the gene is conserved it must be expressed in such volume that it leads to good sex. For if it is not expressed in that manner it will be under sway of Dice' privvy; most often rotting away rather than making inspiring architecture or political music.

By requirement this entails that the crypto evolution must be a bog standard part of the organism's function or get out. As otherwise it will be cocked up.

Everything else is not simply Intelligent Design, but Intelligent Interference.

License

2011-01-31T00:36:00.001-08:00

From the British press:

A teacher who advises colleagues on how to avoid affairs with students was caught having sex with a teenager in the back of her car.

About Colorado. Which is awesome in some manner. The Poms are the first I've heard about Coloradan educators needing to be educated not to diddle their children.

In fairness, being most likely in Fort Collins, this is a matter of a town that's stuck at the crossroads of being a serious city, agricultural hub, or college town. In seriousness, for all the hype of Eurotrash licentiousness this is a fly-over country American affair. Where we require a taxpayer paid position to remind civil servants that they're not here to fuck future taxpayers.

Sadly, her expiry is a local and not Federal job opening.

Certainly Parabolic

2011-01-31T00:13:00.000-08:00

In declaring my self-handed defeat on a metric of complexity Hunt proffered that we utilize what can be contained within the human brainpan. This is a very good notion in a qualitative sense, but we must avoid noting that the human conception sticks out at 7 items plus or minus a pair.

It is the certainly parabolic problem. Or, if you're credentialed, it's a matter of Ceteris Paribus. Or, if you speak English, the notion of all things being equal.

This crops up everywhere in large systems that defy human abilities to grok the multitude of joints and complexities in them. And it is precisely this quest to make everything certainly parabolic that underlies the thrust of science.

"All things being equal, if I do the first thing then the second thing should happen."

If that doesn't work out, then whatever gave you such notions ought be tossed in the dustbin of history such that more enlightened minds can mock them in the cold light that shines from Phlogistons as you reduce Materia to its Calx.

This is all fine and well as it stands so long as, Ceteris Paribus, we can test our notions as to why the second ought follow the first. For if we cannot it is, Certainly Parabolic, not science.

It's a good way to trudge forward into the unknown one wrong step at a time. But it is an absolutely lousy manner in which to understand something with a lot of fiddly bits. Despite that we cannot understand fiddly bits in any other way.

If I should note to you, being something of a gear head, that the crank rotation induces a non-linear velocity on the connecting rod, which then reciprocally raises and lowers a piston? You might be ok. But if I note that the crank rotation pulls on a chain that turns a camshaft, whose eccentric lobes act on one or another buffered followers restrained within a linear guide who then push on a rod of some extraction which produces a strange change in the geometrical conformance of a lever typically held from above by a roughly hemi-spherical bushing such that the force can be translated against a differing linear motion to move one of a pair of poppet valves to induce the entrance or exit of a charge to a hollowed area existing within a space directly past the furthest extent of that piston of some extraction, this allowing the combustion of a charge on one cycle -- but not another -- to induce rotation in the crank?

It might get a little dicey.

All things being equal, this is why we have the Certainly Parabolic problem. We're stuck trying to cram something larger than life into a tragically small working memory. The general solution being to boil things down to a small set of cut tests that presume differing conceptions of Ceteris Paribus.

Lest you think I'm a little fond of motor oil I'll simply note that medical diagnostics are based on the same notions. Certainly Parabolic, the systolic and diastolic pressures ought be between X and Y. If they are not, then we simply pick another Certainly Paribus metric and test again.

As long as we have sufficient knowledge of all the fiddly bits mapped out elsewhere this is completely sufficient. If something violates the most basal cause then we go searching elsewhere in the rat's nest for what else might be up. Ceteris Parabolic, this is as good as it gets.

But when we're looking at large and fiddly things that we don't have a good handle on otherwise we'll find ourselves in something of a sticker. As Ceteris Paribus is not much more than a bit of pedagogy for diagnostic tools. It is most certainly parabolic not an argument by itself.

If we know, or think we know, how it ought work then a cetris paribus notion is simply a spot check to things. If we do not know how things should work then we've gone headlong into a ceteris paribus problem. That it must work the way we state because we're certain that it must.

Because we say so.

Because we can only keep 7 things plus or minus a pair in mind at once. As soon as we've gone off the reservation of practical knowledge of what works, and what cures, and why we've either got to deal with a system larger than what we can imagine at once or make suppositions that we have no evidence to support. Getting past such a notion requires we cast out everything we know, pour some Absinthe over a slotted spoon, and give it a whirl.

I'll go you an example from the time I spent to my elbows in grease. Joe and I had an Oldsmobile come in that simply loved blowing a backfire through the carb. The only way to keep the thing running was to furiously pump the gas pedal and cross-your-fingers since, if you got your rhythm wrong, it would gout great flames through the intake to run along the underside of the hood.

Ceteris Paribus the carb was dead. But it did the same thing when you sprayed ether in the throat. And that was a bit of high humor on its own to see each of us taking turns dodging fireballs.

Certainly Parabolic the distributor was shot or misaligned. Yet everything there seemed to line up properly and operate smoothly without the engine attempting to run.

That leaves only the timing chain to skip teeth while running. So the front end was hauled off the engine to inspect the gear. No Dice. And that was high entertainment. With the timing cover off you have an open hole looking into the oil pan. And nothing was more entertaining than having Joe yell for mercy when the thing blew fireballs underneath the open hood; for it gouted great flames out of the oil pan, through the radiator, to bury his legs in passionate flame.

Joe was done.

Ceteris Parabolic there had to be a way for the intake charge to get into the oilpan. There's simply no other way of it. It ran, such as it were, smoothly while going so the odds of a burnt piston were right out. But Oldsmobiles, of that vintage, had a plug in the bottom of the intake manifold casting. No matter how unlikely it would be for such a thing to fall out? It simply must have. That would give low vacuum, on half the cylinders anyways, and allow the great backspitting flames to run their way through the oilpan.

Which was all fine and dandy until the thing came off the car and the plug was still firmly in place. Certainly Paribus such a thing cannot occur; there are no other options. And yet, there was this odd thing about the gasket. There was great skads of silicone smeared all over it. When one looked it was strictly necessary as the bottom of the intake runners hung below the cylinder heads. Oldsmobile, in their wisdom, had entirely different castings for cylinder heads where they hit the intake manifold depending on whether one had a 2-barrel carb or a 4-barrel one. And here we had 2-barrel heads with a 4-barrel intake.

To this day the finest piece of shady-tree I've ever seen.

Joe was sure, ceteris paribus, that the problem was unsolvable. I was sure, certainly parabolic, that the plug was out. There were no other options.

When we humans get a system larger than our own brainpan, or our own experience, we cannot rely on all things being equal to be any just relation to reality. We have, at best, the ability to take a chain of things without other causes and reduce them to a single notion to help make room in our head for other things, but it's a lousy metric when we know other things may apply. Or even when we don't know other things may apply when they might anyways.

Yet it is a common notion throughout such scientific endeavours such as economics and biology that ceteris paribus is the end of discussion and thought. Reality must match what we already know, ceteris paribus, to be true. Everything otherwise is unsolvable and should be dismissed.

To be sure it's not a bad qualitative metric as we still need to get through life on what we can rapidly think of, certainly parabolic.

Abreedist

2011-01-29T17:18:00.000-08:00

Oh goody, this guy again.

Old context:

Rowthorn has developed a model that shows that the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion are currently “hitchhiking” on the back of the religious cultural practice of high fertility rates. Even if some of the people who are born to religious parents defect from religion and become secular, the religious genes they carry (which encompass other personality traits, such as obedience and conservativism) will still spread throughout society, according to the model’s numerical simulations.

New context:

Robert Rowthorn, emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge University

Glorious credentials. Best school in the world if you believe things; better than the piddling Yale that Krugman has taught at. So let's see how a cranky Atheist economist can rickroll Darwin's corpse with the help of a website devoted to all things science.

Previous research has suggested that a genetic predisposition toward religion is tied to a variety of characteristics such as conservatism, obedience to authority, and the inclination to follow rituals. In this instance of evolution, it’s possible that these characteristics may become widespread not for their own fitness but by hitching a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice.

Waitjustaminute. Cultural hitchhiking is an interesting notion. The description is correct if we assume that religiosity is unrelated with any supposed gene that predisposes us to religiosity. Which is exactly contrary the model this paper is putting forward.

Guess it's too hard for a Marxist to say that a predisposition for religion is higher fitness precisely because it produces more offspring.

Fun thing though, is that we've a link to the paper this time. And the Science Hobo says? It's really not bad at all. The press hype is a gaggle of howlers by pants wearing monkeys baring their teeth but the paper itself isn't bad at all.

Some randomly cadged quotes:

The fact that religion has a genetic basis of great antiquity does not imply that genetic variation has disappeared. Koenig & Bouchard [13] survey twin studies that quantify the genetic and environmental determinants of what they call the ‘traditional moral triad’ of authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness. In most cases, 40 to 60 per cent of the observed variation in such personality traits is explained by genotypic variation. The authors argue that these are large genetic effects in comparison with typical ﬁndings in the social sciences.

Precisely right. The 60/40 split is the Pareto rule of the nature/nurture divide.

In the modern world, religious people, even controlling for income and education, have more children on average than people without religion [29,30]. The reasons are cultural in the broad sense, and include social norms and the inﬂuence exerted by religious organizations [31–34].

Also well known and good to see mentioned.

However, the transition to lower fertility has been slower and less complete among religious people than among those without religion, since it is driven partly by individualistic values of self-fulﬁlment[sic] that are inimical to traditional religious teaching [32,41].

Us slow blokes call that abortion.

The most plausible mechanism that could generate a stable polymorphism is a future convergence of religious and non-religious birth rates.

Beautiful. Imma just smile and sip some coffee while digesting this one.

Oy! Atheists! Quit murdering your tumors or the Amish will take over the world! The high falutin' Marxist Cambridge economics prof said so!

Despite all the histrionic press it really is a decent paper even if he can't quite get over the ledge on munging the definition for cultural hitchhiking. But he's only one miss at bat; and that's a remarkable bit of clarity for any economist. This is one to keep a linky to for future use.

Modesty

2011-01-29T03:26:00.000-08:00

Ok, what the fuck.

The researchers are now investigating whether woman-on-woman or man-on-man gazing has any effect on performance. They're also interested in whether licentious glances could become as taboo as butt-slaps under sexual harassment law.

"When it comes to something subtle like this, it's very difficult to combat," Gervais said. "It's sort of expected that men are going to do this to women and that really it's just not that harmful."

But if research shows that sexualized gazes consistently interfere with work performance, it's time to take rubbernecking more seriously, Gervais said.

Coming soon to the Land of the Free: Burkhims by Law. Don't get caught without you Heqab or you'll get some stones.

Are we allowed to call it an Oppressive Matriarchy yet? 'Cause I'm really itching to get out and burn some jockstraps for justice.

The hieroglyphs are on the wall

2011-01-28T15:35:00.001-08:00

Egypt seems a mighty fine mess. Lots of people are talking about the finer points. Gibbs is talking about Obama taking another vacation. And the ~~youths~~, ~~dissidents~~, ~~revolutionaries~~, domestic terrorists in Egypt are talking about who made the weapons that have been turned on them. Hardly anything interesting to add to that.

Of course news would be a great deal easier if the internet in the Lower Kingdom hadn't been shut down for all save the capital markets. None should be surprised that a ~~tin pot despot~~ democratically elected official cut down the ~~citizens~~, enemy of the Patriots means of communication by simply ~~flipping the internet kill-switch~~, making a few phone calls.

We all know the name of the Patron Saint of the Press: The heinous Kraut Gutenberg, a goldsmith that pushed bronze age words with pewter letters some 570 years ago. No greater act of sedition having ever been continuously presented before man's courts. Most notoriously when a sect of New World expats and savages made good use of such evil German tools in causing rebellion against His Majesty, King George III.

Perhaps you've heard of that horrible incident?

Thankfully, such devious Teutonic mechanical devices are passing non-existent in these days. Having been replaced with Swiss printing laid over Yankee engineered military networks that do the same task. More efficiently, more regulated, and more easily controlled.

It's interesting to consider, as Harry Turtledove might, how history might well have gone better for the world had the English Crown had the ability not only to simply pressure the low men involved in the printing trade, but to confiscate and cause to instantly vanish from existence all the pamphlets they'd already printed.

Ah, but such a thing could never occur in the land of the Rebels. The United States of America, which instantiated in law such quaint notions of revolutionaries everywhere; the divorcement of the government from the oversight and regulation of the printed word. The mere reception of a phone call from the President of the United States of America to any such purveyor of treason would cause an instant rebellion against good government as the Streisand Effect took to the pages of discourse.

No, good government can only be had at the hands of ~~Boot-lickers~~ Patriots and ~~Tyrants~~ Presidents in a ~~Police~~ Free State. Such as Egypt.

So let us raise toast to Mubarrack: To your health, ~~may you choke on it~~!

Complexity is complex

2011-01-27T05:11:00.000-08:00

EaaS asked what I meant by 'complex,' then noted that Dawkins got strung by it. I started to dash an answer off, but I got strung by it also.

Complex is one of those great words that means far too many things. A rough surface, a large volume of notes, a hefty book, a bin of bolts, many interlocking joints, lots of loose interactions, you name it. Mostly we just mean large, fidgity, and beyond immediate grasp. Pinning it down better than that seems like a complex task.

The only technical notion of complexity of which I'm satisfied is that of the complexity classes of various algorithms. Karnaugh maps also have a certain usage in this regard as well. But these are only little fragments of things and not suitable for all the places one would like to use the word.

Is a 455 V8 from a mid-70s Oldsmobile more complex than the four-banger in a Model T?

Sure, it's got more parts and so has more complexity. Simply in terms of construction it will require more effort and steps even if it uses the same kind of bolt repeatedly. Still and yet it has a larger variety of parts than the Tin Lizzie's heart.

It's also got pumps. One each for fuel, oil, and water while the Model T engine had none at all. Each of these is an added complexity to the entire engine.

As a point of intuition and knowledge the 455 is less complex to a modern mechanic. It's got everything it ought have right where it ought have it. While the lack of an oil pump on the Model T would result in general bafflement as to how the crank got lubricated.

However, the 455 is less complicated to operate in general as it's got an automatic choke for cold weather and the spark timing is handled by the engine itself; not to mention an electric starter. Whereas, with the Model T, the operator had a slew of various bobs and levers he had to fiddle with to accomplish the same purpose.

But they're both simply engines. They both use oil to cool and lubricate internal parts. They both use water as a primary coolant that passes through a radiator. They both burn gasoline delivered through a carburetor and they have the same general needs for air/fuel ratios. They both have the same general needs in advancing and retarding the spark timing to handle engine speed and the amount of load its operating under. On these notions the one is the equal of the other.

But we do desire technical notions of complexity. Making simple counts of the full number of parts, as well as the number of unique parts is trivial and covers two of the concepts. The step-wise depth of the assembly process, the critical path, covers a separate notion as well. Likewise counts of the moving bits, as well as their interactions by linear depth. All of these are simple counting games and easily done.

What's harder is the remnant of operation. The Model T has less bits and interactions involved in setting the spark timing. But to get this needful task accomplished it needs a slew of linkages and knobs; all operated by a very fine chap sitting at the wheel. By sneaking all these things out of the engine we conclude the engine is simpler. If we include the full gamut it has more fiddly parts in the system. Which is more complex than which in this regard depends wholly on where we draw a line and stop looking. Stop too short and the Model T is less complex than the 455. Go too far and both don't rise to the level of a single chromosome in the fine chap piloting these devices.

The more difficult portion is that of simple combustion. There's a bundle of simple ranged values that interact in non-trivial manners. This isn't a discourse on automobiles so I'll just say that it's a very hard problem to solve adequately. Hard enough that fuel injected vehicles commonly get some rule-of-thumb baseline values in place and then have the computer learn as it goes to account for the rest. In the days of the Model T we just punted to the wetware computer of the fine chap driving. Ballparking each variable is easy while optimizing them all is decidedly hard. Though this goes more classically to computational complexity, linear programming tasks, and similar.

Broadly we can just take the lot of this to mean the assembly or hard dependencies of a system and the operation of a system. If the two happen to be the same thing then it would seem easier to refer to industrial engineering. Or process engineering. Or materials management. Or...

It's a bit terrible that this field of inquiry is trod heavily by consultants selling this year's best patent medicines to company officers. It's not that such things haven't been looked after so much as they're buried under droidspeak and glossy brochures. Even then they rely on computer simulations in an attempt to capture all the queer interactions in the systems they're designing.

There's nothing unique about the problem. Take any dependent set of items and this discussion occurs; add asynchrony or feedback and the problems simply magnify. Yet the basic construction can be found everywhere. The planning and operation of a plant that makes automobile engines. The engine itself and in operation. The entire set of economic transactions within the supply chain and that of the broader national economy. Meterology, climate science, biology, evolution, pink polar bears and asynchronous computer chips.

In truth, all the interesting questions of our time. Yet, for all of that, we don't have a reasonable back-of-the-envelope metric around to generically capture a sense of how large and how fiddly any of these systems may be. It's certainly possible, and indeed likely, that there's already an airtight paper written on the subject. Though, if there is then it is simply collecting dust while salesmen flash their smiles at people desperate for tonics.

Sliderule Fiction

2011-01-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

Naturally.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board backed off from its plan to make banks use market values to calculate how much the loans on their books are worth.

If the FASB ever stops being a political creature and gets back to the business of bean counting it will spell the instantaneous end of the US banking system.

The key point to understand is that the banks are playing margin just like a daytrader. The notion behind the acceptability of Fractional Reserve Banking is based solely on the notion that the assets can be sold to cover the deposits should there be a run on the bank. The deposits, as always, are a loan to the bank from the depositor.

But given the asset price collapse in housing there wouldn't be enough capital left to cover all the deposits if they were all called at the same time. So the FDIC comes swooping in and closes the bank; which is essentially doing the same thing on the taxpayer dime.

It's a nonsense regardless unless a bank under mark-to-market accounting is so small that dumping their assets in a fire sale won't disturb the market value of what they're trying to unload anyways. Too Big Too Fail™ begins and ends right here.

The banks, for their part, far prefer to keep things listed under loan impairment charges. Which is a bit of oracular actuarial magic in which we rely on the chicken bones and farsight of dudes with sliderules. The notion being not that we can cover our liabilities if there is a run, but that we use estimations of future payments and defaults as the bar to reach.

Aside from differing views of the level of risk management this should be just as acceptable as mark-to-market accounting. Of course, there's no requirements as to which chicken bones must be used and you can reliably assume that we're full of fraud here.

Not least of which how many banks have failed to take loan impairments equal the entire principle of the loans they claim to own. But cannot produce the paperwork to establish such for the courts.

The remaining curiosity is not whether FASB ever gets the stones to put mark-to-market in place as a requirement. It's what hoops they're going to jump to excuse keeping assets you don't own on the books as an asset you own.

Moths, Flames

2011-01-25T19:57:00.001-08:00

I wasn't going to do it. I stayed away from the teevee and the website. And I got suckered anyways.

Tonight I want to begin by congratulating the men and women of the 112th Congress, as well as your new Speaker, John Boehner. And as we mark this occasion, we are also mindful of the empty chair in this Chamber, and pray for the health of our colleague – and our friend – Gabby Giffords.

Very good, very nice. The appropriate genuflection to Gabby without getting over the top. Better than I can say for a similar excerpt I caught from Paul Ryan.

... We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled.

Notwithstanding John Edwards we're all one people with a common hope in Obama and a common creed in... what precisely? Has this yokel ever heard of the 1st Amendment?

Whoops.

Nevermind my rantings. He has a dead girl as a prop. I am completely ashamed of myself. Please, continue to use her corpse as a marionette to poke at my guilt.

That, too, is what sets us apart as a nation.

Yes, we are unique in using dead children to agitate for politics. Palestinians have never done such a heinous thing.

Now, by itself, this simple recognition won’t usher in a new era of cooperation. What comes of this moment is up to us. What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow.

I'm so ashamed of myself. Had I only but realized that killing young women was the route to cooperation I should have lauded Dahmer as a Cooperator of the Future™.

... But we have more work to do. The steps we’ve taken over the last two years may have broken the back of this recession – but to win the future, we’ll need to take on challenges that have been decades in the making.

Says the guy on the Federal teat.

... Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science.

In America.

... We are home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any other place on Earth.

From China.

... What’s more, we are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea – the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny.

Someone forgot to tell the Supreme Court this fabulous notion.

... "What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Free. I hear tell that Communist China is pretty swell for this right now.

The future is ours to win.

Time is America's kewpie doll.

But to get there, we can’t just stand still.

Yay, Fascism and movement!

As Robert Kennedy told us, “The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.”

And here come the Dead Kennedy's.

... The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.

America was plenty innovative about abortion. Since then our innovation has all been about foreign labor pools. What more does this guy want?

... It’s how we make a living.

As long as you pay patent royalties to Google for the privilege.

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation.

Which is why I encouraged the Democrats to stifle medicine and biomedical research.

... Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we’d beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t there yet. NASA didn’t even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

NASA being now used to make Muslims feel better about their science contributions. Innovative suzerainty.

We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, ...

Because I killed the free market here.

That’s what Americans have done for over two hundred years: reinvented ourselves.

Whoops. Wait up here, Sparky. The Republicans were, and have always been, pathetic. It's the Democrats, Copperheads, Progressives, Democrats, Liberals, Democrats, Progressives, Obamanauts, Bipartisan Kumbayah Super Jesus Abortion Hippies From Venus that have to keep rolling back the odometer.

... At the California Institute of Technology, they’re developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars.

70 year old technology that the Nazi's were all about.

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they’re using supercomputers to get a lot more power out of our nuclear facilities.

70 year old technology that Konrad Zuse used to get more power out of Nazi aeroplanes.

With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

First 50's era Communist tech, then 40's era Nazi tech. And now he wants us to reinvent electric vehicle technology. Form 1895.

Let's do the Time Warp, again.

We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, ...

I need to borrow your wallet.

... Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree.

Right now you need a degree to work at Burger King. But having a degree makes you over-qualified for Burger King. So let's hand out more degrees until everyone can wear a paper hat by the hour.

Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair; that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline.

I have changed parties and am now a filthy, violent, Rethuglican bastard. Which is difficult. Because they're racist and I'm only sorta born in Hawaii.

... To all fifty states, we said, “If you show us the most innovative plans to improve teacher quality and student achievement, we’ll show you the money.”

Great. Bush wanted results. His successor wants more art.

Take a school like Bruce Randolph in Denver.

Fantastic! You know what the innovation here was? They fired 85% of the teachers. Allowed by excusing them from District and Union rules. Call that Jackson Pollock and I'm on board.

... And this year, I ask Congress to go further, and make permanent our tuition tax credit – worth $10,000 for four years of college.

Because unemployed male youths tend to break things.

... Now, I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration. I am prepared to work with Republicans and Democrats to protect our borders, enforce our laws and address the millions of undocumented workers who are now living in the shadows. I know that debate will be difficult and take time. But tonight, let’s agree to make that effort. And let’s stop expelling talented, responsible young people who can staff our research labs, start new businesses, and further enrich this nation.

Says the undocumented immigrant from Indonesia whose hospital birth records cannot be found by the Governor of Hawaii.

Though, in fairness, if this yack can be handed the Nuclear Football without consequence we should really revisit the issue thoughtfully. Perhaps hand the nuclear stockpile to random world citizens by lottery drawings or Bingo competitions.

That's it for me. Shoe, monitor, I'm off for a topper to let the Most Powerful Man in the World continue on about how he needs more generosity from those he's got under his boot.

Dinner Theatre

2011-01-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

State of the Union on tonight, so it seems like a good night to do something useful rather than park it in front of the tube. There's a bit of high lather about which SCOTUS robes might skip the shindig and a lot of fainting couches amongst the Republican pundits.

Shame that. Those that want to cross under the wire and exchange presents across the craters and foxholes ought be commended for doing so. They're also daft patsies bolstering the optics against the Democrats failing fortunes. But you can't fault them for being goodhearted patsies.

Trading tins of meat and cigarettes during cession of open fighting isn't bipartisanship and shouldn't be confused as such. Bipartisanship is when I get half of what I want and you're stuck with half of what you don't. As long as Obama can manage some grace, it'll be fine.

On second thought maybe I should watch. If we get another "You lie!" moment the heteropolitical seating arrangements might give a good boxing bout the likes we haven't had since Preston Brooks chased Charles Sumner around the Senate floor with a cane.