France shows the way as always.......
France gets serious:

Sarkozy ordered the expulsion of all Romanian and Bulgarian Gypsies who had committed “public order” offenses and said that illegal camps would be taken down. ... Those in France illegally or who have committed public-order offenses will be sent “almost immediately” back to their countries of origin without the possibility of returning, he added. Digital fingerprinting technology would be employed to ensure that the deported persons did not enter France once again.

Illustrates that a large modern country can act with firmness if it really wants to.

But it's not a close comparison with our Mexican problem.

At times when our economy is growing too fast to employ only natives, we can justify bringing in a well-controlled contingent of Mexicans. In recession times we need to reverse the gradient. As Oklahoma and other states have been doing successfully, by prosecuting employers and landlords. No need for police, just remove the attraction.

None of that applies to Gypsies. Gypsies are 100% criminal and 100% useless. There is never an economic justification for harboring a 100% criminal ethnic group, and every sane nation needs to remove them forcibly.
  ¶ 7:23 PM

  Real science
In response to two almost simultaneous house fires caused by microwaved towels, Spokane fire investigators ran an experiment with an easy-to-remember conclusion:

If you're going to use hot towels to relieve back pain, be sure the towel is completely damp before you put it in the microwave.

This is REAL SCIENCE!

Testing a question that hasn't been tested before, with life-saving results!

Completely unlike the "science" of the aristocracy, made of blatantly false "facts", fictional computer models and untestable theories, with results serving only to increase the obscene riches of the plutocrats.
  ¶ 5:27 PM

  Striped Pajamas again
For the last week or two I've been having strange pains and itches and rashes and numbness on and in my abdomen. Being hypochondriacal, I formed all sorts of anxious notions about what it might be, from hernia to allergy to cancer.

Finally** got in to see the doctor this morning. She listened to my description, took one look at the situation, and said "Shingles".

Great relief! It's annoying but it's nothing deadly, and it will go away.

Strange to think that a virus will sit there in the spinal cord for 53 years, twiddling its chromosomes, waiting for its moment to shine ... and then it strikes, turning a significant section of the body into chaos.

Thank God for answered prayers, and mainly thanks to Group Health for quick and competent service.

= = = = =

** Finally refers to my own anxious procrastination, not to the speed of the Group Health system. They have a Consulting Nurse service that members can call at any time to get an informed opinion, to avoid unnecessary ER visits, and to make appointments. I called the service last night (Thursday) when the numbness and discomfort seemed to be getting serious; they made an appointment for today (Friday). Can't beat that for speed.

I never experienced this kind of speed and expertise from private doctors. During the years when I was using private docs, I got nothing but condescension, impatience, inattention, wrong diagnoses and wrong prescriptions. Gave up on the whole profession for a long time, but Group Health has persuaded me to give them a second chance.

If the nation really wanted to reform health care, they could simply replicate Group Health plus Wash State's 'Basic Health' subsidy system. Allegedly some of Obama's advisers were considering this, but the final result is exactly the opposite, worst of both worlds.

= = = = =

Returning in late September to, ahem, cinch up the story ... for searchers who might be looking for individual experiences with shingles. The episode began around mid-July when I was mowing the lawn over-enthusiastically. I bumped the mower handle into the ribs on my left side several times. That night the pain and itching started, on the left side of the ribcage and abdomen just at the lowest "true rib". Some of the pain was internal, as twinges or pangs. A couple days later the same area started to blister; the blisters seemed to follow the pattern of fingernail scrapes, so I guessed they must have been from scratching the itch. No, they were just part of the typical shingles pattern. On 7/30 when I saw the doctor as described above, the blisters had broken and scabbed, and the itching was transitioning toward numbness. The numbness continued to spread downward through the left side of the abdomen, pelvis and hip, including an odd sense that something inside was flopping around. In addition, the left side of the abdomen was bulging more than the right side, and returned to normal afterward. (Perhaps the virus was affecting the motor root of the spinal nerve, loosening some abdominal muscles.) Through August the internal sensations slowly went away, leaving only the external numbness; and by mid-Sept the numbness was entirely gone. So the whole episode lasted two months, approx 7/15 to 9/15.
  ¶ 3:26 PM

  Wait! It doesn't happen that way.
Randite conservatives endlessly pound this point: Less than half of all Americans now pay Federal income tax, and the proportion is shrinking steadily. Supposedly this drives Congress to respond more and more to the desires of the "parasite class", less and less to the desires of the "Atlas class".

Hold on. The trend actually runs the other way! When did Congress buy the votes of the poor? Mainly during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, when the tax structure drew more heavily from the working class.

Since 1992, only one benefit program has been nominally aimed at the poor: the Medicare prescription drug mess of 2001. Was this something that starving elderly folks were clamoring for? No, not at all. Polls showed that only 15% of old folks wanted this, and most weren't even thinking about the idea. This was merely a bargaining chip, an auction organized by Bush and Gore, to buy those crucial 700 Jewish widows in Palm Beach. It was a gimmick to rig the Electoral College, nothing more.

Everything else since 1992 has been designed to benefit George Soros, or aimed at specific factions of each party's base (which is another way of saying George Soros.)

The wishes of the lower half are completely ignored. The lower half want stricter immigration control, stricter policing, stricter import control, looser environmental regulation, and an end to useless wars. In other words, they want jobs suitable to their skills, and they don't want their sons to continue dying pointlessly.

Neither party will come anywhere near these goals.

Is this an argument for taxing the poor? If we paid more taxes, would the politicians listen? I doubt it.
  ¶ 5:12 PM

  Random local items
(1) In the last two days, two old guys have crashed their experimental airplanes. The first one was 81 years old and died in the crash; the second was 71 and survived with no serious injuries.

(2) Last night two completely separate house fires, both in the same area of Spokane Valley, were caused by microwaved towels which are apparently good for back pain.

I'd never heard of the technique. When I have back pain (which I do this week, as it happens) I just take Advil. Side effect of Advil: sometimes leaves you a bit foggy. Side effect of microwaved towels: house burns up. Hmm, which do I prefer?

(3) The pine trees are dropping baby cones this week. I've never noticed this before, which doesn't mean it hasn't happened ... but I'm reasonably observant of such phenomena. These aren't leftover bits of full-sized pine cones, they're complete embryonic cones.

Later: Oooooops. Examined the situation more closely, and these are not 'baby pine cones' at all, they're hemlock cones. Hemlock cones are little. Time to sing Horse in Striped Pajamas.


As long as I'm being random: Horse in Striped Pajamas is the song that plays in my head whenever I've made a really dumb assumption. But I've always been bothered by the setup of the original Horse in Striped Pajamas. In the song Mr Greenjeans is the one who makes dumb assumptions about various animals, and Captain Kangaroo is the one who supplies the correct answers. This was inverted from their actual characters, because Mr Greenjeans was the show's animal expert, the Jack Hanna type.
  ¶ 6:49 PM

  Reverse leaks
The Wikileaks fiasco is basically irrelevant, with one exception.

Why does a government need to keep secrets? To prevent the enemy from knowing its plans and progress.

Examining this set of secrets by that basic standard:

These leaks do not reveal any information that isn't already known by Pakistan and the Taliban. Pakistan already knows that Pakistan has Stinger missiles; Pakistan already knows about our killing of Pakistani civilians; Taliban already knows that Persia is supporting Taliban.

Who didn't know these facts prior to the leak? The American people.

Therefore: We can conclude that the American people are the enemy of the Bushobama government, and Pakistan and Taliban are allies of the Bushobama government. No real surprise. This has been obvious for many years.
  ¶ 8:42 AM

  Define 'jaunty'
Jaunty.
  ¶ 9:46 AM

  Like Niobe, all tears
NBC ran an unusually powerful feature last night on poverty in Southeast Ohio.

Unusual in two ways: (1) It was exclusively about poor white folks, breaking the standard MSM axiom that All Whites Are Powerful Racists And All Blacks Are Still Slaves. (2) It was a hard-hitting documentary on poverty aired while a Democrat is president, breaking the standard MSM axiom that Poverty Is Solely Caused By Republicans.



While I watched (yes, through tears) I was thinking about this concise bit of alternate history, offered by an anonymous commenter at Sailer's blog yesterday:

If we'd have had a Pat Buchanan as president in 1992, how much better off would we be now? The Clintons would have never have happened. There would have been no George W. Bush, and therefore there almost assuredly would have been no Obama. The border would be walled, factory and construction jobs would still be held by blacks & whites. Many jobs would still be here, and would pay high enough (H1B probably being dismantled) to be worth doing. Real estate prices would be lower, and thus homes more affordable. We wouldn't have had the two recent middle eastern wars because terrorists wouldn't have been able to gain entry here in the first place to make 9/11 happen. The treasury would therefore not have been bankrupted. The Bushes (and their friends like Vicente Fox) have been a disaster for America. The Bushes have hurt America more than the Clintons did. Lets make sure no more of them ever get elected by always donating to their opponents.

I'd add: A Buchanan type wouldn't have allowed Wall Street to consume our entire economy. He would have understood the difference between production and gambling, and would have shaped regulations to favor Americans over Jews.

And a Buchanan type would have reined in the genocidal mass-slaughtering terrorist organization EPA, which was primarily responsible for the deep sorrows of these quiet people. EPA's first vicious blitzkrieg in the '70s strafed the Ohio Valley from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, ripping out the steel mills and transferring our steel industry to EPA's Chinese masters.

= = = = =

NBC didn't talk much about solutions, except for the tiresome and pointless nostrum of education. Nope. Why bother educating factory workers for hi-tech jobs when we're outsourcing the hi-tech jobs along with the factory jobs? The only real answer is the Buchananite or Economic Nationalist solution, closing the circle, keeping money and jobs and human capital inside the country.

Both "parties" treat isolationism and protectionism as dirty words, training us to forget that America's most successful decades were exactly the years when we practiced isolationism and protectionism.

Some of us will not forget.
  ¶ 4:44 AM

  Worst gestures ever
Wash state's local version of C-Span has a nice "Video Voter Guide", featuring statements from most of the Senate candidates. I've mentioned Goodspaceguy before. His video statement is considerably better, more human and commonsensical, than I'd expected from his writing. I just might vote for him! [8/2/10: And I did.]

The really strange one is Schalk Leonard (yes, Schalk is first name and Leonard is last name) who clearly spent many months preparing and rehearsing every detail of his presentation. His speech resembles a badly programmed Audio-Animatronic figure. Somebody should have told him "Just leave your hands on the desk, you'll be fine."
  ¶ 10:52 AM

  Maybe I'm just in an optimistic mood
July has been pretty good, with two bad men dying and one bad man discredited.

Here's another small but good indication: It appears that FBI is finally starting to do preventive work against Mohammedans. Up till now, they were running stings that picked up the unserious wannabes while completely missing the serious Jihadis.

This story details a serious 'homegrown', an intelligent couple with enough resources and connections to do considerable subversion and violence. And FBI caught them without a sting!

So beloved were Paul Rockwood Jr. and his wife, Nadia, that when they left King Salmon [Alaska] in May to move to England, where Nadia was born, more than 30 people – pretty much their entire circle of friends – showed up at the airport. The choir sang “Wherever You Go,” and “people were just bawling,” said Rebecca Hamon, a friend of the couple.

What none of them could have known was that FBI agents were meeting the small turboprop plane in Anchorage to question the Rockwoods on suspicion of domestic-terrorism-related crimes.

This week, Paul and Nadia Rockwood pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Anchorage to one count of willfully making false statements to the FBI; in Paul Rockwood’s case, it was a statement about domestic terrorism.

The plea agreements state that Rockwood, 35, had become an adherent of extremist Islam who had prepared a list of assassination targets, including U.S. service members. And, though no plot to carry out the killings was revealed, he had researched methods of execution, including guns and explosives, the agreements say.

Federal charging papers said his wife, 36, who is five months pregnant with the couple’s second child, lied to investigators when she denied knowing that an envelope she took to Anchorage in April at her husband’s request contained a list of 15 intended targets. She told FBI agents that she thought the envelope contained a letter or a book. She gave it to an unidentified individual who her husband believed shared his radical beliefs, the FBI said.

Nadia knew exactly what was on the list and what it was for, federal authorities said.

The plea agreements the couple signed said Paul Rockwood converted to Islam in late 2001 or early 2002 while living in Virginia and became a follower of radical U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, now believed to be living in Yemen.

“This included a personal conviction that it was his religious responsibility to exact revenge by death on anyone who desecrated Islam,” his agreement said.

Yes, that's the cornerstone of Mohammedan belief.


The sad part of this story is that the locals have been thoroughly stupefied by Bush/Obama propaganda about "The Religion Of Peace".

The couple told neighbors they were Muslim but, other than avoiding pork, never made an issue of their religion. Paul had a beard, but the couple never prayed publicly. Nadia performed Christian and secular songs with the choir in performances at the local chapel; her husband attended with his video camera.

Loukas Barton, a National Park Service archaeologist who lived next door, said the couple’s seeming reticence about discussing their religion may have been because they were, so far as anyone here can remember, the only Muslims who have ever lived in King Salmon.

“It’s not uncommon in a bar here to hear some moron say, ‘I hate Barack Obama because he’s … a terrorist and an Ay-rab.’ And people will swear up and down that he’s a Muslim. Which is really well-informed, right?” Barton said.

Yes it is really well-informed, you hopeless Useful Idiot. Obama was raised as a Mohammedan, and shows no signs of ever converting away from the faith. If he had genuinely turned Christian, there would be fatwas from every Imam.

Barton, you're the badly-informed one.

I don't think Obama is a serious believer in either Mohammed or Christ. The only ideology he's serious about is Leninism. But the standard line that Obama was "never a Muslim" (endlessly repeated with axiomatic certainty by all Good Comrades) is simply and baldly false.
  ¶ 7:21 AM

  Another bad man dies
Comrade Daniel Schorr ceases to pollute the Planet with toxic CO2 and genocidal treason.

July 2010 is turning out to be a very good month for civilization. Two bad men dead, one bad man transformed into a laughingstock.
  ¶ 11:50 AM

  That is a lot of cab drivers!
This isn't highly significant except as a typical example of self-censorship. Obviously all the people involved are Ethiopian, but the "news" article refused to name the nationality.

I'm really keeping it here just because the names and quotes are funny! Reminds me of old Firesign Theater "news" parodies.

SEATTLE - Seattle Police bust a major theft ring, involving almost two dozen taxi cab drivers. Investigators say the trafficking of stolen goods was going on for at least four years.

Seattle Police called the undercover investigation "Operation Yellow Jacket." Stolen property was peddled to at least 22 taxi cab drivers who lined up in the Westlake Center area along 6th Avenue near Stewart Street.

Many cabbies didn't want to talk about it, but those who were willing admitted they were stunned.

"I'm very shocked," says Mercha Baneku, who has been a cab driver for two-and-a-half years. "Twenty-two cab drivers arrested! That is a lot of cab drivers."

Seattle Police surveillance video shows shoplifter after shoplifter, who allegedly stole merchandise from downtown businesses. They are seen getting into the back of taxi cabs, many of them with backpacks or shopping bags. From the cab's backseat, police say they would sell their stolen goods to the driver.

"It's a big shock actually," says cab driver Worba Wako. "More than a surprise, it's a big shock."

Investigators say some drivers would place orders for stolen goods. In the surveillance video, you can see the thieves removing the security tags and the anti-theft devices from the merchandise right on the sidewalk.

The video shows one of the thieves being interrogated, and he told police how it worked.

"He come pick me up and gave me $20 for perfumes. I did that four times, five times," said the unidentified suspect.

I'm pretty damn sure Mr Worba Wako wasn't shocked actually.

Wideo iss here actually.
  ¶ 9:52 AM

  More Birkenstocks are dropping
Well, it was obvious from the start that the Pope of Gaia was in deep shit. Actually it was obvious that something was wrong several months before this story broke open. And now we're starting to get more details of this evil monster's operating procedure, which appears to be well-honed and well-practiced.

The most disgusting part of the whole spectacle is the Propaganda Factories, especially Fox, continuing to treat the accusers as dubious. These are the same "reporters" who treated Crystal Mangum's transparently false claims about the Duke lacrosse boys as gospel truth.

It's all about Who.

Or more precisely, it's the classic Stalinist Who-Whom. If you know the caste and Party status of the accuser, and the caste and Party status of the accused, you immediately know the "truth" of the "crime".

When the accuser is a criminal black female and the accused are rich white boys, you don't need to say "alleged" because the accusation is permanently and eternally true no matter how the trivial little facts turn out.

When the accused is your own High Priest, then it doesn't even matter that the accusers are good Party types (Birkenstock Tribe). The accusation must be permanently and eternally false, no matter how the trivial little facts turn out.

= = = = =


In any case, Polistra and Happystar are enjoying the spectacle. NHI.

  ¶ 11:34 AM

  Law of Us and Them
Polistra's Law of Us and Them:

If you say "We need to be better than them", you are them.


In a serious battle, whether cultural or military, you can't worry about niceties.

Niceness does not impress the enemy, it only shows the enemy that you are weak and uncommitted.

Building schools in Afghanistan does not impress the Taliban. An atomic bomb does impress the Taliban.

Quibbling about statistics does not impress the Carbon Cult. Lawsuits do impress the Carbon Cult.

Exquisitely cautious racial language does not impress the NAACP. Lester Maddox does impress the NAACP.

= = = = =

If this particular war is worth fighting, fight it. Hard and deadly. No quarter.

If it's not worth fighting, go home and enjoy life.


= = = = =

And as usual translating the Law into Conservatese as a public service for Repooflican readers:

If one says "We need to be better than they", one is they.
  ¶ 6:23 AM

  Happy birthday Janet!
This is Janet Reno's 72nd birthday, and she deserves a bit of belated recognition. She didn't want to be AG in the first place; she was just a typical publicity-seeking local prosecutor without higher ambition. Bill & Hill picked her after their first two choices failed vetting, undoubtedly assuming she'd roll over easily. And B&H definitely needed a loyal AG who would participate in covering up a multitude of past and present sins.

Reno's tenure began with the vicious Waco mess, which was a project started by Comrade Bush The Father, and already close to its planned holocaustic conclusion by the time she picked up the reins. She ended up carrying much of the blame, which undoubtedly pleased Comrade Bush The Father almost as much as seeing all those Crispy Christians.

Later she served Bill & Hill reasonably well by all accounts. Scandals disappeared from the headlines, which is the primary job of an AG.

But near the end of her time, something happened that exceeded her capacity for tolerance. The Wen Ho Lee spy case disappeared from the headlines. Lee was more or less vindicated and returned home, and Reno didn't like it. She held a news conference in which she made it clear, by implication and by obvious anguish, that Lee was a serious spy who should have been prosecuted.

After that cri de coeur I couldn't harbor any hard feelings toward Reno. She was too loyal [or too blackmailed] to lash out in an explicit way, but her basic patriotism, her essential understanding of right and wrong, couldn't be entirely suppressed even by expert suppressors like B&H.
  ¶ 7:59 AM

  Sissies forever
The sissy-ass prancers at NRO are still giving way to big black bullies. Even when they are informed of the basic nature of Commies and the proper way to handle Commies, they refuse to fight for their "own" side.

I've been resisting this conclusion for a long time, but it's finally unavoidable. The whole conservative movement is simply a foil developed by the Commies to make dominance easier. It's a tool to steer anti-Commie impulses into the least effective and most absurd channels.

Since NRO is the mainspring of this movement, I should have understood the treason a long time ago. After all, Buckley was CIA, which means he was KGB. His first assignment was to dissociate "right-wing" intellectual types from Joe McCarthy, who was entirely too effective, accurate and commonsensical.
  ¶ 7:04 AM

  The Correct Answer
Now that the BP Bubble Quest Game is Game-Over, the Propaganda Factories (CNN, MSNBC, FOX) have returned to more familiar schoolyard bully form: calling all white people RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST.

And predictably, this month's Featured RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST RACIST is responding in the same old sissy-ass way.

The Tea Party drops to its knees and whines "Oh please, Massa Sharpton, we are not racists. Please, Massa Jackson, we don't have racist elements. Oh Massa Sharpton, tell me please, am I shining your shoes perfectly? Oh Massa Jackson, do you want me to polish your ample and noble pelvic area while I'm at it?"

Fuck. As soon as you say "I am not a racist" you've abjectly surrendered, you've obeyed the enemy's orders. You might as well give up and go home, quit wasting your money and energy.

The CORRECT RESPONSE, the "Present them" response, is as follows: "Hey, Al and Jesse, I'm glad you want to join us. You believe we have a strong racist element, which means you'll be right at home in the Tea Party as you perceive it. Here's an application all filled out, ready for your signatures, Al and Jesse. Caveat: It's possible that you might be really uncomfortable, which will then tell every sane person that the Tea Party is not a good home for racists. Well, how about it, guys? Ready to sign up?"
  ¶ 12:48 PM

  Bad man dies
Via WUWT comes word that Stephen Schneider, one of the original fraudsters of the Global Warming conspiracy and one of the hardest and most effective opponents of civilization, has ceased exhaling toxic poisonous CO2.

Some of the late-comers in this fraud are halfway forgivable. Jones and Mann came along when the 'consensus' was already established, when all the media and all the governments and all the schools and churches were already True Believers in pseudoscience. Like Dillinger, they were just going where the money was.

Schneider is unforgivable because he helped to invent the consensus in 1975, and then helped to spread the lie when it was not yet culturally inevitable.

If those founders had been doing science, even they could be forgiven. If they had observed an abnormal warming trend in 1975 and hypothesized CO2 as the cause, human nature and pride would have kept them on the same Kuhnian track for the rest of their careers, long after it was proven false. But that's not how it happened! The world was cooling in 1975, and the data showing CO2 as a lagging variable was already available in 1975. In short, there wasn't a scientific problem begging to be solved. No, they were not trying to solve a scientific problem, they were trying to solve a political problem. They were looking for a natural phenomenon that could be manipulated in a "scientific-looking" way to justify massive new controls by government. They were doing Lenin's work, not Newton's work.

It's all in this book, and it's all unforgivable.

= = = = =

In the meantime, the world is a better place today.


  ¶ 9:58 AM

  Good man gains


Polistra likes this Alvin Greene fellow who's running for Senate in SC. Likes him in a plain and simple way... not because he might be a spoiler, but because he's a true political novice and an introvert.

Introverts are less susceptible to peer pressure, more inclined to think for themselves. At first it wasn't clear that Greene was intelligent enough to think competently for himself in such a hi-falutin arena, but his intelligence is coming through now that he's saying more than Yup and Nope. He's just laconic, doesn't feel the need for endless jibber-jabber.

One sentence in Greene's debut speech catches Polistra's attention forcibly:

"Let's reclaim our country from the terrorists and communists."

When was the last time you heard any politician name both factions of our enemy correctly? Pretty sure no national politician has named Communists as an internal enemy since the Cultural Revolution was consummated in 1974.
  ¶ 7:40 AM

  Half-formed thought about a fully-formed universe
Dreher has written several times about a quantum-related idea (can't really call it a theory) that energy and matter may not be necessary concepts; that the universe may consist of nothing more than information in the Shannon sense.

Quantum and Shannon are both binary, thus probably 'sideways' to the more likely truth. If you stay with waveforms and analog math, you can reach the same point with fewer paradoxes and less weirdness. The only question that remains unanswered is "what's waving?" ... but that's a simpler question than the quantum crap.

If consciousness is a 'reception' of, or resonance with, the field of waves, then several questions about spirits, clairvoyance and telepathy may turn out to be physically explainable. We may even be able to state what happens to consciousness after death.

A more interesting but even vaguer connection: Studies of genetic coding appear to be leading toward a single complete origin. In this picture, life didn't slowly and randomly build toward its current complexity; instead, the full complexity was already present in the code from the start. Each type of critter, or each individual species, keeps only some parts of the code. Some of the unused parts may be completely gone, and some may remain present as 'macros', ready to be compiled when the species needs them. (Polistra discussed this once in the context of the Paddlefish, which seems to show that fish had the 'macro' for legs from the start, long before conditions on land enabled them to get out and walk.)

Combining these two vague notions: What if the genome is a concrete 'instantiation' of the information-bearing waves? The field pushed the right atoms together to form amino acids, then led them to link into proteins, and so on. All a dance of synchronous rhythms, waves responding to waves. Here's a metaphor.

(Footnote: Here's an earlier study that tends to confirm this line of thinking.)
  ¶ 10:13 AM

  From whence these fools falling?
The young idiot newsreaders at Fox were shocked! shocked! shocked! at the report that "ice chunks" fell from the sky IN SUMMER! ICE CHUNKS IN SUMMER! WHAT'S THE WORLD COMING TO!

Anyone who has lived in America knows that summer is when hail typically comes down. Winter is when snow typically comes down.

Maybe it's different in New York. Maybe million-dollar bills fall from the sky in New York. Maybe knishes and shillelaghs. I don't know, I don't want to find out, and I don't give a damn. I only know that we've committed national suicide if these idiots are our "best and brightest". All book-learning, no experience of reality.

= = = = =

And translating the above into Foxspeak so it's intelligible to Fox viewers:

= = = = =

The young I-word newsreaders at Fox being shocking! shocking! shocking! at the we reporting, you deciding, that "ice chunks" falling from the sky IN SUMMER! ICE CHUNKS IN SUMMER! TO WHAT THE WORLD COMING?

Anyone who living in America (USA! USA! USA! WE BEING NUMBER ONE! WE BEING GREAT AMERICANS!) knowing that summer when hail down which typically coming. Winter when snow down which typically coming.

Maybe it different in New York. Maybe million-dollar bills falling from the sky in New York. Maybe offensive ethnic references and offensive ethnic references. I not knowing, I not wanting out which to find, and I not giving a D-word. I only knowing that we committing national homicide if these I-words being our "best and brightest". All book-learning, no experience of R-word.
  ¶ 8:17 AM

  Real news!
Via WUWT:

The American government has suspended its funding of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit (CRU), citing the scientific doubts raised by last November’s leak of hundreds of stolen emails.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) was one of the unit’s main sources of funding for its work assembling a database of global temperatures.

It has supported the CRU financially since 1990 and gives the unit about £131,000 ($200,000 USD) a year on a rolling three-year contract.

This should have been renewed automatically in April, but the department has suspended all payments since May pending a scientific peer review of the unit’s work.

Money talks. Deprivation of money talks even louder. Remains to be seen whether funding resumes after "peer review". If it resumes, tyranny as usual. If DOE decides to permanently eliminate this funding, it will be the first sign of intelligent life in DC since 1988.
  ¶ 8:06 AM

  Reagent-quality Dyslogic
Article in latest New Superstitionist:

Ashley Ballantyne at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues analysed 4-million-year-old Pliocene peat samples from Ellesmere Island in the Arctic archipelago to find out what the climate was like when the peat formed.

At that time, CO2 levels are thought to have been close to current levels – around 390 parts per million – but global temperatures were around 2 to 3 °C warmer than today. It was the last warm period before the onset of the Pleistocene glaciation, and is used by climate researchers as a model for our future climate.

Previous studies using computer models have suggested that the Pliocene Arctic was also warmer than it is today – up to 10 °C warmer. A little warming can trigger a lot more in the Arctic because the loss of light-reflecting sea ice and the spread of plants across the land increase the amount of solar energy that is absorbed.

Ballantyne's team estimated the temperature of the period at which the peat formed by measuring three things that are affected by temperature: the concentration of various chemical compounds, levels of a certain isotope in tree rings and the amount and types of fossilised vegetation.

The group's analysis suggests the samples formed when average local temperatures were about -0.5 °C. That is 19 °C warmer than temperatures today – more than the previous computer models had estimated.

"These results should be alarming," says Ballantyne. Although it could take centuries for current global temperatures to respond to rising CO2 levels, we can expect the Arctic to warm much more than the rest of the planet, he says.

Summing up, the Arctic at that time had approx the same CO2 as today, but it was 19C (or about 62 real degrees) warmer. And Ballantyne says this should serve as a warning that increasing the CO2 will burn us up.

Any sane human being, any scientist or careful observer whose brain was not fried by Gaia-worshiping fanaticism, would treat this set of measurements as an absolute elimination of CO2 as a factor. (At least for this pairing of places and times.) Whatever was causing the change in temperature here, it was NOT carbon dioxide.

= = = = =

Put it in another context. Say you're involved in designing a new car. Your current job assignment: see if opening the sunroof has any effect on the speed of the car. You do a careful test of one car, with sunroof fully open. The car reaches 62 MPH. You carefully note the result. Now you wait a week and try again, same car, same sunroof position, but different roads and weather conditions. This time the car won't move at all. Speed is 0 MPH.

Constant cause, hugely different result.

If you were a "climate scientist" you'd conclude that the position of the sunroof was the only important variable, because it was the same in both experiments.

  [Constant Cause]
+ [Different Result]
= [Total Correlation] in the mind of a crimatologist.

Or more accurately,
  [Any Set Of Circumstances]
+ [Any Other Set Of Circumstances]
= [DANGER WILL ROBINSON! HUMANS EXHALING POISON!!!! MUST KILL ALL HUMANS!!!!]

But if you were a moderately logical person, you'd instantly conclude that the sunroof could not be the sole controller of speed. You might know from other experiments that it has an effect, but from this experiment alone you can only conclude that speed depends on many other factors. Hills, headwinds, condition of engine, quality of fuel, setting of gas pedal, setting of brakes, and so on.
  ¶ 10:48 AM

  Gibson tapes are fake.
I don't pay much attention to celebrity stories, but this is the rare instance where a celebrity story strays into my range of expertise and interest.

On those tapes of Mel Gibson shouting, the two sides of the conversation are entirely separate. Gibson's voice is overmodulated and accompanied by cellphone noise, while the Russki honeytrap's voice is perfectly clear, studio quality, never interrupted by Mel's heavy breathing.

There's no way to record a conversation with that much distinction between the sides. No matter what technique you use (inductive coupling, radio monitor or just speakerphone with separate audio recorder) Mel's side will always be 'present' to some degree. You'll hear static and rustling at the very least. The main problem is that he's obviously too drunk and pissed off to stay politely silent during each of the intervals when Honeytrap is speaking. When you're roaring and panting in frustrated rage, you aren't going to pause 1/2 second before the other party talks and resume 1/2 second after she's finished.

It's all too neat.

These tapes are edited. And this is a fairly expert opinion; I spent 20 years working with sound, including lots of digital editing and analysis. I know the difference between raw and processed sound.

= = = = =

Less technically, my sympathy is mainly with Gibson here, with one big exception. A man with so much money and controversy must know that he's a prime target for blackmailers and honeytraps. He can afford to hire a detective and a 'yenta' to check out his women thoroughly beforehand. Or he could stick with high-class escorts. (I've never been rich enough to hire a high-class prostitute but I've known a few of them, back when I was working motel night auditor jobs. I'd trust a high-class pro far more than I'd trust any other female. In an unlicensed and semi-legal profession, reputation counts and they know it.)
  ¶ 7:45 AM

  Praying hard


Polistra is praying:

Please, Lord. You've shown that you can shake up these assholes. You've given them a little 3.6 test wiggle. Now do it properly. Give them a 9 or a perfect 10.

Amen.
  ¶ 6:18 AM

  Persian "informant"
This smells worse than the Russian spy swap.

The Iranian nuclear scientist who says he was abducted a year ago by U.S. agents was an informant for the CIA inside Iran for several years ...

Shahram Amiri returned to Tehran early Thursday, saying he was pressured to lie about Iran's nuclear program. Washington denied kidnapping Amiri and insisted he had lived freely in the United States.

Officials said the scientist described to U.S. intelligence officers details of how a university in Tehran became the covert headquarters for Iran's nuclear efforts. While still in Iran, he was also one of the sources for a much-disputed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's suspected weapons program, published in 2007.

You don't need to know the details. You only need to observe that he is willingly returning to Persia. That means he doesn't expect to be executed. And that means he was not working for us at all. He was purely working for Persia, and any information he gave us was disinformation.

CIA always tries double-agent games, sometimes successfully. Nothing wrong with that. But it's just silly to portray this case as a success for our side.
  ¶ 3:59 AM

  And here we go.....
News item:

As Arizona heads to court Thursday to defend its tough new immigration law in the first of several legal challenges, it has the backing of many Americans who have opened their wallets to show support for the border state.

Contributions to Gov. Jan Brewer’s special legal defense fund now top $1 million, mostly in website donations of less than $100 pouring in from all over the country. Arizona, California, Texas, and Florida are the states with the most online donors.

As of Tuesday, website contributions totaled $1,104934.63 from 23,955 donors, according to the governor’s office. Additional mail-in donations totaled $93,084, with contributions still coming in, says Tasya Peterson, a Brewer spokeswoman. The average donation is about $46.

I'm one of those $100 donors. I don't have a lot of money, but this is one of the few causes worth supporting.

If Brewer doesn't succeed in drawing a literal line in the sand, America will accelerate much faster downward. The enemy forces will feel completely unhampered, and only an armed revolution will stop them.

If she does succeed, we may join the turnaround started by Euro countries, and we may not need an armed revolution.

Thursday’s lawsuit before US District Judge Susan Bolton was filed by Tucson police officer Martin Escobar. Various organizations, including immigrant-advocacy groups and the ACLU, filed subsequent legal challenges. The Justice Department suit contends that the law interferes with federal authority, and attorneys for both sides will argue that case before Judge Bolton on July 22.

Well surprise surprise. The first suit was filed by a fucking Mexican. He shouldn't even have standing to sue. Goddamn foreigner.

The Arizona law makes a nice clean litmus test. Americans are with Brewer. Foreign agents and Communists are against Brewer.
  ¶ 7:48 AM

  Yaay! Got more Schultz!
Looks like the incomparable Dwight Schultz is going to be on air with some regularity as a general fill-in. Today he subhosted for Savage.

Yaaaaayy!
  ¶ 7:06 PM

  Delingmole?
James Delingpole of the Telegraph has been a stalwart satirist fighting the Carbon Cult. Today he did something completely inscrutable: he published approvingly a pro-Cult article written by someone else. No sign of satire; appears that Delingmole fully agrees with the guest post.

The article starts by fully supporting the basic lie of the Cult: that "the science is settled". From there, it tries to say that we aren't going to "solve" the "settled problem" anyway, so we don't need to worry.

This is objectively indistinguishable from the demented screechings of Gaian High Priest Hansen.

As Polistra said earlier about squishy-ass pansy-ass bitch-ass sissy-ass Repooflicans:

Murkowski also exhibited the same shit-faced cowardice, saying the science is not the point.

Think of a member of the German Reichstag in 1937, trying to oppose the goals of the National Socialists while simultaneously granting that the eugenic "science" of Herr Professor Doktor Alfred Rosenberg was completely valid, that Jews and Slavs were incurably inferior and dangerous. You can't have it both ways. You can't support the diagnosis and oppose the cure. If you won't argue against the theory that Jews and Slavs are dangerous, then you can't honestly argue against Hitler's elimination of Jews and Slavs. And if you won't argue against the theory that CO2 is dangerous, then you can't honestly argue against Atmungsführerin Lisa Jackson's elimination of CO2.

What the hell is Delingpole doing? Did he simply fail to read the guest post, or has he surrendered to the enemy?
  ¶ 5:41 PM

  Random items
(1) While waiting for a bus this morning, I was taken aback by a wildly old-fashioned sight: a car with a suit hanging on the clothes-hook. The car was a late-90s Buick sedan, and the driver was just what you'd expect ... dapper old guy, probably a high-class salesman. Those clothes-hooks over the rear doors were already obsolescent when I was young. Nobody used them. If I had bothered to think about it, I would guess they had been discontinued by 1980. Apparently not.

(2) I'm still on the Repooflican mailing list, having been a loyal Repooflican from 1994 to 2003. Today I got this fund-raising letter:



Note the cute "1040" appearance of the numbers, the IRS-like format of the envelope, and the warning about "authorized employee representative". Gave me a momentary heart palpitation, which is undoubtedly the goal. Really dumb marketing. If I were still inclined to vote brand-R, this letter would switch me to D. Take a month off my life? I'm damn sure not going to pay you for the experience!

(3) Localeths. It's sort of interesting to live in a place like Spokane that outsiders often mispronounce. You can tell immediately whether a radio ad or a politician is in NYC or actually knows the place. When an ad for a concert gives locations and times for "Spokain and Cower d'Aleen", you know for sure it's NYC.

Some localeths are more subtle, in the domain of stress rather than simple pronunciation. Upper Sandusky, Ohio for example. Locals stress the second syllable, almost like "A person dusky". Or Havre de Grace, Maryland, with a unique intonation that tickles my ears for some reason. "Havver" gets the major stress as you'd expect, but "dee" and "Grace" are exactly equal in length and force. Rhymes and scans with "Have her keep pace."

(4) The protocols and standards that made the Web possible are called HyperText Transfer Protocol and HyperText Markup Language. Both have been submerged by other layers to some extent, and the word Hypertext has been totally lost in the shuffle. We should use Hypertext to describe the 'stuff' that the Web is made of, but we don't. If you said "Well, guess I'll read some hypertext for a while..." you wouldn't be understood.
  ¶ 9:29 AM

  The Poodle and the Mind
Dryden's epic poem The Hind and the Panther is a fable about religious factions in 1687. Some of the intramural Catholic factions have disappeared, but his observations on other major religions, and especially on human argumentation, are classic.

From the preface:

The nation is in too high a ferment for me to expect either fair war, or even so much as fair quarter, from a reader of the opposite party. All men are engaged either on this side or that; and though conscience is the common word, which is given by both, yet if a writer fall among enemies, and cannot give the marks of their conscience, he is knocked down before the reasons of his own are heard.

Compare with Polistra's observation a few weeks ago:

'Who' displaces both 'How' and 'What' on the verbal level. You can see this in any web forum. In Who-land, observation is illegal. You're not allowed to examine nature or events and draw a rational inductive conclusion. You're only allowed to quote a credentialed authority who belongs to Team A or Team B. If your quote is precisely accurate, the authority's own team will cheer and the opposing team will boo. If your quote is inaccurate or (horror of horrors!!!!) you cite nothing more than plain reality, you're out of the arena. Banned for life.

323 years. No change.

Dryden's single sentence on Mohammedans is promising in an odd way, showing that the face of Allah was not always severe and harsh:

Though our lean faith these rigid laws has given,
The full-fed Mussulman goes fat to heaven;
For his Arabian prophet with delights
Of sense allured his eastern proselytes.

Perhaps this fat Ottoman/Persian style can return to dominance if the Bedouin nastiness (which has only been in charge since 1948) fails often enough...?

Finally, 1687 had its Al Gore types:

But ah! some pity even to brutes is due:
Their native walks methinks they might enjoy,
Curb'd of their native malice to destroy.
Of all the tyrannies on human kind,
The worst is that which persecutes the mind.

  ¶ 5:07 AM

  Still not a lick of sense.
Now we know why the 12 incompetent Russian spies were captured a few weeks ago; they were captured to serve as the 'currency' in a classic swap. Clearly the swap was pre-arranged. It's too fast and neat to be accidental.

If we were 'buying' some actual Americans who had been imprisoned in Russia, the swap would make sense. Or if we were buying and repossessing a Russian who was firmly on our side, trying to save him from imminent torture, or trying to get some information that he had acquired in prison, it would make sense.

But that's not what we're getting. The 4 spies we're 'buying' are Russians who have been in prison for spying on behalf of Britain or America. They will be released into Russia, and show no signs of wanting to leave Russia. So their status hasn't really changed; Russia can still do what it wants with them, and we're not in any better position to get information from them.

The net result: 16 Russian spies are now in Russia and out of prison. Russia could have reached this point without involving us at all: just free the 4 from prison and call back the 12 from America.

Not a goddamn lick of sense.
  ¶ 11:29 AM

  Amazing Brits 2
PM Cameron is turning things around yet again, showing that actual change is possible in a parliamentary system.

For many decades the problem with Britain's national health system was too much bureaucratic control, not enough room for doctors and patients to decide.

This is a problem of competence, not an automatic result of government control as conservative commentators would have you believe. (In other words, the important variable is How, not Who.) Some purely governmental health systems work very well, and America's pre-Obama system works very badly with a mix of insurance and government bureaucrats.

How do you fix it? Obama's "reform" makes it worse, putting even more control and money into the hands of insurance and government bureaucrats.

Cameron's brand-new plan finally makes it better!

About £80billion will be distributed to family GPs in a move that will see strategic health authorities and primary care trusts scrapped.

The plan, contained in a white paper to be published next week, is designed to place key decisions about how patients are cared for in the hands of doctors who know them. Tens of thousands of administrative jobs in the health service will be lost as a result.

Responsibility will be handed to GPs working in local groups, who will commission services or provide them by working in rotas through co-ops.

  ¶ 8:03 AM

  Right for wrong reasons
A black-robed saboteur in Boston has ruled the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act "unconstitutional". The buzz hasn't started just yet, but it's easy to predict that conservatives will spend the next few days blasting this decision.

They'll be wrong. Actually, despite his vicious Communist intentions, this black-robed saboteur has accidentally done the right thing.

DOMA was noble in its intent, but wouldn't have made any difference if a saboteur had decided to require "gay" "marriage" across the country.

By overruling DOMA, this particular saboteur has created a precedent that no single federal standard can be imposed on the states. Because saboteurs only obey other saboteurs, this new precedent favoring federalism will be more effective than the mere legislation requiring federalism.
  ¶ 3:03 PM

  Waaaah! I want more Schultz!
Semi-populist radio talker Jerry Doyle had a genuine near-death experience last month, and was mysteriously replaced by Dwight Schultz, a veteran TV and Broadway actor who hadn't done radio before.

Three weeks of Schultz, and I'm well and truly habituated!

He's the sole successor to Barry Farber, and that's saying a hell of a lot.

Broadly and deeply informed, understands math and science at a high level ... unique among all present radio and TV commentators in that respect. And because he's well-informed and rigorously logical, he isn't afraid to call a Commie a Commie.

The rigor is softened by a distinctly non-Randian respect for ordinary human beings who are trying to do the right thing. This is also unique among modern commentators, who uniformly view the Masses (ie the unfortunate yokels who can't afford a fleet of Gulfstreams and a private security army) as Losers Losers Losers Nyah Nyah Nyah.

Doyle is back this week, and I'm happy he's alive and recovering ... but his level of analysis, information and entertainment doesn't match the Schultz standard. (How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, etc.)

Now I hope Schultz can find some way to stay on the air, whether regular radio or some kind of subscription webcast!

= = = = =

Sidenote: I stupidly assumed Barry Farber had retired from broadcasting because his show was no longer on the air here. Nope, he's still going strong, available by free webcast.



Damn, what a relief. Finally some worthwhile listening!


  ¶ 2:12 PM

  Loyal to Middle Kingdom
I see Proconsul Crist, Chinese Agent in charge of subcolony of Frorida, has done special favor for Motherland! Proconsul Crist is attempting to pass permanent ban on offshore drirring by "American" companies near Subcolony Frorida. Excellent gift to Motherland!!!! Great Leap Forward toward Glorious Motherland owning all petroreum on Pranet!!!! Noble Spirit of Chairman Mao highly respect Proconsul Crist!!!!!
  ¶ 2:03 PM

  Spinning requires water power
It was true in 1750 and it's still true now. In an odd and indirect way, the American textile industry may be starting over, again relying on water power:

MOSES LAKE, Wash. -- Representatives from the automaker company BMW broke ground on a new manufacturing plant in Moses Lake Wednesday.

The plant is expected to bring hundreds of jobs instantly to the region.

"We needed a constant power supply for our plant here and that is the reason why we looked at hydropower," says Automotive Carbon Fibers Project Manager Andreas Wullner.

Thus bringing them to Moses Lake. Year-round access to hydropower can provide clean energy for the $100 million plant.

No completed BMWs will be rolling off the assembly line there. Instead, the plant will import raw materials from Mitsubishi Rayon in Otake, Japan, and spin them into fibers that will turned into fabric in Germany for components of BMW's Megacity vehicle.

Clean energy? Can't be! Hydro is officially defined as "dirty" and "non-renewable" by the genocidal tyrants of the state-sponsored terrorist organization EPA.

While EPA continues its scorched-earth blitzkrieg, shredding our industrial base in a way that the Japs and Krauts of 1940 could only dream about, we have modern Krauts helping to rebuild this unfortunate land.

= = = = =

Sidenote: Seems like an awful lot of shipping involved. Carbon fibers are ultimately derived from coal or oil, which aren't native to Japan, so Mitsubishi must be getting coal from China. Ideally the process could be cheaper, and use less energy, if a local company forms up the unspun fibers from Montana coal or oil. Would be a good opportunity for an American business, if the EPA doesn't forbid it.
  ¶ 4:52 AM

  Plane_arium
In one South Park episode the owner of a planetarium has a single-word speech impediment. He can't pronounce the t in planetarium, but he can pronounce other t sounds.

A funny premise, but it's not entirely fictional.

(1) There's a public service announcement discouraging software copying, in which the announcer says "softwurr" every time. The rest of his speech is normal.

(2) A radio spot for some kind of gasoline additive in which the announcer says "gazoline" every time, but pronounces s normally in other words.

I'm wondering if these are deliberate errors, subliminal ways to pin your attention to the important word...?
  ¶ 2:15 PM

  NASA's outreach to Mohammedans
NASA's new director, following the Divine Will of Imam Hussein Obama, decides that his primary mission is to advance the self-esteem of the Mohammedan world, not to advance the scientific knowledge of the West. Probably makes no difference, since NASA has already surrendered science to Gaia. Might as well surrender to Allah as well.

Back in '06, Polistra designed the CORRECT space-program outreach to Mohammedans.
  ¶ 12:02 PM

  Amazing Brits!
When the LibDem/Con coalition gov't was elected recently in Britain, they looked like more of the same, looked like Xerox copies of our McCain/Obama types. Corporate Commies, continuing the vital task of brutally smashing national culture while gifting trillions to nationless corporations and to foreign enemies.

Nope. The Cameron administration is doing some amazing things, taking the off-ramp from the road to Hell.

Teachers will be encouraged to restrain unruly pupils as part of a drive to improve discipline in schools.

Staff will also be able to search children for a wide range of items and punish those misbehaving with immediate detentions ...

Teachers who are the subject of complaints from pupils will not be identified and will be able to continue working until criminal charges are brought.

[Ed minister] Gibb told The Daily Telegraph that the measures were necessary to “shift the balance of power back to teachers”.

He said “poorly-behaved children” were detecting “weakness” in teachers and disrupting classrooms to the detriment of other pupils’ education.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Finally a correct understanding of the situation!!!!!

Every teacher knows this, but until now the educrats have been solely obeying the Soviet culture-destroyers.

PM Cameron is also making FORTY PERCENT cuts in overall government spending, and imposing new rules on banks.

He hasn't yet turned the wheel on Britain's surrender to Mohammedans, nor has he abandoned the "Global Warming" criminal conspiracy, but with so many other good things happening so quickly, I have some hope for these changes. Clearly the British parliamentary arrangement is capable of adapting quickly and correctly to emergency situations.

Needless to say, none of this will ever happen in the unfortunate shit-pile formerly known as America. Our fucked-up political system is permanently frozen, incapable of adapting. We're dead.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 6:34 PM

  What's the opposite of Nullification?
Several states are filing suits against the Infinite Profit For Insurance Companies Act (aka Obamacare). These actions fit the proper meaning of Nullification: these states are trying to free themselves from an oppressive Federal law.

But what do you call the Arizona immigration law? (Along with similar laws in Okla and other states?) These states are trying to free themselves from an oppressive Federal refusal to enforce the law. These actions are the opposite of Nullification, but we don't have a word for it. Maybe "Relegalization"? Clumsy.

Whether the Federal method is excessive enforcement or non-enforcement, the Federal goal is always the same: Exterminate America. This is, of course, the single and universal goal of all Federal officials in the last decade, and most officials in the last 3 decades.

= = = = =

Update: Jed Babbin has provided the perfect name for the Arizona-style action:

SELF-DEFENSE.


  ¶ 1:00 PM

  Better late than never, maybe.
Andy Grove, founder of Intel, has finally caught on to a bit of reality.

Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

No duh, as they say.

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?

Should we wait and not act on the basis of early indicators? I think that would be a tragic mistake because the only chance we have to reverse the deterioration is if we act early and decisively.

EARLY INDICATORS? EARLY INDICATORS? THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING FOR THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AND YOU'RE JUST NOW PICKING UP ON EARLY FUCKING INDICATORS??????????

Idiot.

On the other hand, given that our business and governmental elites are completely stupefied by royalism, completely unable to process reality until it's spoken by a high-caste aristocrat, maybe this will finally reach their evacuated crania.

No it won't. They're not stupid, they're murderous. They know exactly what they're doing. Killing a country in broad daylight, with the spoils going to China, George Soros and Goldman Sachs.
  ¶ 6:00 PM

  Abusing Keynes and Laffer
While England is zooming toward cultural oblivion, it does seem to be recovering economic sanity. Its new gov't is making serious cuts in spending, significant raises in tax, and reforms in welfare.

Meanwhile, Ireland has been running Austerity for a while and shows that it works.

= = = = =

Will the gov't in America ever regain its senses? I doubt it.

Part of the problem is theoretical, and relates to our loss of intuitive How-knowledge in recent decades. Each party has its pet economic theory, and each party completely misreads the originally intuitive theory to serve its own purposes. The misreadings are interestingly similar: in both cases replacing a natural and organic curve by an arbitrary and false straight line.

= = = = =

Brand-R abuses the Laffer curve to justify its subtle, nuanced and complex agenda, namely (1) ZERO TAX FOR GOLDMAN SACHS!!!!! (2) ZERO TAX FOR GOLDMAN SACHS!!!!! (3) ZERO TAX FOR GOLDMAN SACHS!!!!! (4) ZERO TAX FOR GOLDMAN SACHS!!!!!

Trouble is, Laffer's original intuitive theory is a CURVE, to be determined empirically by feedback, while brand-R treats it as a straight line that needs no monitoring. Laffer said that you can find an optimal level of taxation which allows best economic growth without losing the benefits of government. You can find this point by adjustment and feedback. Lower taxes until you see the economy no longer growing. If you go too far, raise taxes again until you see the economy no longer growing. Loop and refine until you hit the optimum for current conditions.

To do it right, you've got to keep up a cycle. The Lafferian growth spurt comes from the delta, from the cut itself, not from a steady low rate. In order to make room for growth spurts when needed, you must allow the tax rate to creep upward in good times.


Real Laffer


Repooflicans say you should simply keep dropping taxes forever, whether you're seeing any growth or not.


Repooflican misreading of Laffer


A proper reading of the curve would tell us we've dropped taxes WAY past the true optimum. Since 1999 the only growth in our economy has been in the fraudulent areas of real estate and Wall Street, made possible by underregulation. In other words, we're off to the left of the optimum point, and still going farther left.

= = = = =

Brand-D abuses the ideas of Keynes in a similar way to justify endless spending on murderous tyrannical shit like Diversity and Global Warming. Keynes originally proposed a common-sense cyclical process: use government as a reservoir to smooth out the floods and droughts of a raw economy. When you're rich, fill up the government reservoir. When you're poor, let some of it out.


Real Keynes

Just as Repooflicans have forgotten the let-taxes-creep-back part of Laffer, Democrats have deliberately forgotten the fill-it-up part of Keynes. Their version of Keynes has no ups and downs; it's just a constant outflow, a constant flooding of the land with money from the government reservoir. Of course you can't do this in Nature: when the lake is empty, you can't take any more water from it. And we've long since passed the dry-lake point in so-called "Keynesian stimulus". We've been trucking in water from China and pretending it comes from the lake.


Democrat misreading of Keynes

How does this relate to Austerity? Easy.

Several decades of co-operative misreading have taken us to a place where the underlying assumptions of both Keynes and Laffer are invalid. No growth is available because the production is in China, and no stimulus is possible because the money comes from China. We're no longer a self-sustaining "closed-circuit" economy. Instead, we are merely a raw-material colony of China.

A full solution will require a declaration of independence from China, a restoration of the closed-circuit economy that prevailed from 1940 to 1980. But since we're not going to do that, we must at least stop the fake theories, stop the mindless and endless tax cuts and spending rises. We have to restore some kind of equilibrium first, so we can be ready for whatever happens next.
  ¶ 1:46 PM

  Mostly right
RNC chairman Steele's comment is almost entirely accurate. Afghanistan was not a necessary war in the first place. It was a disingenuous displacement of military force that should have been used against Arabia. And we have exactly zero chance of 'winning' anything in Afghanistan. We can't even define what 'winning' might mean, let alone find a way to 'win' whatever it might be.

Steele's only inaccuracy is blaming Obama for choosing the war, which is weirdly stupid. Only a completely mindless R-bot, an Alzheimer patient whose sole mental input is daily RNC talking point memos, could show such wild ignorance.

But even there, his implication is valid in a backhanded way. You can properly blame Obama for seamlessly continuing such a self-destructive war; you can blame him for not choosing to end it.

Will Steele have to go? Of course not. Karl Rove won't let it happen. Rove grew up as a nerd, always wanting to be among the Cool Kids. In modern America, black jocks are the Coolest Kids of all, undisputed owners of all the chicks. Now that Rove has a black jock on his team, he's not about to let him go! Firing Steele would lose the huge number of black voters (approx. 0) who have flocked to the Republican side because of Steele. Worst of all from Rove's viewpoint, firing Steele might gain a tiny handful (approx. 10,000,000) of those white voters who are waiting to see just one itsy-bitsy sign of competence and intelligence from the Republicans. We can't have that, can we? We don't want any of those filthy uncool white votes; we only want the cool black votes even though we still haven't received any.
  ¶ 1:05 PM

  Stupid and dangerous
This bit of 'research' is hopelessly stupid and dangerous, but not for the stated reasons.

People in developing countries have lower IQs because their bodies divert energy from brainpower to fighting disease, researchers claimed today.

In hot nations blighted by deadly infections, the priority is survival and populations have evolved to develop stronger immune systems rather than intelligence, according to the controversial theory.

Some critics warned the study could become an excuse for racism if it was used to suggest that people in the Third World are not as intelligent as those in cooler, richer climes.

It's stupid because you can knock out the purported 'cause' instantly.

Super-basic logic: if you want to say that disease causes low intelligence, you must show that a difference in disease consistently correlates with a difference in intelligence, and the correlation must have lasted long enough to influence selection and evolution.

In this case the difference in disease is extremely recent, no more than three generations. Back in 1880 or so, Europe and America were just as disease-ridden as Africa. My parents were in the first American generation with widespread indoor plumbing and good medical care, the first generation that didn't lose half its babies to typhoid and cholera. Despite that, the IQ in Europe and America has always been higher than the IQ in Africa. So the major premise is blatantly and transparently false.

The consequence of this, if we're right, is that the IQ of a nation will be largely unaffected until you can lift the burden of disease.

Huh? So you actually think that America and Europe had the same IQ as Africa until 1920? REALLY?

The research could be abused to rationalise racism, just as the Nazis perverted scientific study in the 1930s, some critics said.

No, idiots, this research is dangerous for the opposite reason. It's dangerous because its blatantly transparent stupidity makes it easier for the Commies to cast all innate-difference research as stupid, which they do anyway.

We will make no progress at all in education and employment until we can calmly and objectively acknowledge, as parts of ordinary reality, the following two factual statements:

(1) IQ differs innately, and part of the difference runs along racial lines.

(2) The 'American dream' was achievable from 1940 through 1980 because we had good jobs for people of lower IQ, NOT because we had a uniformly high IQ.

The 'American dream' has been out of reach since 1980 because our Communist masters have sent those good jobs to China, NOT because our IQ distribution has changed. Current attempts to close the gap through education are utterly futile and extravagantly wasteful. We're trying to pull both Caucasians and Africans up to an Oriental IQ level, which AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.

This idiotic research throws a spanner into the recognition of innate differences, which was just beginning to dawn on some of our dim-witted elites.
  ¶ 3:44 PM

  Didn't check the literature
Science news this week:

Only one in 6,000 people reaches the century mark and just one in 7 million lives to be a supercentenarian — someone who is 110 or older. But a new study, published online July 1 in Science, suggests that more people may have the right genetic stuff for extreme longevity.

In the new study, researchers looked at genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, in 1,055 centenarians and 1,267 younger people, all of European descent. The scientists found 150 genetic SNP variants linked to extreme longevity.

Initially, the team identified only 33 SNPs found more often in people aged 90 to 114 years but not in a control group made up of people who will presumably live an average lifespan. But, says Thomas Perls, ... the researchers felt that they were still missing part of the story. So biostatistician Paola Sebastiani devised a different statistical method to identify additional SNPs that would improve the team’s ability to predict longevity. The team tested their predictions on a separate group of centenarians and controls. With the 150 SNPs, the researchers could correctly predict who was a centenarian 77 percent of the time.

First rule of scientific research: Check the literature, see if someone has done the work before.

With a little Googling, I was able to find this earlier study:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years....

[David, King: Psalm 90:10, in Holy Torah. Edited Moses, Abraham, et al. Published Jehovah & Son, Palestine, 5000 BC. ISBN 0000000001.]


= = = = =

More seriously, I strongly doubt the initial statement that only 1/6000 hit the century mark. Among my own close ancestors (parents, g-parents, g-g-parents, total 14 people): one reached 100 and three made it past 90. I'd bet the typical proportion of centenarians in modern countries is more like 1/50 than 1/6000.
  ¶ 8:16 AM

  Non-self-explanatory non-explanation
News item:

Former Vice President Al Gore welcomes a Portland police decision to reopen an investigation into a massage therapist's allegations that he groped her at a hotel four years ago, his spokeswoman said.

Kalee Kreider said that Gore "unequivocally and emphatically" denied making unwanted sexual advances. She added that "further investigation into this matter will only benefit Mr. Gore."

Portland police did not say why it was reopening the investigation in its brief statement Wednesday.

"It's now an open investigation and I can't comment," police spokeswoman Mary Wheat said.

Perfect pair of sentences. "Did not say why it was reopening the investigation", followed immediately by saying why: "It's now an open investigation and I can't comment."

In other words, Portland is setting up an "investigation" so it can plausibly remain silent about the misdeeds of its Pope, Lord, Prophet, Saint, God Above All Gods, Name Above All Names, the Crazed Sex Poodle.

This will be a difficult "investigation". Normally a government "investigation" has two jobs: to cover up the crime and to discredit the accuser. Normally the accuser is easy to destroy because he's a conservative or a Christian. In this case the accuser will be much harder to damage because she belongs to the same tribe as the Portland authorities, namely the Birkenstock Tribe.


Safe bet: There are many more Birkenstocks yet to drop. In the last few months before this exposé, it's been obvious that Sex Poodle was in some kind of big trouble, far bigger than one old assault charge breaking out of its cover-up shell. Sex Poodle had been canceling speeches, Mrs. Sex Poodle wanted a divorce, Sex Poodle's daughter divorced her husband.

Not quite safe bet, but I'd still bet it: When all is said and done, we'll realize that the conventional picture of Slick Willie as the cunthound and Algore as the Puritan was backwards. Sex Poodle sounds like a man totally accustomed to 100% instant obedience by every female he encountered in his life.
  ¶ 1:49 PM