Israel did not win

February 2nd, 2009

After the recent war in the Gaza strip, Hamas declared victory, and Israel declared victory.

What do they teach small boys in school today?  When I was in school, the first thing I learned is that the fight  is not over till the winner can make loser cry “uncle”.

Hamas has not been destroyed, nor coerced.  They continue to rocket Israel.  Since they are religious fanatics, nothing short of Roman methods can force them to cry “uncle”.  People who rocket one, have to be killed or driven out of rocket range.

Their recent war was not war, but theater.  In war you keep going till one side loses and one side wins.

Plain speaking on warmist “science”

January 29th, 2009

Hansen’s former supervisor tells us plainly what Climate Audit has been telling us politely

The models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

The Origin of Species

January 24th, 2009

blogging the origin” criticizes Darwin for emphasizing selection, rather than separation, as the primary cause of speciation. But we now know that Darwin was, as usual, right, and the latest fashions were, as usual, wrong again.

Until recently the evidence for *any* speciation was thin, and in the absence of evidence, people liked to imagine speciation by physical separation, in large part due the rhetoric of Gould, who argued that absence of evidence was evidence for presence of the events he wished were happening.

The research on three spined sticklebacks, shows that for three spined sticklebacks, sympatric speciation is extremely common, and allopatric speciation is insignificant in the sense that: if two physically separated groups of three spined sticklebacks adapt to similar environments, they become similar, and can and will interbreed if given the opportunity, but if they adapt to different environments, then, whether separated or not, they become different, and disinclined to interbreed if given the opportunity.

Science. 2000 Jan 14;287(5451):306-8

“Populations of sticklebacks that evolved under different ecological conditions show strong reproductive isolation, whereas populations that evolved independently under similar ecological conditions lack isolation.”

Which implies that:  separation and drift does not matter in speciation, does not cause speciation; Differential adaption matters, does cause speciation, as Darwin argued.

Our most complete record on speciation events is that for foraminifera, because we have a humungous number of fossils neatly stacked in layers at the sea bottom.
For foraminifera, all observed speciation events that have been observed in sufficient detail are sympatric.

Gould wanted to discredit sympatric speciation, and argued for the primacy of allopatric speciation, because if adaption, rather than separation, is primary, then this has disturbing implications for our own species. From the supposed primacy of separation over adaption, Gould argued in his essay “human equality is a contingent fact of history” that the races of man must be equal in mean and distribution of abilities, thus the primacy of adaptive speciation over allopatric speciation that we do in fact observe today is as disturbingly politically incorrect as Darwin’s comments on the races of man.

If it is possible for sticklebacks that share a single lake to divide into two species, despite substantial interbreeding, then it is probable that humans whose ancestors lived for the last fifty thousand years or so in an environment where lack of future orientation would result in freezing in bad weather and starving in winter, have considerably greater future orientation than humans whos ancestors lived in an environment where failure to prepare for the future was considerably less likely to be lethal.

British police retreat before Muslims

January 17th, 2009

British police retreat before a hail of not very dangerous missiles:

This retreat follows a long series of recent similar humiliations – the British submission in Basra, in Helmand province, and in the Persian Gulf. Weakness and fear is provocative. Someone is going to take Britain from the British.

All quiet in France

January 8th, 2009

Small Dead Animals draws my attention to the fact that things are not all quiet in France

On New Years day, more than 1000 cars were torched – but the French seem unable to mention the fact that Muslims were burning the cars of infidels.  Islamic jihadism has tripled over the last year, but French government imposition of order has remained unchanged – which trend, if continued for much longer, will end with Islamic rule and sharia rule imposed on French infidels.

affirmative action, bad loans, bailout, crisis

December 28th, 2008

The New York Times explains:

creditors came to believe that their loans to unsound financial institutions would be made good by the Fed — as long as the collapse of those institutions would threaten the global credit system. Bolstered by this sense of security, bad loans mushroomed.

Of course any crisis is multicausal. I have been blaming affirmative action loans. But instead of pushing back against government pressure to make bad loans to protected minorities, lenders eagerly embraced bad loans – because of an entirely correct expectation that they would be bailed out

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No warming trend in raw surface temperature data

December 15th, 2008

You have all seen those GISS graphs of global warming.  Anthony Watt checked the raw data on which they are based.
raw data vs cooked.
The cooked data shows warming, the raw data shows cooling. Of course this does not mean the data is necessarily fraudulent – but the adjustments are largely guesswork, so when they compile these graphs, they are merely guessing that the earth has warmed.

The cause of the crisis

December 10th, 2008

Capitalism and free markets are prone to bubbles, and a great deal more prone to bubbles when speculators can expect that the government will print as much money as needed to keep the bubble going, but bubbles do not in themselves lead to massive financial defaults, because normally lenders only lend to people who are in a position to repay, even if the bubble pops.

If one reads what purport to be analyzes of the crisis, they usually use windy evasive language such as “financial conditions deteriorated” – which tells us nothing about what was happening except that it is something that cannot be spoken, for fear of getting in trouble.

“Financial conditions deteriorated” in that people were not making payments on their loans, but if one was to say such a thing, this would immediately imply the question:  Which people are not making payments on their loans? And that is a question that no one dares ask, for fear of the answer.

The answer, of course, as everyone knows, but no one dares say, is that members of protected minorities, the beneficiaries of government mandated affirmative action lending, are not making payments on their loans.

Foreclosures in Palo Alto west of the freeway (white and some chinese, chinese being an unprotected minority):
One foreclosure at the time I post.

Foreclosures in Palo Alto east of the freeway (black and hispanic, all protected minority):
ninety eight foreclosures at the time I post.

Foreclosures in Gilroy (wholly hispanic, all protected minority)
two hundred and sixty three foreclosures at the time I post.

If no money down loans had been available to white people with no income, no job or assets, there would have been a lot more defaults in Palo Alto west of the freeway.

The distribution of foreclosures by suburb implies that ninety nine percent of the defaulters are blacks and Hispanics, the beneficiaries of affirmative action lending.

All house purchase loans are governed by affirmative action, for since 1999 CRA requires that race must be reported on all house purchase loans, and regulators are required to take the racial distribution all loans into account when making all regulatory decisions – which implies that if a banker does not make enough loans to members of protected minorities he will be punished, but to preserve deniability, nominally punished for something completely unrelated to race.

The financial crisis is wholly caused by affirmative action lending enforced by HUD and CRA.

Therefore, if the same standards had been applied to people in Palo Alto West of the freeway, as in Palo Alto east of the freeway, if CRA and HUD had not imposed racist lending policies in favor of protected minorities, there would be no financial crisis, therefore no need for financial bailouts.

The defaulters are not normal middle class people like you and me. Most of the people that I saw buying houses in Sunnyvale in 2006 were no hablos English, and I could tell in two heartbeats at twenty paces that there was no way in hell they were going to make the payments – I conjectured that they were functioning as straw men for a purchaser more literate than themselves, and perhaps of a race less eligible for a loan with no money down, no credit record, and no evidence of income or assets.  In Malaysia they call these “Ali Baba loans” when a member of the favored religion (Islam) fronts for a member of a disfavored religion.

The crisis

December 3rd, 2008

Fred Thompson argues the solution is thrift – which exactly what the government is trying to prevent.

Obviously he is right – and yet wrong, for one person’s savings have to be another person’s obligations.

What we need is a financial system that mobilizes savings for sound investments – such as mortgages on reasonably priced houses secured by twenty percent down payments, mortgages on farmlands, mortgages on mines and oilfield with secure property rights, mortgages on commerical facilities such as gravel pits that generate secure and reliable income, mortgages on semi government enterprises such as toll roads, harbors, and airports that generate secure and reliable income, mortgages that are subject to proper scrutiny to ensure that the underlying enterprise supports the mortgage payments and valuation.

Without such a financial system, everyone attempting to save will merely throw more and more people out of jobs, and if on the other hand the government enables everyone to spend irresponsibly, it will set us up for bigger catastrophe down the road

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Why do all large organizations skew left authoritarian?

November 24th, 2008

Constant drew my attention to the fact that Fox news, originally created to provide an alternative to the Mainstream Media orthodox ideology, is joining it, which led me to reflect on the tendency of big corporations to go left authoritarian and support socialism, gun control, political censorship, government health, and so on and so forth – as for example, the failure of the owners of shipping lines to allow deadly arms on their ships to meet the problem of piracy.

The Smallest Minority drew my attention to this:

socialism in action

There are some lies that lie so deep in the hopes of man that they can never be killed, no matter how many are executed to make the lie true.

Martin Malia, in “The Soviet Tragedy”, page 50, summarizes the core ideals of left versus right:

And so, by 1914, a dual process of amalgamation had occurred: on the Right were aligned capitalism, unbridled individualism, nationalism, militarism, and social hierarchy;  and on the left were arrayed socialism, economic rationality, internationalism, peace, and equality.  The stage was thus set for the great Auseinandersetzung, the world historical clash, between capitalism and socialism that would dominate our short twentieth century.

Now reflect that all large organizations are, by definition, internally socialist. Capitalism is what you get when independent actors pursue their individual interest – instead of someone’s vision of the greater good being imposed on all. But in a large organization, everyone is supposed to pursue the greater good of the organization, team players and all that. Team players are automatically inclined toward the left side, the left as defined by Martin Malia, the left that leads to terror, slavery, and mass murder. Organization man is basically a leftie.

And that brings me back to the interesting fact that merchant ships are not defending themselves on the high seas against pirates. The kind of people who run shipping companies simply do not feel in their guts that it is right for ordinary seamen to kill pirates.

My intuition would be that someone who owned just one ship would have no hesitation in stacking it with whatever weapons it takes to keep the ship safe, but that someone who owns a shipping line would be horrified by the idea

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