Hypocrites

Conservatives love to beat their chest about "fiscal conservatism" and taunt the Democrats with epithets of "tax & spend liberals".

Look at this and tell me that Republicans are not lying SOBs...

Figure from DeLong's website

What you can see is that the two prevous Republican administrations ran up the debt. The Democratic one worked hard to lower it.

But in January who were those in the US Congress yelling loudest about "pork" and "wasted spending"? Why, it was the Republicans, those paragons of virtue, those tight-fisted fiscal conservatives who would never think to waste a penny! What a joke!

I find that hypocrites are the ones who yell loudest and throw their weight around the most. Sadly, most people are intimidated by the pomposity and bludgeoning that these hypocrites deliver. Pathetic!

Bush 43 delivered not only more debt... he engaged the US in reckless wars killing over 4,000 citizens, he ran the economy into the ground, he larded the supposedly "too burdonsome entitlement programs" with his hole-in-the-middle Pharmacare, and he played Nero busy on his fiddle while New Orleans sank beneathe the waters and poor victims clung to rooftops or huddled in the Superdome & Civic Center pleading for help.

Australian Haboob

Wonderful video of a car in Australian entering a dust storm, a haboob:



Notice how these people make the rookie mistake of failing to pull over well off the highway to ensure that some idiot driving blind in the dust storm doesn't clobber them. People get "mesmerized" by their driving and fail to take simple preventive action.

Straight Talk from Stiglitz

Here is Joseph Stiglitz giving a surprisingly honest, straight-forward statement about US banks and the need to stop wasting US taxpayer dollars propping them up. The real killer point is that the taxpayer's $750 billion that has been poured down a rathole could of in fact created a new bank with $7.5 TRILLION lending capacity that could have lifted the whole country...

Crony Capitalism, Crony Publishing Industry

Hamlet said "There is something rotten in Denmark."

I say, "There is something very rotten in New York."

Here's a bit from Newsweek about a book that I'm anxiously awaiting. I've already got my library to order a copy, but notice that the publisher has backed out of the deal with some very rotten smelling excuses...

To most publishers, it would've been a touch of golden luck: a manuscript about the worst economic crisis in decades, written by a financial insider and finished months before rivals had even a rough draft ready. Instead, Wall Street investor Barry Ritholtz's "Bailout Nation: How Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy" appears to have become a parable for the same corporate shenanigans that it catalogs. In early 2008, McGraw-Hill paid a five-figure advance to Ritholtz, a frequent CNBC guest and author of "The Big Picture," a popular finance blog. When Congress passed its $700 billion bailout bill, McGraw-Hill's contract with Ritholtz looked prescient. The imprint started taking pre-orders and set a March release date. Then, in early February, it dropped the book.

Ritholz claims that he and McGraw-Hill butted heads over scathing passages about bond-rating agencies, which accepted large fees from investment banks while giving sterling ratings to subprime mortgages, helping the banks sell them at premium prices. In his original draft, Ritholtz dubbed this "payola" and called the rating agencies "pimps." His wrath extended to Standard & Poor's, a rating agency owned by the same company as McGraw-Hill. According to the author, when his editors took issue with his tone, he agreed to water it down but insisted on criticizing the agencies. Soon after, the book was dropped.

That's when the blogosphere exploded with claims of undue influence on the part of S&P. But Mary Skafidas, a McGraw-Hill spokesperson, says the company dropped the book because it couldn't corroborate "a number of assertions covering a wide range of public figures and public entities." That explanation "raises some red flags," says Ron Hogan, senior editor at Galleycat, a blog that covers the publishing industry, because most publishers "don't have super-rigorous fact-checking departments." Ritholtz says that he turned over nearly 90 pages of additional sources, and that the notion that his facts couldn't be verified is "ridiculous."

The idea of corporate entanglements causing the book's demise is rich with irony—after all, S&P is already accused of being too cozy with the banks whose bonds it rates. But Ritholtz isn't too upset: he says rivals are offering better advances than the one he's returning to McGraw-Hill.

Visions of the Future

Here is a nice interview of Marc Andreessen (co-author of Mosaic, and founder of Netscape, co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter).

Charlie Rose interviews him:

Police Gone Amok

Earlier today I did a rant about Robert Dziekanksi police murder.

It isn't the only one. Another police murder that bothers me tremendously is the killing of Ian Bush. Sadly, the RCMP "investigatge" themselves and oddly always come to the conclusion that the murder was "justifiable". It is a sham and a travesty that any police force is allowed to "investigate" itself. The police close ranks and "protect their own". The result is a seriously deficient police force that harbours bullies and murderers:

Early Sunday morning, a sleepy Andrea Patrick opened her door to an officer from the local RCMP. After being told that her 22 year-old brother, Ian Bush, was dead, the first question was, "How is he dead? Was it a motor vehicle accident?" The officer's reply was, "All we can say is he's dead."

...

A friend of Andrea's, who had taken criminology courses, insisted the family get themselves a lawyer. She recommended Howard Rubin, of Vancouver. Four months after the incident happened, Rubin was able to inform the family that Ian had died from a single, close range shot to the back of his head.

Here's how CTV, one of the major TV networks covered the story:

The lawyer for the family of a man fatally shot by police said Thursday it appears RCMP were targeting Ian Bush when he was arrested with an open beer.

Howard Rubin said Bush was among a crowd of people outside the hockey arena in this northwestern B.C. community yet he was the only one to get a ticket.

"There's no other tickets,'' Rubin said outside a coroner's inquest into Bush's death.

"There's beer that's seized. They just go for Ian. He's a person that's at the back of the crowd when that happens. They acknowledge that he was just holding someone's beer at one point.''

Const. Paul Koester said he was fighting for his life when he shot Bush, 22, in a struggle at the RCMP detachment Oct. 29, 2005.

The New Westminster, B.C., police investigated the shooting and concluded Koester shouldn't be charged.

The public outcry that followed prompted B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal to make some details of the shooting public.

Paul Davies' "The Goldilocks Enigma"

This is an excellent review of modern physics with an emphasis on "the big questions": why are we here and what does it all mean.

Davies is honest and exhaustive in his examination of what modern physics can say about the nature of the universe, the place of life and mind, and the "meaning" of it all.

He takes a minority position. Most physicists take what he calls the "absurd universe" view, i.e. "the universe is as it is, mysteriously, and it just happens to permit life. It could have been otherwise, but what we see is what we get. Had it been different, we would not be here to argue about it. The universe may or may not have a deep underlying unity, but there is no design, purpose, or point to it all -- at least none that would make sense to us."

He takes a different viewpoint, something between what he calls "the life principle" and "the self-explaining universe". While I don't agree with either of these, he puts a good effort into explaining them. They are a bit mystical for my taste.

I guess I'm in the camp he calls "none of the above". My viewpoint is that it is premature to try to "explain everything". It reminds me of the debates over the fate of the universe in the late 19th century when entropy laws were known but there was a huge enigma of how evolution which required and had evidence for a very long history of evolution on earth (hundreds of millions of years) could be compatible with a sun which based on the physics of heat allowed only a short lifespan (millions of years). Those debates were premature because nobody anticipated the discovery of the immense energy source of radioactivity.

Similarly, it is silly to discuss a "theory of everything" when over 90% of what is observed in space is fundamentally unknown, i.e. it is some combination of dark energy and dark matter, both of which are not understood.

This book is a very good review of "modern physics for the layman". It is an even better overview of "what does it all mean" and "what are the arguments at the cutting edge of physics/cosmology".

Here's a snippet that I think pretty well sums up the conclusions of the book:

"So, how come existence? At the end of the day, all the approaches I have discussed are likely to prove unsatisfactory. In fact, in reviewing them they all seem to me to be either ridiculous or hopelessly inadequate: a unique universe that just happens to permit life by a fluke; a stupdendous number of alternative parallel universes that exist for no reason; a preexisting God who is somehow self explanatory; or a self-creating, self-explaining, self-understanding universe-with-observers, entailing backward causation and teleology. Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limitations of the human intellect. I began this book by saying that religion was the first great systematic attempt to explain all of existence and that science is the next great attempt. Both religion and science draw the methodology from ancient modes of thought honed by many millennia of evolutionary and cultural pressures. Our minds are the products of genes and memes. Now we are free of Darwinian evolution and able to create our own real and virtual worlds, and our information-processing technology can take us to intellectual arenas that no human mind has ever before visited, those age-old questions of existence may evaporate away, exposed as nothing more than the befuddled musing of biological beings trapped in a mental straitjacket inherited from evolutionary happenstance. The whole parapernalia of gods and laws, time, and matter, of purpose and design, rationality and absurdity, meaning and mystery, may yet be swept away and replaced by revelations as yet undreamt of."

I agree this muddle will be swept away. But I think it will be from a newer physics with an understanding that can explain dark matter and dark energy. Rather than get carried about about "escaping" our logic and science to find this new and deeper meaning, I think we just need to keep chipping away with conventional science but with an eye to understanding the bits that we know we can't explain and find theories that encompass them as well as clean up the niggling paradoxes left by conventional theories that don't quite fit the known facts. That's how real science advances. Slowly. Not with grandstanding about whole new levels of meaning and understanding.