Does One Laugh or Cry?

It's Not About the Nail from Jason Headley on Vimeo.

Tip o' the hat to "Ed" on Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail.

So, Papa, how do you like the iPad we got you?

No need to understand German to understand this video.



Hat tip, Chaos Manor Mail.

Guess Who Got Posted at Chaos Manor?

Friday I posted to my Facebook page the link to yesterday's memorial for Ray Bradbury at the LASFS Clubhouse, commenting, "Oh, to be living in LA!" (For some reason, probably because Thursday evenings were for choir practice, I never actually made a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.) Well, I still haven't experienced it personally, but it seems I was sort of there anyway. Read it here!

I haven't been this excited since LA sports radio legend Jim Healy acknowledged on the air a note I sent him from here in Peoria!

California: From Another Age

The following concludes Literature Reader: Sixth Year, edited by Leroy E. Armstrong, a sixth-grade reader from 1916 used in California at least through the mid-1920s. This weblog post is inspired today in part because I read the news from my home state, in part because I posted a new "cover" for my Facebook page featuring a postcard of downtown Los Angeles from the early '60s, and in part because I was thinking of essential things I learned in (California's public) schools that simply aren't taught any longer. Those were the days, my friends, and they seem long gone...

California

(Poets, dramatists, and historians are quite as useful and helpful to society as are wonder-workers in plants. John Steven McGroarty has served the people of California well by writing the Mission Play—a highly interesting portrayal of the days when California was owned by Spain. Mr. McGroarty has also written a pleasing book entitled California: Its History and Romance. The introduction to this book is a poem that is a worthy tribute to California. The author’s love for our beautiful State is felt in every line.)

’Twixt the seas and the deserts,
    ’Twixt the wastes and the waves,
Between the sands of buried lands
    And ocean’s coral caves,
It lies not East nor West,
    But like a scroll unfurled,
Where the hand of God hath hung it,
    Down the middle of the world.

It lies where God hath spread it,
    In the gladness of His eyes,
Like a flame of jeweled tapestry
    Beneath His shining skies;
With the green of woven meadows,
    And the hills in golden chains,
The light of leaping rivers,
    And the flash of poppied plains.

Days rise that gleam in glory,
    Days die with sunset’s breeze,
While from Cathay that was of old
    Sail countless argosies;
Morns break again in splendor
    O’er the giant, new-born West,
But of all the lands God fashioned,
    ’Tis this land is the best.

Sun and dews that kiss it,
    Balmy winds that blow,
The stars in clustered diadems
    Upon its peaks of snow;
The mighty mountains o’er it,
    Below, the white seas swirled—
Just California stretching down
    The middle of the world.

—John Steven McGroarty

Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor.

"If I Wanted America to Fail"

Writes Morgan Richmond over at Hot Air, "A provocative new video from the folks over at Americans for Limited Government promoting a new project focused on economic liberty and free market policies." Indeed it is. Watch it.



Tip of the hat to Chaos Manor Mail.

Picketing Military Funerals

Dr. Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor gets mail. I'm struck by one that showed up a couple of weeks ago:

Picketing at a marines funeral

Clearly a Constitutionally allowed picket. But I would be privileged to contribute to the disorderly conduct fines of the Veterans who beat the hell out of them.

Hmm...

Global Warming? Not This Globe

Christopher Booker of the UK's Daily Telegraph writes yesterday:

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts", reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation", reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world....

Read the rest of Booker's column here. (Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail.)

ELCA at Chaos Manor

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America hit Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail (scroll to the end of the day) yesterday when a ELCA layman from Southern California cc'd a letter he'd sent to someone at the ELCA headquarters in Chicago. Exactly what set off Col. Haynes I cannot tell. Perhaps it is the plea released earlier this week for us to sign on to this letter to President-elect Obama "calling for climate justice" (whatever the hell that is). That's the best I can do via Google for something new, though ELCA voices have been parroting the "climate change" mantra for some time. (See the Shellfish blog's articles Hanson: "Spiritual Blasphemy" from last summer and "Call Me Ishmael" or "Gore-d Again" from over a year ago for examples.)

Anyway, read the reaction of an ELCA layman to his church's enthusiasms, as it appears on "the original blog."

HUMAN INDUCED CLIMATE WARMING ???

Gentlepersons:

The ELCA is once more meddling in an issue that is far above your pay grade as ecclesiastics. Clearly, you have to be accepting a premise that you and all ELCA staffers can not evaluate the truth of yourselves ... namely that "Global Warming" is human induced ... if it is, indeed even happening at all. Contrary to what you are basing your latest excursion into non-ecclesiastic issues on, there is ample and well founded scientific evidence in support of a view contrary to the IPCC ... the International Panel on Climate Change of the UN. The most straightforward way to expose yourselves to a scientifically sound source of contrary information is to Google "NIPCC", to reach the Non-Governmental IPCC, here: http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=NIPCC&btnG=Google+Search

How can this be possible? How can a prestigious UN authorized scientific inquiry be in error?

Well, go and see at NIPCC.

Before you do that, permit me to point out an example of a similar mass misapprehension that has now apparently slunk off the public stage without even a polite goodbye.

I speak of the so-called "Hydrogen Economy",,, remember that one?

Not more than a year or so ago that was going to solve all our air pollution problems, make us independent of foreign oil, in fact, make us independent of hydrocarbon fuels, basta, period!

Our esteemed governator here in CA was going to install a number of hydrogen filling stations on our freeways to help the "HE" along.

What happened?

An "inconvenient truth" rose up and smote the HE right out of the nation's awareness.

It would require far more energy from non-hydrogen energy generation to produce the hydrogen than the hydrogen could ever produce by being burned in turn. Now that's a law of physics that you will not find in the Bible, but that is woven into the reality that is God's Universe.

And where was all that energy going to have to come from?

Why by conventional power generation, including coal, petroleum and of course, a vast new investment in nuclear power plants. But did the once so enthused media sources formally announce the "Death of the HE"?

Of course not. That would be too embarrassing, and would generally undermine their credibility.

So, please, before our ELCA is once again led down a dead end garden path by a new array of enthusiastic dunderheads, at least expose yourselves to the hard facts available on the Internet that counter the dominant but false propaganda that has persuaded you and so many other well meaning, scientifically under-educated, enthusiastic would-be do-gooders that they will contribute to saving our precious world by ceasing what they are not doing: causing Global Warming. Please note:

Even if there is Global Warming (and that is also unproven) it does not automatically follow that it is human induced. Realize that in the '60s of the last century the threat was global cooling, and we were regaled with a flood of articles predicting an imminent "little ice age", and about the same time the "Club of Rome" was predicting world wide famine if the world population rose above 5 billion souls... it is now estimated at 6.5 billion.

One interesting example of an argument against the HIGW claim is this: When the same computer simulations used to support the claims of coming HIGW are applied to conditions say, 100 years ago, they fail to properly predict the actual global weather that was subsequently recorded.

Do yourselves, the ELCA as an organization and all of us parishioners a favor and open yourselves to the possibility, just the possibility that we are all being deceived.... yet again. Well, almost all!

And when you have confirmed that, think about concentrating in the future on the proper business of the church, and avoiding a vain search after virtue by climbing aboard the bandwagons pursuing solutions to every purported, claimed catastrophe that looms up in our so-gullible media.

Very sincerely yours,
William E. Haynes
St Paul's Lutheran Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Thanks, Col. Haynes. Though be prepared to be ignored. Any dissident minds at 8765 W. Higgins Road or www.elca.org have been pretty much sent to places where they can have no influence on the ELCA's public voice.

And for the rest of you, Chaos Manor is linked on my other blog and is highly recommended by Pastor Zip. And for Earth's sake and yours, don't sign this letter; its science is worse than its theology.

How the Crisis Happened

One good summary of how the current financial crisis came about can be found at Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Reviews. Following are some highlights, but read it all here.

In the past month, investment banks managed to lose more money than all the banks in history cumulatively have made as profit on risky investments. Lehman Brothers, which survived the Civil War, the turbulence of the late 19th Century, World War I, the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression, has vanished. Major stockbroker houses, which used to know that the first rule was never to gamble with house money, collapsed. Note that the crisis was easily predicted by anyone except the smartest guys in the room who controlled America's financial centers. They, apparently, couldn't see it coming. ...

As often (but not always) happens when government interferes with economics, the origin of the collapse was due to good intentions. Aristotle tells us that democracy is rule by the middle class, and the middle class are those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. Most political scientists, economists, and intellectuals in general are agreed that ownership of one's home is a key element in defining the middle class in America. It's neither necessary nor sufficient, but it's still important, and the more people who own homes, the more people with a stake in America and the existing social order. People who own houses work hard to keep them. Home ownership is good for the owners, and it's good for America.

It was decided that the usual market forces weren't sufficient to spread the joys and benefits of home ownership, and government help would be needed. There are several ways that might be done including taxing the rich, buying houses, and giving them to those who couldn't afford them, and that was actually proposed at one time; but sanity prevailed. After all, if you could get a free house by being poor, why work hard to save a down payment and take out a mortgage? Better to spend yourself poor...

Eventually a solution was found. Private corporations called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were established with government backing, and by implication, government guarantees. These firms, managed by executives paid on the modern scale (millions to hundreds of millions in 'incentives' and bonuses), were sent forth to make it easier to own a house by making it easier to get a mortgage loan on that house.

This meant that people who couldn't convince bank loan officers that loaning them money would be profitable were able to borrow money because the government guaranteed the repayment. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could obtain money at low interest from the Federal Reserve System. Of course the Feds don't have any money — the budget runs a deficit — but it's easy to print some and borrow more by selling Treasury bonds, so Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were well financed at low interest. Given those loan guarantees to lenders, people who otherwise would not be able to buy a house were enabled to do so. And of course as more people were able to enter the housing market, more bids were made on houses, and housing prices rose. ...

A note here from Pastor Zip, who from 1985-1987 worked for a Savings and Loan in California. We made only Fannie Mae conforming (what Pournelle calls "guaranteed" and, indeed, that was the effect) loans, which became in those years a difficult thing as the prices of homes throughout California (especially LA) were rising well over Fannie Mae limits. In that way we were one of the more conservative S&Ls. But also couldn't be profitable, so Sears abandoned the business at the end of 1987, selling their accounts to other institutions on a largely piecemeal basis. Legal "reforms" of the industry (largely after we'd closed) dramatically raised out-of-date limits, making home loans easier and the industry profitable again. Pournelle describes what happened, but one key he leaves out is that by the mid-1990s "community organizers" were getting really involved. And the market adapted, as it will, to the new rules. Back to Pournelle.

Note that this was not deregulation.

Pastor Zip again, for that sentence simply cannot be repeated enough. Yes, we are hearing stories of greed, the failure of due diligence, etc. Pournelle highlights that in a moment. They have happened. But one of the Big Lies of the last 2-3 decades is that there has been deregulation of industries in the US. Every significant government act of "deregulation" in one area has been accompanied by higher, and more complicated, regulation on that area's flip side. Think of public utilities where, in exchange for deregulating user prices, the supply was even more highly regulated. "Deregulation" has, in every instance, been deliberately designed by legislatures and industry for immediate profits in exchange for long-term failure. In others words, "deregulation" has been anything but. But I digress. Returning to Pournelle...

Note that this was not deregulation. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was amended in 1995 to increase regulatory supervision to guarantee that CRA loans were not confined to high and middle income borrowers, and that more sub-prime loans would be made. For the history of the Act and its modifications see this Wikipedia link or use Google to find your own sources. And the bubble grew and grew.

So far we have a foreseeable crisis in housing and construction, serious enough, but still, nothing that could bring down the whole financial system; but at that point the smartest people in the room got really creative. They realized they had a lot of assets in real estate. As the bubble expanded these assets were valued higher than the mortgages held on them. They were, in a word, really first class securities. Perhaps some of them were a bit shaky — after all, when you loan $500,000 to a $40,000 a year gardener so that he can buy a house with a thousand dollars down and interest only payments, there's a chance he's going to default when it comes time to pay the principal — but many of them were solid as a rock.

What Pournelle describes here didn't happen everywhere, but that was a significant part of the housing market for at least the last 5 years, perhaps a decade or more. The only way most home loans in California (and other large markets) were going to be paid off was by the the home owner selling at an inflated price. How else does one pay off an interest-only payments, or a negatively amortized, home loan? Pournelle continues.

The obvious remedy was to bundle the gardener's loan with a nearly paid off loan by a college professor whose house had appreciated like mad over the years, and sell that package as a "mortgage guaranteed" loan to an investment bank. Now the loan company has even more money to loan out on even more questionable sub-prime deals.

At some point the investment banks began to realize that they'd bought a pig in a poke, and got creative by selling bundled packages of "mortgage guaranteed loans" to retirement funds, other investment banks, and anyone else they could find. After all, a mortgage guaranteed loan was as safe as a Treasury bond, and paid higher interest. Great investment, with no risk.

They sold a lot of those bundled mortgage guaranteed loans; and that is how the entire financial system was endangered. To learn how many bankers were caught by surprise because they didn't look very hard or didn't want to look, see "How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers" by Saul Hansell. Note that some of the lies were deliberately ordered by management who wanted the bubble to continue (and who departed their ruined companies with enormous bonuses). Given incorrect models to work with, the computers continued to forecast profits right up to the crash. For a cartoon summary of the above, see this Sheldon Comics strip.

So: that's where we are. As to what can be done, it may not matter. That is, it's important what we do, but the chance that it will be done sanely and rationally is very small. What will be done must be decided by the most unpopular Administration in nearly a century in connection with the most unpopular Congress in history; and everyone involved in finding a remedy was in one way or another a part of creating the mess. By everyone, I mean everyone: the Administration, the Treasury, the Congress under Carter and Clinton, Congress under Reagan and Bush, Congress controlled by both Democrats and Republicans, the regulatory agencies, and the "experts" now out of jobs who will be hired to manage the new institutions that will be set up to buy bad debts: every one of them. What will be done will be settled by politics, not by economics.

I say this because those who did foresee this disaster tried repeatedly to rein in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but the Fred and Fan lobbyists were easily able to defeat those efforts. Moreover the leaders of Fred and Fan were fired, but left with multi-million dollar bonuses, as did the leaders of various firms ruined in the disaster. The remedies being proposed aren't going to do much more than create a bureaucracy. Once that happens, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy will take over, and whatever is required to keep that bureaucracy healthy will be done. One thing is certain: the people who must pay for this debacle will largely be those who took out sensible loans and have kept up their mortgage payments; those who did nothing wrong, but will be handed the bill. Depend on it.

Again, read it all here.

Broken Escalator

Okay. I'm on dial up (except when I use the free Wi-Fi at a local restaurant), so I don't view web videos very often. But this was linked at Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor last month (I'm catching up on old reading), this one was pretty short, and it is just too funny. Especially since I've not had any of my elevator nightmares in a long, long time.




And if that's not enough for you...

My parents just came back from a planet where the dominant life form had no bilateral symmetry, and all I got was this stupid FShirt.

"It's a documentary, not a musical."

You have probably seen the Twilight Zone episode or, if you are like me, you caught it first via the original short story by Damon Knight. The blurb on my edition of The Best of Damon Knight describes it like this:

The aliens looked something like pigs and something like people—not a very attractive combination. Maybe that's why Earthmen were still so horrified when the Kanamit, as they called themselves, landed in their great spaceships and offered lasting prosperity. It wasn't easy to willingly accept gifts from monsters, but in time the human race adjusted and began to live opulently thanks to the Kanamit credo—"To Serve Man." An admirable motto to be sure . . . or was it?

You know the punch line: "It's a cookbook."

Near the end of yesterday's Chaos Manor Mail comes this line from one of Jerry Pournelle's correspondents:

Suggestion: Watch "Cabaret!" (It's a documentary, not a musical; a portrait of the end-game of a decadent culture.)

Granted, I've not seen the Academy Award winning film since I was 13. (Thirteen?) I've only seen clips on PBS specials since. But that sounds right to me.

And, perhaps, not just about 1931 Berlin, either.

Happy 2008!