An hour or so ago I read that the surge was about to be diminished, because it is unsustainable, and posted “Losing in Iraq, part one†I guess Sadr read it also, for a few minutes ago I read that the Green Zone is being shelled and the oil is being cut off. I read it and posted, Sadr read it and started shelling. The major alternatives: Declare victory, since …
Losing in Iraq, part one
When the US began its attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, I said that destroying our enemies anywhere in the world would be easy, but building states would be hard, would most likely fail, for no one understands how a state is built, and the trend of the times is for states to fail. And so it has proven: The surge produced the temporary appearance of relative quiet in Iraq, …
Global warming explained
In a paper with the deliberately boring title “A Provisional Long Mean Air Temperature Series for Armagh Observatory†C.J. Butler and D.J. Johnston find a near perfect correlation between solar cycle length and temperature from 1796 to 1992 – which implies that recent warming is real, but wholly explained by events happening on the sun. The paper starts off with lots of worthy, important, and extremely boring stuff about thermometers. …
Future Housing prices
Real mortgage interest rates are high and rising in the US, because the the future value of the US dollar is uncertain. Lenders fear the possibility of very high inflation, so demand high interest rates. This makes it difficult to buy a house. At the same time, borrowers fear deflation.  They fear they could put down a deposit, then be wiped out as the value of house falls, along with …
Alan Greenspan on crack
Four days ago, Alan Greenspan posted an article wondering what went wrong: “We will never have a perfect model of risk†“Risk management systems – and the models at their core – were supposed to guard against outsized losses. How did we go so wrong?†Hey Alan! Check your spam folder for 2006. You will find it is full of ads saying: “Buy the house of your dreams for no …
Stagflation
The US economy faces recession: To stimulate the economy, the fed is lowering interest to near zero and the government handing out six hundred dollars to everyone. But what the US faces is not recession, but stagflation, and handing out free money is not the cure for stagflation. Stagflation was first observed in the first great fiat money inflation of modern times, the French assignat. The more assignats they printed, …
Moral hazard:
Financiers know that if they misbehave, the Federal Reserve will print money and give it to them in return for worthless collateral. Public knows that when the central bank prints money, its value diminishes, and thus the public become reluctant to sell, and unable to buy. Hence stagflation.
Cargo Cult Science.
xkcd.com is the ultimate geek cartoon. Getting the joke usually requires esoteric knowledge of some combination of science, maths, popular culture, and internet trivia. In today’s cartoon, Zombie Feynman shows up, seeking to eat brains, but then again explains the essence of the scientific method. He then implies that string theorists have no brains. This is very funny to those of us familiar with today’s critique of string theory, and …
The global warming swindle
Anthropogenic global warming is a swindle in that the scientific method has been abandoned, the evidence is in substantial part lies, and so on and so forth. But it is not a swindle in that it is provably false. It could be true. The evidence vastly overstated, and the effects vastly overstated, but it could be true that humans are causing the world to warm at about one fifth of …
The global warming swindle
Anthropogenic global warming is a swindle in that the scientific method has been abandoned, the evidence is in substantial part lies, and so on and so forth. But it is not a swindle in that it is provably false. It could be true. The evidence vastly overstated, and the effects vastly overstated, but it could be true that humans are causing the world to warm at about one fifth of …