Aspect Ratios

The electronic screen is showing a movie from France. Subtitles in white flicker vanishing in the white of black and white. Old men are plotting while a young girl weighs her options. Everyone smokes cigarettes because smoking is normal. Everyone thinks about money.

The Obama Slaughter Care Gambit

http://zenpundit.com/?p=3355

The Anglo-American tradition of “rule of law” is distinct from that of continental Europe or Confucianist traditions in Asia, both of which are primarily concerned in different ways with the health of the state. Anglo-American “rule of law” has been an evolutionary - and sometimes revolutionary - march to constrain the exercise of arbitrary power and, eventually, assure an egalitarian access to justice.

Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, a great man to whom much is owed, but who today is largely forgotten, was the great theorist and defender of judicial independence and common law from the whims of a sovereign. Without judicial independence, the rule of law is hardly possible because it is ultimately inseparable from the executive power; Coke was instrumental in moving elite Englishmen’s minds from accepting “Rex lex” (”The King is Law”) to demanding “Lex rex” (”The Law is king”).

The matter was not formally settled with the English Civil War, which came not long after Coke’s death, or even the Glorious Revolution of 1688; nor the American Revolution of 1776 or even at Appomattox Courthouse. “The rule of law” is an ongoing struggle that must be constantly renewed by an active and vigilant citizenry if it is to be sustained.

Wbboei on David Axelrod

I wonder who owns David Axelrod. How is it that he gets out ahead of his supposed boss and says they will ram health care reform down our throats regardless of how we feel about it, and then a day later his boss comes out and contradicts him completely by saying do not ram it through, pick the best parts. Who owns Axelrod?

There are a number of machines in the Democratic Party. The three most powerful are the Clinton Machine, the Chicago Machine and the Kennedy Machine. Ostensibly, the Clintons are out of politics so their machine is like an army at winter garrison, The Chicago Machine aka the Daley Machine/Illinois Combine is active at this point. It owns the west wing of the White House. They are vile people of the lowest order. The Kennedy Machine is without a leader. Ted died and he tried to make Obama his political heir but that dream ended with the election of Scott Brown. The film critic Roger Ebert, a lifelong democrat, has a posting on his site yesterday saying the Brown victory is a fuck you Teddy, from the voters of Massachusetts.

David Axelrod is a soldier in the Chicago Machine. He was sent to Massachusetts to manage the campaign of Littel Deval and test market the Chicago machine candidate Obama for the job of president. The alliance between those machines dates back to the time of the 1960 election when Daley Sr. threw the state for Kennedy. But that does not mean they are his only boss. He also reports to George Soros, and his group of global money men.

Many assume that Axelrod runs Obama, since most people realize that Obama is a puppet. In this case, however, the puppet contradicts the puppet master. This suggests that other interests are in play.

One of them is the inevitable decline of the leaderless Kennedy Machine. This machine is old and rickety. It aims to control all activity within its geographic area, much like a union or mafia family does. When the machine can no longer control the market it declines. Thus when the surface transportation market was deregulated in 1980, the Teamsters lost their ability to control that market and non union competition drove many of their companies under. Similarly, when Irish gangs in Chicago and Brooklyn encountered a huge influx of Italians between 1890 and 1920, they lost control of the street and the rackets. When 51% of the electorate in Massachusetts becomes Independent, as it has, then the Kennedy Machine can no longer control the politics. The fear factor is gone. The Brown victory drove that point home rather convincingly.

Obama knows his policies are unpopular. He knows his own popularity is declining as well. Now he has figured out that this “anger” among voters is like a river that runs wide and deep. In sum he can get drowned.

Until now his moves have been dictated by the Chicago crew. How do we know that? All we have to do is look at who his closest advisors are and we know this is true. What we do not know is exactly who is pulling their strings. Certainly Soros and his conies are the financial arm and Zbig is involved too. But the fact he stepped up and repudiated Axelrod means that someone else is whispering in his ear now. Most likely it is Bill Clinton. Obama at this point is lost. He does not know what to do. He is in trouble. And so is the country.

I can’t see the future, but …

Knock, knock. Is it time for a joke? OK.

Ole goes out one day to use the outhouse, and he finds Sven there. Sven has his wallet out, and he's throwing money down into the hole of the outhouse. Ole asks, "Uff da! Sven, watcha doin' there, fella? You're throwing the five dollar bill and the ten dollar bill down into the hole of the outhouse! Whatcha doin' that for?" Sven answers, "Well, when I pulled up my trousers I dropped a nickel down there—and I'm not going down into that mess for just a nickel!"

Problems in Understanding the Validity of Reality

Learning from Science: 75% anomalous results represents a huge information stream in information-theoretic terms. But it’s mostly noise. So scientists have filters in their minds to deal with it — as do we all (read the rest of the article for a little neuroscience about that). The filters explain why “normal science” can proceed so long in the face of anomalies before a Kuhnian paradigm shift occurs. It’s a perfectly reasonable bias to assume that your existing theory, that has worked in the past, is right and the contradictory evidence is noise. It usually is.

But if the bias of your filters somehow gets set by something else — a political belief, for example — the fact that the filters control so much of what you see can steer you wrong a lot faster than you think.

2010 Food Crisis for Dummies

2010 Food Crisis for Dummies: The world is blissful unaware that the greatest economic/financial/political crisis ever seen is a few months away. While it is understandable that general public has no knowledge of what is headed their way, that same ignorance on the part of professional analysts, economists, and other highly paid financial "experts” is mind boggling, as it takes only the tiniest bit of research to realize something is going critically wrong in agricultural market.

Wisconsin Farm Bureau: It is so unusual for corn harvest to stretch into December that USDA had no year ago or five-year average harvest progress comparisons. Wet weather has plagued harvest in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains. North Dakota corn harvest stood at just 60 percent, while South Dakota stood at 82 percent and Wisconsin at 85 percent.

Computer Modeling - FAIL

Another example of trying to define computer modeling as science with disastrous results.

http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=2299

No economist influenced the economics profession in the second half of the twentieth century as much as Paul Samuelson, who died Sunday at the age of 94. As the New York Times noted, “Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.”

Unfortunately, Samuelson’s influence was not as positive as the Times would have it. Samuelson turned economics from a social science that tried to figure out how the world worked into an pseudo-science that tried to turn the world into a mathematical model — a model that failed to account for the realities of individual human desires, incentives, and diversity. As a result, by 1960, economists, politicians, and would-be central planners were misled into viewing the economy as a machine that could be controlled by pulling levers, i.e, passing laws, issuing regulations, and setting tax and discount rates.

The economy is not a machine.

Computing is an epic technological advancement. Too many people, however, believe programming always generates correct answers. Reference: http://xkcd.com/676/