Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I will spare you a Rocky Road reference.

I am not exaggerating, this is quite possibly the best interview I have ever heard in my life. (Just click on the link and then play it from within your browser.) During the show itself , Naomi Wolf comes to see why libertarians are so opposed to the IRS and the Department of Education. She (at least twice) says, "Oh my God, you are so right." Hint: it's not because we hate poor people.

If this is the way to stop the profligate from mailing in their keys, the old Wall Street adage rings true on Main Street: "Bulls make money, Bears make money, but Pigs make more money than anyone." "The Federal Housing Administration began Hope for Homeowners on Oct. 1, aimed at making as many as 400,000 mortgages affordable. Under the program, lenders will refinance loans to 90 percent of a house’s current value, automatically giving the owner 10 percent equity. The loans will be insured by the government, which will take a share of any gain when the house is sold. If a sale occurs in the first year, the government takes it all. The second year, it takes 90 percent; and so on down a sliding scale. After five years, it takes half the gain." WTF? I don't have a problem with helping people manage their bad bets if that's going to stabilize the housing market. But why give away the upside? Would not a better plan be to create a personal recourse lien on the...

Last week -- it's late now, I'm about to go to bed, and too tired to hunt up the link -- Limbaugh posted the idea that the big market drop of day X was due to businessmen being in touch with reality, and realizing that the high likelihood of an Obama win spelled disaster for American businesses. Now, the first piece of rubbish here is that the mountain of bushit contends, in many other posts, that there is NO likelihood of an Obama win, and that the race is neck-and-neck. But the second can only be seen in retrospect, when this week, as the Dow scored its second highest gain ever, Limnuts failed to make a post saying, "Oh, gee, I guess business has decided Obama is fine after all!" That's a sign of pure partisan hackery -- EVERY sort of evidence "supports" you're position.

God had just created Adam and Eve. "Welcome to the World," He said. "I have a birthday present for each of you. You get to choose who gets what." "What are they, huh, what are they?" said Adam. "Well," God said, "One is, I give you a little hose to pee through, so you can pee standing up." "Oboyoboy," said Adam, "Pee standing up--I want that one!" "OK, you got it," said God. "Eve gets the multiple orgasms."

> Sneaking It Past the Demon > > I live with a demon most terrible. > She shits blood in the night. > It drips up through the ceiling. > > Her eyes encircle her head, and she never sleeps. > The first day I slipped it under my coat. > The circlet of eyes never blinked, but she knew. > > The first week I tried mailing it, > Rolling it in a rug, giving it a fake ID, > But always she knew. > > I would have sold my soul. > I bargained, but to no avail. > She wanted it all. > > The pet store delivered a snake. > "Bon appetit," said I, > And later released the snake. > > She purged it. > It isn't natural, you see: > Demons were made before nature. > > > 050203 Thu 1430-1545 > 050211 Fri 2000 stanzas > > Hey, a first for Boy Scout me: a poem about infidelity! > > > (c) 2005 by Walter Bloch, all rights reserved.

If he don't stop that mojo shit he be directing at McCain and Palin ! (Hat tip to Henley .)

Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times : "What’s happening, I suspect, is that the Bush administration’s anti-government ideology still stands in the way of effective action. Events have forced Mr. Paulson into a partial nationalization of the financial system — but he refuses to use the power that comes with ownership." "Whatever the reasons for the continuing weakness of policy, the situation is manifestly not coming under control. Things continue to fall apart." Uh, Paul: 1) An administration with an "anti-government ideology" does not engage in "a partial nationalization of the financial system". 2) An administration with an "anti-government ideology" does not increase the size and scope of government faster than any administration in my life. 3) Your preferred policies are failing. Time to admit it. (Hat tip to Elen.)

Yesterday traffic to Crash Landing was 732% higher than the previous day. I assume this has something to do with Andrew Sullivan's link (HT2 Ralph Raico) to my "How could Obama disappoint you?" thread. Woody, let's start another argument!

A friend of mine who plays go a lot found this on her go server. Mathematicians post stuff there, she said, and, being mathematicians, they post problems, not answers. "You have a collection of 11 balls with the property that if you remove any one of the balls, the other 10 can be split into two groups of 5 that have the same weight. If you assume that all the balls have rational weight, there is a cute proof that they all must weigh the same. Can you find a proof? Can you find a way to extend the result to the general case where the balls have real weights?" Solving the implied system of 11 equations in 11 unknowns is fairly trivial and gives a proof, but it isn’t “cute” by any stretch. I have been unable to come up with either a cute proof, or a proof, cute or otherwise, which depends on the unknowns being rational. Does anyone see what I missed?

Both in the Crash Landing thread and the spin-off on Unqualified Offerings, some people seem to be misunderstanding my challenge. To repeat, I want pro-Obama people to list some concrete things that a President Obama could do, that would make them admit (at that time) they were foolish for having supported him now. As I said, several people are misunderstanding. They say stuff like, "Even if Obama did horrible thing X, my support would only be a mistake if we assume McCain wouldn't have done horrible thing X, or even worse thing Y. And I have no reason to think that." But that's not what I'm asking; we all know you have weighed the evidence, and right now you expect Obama will be better than McCain. Regardless of who wins, we will never know the answer to that question, since history will go down one path and not the other. To return to my own example: I am not sure what John Kerry would have done, had he been in office during the financial panic. Maybe h...

that McCain staff members are now knocking their own VP candidate !

Is baldness now a job requirement at Treasury ?

From my iphone. Here's emma:

In a previous post , I admitted that I now feel quite foolish for being afraid that if Gore won the White House, he would have "wrecked the economy." (Again, I didn't vote for Bush, but I was rooting for him against Gore. I rooted for Kerry, though again I didn't vote for Kerry.) I warned that those who are pro-Obama because he's the "peace candidate" may have similar feelings, a few years from now. So as a fun exercise, I would like the pro-Obama people to come up with specific things that would make them admit they are mistaken right now, in their advocacy of Obama. For example, if Obama orders the use of nuclear weapons on Iran, surely that would count, right? To be clear, I'm not talking about things like, "Aww man, he could raise tax rates and cause slower GDP growth!" I'm saying, what if he starts arresting journalists? So no matter how ludicrous you have to make the events, surely you will admit right now that there are som...

Two people have now emailed me this short video on what to do if you have an analog TV; it's pretty funny.

Here .

Flipping round the AM dial on my way home from work I found Rush Limbaugh on a local station. God, what a pathetic, partisan hack he's become. Is the McCain campaign paying him? He was insisting that the presidential election is very close, and that Palin is helping the GOP ticket! He must of gotten a hold of some oxycontin again. (Far from being "very close," McCain is so far down that GOP operatives aren't even waiting until after the election to start blaming each other for the landslide loss coming.

I recall, after raising objections to what I felt was Murray Rothbard's unneccesarily savage trashing of Adam Smith in his history of economic thought, having some defender of Rothbard's tell me, "Well, Schumpeter reached the same conclusions!" So, now I'm reading Schumpeter, and I find: "But though the Wealth of Nations contained no really novel ideas and though it cannot rank with Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin of Species , it is a great performance all the same and fully deserved its success." And what about the charge that Smith was a plagiarist? "...no charge of plagiarism can be made either against Smith or on his behalf against others." So, not so much in Schumpeter, after all.

I was following some YouTube links and came across one with this title. I was curious and clicked it. At first I was thinking, "Huh? He's not admitting he lied." But by the end he basically does!

(Wabulon, please give someone else a chance before posting the answer.) A while ago I sent my brother Peter Bernstein's book Capital Ideas .* I was trying to get him interested in becoming a "financial engineer," i.e. one of the Wall Street whiz kids who can tell you how safe mortgage-backed securities are. (Now you know why I cannot charge for my advice .) Anyway, he was looking at it again and noticed a pretty dumb mistake. I reproduce the relevant excerpt below. The author is referring to Cowles (whose first name I forget): [Cowles] must have been a fiendish bridge player. Here is one passage from his notes on the game: "If each of 50 million bridge players in the US plays 200 sessions of 40 deals each, this adds up to 50 million*200*40 = 400 billion hands dealt each in US (sic). The probabilities on any given hand being dealt with 13 cards of one suit are .00000000000156. The chances of a hand with 13 cards of one suit being dealt in the US in any given y...

I was working in the yard and, when I came inside, I looked at my jacket and thought, "I've gotten something slimy on it." Then I looked more closely and saw that someone else was getting something slimy on it: a slug was crawling up my chest, soon to nuzzle against my neck. (Dr. Tyson's Chicken, I've given you a big opening here: what can you do with it?) By the way, Bob soon will not be the only one blogging somewhere else : watch for the exciting announcement in these pages soon!

I have finally made it; Tyler Cowen links to me (sort of) at his blog. So here is my original mises.org article, "The Importance of Capital Theory." Then Tyler acknowledges it parenthetically in this post , though he chooses to filter it through a foreign website (presumably for tax purposes). Incidentally, my mises.org article above lays out the basics of how capital consumption can give the illusion of prosperity for a brief time, but then reality sets in and a "recession" is physically inevitable. If you don't really get what I am talking about, but are interested to understand what physically might have happened with the world economy over the last few years, I recommend the big section in the article titled, "A Sushi Model of Capital Consumption." I.e. you can probably skip the first sections where I quote Krugman and Cowen, and jump right into the "model."

As I was planting a rhododendron today, I discovered the above! I realized that, while many creatures (think elephants) before us have uprooted plants, we are surely the first to uproot them from one place and then stick them back in the ground somewhere else . We exist to offer plants mobility!

as someone at (T)reason who was calling for better oversight of Freddie and Fannie years ago. UPDATE: Bob Murphy reminds me how it is endlessly funny, even the 5000th time it is done, to spell the name of this magazine (T)reason -- so the post is suitably amended.

(Hat tip to Elen.)

Aargh! Some virulent spammer found Crash Landing tonight and posted about 30 spam comments in 5 minutes. So, unfortunately, I feel compelled to turn commnt verification on. Sorry.

I have been very frustrated with many libertarians smug dismissal of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine ; as usual, the piece de resistance in this area comes from my favorite GMU professor . But Joe Stromberg sees things my way in the October Freeman , so now I can stop asking, "Is everyone taking crazy pills?!" Some good excerpts: The core thesis of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine is that American foreign and domestic policies of the last 30 years have shaped a new corporatism. Corporatism, Klein writes, “originally referred to Mussolini’s model of a police state run as an alliance of . . . government, businesses and trade unions . . . in the name of nationalism.”... Klein’s case is tightly organized, well presented, and overwhelming in cumulative impact. She makes a complex argument dealing with what are, indeed, complicated matters. Some reviewers complain that Klein forces the evidence into a pattern. They say her treatment of the views of certain psychologists, economists,...

I'm not really rooting for McCain or Obama; I think either of them is equally capable of presiding over some awful developments in federal policy. As I've said before, it's true that McCain sounds more likely to bomb Iran, but by the same token, he will be under less pressure to prove what a tough guy he is, and also, he is probably more likely to grasp whether something really would be infeasible from a purely military point of view. I.e. I think Obama wouldn't want to bomb Iran because of the dead babies, whereas McCain might think, "Nah, we're too bogged down right now. Putin would have an even freer hand if we opened up another front in the Middle East." So, since I am not going to get all worked up hoping for one or the other, what I will say is that I hope one of them wins decisively. At this point, of course, that means I hope Obama really wins. (But if there is a late October surprise, the polls could swing in a matter of days.) What would be...

I haven't watched any of the presidential debates, so I thought tonight I should probably get to know the guy who will lead us into official socialism. I had a freshly opened beer, and was putting off balancing my checkbook. And yet, the debate was so intolerable, I turned it off. That's right, I decided I would rather balance my checkbook than watch these clowns. In the same paragraph, possibly the same sentence, McCain excoriated Obama for not backing a free trade deal with our ally Colombia, who after all had done so much to stem the flow of drugs into our country. (Just let that one sink in.) For his part, Obama said "we" need to guarantee loans to automakers, but also hold them responsible for not building the fuel efficient cars of the future. You see, Obama doesn't think we should import cars from Japan or South Korea. Oh, he also said he was for free trade.

Click on photo for a larger image: The view from the top of High Knob -- that's New Jersey on the horizon. Peck's Pond. Hearty mountaineers..

I saw that graphic underneath a talking head on a sports channel the other day, and thought "Oh my God, and entire pro football team pummeling some poor journalist!" Then I realized the talking head was a writer who covered the Steelers' "beat."

The name of Key Foods frozen fish concoction? "7 Crunchy Fish Portions" Fish portions... mmmmm.

So in case you haven't heard, let me inform you that Paulson has just decided that more than $125 billion* will go to healthy financial institutions . This reminds me of some lines from Eazy-E : Bankin, I specialize in ganking Whites, Mexicans, brothers and others. * Initially RW put the figure at $135 billion, but now he is not sure. The phrasing is a little off in the article, so it's hard to know. So to be safe, just say it's at least $125 billion.

Dropped rock fire the red sun down Golden evening bridge gate crossing the bay. Chopped blue gray glad steep freehold finding To save light. (c) Copyright 2008 by Walter Bloch, all rights reserved.

Greetings! This is from a wonderful book that Gene and Elen turned me on to: Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk (Pantheon Books, 2008). For simplicity, assume that gender in successive children is 50-50 independently for each child. (i) A family has two children. What is the probability that both are girls? (ii) A family has two children, one of them a girl. What is the probability that both are girls? (iii) A family has two children, one of them a girl named Florida. What is the probability that both are girls? According to the author, Florida was a rather popular name in the first decades of the 20th Century, although it has since been very much in decline.

I caught "free marketeer" Larry Kudlow in a whopper that actually made me embarrassed for him.

Why shouldn't Obama move to the center? The people are generally morons.

I think that things are going to be awful over the next four years, regardless of who wins the White House. Now I know some people (even staunch libertarians) are very passionately hoping for an Obama win, because they would rather a Marxist than a Mad Bomber. I agree that in a perfect world, Obama would be much more peaceful than McCain. But of course, we don't live in a perfect world. And I have seen nothing to indicate that Obama will implement the peaceful policies that (I agree) he personally desires. The most classic example is Obama saying something like, "North Korea, Iran...these are tiny countries that don't pose us any threat." Awesome. Somebody needed to say it. And yet, within a few days (maybe even just one, I can't remember) later, he completely reversed himself and said something like, "I have always said that Iran and North Korea pose serious threats to this country." So forget the blatant lie, it's rather that he is lying abo...

This is the kind of thing Gene would complain about, so I'm posting it here rather than at Free Advice. In this post , Tyler Cowen summarizes an article that claims: In economic theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much...The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished. By itself, this is just goofy. There are probably a good 7 things wrong with this theory. (I confess I haven't read the paper, so maybe they address all 7.) Here are some big problems, some of which I thou...

I have been a political/economic news junkie lately, and so I try to catch Rush at lunch and Glenn Beck at night (when I take my son to the park after work). Incidentally, Glenn Beck has really been awesome lately. I don't know if it's just his niche and he ran with it for ratings, but in any case he has been passionately opposed to the bailout, and has been urging his listeners to "stand up for what you believe--someone has to say 'NO' to this!" Etc. Anyway, Woody will be glad to know that I caught Rush completely distorting the excerpts he played from Barack Obama's audio book Dreams From My Father . (I know because my wife and listened to it on a road trip several months ago.) Rush was playing the part where Obama talked about hanging out with Nation of Islam guys, and how they hated whites as a race, not just individual white jerks. And Obama said something like, "This conflicted with the subtle morality I learned from my mother, where you g...

David Pryce-Jones describes the hardships of getting a Visa in the UK: "We took a cab as parking a car is out of the question in central London. Another $25 (and the same again leaving.) Approach roads to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square have been narrowed, and fortified with bollards, concrete barriers and wire fences reminiscent of Baghdad’s Green Zone. British policemen were cradling sub-machine guns — not long ago the British were specially proud that their police were unarmed. We queued for almost an hour until reaching the metal detector. Car keys with locking devices were not permitted, but had to be deposited in a pharmacy some hundreds of yards away (and for a fee.) "Eventually we reached the embassy itself, received a number and sat in a vast room with the other visa applicants — they do seven hundred a day, every day. Around me were people speaking Russian, Greek and French, also people from India and Africa speaking languages I couldn’t identify, the old...

The NASDAQ index now stands at 1581. Given that from here to eternity the NASDAQ returns 7% per year, when will an investor who got in at the top (5048) break even? My calculations show that will happen in, oh, about 2035 or so. So if your were 30 when you got in, the much vaunted "buy and hold" strategy will give you exactly the dollar-amount of funds you put in at just the time you're set to retire -- although, of course, the 2035 dollar will be worth a lot less than the 2000 dollars you invested.

I just picked up The Scientists by John Gribbin. I had thought I was bying a book on the history of science, but unfortunately I've discovered I have bought a work of ideology disguised as history. Gribbin opens by saying "The most important thing science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special." Oh really, and just how did science discover that "fact"? Is there some "specialness-omter" scientist have invented recently? What is the measure of "specialness" that proves Gribbin's assertion? There is none, for of course the assertion is sheer rubbish. The contention of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and so on is not that humanity is special in possessing some unique physical property -- which science might be able to disprove -- but that humanity is spiritually special. Buddhism, for instance, contends that humans are spiritually uniquely positioned to achieve enlightenment. Just how is science supposed to...

Here .

My wife for a time was the patient of a NYC chiropractor who told her, at one point in their relationship, that he treated the Grateful Dead whenever they came to town. I would think having anything to do with Jerry Garcia's state of health was the last thing a doctor would want to publicize.

Part I Part II

Sometimes, when you get a bee in your bonnet, you can't get it out. Here Randall O'toole, who works to lighten the burden of land-use regulation, blames the real esate bubble on... excessive land use regulation! "The key to making a housing bubble," he writes, "is to give cities control over development of rural areas." O'Toole's explanation is nonsensical. Regulation that takes land out of use makes it more expensive , sure, just as would sinking some portion of the land beneath the sea. But this new price is not "a bubble price" -- it correctly reflects the new scarcity of land. (Yes, in the case of regulation, land has been made needlessly scarce -- unless the regulation is needed of course! -- but that makes no difference to the subsequent price analysis.) O'Toole actually seems to have re-defined the word 'bubble' to suit his agenda -- he writes, "But in the early 1960s, Hawaii and California passed laws allowing cit...

Interesting

to smash this smug little bastard's coffee cup repeatedly into his teeth?

Here .

Here . (Hat tip to The Distributed Republic .)

only fifty miles from my house!

In my friendly feud with Woody , he said that the media would be destroying Obama if he were as vulnerable as Palin. I disagree. I think "the mainstream media" is as pro-Obama as Fox News is anti-Obama. For a fantabulous example, click this link and look at these two Us magazine covers. The first discusses why Obama loves his wife. The second on Palin has the headline, "BABIES, LIES, AND SCANDAL." Now what's funny is, if you read the article, it turns out the "LIES" refer to false rumors circulating about Palin. Yet that's not the impression one gets from the cover.

In response to Bob's contention that I have posted many embarrassing things here: I am very proud of all ... most ... many ... some ... a few ... at least one of my posts here at CL.

Below, Woody posted a cringeworthy compilation of Sarah Palin clips. In the comments I said: Please do not misunderstand me: She looks like a complete idiot in these clips, and she has no business running for office. However, if she got the number of US states wrong (Obama), or said that FDR went on TV to explain the stock market crash of 1929 to the American people (Biden), either of those would have been considered her stupidest statements yet. After further research, I am even more confident in this position. Obama and Biden have both said some really incredibly asinine things. I literally had to pause the Obama clip below, because I needed a respite from the embarrassment. And now our good friend, the plagiarist Joe Biden, who is such a liar that he actually adopted someone else's life history when he ran for president . Here's a good clip from Brainiac and Straight Shooter Joe (followed by some more good Obama gaffes): (Note: American troops didn't liberate the A...

I realize this may sound terribly naive, but is this bailout episode fairly unusual? I can't remember another time during my life when the public was really opposed to something , and the feds just went ahead and did it anyway. Up till now, I really couldn't "see" the government actually implementing counterinsurgency against Americans , but now I can. Can some of you old timers enlighten me? To clarify my position, I know there were riots during the Viet Nam era etc. But it wasn't as if the public wanted out of there 90-10, right?

Fuzzy wuzzy was a Gene. Big Adam looking all gnarly. Lewis and Linda, my totem animals.

A poll on CNN shows that, 71% to 29%, the public considers today's bailout to be merely a political payout to Wall St. Yet, the bill passed both houses, in an election year , by goodly margins. Folks, these elections are not real. The incumbent almost always wins, and whichever party we elect, we get the same results -- bailouts for the rich, warrantless wiring tapping, secret prisons, etc. Obviously, a lot of Congressmen didn't want to pass this bill, but their arms were twisted throughout the week until they were almost snapped off. America is an oligarchy.

Not for love, but to read Sandy Ikeda's excellent blog on urban affairs at The NY Sun . No, they haven't fired him -- the financial crisis fired them, and the Sun is ceasing publication. His September posts are here .

There were a number of Hassidim wandering through Brooklyn the other day blowing on ram's horns. Why? Could it be the time has come for " a special impact on the ownership and management of land "?

The above line is being used again and again to defend taking lots and lots of money from average people and giving it to very wealthy people (the bailout). This leads me to annunciate "The Callahan Principle": Whenever someone tells you that "Doing nothing is not an option," you can be damned certain that doing nothing IS an option, and probably a pretty darn good one -- otherwise, why are these folks trying so hard to convince you that it's not one?

all corrupt government officials, those who make bad jokes, and anyone who charges fees of poets. (What's that from?)

So I was trying to call a business to make sure my bill was correct, and their 800 number had the name of the business as the last four digits. And yet, they didn't provide the actual numbers for people. Since I just switched to a Blackberry with a non-classic keypad, I had to google to remind myself which letters go with which numbers . If I weren't at a computer, I was going to have to draw a picture of a phone. Note to companies: It's fine to have easy-to-remember phone numbers, designed with the classic keypad in mind. But your customers shouldn't have to give themselves a headache trying to picture a phone in order to call you.

I just ran across a post on a gardening site saying, essentially, "I'm not into lawn care at all and know nothing of the do's and don't's, but my lawn keeps dying -- can anyone help?" Yes, I can: If you want to succeed at something, learn a little !$^*@&^!@#* bit about it! It's similar to a woman I knew who would always say, "I try to grow things but I just don't have a green thumb!" Knowing her pretty well, I understood that this meant: "I don't know a thing about growing plants and certainly can't be bothered to learn, but rather than admit my repeated failures are due to laziness and ignorance, I'll blame some magical thumb factor as the cause!" Or someone will say to me, "I tried your recipe for X, but it just didn't come out the ways yours did!" Well, yes: I've cooked the dish 50 times before, cook almost everyday of my life, study books on cooking (not recipe books!), and have personally spen...