I am sorry to announce the death of Steve McIntosh. Steve and his wife Sandy were anchors of the AnarchoVillage that grew up around Samuel E. Konkin III in Long Beach, California in the late '70s and through the '80s. Together they brought benevolence and stability to what could be a sometimes-harsh and fast-moving scene. Brad and I hoisted a beer to Steve's memory last night. Good journey, my friend.
Our semi-fast connection to the Internet has been restored. Why does it seem like we have regained our link to reality itself? (I need Spring to arrive, I need to sink my fingers into the soil and re-establish a connection with earth and rock, with something more essential.) FYI...after leaving his level here two visits ago and leaving his gloves here the last time, the repairman was careful to scan every surface for wayward possessions before heading out the door. Of course and nevertheless, he forgot something...but this time, he could not leave without it. The keys to his vehicle. This fellow is a genuine character. I was shut away in my workroom while he dealt with Brad but, at one point, I started to go downstairs because I thought he and Brad were in a heated quarrel. Not so. The fellow is what Jerry Seinfeld calls "a loud talker" -- he shouts sentences as though he were speaking to a deaf world. Wow was he loud! But I don't care. I am connected. We're back, baby, we're back!
Our internet woes continue...but a shaft of light pierces the darkness in our souls. The repairman is due back on our farm this afternoon to replace the defective replacement unit he installed on Friday. If he does a good job, we will return to him the gloves he left behind. On Friday, we returned the level that he'd forgotten the time before. Apparently we are to be spared nothing. I don't know about you but I could use some 'toons....
Again my hat is doffed in the direction of SkippyBob who continues to send the Best of Sinfest along with commentary. He writes, Since I recently received a letter from the Census Bureau telling me that in about a week I would get the actual census form in the mail (apparently so that I can be angry a week early?), I looked for both "census" and "poll" on Sinfest....Here are the two with at least some governmental relevance (although they are from the Bush years). They are: Poll 2 and Poll 3.
SkippyBob continues, As for the census letter itself, it has some interesting characteristics. The source address is: UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau. The census...is apparently now just a minor function of a larger administration that gathers other statistics. I think it was your blog, or a link from your blog (click here for referenced blog post), that pointed out that this same bureau now plans to poll every American once every five years with the equivalent of the long form of the census. That is probably why all the census forms this year are "short". When I was reading about the alternate survey, I remember thinking that the penalties for refusing to answer (or answer truthfully) were much more severe than the ones they threaten to impose for not fully filling out the census. Also, since the five year survey isn't the Constitutionally authorized census, I don't know that the promise (broken many times, of course) to keep the data secret for 75 years still applies.
As for the next two cartoons, which aren't census related, I can only say "If it were only that easy ..." They are: I Like You and Devil Surveillance (my personal favorite).
Our various internet connections, our websites and our servers seem to have come together in a perfect storm that has left us scrambling to perform mundane tasks like sending out an email that actually arrives. The latest: this morning, I noted a dearth of incoming messages. I often receive hundreds of emails a day -- many of them spam -- and I had only received 4 or 5. Upon checking our back-up mail system (to which we switched in desperation yesterday), Brad noticed that the spam filter had been set at the highest level of 1 whereas we generally set it at the rather permissive 8. Now that it has been reset, the email flow is back to normal.
In the best of circumstances, I am not a prompt correspondent but I generally respond within a few days as my time frees up. If you are awaiting a response or if an email to me has bounced back, please drop me a line or resend the message as I believe many emails have fallen victim to our internet woes. BTW we have reason to hope that another big chunk of the problem will be resolved on Monday. Thanks for your patience! And while you are at it, lend me some because, God knows!, I don't have any left.
Another hat tip to SkippyBob who sends along the following Sinfests with commentary. He writes, As I still live in the U.S., I found this one to be touchingly tender. And this one has nice full-color artwork, and was written when there was a chance that Obama really wanted to change things and didn't turn out to be a copy of the "same old same old". Of course, anyone who reads your blog will already have recognized that any of the major party candidates are two sides of the same coin, but assuming Obama wanted change lets the artist make the statements he is making.
Thanks to Brian C. on the forum for posting the link to this very readable (if somewhat long) article on Science News, "Odds are, it's wrong". I particularly liked the discussion of how "statistical significance" is frequently misused:
Correctly phrased, experimental data yielding a P value of .05 means that there is only a 5 percent chance of obtaining the observed (or more extreme) result if no real effect exists (that is, if the no-difference hypothesis is correct). But many explanations mangle the subtleties in that definition. A recent popular book on issues involving science, for example, states a commonly held misperception about the meaning of statistical significance at the .05 level: "This means that it is 95 percent certain that the observed difference between groups, or sets of samples, is real and could not have arisen by chance."
That interpretation commits an egregious logical error (technical term: "transposed conditional"): confusing the odds of getting a result (if a hypothesis is true) with the odds favoring the hypothesis if you observe that result. A well-fed dog may seldom bark, but observing the rare bark does not imply that the dog is hungry. A dog may bark 5 percent of the time even if it is well-fed all of the time.
Put mathematically: P(A|B) does not equal P(B|A). (The probability of A, given that B is true, is not the same as the probability of B, given that A is true.)
Furthermore: the calculation that there is only a 5% chance of some effect happening by chance, does not mean that there's a 95% chance that it was caused by the hypothesized mechanism. The P value only suggests that the result was not caused by chance; it does not suggest which causal mechanism is at work, and it offers no guidance as to competing hypotheses. And there's still a possibility that the result is random, which increases as more tests are performed (the subject of my previous post).
Read the full article, including "Box 2" and "Box 4" for some simple examples of how the statistics may not mean what you think they mean.
SamIam writes in, After noticing that some of the numbers in the interest rate comparison grid I furnished [in the post "Interest, Coming and Going...You are Scewed"], which are supposed to represent week-on-week changes, seemed too stable, I did vet the numbers, at least to the extent of going to the sources (bankrate.com and creditcards.com) claimed by Yahoo. Typical of Yahoo's apparently pervasive incompetence, they aren't updating their numbers to reflect changes in those sources. However, the gist of my rant regarding the delta between interest charged and paid remains valid: the actual current "low interest" credit card rate according to creditcards.com is 12.41%, not 12.23%; the US national average interest rate on all categories of credit cards is a whopping 14.56%!
I also found the following informative article about the myth of a middle-class recovery sourced from Baron's this morning. The most startling revelation is the sheer magnitude of the destruction of wealth instigated by our public serpents on behalf of their banksta masters. The net asset value of real estate held by US households has declined from its peak at the end of 2006 by 53.3%!!!
"Even more stunningly, households' net worth in real estate was down by more than half -- 53.3%, to be exact -- from the end of 2006" (Source, click here.)
Here is yet another interesting article found on kitco.com, the precious metals trading site. Now, there are always a few gold bugs featured there who try to use hyperbole to promote sales. However, Roger Wiegand is usually one of the more level-headed columnists. When a financial nerd whose usual territory is advising clients on what financial instrument to buy or sell, and when, turns to publishing missives on the practical aspects of surviving the crash of an entire civilization, perhaps it is time for all of us to pay heed. The article: "This is a new era as we have been irrevocably destroyed."
If it has seemed quiet here for the last few days, well, there's a story.
It began Wednesday evening when the ifeminists site got hacked. It happened as I was on the road to a meeting; I had to turn around and come back, and spend an hour and a half repairing and hardening the site.
Then, Thursday afternoon, our Internet service failed. Completely. Our wireless ISP scheduled a service appointment for Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, we had to switch to Plan B -- dial-up -- which we keep ready for such contingencies.
Except, last fall the phone company performed a few splices and laid a new phone line, which I presume to be the reason we could only get 14 Kbps of dial up speed. That's barely fast enough to collect email, and Wendy struggled to put up some news items on ifeminists.
Late Friday afternoon the service tech arrived, and after many tests concluded that our 3.5 GHz wireless module was defunct. Fortunately he had a spare 900 MHz module in the truck. (Why he didn't travel with a spare 3.5 GHz module is a mystery to me; we were his last service call of the day, and it's possible he'd used his spares earlier.) At 5:30 he had installed and commissioned the new unit, and decamped quickly for his weekend off, leaving me to reconfigure our router.
Except, the new unit refused to work with our router. And refused to work with my laptop. We still had no Internet service.
So it was time for Plan C: when we got wireless Internet, I left our old satellite dish installed and kept the equipment, just in case. (There was no cost to keep it.) A short call to the satellite ISP and I was able to get the service reactivated, and, mirabile dictu, it powered right up and began working after nine months' inactivity.
So I collected my waiting email, checked that our web sites were still active, and enjoyed a late dinner. Then a visit to the loo. And just as I had seated myself on the toilet...the entire house blacked out. 850 homes, including ours, had just lost power.
We're back now, while our luck holds out. "What a week I'm having!"
Yikes! Those who checked in on the ifeminists site last night may have noticed something a tad different. Namely, a notice announcing it had been hacked and, then, a quick redirect to a Turkish site condemning the Armenians. It seems to have been a password hack by which the fellow gave himself admin power, taking it away from us, and inserted a script to commandeer the site. Never fear! -- ifeminists has been cleaned up and nothing of consequence on the site was damaged or lost. A few news items were deleted (I guess he was testing the admin power) but that was the extent of mischief. Other than the redirect, of course. I never thought I would be typing the following sentence but, here goes...."ifeminists apologizes to the Armenians of the world."
A hat tip and a deep curtsy to SkippyBob for sending along the following 'toons from Sinfest -- what a guy, let's clone him! The first two are in response to an earlier blog post by SamIam that was entitled "Interest, Coming and Going...You are Screwed." The cartoons are Banksta One and Banksta Two.
And, more generally reflecting the state of the States...
In an email exchange, a friend expressed his belief that America would soon have a second revolution that was brought about by political and economic instability. My immediate thought was "if that happens, I expect it will more closely resemble the French Revolution than the one in 1776." Then I sat back and tried to figure out why I had arrived at that instant conclusion, and whether it had any merit. As a proximate cause, I think the conclusion popped up as a result of some reading I did last night and from listening to CNN this morning as I did the ifeminists newsfeeds. CNN had two stories that clashed together in my mind: 1) there had been a sharp increase in the number of millionaires in the U.S.; and, 2) unemployment benefits now run for 99 weeks in order to alleviate the severe and widespread suffering of the jobless. To me that means the gulf between the haves and have-nots is widening and quickly so.
America has become a society of elites. Specifically, those in the political class who enjoy an endless economic bounty that comes from the sweat and blood of taxpayers. At the pinnacle are politicians with rich salaries, plush expense accounts (not counting bribes), platinum pensions and health insurance, etc. Then there are the millions of civil servants who are paid considerably more than their private-sector counterparts, who have greater job security due to unions, and who enjoy a pension plan that others can only dream about. The devouring appetite of these elites is fed by the ever-increasing taxes, fees and other money-grabs from the private, productive sector of society. As the level of theft increases, more productive people are being driven in poverty, homelessness and a despair that could easily turn into rage.
Last night I was reading about the conditions in 18th century, pre-Revolutionary France. (Specifically, I was reading about the Physiocrats who were precursors to libertarianism.) The parallels to the U.S. did not escape my notice.
Under Louis XV (and Louis XIV for that matter) France was plagued by fairly constant and ruinously expensive warfare along with economic instability. There was a huge schism between the haves and the have-nots. The haves basically consisted of the nobility and the clergy, both of whom were exempt from taxes; they lived off the sweat and blood of average people (mostly peasants) in the private sector. The foundation of the private sector was agriculture, even though very few citizens owned land. The nobility and clergy (some 600,000 in a population of roughly 25 million) held most property. For example, the church owed about 1/5th of the total land; in some provinces, it owed up to 2/3rds. Moreover, the Church had feudal privileges that continued from the Middle Ages and bound something like one million people to the land as serfs.
Even though France was a comparatively wealthy nation, the peasants existed at near-starvation level because they were so burdened with taxation in myriad forms. A direct tax ate as much as 50% of the earnings of the non-exempt. The collection process was particularly brutal because tax collector were 'entrepreneurs' who paid the king a flat amount for the privilege of collecting taxes; anything over that amount became profit.
There were a slew of other taxes as well, some of them quite creative. For example, there was a salt monopoly tax by which everyone over the age of 7 (as I remember) was required to purchase several lbs of highly-inferior government salt each and every year. The law also proscribed how the salt could be used and imposed heavy fines for misuse, such as in preservation of meat. Many other commodities had their own separate taxes. Fees were levied at every stage of manufacture, upon transportation, at time of sale to retailers and, then, to customers. It has been estimated that these taxes literally doubled the cost of goods. The list scrolls on and on, including many customs duties that were not merely imposed on goods passing into and out of France but often on goods traveling between different provinces within the nation.
And, of course, there was the constant bribery, unofficial theft by authorities, etc. for which France was notorious and which ran rampant through all levels of government. Unfortunately, it is impossible to even estimate how much corruption cost the average person. Even without this factor, however, it has been estimated that the nobility (including the king) and the church probably took about 75% of the wealth produced by peasants -- many of whom lived on the margin to begin with. Over taxed, often homeless, unemployed, hungry and with no hope of justice from the 'system', the vast majority of French citizens were nevertheless not blind. They saw the starvation of their own children and the riches lavished on the velvet-clad children of the elite -- riches that had been stolen from them and from the mouths of their own families. When the desperation of peasants erupted abruptly into unbridled rage, the French Revolution had arrived. And, at least in the beginning, it was a grassroots revolution around which the disenfranchised rallied for justice. They soon demanded revenge.
These are the some of the thoughts I had upon listening to the two CNN stories this morning. I'm sure it is at least part of the reason the French Revolution came to mind immediately upon reading my friend's email. By contrast, the American Revolution was not rooted in a long-standing class structure that split people into widely disparate, permanent and unjust economic sectors.
In the end, Young noted, by the time you reach 61 tests, there's a 95 percent chance that you'll get a significant result at random. And, let's face it--researchers want to see a significant result, so there's a strong, unintentional bias towards trying different tests until something pops out.
Young went on to describe a study, published in JAMA, that was a multiple testing train wreck: exposures to 275 chemicals were considered, 32 health outcomes were tracked, and 10 demographic variables were used as controls. That was about 8,800 different tests, and as many as 9 million ways of looking at the data once the demographics were considered.
Which is why repeatability, and access to the computer models, is important:
In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial.
And my favorite news item, from two weeks ago: researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington claim to have a commercially-viable process for making oil from low-grade lignite coal, for just under $30 a barrel. (See here and here.) Bravo for human ingenuity!
It is not a theoretical objection -- that is, a fundamental objection -- but an aspect of the libertarianism focus on electoral politics that I find disturbing is its obsession with numbers. How many candidates are running in how many districts with what total votes as compared to whose other numbers... All the movement becomes a numbers game that is stripped of non-arithmetical substance. Even if a vote total turns out to be 'good', is it really a victory? Campaigners will shout "look how many libertarians we now have!" but you never know why people voted for the somewhat libertarian candidate -- in protest against the other parties, out of movement 'purity', a preference for his non-libertarian positions, the candidate's personal charm, the lack of alternatives, or...? If the last few years have taught anything, it is that voters are incredibly fickle.
And what if a libertarian were to win the numbers game; by which I mean, what if he (or she) were elected to a high public office? What if he were able to grab the Holy Grail of libertarian goals and have a bad law repealed? I'm all for repealing anything but I don't put any stock in that strategy. What is enacted today can be repealed tomorrow and re-enacted the next week thereafter. My time frame is inaccurate but my point is that repealing laws is a poor strategy because it plays the legislative game, which is heavily rigged against libertarianism and freedom. It is just another numbers game.
In final analysis, it does not matter how many laws are on the books or how many are repealed. What matters is whether the authorities are able to enforce the laws, however many there are. When a law becomes unpopular enough, the authorities cannot enforce it; it becomes a dead law...one that has been de facto repealed by the withdrawal of public consent to it. History is replete with such vox populi repeals.
In fact, America was founded on the vox populi repeal of law. The 13 colonies had stacks of laws, regulations, and policies; there were British soldiers in the street along with Loyalists to enforce them. Yet every single one of those government measures, including governmental institutions like the courts, became irrelevant once a sufficient number of ordinary people said "no." The government itself became irrelevant because its will was unenforceable. What happened and what mattered was a change in the hearts and souls of the people -- a change that was brought about largely through the ceaseless, stellar efforts of writers like Thomas Paine who infused classical liberalism into the political psyche of the colonies. They did not produce a fickle change but one that inspired loyalty...not to men necessarily but to ideas -- especially the ideas of freedom and independence.
What would have happened, do you think, if the likes of Paine and Jefferson had "gone through channels"? If they had petitioned the king, run for the local school board or a higher position, if they had tried to repeal the Stamp Act and other laws one-by-one. I suspect there would have been no America because there would have been no revolution, no vox populi repeal of government itself. Instead, the American revolutionaries went to the source of all real social change -- the hearts and souls of men. They did the hard work and they showed how quickly a society could be turned around; it took something akin to 15 or 20 years for their ideas to create an expanse of freedom in the world.
I understand the appeal of the numbers game. Cultural change is difficult to impossible to quantify and this introduces frustration into the life of anyone attempting to accomplish change. It would be amazingly helpful to log onto a website every morning and get a graph of feedback, even if the feedback were negative. Alas, it is not possible. Nor is real change possible without doing the hard and frustrating work. There is no quick fix that cannot be as quickly undone.
