Truth and Nothing but the Truth?

In the context of this article, and the concept of thin slicing emotion/thought based on the frames of expression we pass through unconsciously, I wonder if technology may give us what virtue hasn't - the way to tell when we are being lied to. Sure, this article is about another topic, but what it points to is that tech may one day be able to give a true/false read on what people are saying, maybe even in real time.

What would happen if it really was best to always say what is true? Would it wreck us or free us?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/07/artificial-intelligence-can-tell-your-sexuality-politics-surveillance-paul-lewis

Rule of Law. Not.

It’s not just Clinton at risk here: Top aides such as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were also clearly involved in the improper handling of the nation’s secrets. Indeed, the FBI’s reportedly looking into whether aides traded passwords to illegally move info from classified servers to the private system.

We already know that more than 2,000 Clinton emails contained classified information, including dozens with the most confidential stuff. At issue is who’ll take the fall for improper handling of the secrets.

Be glad the FBI’s on the case. The State Department has announced that its investigation won’t wrap up ’til after Election Day.

http://nypost.com/2016/03/03/the-fbis-hillary-probe-closes-in-on-a-political-crisis/

"New" Human?

"What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of human-like creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa. Only one line eventually survived to give rise to us," he told BBC News.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34192447

Somebody Said It

That was my thought, exactly, Dr. Sowell, thanks for writing this.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/08/16/social_degeneration_110964.html

What Is A Journalist?

Holding people in political power accountable is the prime function -- the defining feature -- of a journalist, including a pundit; if you expressly and publicly vow never to do that, how can you possibly be credibly presented as being one?  And how can the political analysis of someone who takes this pledge possibly be trusted as sincerely held, let alone accurate?  Note that this vow was not from three years ago; it was from two months ago.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/27/sharpton/index.html

That sentiment is an interesting ideal, but Mr. Greenwald - get real!  Journalist's exist to make money for their employer however that may be done.  No one watches MSNBC for objectivity - rather, no one who understands the concept watches MSNBC for objectivity.  Frankly, it's a step up for one of their employees to admit what his agenda is.

The Dangers of Not Understanding Keynes

The author seems not to understand that the key point of "stimulus" spending is that there is a presumption of a "multiplier" - in other words, Keynesians believe that for every dollar the government spends, there's an amount of activity stimulated equal to a multiple of the government dollars spent.  While the Keynesians believe their research shows a "multiple", the effect has not ever and cannot ever be proved.

In short, they gambled 800 billion on their assumption of a multiplier.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-dangers-of-being-wrong-on-keynes/2011/07/18/gIQAIuGYMI_story.html

The author, sounding patient and sycophantic in his worship of the oh so wise Keynes, writes:

Keynes — and others who later elaborated on his work, like Hyman Minsky — taught us that although markets are usually self-correcting, they occasionally enter destructive feedback loops in which a shock to, say, the financial system scares business and consumers so badly that they hoard money, which worsens the damage to the system, which further persuades other economic players to hoard, and so on and so forth.  In that situation, the role of the government is to break the cycle. 

This bit of pap may or may not be true, we don't actually know how free market economies work because we've only had small ones in recent times, but it assumes that the Fed and massively influential economy distorting practices by the US government are not to blame for the "destructive feedback loops" such as the one we've seen since 2007 or so.  In short, the present circumstance is at least as likely to be the result of the negative unintended consequences of prior government interventions as it is a cyclical result of a free market's "destructive feedback loops."  In fact, there's simply no reason to believe that our present difficulties are anything but the result of government interventions.

What Keynes taught us is that, when faced with the perception of responsibility for making a depression ravaged economy work, Keynes and most other politicians will happily endorse a model which justifies their choice to spend other people's money "for their own good."  It is political Darwinism at its finest.

The Author's argument is, in effect, "Keynes might have been right."  My dog might have been right, too, and there's equal evidence supporting either theoretician.  I wonder if, were he alive at this juncture, even Keynes wouldn't have realized his theory does not hold water.

The author cites C. Romer's defense of the lack of impact of the 800 billion dollar "stimulus", in which she claims she just underestimated the seriousness of the recession, and the 800 billion dollars wasn't "enough".  Oh, and there's also the problem that we just don't keep enough "shovel ready" programs on hold, waiting for a downturn in the economy, so we can spend our way back out (but we should).

As I read this part, the word nincompoop came to mind.  The author's argument has now become:  "Because Keynes might have been right, we should be ready to spend a much larger amount of money next time on a stimulus - to see if he really was right.  We'll probably know how much money to spend on the stimulus next time, because we missed it so badly this time."

To whom does the author think he is writing?  We didn't all stop learning after our public school education.

Even if the Keynesian multiplier is real, no one "knows" how large it is, and no one knows how much of it will be required to provide an adequate stimulus given that no knows how bad any given recession is, or how long it will last, or ... anything that would amount to more than the pretense of knowledge about how to massage an economy back to health.  The entire Keynesian concept - that an economy is like a football team that just needs a few coaching pointers to perform correctly - is such a joke it's difficult to believe anyone fell for it.

Here's the sad part - there's just no way a politician can do what he/she should - nothing, following the dictum "first do no harm" - when there's a recession on.  The imperative to act is dominating - every President knows they must make it look as thought they know what they are doing, as thought they have the answers, and they must act - even if none of these things are true.  They must act as if they have the fatal conceit even if they are smart enough to know better.

Fantastic Review of Mamet's Book

The book consists of 39 relatively short chapters, ranging from "Culture, School Shootings, the Audience, and the Elevator" ("one might ask not why mass shootings are happening, but why they are happening in schools"), to "The Street Sweeper and the Surgeon, or Marxism Examined" ("the money the Government strips from the surgeon to pay the street sweeper, far from ending in the sweeper's pocket, will most likely arrive somewhere else altogether"), to a concluding chapter entitled "The Secret Knowledge" (drawn from an Anna Simons quotation about the "terrible secret" initiates learn after receiving the "shared truths" -- that "beyond the knowledge the initiates have just been given there is no special knowledge"). 
Not every chapter works as well as the others, but it is a sustained argument about the necessity of choosing among imperfect alternatives in an imperfect world, avoiding the easy utopias and siren songs of government, respecting the centrality of human individuality, and testing theoretical arguments against life as actually lived -- all written in a style that personalizes and dramatizes (and sometimes overdramatizes) the issues in a way that should provoke thought even among those who disagree.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/a_brain-dead_liberal_awakens.html

I long wondered how a Jew could be liberal in the present meaning of the term.  I sense liberals oppose the idea of Israel but identify with the Palestinians (granted, the suffering of those people is a horror, the relevant question being, who's fault is that?), they support the style of european government which is practiced in anti-semitic parts of the world (Europe), and they of all people should know the brutality of an over-powerful government.  Yet they vote for tyranny, and the pretense of empathy via the coercive power of the State.  Can this congnitive dissoance last?

Fight Fires With Fans. Really Big Ones.

The Arizona law’s fate actually was sealed in 1791, when the First Amendment was ratified; 220 years later, one wonders: When will people eager to empower government to regulate speech about itself abandon the fiction that political money can be regulated without regulating political speech?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-supreme-court-win-for-political-speech-and-political-money/2011/06/28/AGVX0mpH_story.html

Compare with this author's misguided take:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/high-court-deals-public-campaign-financing-a-heavy-blow/2011/06/28/AGDiIrpH_story.html

These types of laws are like trying to fight fires by using cooling fans. 

There's a reason people spend ooodles of money to win elections - governments have too much power, Federal, State and Local governments are not limited strongly enough to prevent the corruptions that result from excessive power. 

Therefore - people are willing to spend whatever it takes, in money and life energy, in order to gain control over that power.  POWER COMMANDS A POWER STRUGGLE.

It is oft said and still true - power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Limited government brings a reduced motive for gaining and keeping office.  If you can't use government to oppress your competitors (as is the purpose of unions), you won't give people money to run.  If you can use government to oppress your competitors (unions and any number of examples), you'll spend whatever you can to get a "favorably disposed" candidate in office. 

Those who dream of big government orchestrations of nirvanna either ignore or can't see this plain truth.

I Believe!

http://www.alternet.org/story/151426/why_do_people_believe_stupid_stuff,_even_when_they're_confronted_with_the_truth

The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.

The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

Novelty Facebook pages, get-rich-quick websites and millions of emails, texts and instant messages related to the event preceded the official announcement on May 1, 2011. Stories went up, comments poured in, search engines burned white hot. Between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. on the first day, Google searches for bin Laden saw a 1 million percent increase from the number the day before. Youtube videos of Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood started trending. Unprepared news sites sputtered and strained to deliver up page after page of updates to a ravenous public.

It was a dazzling display of how much the world of information exchange changed in the years since September of 2001 except in one predictable and probably immutable way. Within minutes of learning about Seal Team Six, the headshot tweeted around the world and the swift burial at sea, conspiracy theories began to bounce against the walls of our infinitely voluminous echo chamber. Days later, when the world learned they would be denied photographic proof, the conspiracy theories grew legs, left the ocean and evolved into self-sustaining undebunkable life forms.

Interesting concept, but clumsily delivered.  One example - "photographic proof?"  Who could consider photography proof of anything after all of the BS that has surrounded, for starters, the Kennedy assasination or the moon landing?  "Photographic proof" is an oxymoron.  Photos can be faked as easily as any other medium. 

I'm not sure this is anything we don't already "know."  Everyone knows they can be fooled, and that the fooler in chief is themselves.  Is this article just another way to say that?  Seems like it.

Nonetheless, the Fooler In Chief benefits from analysis of this topic.

Biofuel Illusion Lifting

First, a broad consensus has now thrown its weight behind the environmentalists’ view that using home-grown ethanol—as a replacement for imported oil—squanders far too much energy and water in the process, and is not a particularly good way or reducing greenhouse gases anyway. Indeed, given the intensive use of energy in agribusiness, it is debatable whether replacing petrol with ethanol breaks even in terms of the “wells-to-wheels” energy consumed, or even produces a net reduction in carbon emission.

Besides, even if America’s entire corn crop were to be devoted to ethanol production, it would still only supply 4% of the country’s oil consumption. So much for the argument that home-grown ethanol offers an answer to America’s dependence on foreign oil.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/06/biofuels

Second, the food industry has gone noisily public about the way the federal government’s corn subsidies—which have encouraged American farmers to devote more and more of their corn crops to ethanol production—have driven up food prices. Last year, 40% of the corn grown in the United States (some five billion bushels) was used for making ethanol. This summer, corn supplies for animal feed are heading for a 15-year low. As a consequence, corn futures have soared to almost $8 a bushel—twice their price a year ago. Consumers counting the cost at the supermarket checkout now know who to blame.

This last is kind of a shame.  The higher the price of feed corn, the more likely folks are to choose grass finished beef, which is a win for all involved; the cows, the consumer, the farmers, and the environmental impact.

Apparently, There's Nothing 'Left' Worth Saying

'"America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home," Obama said, speaking from the White House East Room.

I'm stunned by the degree to which the President is left with nothing to say.  Most frequently when I hear him speak, I feel embarrassed for him.  His speeches must be written for an entirely different audience - one that hears what it wants to hear.  I largely felt this way during the campaign as well.  "Can anyone really take that sort of talk seriously?" 

The thing that strikes me most often is the disconnect between what he's doing and why he says he's doing it.  What does "nation building here at home" have to do with troops in Afghanistan?  Aren't we spending billions to supply and equip them and get them to and fro and isn't that just an easily defensible "stimulus"?  Is national defense spending quantifiably different than other forms of "stimulus"? 

Who knows what is meant by "nation building at home" but in the sense he's meant it so far, there's no evidence it can be done by government.

Example of the Road To Hell Being Paved

This is a beautiful example of the folly of good intentions.  Analysis is still required.  I don't know why we as a culture accept these "great ideas" and great terrors ("The Sky Is Falling!" by Algore and the Chicken Littles) so uncritically.  One bit of certainty I have is that the folks trying to hard to convince us about the magnificence of the electric car pocketed millions that Congress diverted from our pockets to the electric auto industry over the last 20 years. 

Britain's Department for Transport is spending $66 million over the next year giving up to 8,600 buyers of electric cars a grant of $7700 towards the purchase price. Ministers are considering extending the scheme.
The study was commissioned by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, which is jointly funded by the British government and the car industry. It found that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.1 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tonnes for a similar petrol car. Emissions from manufacturing electric cars are at least 50 per cent higher because batteries are made from materials such as lithium, copper and refined silicon, which require much energy to be processed.
Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car. Disposal also produces double the emissions because of the energy consumed in recovering and recycling metals in the battery. The study also took into account carbon emitted to generate the grid electricity consumed.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/electric-cars-may-not-be-so-green-after-all-says-british-study/story-e6frg8y6-1226073103576
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/06/13/electric-cars-not-so-green-after-all/

Because carbon emissions are a surrogate for energy, it's reasonable to assume that, even if you are smart enough not to be worried about CO2 as a greenhouse gas, these things are not saving any energy, either.  But at least they are small, expensive and dangerous.

It's difficult not to give in to anger about the stupidity of the "electric car mania" but it also would not help anything or anyone, and it wouldn't 'unspend' all the wealth that's been destroyed by those in Congress, who, presumably, should have figured these kinds of things out before throwing our money at this dreamy eyed project. But of course - they don't actually care about whether or not the moeny they spend will result in a net benefit to the nation, they spend money based on political calculus.  That's why we're screwed.

More Unions, Fewer Employed

But two other factors are omitted from this narrative. The first is the price of labor. The Wagner Act, the great modern labor statute, became law in 1935. It made possible the closed shop, under which only unionized workers were allowed into a unit. In 1937, after Roosevelt was safely elected, labor leader John L. Lewis and his Congress of Industrial Organizations began using their new power to its full extent. Labor's tour de force in this period is memorialized in the photos we still recognize today of sit-down strikes at the General Motors Co. plant in Flint, Michigan. Strike days in 1937 totaled 28 million, up from 14 million during the election year.
Such labor stoppages, and the threat of more, led companies to raise wages more than they could afford to. Harold Cole of the University of Pennsylvania and Lee Ohanian of the University of California, Los Angeles, have demonstrated that wages in the latter half of the 1930s were well above trend for the entire century. Employers also hired less: Even as unionization increased, nonfarm unemployment did as well.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-06/what-paul-krugman-misses-about-1937-redux-echoes.html

This is nothing but common sense.  Anything that makes it more expensive to employ workers makes it less likely they will be hired.  If I could get my lawn mowed for $1, I'd never mow it again - but right now, my son won't even mow for the price I'm willing to pay so he's unemployed and I burn up an hour of my week on a mower. 

This is the effect of unions - fewer workers making more money, for a while; and "after a while" those higher paid union workers get pushed out of the marketplace by workers who provide more productivity than do their union competitors.  Exception - government employees, who rarely have to compete and those from places like Boeing and the big, old automakers who are protected from the folly of their abusurd contracts by their ability to buy off politicians.

Slower Than Slow

What was the secret to the outsized growth of the 19^th century, particularly its latter portion, the Gilded Age? There were great technological innovations and large population increases, to be sure – but these things came in the 20^th century as well. What was different back then was the absence of macroeconomic institutions.
There was no Federal Reserve, and there was no income tax – both would be created in 1913. Therefore, there were no instruments through which the government could conduct monetary or fiscal policy. Government’s role in shaping the economy was confined to regulating trade and enforcing contracts.
http://blogs.forbes.com/briandomitrovic/2011/06/07/back-on-the-road-to-serfdom-history-says-we-should-be-booming/

What?  You mean government might not be a help to economic growth?  And economic stalls were SMALLER before 1913?  So what is it that the Fed does to "help" things? 

What is to be done? As it happens, now on offer are serious suggestions in exactly this direction. Reps. Cantor and Ryan are both talking about capping the income tax at 25%, and there’s a new fascination globally with returning to the 19^th-century monetary system of the gold standard.
Dismissing these solutions, as the cognoscenti are prone to do, as reactionary, unrealistic, and not-quite-Ivy-League is to betray ignorance about the immense statics of American economic history. It’s in our sinews to grow at 5-6% per year. If we’re doing less, it’s because we’ve arrogated power to institutions that blunder around in the name of the public good.

McArdle's Summary of the Greek Default Dominos

After she summarizes another author's post, she summarizes her thoughts:

The most compelling argument against my belief that the euro can't last is simply that it's so . . . damn . . . hard to get out.  The country that does it will suffer immensely.

On the other hand, people do snap their currency pegs when they're already suffering a great deal.  And while the PIIGS are suffering now, that's nothing compared to what will happen if their economies stay in the slough of despond, and the governments and central banks of more solvent countries run out of money and/or patience to continue the subsidies they're now receiving.  

I've only been writing about finance for seven years, and I've already watched a bunch of "unthinkable' and "impossible" actions, from Argentina's devaluation and serial defaults, to my own government nationalizing GM.  The unthinkable gets thunk surprisingly often.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/what-a-greek-default-looks-like/239856/

This is the logical end of government control of an economy, as manifested through unions.  Guess who will be harmed the most?  Not the rich, they got out or covered their bets long ago.

Get That Monkey Of Your Back

In Monkeys on Our Backs, Richard Tokumei thoroughly explains how the policies endorsed by liberals, who believe in evolution, not only go against its principles, but, because they do, are doomed to failure.  Policies endorsed by conservatives, on the other hand and unbeknownst to them, are actually derived from the principles of evolution which they publicly denounce, and, because they are, they have a better chance of working than liberal policies.  The book is full of such astute observations, peppered with a sense of humor.
For someone who is not a scientist and has no background in evolutionary biology, Tokumei has a deep understanding of evolution and how it operates.  And he is able to express the fundamental principles of evolution very clearly.  In fact, Part One of the book, where he explains how evolution works, is simultaneously so accurate and so lucid that I believe it should be used as a biology textbook in junior high schools..
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201104/why-liberals-and-conservatives-are-both-wrong-about-evolut

This sounds like a great book!

Masters of The Meaningless

http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/22/harry-reid/reid-calls-nuclear-waste-issue-solved/
Scientists are now saying leave the nuclear waste where it is, in deep ground storage. And when I say deep ground, (I mean) 10 feet underground. The new nuclear power plants are going to be built, and it's terrific that the president stepped forward on this. I'm not against nuclear power. I'm against bringing nuclear waste to Nevada. Scientists say leave it where it is. That's what we have to do.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/22/harry-reid/reid-calls-nuclear-waste-issue-solved/
This is standard polspeak of course, but next time you hear a politician speak like this, won't you be thinking as I do:
-Which scientists? 
-How many? 
-What if 49 say "leave it where it is" and 48 say "move it to one location"? 
-What if the 49 who say "leave it" are conservative voters from near the Yucca mountains and the 48 who say "move it" are all liberals from states other than Nevada? 

In short, beware the politician who appeals to a faux authority.  Yes, faux authority is convenient for a fella that has to appear to know everything about everything - that's why we must distrust those who use it just as instinctively as they use it.

However, I'm going to find a scientist who says that we need to restore the constitution to it's historical limitations on the power of the federal government and introduce that guy to every politician I can find.

Trust Me, I'm a Journalist, A Professional

But anyone who read the open-access academic paper in PLoS One, titled "Beaked whales respond to simulated and actual navy sonar", would see that the study looked at sonar and didn't mention wind farms at all. At our most generous, the Telegraph story was a spectacular and bizarre exaggeration of a brief contextual aside about general levels of manmade sound in the ocean by one author at the end of the press release (titled "Whales 'scared' by sonars"). Now, I have higher expectations of academic institutions than media ones, but this release didn't mention wind farms, certainly didn't say they were "one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches", and anyone reading the press release could see that the study was about naval sonar.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/19/bad-science-ben-goldacre

Conclusion:  Author offers a common sense suggestion - "cite sources or I don't trust you."

The Unknown Becomes Known

The real and imagined Tokyo earthquakes are different events: The real earthquake, though more severe than the imagined one, dealt Tokyo only a glancing blow; the financial losses caused by the real quake so far don’t appear to be anything like $1 trillion; and back in 1988 no one considered the possibility of nuclear disaster.
The immediate financial-market response to the actual event is also, at best, a first cousin to the scenario imagined back in 1988. In the fictional catastrophe, the yen rose dramatically as the Japanese government and private insurers sold all sorts of non-yen assets to buy yen, and it is rising now, for instance.
But in the imagined scenario, the Japanese stock market rose in anticipation of a massive stimulus and a glorious economic future. Just now it is collapsing, spectacularly.
There’s a reason for the difference: The market has a lot less faith now than it did in 1988 in Japan’s economic future. The single biggest financial question to arise from the imagined scenario was: Just how screwed will the U.S. be when Japan asks for its money back? It now has been joined by another: just how screwed will Japan be when it reveals that it not only wants but needs its money back?
That is what leaps out at you from the comparison of the real catastrophe with the imagined one: how different the context has become. Back in 1988, it was hard to imagine Japan working from anything but a position of strength: high savings rates, massive trade surpluses, a booming economy and stock market. There was no question then that Japan would bounce back. Today, Japan feels almost doomed.

What Could Go Wrong?

Lessons from the long tail of improbable disaster

Indeed, it seems that when we conclude that the chance of something really bad happening is very small, we wind up taking actions that either increase the probability of the disaster or the damage that it will cause.
Once the rocket scientists on Wall Street, for example, concluded that it was virtually impossible for investors in so-called “mezzanine” tranches of mortgage-backed securities to lose money, it set off a chain of events that made the prediction untrue. The heavy demand for the securities led to dramatically lower lending standards and a sharp increase in housing prices, creating a bubble so large that when it burst, it caused heavy losses for those same mezzanine investors. The declaration that a particular investment was riskless became a self-negating prophecy.
Similarly, when the government builds a levee, it may reduce the frequency of damaging floods but may also encourage even more people to build homes and businesses behind the barrier. When the Big One finally arrives, the total damage will be even greater than if no levee had been built.