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Thursday, December 17, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
What I like about Republicans
From
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/12/gingrich-health-care-repeal/
Newt Gingrich:
"Copenhagen in it's current form is a fraud by the left around the world to take power away from people and give it to government and bureaucrats, and it is a combined effort by the bureaucrats and the academics to take power away from free people and turn them over to an international organization and it is going to be a disaster and we should be committed to not implementing Copenhagen in it's current form under any circumstances."
and then:
"if the left manages to drive through a bill which is opposed by 65 percent of the country on health care our commitment should be simple: the minute we get a majority we are repealing the whole thing." and then: "And I want every Democrat who is about to sacrifice their seat for socialized medicine to understand: after you lose your seat, you’re going to lose the socialized medicine too." Both quotes got hearty applause.
These are exactly the kind of things that the left is to cowardly to say in defense of their positions.
There is of course a grain of truth in the first Gingrich quote above. Global warming is a real problem but there *are* governments and bureaucracies who would exploit it simply as an excuse to seize various powers. What's good about Republicans is you can count on them to stand up to this. But lets change that quote to be about the recent war and see how wanting and cowardly to Democrats have been:
"An invasion of Iraq at this time is simply a ploy by the right wing and the military to take power away from people and give it to the government and military by plunging the country into an unnecessary war. War suits their domestic and foreign agenda, it strengthens them politically and themselves personally. This war is designed to take power away from free people and turn them over to a regime of fear for purely political reasons. It is going to be a disaster and we should be committed to not doing it under any circumstances."
But no Democrat of any stature had the courage to say that in 2003. Instead they rushed to vote in favor of the war so as to "get it off the table". Both statements are equally accurate. In both cases there are and were "true believers" who do and did actually believe in the cause - and there are powerful drivers of each who do so for strictly political purposes.
The GOP has the guts to come out and say it, the Democrats largely did not.
Also note the "never say die" attitude in the second Gingrich quote and contrast that with the typical lameness of the Democrats.
On both statements Gingrich might be at risk of being portrayed as outside the mainstream at the moment. Does that stop him? Does that frighten him? No.
Standing up the way he is now -when the wind is blowing in the other direction- is inspiring.
On the other side the Dems are being all bent around by one of their own (Joe Lieberman).
I'm not the only one to notice the dichotomy:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberals_are_useless_20091206/
If present trends continue expect big GOP gains next fall.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/12/gingrich-health-care-repeal/
Newt Gingrich:
"Copenhagen in it's current form is a fraud by the left around the world to take power away from people and give it to government and bureaucrats, and it is a combined effort by the bureaucrats and the academics to take power away from free people and turn them over to an international organization and it is going to be a disaster and we should be committed to not implementing Copenhagen in it's current form under any circumstances."
and then:
"if the left manages to drive through a bill which is opposed by 65 percent of the country on health care our commitment should be simple: the minute we get a majority we are repealing the whole thing." and then: "And I want every Democrat who is about to sacrifice their seat for socialized medicine to understand: after you lose your seat, you’re going to lose the socialized medicine too." Both quotes got hearty applause.
These are exactly the kind of things that the left is to cowardly to say in defense of their positions.
There is of course a grain of truth in the first Gingrich quote above. Global warming is a real problem but there *are* governments and bureaucracies who would exploit it simply as an excuse to seize various powers. What's good about Republicans is you can count on them to stand up to this. But lets change that quote to be about the recent war and see how wanting and cowardly to Democrats have been:
"An invasion of Iraq at this time is simply a ploy by the right wing and the military to take power away from people and give it to the government and military by plunging the country into an unnecessary war. War suits their domestic and foreign agenda, it strengthens them politically and themselves personally. This war is designed to take power away from free people and turn them over to a regime of fear for purely political reasons. It is going to be a disaster and we should be committed to not doing it under any circumstances."
But no Democrat of any stature had the courage to say that in 2003. Instead they rushed to vote in favor of the war so as to "get it off the table". Both statements are equally accurate. In both cases there are and were "true believers" who do and did actually believe in the cause - and there are powerful drivers of each who do so for strictly political purposes.
The GOP has the guts to come out and say it, the Democrats largely did not.
Also note the "never say die" attitude in the second Gingrich quote and contrast that with the typical lameness of the Democrats.
On both statements Gingrich might be at risk of being portrayed as outside the mainstream at the moment. Does that stop him? Does that frighten him? No.
Standing up the way he is now -when the wind is blowing in the other direction- is inspiring.
On the other side the Dems are being all bent around by one of their own (Joe Lieberman).
I'm not the only one to notice the dichotomy:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberals_are_useless_20091206/
If present trends continue expect big GOP gains next fall.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Mathematical illiteracy
Colts 35 Patriots 34
Score was Patriots 34 Colts 28 with slightly less than 2 minutes to go. Patriots have the ball on their own 28 and are on 4th down with 2 to go. They go for it, don't make it, the Colts take over and then score to win the game.
It seemed like a gamble and my first thought was that their chances would have been better punting - but given that man who made the decision was a professional football coach (and considered one of the smartest) I figured that there may be more to the story. There may be a reason. The reason was not hard to find:
http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/articles/2009/11/17/percentages_say_coach_made_the_right_call/
Finding that took about 2 minutes of searching. Statistics indicate that in that situation there was a better chance of winning the game by going for it on 4th down (79%) vs. punting (70%). OK, so it was not so stupid after all. Didn't work but not stupid.
Yet much of the media is filled with howls of outrage against this decision and the coach who made it (Bill Belichick) and much of the criticism seems oblivious to the statistics. It's like there are two utterly different planes of reasoning. Much of the sports media is just filled with hyperbolic "What was he thinking!?!?" stories. Stories filled with sarcasm, emotion and exaggeration. A few stories where the author colorfully claimed to have searched far and wide looking for a rationalle for the decision - but failed to find any. Bob Kravitz of IndyStar is typical. Concludes the the decision must have been based on "arrogance" and "hubris" because he can find no other explanation:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20091116/SPORTS15/911160369/1034/SPORTS15/Kravitz-Belichick-helps-Colts-win
The lead story in the Boston Herald sports section is titled "Brain Cramp."
Do these guys not know about the statistics or do they not care. Both? Are they playing to a public that is mathematically illiterate and does not especially like to be enlightened?
Some pundits even disparaged Belichick for "not playing the percentages" obviously ignorant as to what the percentages actually were!
OK, At first blush it does *seem* like the wrong decision and 'a gamble.' The thought process probably goes something like this: "if the 4th down conversion fails then the Patriots lose because the other team is deep their end and can score easily, but if the Patriots punt the Colts have to go practically the whole field so the Patriots will probably win, hence punting is the correct option."
That was my first thought.
But this just isn't accurate. You have to think things through like a chess game in order to see why the statistics back up the 4th down try:
- Making the 4th down means the Patriots can run out the clock and win.
- Failure to gain the first down does not guarantee a loss. A first and goal on the other teams 22 yard line does not always result in a score and even if it does:
- Scoring as a result of a drive from the opponents 22 yard line is likely to take less time than from farther away (after receiving the punt) and hence more likely to give the other team time to come back. In this case the Patriots would only have needed a field goal to win even after being scored on.
- Going 60 or 70 yards (what the Colts would have had to do) was more likely than it seemed because it was "4 down territory."
When these factors are considered and numbers run, the statistics show the best chance of winning in this particular situation came from attempting a 4th down conversion - and not punting. Two independent computer programs have come up with the same result. The first one is discussed above and the second is called Zeus:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20091117/SPORTS03/911170346/1058/SPORTS03/Opinions-vary-on-Belichick-s-decision
So it's a pretty open and shut case: the correct decision was to go for it on 4th down.
But the national sports media is overwhelming in in condemnation of the decision and the condemnation is largely emotional. "You know it's wrong", "In football you just don't do things like this." Some commentators have dug in their heels even in the face of clearly knowing the statistical evidence and just re-iterated their emotional arguments in the face of the math.
Part of it is that the decision is is easy to criticize because it didn't work out but there is something more going on here. The opposing camps are really occupying two different planes of reality. Dealing with truth in two very different ways. One looks for truth in the physical/mathematical sphere - and typically keeps an open mind, the other seeks to establish what I would describe as "social truth". It's the kind of truth based on "everybody says so" kind of reasoning. People do not seek this second kind of truth they aim to establish it. In the Patriots 4th down decision case, it is probably an example of an opportunity to trash someone many people didn't like. The decision looked bad at first blush and many don't like Bill Belichick. Hence there is an opportunity to construct a social truth that he screwed up. In this case it runs headlong into a more substantial mathematical truth that he made the correct decision. It's not a judgment call like drafting player X vs Y. There is clear math on the side of the decision. But that does not matter to people engaging in constructing social truths - which occupy a different plane of reality. In the social truth plane of reality if everybody says so, it's true. People engaged in constructing social truths typically use in heavy doses of emotion. Social truth is not necessarily at odds with physical/mathematical truth but it often is and in this case it is.
This truth dichotomy exists in many spheres other than football. I think it's an important distinction in the real world in many places.
In my opinion, this episode exposes (as if we need more evidence) American anti-intellectualism. I noted above that Bill Belichick is "not well liked". He isn't. He's considered one of the smartest coaches in football and probably one of the smartest of all time. Much of the sports media and fan base throughout the country does not like them man. If this was an isolated case you could chalk it up to factors other than intellect, but (sadly for America in my opinion) it's not an isolated case. The criticism of Bill Belichick bears a similarity to criticism of Al Gore who was trashed on a personal level vs. the "likable" -and obviously un-intellectual George W. Bush. Same thing with Mike Dukakis. The intellectual Republican of recent times has been Newt Gingrich. He got the same negative treatment. This is not limited to sports and politics. Unfortunately it goes pretty deep in America right now and Bill Belichick is just the latest "smart guy" to receive the ire of the American "yahoo" mobs.
Score was Patriots 34 Colts 28 with slightly less than 2 minutes to go. Patriots have the ball on their own 28 and are on 4th down with 2 to go. They go for it, don't make it, the Colts take over and then score to win the game.
It seemed like a gamble and my first thought was that their chances would have been better punting - but given that man who made the decision was a professional football coach (and considered one of the smartest) I figured that there may be more to the story. There may be a reason. The reason was not hard to find:
http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/articles/2009/11/17/percentages_say_coach_made_the_right_call/
Finding that took about 2 minutes of searching. Statistics indicate that in that situation there was a better chance of winning the game by going for it on 4th down (79%) vs. punting (70%). OK, so it was not so stupid after all. Didn't work but not stupid.
Yet much of the media is filled with howls of outrage against this decision and the coach who made it (Bill Belichick) and much of the criticism seems oblivious to the statistics. It's like there are two utterly different planes of reasoning. Much of the sports media is just filled with hyperbolic "What was he thinking!?!?" stories. Stories filled with sarcasm, emotion and exaggeration. A few stories where the author colorfully claimed to have searched far and wide looking for a rationalle for the decision - but failed to find any. Bob Kravitz of IndyStar is typical. Concludes the the decision must have been based on "arrogance" and "hubris" because he can find no other explanation:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20091116/SPORTS15/911160369/1034/SPORTS15/Kravitz-Belichick-helps-Colts-win
The lead story in the Boston Herald sports section is titled "Brain Cramp."
Do these guys not know about the statistics or do they not care. Both? Are they playing to a public that is mathematically illiterate and does not especially like to be enlightened?
Some pundits even disparaged Belichick for "not playing the percentages" obviously ignorant as to what the percentages actually were!
OK, At first blush it does *seem* like the wrong decision and 'a gamble.' The thought process probably goes something like this: "if the 4th down conversion fails then the Patriots lose because the other team is deep their end and can score easily, but if the Patriots punt the Colts have to go practically the whole field so the Patriots will probably win, hence punting is the correct option."
That was my first thought.
But this just isn't accurate. You have to think things through like a chess game in order to see why the statistics back up the 4th down try:
- Making the 4th down means the Patriots can run out the clock and win.
- Failure to gain the first down does not guarantee a loss. A first and goal on the other teams 22 yard line does not always result in a score and even if it does:
- Scoring as a result of a drive from the opponents 22 yard line is likely to take less time than from farther away (after receiving the punt) and hence more likely to give the other team time to come back. In this case the Patriots would only have needed a field goal to win even after being scored on.
- Going 60 or 70 yards (what the Colts would have had to do) was more likely than it seemed because it was "4 down territory."
When these factors are considered and numbers run, the statistics show the best chance of winning in this particular situation came from attempting a 4th down conversion - and not punting. Two independent computer programs have come up with the same result. The first one is discussed above and the second is called Zeus:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20091117/SPORTS03/911170346/1058/SPORTS03/Opinions-vary-on-Belichick-s-decision
So it's a pretty open and shut case: the correct decision was to go for it on 4th down.
But the national sports media is overwhelming in in condemnation of the decision and the condemnation is largely emotional. "You know it's wrong", "In football you just don't do things like this." Some commentators have dug in their heels even in the face of clearly knowing the statistical evidence and just re-iterated their emotional arguments in the face of the math.
Part of it is that the decision is is easy to criticize because it didn't work out but there is something more going on here. The opposing camps are really occupying two different planes of reality. Dealing with truth in two very different ways. One looks for truth in the physical/mathematical sphere - and typically keeps an open mind, the other seeks to establish what I would describe as "social truth". It's the kind of truth based on "everybody says so" kind of reasoning. People do not seek this second kind of truth they aim to establish it. In the Patriots 4th down decision case, it is probably an example of an opportunity to trash someone many people didn't like. The decision looked bad at first blush and many don't like Bill Belichick. Hence there is an opportunity to construct a social truth that he screwed up. In this case it runs headlong into a more substantial mathematical truth that he made the correct decision. It's not a judgment call like drafting player X vs Y. There is clear math on the side of the decision. But that does not matter to people engaging in constructing social truths - which occupy a different plane of reality. In the social truth plane of reality if everybody says so, it's true. People engaged in constructing social truths typically use in heavy doses of emotion. Social truth is not necessarily at odds with physical/mathematical truth but it often is and in this case it is.
This truth dichotomy exists in many spheres other than football. I think it's an important distinction in the real world in many places.
In my opinion, this episode exposes (as if we need more evidence) American anti-intellectualism. I noted above that Bill Belichick is "not well liked". He isn't. He's considered one of the smartest coaches in football and probably one of the smartest of all time. Much of the sports media and fan base throughout the country does not like them man. If this was an isolated case you could chalk it up to factors other than intellect, but (sadly for America in my opinion) it's not an isolated case. The criticism of Bill Belichick bears a similarity to criticism of Al Gore who was trashed on a personal level vs. the "likable" -and obviously un-intellectual George W. Bush. Same thing with Mike Dukakis. The intellectual Republican of recent times has been Newt Gingrich. He got the same negative treatment. This is not limited to sports and politics. Unfortunately it goes pretty deep in America right now and Bill Belichick is just the latest "smart guy" to receive the ire of the American "yahoo" mobs.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Wall Street Makes It Hard to Earn Legal Living
What follows hits the nail on the head. The bold/italics are mine:
Wall Street Makes It Hard to Earn Legal Living: Alice Schroeder
Commentary by Alice Schroeder
Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- A group of university students I spoke to recently asked if it was possible to make a living on Wall Street without compromising your values. I had to tell them no.
Wall Street has many decent, honorable people, but they work in a system that fundamentally compromises people’s ethics. The high pay is like an anesthetic that numbs you from feeling how you are being corrupted. Not only that, many honest people who work there would agree with an even more extreme statement: It’s hard to make a living legally on Wall Street.
The goal of investing is to get an edge, whereas the securities laws presume all investors should have the same information at once. If ever there was a recipe for a system rife with abuse, this is it. The harder that money managers, traders and analysts must work to get information that gives them that edge, the more likely some are to cross a legal line.
This week, Manhattan federal court dealt with a case of insider trading when Michael Koulouroudis pleaded guilty to charges that he traded on secret tips from UBS AG investment banker Nicos Stephanou, who previously took a guilty plea. Joseph Contorinis, a former money manager for Jefferies Group Inc.’s Paragon Fund, was indicted by a federal grand jury last week for his role in the scheme.
People who are looking from the outside at the Galleon hedge fund insider-trading case may also be thinking, “How could they have been so stupid?” Admittedly, naming the ringmaster “Octopussy” wasn’t the brightest move, yet the reason insider traders create networks to exchange illegal information isn’t because they are dumb. It is because so few money managers outperform market averages over time.
Not Enough Alpha
There is only so much alpha -- that excess return above a baseline average -- to be had in an efficient market. The incentive to create some artificial alpha one way or another is very high. Those who bend the rules successfully post good numbers, which adds to pressure on other Wall Streeters to push the gray boundaries of legal information flow.
One had to wonder if that’s what happened when the volume of 3Com Corp. call options surged to the highest level since September 2007 before Hewlett Packard Co. said it would buy the computer-networking equipment maker for $2.7 billion this week.
Investors also form an “us against them” mentality of sleuthing by whatever means is necessary to counter the stonewalling and obfuscation of company executives. A lot of inappropriate blabbing on Wall Street takes place by people who are outraged at some atrocity that is being committed by a company whose stock is overvalued.
Lying Managers
The tippees feel self-righteous about using the information, no matter how it was obtained. They see themselves as leveling a playing field skewed by lying company managers who are aided and abetted by cynical investment bankers and invertebrate analysts who (still) do bankers’ bidding out of concern for their careers.
Beyond that, big money managers feel entitled to even more information by virtue of clout: the first phone call from analysts; a heads-up that a salesperson thinks a downgrade on a stock may be coming; preference in a hot banking deal. This is simple economics. It goes without saying (because it can’t be publicly acknowledged) that the millions of dollars of business that an institutional client is doing with an investment bank means they will be treated much better than a small retail client who is paying a 1 percent wrap fee on a $50,000 account.
The better class of financial advisers tries to make up for this crooked system with creativity and pride in the way they serve their clients. They resist pressure from their employers to sell products only because they are profitable.
Over Legal Line
They have another, bigger problem, the same one faced by the large institutions. There is only so much alpha to be had in the market, and they are chasing it along with everybody else.
The aggregate number of people trying to carve fees out of investor returns simply overwhelms the potential gains for stockholders. It is this oversupply of overhead that creates so much pressure to cross the legal line.
Victims of their own success, the banks have severely aggravated this situation by going public, then taking on too many masters to “diversify” earnings: institutional money managers, retail investors, investment-banking clients, prime brokerage clients, “financial sponsors” (private-equity and buyout funds), their own asset-management arms, and proprietary traders. It is all but impossible for people at investment banks to serve all these clients -- whose interests conflict -- while doing their real job: to satisfy the quarterly earnings expectations of the banks’ investors.
Incentives to Cheat
Breaking up the banks into their constituent parts and forcing them to return to privately funded partnerships might reduce the apparatus that provides all parties with the incentives to cheat.
Even in the very unlikely case that this happened, it would still leave a shortage of alpha. As long as working on Wall Street is the most prestigious and financially rewarding job in the U.S., too many mouths will show up every morning to be fed.
Here, I sense a breath of change in the air. Kids who left college to import crafts made by women war refugees in Sudan are beginning to be envied by junior bankers who toil 80 hours a week creating spreadsheets. That’s a trend to be encouraged.
Aspiring young bankers and hedge-fund managers, be assured of this: The more of you who choose to import crafts from Sudan, the easier the rest of you will find it to make a living legally on Wall Street.
(Alice Schroeder, author of “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this column: Alice Schroeder at aliceschroeder@ymail.com.
Last Updated: November 12, 2009 21:00 EST
Wall Street Makes It Hard to Earn Legal Living: Alice Schroeder
Commentary by Alice Schroeder
Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- A group of university students I spoke to recently asked if it was possible to make a living on Wall Street without compromising your values. I had to tell them no.
Wall Street has many decent, honorable people, but they work in a system that fundamentally compromises people’s ethics. The high pay is like an anesthetic that numbs you from feeling how you are being corrupted. Not only that, many honest people who work there would agree with an even more extreme statement: It’s hard to make a living legally on Wall Street.
The goal of investing is to get an edge, whereas the securities laws presume all investors should have the same information at once. If ever there was a recipe for a system rife with abuse, this is it. The harder that money managers, traders and analysts must work to get information that gives them that edge, the more likely some are to cross a legal line.
This week, Manhattan federal court dealt with a case of insider trading when Michael Koulouroudis pleaded guilty to charges that he traded on secret tips from UBS AG investment banker Nicos Stephanou, who previously took a guilty plea. Joseph Contorinis, a former money manager for Jefferies Group Inc.’s Paragon Fund, was indicted by a federal grand jury last week for his role in the scheme.
People who are looking from the outside at the Galleon hedge fund insider-trading case may also be thinking, “How could they have been so stupid?” Admittedly, naming the ringmaster “Octopussy” wasn’t the brightest move, yet the reason insider traders create networks to exchange illegal information isn’t because they are dumb. It is because so few money managers outperform market averages over time.
Not Enough Alpha
There is only so much alpha -- that excess return above a baseline average -- to be had in an efficient market. The incentive to create some artificial alpha one way or another is very high. Those who bend the rules successfully post good numbers, which adds to pressure on other Wall Streeters to push the gray boundaries of legal information flow.
One had to wonder if that’s what happened when the volume of 3Com Corp. call options surged to the highest level since September 2007 before Hewlett Packard Co. said it would buy the computer-networking equipment maker for $2.7 billion this week.
Investors also form an “us against them” mentality of sleuthing by whatever means is necessary to counter the stonewalling and obfuscation of company executives. A lot of inappropriate blabbing on Wall Street takes place by people who are outraged at some atrocity that is being committed by a company whose stock is overvalued.
Lying Managers
The tippees feel self-righteous about using the information, no matter how it was obtained. They see themselves as leveling a playing field skewed by lying company managers who are aided and abetted by cynical investment bankers and invertebrate analysts who (still) do bankers’ bidding out of concern for their careers.
Beyond that, big money managers feel entitled to even more information by virtue of clout: the first phone call from analysts; a heads-up that a salesperson thinks a downgrade on a stock may be coming; preference in a hot banking deal. This is simple economics. It goes without saying (because it can’t be publicly acknowledged) that the millions of dollars of business that an institutional client is doing with an investment bank means they will be treated much better than a small retail client who is paying a 1 percent wrap fee on a $50,000 account.
The better class of financial advisers tries to make up for this crooked system with creativity and pride in the way they serve their clients. They resist pressure from their employers to sell products only because they are profitable.
Over Legal Line
They have another, bigger problem, the same one faced by the large institutions. There is only so much alpha to be had in the market, and they are chasing it along with everybody else.
The aggregate number of people trying to carve fees out of investor returns simply overwhelms the potential gains for stockholders. It is this oversupply of overhead that creates so much pressure to cross the legal line.
Victims of their own success, the banks have severely aggravated this situation by going public, then taking on too many masters to “diversify” earnings: institutional money managers, retail investors, investment-banking clients, prime brokerage clients, “financial sponsors” (private-equity and buyout funds), their own asset-management arms, and proprietary traders. It is all but impossible for people at investment banks to serve all these clients -- whose interests conflict -- while doing their real job: to satisfy the quarterly earnings expectations of the banks’ investors.
Incentives to Cheat
Breaking up the banks into their constituent parts and forcing them to return to privately funded partnerships might reduce the apparatus that provides all parties with the incentives to cheat.
Even in the very unlikely case that this happened, it would still leave a shortage of alpha. As long as working on Wall Street is the most prestigious and financially rewarding job in the U.S., too many mouths will show up every morning to be fed.
Here, I sense a breath of change in the air. Kids who left college to import crafts made by women war refugees in Sudan are beginning to be envied by junior bankers who toil 80 hours a week creating spreadsheets. That’s a trend to be encouraged.
Aspiring young bankers and hedge-fund managers, be assured of this: The more of you who choose to import crafts from Sudan, the easier the rest of you will find it to make a living legally on Wall Street.
(Alice Schroeder, author of “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this column: Alice Schroeder at aliceschroeder@ymail.com.
Last Updated: November 12, 2009 21:00 EST
Monday, November 9, 2009
So close and yet so far
I stumbled on a link to a talk given by someone named David Icke today.
In my opinion he really hit the nail on the head with part of what he was saying but -in my opinion- was pretty far from reality on other things.
His basic message:
a) People are controlled and manipulated by fear to serve an agenda that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Conflict is manufactured to generate a mindset that factors out higher level thought, creativity, and wisdom from the minds of most of us and puts us in a subservient and exploitable position.
so far so good.
b) He claims that a group of "reptilian" beings connected with Aliens, The Illuminati, jews, royal families etc. is behind this and has been 'pulling the strings' for thousands of years.
Fruit loops.
OK so here's my opinion: humans have been more often than not controlled by fear for essentially our entire existence. Controlled by the few at the expense of the many. By fear. But I really don't think external "boogeymen" are involved. No aliens, no Illuminati (in the sense of world control), the jews are not behind it, nor royal families.
It's just us. Doing it to ourselves. I think fear based control of the many for the benefit of the few is an emergent property of human existence. Some people find themselves in positions to exploit fear for their advantage and they do it. From Ancient rulers to Dick Cheney.
We are perpetually exploitable by fear because our brains are wired for fear having "trump card" power over other brain functions. See "The Three Pound Universe" by Judith Hooper for a great explanation of this wiring. The human brain's wiring evolved this way because during our evolution it was important for our survival. If we were digging out a mud hut or discussing where the buffalo were moving it was important that we drop that to deal with the Sabre tooth tiger lurking in the bushes. Fear needed to have trump card status in the brain or we were going to get eaten.
"The Three Pound Universe" goes into detail about how the higher functions of the brain are shut down by fear. Reason, abstract thought, complex language all fly out the window.
If you want to control people against their own interests it's essential to use fear. When fear is used strategically people will be unable to reason through what is being done to them. I think this has been known by power hungry people since the dawn of time. What evolved as a defense mechanism in the natural world is now exploited in the social context.
Why do people like Icke seem to get half of this right (control using fear) but don't get the other half right. IE that it's just us controlling each other as opposed to some over the top external force. Why the need for a grand conspiracy. I think the idea that we let other mere mortals control us this way just makes us feel bad about ourselves and we reject it. If this is engineered by other normal flesh and blood people then what does that say about us, who submit to it. What does that say about our country, our city, our family. It says were not all that we think we are. It says we are really kind of pathetic. We don't want to be pathetic.
But if our condition is the result of a grand conspiracy of aliens, Illuminati, royals and well placed jews then our condition is is not so sad. It's a bad position but not a sad and pathetic position. It's understandable. "Gee, given all that our condition might be even worse!" And we can get involved in a heroic struggle to overthrow our tormentors! Now we are feeling better about ourselves.
Similar in my opinion, is the conspiracy stuff surrounding the assassination of JFK. Despite there being no credible evidence emerging in 45 years of looking, many (most?) choose to believe that it was a conspiracy as opposed to Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. People just don't want to believe that the world is so chaotic and capricious that a nobody, a dreg of a human being acting alone could kill the most powerful man on the planet and change the world. We don't want to live in such a world. Such an arbitrary and uncontrolled world. So we insist on grand conspiracies to make the equation add up in our heads.
If you look at what is called "progress" - social progress, technological progress, etc. it's based overwhelmingly on reason. The Manga Carta, the Declaration of Independence, Calculus and so on. So reason does intrude into the regime of fear but in my opinion the journey forward has just begun. Fear still trumps reason in relations between nations. The league of nations/united nations has so far gained little traction. They have been irritants to those who want to exploit fear to start wars but no more. The few control this world economically and do so largely at the expense of the rest of us. There is no such thing as "corporate democracy" at the moment.
A small slice of goodness (based on reason) has been carved out with a lot of effort and bloodshed but the journey is at an early stage.
In my opinion he really hit the nail on the head with part of what he was saying but -in my opinion- was pretty far from reality on other things.
His basic message:
a) People are controlled and manipulated by fear to serve an agenda that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Conflict is manufactured to generate a mindset that factors out higher level thought, creativity, and wisdom from the minds of most of us and puts us in a subservient and exploitable position.
so far so good.
b) He claims that a group of "reptilian" beings connected with Aliens, The Illuminati, jews, royal families etc. is behind this and has been 'pulling the strings' for thousands of years.
Fruit loops.
OK so here's my opinion: humans have been more often than not controlled by fear for essentially our entire existence. Controlled by the few at the expense of the many. By fear. But I really don't think external "boogeymen" are involved. No aliens, no Illuminati (in the sense of world control), the jews are not behind it, nor royal families.
It's just us. Doing it to ourselves. I think fear based control of the many for the benefit of the few is an emergent property of human existence. Some people find themselves in positions to exploit fear for their advantage and they do it. From Ancient rulers to Dick Cheney.
We are perpetually exploitable by fear because our brains are wired for fear having "trump card" power over other brain functions. See "The Three Pound Universe" by Judith Hooper for a great explanation of this wiring. The human brain's wiring evolved this way because during our evolution it was important for our survival. If we were digging out a mud hut or discussing where the buffalo were moving it was important that we drop that to deal with the Sabre tooth tiger lurking in the bushes. Fear needed to have trump card status in the brain or we were going to get eaten.
"The Three Pound Universe" goes into detail about how the higher functions of the brain are shut down by fear. Reason, abstract thought, complex language all fly out the window.
If you want to control people against their own interests it's essential to use fear. When fear is used strategically people will be unable to reason through what is being done to them. I think this has been known by power hungry people since the dawn of time. What evolved as a defense mechanism in the natural world is now exploited in the social context.
Why do people like Icke seem to get half of this right (control using fear) but don't get the other half right. IE that it's just us controlling each other as opposed to some over the top external force. Why the need for a grand conspiracy. I think the idea that we let other mere mortals control us this way just makes us feel bad about ourselves and we reject it. If this is engineered by other normal flesh and blood people then what does that say about us, who submit to it. What does that say about our country, our city, our family. It says were not all that we think we are. It says we are really kind of pathetic. We don't want to be pathetic.
But if our condition is the result of a grand conspiracy of aliens, Illuminati, royals and well placed jews then our condition is is not so sad. It's a bad position but not a sad and pathetic position. It's understandable. "Gee, given all that our condition might be even worse!" And we can get involved in a heroic struggle to overthrow our tormentors! Now we are feeling better about ourselves.
Similar in my opinion, is the conspiracy stuff surrounding the assassination of JFK. Despite there being no credible evidence emerging in 45 years of looking, many (most?) choose to believe that it was a conspiracy as opposed to Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. People just don't want to believe that the world is so chaotic and capricious that a nobody, a dreg of a human being acting alone could kill the most powerful man on the planet and change the world. We don't want to live in such a world. Such an arbitrary and uncontrolled world. So we insist on grand conspiracies to make the equation add up in our heads.
If you look at what is called "progress" - social progress, technological progress, etc. it's based overwhelmingly on reason. The Manga Carta, the Declaration of Independence, Calculus and so on. So reason does intrude into the regime of fear but in my opinion the journey forward has just begun. Fear still trumps reason in relations between nations. The league of nations/united nations has so far gained little traction. They have been irritants to those who want to exploit fear to start wars but no more. The few control this world economically and do so largely at the expense of the rest of us. There is no such thing as "corporate democracy" at the moment.
A small slice of goodness (based on reason) has been carved out with a lot of effort and bloodshed but the journey is at an early stage.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
What we pay for
From "Celebs shell out big bucks for security"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/06/celebrity.security.costs/index.html
"This week, rapper 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, admitted that he spends $20,000 a week on security at his Farmington, Connecticut, mansion."
and
"That cost can rise by a premium of $20,000 a month the second a celebrity stalker enters the equation."
Seems like there might be an easy way for security companies to jack up revenue if they ever get into a pinch: invent a stalker. I'm only half joking here.
This article illuminates some of pathologies in our society. And we are not lacking for pathologies at present are we.
The Wikipedia entry for him reports that:
- "50 Cent is one of the richest hip-hop performers, having a net worth estimated at US $440 million in 2008.
- Born in South Jamaica, Queens, 50 Cent began drug dealing at the age of twelve during the 1980s crack epidemic.[3] After leaving drug dealing to pursue a rap career, he was shot at and struck by nine bullets during an incident in 2000. After releasing
- On June 29, 1994, Jackson was arrested for helping to sell four vials of cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was arrested again three weeks later when police searched his home and found heroin, ten ounces of crack cocaine, and a starter gun.
His music glorifies violence, talks a lot about money for the sake of money and like most rap is filled with misogyny. You can listen to his first big hit here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/How_To_Rob.ogg
He made movie called "Get Rich or Die Tryin"
Basically he started out as a criminal selling drugs (and not just pot but crack cocaine) and has made quite a bit of money for himself in glorifying the criminal lifestyle. He's not alone. Is he a good entertainer? I guess so,when you listen to his stuff (and that or others like him), it's like the "id" run riot, like the call of the wild and there is a certain appeal to that, but that's not my point here.
My point is that regardless of what we say we want our kids to do and grow up to be, this is what we pay for. We may say we want our kids to say in school and acquire skills and so for forth but that's just talk. 50 cent has 440 million dollars. We get what we pay for. Our urban school systems are in chaos with violence and drugs are rampant. 100 school kids shot down in Chicago last year. We get what we pay for. We pay athletes millions per year and guys like 50 can accumulate fortunes. Kids in inner city schools overwhelmingly tell us they want to be rappers and professional athletes. We get what we pay for.
Are people in this country really surprised at how criminal, hoodlum, violent and corrupt we are? We get what we pay for.
And even if you cannot make to to the 50 cent level, there is a lot of money to be made in protecting people like him. From the aforementioned article: "..paying each security guard between $500 and $1,000 a day while away from home." That rate comes to between $135000 and $270000 per year. That's a lot better than McDonalds. In fact, that's a lot better than being an accountant. And there no college degree required and no crushing student loans to worry about.
As has been noted by numerous CEO's, pundits and others defending huge salaries for CEOs and Wall Street traders and such: income is a means of keeping score and keeping score is important in capitalism (and in life). The process of keeping score helps to keep people motivated and focused and informs them of whether or not they are doing the right things.
Come down to any inner city Chicago public school and take a look. We get what we pay for.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/06/celebrity.security.costs/index.html
"This week, rapper 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, admitted that he spends $20,000 a week on security at his Farmington, Connecticut, mansion."
and
"That cost can rise by a premium of $20,000 a month the second a celebrity stalker enters the equation."
Seems like there might be an easy way for security companies to jack up revenue if they ever get into a pinch: invent a stalker. I'm only half joking here.
This article illuminates some of pathologies in our society. And we are not lacking for pathologies at present are we.
The Wikipedia entry for him reports that:
- "50 Cent is one of the richest hip-hop performers, having a net worth estimated at US $440 million in 2008.
- Born in South Jamaica, Queens, 50 Cent began drug dealing at the age of twelve during the 1980s crack epidemic.[3] After leaving drug dealing to pursue a rap career, he was shot at and struck by nine bullets during an incident in 2000. After releasing
- On June 29, 1994, Jackson was arrested for helping to sell four vials of cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was arrested again three weeks later when police searched his home and found heroin, ten ounces of crack cocaine, and a starter gun.
His music glorifies violence, talks a lot about money for the sake of money and like most rap is filled with misogyny. You can listen to his first big hit here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/How_To_Rob.ogg
He made movie called "Get Rich or Die Tryin"
Basically he started out as a criminal selling drugs (and not just pot but crack cocaine) and has made quite a bit of money for himself in glorifying the criminal lifestyle. He's not alone. Is he a good entertainer? I guess so,when you listen to his stuff (and that or others like him), it's like the "id" run riot, like the call of the wild and there is a certain appeal to that, but that's not my point here.
My point is that regardless of what we say we want our kids to do and grow up to be, this is what we pay for. We may say we want our kids to say in school and acquire skills and so for forth but that's just talk. 50 cent has 440 million dollars. We get what we pay for. Our urban school systems are in chaos with violence and drugs are rampant. 100 school kids shot down in Chicago last year. We get what we pay for. We pay athletes millions per year and guys like 50 can accumulate fortunes. Kids in inner city schools overwhelmingly tell us they want to be rappers and professional athletes. We get what we pay for.
Are people in this country really surprised at how criminal, hoodlum, violent and corrupt we are? We get what we pay for.
And even if you cannot make to to the 50 cent level, there is a lot of money to be made in protecting people like him. From the aforementioned article: "..paying each security guard between $500 and $1,000 a day while away from home." That rate comes to between $135000 and $270000 per year. That's a lot better than McDonalds. In fact, that's a lot better than being an accountant. And there no college degree required and no crushing student loans to worry about.
As has been noted by numerous CEO's, pundits and others defending huge salaries for CEOs and Wall Street traders and such: income is a means of keeping score and keeping score is important in capitalism (and in life). The process of keeping score helps to keep people motivated and focused and informs them of whether or not they are doing the right things.
Come down to any inner city Chicago public school and take a look. We get what we pay for.
Friday, October 30, 2009
How to solve to big to fail
We have been in a conundrum recently because some institutions have been deemed "to big to fail" and hence received government bailout money even though they were some of the very same institutions that created the problems in the first place.
Some have argued that they should have been allowed to fail.
Others have argued that if they had been the economy would have tanked, there would have been massive dislocations and unemployment.
I'm inclined to believe the latter. I'm inclined to believe that there was no choice. And it's water under the bridge anyway.
But what about next time.
An easy solution would be to make sure that no one is to big to fail in the first place. Isn't it a market failure if anyone is to big to fail? In a competitive market someone would be there to step in if another failed. So why didn't they just let Ban of America and Goldman Sachs go down. The reason is that they do not operate in a competitive market. To get technical the market they are in is oligopolical. Which is a market or industry "dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists). "
The easy solution is to break them up. And it would be easy. The market here tends toward oligopoly but does not need to be that way.
Goldman Sachs is primarily an investment bank. From Wikipedia:
An investment bank is a financial institution that raises capital, trades in securities and manages corporate mergers and acquisitions. Investment banks profit from companies and governments by raising money through issuing and selling securities in capital markets (both equity, debt) and insuring bonds (e.g. selling credit default swaps), as well as providing advice on transactions such as mergers and acquisitions. A majority of investment banks offer strategic advisory services for mergers, acquisitions, divestiture or other financial services for clients, such as the trading of derivatives, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodity, and equity securities.
Providing advice, raising money, issuing bonds. Mergers and Acquisitions. None of these things are naturally monopolies. Quite the opposite. We want competition in this space. Competition is multiple competitors, not one giant (Goldman Sachs currently) who dominates.
Goldman gets an enormous social (and monetary!) windfall from having all the key players in their space under their roof. They have the connections to Washington DC. They make the rules. At least that's the perception. Plus if things are about to blow up, Goldman is to big to fail and hence has an implicit government guarantee and that implicit government guarantee is well almost priceless.
The big loser is everybody else. You. Me. Any company that wants to raise money in the capital markets or engage in M&A or anything else like that will have to either a) Go through Goldman and pay through the nose. or b) go with a bit player with no name and no implicit government guarantee of being around.
But what if Goldman was broken up into 10 or 15 different pieces who competed against each other (and against the other current bit players in the space). I think things would be far far better. The energy of the resulting players would be spent on competition instead of on manipulating and controlling Washington DC and on protecting and expanding monopoly profits (which is what they do now).
Some have argued that they should have been allowed to fail.
Others have argued that if they had been the economy would have tanked, there would have been massive dislocations and unemployment.
I'm inclined to believe the latter. I'm inclined to believe that there was no choice. And it's water under the bridge anyway.
But what about next time.
An easy solution would be to make sure that no one is to big to fail in the first place. Isn't it a market failure if anyone is to big to fail? In a competitive market someone would be there to step in if another failed. So why didn't they just let Ban of America and Goldman Sachs go down. The reason is that they do not operate in a competitive market. To get technical the market they are in is oligopolical. Which is a market or industry "dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists). "
The easy solution is to break them up. And it would be easy. The market here tends toward oligopoly but does not need to be that way.
Goldman Sachs is primarily an investment bank. From Wikipedia:
An investment bank is a financial institution that raises capital, trades in securities and manages corporate mergers and acquisitions. Investment banks profit from companies and governments by raising money through issuing and selling securities in capital markets (both equity, debt) and insuring bonds (e.g. selling credit default swaps), as well as providing advice on transactions such as mergers and acquisitions. A majority of investment banks offer strategic advisory services for mergers, acquisitions, divestiture or other financial services for clients, such as the trading of derivatives, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodity, and equity securities.
Providing advice, raising money, issuing bonds. Mergers and Acquisitions. None of these things are naturally monopolies. Quite the opposite. We want competition in this space. Competition is multiple competitors, not one giant (Goldman Sachs currently) who dominates.
Goldman gets an enormous social (and monetary!) windfall from having all the key players in their space under their roof. They have the connections to Washington DC. They make the rules. At least that's the perception. Plus if things are about to blow up, Goldman is to big to fail and hence has an implicit government guarantee and that implicit government guarantee is well almost priceless.
The big loser is everybody else. You. Me. Any company that wants to raise money in the capital markets or engage in M&A or anything else like that will have to either a) Go through Goldman and pay through the nose. or b) go with a bit player with no name and no implicit government guarantee of being around.
But what if Goldman was broken up into 10 or 15 different pieces who competed against each other (and against the other current bit players in the space). I think things would be far far better. The energy of the resulting players would be spent on competition instead of on manipulating and controlling Washington DC and on protecting and expanding monopoly profits (which is what they do now).
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Lets open emergency 0% loans to everyone next time
In late 2008 we needed to infuse lots of capital into the likes of AIG, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs because there was no other way to stop collapse.
Maybe we should create "another way" so next time (and there will be a next time) the engineers of the problem are not in control of the choke points and therefore in position to reap yet another big payday when things blow up. Which is what just happened.
We know that Goldman (and a few others) were extended the privilege of borrowing money from the Federal Reserve bank at close to 0% and this privilege was extended as a way to get money flowing into the banking system. Goldman's latest profit numbers show they made a huge amount of money "trading". Some of that "trading" was just borrowing at 0% from the fed and buying bonds or stocks yielding something. To make money when you can borrow at 0% is child's play.
So why not have an emergency plan in place that gives 0% access to federal reserve money to all Americans. It may sound impractical but it's not. And the benefits would be largely the same as funneling the 0% borrowing through the Goldmans of the world: money would flow into the banking system. The big difference is that no one would be in a position to reap a windfall by controlling the choke point(s) - as Goldman clearly has.
According to http://cop.senate.gov/reports/library/report-040709-cop.cfm " as of April of this year, "the fed extended 1.5 trillion in loans in conjunction with the financial stabilization activities"
That is $5000 for every person in America.
Wouldn't it be better if the fed had just lent that money to individuals directly? The very same effect would be achieved. At present they can't do it because the mechanism is not in place. In a crisis you have to act fast and use whatever mechanisms are available. It just so happens that the Goldmans and Bank Of America's of the world made sure that they had the kind access to the fed that put them in position to reap the windfall.
It would be very easy to create an emergency plan that would allow *anyone* to borrow at 0% from the fed next time. And as I said above there will be a next time.
All you have to do is sell deeply discounted Treasury securities online. Right now anyone can purchase treasury securities online from treasurydirect.gov.
In a financial emergency like last fall they could be deeply discounted and there is your lending.
Perhaps a $5000 note could be purchased for $1 and you owe $4999 to the Federal Government which will be paid via an increase of $4999 in your tax burden over the next 3-5 years. In other words you are borrowing $4999 interest free and get the 'loan' immediately by purchasing the discounted note.
There would of course have to be limits or the Goldmans and Bank of America's would just swoop in and buy up the entire allotment of discounted securities before average joe had finished his cup of coffee. Maybe a limit of 10,000 per borrower or something like that would be in order.
If you can buy a security for 1$ you pretty much open it up to anyone.
Planetary engineering
I was watching "20/20" last night with some friends and they were talking with Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures. The segment "Can a garden hose stop global warming" (http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8904740) elicited what I have found to be typical responses to these kinds of ideas. "Every time we try to change the planet for the better it never works," "Every time humans try to improve things like this it's always a disaster," "The world is to complicated, we can never understand the entirety of it all and whenever we mess with things like this there are always unintended consequences that end up making things worse"
But here's the thing - humans have never tried large scale global engineering like this (purely to make things better). Never. The large scale engineering that has been done so far has been been either to make money, provide humans with protection from the elements or for military purposes. And they typically worked in so far as doing what they were designed to.
The re-engineering of much of the Everglades (which wiped out much of the Everglades) was done in order to create arable land so sugar growers and orange growers could make money. Damming of rivers is done either for flood control (protecting humans) or to generate electricity - IE to make money. Floods are limited and electricity is generated. Dams generally work. The great wall of china was created for military purposes. China has never been overrun. Many swamps have been drained worldwide to either create arable land, protect humans from mosquito born illness or even to create cities (Chicago for example). Humans did these things for the benefit of themselves . Thoughts of global scale engineering for the benefit of the planet as a whole are an entirely recent phenomenon. Only recently has mankind acknowledged that he is creating global scale problems and only recently has mankind achieved the engineering skills to contemplate global scale solutions. Only recently has mankind started to wisely realize that a) his fate is very much tied to the planet and b) his actions have become big and consequential enough to cause real damage.
We have attempted small scale engineering in order to generally improve some aspect of the environment around us and so far our efforts seem to have generally worked. Fish ladders alongside dams, the cleanup of Boston harbor, various remediation projects. There have been unintended consequences but none that have been catastrophic. Generally these efforts have worked well.
But the really big things humans have done so far in our history are exclusively selfish and it seems that it will be genuinely tragic if selfish destruction of the environment is largely tolerated but attempts to undo or fix what we have broken are rejected.
We are tolerating massive selfish destruction of course. It's becoming rapidly clear that mining the tar sands in Canada for oil is an environmental disaster of epic proportions. But we need the oil we say. We need the oil for our "way of life."
So we tolerate the large scale experiment of ripping up much of the tundra in Alberta to fuel our SUVs and we tolerate various massive global experiments - replacing millions of acres of prairie in North America with industrial non sustaining farms, large scale ocean fishing that has decimated world fish stocks, releasing billings of tons of CO2 from our tailpipes and smokestacks each year. We tolerate numerous global experiments - as long as they are for selfish purposes.
In my opinion it will be genuinely tragic if we do not even entertain ideals on how to fix the damage we are doing.
BTW one of my friends who was arguing against the garden hose drove back home in his SUV.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
The REAL key to success
Success is often presented as going to those who work harder, have an innovative idea and best of all work hard, and have the innovative idea at just the right time. OK, so there is a little bit of luck involved.
Biographies of very successful people often have a theme somewhat like this: "he came up with a great idea", and then "he came up with another great idea", and maybe "he beat the competition yet again", leading to perhaps: "after 3 failed attempts at BIG success the time was finally right". Read: perseverance can eventually get you the "luck" needed. Read: you could have done this to if you just had the drive and gumption.
But I'm pretty convinced that reality is not so nice and neat.
A recent interview in the Wall Street Journal with Reid Hoffman (creator of LinkedIn) sheds a little light on what the real key(s) to success often are in my opinion.
At the very top of the interview it states:
"In May 2003, the former Apple Inc. and PayPal executive launched LinkedIn out of his living room, inviting 350 of his contacts to join his network and create their own profiles. By the end of that month, LinkedIn had 4,500 members."
and a bit down the page:
"I didn't know any VCs, but I knew people who knew VCs. They referred me, saying: "This is a bright young kid coming out of Stanford/Oxford – could you give him a little bit of your time?" Lots of people contact VCs out of the blue; the referrals distinguished me from some crazy person."
The naive analysis of the early LinkedIn growth would probably go like this " LinkedIn had 4500 members after a month because Reid Hoffman had created a better product and had created a product that that people liked to use.", maybe "It had features for...", and probably "no one else had one key feature in particular." maybe ending with "users liked LinkedIn's [fill in the blank] feature(s) and they told their friends."
The naive analysis of his VC connections would probably be that they didn't really matter that much - maybe without them it would have taken him a bit more time to get LinkedIn (and his other projects) going but we know he would have gotten them going because we know he has the goods and the proof is out there in the real world with 50 million LinkedIn members. 50 million people can't be wrong.
But here is the thing. Social network sites are technically not that difficult to create. A reasonably competent programmer/web developer could probably create one on several weeks.
So this leads me to another theory entirely. Perhaps the key to LinkedIn's early growth was Hoffmans ability to influence others and Hoffmans reputation. Perhaps that often trumps product details. Perhaps LinkedIns grew from 350 to 4500 members in a month because Reid Hoffman had established a reputation as powerful or influential person and other people wanted to be linked to him. Perhaps in the beginning LinkedIn was just a mechanism to be linked to Reid Hoffman.
The key then if this is correct (and I think it is in some markets at some times) is to establish a reputation and generate a following.
I think the business press all to often anthropomorphize product features into the "key" to success of a product and underplay the value of the reputation and connectedness of the owners of the product. I suspect the analysis of LinkedIn that I have read is an example of this.
A fascinating case study is the growth of Google. At the time of Google's initial important growth, there were many competitors (Alta-Vista, HotBot, Infoseek, Yahoo, and many others). Many were doing the exact same things that Google was doing (page rankings of some sort or another). Many seemed to be well funded and well connected. The space was hot. But Google won the PR and influence game hands down. Google clearly managed to convince much of the VC communiuty and the press that "we are going to win" and "we have the momentum."
At a time (lets say 1998-2002 or so) when Google was just one of many search competitors they managed to convince key people in their space that they and they alone were "it". The momentum gained then has never been relinquished. But how did they gain it in the first place. I guess you would call that it the science of influence. Note: Google has clearly built great products over the years but a great product built by them in 2004 does not help them in 1998 (unless one of those products is a time machine). It's breathtaking that they were able to convince/influence so many key players during their rise (investors and press). In the early days I marveled how these guys could consistently get glowing nationwide press when it looked like they had nothing more than anyone else. In some cases less. In retrospect they did not have anything really noteworthy in 1999 (look at the history of AltaVista, HotBot and others to verify that Google was actually behind those guys in 1999.) But clearly they were winning the "back room" game. They were getting the press and they were getting the infusions of capital. They had convinced key decision makers in their space that they were where it was at. I'm sure books will be written about this. Those books will probably say something like "the capital came looking and found a great product". I think the reality of it may be more like "they figured out how to get capital and press when others could not and then built a great company"
Next key point in the Hoffman interview: "but I knew people who knew VCs." The power of connections. Hoffman notes that if you approach VC people directly you tend to get rejected. To get anywhere you generally need an introduction. The mother of all introductions in the tech world is of course Bill Gates 's introduction as a teenager to IBM chairman John Akers by his mother who served on United Way's board of directors - alongside Akers. Did this give Microsoft an advantage when they "sold" DOS to IBM on terms no other company got before or since? I think the answer is obvious. Did it help that Gates's father was/is an intellectual property Lawyer? I think the answer is obvious. In the case off Hoffman, we (me at least) do not know the nature of his initial VC connections back in the 90's. Were they people he met and cultivated in college?, friends of his family? We don't know. What we do know is that they were and are important.
We know of course that that George W. Bush famously leveraged his connections in various ways throughout his life.
Can anyone play this game or are facts of birth and luck predominant. Very interesting question.
This post is not meant to disparage Reid Hoffman, Google, Bill Gates or even Bush. It's meant to explore the way our world actually works - in the very important realm of success (or failure). I mean that is important isn't it!? The picture that you look at the process is not sometimes pretty - maybe not ugly either but perhaps messy. Messy and complicated. If you want to be successful how much time should you spend on things we would describe as "work" vs. social networking and managing your reputation. In some jobs social networking and managing reputation(s) is the job. Interesting difficult quesitons.
In closing, it's not ironic at all that it's important to be networked to create a successful social networking site!
The recent fascinating book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell gets into some of this
Biographies of very successful people often have a theme somewhat like this: "he came up with a great idea", and then "he came up with another great idea", and maybe "he beat the competition yet again", leading to perhaps: "after 3 failed attempts at BIG success the time was finally right". Read: perseverance can eventually get you the "luck" needed. Read: you could have done this to if you just had the drive and gumption.
But I'm pretty convinced that reality is not so nice and neat.
A recent interview in the Wall Street Journal with Reid Hoffman (creator of LinkedIn) sheds a little light on what the real key(s) to success often are in my opinion.
At the very top of the interview it states:
"In May 2003, the former Apple Inc. and PayPal executive launched LinkedIn out of his living room, inviting 350 of his contacts to join his network and create their own profiles. By the end of that month, LinkedIn had 4,500 members."
and a bit down the page:
"I didn't know any VCs, but I knew people who knew VCs. They referred me, saying: "This is a bright young kid coming out of Stanford/Oxford – could you give him a little bit of your time?" Lots of people contact VCs out of the blue; the referrals distinguished me from some crazy person."
The naive analysis of the early LinkedIn growth would probably go like this " LinkedIn had 4500 members after a month because Reid Hoffman had created a better product and had created a product that that people liked to use.", maybe "It had features for...", and probably "no one else had one key feature in particular." maybe ending with "users liked LinkedIn's [fill in the blank] feature(s) and they told their friends."
The naive analysis of his VC connections would probably be that they didn't really matter that much - maybe without them it would have taken him a bit more time to get LinkedIn (and his other projects) going but we know he would have gotten them going because we know he has the goods and the proof is out there in the real world with 50 million LinkedIn members. 50 million people can't be wrong.
But here is the thing. Social network sites are technically not that difficult to create. A reasonably competent programmer/web developer could probably create one on several weeks.
So this leads me to another theory entirely. Perhaps the key to LinkedIn's early growth was Hoffmans ability to influence others and Hoffmans reputation. Perhaps that often trumps product details. Perhaps LinkedIns grew from 350 to 4500 members in a month because Reid Hoffman had established a reputation as powerful or influential person and other people wanted to be linked to him. Perhaps in the beginning LinkedIn was just a mechanism to be linked to Reid Hoffman.
The key then if this is correct (and I think it is in some markets at some times) is to establish a reputation and generate a following.
I think the business press all to often anthropomorphize product features into the "key" to success of a product and underplay the value of the reputation and connectedness of the owners of the product. I suspect the analysis of LinkedIn that I have read is an example of this.
A fascinating case study is the growth of Google. At the time of Google's initial important growth, there were many competitors (Alta-Vista, HotBot, Infoseek, Yahoo, and many others). Many were doing the exact same things that Google was doing (page rankings of some sort or another). Many seemed to be well funded and well connected. The space was hot. But Google won the PR and influence game hands down. Google clearly managed to convince much of the VC communiuty and the press that "we are going to win" and "we have the momentum."
At a time (lets say 1998-2002 or so) when Google was just one of many search competitors they managed to convince key people in their space that they and they alone were "it". The momentum gained then has never been relinquished. But how did they gain it in the first place. I guess you would call that it the science of influence. Note: Google has clearly built great products over the years but a great product built by them in 2004 does not help them in 1998 (unless one of those products is a time machine). It's breathtaking that they were able to convince/influence so many key players during their rise (investors and press). In the early days I marveled how these guys could consistently get glowing nationwide press when it looked like they had nothing more than anyone else. In some cases less. In retrospect they did not have anything really noteworthy in 1999 (look at the history of AltaVista, HotBot and others to verify that Google was actually behind those guys in 1999.) But clearly they were winning the "back room" game. They were getting the press and they were getting the infusions of capital. They had convinced key decision makers in their space that they were where it was at. I'm sure books will be written about this. Those books will probably say something like "the capital came looking and found a great product". I think the reality of it may be more like "they figured out how to get capital and press when others could not and then built a great company"
Next key point in the Hoffman interview: "but I knew people who knew VCs." The power of connections. Hoffman notes that if you approach VC people directly you tend to get rejected. To get anywhere you generally need an introduction. The mother of all introductions in the tech world is of course Bill Gates 's introduction as a teenager to IBM chairman John Akers by his mother who served on United Way's board of directors - alongside Akers. Did this give Microsoft an advantage when they "sold" DOS to IBM on terms no other company got before or since? I think the answer is obvious. Did it help that Gates's father was/is an intellectual property Lawyer? I think the answer is obvious. In the case off Hoffman, we (me at least) do not know the nature of his initial VC connections back in the 90's. Were they people he met and cultivated in college?, friends of his family? We don't know. What we do know is that they were and are important.
We know of course that that George W. Bush famously leveraged his connections in various ways throughout his life.
Can anyone play this game or are facts of birth and luck predominant. Very interesting question.
This post is not meant to disparage Reid Hoffman, Google, Bill Gates or even Bush. It's meant to explore the way our world actually works - in the very important realm of success (or failure). I mean that is important isn't it!? The picture that you look at the process is not sometimes pretty - maybe not ugly either but perhaps messy. Messy and complicated. If you want to be successful how much time should you spend on things we would describe as "work" vs. social networking and managing your reputation. In some jobs social networking and managing reputation(s) is the job. Interesting difficult quesitons.
In closing, it's not ironic at all that it's important to be networked to create a successful social networking site!
The recent fascinating book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell gets into some of this
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The ice cap is expanding
Have you noticed that there has not been much media attention this summer devoted to the north polar ice cap?
The probable reason is that it seems to be *expanding* and that does not follow the media's "global warming" line. Right now it's running at the biggest it's been in several years but that news is buried.
The image at the top really caught my eye (http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent_hires.png)
Notice that the orange line is the median for 1979-2000 which artificially makes the current ice cap seem small given that 1979 was the coldest year since World War II and right in the middle of a string of cold years. Why not have the orange line be the median from 1989-2008. Why choose an arbitrary time in the past for that median line. I think the answer is obvious.
Something else caught my eye in this image. Notice the smaller areas of ice that are totally outside the orange line - several in southern Hudson bay, some along the coast of Greenland and some in northern Russia and Alaska. Totally *outside* the Orange line. That means ice does not normally exist there on August 16. Even in 1979-2000. I'm guessing that where we see "extra* ice vs the 1979-2000 median are in places where ice does not (typically) make it through the summer.
Much of ice in the arctic ocean is multi year.
Here's the insight: it appears that the remains of single year ice (ie formed only last winter) is actually running *higher* than the 1979-2000 median wheras the ice deficit is in places that had a multi year ice pack throughout the 1979-2000 period. Melting of that multi-year ice pack from 1995-2005 does not reflect higher than normal melting this summer. Key question: how much melting occurred this summer vs recent summers. Given the amount of extra single year ice, I'm guessing less melting - which points to a (sharp?) reversal vs recent years. Note: last years summer ice cap was bigger than the year before so this would be the second year of a reversal.
Will the media report it this way? Or will they report something like "the ice cap is the 3rd or 4th smallest in history" which would be a distortion.
Another insight: research indicates that northern hemisphere cooling can happen very quickly and I think I can see a possible reason why. Notice that there is still some ice in southern Hudson bay (on Aug 16) and that means ice has almost made it through the summer there. That would seem to indicate that only a slight cooling could cause multi-year ice pack to persist in Hudson bay and Hudson Bay extends down towards the middle of N. America. If Hudson bay was frozen over I think summers here in Chicago would be a lot cooler immediately - look at the map. That could set off a cascade. I wonder if anyone has done a mathematical model of this. I'm sure they have but give the media's focus it's not likely to get a lot of attention.
It seems well established that: 1) the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, 2) global temperatures were rising from 1982/83 until about 2006/7 3) the increase in CO2 is due to activities of mankind. We can be pretty darn sure of the first 2, and #3 seems highly (overwhelmingly?) likely also but notice that there is something kind of big left out. This does not mean that humans were causing the global warming observed from 1982/83 until about 2006/7. CO2 level is only one aspect of climate. There are lots of others. CO2 was also increasing from 1960-1979 and the planet was cooling in that period.
Perhaps the Old Farmers Almanac has it right. (www.almanac.com/timeline/). Humans are contributing to global warming but other factors are really driving the climate change process and they are far bigger than us and our impact. Factors like the tilt of our axis, when in our orbit we are closest and furthest from the sun and the (of course!) the sun itself. Sun cycles could be a very important driver of climate on the earth (duh!). It's known that the sun filters out a variable amount of cosmic rays that would otherwise enter our atmosphere and it's also known that cosmic rays cause increased cloud formation. Climate researchers know that cool times are correlated with cloudy times. Could effects like this overwhelm CO2? According to the OFA the answer is yes.
People of course want (often desperately) to believe that they are in control of things. One of the hallmarks of depression a feeling that you are out of control. People at present very much want to believe that they are in control of the climate. If we just behave, it won't change - or so we want to believe. Well maybe not.
But "all the experts agree!" you say?
Yes, and all the experts agreed on the "new economy" in the late 90's and preached to those of us who were skeptical of business models based not on profits or even revenue but "eyeballs" that we "just didn't get it." The experts were proved wrong in 2000-2001.
All the experts were united in telling us that Saddam Hussein had WMD in 2003. None were found.
All the experts were telling us that "there is no national market for housing" and "a housing bubble is impossible". Until it popped.
In each of these cases the experts were telling the public or a subset of the public (IE important people) what they wanted to hear.
It's time to be skeptical of global warming - at least how it's been presented so far.
It will be real interesting to see how it's presented if the cooling that the OFA is predicting comes to pass.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Our corrupt medical establishment
I was just doing some research on Red Yeast Rice for a friend who has high cholesterol and no medical insurance.
I suggested Red Yeast Rice (RYR) which has been around a long time and is well known to reduce cholesterol. In fact it and a similar cousin form the origins of our statin drugs. RYR has been used in Chinese Medicine for over 1000 years: "Its use has been documented as far back as the Tang Dynasty in China in 800 A.D. and taken internally to invigorate the body, aid in digestion, and remove "blood blockages."
Western scientists started looking into the specifics of RYR in the late 1940's and "discovered" the statins which are the necessary/key ingredient.
So far so good except that that some RYR contains statins and some does not and obviously you need to get the kind with the statin or you are not doing yourself any good.
But thanks to our corrupt medical establishment you can't:
"the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled that it is illegal to sell red yeast rice that contains more than trace amounts of the cholesterol-lowering substances and to promote red yeast rice for lowering cholesterol levels."
Their reasoning is so absurd as to be almost comical:
1) "the FDA considers the products containing red yeast rice with high levels of cholesterol lowering substances to be new, unapproved drugs for which marketing violates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. "
Something used for more than 1000 years is deemed "new" by the FDA? Talk about presumptuous arrogant western logic.
2) There is concern that patients who already take statin drugs with or without these other medications may increase their risk of muscle or kidney injury. So a doctor cannot just tell a patient to not take RYR if they are prescribed a statin drug? Hmmm wait a minute here... why not just take RYR instead of the statin drug! Now we are on to something.
Statin drugs are expensive. RYR is cheap. Doctors are peddling new generation statin drugs which are $100/refill. RYR is about $5 last time I checked. 1/20 the cost.
Another part of our medical establishment (the Mayo Clinic) gives us a purported reason for the ban: The presence of lovastatin in the red yeast rice products in question is potentially dangerous because there's no way for you to know what level or quality of lovastatin might be in red yeast rice.
Sounds reasonable except:
1) RYR has been used for over 1000 years in Chinese medicine so the notion we don't know how to use it says that the knowledge and wisdom gained through those 1000 years is meaningless. I just don't believe that for a second. I think 1000 years of experience counts for something.
2) Lowering cholesterol is an iterative process even with modern statin drugs. You get your level tested and the doctor prescribes (or does not prescribe) something. You come back and have the level checked again. Dosage of statin is adjusted accordingly. Dietary changes are perhaps suggested. You repeat the process as necessary. Their own methods are iterative and imprecise.
3) Is there any evidence that short term variations in cholesterol are important (vs. a generally lower level over time?). Is there a "latency" with Statin drugs? Perhaps as the statin level builds up the cholesterol level drops? Maybe they are like SSRI drugs for depression. Missing a day is meaningless due to the latency of the drug. If statins worked the same way then it would not matter if a given RYR tablet had 10% or more or 10% less statin than another one.
I am guessing that the statement "The presence of lovastatin in the red yeast rice products in question is potentially dangerous because there's no way for you to know what level or quality of lovastatin might be in red yeast rice." is pure speculation - and flies in the face of 1000 years of Chinese experience. I am guessing that they (the Chinese) have ways (honed over that time) of ensuring the efficacy of RYR treatment. Obviously their traditional methods do not precisely measure the statin level directly but I'm guessing they arrive at essentially the same place via different means. They probably use complex and well thought out cultivation and fermentation methods that when followed precisely provide consistent statin levels without even knowing what statins are.
But we will probably never know because it's unlikely that an American drug company would spend money to study something that might undermine it's own (much more expensive) product.
That's what this comes down to of course: money. It's not about protecting us, it's about making us powerless to help ourselves and instead forcing us to spend (big) money on their products - or potentially suffer heart attacks and strokes. In my opinion this is modern American "extortion capitalism" at it's worst. Legally deny people the opportunity to help themselves and instead expose them as powerless fodder to be exploited by avaricious drug companies. Red yeast rice was THE way you reduced cholesterol on your own - until 2007.
How about looking at this from a public health standpoint. What is better overall a) having a broad section of the public (especially low income/uninsured) take RYR regularly -the way they take Saw Palmetto for Prostate issues, or b) make effective RYR unavailable forcing people with cholesterol problems to get expensive statin drugs that are fundamentally no different and thereby shutting out 35 million uninsured totally. I don't think it takes a genius to see that the RYR statin ban is costing lives. Probably lots of lives but this ban is not about saving lives this is about making money.
There was something almost sinister about that way this went down: "In 1998, the FDA tried to ban a product (Cholestin) containing red yeast rice extract but the U.S. district court in Utah allowed the product to be sold without restriction. " There was public outcry over the case and the FDA backed off for a while. But more recently they have taken a different -and deceptive- tack. Instead of banning RYR outright they simply declared that any RYR types that contain statins are verboten. This brings technical issues into play, technical issues that are over many peoples heads. This allows supplement companies to sell RYR to customers who have learned/been told/read that RYR "lowers cholesterol" but not mention it no longer contains the key ingredient! Many of these supplement companies are just as unscrupulous as the FDA and welcome the opportunity to continue making money on RYR even though it's now worthless. They don't care, they still make money. And doctors can now tell people that they can take RYR along with statin drugs thus appearing friendly to eastern/alternative medicine. Everybody makes money. Everybody is happy. Except the people having heart attacks and strokes that would have been prevented by unimpaired RYR - which is what many thought they were taking.
There is something almost Dickensian about this. It's dysfunctional and bizarre.
There is a pharmacist who is currently being prosecuted for diluting chemotherapy treatments to make more money. Basically what was supposed to be one treatment was "cut" and used for 3, 5 even 10 people. This man is considered by some to be evil and may get the death penalty. OK, so what about an institutional process engineered by the FDA which allows the selling of a substance that is essentially diluted on an ongoing basis. Is this not similar? Heart attacks and strokes are serious issues. Every bit as serious as cancer.
What do I tell my friend who has no medical insurance and high cholesterol.
I suggested Red Yeast Rice (RYR) which has been around a long time and is well known to reduce cholesterol. In fact it and a similar cousin form the origins of our statin drugs. RYR has been used in Chinese Medicine for over 1000 years: "Its use has been documented as far back as the Tang Dynasty in China in 800 A.D. and taken internally to invigorate the body, aid in digestion, and remove "blood blockages."
Western scientists started looking into the specifics of RYR in the late 1940's and "discovered" the statins which are the necessary/key ingredient.
So far so good except that that some RYR contains statins and some does not and obviously you need to get the kind with the statin or you are not doing yourself any good.
But thanks to our corrupt medical establishment you can't:
"the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled that it is illegal to sell red yeast rice that contains more than trace amounts of the cholesterol-lowering substances and to promote red yeast rice for lowering cholesterol levels."
Their reasoning is so absurd as to be almost comical:
1) "the FDA considers the products containing red yeast rice with high levels of cholesterol lowering substances to be new, unapproved drugs for which marketing violates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. "
Something used for more than 1000 years is deemed "new" by the FDA? Talk about presumptuous arrogant western logic.
2) There is concern that patients who already take statin drugs with or without these other medications may increase their risk of muscle or kidney injury. So a doctor cannot just tell a patient to not take RYR if they are prescribed a statin drug? Hmmm wait a minute here... why not just take RYR instead of the statin drug! Now we are on to something.
Statin drugs are expensive. RYR is cheap. Doctors are peddling new generation statin drugs which are $100/refill. RYR is about $5 last time I checked. 1/20 the cost.
Another part of our medical establishment (the Mayo Clinic) gives us a purported reason for the ban: The presence of lovastatin in the red yeast rice products in question is potentially dangerous because there's no way for you to know what level or quality of lovastatin might be in red yeast rice.
Sounds reasonable except:
1) RYR has been used for over 1000 years in Chinese medicine so the notion we don't know how to use it says that the knowledge and wisdom gained through those 1000 years is meaningless. I just don't believe that for a second. I think 1000 years of experience counts for something.
2) Lowering cholesterol is an iterative process even with modern statin drugs. You get your level tested and the doctor prescribes (or does not prescribe) something. You come back and have the level checked again. Dosage of statin is adjusted accordingly. Dietary changes are perhaps suggested. You repeat the process as necessary. Their own methods are iterative and imprecise.
3) Is there any evidence that short term variations in cholesterol are important (vs. a generally lower level over time?). Is there a "latency" with Statin drugs? Perhaps as the statin level builds up the cholesterol level drops? Maybe they are like SSRI drugs for depression. Missing a day is meaningless due to the latency of the drug. If statins worked the same way then it would not matter if a given RYR tablet had 10% or more or 10% less statin than another one.
I am guessing that the statement "The presence of lovastatin in the red yeast rice products in question is potentially dangerous because there's no way for you to know what level or quality of lovastatin might be in red yeast rice." is pure speculation - and flies in the face of 1000 years of Chinese experience. I am guessing that they (the Chinese) have ways (honed over that time) of ensuring the efficacy of RYR treatment. Obviously their traditional methods do not precisely measure the statin level directly but I'm guessing they arrive at essentially the same place via different means. They probably use complex and well thought out cultivation and fermentation methods that when followed precisely provide consistent statin levels without even knowing what statins are.
But we will probably never know because it's unlikely that an American drug company would spend money to study something that might undermine it's own (much more expensive) product.
That's what this comes down to of course: money. It's not about protecting us, it's about making us powerless to help ourselves and instead forcing us to spend (big) money on their products - or potentially suffer heart attacks and strokes. In my opinion this is modern American "extortion capitalism" at it's worst. Legally deny people the opportunity to help themselves and instead expose them as powerless fodder to be exploited by avaricious drug companies. Red yeast rice was THE way you reduced cholesterol on your own - until 2007.
How about looking at this from a public health standpoint. What is better overall a) having a broad section of the public (especially low income/uninsured) take RYR regularly -the way they take Saw Palmetto for Prostate issues, or b) make effective RYR unavailable forcing people with cholesterol problems to get expensive statin drugs that are fundamentally no different and thereby shutting out 35 million uninsured totally. I don't think it takes a genius to see that the RYR statin ban is costing lives. Probably lots of lives but this ban is not about saving lives this is about making money.
There was something almost sinister about that way this went down: "In 1998, the FDA tried to ban a product (Cholestin) containing red yeast rice extract but the U.S. district court in Utah allowed the product to be sold without restriction. " There was public outcry over the case and the FDA backed off for a while. But more recently they have taken a different -and deceptive- tack. Instead of banning RYR outright they simply declared that any RYR types that contain statins are verboten. This brings technical issues into play, technical issues that are over many peoples heads. This allows supplement companies to sell RYR to customers who have learned/been told/read that RYR "lowers cholesterol" but not mention it no longer contains the key ingredient! Many of these supplement companies are just as unscrupulous as the FDA and welcome the opportunity to continue making money on RYR even though it's now worthless. They don't care, they still make money. And doctors can now tell people that they can take RYR along with statin drugs thus appearing friendly to eastern/alternative medicine. Everybody makes money. Everybody is happy. Except the people having heart attacks and strokes that would have been prevented by unimpaired RYR - which is what many thought they were taking.
There is something almost Dickensian about this. It's dysfunctional and bizarre.
There is a pharmacist who is currently being prosecuted for diluting chemotherapy treatments to make more money. Basically what was supposed to be one treatment was "cut" and used for 3, 5 even 10 people. This man is considered by some to be evil and may get the death penalty. OK, so what about an institutional process engineered by the FDA which allows the selling of a substance that is essentially diluted on an ongoing basis. Is this not similar? Heart attacks and strokes are serious issues. Every bit as serious as cancer.
What do I tell my friend who has no medical insurance and high cholesterol.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Why is population decline presented as a bad thing
The article I mentioned in the previous post about the population decline in certain parts of eastern Germany presents it as a bad thing. Population decline=decay, and equals a general sort of decline that is lamentable.
Last I checked there were to many people on this planet and this overpopulation was presenting problems. To put it mildly.
Statements like this just don't make sense to me: "Not far beyond the few thriving urban centers, traffic is often spare on the freshly paved highways". This is a problem? A place that has good infrastructure and is not very crowded is a problem? Later it states: "economic activity per person has risen to 71 percent of the former western sector’s from 67 percent over the course of this decade." There are fewer people and they have more money. Again I ask: what exactly is the problem here. Is there some sort of weird sentimentality for crowded eastern block housing projects? Of course there are the lost jobs right? "Employment at the nearby mines, once accounting for as many as 5,000 jobs, has fallen to 500 or fewer. " Due to a weird quirk I knew someone who worked in one of those mines. He died of black lung disease in the early 80's.
This article is not alone in presenting population decreases as problems. This article is typical of what is said about Russian decreases in population. I have read similar sounding stuff regarding Japan. And Italy. Often the talk gets back to power. Nations who have decreasing populations will suffer a loss of power and prestige and be negatively affected "on the word stage". I have even heard it said that nations who tolerate a persistent drop in population are "committing suicide." What is going to happen, they are going to get invaded by some horde?
Is this the 19'th century? That isn't even 20'th century thinking. Maybe it's just "primal" thinking that never really goes away.
In my opinion if Russia 50 years from now is more like Canada. (fewer people, cleaner, higher standard of living etc. etc.) how could that be a bad thing? Yes Russia has some significant social problems but maybe a lower population will make it easier to fix them.
I think that pundits who do not embrace population declines as a good thing when the planet is so overpopulated would lead us all to suicide.
Last I checked there were to many people on this planet and this overpopulation was presenting problems. To put it mildly.
Statements like this just don't make sense to me: "Not far beyond the few thriving urban centers, traffic is often spare on the freshly paved highways". This is a problem? A place that has good infrastructure and is not very crowded is a problem? Later it states: "economic activity per person has risen to 71 percent of the former western sector’s from 67 percent over the course of this decade." There are fewer people and they have more money. Again I ask: what exactly is the problem here. Is there some sort of weird sentimentality for crowded eastern block housing projects? Of course there are the lost jobs right? "Employment at the nearby mines, once accounting for as many as 5,000 jobs, has fallen to 500 or fewer. " Due to a weird quirk I knew someone who worked in one of those mines. He died of black lung disease in the early 80's.
This article is not alone in presenting population decreases as problems. This article is typical of what is said about Russian decreases in population. I have read similar sounding stuff regarding Japan. And Italy. Often the talk gets back to power. Nations who have decreasing populations will suffer a loss of power and prestige and be negatively affected "on the word stage". I have even heard it said that nations who tolerate a persistent drop in population are "committing suicide." What is going to happen, they are going to get invaded by some horde?
Is this the 19'th century? That isn't even 20'th century thinking. Maybe it's just "primal" thinking that never really goes away.
In my opinion if Russia 50 years from now is more like Canada. (fewer people, cleaner, higher standard of living etc. etc.) how could that be a bad thing? Yes Russia has some significant social problems but maybe a lower population will make it easier to fix them.
I think that pundits who do not embrace population declines as a good thing when the planet is so overpopulated would lead us all to suicide.
On the futility of war
The New York Times had an article yesterday about the persistent decline of population in parts of eastern Germany, a decline so pronounced that wolves have returned to the area along the Polish border.
That region has seen some of the most horrible warfare in modern times and has been fought over in a systematic way for 5oo years or so. Some of Hitlers armies assembled there preparing to invade Poland. The Red Army swept in from the other direction 4 years later. Napoleon came though in 1812. A partial list of nations who have fought in this area are: Germany, Poland, Russia, Britain, Austria, France, Prussia, Sweden, and the United States.
And what was settled? The area now returns to the wolves!
They probably deserve it more than we do.
That region has seen some of the most horrible warfare in modern times and has been fought over in a systematic way for 5oo years or so. Some of Hitlers armies assembled there preparing to invade Poland. The Red Army swept in from the other direction 4 years later. Napoleon came though in 1812. A partial list of nations who have fought in this area are: Germany, Poland, Russia, Britain, Austria, France, Prussia, Sweden, and the United States.
And what was settled? The area now returns to the wolves!
They probably deserve it more than we do.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Do the Media Hate the Rich?
The headline "Do the Media Hate the Rich?" in Newsweek caught my eye:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/201864
The key point:
"In a two-page note in the June issue of "Robb Report" entitled "Putting Luxury Into Perspective," editor in chief Brett Andersen attacks "the mainstream media" for its "demonization of the wealthy and the industries that cater to them." This antipathy toward the magazine's prime audience and advertisers, Andersen charges, is "a media phenomenon we have observed lately with increasing dismay." He lambastes the wave of populism as failing "to recognize the ways in which luxury industries have enriched society not only economically, but also intellectually, technologically and culturally."
Maybe I have missed something (I doubt it) but I have not seen general "demonization of the wealthy or the "industries that cater to them." What I have seen is some questioning of whether some specific individuals -who were apparently responsible for engineering much of the financial mess we are in- deserved to be compensated in the way they were. Whether they deserved mammoth compensation up front in light of the fact that the risks they undertook have now been offloaded on the rest of us as things go south is a fair question and it's not the same thing as a general "demonization" of the wealthy.
I have also seen some hard questions about the wisdom and propriety of making use of the accouterments of privilege (like private jets) while begging for government money. I don't see a media spotlight on Apple executives taking private jets. Big difference.
But perhaps the question of to what extent the "luxury industries have enriched society not only economically, but also intellectually, technologically and culturally" deserves some thought.
Looking at the the luxury industries presented by Robb Report we can see several themes (note: I do read it from time to time). Things tend to be hand crafted, many items have incredible attention to detail. Things often are part of a tradition. I can see Brett Andersen's point about luxury industries adding something to society (what do we live for in the material sense if not for the finer things?). But I also see a dark side. One facet of these industries is things are typically made by hand. Take high end watches. The high end watches are all made by hand by (very) skilled craftsman yet will never be as accurate as a simple quartz model. On the other hand they are beautiful and something can definitely be said for that. There is something fascinating and compelling about the tiny machinery that goes into a watch. I'm glad this tradition is kept alive but the size and extent of it is a bit troubling: do we really need this many high end watches?
Next lets look a Bentley cars. Again hand crafting is key. Most (virtually all?) parts are hand crafted. So far so good, but the Continental Flying Spur is 5467lbs and gets about 8mpg. Not such a good thing in this era of global warming. I suppose the damage is minimized if it's only used occasionally.
I think a stronger case can be made that luxury industries have enriched society culturally vs. technologically. They uphold traditions of craftsmanship. That's positive in a cultural sense. But technologically? I'm not sure I go along with that. There is almost an anti-technology attitude in the luxury goods market. Look at this high end applifier: http://www.robbreport.com/Old-Is-New-Again. It's based on vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes can give a certain distinctive sound I guess and in some limited ways out perform more recent technologies but it's a stretch to suggest that a cicruit design dating to the 1940's is contributing to technological enrichment. That "it can safely be called a classic" seems true. Robb Report is filled with such items.
Aside: I like vacuum tunes. The hum as they warm up. Even the smell - I swear there is a distinctive smell. A device based on vacuum tubes seems to slowly come alive like some sort of being waking up. I'm glad that there are companies out there still manufacturing electronics based on vacuum tubes. I vividly remember my grandfather's "hi-fi" and it's vacuum tubes.
Handbags. There seems something almost psychotic about spending thousands of dollars for a Birkin or other simplar handbag. Another spiral of conspicuous consumption where people are in a "can you top this" mindset? I guess a certain set of women watch these things very closely. I wish people would rise above this a bit or a least keep in in check. It seems bordering on the obscene. One way to look at it is if you have millions of dollars what's 3 grand for a handbag. That to me is an argument against such income polarity. Wouldn't it be nice if this passion went into creating green sustainable homes as opposed to overpriced handbags? Maybe it does in some places but not on the pages of the Robb Report.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/201864
The key point:
"In a two-page note in the June issue of "Robb Report" entitled "Putting Luxury Into Perspective," editor in chief Brett Andersen attacks "the mainstream media" for its "demonization of the wealthy and the industries that cater to them." This antipathy toward the magazine's prime audience and advertisers, Andersen charges, is "a media phenomenon we have observed lately with increasing dismay." He lambastes the wave of populism as failing "to recognize the ways in which luxury industries have enriched society not only economically, but also intellectually, technologically and culturally."
Maybe I have missed something (I doubt it) but I have not seen general "demonization of the wealthy or the "industries that cater to them." What I have seen is some questioning of whether some specific individuals -who were apparently responsible for engineering much of the financial mess we are in- deserved to be compensated in the way they were. Whether they deserved mammoth compensation up front in light of the fact that the risks they undertook have now been offloaded on the rest of us as things go south is a fair question and it's not the same thing as a general "demonization" of the wealthy.
I have also seen some hard questions about the wisdom and propriety of making use of the accouterments of privilege (like private jets) while begging for government money. I don't see a media spotlight on Apple executives taking private jets. Big difference.
But perhaps the question of to what extent the "luxury industries have enriched society not only economically, but also intellectually, technologically and culturally" deserves some thought.
Looking at the the luxury industries presented by Robb Report we can see several themes (note: I do read it from time to time). Things tend to be hand crafted, many items have incredible attention to detail. Things often are part of a tradition. I can see Brett Andersen's point about luxury industries adding something to society (what do we live for in the material sense if not for the finer things?). But I also see a dark side. One facet of these industries is things are typically made by hand. Take high end watches. The high end watches are all made by hand by (very) skilled craftsman yet will never be as accurate as a simple quartz model. On the other hand they are beautiful and something can definitely be said for that. There is something fascinating and compelling about the tiny machinery that goes into a watch. I'm glad this tradition is kept alive but the size and extent of it is a bit troubling: do we really need this many high end watches?
Next lets look a Bentley cars. Again hand crafting is key. Most (virtually all?) parts are hand crafted. So far so good, but the Continental Flying Spur is 5467lbs and gets about 8mpg. Not such a good thing in this era of global warming. I suppose the damage is minimized if it's only used occasionally.
I think a stronger case can be made that luxury industries have enriched society culturally vs. technologically. They uphold traditions of craftsmanship. That's positive in a cultural sense. But technologically? I'm not sure I go along with that. There is almost an anti-technology attitude in the luxury goods market. Look at this high end applifier: http://www.robbreport.com/Old-Is-New-Again. It's based on vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes can give a certain distinctive sound I guess and in some limited ways out perform more recent technologies but it's a stretch to suggest that a cicruit design dating to the 1940's is contributing to technological enrichment. That "it can safely be called a classic" seems true. Robb Report is filled with such items.
Aside: I like vacuum tunes. The hum as they warm up. Even the smell - I swear there is a distinctive smell. A device based on vacuum tubes seems to slowly come alive like some sort of being waking up. I'm glad that there are companies out there still manufacturing electronics based on vacuum tubes. I vividly remember my grandfather's "hi-fi" and it's vacuum tubes.
Handbags. There seems something almost psychotic about spending thousands of dollars for a Birkin or other simplar handbag. Another spiral of conspicuous consumption where people are in a "can you top this" mindset? I guess a certain set of women watch these things very closely. I wish people would rise above this a bit or a least keep in in check. It seems bordering on the obscene. One way to look at it is if you have millions of dollars what's 3 grand for a handbag. That to me is an argument against such income polarity. Wouldn't it be nice if this passion went into creating green sustainable homes as opposed to overpriced handbags? Maybe it does in some places but not on the pages of the Robb Report.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
"There has never been a fake bin Laden tape,"
From http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/03/world/main5058482.shtml?tag=topHome;topStories
.
.
"There has never been a fake bin Laden tape"
Why even say such a thing.
From
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/america_under_attack/bin_laden/framesource_tapes.html
"The first known videotape of Osama bin Laden referencing the Sept. 11 attacks surfaced on Oct. 7, 2001, the same day the U.S. and Britain started bombing Afghanistan.
.
.
"There has never been a fake bin Laden tape"
Why even say such a thing.
From
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/america_under_attack/bin_laden/framesource_tapes.html
"The first known videotape of Osama bin Laden referencing the Sept. 11 attacks surfaced on Oct. 7, 2001, the same day the U.S. and Britain started bombing Afghanistan.
Following the release of that tape, the U.S. government urged news organizations to be cautious when airing the terror mastermind's unedited statements, voicing concerns that he might use them to send coded messages to his fighters. Since then, portions of several tapes have been released by the Arabic television network Al-Jazeera, American television networks or the Pentagon; others have been mentioned by governments and the press but not made public."
This seems like a rather disparate group of sources. Bin Laden can reach out to all of these entities but cannot be found?
We constantly hear that the tapes have been "authenticated". Authenticated by whom. The CIA? The Pentagon? How about independent analysis. In what format are these tapes. How were they delivered. The more quesitons you ask the fishier this seems. CBS shows 35 tapes between 10/07/2001 and today. That's a lot. If the tape is in the form of a dvd, couldn't that be tracked? If it was placed on a computer then what's the IP address. See where I'm going here? It's one thing if there was one or two tapes. But 35 tapes over the span of 8 years? None of those 35 cases produced a good lead for the CIA or Pentagon sources to use to find this guy?
I forgot, we are supposed to trust them.
Well I like what Ronald Reagan used to say: trust but verify. In this case couldn't the audio and video be put to the test via an independent entity? Maybe someone like this http://www.paulekman.com could take a look. He is famous for reading facial expressions. I'm guessing that if he can do that he could make an estimate of whether or not a face presented on video is even really the correct face.
This whole Bin Laden tape thing needs to be looked into.
Derrick Rose and the ripple effect
Rick Telander of the Sun Times writes about the "ripple effect" of the Derrick Rose grade changing scandal and why it's more important than some people might think. I've put the full article in at the end of this post.
I think there is a ripple effect but I believe the stone causing the ripples is a bit further back.
The nexus of Telander's ripple effect is this:
"Partly because Rose went to Memphis, Calipari, then making $2.35 million a year and with four years left on his contract, abruptly bolted for Kentucky this April, becoming the nation's highest-paid college basketball coach in the process. His new deal? Eight years at $4.1 million per."
Does anyone other than me see a problem with paying a college basketball coach 4.1 million dollars per year? To me this is corrupting on several levels. Isn't the fundamental mission of a university to teach and perform research? I'm guessing that Calipari is now far and away the highest paid person at the University of Kentucky and he has nothing to do with their ostensible primary mission. How can you illustrate the importance of learning and substance and all those good things when you pay the basketball coach 4.1 million per year. As recently as the 1950's Football and Basketball (and other) coaches were often recent graduates who were paid token salaries. A step above a teaching assistant. When a sideshow commands such resources it indicates that the primary mission is not taken seriously.
Many are under the misconception that college sports generate profits for the schools and hence such spending is "OK". The reality is that only rarely do college sports (even Basketball and Football) generate profits. In general they are money losers. What college sports really do is provide (often very expensive) advertisements.
When you attach so much money to trivialities like college basketball you will have a ripple effect all right but it does not start or end with Derrick Rose. He's just a cog in a giant corrupt system.
When you stake millions of dollars on the outcome of a sideshow you are asking for trouble.
Here is the full article:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think there is a ripple effect but I believe the stone causing the ripples is a bit further back.
The nexus of Telander's ripple effect is this:
"Partly because Rose went to Memphis, Calipari, then making $2.35 million a year and with four years left on his contract, abruptly bolted for Kentucky this April, becoming the nation's highest-paid college basketball coach in the process. His new deal? Eight years at $4.1 million per."
Does anyone other than me see a problem with paying a college basketball coach 4.1 million dollars per year? To me this is corrupting on several levels. Isn't the fundamental mission of a university to teach and perform research? I'm guessing that Calipari is now far and away the highest paid person at the University of Kentucky and he has nothing to do with their ostensible primary mission. How can you illustrate the importance of learning and substance and all those good things when you pay the basketball coach 4.1 million per year. As recently as the 1950's Football and Basketball (and other) coaches were often recent graduates who were paid token salaries. A step above a teaching assistant. When a sideshow commands such resources it indicates that the primary mission is not taken seriously.
Many are under the misconception that college sports generate profits for the schools and hence such spending is "OK". The reality is that only rarely do college sports (even Basketball and Football) generate profits. In general they are money losers. What college sports really do is provide (often very expensive) advertisements.
When you attach so much money to trivialities like college basketball you will have a ripple effect all right but it does not start or end with Derrick Rose. He's just a cog in a giant corrupt system.
When you stake millions of dollars on the outcome of a sideshow you are asking for trouble.
Here is the full article:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 29, 2009
Let's say you're of the cynical, entertain-me-now school of fandom.
You don't care a wit that young Bulls star Derrick Rose has been implicated as the beneficiary of some serious academic cheating at both his alma maters -- Simeon High School and the University of Memphis.
According to NCAA allegations first reported by the Memphis Commercial-Appeal and Chicago high school sources informing the Sun-Times, some person other than Rose allegedly took his college-entrance SAT, and someone with access to Rose's Simeon transcripts changed one of his grades from a D to a C just as Rose was applying to colleges.
So what, you say. He's a pro now. He was always gonna be a baller. Go, Bulls!
That's fine.
Live in your world of beer-can-on-the-belly sports relativism.
But just ponder the ripple effect and the hypocrisy revealed by the academic fraud before you lumber to the fridge for another cold one.
First off, Rose might never have gotten into a powerhouse hoops college like Memphis without the cheating. He might have had to spend time at a junior college or even go overseas to play. Had he not gone to Memphis, the Tigers almost certainly would not have made it to the 2008 NCAA championship game.
Think that matters to UCLA, which lost to Memphis in the semis?
Rose was clearly a one-and-done mercenary, something head coach John Calipari always new full well.
Partly because Rose went to Memphis, Calipari, then making $2.35 million a year and with four years left on his contract, abruptly bolted for Kentucky this April, becoming the nation's highest-paid college basketball coach in the process. His new deal? Eight years at $4.1 million per.
Gillispie topples
Think former Wildcats coach Billy Gillispie -- canned in March with five years left on his deal -- liked that? Not much. Gillispie just filed a $6 million lawsuit against Kentucky claiming breach of contract and fraud.
Oh, and here's a nice tidbit. ESPN.com, citing inside sources, stated in late March that, ''with a strong recruiting class coming in and a tradition already established at Memphis, Calipari wouldn't leave if the UK job was offered.''
Ha!
He was gone in an eye blink.
And, of course, so was Rose.
Off to the NBA, where, based largely on his display while at Memphis, and to a lesser degree at Simeon, where he led his team to back-to-back state championships, he was taken No. 1 in the 2008 NBA draft. Think that was worth a little money?
And how much was it worth to other parties, such as Rose's constantly pressuring, Svengali-like older brother Reggie?
As Rose's former club basketball team coach, Luther Topps, said of the NCAA investigation, ''Reggie moved me and [Simeon head coach Robert Smith] out of the way long before that, as soon as the money got involved.''
And, of course, partly because of where he was drafted and the role expected of him with the rebuilding Bulls, Rose flourished and was named NBA rookie of the year.
That, too, is both an honor and money in the bank.
Sanctimony minus standards
Let's think about the NBA itself for a moment.
This kind of manipulative fraud is precisely what commissioner David Stern almost guaranteed would blossom to new levels after he sanctimoniously declared that nobody could play in the NBA until at least one year after high school.
No more Kevin Garnetts or Kobe Bryants.
It's not that Stern and his league care about education -- the NBA has no diploma standards or even literacy standards whatsoever. What the NBA wants is the orderly entrance of older players who are a little more -- shall we say, polished? -- than post-adolescents.
We all know the phoniness involved in big-time athletes going to institutions of higher learning when those athletes have no academic mission, and when the schools have interest in the athletes only as stadium-fillers.
But when the hypocrisy becomes public like this, it indicts a lot more than just phonies like Calipari (Oh, and it's for sure the coach knew nothing!)
Consider the Chicago Public School system. Somebody can change a transcript grade -- as was done on the Simeon computer -- and the CPS investigators discipline ... no one?
Who took Rose's SAT?
That's not easy to do, what with IDs and signatures and the like.
If this were done for a non-athletic kid who desperately wanted to go to college to better himself or herself, to learn -- and then that student flourished academically -- you could even justify such an opportunity given.
But this was done in the name of let's-rob-the-bank.
Bulls vice president of basketball operations John Paxson is a straight arrow who agonizes over character.
Would he have taken Rose if he knew the kid had allegedly cheated this way?
Yes, this was all stuff done back in the ''amateur'' days. But you know something? Those days weren't so long ago. And they don't vanish under the weight of cash.
Derrick Rose has been a likable point guard in his one pro season.
But how do you explain the lesson here to, say, Chicago school children?
Practice your crossover, kids. As you know, schoolwork's for dummies.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Is Osama Bin Laden dead?
I have suspected this for some time. This article in the conservative American Spectator makes a pretty good case:
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/13/osama-bin-elvis/
I would add the question of whose interests are advanced by keeping alive a myth of Osama Bin Laden's continued existence. First, the interests of American neo-conservatives who wish to keep the nation at war are advanced by a "living" Bin Laden. A dead Bin Laden would open the possibility of ending this war.
Al-Qaeda and various radical elements in the middle east also would want to perpetuate a myth of a living Bin Laden to show their friends and allies that they are robust and can persist in the face of American power: he attacked downtown New York City and he's still alive and free! A dead Bin Laden might suggest an impotent Al Qaeda. If there is one thing they don't want to be it's impotent.
The question of Bin Laden's real involvement (vs. being just a cheerleader) in 9/11 is moot to both groups.
OK, so how would this have gone down - if Bin Laden is dead how could that have been hidden. The "osama-bin-elvis" article notes that there are is no credible evidence of a living Bin Laden after November of 2001. That is when the Afghanistan war was reaching it's most intense point. Here is a description from Wikipedia of what happened in Tora Bora cave region in December 2001:
"Al-Qaeda fighters were still holding out in the mountains of Tora Bora, however, while an anti-Taliban tribal militia steadily pushed bin Laden back across the difficult terrain, backed by withering air strikes guided in by U.S. and UK Special Forces. Facing defeat, the al-Qaeda forces agreed to a truce to give them time to surrender their weapons. In retrospect, however, many believe that the truce was a ruse to allow important al-Qaeda figures, including Osama bin Laden, to escape. On December 12, the fighting flared again, probably initiated by a rear guard buying time for the main force's escape through the White Mountains into the tribal areas of Pakistan. Once again, tribal forces backed by British and U.S. special operations troops and air support pressed ahead against fortified al-Qaeda positions in caves and bunkers scattered throughout the mountainous region. By December 17, the last cave complex had been taken and their defenders overrun. A search of the area by U.S. and UK forces continued into January, but no sign of bin Laden or the al-Qaeda leadership emerged. It is almost unanimously believed that they had already slipped away into the tribal areas of Pakistan to the south and east. It is estimated that around 200 of the al-Qaeda fighters were killed during the battle, along with an unknown number of anti-Taliban tribal fighters. No U.S. or UK deaths were reported."
But instead of the official line maybe:
a) Bin Laden was pre-emptively killed by his own people via prearrangement as enemy forces closed in and then the body was then disposed of.
b) his cave or hiding place was hit directly by a large bomb which left no body behind.
c) He died from pre existing conditions which were exacerbated by the stress of what was happening and his body was disposed of via prearrangement. This could have happened months or years after Sept 2001.
Maybe after that, statements or video's he had made while alive continued to leak to the media for a time giving the appearance that he was still alive and then someone got the bright idea to start creating fake video's and statements to keep the ball rolling and after that it took on a life of it's own.
In any case, the longer we go without having independent verifiable evidence of his existence, the more likely it is that he is dead. And it seems not altogether implausible that he died in late 2001 and all the tapes and video's and statements attributed to him since then have been fakes. The CIA validated much of the stuff you say? Well the CIA has a long and sad record of "validating" what it's bosses want to hear. Remember Weapons of Mass Destruction?, the "potent power" of the Soviet Union when it was on the verge of collapse?, Tonkin Gulf?. The CIA can be counted on to tell us what it's bosses (typically the president of the U.S.) want to hear. The historical record on this is clear.
As time goes on another party becomes interested in perpetuating the myth: the media. After years of sensationalistic coverage of Bin Laden they would look like fools if it was revealed that he had in fact died long ago. So they have no incentive to look long and hard at the question of his existence either.
The "osama-bin-elvis" article makes another good point. A point that I have heard elsewhere: what/who is Al Qaeda now. Is there still a coherent Al Qaeda connected to the original group that has grown and expanded or is "Al Qaeda" just want one calls oneself when one wants to fight the United States in the middle east. My bet is it's the latter.
Both these questions (is Osama really still alive and what is the real nature of Al Qaeda at this time) deserve attention.
One final (and very dark) thought: could the (perhaps post mortem) video's, tapes and statements attributed to Bin Laden lead eventually to the rise of an "after death/rose from the dead" mythology that would be -by it's nature- religious, thereby elevating him to supernatural status. Boy if you think radical Islam is bad now...yikes. That would be the mother of unintended consequences!
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/13/osama-bin-elvis/
I would add the question of whose interests are advanced by keeping alive a myth of Osama Bin Laden's continued existence. First, the interests of American neo-conservatives who wish to keep the nation at war are advanced by a "living" Bin Laden. A dead Bin Laden would open the possibility of ending this war.
Al-Qaeda and various radical elements in the middle east also would want to perpetuate a myth of a living Bin Laden to show their friends and allies that they are robust and can persist in the face of American power: he attacked downtown New York City and he's still alive and free! A dead Bin Laden might suggest an impotent Al Qaeda. If there is one thing they don't want to be it's impotent.
The question of Bin Laden's real involvement (vs. being just a cheerleader) in 9/11 is moot to both groups.
OK, so how would this have gone down - if Bin Laden is dead how could that have been hidden. The "osama-bin-elvis" article notes that there are is no credible evidence of a living Bin Laden after November of 2001. That is when the Afghanistan war was reaching it's most intense point. Here is a description from Wikipedia of what happened in Tora Bora cave region in December 2001:
"Al-Qaeda fighters were still holding out in the mountains of Tora Bora, however, while an anti-Taliban tribal militia steadily pushed bin Laden back across the difficult terrain, backed by withering air strikes guided in by U.S. and UK Special Forces. Facing defeat, the al-Qaeda forces agreed to a truce to give them time to surrender their weapons. In retrospect, however, many believe that the truce was a ruse to allow important al-Qaeda figures, including Osama bin Laden, to escape. On December 12, the fighting flared again, probably initiated by a rear guard buying time for the main force's escape through the White Mountains into the tribal areas of Pakistan. Once again, tribal forces backed by British and U.S. special operations troops and air support pressed ahead against fortified al-Qaeda positions in caves and bunkers scattered throughout the mountainous region. By December 17, the last cave complex had been taken and their defenders overrun. A search of the area by U.S. and UK forces continued into January, but no sign of bin Laden or the al-Qaeda leadership emerged. It is almost unanimously believed that they had already slipped away into the tribal areas of Pakistan to the south and east. It is estimated that around 200 of the al-Qaeda fighters were killed during the battle, along with an unknown number of anti-Taliban tribal fighters. No U.S. or UK deaths were reported."
But instead of the official line maybe:
a) Bin Laden was pre-emptively killed by his own people via prearrangement as enemy forces closed in and then the body was then disposed of.
b) his cave or hiding place was hit directly by a large bomb which left no body behind.
c) He died from pre existing conditions which were exacerbated by the stress of what was happening and his body was disposed of via prearrangement. This could have happened months or years after Sept 2001.
Maybe after that, statements or video's he had made while alive continued to leak to the media for a time giving the appearance that he was still alive and then someone got the bright idea to start creating fake video's and statements to keep the ball rolling and after that it took on a life of it's own.
In any case, the longer we go without having independent verifiable evidence of his existence, the more likely it is that he is dead. And it seems not altogether implausible that he died in late 2001 and all the tapes and video's and statements attributed to him since then have been fakes. The CIA validated much of the stuff you say? Well the CIA has a long and sad record of "validating" what it's bosses want to hear. Remember Weapons of Mass Destruction?, the "potent power" of the Soviet Union when it was on the verge of collapse?, Tonkin Gulf?. The CIA can be counted on to tell us what it's bosses (typically the president of the U.S.) want to hear. The historical record on this is clear.
As time goes on another party becomes interested in perpetuating the myth: the media. After years of sensationalistic coverage of Bin Laden they would look like fools if it was revealed that he had in fact died long ago. So they have no incentive to look long and hard at the question of his existence either.
The "osama-bin-elvis" article makes another good point. A point that I have heard elsewhere: what/who is Al Qaeda now. Is there still a coherent Al Qaeda connected to the original group that has grown and expanded or is "Al Qaeda" just want one calls oneself when one wants to fight the United States in the middle east. My bet is it's the latter.
Both these questions (is Osama really still alive and what is the real nature of Al Qaeda at this time) deserve attention.
One final (and very dark) thought: could the (perhaps post mortem) video's, tapes and statements attributed to Bin Laden lead eventually to the rise of an "after death/rose from the dead" mythology that would be -by it's nature- religious, thereby elevating him to supernatural status. Boy if you think radical Islam is bad now...yikes. That would be the mother of unintended consequences!
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