Not Surprised

Has anyone noticed that gasoline prices went down before the November elections? 

Has anyone noticed that now, less than a month after those elections, gasoline prices are rising again? Is anyone surprised by that?

I'm not. I predicted it.

Amusing Moments

My wife and I take care of each other, which is what old people (which we are) do when they love each other (which we do). That sometimes can get a little comical, which we won't go into, and sometimes involves our own private language.

Such as when I'm taking medication for back pain and she doesn't trust me to remember to take it as instructed, which results in her asking her recovering alcoholic husband, "Did you take some more drugs?"  Yes, I did, but I appreciated her asking.

Oh yes, and Russia ran out of missiles again last week, then fired 120 more missiles again yesterday. I have lost count of how many times Russia has run out of missiles. It's at least a couple of dozen times.

Football Highlight and Lowlight

The Chiefs have just taken the lead, 30-27, and there are 31 seconds left. The Chargers have one time out left. The Chiefs are going to line up with four players 25 yards deep, four players 15 yards deep, and will engage in a three-man pass rush, enabling the Chargers to complete a fifty yard pass.

But no! What's this? The Chiefs have 11 players on the line of scrimmage! It's a jailbreak! And they sack the Chargers quarterback!!!

Time for one more play, and they do it again!!! Interception!! Who knew? Eleven men on the line of scrimmage is actually a "prevent defense."

Update, Dec 17, 2022: Last week against Miami, the Chargers have 3rd and goal at the 17-yard line, which is less than a sterling accomplishment in itself. The Dolphins defensive alignment consists of three men at the line of scrimmage, three on the goal line, and the remaining five men in the end zone. Eight players 17 or more yards away from the line of scrimmage.

Oddly, the Chargers did not score! With the Dolphins giving them 17 yards of empty grass between them and the end zone, they did not score.

A completed pass was carried out of bounds 18" short of the goal line. The Chargers went for it on fourth down and scored a touchdown.

Artificial Reasoning

I am most certainly not a scientist, but I grew up in an era when students were taught to think rationally, along the lines of, “regardless of who says it, if it doesn’t make any sense it isn’t true.” I therefor do not subscribe to the modern religion of blindly accepting as gospel anything that is spoken by a government official, journalist or putative scientist.

So when I read an article in Quantum Magazine which tells me that physicists have detected a stunning new, heretofore unknown “feature of the fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang,” I am not necessarily or automatically awestruck by the genius of the parties involved. (Especially given that the Big Bang itself is an unproven theory, so discovering "features of fundamental laws" that operated during an unproven event is more than a bit questionable.)

The discovery has to do, the article tells us, with “a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky.” Why anyone would expect the galaxies in the universe to be symmetrically distributed escapes me, as it’s rather like expecting trees in a natural forest to be in nice neat rows like an apple orchard.

Given that the Big Bang Theory says that the universe was created when something exploded, scattering material in all directions, why did they think that the material would be scattered symmetrically? 

Well, let’s move on to how they discovered this asymmetry.
 
The article reports that, “…the researchers drew lines between sets of four galaxies, constructing four-cornered shapes called tetrahedra. When they had built every possible tetrahedron from a catalog of 1 million galaxies, they found that tetrahedra oriented one way outnumber their mirror images.”

You have to be kidding me. How long did it take these “researchers,” and how much did they get paid, to play “connect the dots” with one million fucking galaxies? Why did they choose to connect in sets of four? Why not three and make triangles? Or five and make pentagons?

How do they know that they started with the right four galaxies? What if they started with three of those four and included a different one as the fourth in the initial group? What if they stared with two of those four and included a different two? How did they determine how to select the other sets of four?

“If the observation withstands scrutiny,” the article goes on to say, using the term “observation” rather generously, “physicists think it must reflect an unknown, parity-violating ingredient in the primordial process,” which would rather seriously disparage the thinking capacity of physicists.

They do, finally, caution that with “such a blockbuster finding” that “experts say caution is warranted.” I would suggest that a little more than mere caution is warranted.

This is what “science” has deteriorated into; “researchers” playing connect the dots with star maps.

Gaslighting

I sometimes watch NBC Evening News, typically until I am faced with a piece containing such virulent dishonesty that I vow never to watch it again. That usually doesn't not take long.

Last night they ran a piece on “Cyber Monday” holiday shopping, celebrating 5.8% increase in sales over last year and telling us that it constituted the “largest holiday shopping day in history” and that it was caused by “a mix of inflation and demand.”

It’s difficult to find what current inflation is, as the media is busy grinding axes and each outlet reports different segments depending on which point they are trying to make. Inflation is easing because gasoline prices are dropping, for instance, or it’s increasing because the price of spiral-cut ham went up.

The numbers that I can find for overall consumer goods ranges from 6.6% to 7.2% year-to-year, but no report claims as low as 5.8%. So a 5.8% increase in spending is not a “mix” of anything. It is caused entirely by inflation and represents a reduction of the actual amount of goods purchased, which makes the entire news story a lie.

Peak Insanity

The Department of Justice, increasingly a misnomer, has named a "Special Investigator" to pursue Donald Trump regarding the Jan 6th "insurrection," and in regard to papers which were stored in his home and which the FBI has revealed had no value other than as, um, sort of trophies.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Republicans have announced that as soon as they are sworn in and have control of the House they will commence an investigation of Joe Biden and his business dealings with various enemies of the United States.

So we now have both political parties investigating the heads of their opposing political parties and have become the Disunited States of Investigations, DSI, devolving from comedy into farce.

Football Sanity Question

Now that the Raiders, having been in the playoffs last season, have achieved the stellar record of 2-7, are they finally going to show the same good judgement that the Broncos did and fire Josh McDaniels? 

That is a sequel to the imponderable question of why in the hell did they hire him to begin with?

I watched as much of the Chargers vs. 49ers as I could stand. That was two sorry looking football teams. Looked like 22 drunks out on a field chasing each other.

A Plethora of Rights

San Diego City Council is considering a resolution to declare that “housing is a human right” to go along with what seems to be an established policy that “health care is a human right.”

The policy would be accompanied by laws requiring landlords to pay the tenant three months rent if they decide to sell the property, or if they decide to renovate it, but the details don’t matter. At issue, for me, is the basic one of one person’s property or service being the basis for another person’s “right.”

If I own a home, which I built or am paying for with my money, what valid principle gives you a right to live in it? On the other side of that coin, why do you have a right to live in a home that you neither built or paid for? In order for this idea to hold, one has to discard the whole concept of the right to hold property.

Similarly, health care is a service provided by people who are providing that service in order to earn money to house and feed their families. What gives anyone a right to receive the fruit of those people’s labor? Is a doctor a de facto slave to anyone who has become sick?

If a physician decides that he/she no longer wishes to perform that service, but wants to work as an auto mechanic in the future, can that person be prosecuted by the federal government for denying his/her patients their civil rights, that is their right to receive health care?

It’s a reasonable conclusion, is it not. The premise is that those patients have a human right to health care, and the doctor is denying them their right.

In one news piece the reporter was referring to a “person’s right not to be offended.” This country is becoming a morass of “rights,” mostly imaginary, which are designed to make life comfortable. In doing so they make the nation weak.

More Irony

The United States weaponizes Ukraine to the hilt against Russia via an array of “consultants,” advisers, trainers, mercenaries, heavy weapons, munitions, satellite intelligence, and electronic warfare. We don’t even deny this, we openly brag about it, and we are not selling these things to Ukraine, we are providing them as gifts.

Then, in yet another trademark boatload of hysteria loaded to the gunwales with irony, we accuse Iran of weaponizing the Russian Armed Forces by selling them drones.

I Love It

SportsScroll ran an article about the worst NFL coaches of all time and included Josh McDaniels, who was an assistant under Belichek for the Patriots before and after serving as head coach of the Denver Broncos.

One wonders how much he contributed to the Patriots, given that his first season with the Broncos their record was 8-8, and he was fired during his second season when the team was at 3-9.

The Raiders then come along and hire him as head coach, at $1 million per year, and currently have a record of 2-5 in his first year. Question. Why would the Raiders think that he would be any better in Las Vegas than he was in Denver?

Slanted Much?

When the stock market falls, the media always cites the drop in terms of how many dollars the drop was. "Dow dropped $439," it will tell us.

When it rises the media will tell us what the percentage of rise was. "Dow rose 1.39%," is the headline.

Would it surprise you to know that the huge drop of $439 and the miniscule rise of 1.39% are precisely the same amount?

Forecasting (Probably Accurate)

James Howard Kunstler speaks of, "...the magic moment when the necromancers of finance discover that the proverbial can they’ve been kicking is filled with Schrödinger’s cat food, and the road they’ve been kicking it down actually comes to a dead end."  He goes on to say that, "Economics will never be the same hereafter."

 You can read the whole thing. He is not an admirer of American governance.

The Peter Principle

Just because one is good at participating in a sport does not mean they will become a success at officiating that sport, or will be very illuminating as announcer for it.

The Alabama quarterback was sacked in his own endzone. He lost the ball after going down, which rolled out of bounds in the end zone. Texas was celebrating a safety until they noticed a flag on the play.

The official announced “roughing the passer with targeting” and that there would be a review. So far, so good, but the Texas player barely hit the quarterback, and did not come anywhere near his head, so the first part of the call was a stretch, and the second was pure fiction. Targeting requires a review, but roughing the passer is not reviewable, so the two-point safety was out and Alabama was going to get a first down just based on the roughing part of the call.

Not so fast. The review established that there was no targeting, but it also made it very clear that the roughing call was ridiculous. Problem was, however, that roughing is not reviewable. The official then gave a complicated explanation about the call having been explained to him wrong and that roughing had never been called, only the targeting had and that there was no targeting. (And no roughing, not because it was overturned, but because that penalty had never been called.)

He did not explain how targeting, hitting the quarterback in the head, can be called without also calling roughing the passer. It would seem impossible, but… So there was no penalty. That would make it a sack, and two points for Texas.

He wasn’t done yet. He said that the quarterback was out of the pocket and had not fumbled the ball but had thrown it, and it was therefor an incomplete pass, third down Alabama at the one yard line.

If the quarterback had thrown, rather than fumbled, the ball, which he did not, the ball did not reach the line of scrimmage, which means it was “intentional grounding.” That would be a penalty committed in the end zone, which is by definition, wait for it... A safety.

So the official’s ignorance, abetted by the announcers’ ignorance, was a gift of two points to Alabama, which won the game by one point.

On to Indycar, and the season ending race at Laguna Seca. Will Power was leading in the championship by 21 points and was starting on the pole. Joseph Newgarten, second place in the points, was starting at the rear, in 26th place.

As Newgarten worked his way up in the field, the announcers, both former Indycar drivers, got all excited, implying, and even saying that all Newgarten had to do was pass Power to win the championship. I knew different, and was becoming increasingly annoyed, as it was increasingly unlikely that Newgarten was even going to take the lead in the race, let alone pass Power for the championship.

Finally one of the announcers calmed down as he said that, “We have been informed that because of the way that race points are awarded if Will Power finishes fifth or better he will win the championship.”

I knew that before the race started, as did a million other people. Why did they not?

Burying The Lede

It tends to amuse me when the media promote social causes by using stories which “bury the lede,” that is, which ignore points within the story which utterly refute the point which they are trying to make.

“This is the worst drought in 200 years.” To suggest that it is caused by current human activity raising CO2 levels ignores that the worse drought 200 years ago was not caused by current human activity and happened when CO2 levels were lower. Why do we suppose that, not having caused that drought, we did cause this one? The planet has been having droughts for many centuries.

The Anazazi people, who built amazing cities in the cliffs of the Southwest, disappeared somewhere around the 14th century. According to Britannica, “The Great Drought (1276–99) probably caused massive crop failure; rainfall continued to be sparse and unpredictable until approximately 1450,” which contributed to their disappearance. Did the Anazazi people cause that drought, too?

The most recent is the appearance of “Hunger Stones” in the rivers of Europe. These stones have been exposed by river levels dropping to the lowest levels that they have been in centuries. Back then, people carved notes on the stones recording the severe conditions prevailing when the rivers became that dry. One stone dates from the year 1616 and others from the 19th century.

We were probably burning some fossil fuels in the 19th century, but not a hell of a lot. How much fossil fuel were we burning in the year 1616? And yet when the rivers drop to the same level that they did when we were not burning fossil fuel, we blame the drop on the fact that we are burning fossil fuel.

The rivers dry up when the CO2 level is 280ppm, and when they dry up now we claim that they did so because the CO2 level is 420ppm.

To bemoan that something is “the worst it has been since…” is an admission that it has happened before now, that the condition is not unique. It says that the condition existed when your purported cause did not yet exist. For statement of actual systemic disaster attributable to your purported cause one needs, “this is the worst it has ever been,” which we virtually never see.

Big Weekend Upcoming

Big, big weekend coming up. To start with, Formula 1 goes to Holland (Netherlands). Dutch Grand Prix. Max Verstappen's home course. This is a downforce course, so he won't dominate like he did in Belgium, but Zandvoort is a really cool curcuit.

MotoGP is on television. In case you don't know, this is motorcycles on Formula 1 race courses. They go as fast as 200 mph, and in the turns lean over at 70 degrees. Exciting stuff. Those riders are nuts. They're on NBC Sunday afternoon.

Indycar is on the road course at Portland. It's a really nice circuit and usually provides for interesting competition.

Finally, college football opens with two games featuring what I consider home teams. San Diego State plays in their new stadium against Arizona Saturday, and LSU plays Florida State on Sunday. Both should be fun games to watch.

I have the best wife in the world. She is happy for me to have all these sports to watch and makes her plans around me doing so.

Why do they do things like this?

Mark Wahlberg said he spent 12 hours naked on a pier while filming his latest movie "Me Time." Well, he wasted his time. The movie was probably the worst movie in several decades. I watched about 12 minutes and turned it off. Utter garbage.

A Non-sentient Race

The human race was living in North America 15,000 years ago. The area was still in the throes of the last Ice Age, which would not end for another 3000 years. The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere was 46 degrees, some 11 degrees cooler than it is today.

The human race is still living in North America. Or I think it’s the human race. Sometimes I’m not sure.

Anyway, the average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has risen 11 degrees, a process which not only has the human race survived, but during which it has thrived and multiplied, but we are told that we will be catastrophically destroyed if the temperature rises another 2 degrees.

To repeat a bit; we survived an 11 degree rise, but we will not survive a 2 degree rise. Does that sound a little bit stupid to you? Did we lose our ability to adapt? Or did we merely lose our intelligence?

Since we, apparently, no longer can change ourselves or the way we have been doing things for the past 100 years or so (other than by using electricity to do it instead of “fossil” fuels), we propose to change the way the planet has been doing things for more than 15,000 years.

Sea levels are rising, we are told. I have seen no observable evidence of that in the more than fifty years that I have been going to the beach, but let’s assume that sea levels are rising and will drown our big cities.

Perhaps we should be talking about moving our big cities inland and to higher ground, away from those rising seas. We’re not doing that. Not one person is suggesting that. We are, instead, talking about stopping the seas from rising. I spent time in the Navy. News flash. The oceans are really big.

There was a king named Canute tried what we are proposing. He was a powerful guy, being king of England and Denmark, and Norway and Sweden. He got wet.

Temperatures are rising, we are told, so maybe we should be talking about moving our populations farther north and/or to higher altitudes where it is cooler. Adapting. We’re not talking about that either. Instead we’re talking about stopping the temperature from rising, stopping the entire freaking planet from doing something that it has been doing for more than 15,000 years.

Sorry for being so blunt, but that is just plain stupid.

Government Accuracy

The "Employment Survey" produced by the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the economy produced well over 500,000 new jobs last month, which was hailed by the media as proof that there is no recession and that the economy is growing like mad. The stock marked soared.

The "Household Survey," also produced by the BLS, reported that there were only 150,000 newly employed persons filling those newly created jobs. That should have created some suspicion about the jobs report, but it was ignored.

Do economists think that each of the newly employed persons filled 3.33 new jobs?

Redefining Reality

After a report saying that the nation has experienced a second quarter of negative growth in GDP, which has been the definition of a recession for more than fifty years, the White House is denying that we are in a recession because two quarters of negative growth is not the definition of a recession as everyone has thought for the past half century.

Just like we thought that a vaccine was a product that prevented the spread of an infectious pathogen. We were set straight on that one by the Biden White House. A vaccine does not stop the spread of a disease, like the smallpox vaccine did, it merely “reduces the risk of hospitalization or death.”

So we are now told that a recession is not defined by negative GDP, but is defined by “a much broader spectrum of data points,” which for some reason they cannot list for us. Probably because they have not made them up them yet. After all, the second negative GDP quarter was only announced yesterday.

From Politico we learn that the “National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee can determine whether the U.S. economy is in a recession, based on a multitude of factors that can only be found several months or up to a year after a recession actually begins.” And, presumably after the current election cycle has passed as well.

Economist Ben White provided a tweet reading, “Yeah I did a bad tweet a while ago referring to two negative q’s in a row as  a recession. Should have known better at the time but it had been a while since I’d studied recession criteria and that’s not it.” Right. It had, "been a while since I’d studied recession criteria."

That was not particularly illuminating, so he amplified that the actual definition is “NBER and lots of data points beyond GDP.” He, too, does not elaborate on the “lots of data points.”

Wikipedia, which cannot be used for toilet paper because it is a virtual source, admits that its article, “may be affected by the following current event: Increased political debate in the United States.” No shit.

Anyway, it says that a recession, “In the United States, a recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as ‘a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales’."

Wikipedia follows that with the statement that, “In the United Kingdom and most other countries, it is defined as negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters,” which is basically saying that the NBER, and the White House, are full of shit, which is kind of awesome.

Note that, despite its name, the NBER cited repeatedly above is a private economic research organization.

I don’t really care what the “lots of data points” are, two quarters of negative GDP growth tells me we are in a recession, and my observation and common sense told me that several months ago.

Say What?

A military expert is challenged with respect to his predictions on the war in Ukraine. "You have been predicting that the Russians will soon run out of missiles, ammo and men since mid-March. And yet as predictions go it never seems to come to pass." 

The expert responds, "It is an ongoing process." 

And we keep paying attention to these oracles of wisdom, seeking their "wisdom"  and publishing their opinions.