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POPS Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts
But what this means is that even the record-breaking federal deficit understates the government's real financial liabilities, because agencies like FDIC and the Federal Housing Authority are likely to need increased amounts of money to keep going. An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. I doubt whether the man responsible for the massacre at Fort Hood will pay with his life for the lives that he took. He may well be free again someday. We can only hope that he does not get a hero's welcome when he arrives in some terror-sponsoring country, the way the Lockerbie bomber did. A recent study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that, after the housing boom and bust, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians all reduced their subprime mortgage loans. Only politicians seem not to have learned anything from the economic disaster ...
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POPSCNN: Angry Republicans Hassling Democrats at Polling Stations From the website: The officer, who’s name we are with holding, specifically heard the men discussing that he was a police officer and that they now know where he lives. The officer confronted the men and they took off. He contacted the local police who responded and caught up with them and about a dozen other men a few blocks away. According to the police report, the men were known criminals and when asked why they were in the neighborhood they stated they were “campaigning for the Democratic Party.” Gangbangers Going Door to Door to ‘Get Out the Vote’ for New Jersey Dems http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/11/new-jersey-gangbangers-going-door-to-door-to-get-out-the-vote-for-new-jersey-dems-video/
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POPSRandom Thoughts One good turn gets most of the blankets. There are two kinds of pedestrians -- the quick and the dead. If quitters never win, and winners never cheat, then who is the fool who said "Quit while you're ahead"? Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not sure. What happens if you get scared half to death twice? Multitasking: Screwing up several things at once. Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
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POPSWe are all multiple personalities: or, Why "I" don't know what's good for "me" More: Such contradictions arise all the time. If you ask people which makes them happier, work or vacation, they will remind you that they work for money and spend the money on vacations. But if you give them a beeper that goes off at random times, and ask them to record their activity and mood each time they hear a beep, you’ll likely find that they are happier at work. Work is often engaging and social; vacations are often boring and stressful. Similarly, if you ask people about their greatest happiness in life, more than a third mention their children or grandchildren, but when they use a diary to record their happiness, it turns out that taking care of the kids is a downer—parenting ranks just a bit higher than housework, and falls below sex, socializing with friends, watching TV, praying, eating, and cooking.
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POPSMassachusetts Resident Charged With Plotting Jihad in U.S. . . booked at the Sudbury police station before being turned over to federal authorities. Federal agents have searched Mehanna’s home and say he is a U.S. citizen. A bail hearing has been scheduled for 1:30 p.m. in federal court. Abousamra left the United States for Syria on Dec. 26, 2006, officials said. He said he would be back within a month after visiting his wife, but has never returned, officials said. The plot included plans to fire at emergency responders, but was abandoned because the men could not obtain the weapons, authorities said. They declined to name the mall or mallsthe men were targeting. Automatic weapons may be more of a challenge, but if you can’t get your hands on guns, even in Massachusetts, you aren’t trying hard enough. It looks like the kind of bust that, during the Bush years, some people would have considered a joke. You don’t hear the sneering anymore. Instead, people behave and talk as though the threat is dated, passe, no longer a concern.
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POPSReligion Going Badly In what appears to be a blending of old nativistic religion and Christianity the children of Africa suffer.
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POPS2009-09-Trip images via FlickrRiver (menu). This is mainly just a test of a slightly different way of viewing the images that I post at flickr. I would appreciate comments since I'm debating the relative merits of various User interface designs with several groups of technicians that (needless to say) all have their own conflicting views of how this should be done.
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POPSCrazy Conspiracy Theories ... or Are They? Some of these theories are bizarre, some - hold water. Mix false and true for their own advantage is usual method of con artists from behind the scene. Another method is distracting public attention from real leads by BS. But nothing can be hidden forever and in some point, sometimes so unpredictable, the true show its face. Good when we have a chance to catch glimpse of it and show it to the world, now in our new media environment - virtual space of thought - it's become easy and handy.
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POPSBooker Short List Announced Super excited about the new books from Byatt and Coetzee. Will read them even if they do not win. Will definitely read the winner. I'm still reading last year's winner - "Midnight's Children" by Rushdie. It is fantastic, but I hit a lull. Not enough time to read when you're having fun raising a toddler.
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POPSWall Street Derivatives: So complex as to be "Computationall intractable" MORE: In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis. Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs. Everyone on Wall Street... UP AGAINST THE WALL, THE LOT OF YOU BASTARDS!
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POPSJohn Scalzi on the latest "girls are ruining science fiction!" idiocy
More: Well, actually , the thing to do is trap such creatures in a dork snare (cunningly baited with Cool Ranch Doritos, Diet Ultra Violet Mountain Dew and a dual monitor rig open to Drunken Stepfather on one screen and Duke Nukem 3D on the other), and then cart them to a special preserve somewhere in Idaho for such as their kind. We’ll tell them it’s a “freehold” — they’ll like that — and that they will be with others of a like mind, and there they will live as men , free from the horrible feminizing effects of women and their gonad shriveling girl rays . And then we’ll tag them with GPS and if they ever try to leave the freehold, we’ll have them hunted down by roller derby teams with spears . That’s really the optimal solution. But since we can’t do that , then pointing and laughing will suffice. So, yes: let’s all point and laugh at these funny little terrified stupid men, and then ignore them. Because that’s what they rate.
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POPSThis is following what the Honduran Constitution says? This is better than Zelaya just wanting to ask people if they thought that the president should have a right to run for longer terms? This is what happens when right-wing radicals in government usurp democracy. A policeman shooting a 13-year-old boy? In the back, yet? Contact your congressmen and members of Parliament. Get them to pressure Honduras to put the rightful president, Manuel Zelaya back in power, and end this savage, illegal coup!
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POPSStephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" The best part of the article: ""By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA." :)
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POPSOne Man's Rumor; Another's Reality "But in the meantime, don't forget psychologist Knapp. "To decry the ravages of rumor-mongering is one thing," he wrote, "to control it is yet another." Pass it on."
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