Self-Rebutting Morons

"Noah's Ark", built on Mount Ararat to attract world leaders' attention to global warming, will be inaugurated for public visits.

As a part of the project prepared by Greenpeace, a ship similar to Noah's Ark has been constructed on the mountain - thought to be the location where Noah's Ark finally touched dry land.

The wooden ship will be ten meters long, four meters wide and four meters in height.

"We are in front of a second universal flood. But it is not yet too late. If all the nations of the World make a turn in favor of environment one will be able to avoid the catastrophe," indicated Andree Behling, Greenpeace expert in energy." "The politicians must assume their responsibilities and cannot continue to look at a world threatened to be submerged by the tides, the storms and floods, while hundreds of thousands people lose their houses, while plants and animals disappear by the diseases and dryness," he said. (link)

The quartet of irony, hypocrisy, ignorance, and stupidity, even if each raised to the n-th degree, could not adequately describe Climate Change Morons.

When did modern scientists start touting biblical tales of creationism? What happened to the Big Bang Theory and Darwinism?

Is "climate change" alarmism a science or a religion? If it's a science, when do they need to invoke the religious metaphor of Noah?

(Answer: it's really all about deception!)

The fact remains, every civilization throughout history has had doomsayers warning of cataclysmic flooding. Furthermore, they have always blamed it on human iniquity. So despite millennia of scientific discovery and innovation, today's experts have nothing more than an age-old popular myth.

These days I am partial to historically-based arguments and wisdom. Read what Will Durant wrote over 70 years ago to put today's fears of "climate change" into proper focus:

"Even more universal was the story of the Flood; hardly an ancient people went without it, and hardly a mountain in Asia but had given perch to some water-wearied Noah or Shamash-napishtim. Usually these legends were the popular vehicle or allegory of a philosophical judgment or a moral attitude summarizing long racial experience – that sex and knowledge bring more grief than joy, and that human life is periodically threatened by floods, - i.e., ruinous inundations of the great rivers whose waters made possible the earliest known civilizations. To ask whether these stories were true or false, whether they “really happened,” would be to put a trivial and superficial question; their substance, of course, is not the tales they tell but the judgments they convey."

That last line really is the crux of the pathology, "...but the judgments they convey."



Noah's Ark is a self-discrediting argument - most especially coming from today's scientists. Greenpeace is trying to invoke history to buttress their alarmism when in fact, history exposes "climate change" as just another in a long line of scaremongering hoaxes.

This would be like saying that O.J. Simpson's acquittal PROVES that murderers are often falsely accused.

Where are those "real killers" anyway?

A Guinea Pig As Your Role Model?

Click the pic to enlarge and read.

This was sent to me by an over-stimulated relative. The email was titled "Check out our hero!"

Feeding Rats and Lawyers...

Some deranged "old coot" near me has adopted the neighborhood rats. No wonder the local egg rolls melt in my mouth.

According to Gruss and ISD, Hanron realized there was initially a rat issue in July 2005 when she hired a contractor to remedy the problem. When that work did not completely eradicate the rats, she started feeding the creatures because, as Gruss described her, she loves animals and taking care of others and “even agreed to feed me as a lawyer, if you can believe that.” (link)

My mother-in-law is also an inveterate "feeder" - but she restricts her bounty to humans.

She cooks for her neighbors. She cooks for her contractors (and their kids) and I also suspect she feeds her local garbage collectors. She has sneaked pancetta and prosciutto through customs on her way back from Italy (spraying the sniffing dogs with perfume to mask her smuggling). She has toted chicken soup as a carry-on halfway across the country to bring to her sick daughter. I maintain that she would feed Bin Laden if she showed up at her house hungry.

More Propaganda...

Touché!!!

30 Year Treasury Bond - Linchpin of Prosperity

Above find an intraday graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for May 24th. As you can see, it spiked sharply that morning at 10am (9am Central Time) when new home sales data came in "better than expected". From Briefing.com,

Economic Perspective: Review of New Home Sales data

New home sales in April took a surprisingly large 16.2% jump to 981,000 annual rate. This follows a modest gain in March. It is hard to conclude from this increase that the problems in the housing market are over, but this will certainly ease concerns about the severity of the problems in the new home market. It is clearly bullish from an economic and stock market standpoint because it lessens the downside risks... The major indices have seen a strong move to the upside on this morning's data, with the Dow pushing higher by ~60 points following the data, the SPX gaining 5 pts, and the Nasdaq gaining 5 points on the release.

I shorted into this spike of the market and quickly made some good money. I shorted because the sales "volume" of new homes (or existing homes) remains a wholly irrelevant metric. All that matters is the PRICE of home sales - at least as far as the larger economy is concerned. Getting aroused over a sales jump would be as silly as celebrating a high volume day in one of your stocks. But nobody really cares if Google traded 2 million shares on a given day or 20 million shares; they care whether or not the stock went up or down.



Home prices are dropping, in fact quite rapidly these past two weeks. I know this from watching the 30 year Treasury bond. No anecdotes from brokers or aggregate national sales data can refute the mathematics of Higher Rates = Lower Home Prices.

First of all, almost nobody knows this. They may sense it but I have never seen or heard the naked math discussed anywhere. So I'll provide that service presently.

On May 8th, the 30 year yielded 4.80%. Two weeks later, as I type this, it's yielding 5.03%. So essentially, rates have risen a quarter point (23 basis points). That lowered the theoretical value of every home in America and I will tell you by exactly how much.

Consider four theoretical homes priced at: 250k, 500k, 750k, and $1 million bucks.

When 30 year fixed mortgage rates are 5.75%,

A 250k house costs $1,459 per month
A 500k house costs $2,918 per month
A 750k house costs $4,377 per month
A $1 million house costs $5,836 per month

(These figures represent total capital costs of homeownership. It doesn't matter how much money you put as down payment on the house because the total cost of lost interest on your down payment and paid interest on your mortgage always adds up to the capital cost of the home's price.)

Now when interest rates rise, obviously a given monthly payment doesn't mortgage as much as before. To find out how much, change the interest rate on a mortgage calculator and then lower the principal amount until the monthly payment equals the level before the rate change.

You'll find out that at 5.75%, a $1,459 payment covers a 250k house, but when rates rise to 6.00%, such a payment only buys a $243,300 house.

Continuing, a 500k house drops in value to $486,700.

A 750k house becomes a $730,200 home.

And a $1 million house depreciates to $973,500.

As the math illustrates, every house in America just lost about 2.65% of its value.

This semi-dated link I found says that American consumers owe $8 trillion in mortgage debt. Since consumers own about half of their homes these days, impute the total value of housing real estate is around $16 trillion.

Therefore, the recent bump in rates shaved roughly $424 billion (2.65%) from the coffers of homeowners.

$424 billion !!!!

Now let's do the math again, only with a theoretical rise in rates from our current 5.75% to 7%, 8%, 10% and then 15%.

Here's how much every house will depreciate for given higher mortgage rates.

-12.28% at 7%
-20.47% at 8%
-33.50% at 10%
-53.80% at 15%

I believe that within three years, we will see 8% mortgage rates. So I am forecasting an approximate 20% decline from today's levels.

Devil's Advocate - But if they have a fixed mortgage, homeowners are safe, right?

NO.

Their payments for that particular house may be locked in at a set rate, but the proceeds from any sale of the property will theoretically be 2.65% lower; also any potential home equity loans would be lower. Remember, the value of your home has nothing to do with what you paid for or put down on the house - it's wholly determined by what OTHERS can currently pay for it.

Say this homeowner lived in a development of identical houses and wanted to move down the street into a facsimile of his current house. He couldn't do it without incurring higher costs. Allow me to illustrate how this fixed rate borrower is still at risk to interest rate pops.

Joe Blow just paid 600k for a house in this mythical neighborhood of identical homes. Every home there is currently worth 600k. Joe Blow puts a 100k deposit down and mortgages the 500k balance.

Suddenly every home is now worth 550k due to an interest rate spike.

Joe decides to sell his house and move down the street into another house that's also now worth 550k.

He sells his original house for 550k, uses $500,000 of it to pay off his mortgage, and used the 50k he has left as a down payment on his "new" house. Obviously Joe needs to borrow 500k more in mortgage debt, ONLY HE HAS TO DO SO AT THE PREVAILING HIGHER RATES NOW - so his payments are higher than they were before.

Joe Blow bought his first house and "locked" into a fixed mortgage. He thought he was safe from the bond market - HE WAS WRONG. Now he has zero equity (instead of 100k) and he has higher payments and an equal debt for the exact same type of house!!!

Many people mistakenly think that once you buy a house, they are insulated from larger market fluctuations but that is only true if rates stay the same.

In America, one cannot take their mortgage with them when they move (in Britain it may be allowed). They need to take out an entirely new loan at market rates. After all, a mortgage is a loan based on a specific house. The specific location, price, timing, and financial status of the borrower were extremely important variables for the lender. The lender doesn't want what they had previously deemed a safe loan transferred to another property, in another town, on a differently priced home, when the financial status of the borrower may or may not have changed.



I want to make a few more points about how important the 30-year bond is to our economy.

When interest rates tick up as they just did, it's not just homes that lose value. All income bearing assets lose some value because they compete with Treasuries and corporate bonds for funds. Everything from gas stations, to hardware stores, to shares of stock, to professional sports franchises lost a couple of percentage points of value over the last few weeks. Cars and college tuitions got more expensive because they rely on financing. Name just about any enterprise or product and it recently got pricier to underwrite and produce.

Now this leads to my second point.

Right now, real estate has consumers in an inflationary vice. Residential rents are rising. Commercial rents are rising - they always do but are on a meteoric rise now. Allow me to explain. Most businesses sign ten year (or longer leases). So when they expire, they'll be reset in an entirely different (higher) real estate market. You may have noticed several of your favorite restaurants or stores suddenly closing. "How could that be...", you wonder, "they do a good business there?" Well, their lease was probably up and the building owner can likely get a whole lot more rent from say a real estate agency, a pharmacy, or a corporate restaurant chain. (Have you noticed how the CVSs, Duane Reades, and Walgreens are taking over everywhere? It's because they make so much money from prescription drugs that they can pay exorbitant rents, that little delicatessens and bakeries can't compete with.) The reason commercial rents are rising so much more than normal is because the economic landscape has grown extraordinarily since 1997 - remember, back then, the internet was just a novelty. We've had the greatest bull markets in both stocks and bonds (real estate) crammed into a mere ten years. Your bakeries, restaurants, and bars will still be around but expect some real expensive shopping there going forward - after all, they have to pay their ballooning rents.

It's easy to see how rising rents (commercial and residential) are inflationary events for consumers, but house prices are dropping, that has to be deflationary, right?

WRONG.

If nobody owned a home, declining house prices would be a very good thing. BUT, about 70% of households in America now own their home. This dropping market is only a deflationary event for first time home buyers like me (though my rent is ticking up slightly).

The housing malaise may be deflationary for plasma televisions, sheet rock, and granite countertops, but it's absolutely inflationary for consumers. This was always just an undeveloped intuition of mine. I figured that home equity was in part a major currency and any depreciation of a currency could be deemed inflationary because it represented a loss of purchasing power. So then, is home equity a currency? Well, Americans re-mortgage their homes to send their kids to college. They use it to buy vacation homes; and they use it for estate planning/life insurance. Etc. It defies all my experience to NOT see homes as veritable ATMs for most Americans.

Recently Taylor sent me an insightful article that had a more illuminating take on the interplay of home ownership and inflation.

Number Three: Home ownership was the American dream only to the extent that housing protected Americans from monetary inflation. Presidential candidates this year will wax ad nauseam that home ownership is the American Dream and that this dream is now too expensive for average Americans. What they won't talk about is how government policies, and specifically monetary policies, help bring this situation about.

What is rarely asked is why home ownership ever became the American Dream. The dream was never so much to own a home for the sake of it. Rather, the real dream has always been to protect wealth from the evils of inflation, and the middle-class housing market generally served that purpose. Housing was the middle class's best hedge against a growing government intent on expanding its scope and power by inflating the money supply.

Today, housing looks like a relatively weaker hedge, and if this trend continues, middle-class wage earners will have to find better assets in which to store the brunt of their wealth.

In other words inflation has been omnipresent for a while, but homeowners have been sharing in it and thus its full bane has been blunted. Now, the declining housing market will unmask the villain for all to see.

Lastly, why am I so bearish on the bond?

Here's part of a comment I left on another blog.

How do I know the bond is toast?

Look at it this way, the housing boom brought homeownership (or home indebtedness) up to 69%. Essentially, it made the whole country long the bond. When the public piles into an asset, a reversal always follows.



So there you have it. Higher long term interest rates are bad for real estate prices, bad for consumers, and inflationary. Oh yeah, they are bad for all debt-laden governments as well.

Long the long bond....it's a very crowded trade. It's something you definitely should diversify away from.

Drudge Report Links To CaptiousNut

Matt Drudge just linked directly to one of the videos I posted on YouTube.

There it is, at the bottom, titled "FLASHBACK..."

Democrats, United on Terrorism - John Edwards

I saw that Michelle Malkin had it up earlier and I was patting myself on the back. Then about 5 minutes ago I saw the link on Drudge and was almost blown away.

A few months ago when I saw the clip on O'Reilly I knew it was gold (of course, so did Bill).

A genius isn't someone who has great ideas insomuch as it is someone who quickly recognizes them.

So that makes Matt Drudge a genius, right?

Marrying Morons

Someone I know is engaged to be married. She and her betrothed went to see the local priest in preparation for a Catholic wedding ceremony. Here is an appalling excerpt from that colloquy.

Priest - Tell me about a married couple you admire and why.

Bride-to-Be - We admire Bob and Mary Smith because they have a beautiful home in Port Washington, a summer house out in Montauk, and an awesome 30-foot boat.

I am not sure what's worse:

1) The fact they she doesn't admire Bob and Mary for a wonderful, harmonious, and intimate relationship.

2) The fact that the bride-to-be hadn't the brains to at least feign admiration for a warm, loving marriage - even if boats and square footage are most important to her.

3) Or the fact that she's out relaying this episode, exactly as it happened, and is patently clueless as to how shallow it makes her look.

????

Illegal Immigrant Prediction

Only if you are a Drudge Report-reading newshound would you know that our abominable Congress has recently been trying to pass "comprehensive" immigration reform. The disconnect between these unctuous pols and the public on this issue is truly astounding. Clearly, they are acting as whorish lackeys for the money dispensers - those farsighted, rationalist party chieftains. Why else would a sitting politician ignore his current constituent voters for the sake of very hypothetical future voters?

I am also aware of, and partial to, this theory that Congress has agreed amongst itself to pass something now on illegal immigration simply because it wants the messy issue over and done with before next year's elections. A "comprehensive" bill allows them to claim that they have dealt with every thorn from enforcement to eventual citizenship. The issue is just "too divisive" and these incumbents don't want to have to debate any upstart challengers who are fired up on border jumpin', identity thieves. That's wonderful, the slimeballs are thinking about themselves first and whom they serve second third fourth - who knows where we fall on their list? Or maybe it's more of what I described in the first paragraph - namely, that they don't want to have to fight with the money dispensers during the election season, when they really need them.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to make one, prescient prediction.

There will be a massive public uproar against and clampdown on illegal immigration whenever it is that the economy turns sour.

This isn't so much a prediction as it is a history lesson. Whenever financial times have gotten tough, the outsider has always been shunned if not blamed. The Jews were economic scapegoats in ascendant Nazi Germany. The Poles were thrown out of England after WWII when jobs became scarce. In fact, that is how my grandfather, a Polish pilot, ended up in South Africa; nobody dared hire a Pole in England while Englishmen were unemployed thus my grandfather set off for Johannesburg with his English wife and 2.5 children. He had no job lined up and enough money in his pocket for about a week's worth of food. (Remember the Poles became personae non gratae despite having rescued England from the brink of Nazi domination.)

And the most recent example of economic scape-goating was the welfare reform of the early and mid-1990s. It can be argued that seeds of that were sown by the 1990-91 recession.

Mark my words, the values of your house and portfolio won't be the only casualties of the next recession - you could lose your gardner as well.

Housing Crash Imminent

My wife and I have a live bid in on our first house.

The bid technically expires at 7pm tonight.

Will advise.

Starter Home?

I found this listing that just popped up on my MLS really funny.



(click to enlarge)

$900,000 for a "Nice starter home"?

You've got to be kidding me. That's not a starter home even in the more expensive New York Metro area, no less in Westborough, Massachusetts - a suburb only marginally commutable to Boston.

Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest

First off, let me say that I hate having to cover subjects like I am about to here - but no blog named Marginalizing Morons can justifiably ignore this.

22% Believe Bush Knew About 9/11 Attacks in Advance

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Reiterating, I hate having to put stuff like this on my blog. One, because everyone else is talking about this poll and two, because it crosses the line into the "political arena" - a fray I try to stay above.

Clearly, the fact that 35% of Democrats believe Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand is one mother lode of a Moron indictment.

Almost on par with these demented conspiracy theorists was the reaction among some Democrats that I observed. Bill O'Reilly had a "Democratic Strategist" on last night and he asked her to respond to the results of the poll, namely the 35% number. Her Moronic response was two-fold. First, she screamed "15% of Republicans believe it too!" Bill O'Reilly demanded a more legitimate answer so she exclaimed, "President Bush has created a lot of mistrust in voters..."

Okay, he may have created "mistrust" among the electorate, but he didn't start confiscating brain cells. Can you say external locus of control?

If I was a Democrat I would just say, "Sure we have a lot of dummies in our party, but we also have a lot of smart people too" or "Well, 75% of Americans can't find their own country on a map..."

I certainly wouldn't have gotten as defensive as the guest on O'Reilly. Doing so essentially corroborates the point they are trying to deflect. This illustrates why arguing has gotten real boring for me. I can't hardly get a good argument from anyone. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I know better counter-arguments against my views then the Moron or genius trying to altercate with me.

I emailed the story to a couple of acquaintances who I knew would get similarly "defensive". One responded with the Republican percentage just like the clown on O'Reilly. While the other tried to draw a Moronic equivalence with those who "reject evolution" - which started a whole other sidebar discussion. But the evolution analogy is fatuous at best. Evolution is a theory on human development. Many evolution deniers don't "reject evolution", they consider it a theory and not a fact. Also, how can anyone compare doubt of what happened incrementally over a period of millions of years to doubt of what happened six years ago in a time of prevalent video cameras, human witnesses, etc.? Evolutionists and 9/11 conspiracists have one thing in common in that both groups' evidence has yet to "fossilize".



Identity politics is out of control in 2007. I voted for President Bush in the last election - so did Don King but I don't feel any obligation to vouch for his intelligence.

Lord Halifax said that ignorance,

"maketh most men go into a party, and shame keepeth them from getting out of it."

Indeed.

One more excerpt from that poll,

White Americans are less likely than others to believe that either the President or the CIA knew about the attacks in advance. Young Americans are more likely than their elders to believe the President or the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.

Let's see....Ethnic minorities and college kids are most likely to believe in the 9/11 conspiracy tripe.

Does that mean that American socialists are failing in their efforts to elevate and educate?

Or does it mean that they have been successful in creating a docile horde of bitter voters?

Can A Winning Streak Be Bad?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 13,313 yesterday, another all-time high. The benchmark index has risen 24 out of the last 27 days - a streak unmatched since 1927.

Mmmm....how'd the economy do in the years following 1927?

I just noticed that I have the End-Of-The-World Trade on again.

Okay, I apologize. That graph is a little bit on the alarmist side. I don't really think the stock market is going to crash, at least not directly. I believe there could be a bubble in the bond market (30 year Treasury) and we'll just have to wait to see whether or not that's true.

(Technically speaking, the housing bubble has been a derivative of the frothy bond market.)

Marginalizing Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban recently posted a blog titled, Ripoff Commercials = Stupid TV Stations and Networks. Here's an excerpt:

How stupid can you be to run these commercials ? Do you not realize that its not a commercial for the product, its a commercial to reduce the value of the brand of your station or network ?

HDNet wont run informercials or any ripoff commercials. We don't need or want their money and I would rather go without commercials than run them. My viewers are my customers. For some reason that is a strange concept to stations and networks these days. They would rather squeek out a commission on herbal enhancement pills and end up with a poorer, upset viewer than run a show without commercial breaks. Thats ridiculous. Its a brand killer

How about this for a concept: If you havent sold a commercial, dont run a commercial. The lack of a spot will hurt your bottom line far less than running a spot to ripoff your customers

(In addition to owning the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban owns HDNet, a high-def television channel.)



Pardon the grammatical errors but such is par for Cuban's course. He's as intellectually incontinent as they come.

So Cuban is anti-late night-infomercials, big deal, right?

But consider another brouhaha that Cuban is currently embroiled in.

His film company is about to distribute a 9/11 conspiracy film titled "Loose Change". That movie promulgates, "that a corrupt faction within the federal government orchestrated the mass murder at the World Trade Center". (link)

More from that link,

Cuban e-mailed us: "We are having discussions about distributing the existing video with Charlie's involvement as a narrator, not in making a new feature. We are also looking for productions with an opposing viewpoint. We like controversial subjects, but we are agnostic to which side the controversy comes from."

Cuban is "agnostic" about the content of his distributed films?

So let me get this straight, he's oozing with ethics when it comes to putting "ripoff" commercials up on HDNet, but when it comes to the content of his films, he's resolutely non-judgmental.

Okay, one more quote from Cuban,

"I don't believe the movie. Not at all," Mr. Cuban explained. "But I do believe that lies in the shadows are far more dangerous than lies you can confront and refute. There probably will be a movie that responds to this one, and we would be more than happy to distribute it as well, for the very same reason."

So, the airhead is a self-serving hypocrite, right?

Maybe, maybe not.

I submit that there is a consistency to Mark's ruminations.

It's all about money. To Mark Cuban, ripping someone off is a crime (particularly one of his customers), but he thinks nothing of polluting minds and debasing public dialogue with lunatic propaganda. The almighty dollar trumps all. (not that there's anything wrong with that)

Cuban's does have some balls though. He pens near one blog post per week complaining about how YouTube isn't aggressively taking down "copyrighted" videos. You see, when it comes to Google/YouTube, he doesn't buy their "agnostic" stance toward content hosting.

Incontinence, both intellectual and the other variety, usually manifests in old coots. Imagine how leaky Mark Cuban is going to be when he is sixty or seventy.

Mark may be a successful guy; but he's a doer, not a thinker.

TV's Lost - An Allegory?

Like millions of people, I have been watching and enjoying ABC's Lost for the last few years.

It just dawned on me this week that maybe the show is a deliberate allegory.

Dictionary.com defines allegory thusly,

1. a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.
2. a symbolical narrative: the allegory of Piers Plowman.

Now, like most normal people I couldn't stand trying to figure out stuff like this back in English class. Who is supposed to represent what? Why is the story muddled with "deeper meanings"? And was the symbolism even intended by the author or is it all just a bunch of academic mental masturbation? I mean how many scores of dead authors and artists are looking down from heaven and chortling at the analyses of their works?

So where do I see metaphor in Lost?

Well, the "Others" are depraved socialists who worship science - as such they see humans as mere lab rats (Hitler anyone?). While Jack, Kate, and the rest of the gang represent the goodness of common man. Though seemingly mired in fate, the plane crash survivors still have enough free will to wield against their personal and common demons. There's no doubt in my mind that this clash of free will versus determinism is a deliberate motif - as it is in so many works of literature.

There is of course the supernatural element of the island in the "beast" coupled with the isle's mystical healing powers: John Locke's cured paralysis, Sun's miraculous pregnancy, etc. But I am going to end my discourse right here.

I just did a google of "Lost is an allegory" and found a blog that sees the show as political allegory of the post-9/11 world. Skimming the posts, I found them a little too extrapolative for me. This blogger actually sees Desmond as a fighter of "neoconservatism" and Naomi(the parachutist) as representing the United Nations.

More likely, somebody is lacing their kool-aid with vodka on Wednesday nights.

More web surfing finds that Lost is supposed to be about "man versus man", "man versus nature", etc. Some people really just suck the life out of everything. I think the term for it is "killjoy".

And since I don't really want to be lumped in with these losers, I promise to never post on Lost as an allegory again.

Idiots Chasing A Tornado

I thank these jokers for sharing a great video but I have Marginalize anyone who'd chase a tornado.

(May 4th, 2007, Ellis County, Oklahoma)

More NBA Racism

A recent study suggests that black referees in the National Basketball Association are in fact racist.

It turns out that they call fewer fouls on black players than other referees do.

Some academics at UPenn, actually used the same data to conclude that white referees are the racists because they call more fouls on black players. (link)

An academic study of NBA officiating found that white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players, The New York Times reported on its Web site Tuesday night.

Clearly, since both conclusions are possible from the research, the "study" is complete garbage.

The Morons at the NBA decided to criticize the data mining methodology, saying that the nerds couldn't even count which particular ref called each foul - all they had to go on were the names (and races) of the officiating crew and the individual game tallies.

But this is a ridiculous criticism. Just assume the quantitative results of the study are true, and retort with my conclusion of black refs being lenient on black players, arguably a de facto act of racism against non-black players.

This study, and I use that term loosely, like most propaganda, took the bricolage route. They also slung against the wall the overall statistic that black players get called for more fouls than whites. This datum is supposed to somehow buttress their racism accusation against white referees?

Let's see - white guys stand around outside and shoot three-pointers while black guys are taller and mix it up underneath the basket. Who the heck who you expect to commit more fouls?

If anyone can't see the transparent race-baiting agenda of this study, then they are an absolute, complete Moron.

Black professional basketball players score a lot more points than white players.

Doesn't that imply the scorekeepers are biased against white guys that can't jump?

There will never be an adult national dialogue on race in this country so long as taxpayer monies are funding bullsh*t studies and the Associated Press is propagating them.

(See also an old post, NBA Salaries, A Medley of Socialism and Racism.)