Monthly Archive for February, 2009

The Roland Burris Debacle

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” -Groucho Marx

I haven’t really commented on the whole Roland Burris thing because I simply have not had much to say on the matter. The entire Blagojevich issue has been botched from the beginning. The FBI shouldn’t have released the tapes until they had a solid case. The Illinois legislature shouldn’t have impeached him until they had solid charges. Harry Reid should have kept his trap shut. The state elected Blagojevich, what he does to abuse that power is up to the people of Illinois to deal with, not Harry Reid.

Yeah, now we know Burris lied during the investigation and whether or not he actually did anything wrong, he is “tainted.”*

I love Wonkette. They completely hit the nail on the head here.

Roland Burris! This guy! The respected Chicago politician who has his own glamorous mausoleum already built and who repeatedly lost in his many attempts at seeking a public office higher than dog catcher managed to weasel his way into the Senate by calling Harry Reid a racist. As we watched events unfold in December and January we were frankly amazed by his PR strategy which involved, number one, accepting an appointment by a TAINTED governor that literally no other self-respecting Democrat in the state would take, and number two, again, calling Harry Reid a racist.

NPR/CNN/MSNBC/Whoever should have the Wonkette writers do the politics run down. We’d get more accurate information. And it would be less depressing.

*I am seriously tired of people using this word to describe the situation. Can’t they find a word without a sexual connotation?

Published on February 25, 2009 in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. 0 Comments

Obama and Markets

“The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions.” –Paul Samuelson

For anyone that’s been living under a rock, Obama passed a big huge giant stimulus package that’s going to fix everything and pay everyone’s mortgage. And then the stock market tanked. Well, continued to tank.

A great number of conservatives are arguing that the stock market is an indication that “markets” are rejecting the Obama plan.

From this article on Real Clear Markets:

“More pointedly, key political victories for the Team Obama spending plan have not been viewed as buying opportunities on Wall Street. A string of negative market reactions began with the December 18 announcement of a stimulus bill of $700 billion (Dow down 2.5%), continued with the January 7 announcement that the actual plan would be “on the high side” (-2.7%) and continued with last week’s 61-36 Senate vote supporting the Administration’s fiscal plan. The White House victory and the new bank bail-out plan announced the following day by Treasury Secretary Geithner were met with a 5% wipe-out in the DJI, and a decline in Treasury bond yields, indicating a “flight to quality.”

That article was written by a professor of finance at the University of Kansas and a professor of law and economics at George Mason University.

My BFF Nate Silver addresses some of the issues raised in this article. This is, I think, his best point in arguing with those who insist that Obama has RUINED THE STOCK MARKET:

“Robust markets like major stock indices are fairly good at incorporating information. they don’t literally have to see an event occur in order to “price in” its effects. On Wednesday, for example, Barack Obama signed the stimulus package into law. Once this occurred, the prospects for the passage of the stimulus rose to 100%. But what had been the probability of the stimulus bill passing the very second before Obama put pen to paper? Probably about 99.999999%, accounting for the small probability of a hostile takeover by space aliens in the intervening moments. The performance of the market in reaction to such events tells us no more about how it feels about them than it does to the rising of the sun.”

He goes on to pick apart the rest of that article.

The Real Clear Markets article seems to want to have it both ways. They argue that the stock market is a forecasting agent, and yet assume the market refuses to react to forecasted data until the minute it becomes fact.

The stock traders do not work like this. If they did, you and me and Joe the Plumber could be making tons of money on the stock market. Traders of stocks attempt to forecast what is going to happen in the future and would have accommodated the stimulus news long before the bill was signed, since, as Silver says, it was very likely to pass.

Published on February 23, 2009 in Dollars and Sense. 0 Comments

No One Is Right 100% Of The Time (Except Me!)

“I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.” -Orson Wells

I mostly love Andrew Sullivan. I think he has an interesting opinions about politics. I also think he does a good job addressing dissenting points.

However, sometimes, he makes me sad.

He’s such a smart guy, and yet simply refuses to use his brain in this situation.

Published on February 18, 2009 in Darwinism. 0 Comments

Addiction

“I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise.” -Chuck Palahniuk

This is an interesting article about porn addiction. The article is not a serious one, nor is the study they complete a scientific one. The author notes that he isn’t attempting a scientific study,

“which is why you’re seeing these results on an internet comedian’s website rather than the New England Journal of Medicine. Yes, these were faceless people with fake names (a porn study where the subjects went by names like Johnny Hard On and James Bondage probably will give the Nobel committee pause).”

He gathers 100 volunteers and requests they attempt to abstain from porn viewing for two weeks. According to his results, 24 didn’t last three days and 52 didn’t last two weeks. 28 seemed to have no problem giving it up.

He goes on to discuss what would qualify as “addiction.” He (jokingly) contends that you are addicted to porn if,

8. You find yourself reading porn at a funeral;
9. You read porn at the funeral of a man whom you killed for his porn;
10. You have paid for internet porn.

Joking aside, I don’t really see his “results” as all that troublesome. For starters, this wasn’t a truly scientific survey. I’m not criticizing for the lack of random sampling, lack of definition of what constitutes porn, etc. Since the participants knew it was a joke, they didn’t take giving it up seriously. I would think a more serious survey (say, one actually conducted by the some researchers who want published in the New England Journal of Medicine).

Secondly, according to the article, a lot of people got bored and watched porn. It became a habit. Habits are quite different from addiction. The author discusses this. Being addicted (along the lines of coke or cigarettes or compulsive gambling) must be differentiated from having habits. Selling your body for drug money or selling your kid to the Thai sex trade to pay off your gambling debts should not be lumped into the same category as eating lunch at a certain time or nail biting.

Thirdly, an addiction should have some sorta negative consequence to be considered a bad thing. I could be accused of being “addicted” to running four days a week (because I really enjoy it, I don’t want to stop, and I’m less happy when I don’t). However, running four days a week is extraordinarily beneficial. I’m not contending that porn is as beneficial as running, but it also lacks the extreme negative consequences of drug or gambling addiction.

Fourthly, yes, some people do get addicted to porn. But people have addictions to a lot of crazy things. That doesn’t mean porn is addictive. That means some people can get addicted to anything.

Published on February 17, 2009 in Hodgepodge. 0 Comments

Applications

“The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.” –Stanley Randall

As a way to make some extra cash and supplementing my super awesome graduate student salary, I’ve been evaluating freshman undergraduate applications. Mostly it’s pretty dull stuff. Read essays and recommendation letters. Fill out a form ranking the students. Generally the students are pretty average, similar grades, life experiences, interests.

However, sometimes a few gems pop up. And by gems I mean “What the fuck was this kid thinking when they wrote that?”

I had a girl write an entire essay about how much she loved her cell phone, how “awesome” it is, and how she couldn’t live without it.

I had a teacher write a recommendation letter which included a note about how the student “should have tried harder.”

Another teacher wrote (about a different student from above) that they don’t complete homework assignments.

One kid included a section of the fantasy sports he enjoys playing on his resume.

I had several kids include pictures of themselves on their resume. I’m not sure why. First, the pics are usually “senior photos.” Ya know, the professional pictures that a kid gets done for senior year. Usually there is a formal one for the yearbook and some miscellaneous ones that are supposed to show your personality. Apparently the picture calls attention to the fact that you play tennis (hence the tennis racket in the photo). Although this point is also listed on your resume…

This is our future people.

Published on February 5, 2009 in Darwinism. 0 Comments
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