We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Global warming is dying.  Mother Gaia keeps refusing to provide the eco-fanatics with the tropical apocalypse that they’ve been dreaming for so long:

• Madison, Wisconsin just finished its second snowiest December on record.
• Temperatures in Siberia are expected to reach -67 degrees Fahrenheit, which is too cold even for that region’s hardy residents.
• And Baghdad saw snow for the first time in decades.

I’m sure that your heart goes out to the many soon-to-be-unemployed doom-mongers.  But don’t worry.  They’re already working hard to find something new for us to be scared of.

Intrepid Seattle reporter Tom Paulson informs us that we’re running out of dirt:

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.

Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil — the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

“We’re losing more and more of it every day,” said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. “The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.”

. . .

Montgomery has written a popular book, “Dirt,” to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as “soil mining” to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth’s natural rate of restoring topsoil.

Try not to laugh, please.  Mr. Paulson is only a journalist, and we therefore can’t expect him to know much of anything, nor can we expect him to ask any basic questions that might interfere with his clean narrative.

I don’t want to hear any snide comments about how farmers have closely studied the science of soil quality and erosion for centuries, if not millennia.  And you smarty-pants scientists who have spent your lives studying the specific chemicals that give soil its fertility, you genetic engineers who creates new varieties of plants that do an even better job with maintaining soil fertility, you civil engineers who build manmade lakes and design flood plains.  You can all just shut up with your facts and figures, because Tom Paulson is a journalist, and his almost completely uninformed opinion on the subject outweighs the views of a thousand actual scientists and engineers.

In a few months, topsoil depletion will be a full-fledged eco-disaster every bit as real and terrifying as global warming.  And I really mean that.

HT: Clayton Cramer, Ace of Spades

The bears are in charge, folks. (more…)

It was a wild day. (more…)

Mike Nifong has filed for bankruptcy, buried under $180 million worth of civil claims brought by the young men whose lives he attempted to ruin for political gain.

I’m not sure how much good it will do him. Last I checked, liability for willful and malicious torts is not dischargeable in bankruptcy 11 USC 532(a)(6). And Nifong’s conduct in the Duke Rape Case was about as malicious as I can imagine.

But even assuming that Nifong could put together some argument that his actions were merely negligent, he doesn’t have the money to mount a defense and make that argument. His bankruptcy schedules show a house worth $235,000 but secured debt over $302,000, from which I infer that his mortgage is more than the value of his house, so he doesn’t have any equity to borrow against to pay his lawyers. Probably his bankruptcy lawyer has some angle that I’m not seeing, but Nifong declaring bankruptcy mystifies me.

It’s nearly impossible to predict which technology will most shape our lives in the future, and even more difficult to predict how it will change them.  Here’s one of my top contenders:

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.

Thus begins the predictable drama that surrounds every new technology.  Alternating groups tell us that it will either solve all our problems or destroy life as we know it.  Right now we’re on the pessimistic side with this particular technology:

The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level”. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: “This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.”

I seriously doubt that this technology would accomplish much in most workplaces.  Managers can already snoop on their workers in various ways, such as internet usage or video cameras.  The problem with worker supervision isn’t in the technology, but in the labor required to interpret the results.

This technology is more mature than many people realize.  It has already been used extensively in the armed forces, and this article suggests that some pilots, firefighters, and astronauts are already using them.

And as those uses suggest, the real power of these implanted body-monitoring systems is to instantly communicate when your body is in trouble, whether that trouble involves sleepiness, low oxygen, irregular heartbeat, or just about anything else.  If the technology becomes cheap enough, then the elderly could start signing up in droves.  An abstract fear of Big Brother will quickly lose out to the opportunity to get immediate help with much more real and reasonable fears of stroke, heart attack, etc.

Investopedia doesn’t really cover this, so let’s start with a brief introduction to candlestick patterns.  (more…)

General advice for the beginner on how to go about learning technical trading.

(more…)

We had a strong down day, but not a full-fledged panic. (more…)

I haven’t yet written about Canada’s Human Rights Commissions (HRCs), because I haven’t thought of anything interesting or witty to say that hasn’t been said a dozen times elsewhere.  These Commissions are kangaroo courts set up by liberals to harass conservatives.  Until recently, they were a tool for activist liberals to bash poor, isolated far-right Canadians.

I’m not clear on whether the plaintiffs in these cases have won every time or merely nearly every time.  The plaintiff enjoys taxpayer-funded legal help, while the defendant must pay his own legal bills.  And there is no real law to be applied.  If you’re a liberal, then you need merely complain that your feelings were hurt, and the liberals on the HRCs will bring the might of the state down on whoever offended you.

The HRCs have mostly gone after fringe individuals before, but now they’re trying to get into the mainstream.  The case against MacLean’s for publishing excerpts from Mark Steyn’s book has received lots of attention in recent months, and it still makes me too angry to write anything interesting about it.  But before Mark Steyn there was Ezra Levant, owner of the now-defunct Canadian magazine The Western Standard.  In early 2006, amid the furor over the Mohammed cartoons, The Western Standard was virtually alone among media outlets in actually publishing the “offensive” images.  Various Muslims ran crying to the Alberta HRC, and now the case has come to what seems to be its first hearing.

This hearing was videotaped, though the audio is very, very quiet.  Turn your speakers way up.  Mr. Levant is not going away quietly.  He has posted eight segments of the hearing up on YouTube for the world to enjoy.  I recommend starting with the opening statement.  He is eloquent, and he understands perfectly the larger issues at stake.  Canadians should be calling their politicians in outrage, demanding that these HRCs be disbanded.

Today was a tough day for me.  I stayed out of the market, and tomorrow I’ll know if that was wise. (more…)

We got our bounce. (more…)

We finally got a rally after eight trading days of neutral or down trading. (more…)

Remember The New Republic?  It’s the bi-monthly political magazine that disgraced itself so severely in the Scott Beauchamp affair.  For those fortunate enough to have missed that mess last summer, TNR published an article in which a soldier serving in Iraq confirmed all the darkest stereotypes that the left holds about the US military.  The story turned out to be almost entirely false, but TNR stood by it as long as possible, twisting and turning for months to avoid the necessary retractions and apologies.  Last month the magazine reviewed the whole drama in some detail and concluded after thousands of words that the story was in fact, actually, really truly, false.  If there’s an apology in there somewhere, I couldn’t find it.

All that is background for the latest blockbuster article from The New Republic, this one savaging presidential candidate Ron Paul for articles in newsletters with his name on them:

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

I don’t like Ron Paul.  I think he’s a nut, especially on foreign policy.  Men who say things like this just can’t be taken seriously:

You’d pull American troops out of Korea, Germany, the Middle East, everywhere?

I would. Under the Constitution, we don’t have the authority to just put troops in foreign countries willy-nilly when we’re not at war.

Conservatives already unhappy with Ron Paul will be tempted to use this TNR article to pile on his and drive him out of the race.  But that would be a serious error.  The fact that Ron Paul is a nut doesn’t mean that the hit piece against him is fair or accurate.  My reading of the article is that it’s the kind of overheated political hatchet job that got TNR in so much trouble over Beauchamp. (more…)

Prices bounce at support—except when they don’t. This is the lesson of today’s market panic. (more…)

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start blogging consistently about technical trading, which takes up much of my time these days. I’m thinking of two lines of posts: One will be a simple diary about what the market did and what it’s likely to do. The other will explain what technical trading is, how it works, and how you can use it to develop a trading system that will make you far more money in the market than any mutual fund.

But in this age of litigation, obviously I cannot recommend that you make any particular investment. In fact, my official advice is that you view technical trading merely as a hobby to be done with virtual money and make-believe trades. Your actual money you should keep under your mattress or in a clean, dry mayonnaise jar. If you choose to enter the stock market with real money, be aware that this is a big, mean game in which very smart people will take your entire life’s savings without a moment’s hesitation, if you’re foolish or careless enough to let them.

Many of my readers will have no interest in any of this, so I plan to hide it all behind More links, so that readers who prefer my posts on politics, philosophy, and theology can still find them without undue effort. (more…)