Technical Analysis

Resources on technical analysis of financial markets:

• stockcharts.com
• wikipedia.org
  
• investopedia.com
  

California Leading the Way

California has always been a leader in commerce, science and culture. Recently it has fallen on hard times economically. The resulting decline in tax revenue has also coincided with huge increases in state government expenditures and future obligations.

The War Over California - by Ross Douthat

The argument about what went wrong with California is really an argument about the future of America. To the right, the Golden State’s ongoing crisis is a case study in liberal failure: A big-spending state that lived far beyond its means, and let its public-policy priorities be dictated by the appetites of liberal interest groups instead of the common good. To the left, it’s a case study in how a malign nexus of conservative intransigence and institutional sclerosis can thwart good governance. The problem in California isn’t the spending, liberals argue: It’s the supermajority requirements that prevent a liberal majority from raising the taxes necessary to pay for it.

The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm - by William Voegeli

Unpacking the numbers is even more revealing—and, for California, disturbing. The biggest contrast between the two states shows up in “net internal migration,” the demographer’s term for the difference between the number of Americans who move into a state from another and the number who move out of it to another. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more Americans moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas saw a net gain, in an average week, of 1,544 people. Aside from Louisiana and Mississippi, which lost population to other states because of Hurricane Katrina, California is the only Sunbelt state that had negative net internal migration after 2000. All the other states that lost population to internal migration were Rust Belt basket cases, including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio.

Failed State - by William Voegeli

Adjusted for inflation, California's per-capita outlays increased by 21.7% between 1992 and 2006; the increase for the other 49 states and the District of Columbia was 18.2%....

A few counterfactuals show that these different growth rates matter—a lot. If constant-dollar, per-capita expenditures by California's state and local governments had grown by 18.2% between 1992 and 2006, the rate for the rest of the country, rather than 21.7%, California's public sector would have spent $10.6 billion less than it actually did in 2006. While California government expenditures grew faster than the national average, even states not famous for the parsimony or integrity of their public sectors, such as New York (16.4%) and New Jersey (12.8%), grew more slowly. If California's outlays had grown only fast enough to keep pace with population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, public spending would have been 17.8% less in 2006, $300 billion rather than $365 billion. The resulting level of per-capita government outlays in 2006 would have equaled neither Somalia's nor Mississippi's, but...Oregon's, which is rarely considered a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.

Public Employee Unions Are Sinking California - Steven Greenhut

Approximately 85% of the state's 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, "This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs." There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year's pay. The pensions for these (and all other retirees) increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever—regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state's pensions funds have been fully funded (which they haven't been).

Climate Change Resources

Some good resources on Climate Change:

• Cosmic Rays and Climate - by Jasper Kirby
• The Inconvenient Truth About Malaria - by Paul Reiter
• Hockey Stick Observed in NOAA Ice Core Data - by J. Storrs Hall
  
• Hockey Stick Over Time - by Doc at theautopsy.wordpress.com
• Climate chaos? Don't believe it - Christopher Monckton
• Fact-based Climate Debate - Lee C. Gerhard
  

Climategate: A Multifaceted Fraud

The Climategate scandal (or Climaquiddick, or the CRUtape Letters if you prefer) has demonstrated the fraudulent actions of those behind Anthropogenic Global Warming alarmism. The various aspects of wrong-doing include:

1. Although AGW proponents publicly declared that there was a settled consensus about the methods and conclusions of their work, there was in fact intense and ongoing debates about these issues even within their own close-knit community.

• Scientists Behaving Badly - Steven F. Hayward

2. Researchers concealed raw temperature data and analytic methods from critics and perhaps illegally destroyed data when a Freedom of Information Act request was granted.

• Climate Change Data Dumped - Jonathan Leake
• The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg - Wall Street Journal
• Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data - Ben Webster and Jonathan Leake
  

3. Researchers colluded to exclude AGW critics from publishing in scholarly journals and then claimed that the critics had no merit because they lacked significant published work.

• The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate - Ronald Bailey
  
• Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate - Iain Murray
  
• University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes - The Telegraph
• Climategate: the Fix is In - Robert Tracinski
  

4. Researchers were unable to replicate earlier results from computer program models when trying to demonstrate it on the same temperature data at a later date. They eventually gave up and quietly let the earlier results stand.

• Climategate Computer Codes are the Real Story - Charlie Martin

5. Researchers made arbitrary "adjustments" to temperature data in order to reach predetermined results.

• Climategate: The Smoking Code - Robert Greiner
• The Smoking Code, part 2 - Robert Greiner
• Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline - Marc Sheppard
• ClimateGate: Was Data Faked? - Megan McArdle
• The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero - Willis Eschenbach
• Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm ... - James Delingpole
• Climategate: Faster and Faster, the Dominos Fall - Charlie Martin
• Climategate: Something’s Rotten in Denmark ... - Joseph D’Aleo
• Climategate: NOAA and NASA Complicit in Data Manipulation - Joseph D'Aleo
• Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? - Joseph D'Aleo & Anthony Watts
• Strange case of moving weather posts and a scientist under siege - Fred Pearce
• Climategate Update 1: The China Syndrome - Ronald Bailey
  

Another interesting point is that the individuals implicated by the emails are not minor participants operating in unimportant locations. On the contrary, these scientists represent the mainstream of the AGW scientific establishment.

• Climategate: Obama’s Science Adviser Confirms the Scandal — Unintentionally - Myron Ebell

Additional Climategate Resources:

• http://www.climate-gate.org/
• http://climateaudit.org/
  
• http://www.climatedepot.com/
• http://wattsupwiththat.com/climategate/
• Charlie Martin: fast-facts-about-climategate
• Climategate: How To Follow the Money - Charlie Martin
  
• Pajamas Media document database
• The Timeline, “ClimateGate: 30 years in the making” - Joanne Nova
• It's Not Apostasy - John Hinderaker
  

Climategate: The Video

Hide the Decline video (via PowerLine).

Moral Education

Whitewashing Reality by Bill Bennett describes how language has been used to make a terrorist event with clear motives and intentions appear to be just an inexplicable act of violence.

We have a Muslim terrorist, who called for jihad, who shouted “Alahu Akbar” as he was killing unarmed soldiers in a health center, who had cards made up that said “Solider of Allah,” who spoke of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, who has regular correspondence with a radical imam who preached to 9/11 terrorists . . . and, and, and, and . . . we call it not terrorism but a “killing spree” as if that is what it was and not a terrorist trying to kill as many Americans as possible for political motives.

There is a rot that spreads outside of Washington into the larger culture. It begins with a confusion of terms, and by not calling things by their proper names, it begins with a disassembling of the moral categories. We don’t hear about terrorism or radical Islam so we are surprised to find it in our midst, and when we do, we don’t even recognize it. We have Army generals who elevate diversity over life, we have a president who speaks not of radical Islam or terrorism — though life is what we are fighting for and radical Islam and terrorism is what we are fighting against. And so we are reminded again of the notion that the chief purpose of education is to know when a man is talking rot. Because, if unchecked, the rot will settle, it will metastasize. Soon we no longer know anymore what we are fighting against . . . or more importantly, what we are to fight for. (Emphasis added.)

Moral ignorance leads to moral confusion and moral apathy. This opens the door for opportunists to advance their own agenda, whether well-intentioned "useful idiots" or violent enemies. Thus the importance of moral education of our own children, And to whatever extent possible, with sincere humility, those of us with moral convictions need to help others around us reject moral relativism.

Suppose the U.S. Government was a Household

Suppose the U.S. Government was a normal American household. What would it's income, expenditures and liabilities look like? Using the handy U.S. Debt Clock, we can see the following for Household USA:

2009 Income (ytd): $16,597

• Adjusting for the rest of the year, this comes out to about $19,900.
  

2009 Expenditures (ytd): $29,226

• Adjusting for the rest of the year, this comes out to about $35,071.
• About $3,624 of the $35,071 is interest to finance debt.
• The household is running a debt of $15,000 this year (or 75% over budget).
  

Current debt due to borrowing: $110, 329

• This is about 5.5 years income at $19,900 per year.

Future obligations for medical care and retirement (unfunded): $976,390

• This is about 49 years income at $19,900 per year.
• Note that this 49 year figure would exclude expenditures for anything else during those years.
  

Clearly the debt and future obligations will never be repaid out of income. And eventually lenders will view the household as too large a risk and refuse to lend it any more money. This means that the household will eventually be left with the following options:

1. Sell or forfeit assets to cover the difference (fire sale or foreclosure).
2. Repudiate the debt (bankruptcy).
3. Print money (theft).

Note that normal households cannot print money. It's considered counterfeiting. But governments can by merely turning up the printing presses. However it's still equivalent to counterfeiting and is actually a form of theft. It leads to inflation and a corresponding devaluation of the currency. In other words, personal savings will be devalued to whatever extent the government resorts to this. If the government prints enough money to double the money supply, everyone's savings accounts will effectively lose 50% in value. So printing money to cover government debt ends up being the same as stealing it out of personal bank accounts.

And this doesn't just hurt fat-cats with big bank accounts. Paychecks don't go up. Social Security checks don't go up. Retirement pensions don't go up. OK, they go up some, but not enough to cover the difference. And yet prices for things like food, clothing, fuel and housing all do go up. So it's also theft of value from everyone's paycheck.

Just ask the Germans:


All figures have been normalized by dividing total U.S. figures by the number of U.S. Taxpayers (approximately 108,600,000).

Year to date figures were converted to approximate annual figures by multiplying YTD figures by 1.2.

What's the Fuss?

The U.S. House of Representatives passes the health care bill. What's the problem? We're the richest and most powerful economy in the world. Certainly we can afford to help everyone get the medical care they need. Right?

Actually not. Take a look at The U.S. Debt Clock. This handy little page includes convenient boxes listing the U.S. National Debt (currently approaching $12 trillion) and the number of U.S. Taxpayers (currently about 108 million). But the real kicker is the total U.S. Unfunded Liabilities. This is the amount of future obligations for Social Security and Medicare which the U.S. government has taken responsibility for, but does not have the ANY money set aside to cover (hence the term "unfunded").

Folks, the current U.S. Unfunded Liabilities is a whopping $106 trillion. Yes, that's "trillion" with a 'T'. That future obligation represents a knee-buckling $1,000,000 per taxpayer. This is madness. The current total national assets is only $74 trillion. So we are already obligated 50% above our current assets.

And it's in this sort of economic situation that our Representatives in Washington have voted to saddle U.S. taxpayers to even more trillions in obligations. We are promising benefits which cannot be delivered while simultaneously burdening future generations with expenditures they cannot afford.

Understanding the Obama Administration

Have you ever watched recent events and wondered "What in the world were they thinking?" Well, the following articles are very helpful for explaining the larger context for the Obama administration's actions.


Wishful Thinking

First, Charles Krauthammer writes "Debacle in Moscow". From China, to the Middle East, to Poland and the Czech Republic, to Russia, Barack Obama's foreign policy strategy is either masterfully subtle, or else he's simply giving away the store.

Altering the famous Churchill quote on Russia ("It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma") Krauthammer concludes:

It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity.

Renunciation of Primacy

Next, we have Charles Krauthammer again with "Decline is a Choice". Among other things, he explains that the President's health care takeover is actually a two-fer:

1. Socialized medicine is the perfect vehicle for accomplishing massive income redistribution.
2. The consequent massive federal budget deficits will force large cutbacks in defense spending, thus preventing the United States from projecting its military power overseas.

But if the United States abandons its role as benign hegemon, which nation (or nations) will seize the opportunity to become a malignant hegemon? Naturally, the most aggressive nations will fill the vacuum.


Inexperience

Next is Byron York (Obama can't be community organizer for the world) who interprets Obama's foreign policy blunders through the lens of his prior experience as a community organizer. York notes that "as an organizer, Obama started a lot of projects, gave a lot of inspirational talks, but accomplished very little." His preferred approach to problems was "to make powerful people feel guilty, or embarrassed, or annoyed enough to give them things."

But the problem is that Obama's prior experience is with

... people who shared his goals. They wanted to believe in him and in their shared enterprise.

Does Mahmoud Ahmedinejad fit into that category? The Taliban? Kim Jong-il?

Now that Obama is the president of the United States, he is the power figure, not the supplicant or the protester. Certainly a president still needs to convince foreign leaders to give him what he wants, but when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world, Obama isn't the underdog. His years on the South Side are little help.

A Couple of Funny Videos

The first one (via PowerLine) is the SNL skit lampooning President Obama as having accomplished nothing after 10 months in office. Scott Johnson rightly points out that it must be OK to mock him now.

The second one is about the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. It's brought to you by Jackie and Dunlap.

Perseverance

Heard on The Dave Ramsey Show:

"Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance."
Samuel Johnson

Another one I like:

“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.”
Newt Gingrich

And where would we be without Churchill?

“Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential”
Winston Churchill

Jon Stewart gets it right on Acorn

Thanks to the work of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, the criminal enterprise known as Acorn has been exposed. Hopefully the tide has turned and Congress will permanently de-fund this organization. Among Acorn's many accomplishments have been illegal endeavors to help elect President Obama and Senator Al Franken (see also here).

Hats off to Jon Stewart though. In this video (via HotAir) he brilliantly ridicules both Acorn and the shameless media establishment that tried to keep a lid on this story.

The Man Who Was Thursday

The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton is a story about a British detective, Gilbert Syme, who goes under cover to investigate a group of anarchists in early-1900's London. It is subtitled A Nightmare because it is combination of realistic fiction, fantasy and allegory.

Inspector Syme is able to join the anarchists and soon finds himself a member of the inner council. Each member of the council is a code-named for a day of the week, and Syme receives the name "Thursday". Syme feels utterly alone and fears for his life among these murderous men. However he gradually discovers that there are other detectives among the anarchists. With them, he attempts to bring down the group of conspirators and makes many paradoxical discoveries along the way.

Chesterton addresses many themes from a Christian viewpoint in this novel. Some of them are enduring loneliness, confronting evil, overcoming fear, willingly encountering danger, the purpose of hardship and suffering, and understanding that we only have partial knowledge in this life. It is fun to read and provides many valuable insights on life.

C. S. Lewis: Extreme Reading

He lectured in philosophy for a year before he was elected a fellow in English at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1925. Lewis taught there until 1954, when he was appointed professor of Medieval and Renaissance studies at Cambridge University. He mastered ancient, medieval, renaissance and reformation philosophy and literature. For example, his highly regarded book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century took him sixteen years to write because he felt he had to read everything in English in the sixteenth century before he wrote the book. This was typical of his thoroughness.

Emphasis added.

From C. S. Lewis's Case for Christ by Art Lindsley.
InterVarsity Press, ISBN 0-8308-3285-8

C. S. Lewis Parlor Games

C. S. Lewis remembered everything he read.

Sometimes in his rooms at Oxford, Lewis would play a parlor game, asking a visitor to pull any book out of his extensive library and read aloud a few lines. Lewis would then proceed to quote the rest of the poetry or prose verbatim for pages. For instance, Kenneth Tynan, who became a well-known English dramatist and critic, told of an encounter with Lewis during a tutorial at Oxford. Tynan said, "He had the most astonishing memory of any man I have ever known. In conversation I might have said to him, 'I read a marvelous medieval poem this morning and I particularly liked this line.' I would then quote the line. Lewis would usually go on to quote the rest of the page. It was astonishing.

"Once when I was invited to his rooms after dinner for a glass of beer, he played a game. He directed, 'Give me a number from one to forty.' I said 'Thirty.' He acknowledged, 'Right, go to the thirtieth shelf in my library.' Then he said, 'Give me another number from one to twenty.' I answered 'fourteen.' He continued, 'Right. Get the fourteenth book off the shelf. Now let's have a number from one to one hundred.' I said 'Forty-six.' 'Now turn to page forty-six. Pick a number from one to twenty-five for the line of the page.' I said, 'Six.' So, he would say, 'read me that line.' He could always identify it -- not only by identifying the book, but he was also usually able to quote the rest of the page. This is a gift. This is something you cannot learn. It was remarkable."

From C. S. Lewis's Case for Christ by Art Lindsley.
InterVarsity Press, ISBN 0-8308-3285-8

Everything Else

This is my blog for everything else. My Christian Worldview blog is at Worldview Bookshelf.