Monthly Archives: December 2012

Rachel Maddow, War Propagandist

open quote The Moment had arrived! I’m talking about that Benghazi Moment, when the axis of elite opinion turns and the Forces of Righteousness come to the rescue — Syria’s internet was down!

Rachel Maddow had one of those “Oh, This is Serious” looks on her face as she solemnly warned us that Something Was Up: that nasty old critter Bashar al-Assad was about to commit Hair-Raising Atrocities “in the dark”! Think of those poor jihadists “rebels” who would have to construct their suicide bombs without downloading the instructions — why, that could be dangerous!

Of course, Maddow knew who was behind this outage, because the US government told her what to believe, and she believed it. So in place of reporting, you know, actual news, she channeled US government officials accusing the Syrian government of this dastardly act.

. . . .

Two days later, our Rachel was “reporting” the imminence of yet another Benghazi Moment — the Syrians, she breathlessly recounted, have Weapons of Mass Destruction! Without referencing her previous false alarm, Maddow once again solemnly informed us the evil Syrian government was about to visit Death and Destruction “on its own people” — you know, just like Saddam Hussein, that other possessor of Weapons of Mass Destruction.close quote (Read more)

Intrade.com more accurate that pundits!

open quoteJust recently in the presidential election, for example, I followed Intrade.com’s election markets. Here, the odds are formed by people betting their own property on the outcome. They have every incentive to extract every possible amount of truth out there so that they can make their money work for them.

I figured that the markets knew more than the blabberheads on television. This way I could ignore all election coverage. One guy would win, and it would probably be the one Intrade said would win, and then the whole thing would end. I would have used my time during the season doing actual productive things, rather than listening to the dopes on television who pretend to know what they do not.

It turns out, of course, that Intrade was right. Obama won. Romney never really had a serious chance, despite what every Republican operative claimed even up to the last minutes before the election was called. Intrade might have been wrong, of course, but it turned out to be more right than every expert.

My strategy of following the markets over the pundits worked. That’s generally true of markets: They are more correct than any individual. Not always, but most of the time.

It further turns out that I’m not alone. Even Washington Post energy reporter Brad Plumer wrote, “I’ll confess, I spent a good chunk of the 2012 campaign clicking on Intrade.com several times a day to see where the House, Senate, and presidential races stood. All those traders betting on the eventual outcome, I figured, could provide a more accurate synopsis of the race than reading endless blog posts and tweets.”

He points out that Intrade predicted 49 out of 50 state races as well.close quote (Read more)

Religion and Genetics

open quoteReligious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain ‘religiosity’ gene are more likely than average to become or remain religious. The paper considers the effect of religious defections and exogamy on the religious and genetic composition of society. Defections reduce the ultimate share of the population with religious allegiance and slow down the spread of the religiosity gene. However, provided the fertility differential persists, and people with a religious allegiance mate mainly with people like themselves, the religiosity gene will eventually predominate despite a high rate of defection. This is an example of ‘cultural hitchhiking’, whereby a gene spreads because it is able to hitch a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice. The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations.

Keywords: religion; fertility; evolution; genetic predisposition; cultural hitch-hiking; evolutionclose quote


rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/01/07/rspb.2010.2504.full.pdf

IRS vs ex-pats

open quoteFatca calls for foreign financial institutions to file an annual report to the I.R.S., either directly or through its own national tax authority, on each U.S. taxpayer for whom it holds more than $50,000 in assets at the end of the year.close quote

This is why a friend in Singapore gave up his US citizenship. He couldn’t get any financial institution to do business with him. It’s also why some Swiss banks have dumped US clients.

open quoteThe law also requires account holders to file an I.R.S. form themselves, 8938, detailing their foreign holdings, though American expatriates need file only if their financial assets exceed $200,000 at year’s end. To make sure account holders stay in touch, the agency levies a $10,000 penalty for failure to file a required 8938, and any underreported income will be subject to an additional 40 percent penalty. close quote (Read more)

$200k — I aspire to have these problems. :)