Suicide bankers

Bank of America arranges for mutually assured financial destruction:

Recently Bank of America transferred a bunch of derivatives into their banking arm. "A bunch" means somewhere around $80 trillion worth. Now pay very careful attention, because part of the bankruptcy "reform" law in 2005 placed derivative claims in front of depositors in a business failure - including a bank failure.

What JP Morgan is claiming in the MF Global case is that the derivative trade (which is exactly what a "Repo to Maturity" trade is - it's a derivative) is entitled to preference in the case of MF Global over those who had cash there for safekeeping either as a margin deposit or just as free cash as you would hold free cash in a bank.

If a major bank blows up this very same claim, supported in existing Bankruptcy Law with the changes signed by George Bush in 2005, will be used to steal the entirety of your bank account, and if you detect the impending blowup shortly before it happens -- say, 90 days before -- you're still exposed to the risk through clawback!

There is a fairly cogent argument to be made that what BofA did is tantamount to intentionally placing an armed financial nuclear device in the center of the board room table and then daring anyone -- including the government -- to come tamper with it and risk setting it off, knowing full well that if it explodes it is utterly impossible to contain the damage to our economy and financial system.

Translation: your FDIC guarantees won't matter if you're a BoA depositor. Whatever can be salvaged from the mass destruction will go towards paying back its derivative bookie, most likely Goldman Sachs. This sounds rather as if BoA's executives are planning to abandon ship.

And notice that it was that conservative Republican, George W. Bush, who signed that law into place, again confirming that Republicans are part of the problem, and therefore cannot be part of the solution.

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Choosing collapse

This is a rather timely poll, following as it does my recent column on the subject. It makes it very clear that there is no point looking to the Republicans to save the nation. John Hawkins polls the nominal right-wing blogosphere about the Republican primary:

If you had to pick a 2012 GOP contender today, which of the following candidates would you select?

7) Jon Huntsman: 2.5% (2 votes)
6) Rick Santorum: 5.1% (4 votes)
5) Michele Bachmann: 6.3% (5 votes)
4) Ron Paul: 7.6% (6 votes)
3) Mitt Romney: 12.7% (10 votes)
2) Rick Perry: 26.6% (21 votes)
1) Newt Gingrich: 39.2% (31 votes)

Which candidate would you LEAST like to see as the GOP nominee in 2012?

7) Rick Santorum: 1.3% (1 votes)
6) Rick Perry: 1.3% (1 votes)
5) Newt Gingrich: 3.8% (3 votes)
4) Jon Huntsman: 9% (7 votes)
3) Michele Bachmann: 11.5% (9 votes)
2) Mitt Romney: 25.6% (20 votes)
1) Ron Paul: 47.4% (37 votes)

If your top choice couldn’t get the nomination, which candidate would be your second choice?

7) Ron Paul: 3.8% (3 votes)
6) Jon Huntsman: 6.4% (5 votes)
5) Michele Bachmann: 10.3% (8 votes)
4) Mitt Romney: 14.1% (11 votes)
3) Rick Santorum: 15.4% (12 votes)
2) Newt Gingrich: 19.2% (15 votes)
1) Rick Perry: 30.8% (24 votes)

This is why I have absolutely no sympathy for Americans whatsoever, especially not Republicans who claim to be so distraught over what "the Democrats" are supposedly doing to the country. They are revealing themselves to be EVERY BIT as stupid and clueless as the "Hope and Change" Obama Democrats. They are an integral part of the problem, not the potential solution they imagine themselves to be.

I find it particularly telling that Ron Paul is the Republican for whom they harbor the most distaste. No one likes the man who tells you that you aren't a beautiful snowflake whose every action is justified, much less the one who tells you that the good times are not going to continue rolling and happy days are not here again.

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Why I don't watch NCAA football

It's just a joke. A complete farce. I'm glad I quit paying attention to it years ago. The idea that Alabama, which has already lost to LSU, should play LSU again for the nonexistent "national title" is simply ridiculous in every way.

What they're playing for is the SEC title, not the national one, the recent SEC championship game notwithstanding. How many teams outside the SEC have both teams even played? Six! LSU played Oregon, Northwestern State (?), and West Virginia. Alabama played Kent State, Penn State, and North Texas. A real murderer's row of competitors there. While the SEC is the premier conference in college football, the more salient point here is that neither team has played a single Big 12 team; LSU hasn't played the Big 10, Alabama hasn't played the Pac-12.

Who cares if LSU beats Alabama again? We already know they can and probably will. And it's worse if Alabama upsets LSU, since people will always wonder if Oklahoma State could have beaten them as well. I used to follow college football, but began to lose interest in college football once the focus shifted away from the inter-conference rivalries and towards a mythical "national" championship. I haven't paid any attention to it in years, and latest debacle confirms my opinion that the NCAA is corrupt and stupid, the BCS is a ridiculous farce, and I'd rather much rather review advanced NFL statistics at Football Outsiders than devote any time to NCAA football.

If I ran the BCS, I would have instituted a simple rule preventing any such travesties. No intra-conference rematches if there is a potential opponent with a similar or better record, regardless of the BCS rating. When one is attempting to determine a national title, there should always be a heavy bias towards matching up teams from difference conferences. Of course, an NFL-style playoff system where the top teams from the six major conferences, plus two wild cards, make the playoffs makes far too much sense for the NCAA to ever adopt it.

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No skepticism in science

An illuminating admission in the contemplation of a potential explanation for all that missing "dark matter":

You probably want to put on your skeptical goggles and set them to maximum for this one. An Italian mathematician has come up with some complex formulae that can, with remarkable similarity, mimic the rotation curves of spiral galaxies without the need for dark matter.

Currently, these galactic rotation curves represent key evidence for the existence of dark matter – since the outer stars of spinning galaxies often move around a galactic disk so fast that they should fly off into intergalactic space – unless there is an additional ‘invisible’ mass present in the galaxy to gravitationally hold them in their orbits....

Conceptually the idea makes little sense. Positioning gravitationally significant mass outside of the orbit of stars might draw them out into wider orbits, but it’s difficult to see why this would add to their orbital velocity. Drawing an object into a wider orbit should result in it taking longer to orbit the galaxy since it will have more circumference to cover. What we generally see in spiral galaxies is that the outer stars orbit the galaxy within much the same time period as more inward stars.

But although the proposed mechanism seems a little implausible, what is remarkable about Carati’s claim is that the math apparently deliver galactic rotation curves that closely fit the observed values of at least four known galaxies. Indeed, the math delivers an extraordinarily close fit.

For me the most interesting thing isn't the idea itself, about which I have no opinion, it is the way the Slashdot submitter described it: "As usual, these are extraordinary claims that divert from the consensus, so keep a healthy skepticism."

This permits us to infer something that we have previously observed on many occasions: scientists and science fetishists do not maintain a healthy skepticism about claims that concur with the consensus. And the fascinating thing is that it is quite easy to factually demonstrate that scientists place more and blinder faith in the various scientific consensuses than religious people do in the tenets of their various faiths. Once more, we are given evidence that the false claims of atheists who subscribe to the cult of science are based on psychological projection.

Speaking of which, I found this Slashdot comment to be amusing: "The creationists trail real science and keep changing their story, but never, ever, ever admit error. What they believe is always the absolute truth and always has been and if you remember having hours long arguments with them over something which they now believe to be the case but didn't then, your memory is faulty!"

Sounds familiar, doesn't it! As for dark matter, at this point, logic dictates that it most likely will turn out to be a spectacular example of the classic theoretical epicycles to which scientists have been increasingly given ever since medieval astronomers noticed that the observed planetary orbits didn't correspond well with their Ptolamaic theories.

UPDATE: Fascinating to see that physicists now appear to be making the same mistake as economists: "Not sure about the summary, but the paper is extremely simple. I'll summarize it: It is commonly assumed that galaxies are evenly distributed. This would mean that if you picked any galaxy at random, you could pick other galaxies whose gravitational pull totally balanced out the effect of the first one. So, overall, no distant galaxy would ever affect anything. What is observed is that galaxies are NOT evenly distributed. There is, indeed, left-over gravitational pull."

And that, my dear and Dread Ilk, is precisely why anyone schooled in picking apart the flaws of one discipline is actually very well suited to pick apart the flaws of another discipline, even when he knows virtually nothing about that other discipline. Human error tends to follow readily identifiable patterns.

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A lesson in unintended consequences

Charles Stross explains how insisting on DRM caused publishers to leap from the frying pan right into the fire:

DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. If you buy a book that you can only read on the Kindle, you're naturally going to be reluctant to move to other ebook platforms that can't read those locked Kindle ebooks — and even more reluctant to buy ebooks from rival stores that use incompatible DRM. Amazon acquired an early lead in the ebook field (by selling below cost in the early days, and subsidizing the Kindle hardware price to consumers), and customers are locked into the platform by their existing purchases. Which is pretty much how they gained their 80% market share.

An 80% share of a tiny market slice worth maybe 1% of the publishing sector was of no concern to the big six, back in 2008. But today, with it rising towards 40%, it's another matter entirely.

As ebook sales mushroom, the Big Six's insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy[*], it has locked customers in Amazon's walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon's leverage over publishers. And unlike pirated copies (which don't automatically represent lost sales) Amazon is a direct revenue threat because Amazon are have no qualms about squeezing their suppliers — or trying to poach authors for their "direct" publishing channel by offering initially favourable terms. (Which will doubtless get a lot less favourable once the monopoly is secured ...)

If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position. But it's not clear that the folks in the boardrooms are agile enough to recognize the tar pit they've fallen into ...

I avoid walled gardens like the plague. I use Kobo and Aldiko as my eReaders and will not even look at any ebook that is not in EPUB format. And while my publishers publish in Amazon's KZW format, I always urge them to be sure that an EPUB version is also available.

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WND column

Choosing Collapse

Another flavor of the month has passed its sell-by date. To no one's surprise, except perhaps those Republicans in desperate search of a get-out-of-racism-free card, the Magic Negro, Part II: Republican edition has "suspended" his campaign, thus marking the latest collapse of a nominal frontrunner. If we are to take the polls seriously, this leaves Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney as the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination, which is arguably the least attractive leadership pair on offer since the Polish people were divided between Hitler and Stalin.

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An upset in Iowa?

Ron Paul is coming on strong:

A brand-new Iowa Poll, just published by the Des Moines Register, reports the often-dismissed 76-year-old Paul has surged past one-time front-runner Mitt Romney and moved into second place, with his sights set on the current front-runner Newt Gingrich.

According to the new poll results, Gingrich leads the pack at 25% of likely caucus-goers with less than a month until they're held. Paul is second with 18% and Romney now trails with 16%.

It would certainly be interesting to see how far the media is willing to go in pretending Ron Paul doesn't exist if he were to win Iowa. It would certainly be hard to maintain the unelectable theme. I imagine the big story would be the "unexpected" strength of Mitt Romney's third-place showing.

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VPFL Week 12

58 Moundsview Meerkats (8-4-0)
55 MS Swamp Spartans (6-6-0)

79 RR Redbeards (5-6-1)
76 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-5-0)

81 Bane Sidhe (6-6-0)
63 GroverBeach Quixotes (4-8-0)

84 Bailout Banksters (7-4-1)
30 Cranberry Rhyneauxs (4-8-0)

67 Macau Marauders (5-6-1)
56 Green Reverends (6-5-1)

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The SF classics and the human condition

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I am a fervent believer in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And let us further suppose that I am utterly convinced that the tenets of the Pastafarian Church not only represent the present pinnacle of human progress, but are guaranteed to remain valid and morally definitive for so long as our species shall fail to evolve. And finally, let us also suppose that many of the classics of the science fiction and fantasy genre are deemed to infringe in a variety of ways upon the tenets of Pastafarianism. Am I then justified in claiming that these works are not classics, indeed, cannot be considered classics because they violate the Pastafarian sensibilities that every right-thinking human being knows are true? Am I perhaps even justified in claiming that no one should be permitted to read, much less enjoy, works that offend fundamental human decency as defined by the true interpretations of the various blots and sigils left to humanity by the Flying Spaghetti Monster as he passes overhead in all his noodly goodness?

Even if we cannot justify these things, surely I, as a fine, upstanding human, Pastafarian, and scholar, cannot be expected to slog my way through any literary work that is insufficiently respectful of the societal mores that, if not necessarily dominant today, are assured to one day be accepted by all of humanity in the fullness of time!

Read the rest at The Black Gate

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Mailvox: an easy choice

Jamsco asked me to consider presenting an argument for supporting Tebow and the Broncos versus an argument for supporting the Vikings. I rejected that because there is absolutely no chance I would ever support any team against the Vikings. I find The Miracle of Tebow to be even more entertaining than the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment, and I wish the young man well in general, but against the Vikings?

Never. The only circumstance in which I might consider supporting another team against the Vikings is if one of my children was playing against them. And even then, I'd probably hope for an excellent individual performance in defeat.

However, I can say that seeing the Vikings lose to Tebow and the Broncos on Sunday would be less painful than most historical Vikings defeats. I rank Vikings defeats on the following 10-point pain scale:

10- Dallas Hail-Mary game. Pearson absolutely committed offensive pass interference.
9 - Oakland. Super Bowl XI.
8 - Atlanta. 38 in 98. This was dreadful, but unlike the other two games, I didn't actually cry. One of the guys at the bar in Florida did, however.
7 - New Orleans. NFC Championship aka The Greased Pig Game. This probably would have been an 8 if I was younger and was still capable of feeling normal human emotion. Also, New York 41-0. People tend to forget the Vikes were actually favored. Total disaster from the get-go.
6 - New England. The 28-27 game. How do you lose when you're winning 27-0? Pittsburgh. Super Bowl IX. I didn't expect the Vikings to win, but I still hoped. Washington. The Darren Nelson drop in the 1987 NFC championship. We would have crushed Denver too.
5 - Any loss to the Packers when the Vikings are favored. And pretty much any loss to the Lions. Not that the Lions are a rival, it's just that it's so unexpected.
4 - Arizona. 18-17 in 2003 to knock the Vikings out of the playoffs. Or any playoff loss in a year when the Vikes clearly aren't good enough to compete.
3 - Any loss to the Packers when the Packers are the better team. Losing then isn't surprising, it's just annoying. As are the Packer fans. Or losing after leading by 10 or more in the third quarter. Or any loss in the second half of the season after starting 6-2 or better.
2 - A regular season loss.
1 - A preseason loss.

I would say that a loss to the Broncos would probably be about a 1.5, not because I'm cheering for Tebow, but because the season is shot anyhow and I'd just as soon see Frazier go. I see no reason to have any confidence in him. The Vikings run defense isn't as epic as it was a few years ago, but it is still a top-10 run defense giving up only 99.6 YPG, which should slow down the top-ranked Denver running attack. The Vikings should win, even without Adrian Peterson, since their weak and wounded pass defense, (missing both starting corners and ranked 29th), should be capable of rising to the challenge posed by Tebow's arm, and because the Denver defense simply isn't as good as many casual observers imagine.

By the way, I always support the NFC North team in the playoffs. Bears, then Packers. I hate the NFC West. I don't hate the NFC East, but I hate the way the media spends half their coverage on the NFC East and the other half on the rest of the league. And the NFC South still strikes me as a nonentity, the Saints one Super Bowl notwithstanding.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's game. You can always judge a player better when you see him play against a team you know well. I do wish Winfield wasn't on IR; it would be fascinating to see if Denver could run his way or not... I'm betting not, but we won't be able to find out.

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Exit the Harassinator

You know, it really doesn't bother me in the slightest to say "I told you so".

Herman Cain, the insurgent populist whose candidacy has been ensnared by allegations of sexual impropriety, said Saturday that he is leaving the race for the Republican presidential nomination, saying that the allegations have cast a "cloud of doubt over me and this campaign."

"As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching, I am suspending my presidential campaign," he said at an event in Atlanta. "I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction, the continued hurt . . . on me, on my family, not because we are not fighters, not because I am not a fighter."

Herman Cain's campaign was always a joke. He was never a serious candidate in the eyes of anyone with more than half a brain who bothered paying attention to what came out of his mouth after swirling around in his head.

I shall now commence to gargle with the sweet, saline goodness of Fred Backer's tears

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Homeschool or die

I'm about as cynical about the basic concept of public schooling as it is possible to be. And yet, the American "education" system still regularly manages to surprise me to the downside:

A 7-year-old boy is being investigated by his South Boston elementary school for possible sexual harassment after kicking another boy in the crotch. The first grader’s mother, Tasha Lynch, says she was shocked by the school’s decision.

“He’s 7 years old. He doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment,” she said.

Lynch’s son, Mark Curran, said the boy that he kicked had been bullying him on the school bus ride home from Tynan Elementary last week.

“He just all of a sudden came up to him, choked him. He wanted to take his gloves, and my son said, ‘I couldn’t breathe, so I kicked him in the testicles,’” said his mother.

Lynch described a phone call she received from the school explaining that the case will be treated like sexual harassment, due to what it considers inappropriate touching.

“‘Your son kicked a little boy in the testicles. We call that sexual harassment,’” Lynch said the school told her.

Apparently the schools wish parents to teach their children to die when they are being choked. Or something. In any event, it does suggest an alternative strategy for kids who are being bullied. The moment that a bully lays so much as a finger on you, charge him with sexual harassment. That should keep him and his parents busy for the next few weeks... and if he dares to say anything about it later, it's a simple trip down to the counselor's office to lay a second charge.

Of course, if you're a parent, what on Earth are you thinking to leave your children in what has clearly become a complete madhouse? I know, I know, your school is different. The teachers are excellent. Your kids are more than fine. And you know absolutely everything that goes on inside their school building for 36 hours every week, right?

Parents of kids in public school are almost uniformly idiots, at least in this one regard. They always claim to know everything about their children's schools, and yet I've never met a single one who could even tell me the ratio of teachers to administrative staff or the average number of children in a classroom. Most of them can't even tell me what classes their kid has, let alone his daily schedule. Yeah, you totally know what's going on there.

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Exposing the injectors

The rabid "vaccinate everyone for everything" crowd likes to mock the vaccine realists as "anti-vaxxers" and "anti-science", but the dishonesty and hollowness of their position is exposed every time the facts about vaccination manage to leak out into the mainstream:

Natasha Bita, a journalist for The Australian has just won a Walkley Award (the Australian equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize) for an in-depth article series on the CSL Afluria flu vaccine, a shot that caused convulsions in one percent of Australian infants who received it.

To put this vaccine scandal in perspective, the CDC states that ‘seizures can occur after vaccination,’ 33% of infants who have a first seizure will have more seizures and 10% of infants who have one seizure can develop epilepsy. According to the Merck Manual (the largest-selling medical textbook), seizures are a symptom of encephalitis, which the Merck Manual defines as a vaccine adverse reaction. Vaccine-induced encephalitis can leave a spectrum of permanent brain damage in its wake – post-encephalitic syndrome (aka epilepsy and autism). In other words, kids that have convulsions from Afluria can have lifelong neurological disabilities.

Incredibly, the defective CSL flu vaccine Afluria is still on the market in the US: FDA-approved and CDC-recommended. The only concession US vaccine authorities have made to this Afluria scandal is to raise the recommended age for this vaccine, but even that feeble response is colored by a direction to give Afluria to young kids anyway if no other flu vaccine is available.

One thing that few American pro-vaxxers understand is the extent to which their pro-vaccine enthusiasm is viewed as lunacy by the rest of the medical world. For example, the US vaccine schedule involves 2.4 times more vaccines before the age of two than the UK schedule. In the period in which infectious diseases were all but eliminated, children received ONE-FIFTH as many vaccines as they do now. It is profoundly and shamefully dishonest to pretend that it is in any way necessary to give FIVE TIMES MORE vaccines to children in order to accomplish what was already accomplished with a much more limited vaccine schedule.

What the irrational pro-vaxxers fail to realize, in their futile and stupid attempts to launch deceptive, emotion-based attacks on those who demonstrably know more about the relevant facts of the matter than they do, is that their efforts are counterproductive. Instead of engaging in reasoned discussion, they simply point and shriek like the global warming crowd. Not only are they completely unconvincing, but they are losing, as vaccination rates continue to fall.

When intelligent and concerned parents are told they are stupid and anti-science when they are merely asking intelligent and relevant questions instead of having their questions answered in a respectful manner, they are not going to obediently fall in line and get their kid injected. Instead, they are quite correctly going to conclude that there is no chance in Hell that they are going to pay any attention to what the hysterical pro-vaxxers say in the future.

Most pro-vaxxers simply haven't thought through the costs and benefits to the average family. Nor have they ever considered that many families that don't adhere to the vaccine schedule are doing so with the medical approval of their pediatricians who have seen one of their children have an adverse reaction. Once you've seen one child collapse unconscious or have a seizure, how completely and utterly stupid do you have to be to blindly proceed with the recommended vaccine schedule with that child or any of your other children?

Some vaccines make sense. Others don't. That is the reality that the pro-vaxxers will have to get their heads around before anyone in the vaccine reality camp will pay any attention whatsoever to their emotion-laden rantings. Consider this: the fact that children need water in order to live is not a rational basis for drowning them on behalf of their health.

And just to be clear, I think it makes sense to vaccinate for tetanus, polio, and after the age of four, measles. It may make sense to vaccinate for some influenzas if a sufficiently deadly variant were to arise and begin spreading. But it makes no sense to vaccinate against most of the other diseases which are so seldom fatal and are so easily treated without hospitalization. I am not an "anti-vaxxer", I am simply a vaccine realist. If the rabid vaxxers were as genuinely concerned about saving lives as they claim, they would occupy themselves with banning automobiles, not injecting children with various toxic substances.

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So much for "scientific consensus"

The models were wrong, the predictions were wrong, and now the basic assumptions underlying the hypotheses appear to be wrong too:

The Economist reports on some new cutting-edge climate research published in a peer-reviewed article in Science that challenges some core green doom warnings. In particular, the study suggests that the probable sensitivity of the earth’s climate to increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far lower than the assumptions traditionally used by the (already discredited) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not only that, the authors find that the existence of a so-called “fat tail” — the notion that extreme temperature changes in response to increases in atmospheric CO2 are likely — is illusory.

The failure of the global warming "science" needs to be rubbed hard and repeatedly into the noses of all the scientists and science fetishists who claim that science cannot be questioned by non-scientists, or indeed, that their statements bear any more weight than those made by the fat homeless guy living in van DOWN BY THE RIVER!

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Hide the decline

Economic statisticians can utilize the climate scientists' trick too:

The jobless rate declined to 8.6 percent, the lowest since March 2009, from 9 percent, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Payrolls climbed 120,000, with more than half the hiring coming from retailers and temporary help agencies, after a revised 100,000 rise in October. The median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey called for a 125,000 gain.....

The decrease in the jobless rate reflected a 278,000 gain in employment at the same time 315,000 Americans left the labor force. The labor participation rate declined to 64 percent from 64.2 percent.

This appears to be nothing more than the usual statistical shenanigans. By claiming that the labor force is shrinking, those who have left it are not counted as jobless, therefore unemployment is considered to have fallen, therefore more people are employed even though a smaller percentage of the growing population has jobs than before.

However, the more important number, the EPR, did continue to tick upwards to an unadjusted 58.7 percent, the same as last month. This means that the jobs situation is marginally better than one year ago, when it was 58.4 percent.

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The true and obscure history of Psykosonik, part I

Among the very small number of people still interested in Psykosonik, there is a fair amount of confusion as to what actually happened concerning the band's beginnings as well as its end. It was an interesting, and I would have to say, generally positive experience even if we never realized our potential, never put too much effort into it, and basically demonstrated how far one could expect to go without seriously trying.

Psykosonik began with a small, personable guy named Gordie, who was determined to be a nightclub impresario. He got his start with a little place in Minneapolis called The Upper Level, in partnership with a rich kid from Minnetonka named John something or other. John was a short, good-looking blond guy who, if he had been taller, could have played the villain in every 80's movie. He could have defined the term "douchebag". The featured attraction at The Upper Level was a band called Smilehouse, which in addition to John and Gordie, featured the music, singing, guitar, and keyboard programming of a tall, handsome, diffident musician named Paul Skrowaczewski.

Paul came by his skills naturally, being the son of Stanislau Skrowaczewski, who at the time was the conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra. His younger brother Nick was also in Smilehouse, (more about him later), and played the drums. They had a very 80's sound and were really rather good, although I was always skeptical about whether Gordie and John were actually playing anything on keyboards and bass. I think the Smilehouse name was meant to trade on the Acid House that had been big in the UK around that time, but there was nothing either Acid or House about the music, which was straightforward dance pop written by Paul. Their most popular song was "All Night Party", an upbeat dance number, but I really liked the more subdued and mysterious "Perfect Stranger".

The summer before, in 1987, Big Chilly and I had formed a cover band called NoBoys with his brother Sharp and our friend Horn, which wasn't particularly serious and was more devoted to figuring out how to program the electronics of the songs we liked than anything. We learned how to play songs by Depeche Mode, New Order, Shriekback, Erasure, and Information Society, whose singer, Kurt Harland, happened to be from the next suburb over. More about him later too. The name was a bit of a joke, standing for North Oaks Boys, which was about as far from "the street" as you could get without going to an East Coast prep school. Had we started it just a little later, after Straight Outta Compton was released, (we were huge PE and NWA fans from the start), I have no doubt we would have called it NoBoyz....

Right before we all went back to college in the summer of 1988, I played a tape to Gordie and we discussed NoBoys playing at The Upper Level. He was excited, because at the time, with the exception of Prince and the various Prince-related bands, all the live bands played rock and roll, not dance music. He came out to my parents' house where we practiced in the exercise room in the basement, liked the song selections and the fact that all four of us could sing, and hired us for what turned out to be NoBoys second and final live performance. So, we got The Upper Level gig in return for a percentage of the evening take.

This was the picture used in the flyer that Gordie distributed. From left: Big Chilly, Vox, Sharp, Horn.

As would happen later a few blocks away, with Psykosonik, the crowd completely abandoned the floor once the DJ stopped and the stage lights went on, only to return with delight once they heard the electronics kick in and everyone realized we weren't going to play music that was 20 years out of date. We played for an hour and the set went over well, extremely well. So well, in fact, that John, Gordie's partner, was furious that the crowd was so much more enthusiastic than it had been lately about Smilehouse. (This was because Smilehouse had been playing there all summer, not because their songs were bad. Also, when it comes to dancing, people tend to prefer covers to original music by unknown bands, live crowds never want to hear anything new even if it is U2 or Springsteen that is introducing it. Although in the latter case, that will seldom stop them from bragging about it later....)

John was so jealous that he not only pulled the plug on us once we'd hit precisely the one hour allotted, (we were just about to kick into our big closing number, a rocked-up version of Malaria by Shriekback(1), he actually had the DJ play "Blue Monday" by New Order, the last song we'd been permitted to finish. This was a mistake, because our programming was very good and thus our version sounded almost precisely the same, (except for the vocals)(3), and he just about lost it when people kept asking him why it was being repeated. The four of us were so indignant about being prevented from finishing our set when it was going so well that we refused to accept the few hundred dollars we were due from Gordie, who was a nice guy and extremely embarrassed by his partner's behavior. I also met a pretty blonde waitress that evening who was very sympathetic to us, which eventually proved to be of minor significance, as shall be seen later.

But Gordie and I stayed in touch, and the following winter, he invited me to see his new club, an all-ages place called The Underground, near the University of Minnesota campus in Dinkytown. He had the most ridiculous little "VIP" section roped off, with just enough room for about ten people and invited me to come sit with him in there.(2) As it happened, that evening there was already one other "VIP" sitting there smoking a cigarette behind the ropes, a guy that I recognized right away as the lead singer of Smilehouse. Gordie introduced us, and that was how I met Paul Sebastien.


The true and obscure history of Psykosonik part II


(1) Man, we loved that Shriekback song. And everyone went nuts when we played it, Malaria was the one big exception to the rule about live crowds not liking songs they hadn't heard before. With his big bass voice, Big Chilly just ripped it up, both vocally and on guitar. And how can you not respect a band that not only incorporates the word "parthenogenesis", but does so in the freaking chorus! If you haven't heard Shriekback's Oil and Gold CD, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

(2) I was tremendously amused to see that for the dance floor, Gordie had used the same black-and-white linoleum tile at that he had admired so in my parent's basement exercise room.

(3) "Blue Monday" was one of the two songs on which I sang lead, because the other three were all talented vocalists who didn't sound plugged-up and drugged-out enough for New Order. And by talented vocalists, I mean genuinely talented.

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The inevitable result of the "Arab Spring"

Perhaps, my dear anklebiters, you may recall when you said I had no idea what I was talking about when I scoffed at the idea that the "Arab Spring" would lead to that vision of shiny secular democracy that is dying in the West and will never exist in the Middle East. After all, weren't there STUDENT LEADERS speaking ENGLISH to CNN reporters? Surely the ability of two or three twenty-somethings to appear presentable on camera must have been a reliable indicator of their political power in Egypt! And I'm sure you haven't forgotten all your pooh-poohing of the idea that democracy would lead directly to rule by religious fundamentalist parties:

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

Quelle surprise! The entire point of establishing the various kings and military dictatorships at the end of the European colonial era was to avoid popular governments and thereby prevent the revival of violent Islamic expansion. And I have no sympathy for the neocons, particularly the Jewish ones who loudly advocated democratic revolution in the Arab world and will soon be shrieking about how their precious Israel is now increasingly threatened by the democratic governments they helped establish.

The neocons have clearly already made geo-politics much more unstable with their unrestrained interventionist strategery. I suggest they all shut the hell up and simply watch as the Arabs, Israelis, and Americans go about pursuing their national interests without the "benefit" of advice from the idiot interventionist lobby.

Democracy is not, and has never been, an intrinsic good in and of itself. It is not freedom. It is not liberty. And very often, it is a very good way of ensuring that human freedom and liberty are repressed.

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Is the Denver D holding back Tebow?

It astonishes me that it is necessary to walk the doubters through this, but Denver is not winning because it has a great defense. Nor can it be honestly said that Denver's offense is terrible because Tim Tebow is the starting quarterback. Consider the following facts:

Denver DEF

Points per game: 23.6 (22nd)
Rush yds per game: 120.5 (19th)
Pass yds per game: 234.7 (17th)
Interceptions: 7 (26th)
Fumbles Recovered: 6 (14th)
Sacks: 30 (7th)

Denver OFF

Points per game: 20.1 (21st)
Rush yds per game: 159.7 (1st)
Pass yds per game: 153.1 (31st)
Interceptions: 1 (1st)
Fumbles Lost: 9 (27th)
Sacks given: 16 (10th)

(Note that the NFL ranks sacks given and interceptions by QB rather than by team: Tebow has thrown one while Orton threw eight.)

The astonishing thing isn't that Denver doesn't have the league's best defense, but that it doesn't even have the league's worst PASSING offense. What is often overlooked in assessing the Broncos is that in addition to saddling Denver with a low-risk, low-performance passing game, Tebow also provides his team with an EXCELLENT running game. Jacksonville has a much better defense than Denver and an even worse passing game; the primary difference is that Denver gains 40 more rushing yards per game and throws one less interception than the Jaguars. The NFL being a game of inches, that is the difference between 5-1 and 1-5. And given that Tebow rushes for 50.6 yards per game without losing any fumbles and throwing only 0.15 INT per game, it should be fairly obvious that in the case of Denver, the difference is #15.

If Denver's defense was genuinely as good as everyone keeps saying it is, the Broncos would be the favorites to not only win the AFC West, but would probably have the AFC's best shot at beating the Packers in the Super Bowl. (Ironically, in light of Tebow's connection to the First Coast, he would likely have the Jaguars winning the AFC South and playing for home field advantage right now if he was playing with MoJo Drew and the league's fifth-rated defense instead of a Ravens reject and the league's 22nd-rated defense.) Tebow isn't proving a team can win in the NFL with an excellent defense and a caretaker quarterback who doesn't turn the ball over, that was Trent Dilfer and the 2000 Ravens. He is proving instead that a team can win in the NFL with an average defense, a low-risk, low-performance passing game, and the best running game in the league.

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