Tuesday's precipitous rise in stock averages is unexplainable. Some folks are calling it a "melt-up" (instead of a meltdown) and it's got investors spooked.
I thought it was because of the jobs news--unemployment is slightly less horrible this week than it has been--but I guess that's not it. And anyway that kind of news wouldn't (shouldn't) cause the Dow to rise 350 points in about an hour.
It's fair to say that no one really understands how the market works nor what it's going to do, especially right now. It's a chaotic system and under the best of circumstances the thing is unpredictable; A will usually result in B but not always. Right now, A has a good chance of resulting in B, but C or D are possible...and it might just go haywire and result in X or Q.
I think Tuesday's sudden rise was X.
DOOM!
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Before Hitler, Pharoah. The guy to whom Moses said, "Let my people go!" That Pharoah.
Also Judas and Pontius Pilate.
...but if you think about it, Judas betrayed one person, and Pilate was just doing his job. Hitler, on the other hand, was responsible for six million civilian deaths. I'm just saying that Judas and Pilate were not exactly on Hitler's level, you know?
Pharoah--that's debatable. Pharoah's big evil was keeping the Jews in chains after Moses told him that God had said to let them go. He wasn't sending them to the gas chambers; he was just making them work. (Work without pay, that is, slavery--but work nonetheless.)
It's not easy to best Hitler for "evil", is it?
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Fourth-order rainbow!
..."A quadrulple rainbow! Oh, what does it mean?"
*sigh*
It's not easy to see the 3rd and 4th order of a rainbow because they're very faint and appear closer to the sun than the primary and secondary ones. The picture shows only the 3rd and 4th order rainbows; the 1st and 2nd require about a 90° turn to the right to be visible from that vantage point. (Might be 120°, in fact.)
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Stuff being shot with air rifles. This guy is doing photos in the same vein as the ones done by Harold Edgerton, who was a major pioneer in high-speed photography.
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"Even our greatest scientists are not immune to getting stuck in convention." Oh, you mean like "carbon dioxide is causing global warming"? Or is that one still off the table?
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Yeah, or perhaps there's a major flaw with the whole "carbon dioxide equals global warming" thing.
Some researchers believe that at points in our planet's history — at least two, possibly three times — ice blanketed its surface, down to the equator and across the oceans, forming a "Snowball Earth.""Some researchers believe"--we have geological evidence that this is so.
But new research raises questions about whether a surge in carbon dioxide — one of the greenhouse gases responsible for modern, human-caused global warming — could have been responsible for the big thaw that followed the most recent Snowball Earth, about 635 million years ago. And if there wasn't a greenhouse effect big enough to melt the thick veil of ice, perhaps, the researchers suggest, Earth may not have been a big, icy snowball at the time.
But because CO2 keeps rising and global warming isn't happening, we now have to get rid of ice ages to make AGW/CC theory work. It's not enough to hide the Medieval Warm Period or the Maunder Many more; now we have to explain away the ice ages, too.
"While previous estimates had put the carbon dioxide concentration at as much as 90,000 parts per million [in the post-glacial period following an ice age], this new analysis put it lower than 3,200 ppm, possibly as low as it is today, about 400 ppm." ...and that's not enough to account for all the warming they saw if you accept that CO2 is the primary driver of climate.
The problem is, of course, that CO2 isn't the primary driver of Earth's climate. For one thing, CO2 concentration lags warming by centuries; for another, once you pass about 200 ppm you've used up all the heat that can be absorbed by CO2 anyway.
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I agree that Americans have become far too soft. $10.50 an hour to pick corn or onions--and the jobs go unfilled because people are afraid of physical labor. "It's just too hard!"
I've done it. Not picking vegetables, but unloading trucks and schlepping freight around--and for less than $10.50 an hour, let me tell you. Yeah, it's hard work; and you know what? When you work like that, it no longer matters what you eat because you're burning all of it off. You don't have to watch your diet when you work like that. So if you think, "This is an exercise program: I'm getting fit and getting paid to do it!" it becomes a lot easier.
Ask me how I know.
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The 50 best Ann Coulter quotes.
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"Hey, just calm down; this isn't that big a deal." Okay, a federal agency bought guns and distributed them to mexican drug gangs without trying to track where they went, breaking about 50 kajillion laws in the process. But, you know, just calm down! Don't get all upset!
CBS seems to be trying to muffle the story. CBS was the only mainstream media outlet that was seriously covering this thing, and now suddenly the reporter behind the story is "unavailable".
I'm on the fence about the motivation behind F&F. On the one hand it's easy to see how a corrupt government might try to pad the gun crime statistics in order to advance their agenda for limiting its citizens rights under the Second Admendment. On the other hand, no evidence has surfaced that this is the case.
On the gripping hand, the story's not over yet.
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Incidentally, you don't have a right to produce your own food. That's right: if you have a cow, and you milk it, and you drink the milk, you're breaking the law--especially if you keep the cow somewhere other than your own home.
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"They are nothing but human spam." Yeah, that's as good a description as any for those knuckleheads "occupying" Wall Street.
WEERD comments.
Also from WEERD, "Selective Enforcement of the law is the first sign of Tyranny, and [Boston mayor] Tom Menino is showing his Marxist stripes."
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I'm always extra-careful around tanks containing gas under high pressure for exactly this reason.
Also, it's why aluminum is a much better choice for pressure vessels than steel. Steel rusts, and when it comes apart under pressure it fragments. Aluminum just tears.
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Steven Den Beste comments on "victory disease", and as always it's worth reading.
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One of the defenses of wartime Germany is that the people didn't know Hitler was killing the Jews.
Incidentally, a line in one of the opening paragraphs gives the lie to the common atheist notion that Hitler was Christian: "The Lord, who has been maligned by all National Socialists as part of their official policy, is now being implored by the Führer in his hour of need. What strange hypocrisy!"
...and typical of leftists, by the way. (Which Hitler, as a national socialist, was.)
I should like very much to read these diaries. Also on my list is to obtain and reread Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
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Michael Flynn writes a long essay about evolution and its development as a scientific theory. "Oddly, Mendel's work and the support from his Order are seldom mentioned during debates about church-science relationships," he remarks in a footnote.
An interesting read, with no particular axe to grind.
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"...[S]olid spent nuclear fuel contains about 97% of the original fissionable material present in newly manufactured nuclear fuel."
Which is why we ought to recycle our spent nuclear fuel.
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A gorgeous Indian Summer day today; I rode the bike to therapy, then took a ride out to VHQ. I took a circuitous route home from there, and had a jolly good time.
Having some stuff to drop in the food pantry box, I dug out a knapsack, and that did quite a nice job for me. So tomorrow, when I go to Wal-Mart to pick up my pills, I can also pick up a couple botlles of mouthwash. After that I could even stop at the auto parts store and pick up the battery for Sailor V's ATV--and probably will. Even if I stop at home first to drop off the mouthwash it'll still end up using less gasoline than the Jeep would.
Had no trouble whatsoever with riding 55 MPH on Crete-Monee road out to Monee, either.
I got tailgated a couple times coming through Richton Park and Park Forest; and the other day someone apparently didn't see me until she was about a third of the way into the road. Defensive riding is the best thing you can do. Keep your eyes open and pretend all the other drivers are blind!
And wear your safety gear.
One of the guys in my Bible study group is looking at a Harley for about $6,000. I wanted to talk to him about it a bit Tuesday night but didn't have a chance. But before the meeting began everyone in the room was all, "You'll put your eye out, kid!"
Er, wait: "You'll get in a wreck and die!"
...I wanted to tell the guy, "Hey, do what you want to do. Motorcycles are fun!" I was also going to advise him, though, not to buy a big Harley for his first bike. Shit, you can get a brand new Honda Rebel for $3,000 (half the asking price for that used Harley) if you don't dicker, and it's much more manageable for a first bike than a Harley would be. Or buy a similar bike that's a year or two old, and save perhaps a thousand dollars.
People were advising him to buy a new big-screen TV instead. WTF, you can get a decent flatscreen TV for under a grand, but it's not as much fun.
Oh well.
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One of the big problems with my ride this afternoon was that I kept riding past restaurants at dinner time, and every time I did I'd smell something good that reminded me I was f-ing hungry and wanted dinner. Burritos, gyros, Chinese, fish--oh, man. This mexican place in Monee nearly convinced me to stop at Super Burrito! and get one (though I've already had one this week) and to heck with my resolve to finish off the Hamburger Helper I made earlier in the week.
*sigh*
...but I was good and ate the HH up. A couple hours later I'm hungry again, though, because all I had today other than the HH was a ham and cheese sandwich. But I'm planning to have General Tao's Chicken for dinner tomorrow--assuming I don't instead decide on a trough of Lucky 7 or something.
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Now I'll do some WoW and see how Erogami's auctions are going.