The Scrutinator

Compassion International just sponsored their one millionth child. They're a great organization, and I commend them for the progress they've made.

The global financial crisis has brought poverty to 100 million people around the world.

Think of the scale: 1 million in 57 years; 100 million in less than two years. That's 2850 times the effect. Three orders of magnitude.

If you could have started a non-profit that would have prevented this crisis, think of the good you would have done.

But even now are your beliefs about this crisis just a collection of convenient myths you've accumulated?

By The Scrutinator @ 1:52 PM  ::  0 comments   ::  back-links

Seen this? Comedy, yet profound.

"Everything's Amazing, Everyone's Unhappy" (Can't embed it here, it seems.)

It's more a comment on the human condition, I think, than anything.

On flying, I'd say you're doing something no one in history had ever done until 100 or so years ago, and going faster than any human had ever traveled until maybe 60 years ago.

We take so much for granted.

By The Scrutinator @ 3:09 PM  ::  1 comments   ::  back-links

Thomas Friedman:

I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the “legal” scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed. What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds — which Moody’s or Standard & Poors rate AAA — and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn’t a pyramid scheme, what is?

The SEC's description of Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBSs) (emphasis mine):

Mortgage loans are purchased from banks, mortgage companies, and other originators and then assembled into pools by a governmental, quasi-governmental, or private entity. ...

Most MBSs are issued by the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), a U.S. government agency, or the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), U.S. government-sponsored enterprises. Ginnie Mae, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, guarantees that investors receive timely payments. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also provide certain guarantees and, while not backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, have special authority to borrow from the U.S. Treasury. Some private institutions, such as brokerage firms, banks, and homebuilders, also securitize mortgages, known as "private-label" mortgage securities.

So if most are from Ginnie, Fannie and Freddie, isn't it really those organizations' pyramid scheme? And if they come with "certain guarantees," why wouldn't they get high ratings?

It really does go back to the Community Reinvestment Act.

By The Scrutinator @ 9:41 AM  ::  12 comments   ::  back-links

Zimababwe blames the west for their cholera:

Zimbabwe on Saturday accused the West of waging biological warfare to deliberately start a cholera epidemic that has killed hundreds of people and sickened thousands.

... Zimbabwean officials often blame their country's troubles on the West.

By The Scrutinator @ 2:21 PM  ::  2 comments   ::  back-links

Via Breitbart: the "snub" that wasn't, even though Jon Stewart and your own eyes clearly tell you otherwise.

Maybe I sound like a broken record, but what would public opinion be if every falsehood and distortion like this could be completely undone in every person's mind?

By The Scrutinator @ 10:02 AM  ::  0 comments   ::  back-links

The backstory of October being declared (erroneously) the hottest on record: The world has never seen such freezing heat:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

...

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

Unbelievable. But how long will we be hearing that October 2008 was the hottest on record? Hats off to the skeptics willing to actually look at the data.

Where would public (or scientific) opinion be if we could perfectly unwind every scam, distortion and falsehood in each person's thinking?

Via Instapundit

By The Scrutinator @ 1:33 PM  ::  0 comments   ::  back-links

Hats off to our new President-elect Barack Obama. Though I have a lot to be troubled about, I think he has an historic opportunity to do good in ways our society needs.

More later, as time permits.

For me, part of blogging is going on record with what I think and believe, so you (and I) can hold me accountable for what I say in the future. So I'll revisit things I said earlier on.

By The Scrutinator @ 11:10 AM  ::  6 comments   ::  back-links

An excellent lesson on psychological warfare.

By The Scrutinator @ 2:10 AM  ::  0 comments   ::  back-links