Author Archives: the editor

Invoking the Tooth Fairy Twice……

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There is an interesting article in the New York Times on dark matter and dark energy. A quote from the article…..

And if the right ripples hadn’t shown up? As Frieman puts it: “You just would have thrown up your hands and said, ‘My God, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board!’ What’s remarkable to me is that so far that hasn’t happpened.”

Yet in a way it has. In the observation-and-theory, call-and-response system of investigating nature that scientists have refined over the past 400 years, the dark side of the universe represents a disruption. General relativity helped explain the observations of the expanding universe, which led to the idea of the big bang, which anticipated the observations of the cosmic-microwave background, which led to the revival of Einstein’s cosmological constant, which anticipated the observations of supernovae, which led to dark energy. And dark energy is … ?

The difficulty in answering that question has led some cosmologists to ask an even deeper question: Does dark energy even exist? Or is it perhaps an inference too far? Cosmologists have another saying they like to cite: “You get to invoke the tooth fairy only once,” meaning dark matter, “but now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice,” meaning dark energy.

The article makes me think of the argument in Spinoza, Einstein, and the Failure of Reason. Especially those places in the article were they are speculating that the answer might be more complicated then we can conceive.

Canaries in the Coal Mine

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Did you know that sub-prime lenders (those that lend to people with bad credit) are dropping like flies in a cold snap? No? It is common knowledge amongst those who follow business news but it has not made the headlines yet. To get an idea of how fast this turn around was, consider this quote from this New York Times article…..

On March 1, a Wall Street analyst at Bear Stearns wrote an upbeat report on a company that specializes in making mortgages to cash-poor homebuyers. The company, New Century Financial, had already disclosed that a growing number of borrowers were defaulting, and its stock, at around $15, had lost half its value in three weeks.

What happened next seems all too familiar to investors who bought technology stocks in 2000 at the breathless urging of Wall Street analysts. Last week, New Century said it would stop making loans and needed emergency financing to survive. The stock collapsed to $3.21.

The analyst’s untimely call, coupled with a failure among other Wall Street institutions to identify problems in the home mortgage market, isn’t the only familiar ring to investors who watched the technology stock bubble burst precisely seven years ago.

New Century Financial is not the only one. Every company that made loans to poor people is having serious problems. Now an analyst at Bear Stearns is saying that….

Tougher lending standards stemming from the shakeout in the beleaguered subprime mortgage industry could prevent up to 1.1 million U.S. homebuyers from getting mortgages this year, a Bear Stearns analyst told investors on Friday.

You might wonder why you should listen to anyone from Bear Stearns. After all they were the same fools who put a buy call on New Century a week before it collapsed. In fact, there are a lot of people out there arguing that problems in the sub-prime market are no big deal. Consider this quote from the LA times….

Many economists, as well as Fed officials, say they don’t believe that sub-prime borrowers account for a big enough share of the housing market to have a dramatic effect on the economy.

Haven’t these people ever heard of canaries in the coal mine?

Bear Stearns might be off in saying that 1.1 million homebuyer will not be able to buy a home this year because of tightening lending standards, but I would not bet against them. Bear Stearns itself has a lot of its own money in the game. They are reputed to have already taken big losses. Their recent pain is what makes me think that they are now a little more grounded in reality.

But regardless of whether you trust Bear Stearns or not, it has always been conventional wisdom that problems in the sub-prime market were early warnings of coming economic problems. Why do people think that this time will be different?

There are a lot of web sites covering this unfolding story. But my favorite is Calculated Risk. They tipped me off to all of links in this story except for the New York Times article.

Curious about the High Level Iranian defector?

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For anyone who is curious, a former Iranian deputy defense minister has defected to the west and is being questioned. At least, that is the official story. There is lots of speculation flying round about why and how he left. The Iranian government was swearing that he had been kidnapped for awhile.

Since this dude’s last official capacity in the Iranian government was in 2005, he probably has a fair amount of knowledge that is of interest to the US. But most people seem to think that Israel is the one questioning him.

You can read the Washington Post article on the subject here. You can read the Pajamas Media article on the subject here. Hat Tip: Belmont Club

Rage of the Young Danes…..

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Have you heard about how a thousand odd young Danes are rioting because the city of Copenhagen sold a building?

If you have, you have properly only seen it mentioned in passing. But we here at the Ethereal voice believe that picture is worth a thousand words. So take a gander at the following clips from the riots.

Before we start, let us say that we are trying very hard to be fair. To best of our knowledge, both of the videos that we are showing have been approved by the protesters themselves. We don’t want people to think that we are just trying to smear them. Here is a video showing the Danish protesters taking action against the police….

Please note that Danish protesters were using Molotov cocktails and firecrackers as well as stones throughout the riot. I am not sure how well this comes through on this video. I am not even a hundred percent sure that they were using Molotov Cocktails at this particular event. But if I understand the video rightly, they were using firecrackers.

This next clip was posted by someone sympathetic to the protesters. It purports to show the police using excessive force.

All we can say is that we were not outraged.

In case you think we are taking those videos out of context, here is an “essay” explaining the cause of the conflict in great detail. It is written by a protester.

It you want a different view of the matter, this post from the Gates of Vienna should get you started. And yes, we know the Gates of Vienna is written by a bunch of subhuman extreme right wing conservatives.

Here is another right wing post on the subject.

Why are there no Honeybees anymore?

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According to the New York Times, the answer cannot be blamed just on the varroa mites. They say that there is more to it then that. An excerpt from the article…..

Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.

Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

You can read the whole article here….

Seen by Ape Man