Schiff: Cassandra or stopped clock? You decide

The New Neo Posted on by

Peter Schiff is an interesting case of prognostication. Take a look at this video (or any number of others), and you will find him describing the financial crisis-to-be with a fair amount of detail and specificity before it happened:

So, was Schiff a genuis? And were all the others fools?

The latter question is easier to answer than the former: yes. They were as wrong as they could be, and most were arrogant about it as well. A losing combination. And if you followed their advice you lost too, big-time.

But as the old saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I haven’t followed Schiff’s career up to this point, but apparently he’s been a bear for a long time. Perhaps his being on the money about the current crisis (can’t resist those puns) simply illustrates the fact that sooner or later he was bound to get lucky, as the rest of us got unlucky. A bull market can’t last forever.

So the real question is, was Schiff’s uncanny ability to predict this one a fluke, or was it evidence that the guy’s a guru with excellent advice for the future? Consider that his predictions about gold and the dollar do not seem to have come true—and least, not yet.

This article from the Globe and Mail, written last July before the big meltdown, calls Schiff “Dr. Doom,” and describes him thusly:

To say Peter Schiff is bearish is like saying Tiger Woods is an okay golfer, or China has a small problem with air quality. The president of Connecticut-based Euro Pacific Capital Inc. is so pessimistic about the U.S. economy that he lives in a rented house and keeps the vast majority of his and his clients’ money outside the country, a healthy chunk of it in gold and energy stocks.

“America is finished. We are going to destroy this country. Our economy is just going to unravel,” he told me yesterday. “The question is how much money is the world going to lose before it writes us off?”

The article also points out that certain other predictions of Schiff’s have “proved uncannily accurate.” They cite his foreseeing the dot.com crisis, and the problems with Fannie and Freddie that had already surfaced by the time the piece was written. He also appears to have predicted the rise in oil prices a while back, although I haven’t read any evidence that he foresaw their current fall. And from the quote above, it seems he didn’t understand the effect the US problems would have on foreign stocks; they have not been immune, to say the least.

Let’s give Schiff credit for his remarkable foresight on this one. But I’d like to hear from you all—especially those who have followed him closely over the years—about his predictions in general. Has he made as many errors as correct forecasts? And what do you think of what he’s saying now?

Be forewarned: it’s not encouraging;. Let them fail, says Schiff. The government needs to stop bailing companies out, and no artificial economic stimulus will help. Americans need to start saving more and producing more:

What good is intelligence if you can’t/won’t use it?

The New Neo Posted on by

The US says it warned Indian authorities that terrorists from Pakistan would be arriving by water and targeting Mumbai. This sounds like a “good news/bad news” story: it’s reassuring the US knew that much, distressing that India chose to ignore it.

But did they? Since US officials are refusing to say when the information was conveyed and how much detail it involved, it’s difficult to evaluate what really happened.

As with all such warnings, it is only possible ex-post-facto to know which were important ones. But decisions most be made without the benefit of such hindsight.

In this case, the area to be guarded was large. How much care was India already taking to protect its coast? Was the effort stepped up, and did the terrorists succeed despite such measures? How many warnings from Washington does India get on a regular basis? Was this one just in the nature of the hum of the background noise, or was there something that made it stand out? To know whether India was negligent or not, and to what extent, we must know the answers to these questions.

This is one of the major problems with modern-day intelligence. It is not always that we have too little of it—it’s that we have too little of the exceptionally detailed variety, and too much of the very general type. How do we sort out the wheat from the chaff?

Logic indicates that the best information would come from infiltration of terror groups. I am certain this occurs—but how much, and to what effect, we do not know. As President Bush said long ago:

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.

The failures, on the other hand, are not secret. That is the nature of this war.

About blessings and enemies

The New Neo Posted on by

Blogger Yaacov Ben Moshe is an essayist whose thoughts are well worth reading. In this post, he ruminates on Mumbai and its significance, as well as his rage at the following bumper sticker, which he saw recently on a car in Newton Massachusetts:

sticker.jpg

I share his disgust with those who would display such a banner with the intent of annoying the “God Bless America” folks. I have no patience with those who ignore our strengths, and whose reflexive position is to revile most of America’s actions while employing a double standard for the rest of the world.

I most strongly share his rage at the Islamic terrorists, who cold-bloodedly murdered so many innocents in Mumbai to no purpose but their own nihilistic yearnings and their desire to punish infidels and strike fear into the hearts of anyone associated with the West. I especially deplore and despise their sadistic torture of many of their victims (evidence is that they saved the worst torture for the Jews).

Ben Moshe wonders about other aspects of the sentiment expressed in the bumper sticker:

What does that mean? Does it mean they would call down God’s blessing on the stinking swine who apparently did their reconnaissance in the Chabad House by posing as travelers and accepting the food, hospitality and blessings of the Rabbi and his family while they plotted their torture and death?

Does it mean that they can see no moral or spiritual difference between the Rabbi who welcomed and served them with an open heart and the filthy, lying murderers who rewarded his kindness by killing his wife before him and letting him suffer her death, tenderly wrapping her body in his prayer shawl, before murdering him?

I know enough about the Left and its moral relativism towards the excesses of third world countries and peoples, and especially about those who adopt terrorist causes as their own pet projects, to know that Ben Moshe is correct about some of the people who would place this bumper sticker on their cars. But I hereby offer another (and yes, a kindler, gentler) explanation for at least some the rest.

The word “bless” can be interpreted in other ways than simply equating the worthiness of murderers with that of innocents. It is possible to ask for a blessing for one’s enemies (and if the word “enemy” has any meaning at all—and I most definitely believe it does—these people are our enemies) without such moral equivalence. For example, it would be a blessing if the terrorists’ hearts were opened to the light of respect for the religion of others. It would be a blessing if terrorists realized that the wanton murder of innocents and torture of same are wrong. Such a change would be an enormous blessing not just for the rest of us, but for the terrorists themselves.

It is a matter of personal belief whether one thinks such a basic change in a human being can be accomplished by prayer. I submit, however, that many religious people do indeed think so, and that this is a possible (and far more benign) interpretation of the bumper sticker Ben Moshe found so offensive.

But even for those who believe in the power of prayer, it is clear that we cannot wait around for such a profound transformation to take effect through prayer alone. Fortunately, prayer and action are not mutually exclusive. We must take multiple and varied actions in the world to seek out terrorists and prevent them from being able to cause new horrors such as those in Mumbai.

Walmart stampede dynamics

The New Neo Posted on by

No doubt you are aware that the title of this post is not a metaphor for a buying frenzy, but a description of something quite literal. At the Valley Stream, NY, Walmart, on the day after Thanksgiving, an employee was trampled to death by an early-bird crowd that had waited all night for the bargains, giving new and tragic meaning to the phrase “Black Friday.”

Two thousand people are said to have stormed in, overwhelming the staff and trampling 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour to death, as well as injuring several other people. Descriptions of the scene paint a horrific picture of a crowd without pity or sense:

“They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.

“They took me down, too … I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back,” Overby said.

“They pushed him down and walked all over him,” Damour’s sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said. “How could these people do that?”

How, indeed? I’m not certain, of course. But, having done some research a while back for a post on how stampede deaths occur, I can venture a guess.

A stampede does not ordinarlly involve the heartless, out-of-control, murderous mob scene that such reports might indicate. The important elements necessary for a stampede are the following: (1) a large crowd moving forward with impatience; (2) the sudden funneling of that crowd from a wider into a narrower space (such as a bridge or entrance doorway); and (3) the rear of the crowd is unable to see what the front can, and pushes on largely unaware of the violence taking place ahead.

The people in front, who can see, are inexorably propelled forward by the eager crowd behind them who cannot. Even if the people in front want to stop moving, they are physically unable to do so. The horror occurs against their will.

A person at the Walmart that day managed to take these photos on her cellphone as the scene unfolded. If you study them, you will see that the crowd was indeed spread out horizontally at the outset, with no ropes or barriers guiding them into more orderly (and lengthy) lines the width of the doors (this report also mentions the shameful lack of police presence or basic crowd control).

The report from employees inside the store, who could only see the front of the line, is that the shoppers tore the doors off their hinges in order to get in. Another article mentions the doors “bowing with the weight of the assault” and then “shattering.” That sounds more involuntary—and more correct. A large crowd pushing from behind can exert an astounding amount of strength.

The forceful opening of the doors—whether purposeful or accidental—would have created a wider opening to ease some of the pressure of the huge crowd surging forward, allowing a quicker flow of people into the store. This may have actually saved some of the people in the front, who might otherwise have been crushed against the doors. But it was not enough to save Mr. Damour.

Reports are that some people in the crowd wanted to continue shopping even after learning of the death. If true, this is evidence of a profound and chilling level of callousness. But the stampede itself is probably not. More likely, it is evidence of a lack of proper crowd control.

[NOTE: For more information, see my previous post on stampede dynamics, as well as this website.]

The curve of an Instalanche

The New Neo Posted on by

An Instalanche—that’s a link from blogger Glenn Reynolds, who’s otherwise known as Instapundit—can drive a huge amount of traffic to a blog. Glenn’s own blog traffic hovers somewhere in the vicinity of 300,000 hits a day (let me spell that out for you: that’s three hundred thousand). Depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the way Glenn phrases the link, the general interest in the topic, and other variables that remain mysterious, an Instalanche can vary from a modest spike in traffic to a tsunami of visitors.

But I’ve noticed there’s one thing about an Instalanche (or any high-traffic link) that is quite predictable: the graph of the visits always seems to follow a rather strict pattern. There’s a sudden soar the first hour. Then the second hour there’s a fractional step down that represents, very roughly, maybe twenty percent of the whole. Then another similar step down in the third hour, and so on. As the traffic diminishes, the size of the step-downs grows smaller and smaller, and the previously steep imaginary line connecting the steps becomes flatter.

I’m sure there’s a simple equation that expresses the relationship. Here’s a picture of it:

sitemeter11-30-082.jpg

As you can see, this graph charts the number of visitors to my blog yesterday. It is a snapshot taken towards the middle of hour twenty-two. It begins in the wee small hours of the morning, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, ordinarily a very slow time on a very slow day. My traffic was just getting to around the 70 hits-per-hour point when suddenly, at approximately 10 AM, in came the Instalanche and BOOM! went the sitemeter.

There were over 2,400 hits in the first hour after that, about 2,200 in the second, 2,000 in the third, and so on, down to those smaller steps with the smaller decreases between them. This particular Instalanche was good for about 12,500 extra hits that first day—and it’s still going on, albeit at a much reduced rate.

Fun with sitemeters.

The Mumbai policemen who refused to shoot

The New Neo Posted on by

Photographer Sebastian D’Souza, who was able to take a photo of one of the armed terrorists in the train station in Mumbai, also described the events he witnessed there. One puzzling—not to mention profoundly troubling—aspect of his report was the following [emphasis mine]:

But what angered Mr D’Souza almost as much [as the terrorists’ rampage] were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”

…The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit…Mr D’Souza added: “I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera.”

Unless these policemen were disciples of Gandhi or abject cowards, it’s hard to explain what might have stayed their hands. But I’ll give it a try.

Lack of readiness. There’s a difference between ordinary police training and the skills one learns in preparation for being a member of a SWAT or counter-terrorism team. Still, one would strongly hope—and expect—that any armed policemen would have the proper instincts and reflexes to take the terrorists out, even minus specialized training.

The problem in the Mumbai station could have been the presence of the crowd of innocents. The police may have been waiting for an opportunity to get off a clear and unobstructed shot, one with little likelihood of striking an unarmed traveler instead of a terrorist. Of course, when the terrorist in question is engaged in calmly murdering scores of people in the crowded station, it seems obvious that the policemen should have taken that chance. Even if a police bullet killed an innocent bystander, the action would end up saving far more people than it killed.

This much seems clear. But fear of doing the wrong thing may have paralyzed some of the policemen. I found a clue in an article about an incident from a month ago that indicates this might have been the case:

The Central and Bihar governments have reacted sharply against the Mumbai police killing a young man who allegedly fired shots and shouted slogans against Navnirman Seva (MNS) leader Raj Thackeray in a bus in Mumbai on Monday.

Police claim 23-year-old Rahul Raj, a resident of Patna who was visiting Mumbai, was mentally unstable and was gunned down when he refused to surrender or throw away his gun.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who is visiting Delhi, condemned the Mumbai police for killing Raj… Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi and Shyam Rajak, general secretary of the state opposition Rashtriya Janta Dal party, also condemned the police.

A single man on a bus shouting slogans and firing shots that hit no one is not the same as a group of armed men coolly gunning down people in a crowded railway station. But it’s not really that big a stretch from one to the other. And if the killing of the first man was widely condemned, and the Mumbai police warned against another similar incident, that might have accounted for at least some of the tragic hesitation of the policemen in the train station.

I wrote the preceding part of this post late last night, planning to publish it today. Then this morning I read an article in the NY Times, which quoted police and/or military forces at the Taj Hotel, giving new support to my theory:

On Saturday afternoon, a sharpshooter who had spent over 60 hours perched outside the Taj Hotel said neither he nor his partner had fired a shot because they were not sure how to distinguish the gunmen from ordinary civilians trapped inside the hotel.

Similarly, a commando told a private Indian television station, CNN-IBN, that the gunmen seemed to be firing from so many different parts of the hotel that security forces did not quite know where to strike without inflicting civilian casualties. “There were so many people, and we wanted to avoid any civilian casualties,” he said.

It seems that in India, even “commandos” (which indicates at least some sort of specialized preparation) are not trained to face the chance that they might possibly inflict civilian casualties themselves in a situation like this. But such a risk is an inevitable part of dealing with terrorists willing and eager to fire into crowds. The police must be willing to do the same. The big difference is that the terrorists are aiming for the civilians, whereas the security forces are aiming for the terrorists.

[ADDENDUM: Quite a few interesting topics have come up in the comments section of this post. For more on one of them—Gandhi and pacifism—see this. For more on another—how to train troops to kill—see this.]

Whatever happened to respecting your elders?

The New Neo Posted on by

And here I thought the Japanese were supposed to be one of those peoples who revered the elderly, with a culture that featured exquisite politeness.

I guess that’s all changed now, at least if we consider the evidence offered by Japan’s relentlessly non-PC Prime Minister Taro Aso, who decided it was verbal open season on the aged.

The rather aptly named Aso attacked old people for their lack of exercise, calling them “hobbling malingerers” who are “always tottering off to the doctor.” Maybe something was lost in translation, but Aso’s remarks don’t seem inclined to garner him a great deal of support in a nation in which one-fifth of the population is over seventy.

Aso is sixty-eight himself, by the way, and a former Olympic clay pigeon shooter.

Terrorism: the “I’s” have it

The New Neo Posted on by

Rule of thumb in fighting terrorist attacks: if the Israelis offer advice, take it.

Israeli spokesmen say that in Mumbai, Indian troops stormed the hotels too soon, without gathering enough intelligence first. There is no country on earth with the expertise of the Israelis in this regard, and it’s surprising that (if the article is correct) India may have refused Israel’s assistance when it was initially offered in dealing with the Mumbai attacks.

This is not just because the Israelis wrote the book on this sort of thing. It’s also because India and Israel are countries that have more in common than their initial letter “I.” Although exceedingly different in size and population, they share a fact of history: both were partitioned and separated from their predominantly Muslim segments around the same time (late 1940s), when each ceased being part of the British Empire. In both cases bloodshed followed, and continues to this very day.

But that special history is not all they share. The two countries are increasingly cooperative economically and defensively as well. India is also the most prosperous country in its area, the one most closely allied with the West. And that’s even more true of Israel than it is of India. Islamic terrorists want both of them to pay the price, in blood.

And that’s not all. Both Judaism and Hinduism are the oldest of the world’s major religions still being practiced today. They are not only similar in their antiquity, but are also especially tolerant of the existence of other religions (see this about Judaism). Both have become targets of later, less tolerant religions—in recent years, Islam.

The news today is that the terrorist seige has ended in Mumbai. We can all be grateful for that, most especially the people of Mumbai and of India as a whole. But, as in Israel, it is clear that this is just a momentary lull in a storm that will be disrupting the country for a very long time.

Mumbai terror

The New Neo Posted on by

The terror in Mumbai angers me, but it doesn’t surprise. Any shock that this sort of thing can be planned and executed with such vicious intent went away long ago, on 9/11. Perhaps even before that.

We don’t have many details on exactly who is doing this and/or why, but it seems to involve Islamic terrorists. That’s always a good bet, of course. There’s also a long history of attacks in India from such groups, including a newer outfit that appears to be homegrown. Here’s a timeline.

In addition to the targeting of Americans, British, and Jews (one would imagine the latter are not so easy to find in India, but the terrorists have a will and so there’s a way), another difference between this attack and previous ones is the scope and scale of the present one. It is well-coordinated and involves multiple sites, and includes hostage-taking in addition to outright killings.

This underscores the tendency of terrorists to feel the need and the desire to escalate in order to get more and more attention. My guess is that these increasingly outrageous and deadly attacks also feed the terrorists in a personal and emotional way, making them feel bigger and badder and giving them a certain nihilistic glow.

If the aim was to capture the attention of the world, the Mumbai attack has already succeeded. It also promises the added potential benefit for the terrorists of striking a psychological and symbolic blow against India’s strong economy, seeking to discourage the boom in investment from overseas. The specificity of the targets indicate this goal, a resemblance to the apparent motivation for the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The Mumbai carnage also contains an extra message for President-elect Obama: don’t think there’s anything special about you or your election. For us, it’s business as usual—which is to disrupt your business, and that of your allies such as India.

The following photo seemed particularly touching to me, even though there is nothing overtly violent in it. The carnage is implied rather than shown:

mumbaistation.jpg

There’s something about those bags just lying around, abandoned by the people they belonged to, whose ordinary day was disrupted by a nihilim that seems to love violence for its own sake as well as whatever strategic aims were in mind. But in the middle of the photo, there is the image of kindness and the hoped-for restoration of civic law and order: the elderly man (slightly reminiscent of Gandhi) being helped to safety by a soldier.

Thanks for the burger, but no thanks

The New Neo Posted on by

A few days ago I noticed a sign outside the local Burger King that said “Open on Thanksgiving.” It made me wonder just what a Thanksgiving Day gathering there might be like. But then I realized that I actually had some personal experience in this regard, many moons ago.

That was when I was in college, before fast food had taken over the world. My family lived about a thousand miles away. My freshman year I’d gone home for Thanksgiving, but it seemed I’d hardly said hello to them before I had to say turn around and say goodbye again.

So my sophomore year I decided to make life easy and stay at school for the holiday (as I recall, one of the things that sweetened the deal was that I had some sort of date planned for Saturday night. But I digress.) I was going home for Christmas in a few weeks anyway, so I figured that would be soon enough to see my parents. After all, I was hardly a baby anymore; I’d reached the outrageously autonomous and sophisticated age of eighteen.

The dorm remained open, and there were three other girls staying there for the duration, all of them from foreign countries. But on Thanksgiving Day I discovered to my surprise that the dorm kitchen was closed, and all the other girls had somewhere else to go for the big feast.

I did not. I sat in my room pondering the dilemma. I had no car. There were very few restaurants in town, and the only nearby one that was open was a greasy spoon across the street that served sandwiches and fries and burgers. To top it all off it was raining in torrents.

I waited till the evening when hunger got the better of me, and then I scooted across the street in shame to the restaurant that was empty of any other customers, ordered a double cheeseburger to go with extra ketchup and a large fries (it was, after all, Thanksgiving, time for a feast), brought it all back to my room, and ate it slowly at my desk. “Slowly” in this case might have been all of fifteen minutes.

I never again made the error of being alone on Thanksgiving. Or having a burger. Despite all sorts of menu and venue variations, the classic turkey-with-stuffing theme has always been scrupulously followed.

This year I want to express the hope that all of you had a wonderful meal with wonderful company—whatever the menu, wherever you may be.

beforeturkey.jpg