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Showing posts with label longevity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label longevity. Show all posts

Jun 5, 2011

Short Term Longevity Risk

As well-born actuaries we all know the long term risks of longevity:

Lots of actuaries keep expending their energy on calculations of 50 years ahead mortality probabilities....  And indeed..., this is challenging....

Some research reports predict a decline in life expectation, others and more serious recent reports show a steady increase of life expectation.

Mission Impossible
Fact of actuarial life is that - although long term research is useful and educational - we are no Actuarial Magicians.

We should never suggest that we're able to value a bunch of complex and systemic risks  (liabilities, assets,mortality, costs, demographics, etc) into a reliable consistent model that predicts reality.

It's a farce!

What CAN we do?
Instead trying to compress a complex of long term risky cash flows into one representing unique value, we need to:
  1. Analyze and model the short term risks
  2. Develop a method (system) that enables boards of directors to manage and control their risky cash flows (profit share systems, experience rating, etc.).

Example: Short Term Longevity Risk
As a 2011 report of the National Research Council clearly shows:  The previous 50 years we've seen a 3 months yearly increase of lifespan every calendar year.

Instead of recalculating, checking and pondering this trend, let's take a look at the short term effects of this longevity increase trend.

Effect of 'one year life expectancy' increase
First we take a look at the cost effect of the increase of 'one year of life expectancy' on a single-premium of a (deferred) life annuity (paid-up pensions)...
( Life table total population: United States, 2003 )

Depending on the discounting interest rate, a one year improvement of longevity for a 65 old person demands a 2,3% to 4,0% increase of the liabilities.

Of course the increase of the liabilities of a portfolio (of a pension fund) depends on the (liability weighted) age distrubution of the corresponding portfolio.

Here's a simple example:

This comes close to the rule of thumb as mentioned by AEGON:

10% mortality improvement adds one year to life expectancy, and one year of life expectancy adds 4% to the required value of a pension fund’s reserves

From the above presented visual sensitivity analysis we may conclude that for general (distributed) portfolio's a 'one year lifetime increase' will demand approximately 4-5% of the actual liabilities.

A three to four months yearly longevity-increase - as is still the actual trend - will therefore demand roughly a substantial 1,5% (yearly) of the liabilities.
This implies that in case your contribution is calculated at 4% and your average portfolio return is 7%, there's 3% left for financing longevity and indexation (=method). As 'longevity growth' in the near future will probably cost about 1,5%, there's  only 1,5% left for indexation on the long run.

Case closed

Related links:
Spreadsheet (xls) with data used in this blog
- Forecasting longevity of Dutch pension scheme members using postcodes
- Increasing life expectancy at pension funds (uvt;2011)
- Life Tables for the United States Social Security Area 1900-2100
- Valuing Pension Fund Liabilities on the Balance Sheet
- No limits to life expectancy?
- Broken Limits to Life Expectancy
- NRC: Explaining divergent levels of longevity (pdf;2011)
- Wolfram Alpha: Longevity U.S.
- AEGON: Longevity Rule of thumb

Sep 11, 2010

Coverage Ratio Solution Space

Dutch pension funds are in deep trouble. The average coverage ratio of many pension funds has fallen to a level well below 100% (underfunded). Some major Dutch pension funds with coverage levels around 90%, called Government to dissuade the planned pension rights cuts.

A delay in pension rights cuts seems justifiable. Key question is the reason for this requested delay. For reasons of reformulating new pension policies and ambitions, delay seems reasonable. With the intention to just 'buy time' in order to continue 'desperate hope' that the markets and low returns will recover, further delay could prove catastrophic.

Facing Reality
Pension funds have to cope with several hurricanes at the same time:
  1. Relatively low interest rates
  2. Underperforming stock market
  3. Underestimated longevity risks
  4. Need for higher confidence levels

Although low interest rates and underperforming stock markets could continue for several years, on the long term interest rates and stock markets will most likely recover, simply because economic growth imply higher returns on the long term.

Underestimating The Longevity Monster
One of the 'big' (?) surprises seems the recent development in longevity. For decades now, actuaries and researchers are structurally underestimating the effect of longevity.

Maggid's Longevity Forecast
Although longevity has been studied a lot, a decrease of the steady growth of the human lifespan in the coming decades will most likely turn out to be idle hope....

Lessons learned, we actuaries will seriously have to take into account that the linear increase of lifespan probably will continue until at least the age of 90 (Maggid forecast). This implies that we'll have to 'spice up' our mainly retrospective life expectancy models and corresponding forecasts with a healthy portion of common sense.

What about the 'risk free' discount rate?
More actu(ari)al trouble is caused by the fact of the low interest rates and sticky stock markets.
Pension funds face the substantial volatility and the low level of the so called "risk free discount rate" that drives the coverage ratio. Paradoxically we could state:

There's nothing more risky than a  'risk free' discount rate

The - artificial - low level risk free interest rate pulls down the coverage ratio of a pension fund.

At the same time it's necessary to level up the existing 97.5% confidence level of pension funds. A 97.5% confidence level implies that a pension fund will turn into default (underfunding) twice in an average person's lifespan.

Despite the fact that a 'twice in a life meltdown' is probably hard to explain to anyone, new upcoming Solvency demands for pension funds will be inevitable in order to create a level playing field on the financial market. Good governance, common sense and upcoming new regulatory initiatives will therefore certainly urge a higher pension fund confidence level like the 99,5% level in the insurance industry (Solvency II) or the 99,9% level in the banking industry (Basel II) .

Sitting Ducks
As is clear from the above image, successfully financing a pension-fund (portfolio) on the long term at the current ambition level, calls - in general - for high (unrealistic) interest rates. The 'solution space' for achieving the necessary  high coverage ratios that match the (new) capital requirements appears to be very narrow.

Therefore (there is no other way), most pension funds have to take time and redefine their (future) ambition instead of playing 'sitting ducks' and hoping for the best.

Used Sources, Links:

- Dutch life expectation 2010-2060
- Japanese life expectation: 86.5 years
- Dutch life expectation 2010-2060
- Japanese life expectation: 86.5 years
- Dutch - De risico's van het leven (risks of life) ...
- Will Life Expectancy Continue To Increase Or Level Off

Jul 5, 2010

Exceptional Longevity Predictable

A genome-wide association study (Paola Sebastiani et al) based upon 1055 centenarians, showed that Exceptional Longevity (EL)  - living 90 years or more - can be predicted with 77% accuracy!

EL Genetic Passport
This research development will have major impact on 'life insurance' and pensions. With an EL Genetic Passport in your pocket, you'll have the power to conclude with 77% certainty whether it's profitable (or not) to buy life insurance or to invest more or less in your pension fund.

Genetic Loss by GAS
To prevent major losses caused by 'adverse selection', life insurance companies and pension funds have no other choice left, than to base life insurance premium prices and pension contributions on 'genetic passport information'.

Just like it's (from a company's perspective) devastating to sell mortgages to people who cannot afford it, it's also killing to sell life annuities to people who have knowledge of getting 90 years or older with 77% certainty.

As Genetic Adverse Selection (GAS) also negatively affects current provisions and value of an insurance company or pension fund, GAS development effects should be included and estimated in actual liability calculations.

Without doubt, GAS will generate large Genetic Losses in the next decades. Perhaps GAS can be qualified as a substantial new kind of risk in Pillar I calculations.

Related links - Sources:
- Science: Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans
- PDF: Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans
- BU: Signatures of Human Exceptional Longevity (video)
- Centenarians in some European countries, 2007

Feb 6, 2010

Why VaR fails and actuaries can do better

Perhaps the most important challenge of an actuary is to develop and train the capability to explain complex matters in a simple way.

One of the best examples of practicing this 'complexity reduction ability' has been given by David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital. In a nutshell David explains with a simple example why VaR models fail. Take a look at the next excerpt of David's interesting article in Point-Counterpoint.

Why Var fails
A risk manager’s job is to worry about whether the bank is putting itself at risk in the unusual times - or, in statistical terms, in the tails of distribution. Yet, VaR ignores what happens in the tails. It specifically cuts them off. A 99% VaR calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last1%.

This, in my view, makes VaR relatively useless as a riskmanagement tool and potentially catastrophic when its usec reates a false sense of security among senior managers and watchdogs.

VaR is like an airbag that works all the time,except when you have a car accident

By ignoring the tails, VaR creates an incentive to take excessive but remote risks.

Consider an investment in a coin-flip. If you bet $100 on tails at even money, your VaR to a 99% threshold is $100, as you will lose that amount 50% of the time, which obviously is within the threshold. In this case, the VaR will equal the maximum loss.

Compare that to a bet where you offer 127 to 1 odds on $100 that heads won’t come up seven times in a row. You will win more than 99.2% of the time, which exceeds the 99% threshold. As a result, your 99% VaR is zero, even though you are exposed to a possible $12,700 loss.

In other words, an investment bank wouldn’t have to put up any capital to make this bet.

The math whizzes will say it is more complicated than that, but this is idea. Now we understand why investment banks held enormous portfolios of “super-senior triple A-rated” whatever. These securities had very small returns.

However, the risk models said they had trivial VaR, because the possibility of credit loss was calculated to be beyond the VaR threshold. This meant that holding them required only a trivial amount of capital, and a small return over a trivial capital can generate an almost infinite revenue-to-equity ratio.

VaR-driven risk management encouraged accepting a lot of bets that amounted to accepting the risk that heads wouldn’t come up seven times in a row. In the current crisis, it has turned out that the unlucky outcome was far more likely than the backtested models predicted.

What is worse, the various supposedly remote risks that required trivial capital are highly correlated; you don’t just lose on one bad bet in this environment, you lose on many of them for the same reason. This is why in recent periods the investment banks had quarterly write-downs that were many times the firm wide modelled VaR.

The Real Risk Issues
What. besides the 'art of simple communication', can we - actuaries - learn from David Einhorn?

What David essentially tries to tell us, is that we should focus on the real Risk Management issues that are in the x% tail and not on the other (100-x)% .

Of course we're inclined to agree with David. But are we actuaries truly focusing on the 'right' risks in the tail?

I'm afraid the answer to this question is most often : No!
Let's look at a simple example that illustrates the way we are (biased) focusing on the wrong side of the VaR curve.

Example Longevity
For years (decades) now, longevity risk has been structurally underestimated.

Yes, undoubtedly we have learned some of our lessons.

Todays longevity calculations are not (anymore) just based on simple straight on mortality observations of the past.

Nevertheless, in our search to grasp, analyze and explain the continuous life span increase, we've got caught in a interesting but dangerous habit of examining more and more interesting details that might explain the variance of future developments in mor(t)ality rates.

As 'smart' longevity actuaries and experts, we consider a lot of sophisticated additional elements in our projections or calculations.

Just a small inventory of actuarial longevity refinement:
  • Difference in mortality rates: Gender, Marital or Social status, Income or Health related mortality rates
  • Size: Standard deviation, Group-, Portfolio-size
  • Selection effects, Enhanced annuities
  • Extrapolation: Generation tables, longitudinal effects, Autocorrelation, 'Heat Maps'

In our increasing enthusiasm to capture the longevity monster, we got engrossed in our work. As experienced actuaries we know the devil is always in the De-Tails, however the question is: In which details?

We all know perfectly well that probably the most essential triggers for longevity risk in the future, can not be found in our data.
These triggers depend on the effect of new developments like :

It's clear that investigating and modeling the soft risk indicators of extreme longevity is no longer a luxury, as also an exploding increase of lifespan of 10-20% in the coming decades seems not unlikely.
By stretching our actuarial research to the the medical arena, we would be able to develop new (more) future- and shock-proof longevity models and stress tests. Regrettably, we don't like to skate on thin ice.....

Ostrich Management

If we - actuaries - would take longevity and our profession as 'Risk Manager' more serious, we would warn the world about the global estimated (financial) impact of these medical developments on Pension- and Health topics. We would advice on which measures to take, in order to absorb and manage this future risk.

Instead of taking appropriate actions, we hide in the dark, maintaining our believe in Fairy-Tails. As unworldly savants we joyfully keep our eyes on the research of relative small variances in longevity, while neglecting the serious mega risks ahead of us.

This way of Ostrich Management is a worrying threat to the actuarial profession. As we are aware of these kind of (medical) future risks, not including or disclaiming them in our models and advice, could even have a major liability impact.

In order to be able to prevent serious global loss, society expects actuaries to estimate and advice on risk, instead of explaining afterwards what, why and how things went wrong, what we 'have learned' and what we 'could or should' have done.

This way of denying reality reminds me of an amusing Jewish story of the Lost Key...

The lost Key
One early morning, just before dawn, as the folks were on their way to the synagogue for the Shaharit (early morning payer) they notice Herscheleh under the lamp post, circling the post scanning the ground.

“Herschel” said the rabbi “What on earth are you doing here this time of the morning?”

“I lost my key” replied Herscheleh

“Where did you lose it?” inquired the rabbi

“There” said Herscheleh, pointing into the darkness away from the light of the lamp post.

“So why are looking for you key in here if you lost it there”? persisted the puzzled rabbi.

“Because the light is here Rabbi, not there” replied Herschel with a smug.

Let's conclude with a quote, that - just as this blog- probably didn't help either:

Risk is not always apparent,
but its invisibility is no longer an excuse for ignoring it.

-- Bankers Trust on risk management, 1995 --

Interesting additional links:

Jun 7, 2009

Happy Life Expectancy

As we know, Life Expectation can be measured in many ways. The three most common methods are:
  • LE = Life Expectation (standard), the average number of years that a newborn can expect to live.
  • HALE = Health Adjusted Life Expectation, the average number of years that a newborn can expect to live in "full health"
  • HLE = Healthy Life Expectation, the average number of years that a newborn can expect to live in "full perceived health"

As comparisons between LE an HALE show, 'living longer' doesn't necessarily mean 'living longer in good health'. However, it has become clear that a strong Healthy Working Life Expectancy at age 50 or higher is the best guarantee that people will be able to work longer as they live longer.

One step further. Living in "good (perceived) health" doesn't automatically mean that people are living a happy life.

Happiness is one of the most important lifestyle statistics. Optimizing the number of 'happy years' in our life is therefore an important issue.

Happy Life Expectancy
Here is where Prof.dr. Ruut Veenhoven (Publications), comes in.

Veenhoven defines a different HLE as:

In formula:

HLE = LE x Happiness-score/10

The Happiness-score (H) is the average happiness as expressed on a 0-10 scale.

Let's compare the HALE an HLE (Happy Life Expectancy) scores with each other for different (top-30 ranked) countries:

A full list and data is available at the World Database of Happiness.

It's clear that in most top-30 countries we spend about 90% of our life in healthy conditions and only about 70-80% in happy conditions. There room for improvement here! I'll leave the other conclusions up to yourself....

Let's conclude with two other correlated interesting findings:

1. Happy Life Expectancy Determination
What public policies are most conducive to happiness? This requires a view on the determinants of happiness in nations:

It turns out that six societal qualities (wealth, security, freedom, inequality, brotherhood and justice) explain 83% of the differences in Average happiness, 71% of the differences in Inequality of happiness and no less than 87% of the differences in Happy Life Years.
Enough for an interesting discussion between actuaries and politicians, I would say....

2. Wealth and happiness correlation
As expected wealth (expressed in GDP per capita) and happiness (e.g. highly satisfaction) are strongly correlated in clear distinguished regions.
Also the 'mean life satisfaction' turns out to be correlated to different age-groups and countries:

These graphics are food for thought on the relationship between mortality and wealth. More about that soon......


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Dick Christian's letter (AA, March 20) expressed feelings I've experienced since leaving the agency business. I worked with Dick for many years at Marsteller and I agree that those times were, as he put it, "stimulating, challenging, rewarding and fun."

As we reminisce about the good old days when the ad agency business was both rewarding and fun, let us not forget that we were involved in a childlike world that paid artists and writers very well for doing what they loved to do without taking risks.

The agency commission system assured agency owners of healthy profits, and the payment system created substantial cash flow as media rates and ad budgets ballooned. .*.*. [But] when agency owner-founders want to retire, they have difficulty recovering fair value for goodwill, a major balance sheet component of agencies.

Those features were bound to capture the attention of money men whose focus on the bottom line is dispassionate at best and rapacious at worst. The "onslaught of furor" that client CEOs turned on now-educator Christian in response to the "Saatchi wrecking ball" could just as easily have been directed inward at their own short-sightedness. They let it happen by continuing to do business with the huge advertising conglomerates that people just like them have created.

Bruce H. Cole

Sandy Mountain Equities

Paradise Valley, Ariz.

I want to clarify one point in your fine article, "Texaco Star points to fun of performance" (AA, April 17).

Two large U.S. companies sell gasoline under the Texaco CleanSystem 3 brand. Star Enterprise markets Texaco gasoline in 26 states, mainly in the South, Southwest and Northeast. Texaco Refining & Marketing markets CleanSystem 3 in the West, Rockies and Northwest. Both companies are part of Texaco Inc.

To get a true U.S. market share for Texaco Clean System 3 gasoline, you must add the shares of both. The August 1994 Lundberg National survey shows Star Enterprise share at 4.4% and Texaco brand share for Texaco Refining & Marketing at 2.8%, for a total national share of 7.2%. That would put Texaco CleanSystem 3 in second place.

Kevin Kelly

Coordinator, market research

and strategic planning

Star Enterprise

Norcross, Ga.

The Forum piece in your Feb. 27 issue ("Sir Flack eyeing the Colonies") has just been brought to my attention. As an Englishman living and working in the U.S. I was amused to think that there remained one denizen of New York who still believed that anyone with the title "Sir" was automatically to the manner born.

I would judge that [author] Saul Bennett is an adherent of the rather outdated adage "no publicity is bad publicity" by writing this article. If I were a client, I would have severe doubts about his grasp on reality; to wit:

Professing as he does to be a PR professional, has he really never heard of Tim Bell? (It's a bit like an advertising executive asking, "Who's this Ogilvy guy?") Bell-and the various companies he has fronted-has certainly had a not inconsequential influence in the U.S. over the last 20 years. Maybe Mr. Bennett should get out and about more?

Is his monitoring of both business and trade media so poor that he is unaware that Bell received his knighthood a few years ago (a purely political honor, by the way, which is non-hereditary and nowhere near "royalty") solely for services to Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in assisting them to hold on to power for a further few years? As far as I remember, he comes from beginnings just as humble and proletarian as Mr. Bennett's.

Robin Patrick Browne

Director of business development, Rapp Collins Worldwide

Irving, Texas

Address letters to Advertising Age, Viewpoint Editor, 740 Rush St., Chicago 60611. Fax: (312) 649-5331. Letters can also be posted through the Ad Age Bulletin Board on Prodigy, or by Prodigy E-Mail at

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Online Exclusive: TV Spots of the Week

And Other Current TV Commercials of Note

By Published on .

Freezing the Rivers of Bangkok
Marketer: Diageo
Brand: Johnnie Walker Red
Title: "Winter in Bangkok"
Agency: Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Singapore

To fully appreciate this ad for the Thailand market, you need to know the average December temperature in that country of tropical jungles and monsoons is 86 degrees. The very idea of ice on rivers and lakes is an alien and seemingly impossible one. Thus, using special effects to create such a real-looking ice-bound Bangkok is a stunning attention getter. And what better way to emphasize the Johnnie Walker Red theme, 'Impossible is only a state of mind'?

Bright Lights, Blown Circuits
Marketer: Dunkin' Donuts
Brand: Latte
Title: "Holiday Lights"
Agency: Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos

Lifting a peppermint mocha latte, Dunkin' Donuts pays homage to the hallowed Christmas tradition of blowing out circuits with ill-wired tangles of aging holiday lights.

Charge Card for a Surfer God
Marketer: American Express
Brand: American Express
Title: "Laird Sherpa"
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, New York

Surfer god Laird Hamilton smugly notes in this spot that 'My life takes me to the edge.' The camera follows him through daredevil stunts that appear all but suicidal to mere mortals. He's shooting this curl as part of the new American Express 'My Life. My card' global branding campaign.

The Joy of It All
Marketer: Toys R Us
Brand: Toys R Us
Title: "Joy"
Agency: Y&R Advertising, New York

Anyone who has experienced the pandemonium of a Toys R Us store on a recent holiday weekend can only smile wryly at this spot celebrating the joy of it all. But at least it's a quaint sentiment that should stiffen the determination of grandmothers and doting great-aunts who are gathering their strength for toy store shopping visits.

Downhill Cart Race
Marketer: Nike
Brand: Nike Shox
Title: "Hotdog"
Agency: Weiden & Kennedy, Amsterdam

Shot on the winding streets of Lisbon, Portugal, this spot for Nike Shox features a frantic downhill race after a runaway hot dog cart. Initially it appears that the customer who started it rolling is chasing the cart to protect pedestrians. The kicker, however, is that he sprinted all those blocks to get some more condiment for the hot dog he is holding in his hand.

Not Free
Marketer: PepsiCo
Brand: Sierra Mist
Title: "Who Knew"
Agency: BBDO, New York

Making the point that while its product is free of sugar, calories, carbs and caffeine, it is not free for the taking. Cops grill a consumer who thought the 'Free' on the bottle meant no cost. The convenience-store cameras caught him. Who knew?

Basketball-Playing Cars
Marketer: General Motors
Brand: Chevrolet Cobalt
Title: "Little Brother"
Agency: Campbell-Ewald, Warren, Mich.

This campaign for the new compact Cobalt, which starts in the $14,000 price range, attempts to rub it with some of the status of the company's classic Corvette, which starts in the $44,000 range. Great pains have been taken not to show the vehicles side by side and the only similarity we can see is that both cars are painted red. Here, they play basketball to emphasize the promotional point that one is the 'little brother' of the other.

The Last Roll
Marketer: General Mills
Brand: Pillsbury Crescents
Title: "Last Roll"
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, New York

This run-of-the-mill commercial, which uses imagery and messaging common to Pillsbury's marketing, also appears to have struck just the right holiday nerve in its audience. This spot received the highest consumer recall score for the period of Nov. 22 to Dec. 5 in the bi-weekly Intermedia Advertising Group survey.

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The takeaway

Some notable notions discussed at last week's magazine symposium

Published on .

Toby Korner

Marketing Management Analytics on

"The value of print in the marketing mix"

* Returns on print ad spending are among the highest of any media, short only of digital channels.

* Half-page ads, when designed to be half-page ads, can be more effective than full-page ads.

* Niche magazines may be more expensive, but their targeted nature makes them more efficient.

* Print excels at communicating complex messages.

William J. Havlena

Dynamic Logic

* Combining TV and magazine advertising produced best impact on purchase intent for a beverage product

* Different media perform differently at different points in the "purchase funnel," with magazines making high contributions closer to purchase, when consumers are highly engaged.

John Farrar

Marketing Evolution

* Magazines are more effective than current buzz suggests-especially when combined with TV

* Examining a direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical campaign, Marketing Evolution found that print had the greatest ability to influence "Intent to talk to a doctor"-at the smallest cost per consumer.

Phil Sawyer

GfK Starch Communications

* Engagement is not as closely linked with advertising effectiveness as many believe; creative execution is central to an ad's success or failure.

* Ads appearing in low-engagement magazines do not suffer from the environment-and ads in high-engagement publications do not receive any great advantage.
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Saturday, July 4, 2009

Giggle giggle

Originally uploaded by adriennevh.

The babies are 6 months old and big and fat and juicy. Literally juicy since Matthew drools consistently now.

They are also always full of laughter, this is Madilyn giggling away.

Truly a blessing.

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Saturday, January 07, 2012

Jon Huntsman "Manchurian Candidate" Video Classic Karl Rove-Like Tactic To Discredit Ron Paul

On Wednesday, an anonymous account was created on YouTube and a few brief minutes later a video using this anonymous person's account was uploaded depicting Jon Huntsman as a "Manchurian Candidate" because he was Obama's U.S. Ambassador to China, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and has an adopted Chinese daughter. The person(s) behind the video intended to make it appear that the campaign of Ron Paul was behind the negative attack ad. A link to the video was almost immediately sent to Huntsman's campaign where the first viewer of the video was associated with Huntsman's campaign website. Not surprisingly, the Huntsman campaign pointed fingers at Ron Paul's campaign and the media gleefully chimed in, blaming it on the candidate by implication because one of his supporters supposedly created it.

Only a fool would truly  believe that a Ron Paul supporter actually created that video. What we know is that polls show that only Paul is in a position to compete against front-runner Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, where an open primary allows voters of all stripes to participate in Tuesday's election. Huntsman, who has devoted all of his efforts in New Hampshire, can't break 10% in Granite State polls, while Ron Paul has surged to 20% or better in some polls, although well behind Romney. Huntsman and Romney are fellow Mormons who have no love lost for one another. The video most likely was part of dirty tricks operation by the Romney campaign to kill two birds with one stone. The subject matter of the ad clearly is aimed at stirring up xenophobic fears towards Huntsman at the same time making those who back Ron Paul's campaign appear to be simple-minded racists. The diabolical nature of it is a classical Karl Rove-type negative campaign operation against political opponents.

Throughout his career as an operative within the Republican Party, Rove has been at the center of one dirty trick after another. Rove, who was raised in Nevada, took his first role running a U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois in 1970 after dropping out of the University of Utah. During the campaign, Rove used a false identity to enter the campaign headquarters of a state treasurer candidate, Alan Dixon (D), where he stole letterhead bearing the candidate's name. He then printed up fake campaign rally fliers promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing", and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters, in order to successfully disrupt Dixon's campaign rally. The college drop out became a key figure in the dirty tricks operation of Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign and became involved in a highly disputed election to head up the national College Republicans organization. Rove manipulated the credentialing of delegates to the convention to claim victory over his opponent. The dispute was taken to the RNC Chairman, George H.W. Bush, who declared Rove the winner. When the losing candidate wrote to Bush inquiring how he could have concluded Rove won the election fairly, Bush sent the young man the "angriest letter" he had ever received in his life.

After serving as chairman of the College Republicans, Rove settled down in Texas where he worked for campaign organizations associated with the Bushes and their allies. Rove helped Democrat-turned-Republican Phil Gramm defeat Ron Paul for a U.S. Senate seat in 1984. When he worked on the campaign of former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, he claimed his offices had been bugged by a political opponent, an allegation dismissed by the FBI and police after an investigation was conducted. Critics believed Rove had made the story up and planted an inoperable bug in his own offices to cast suspicion on Clements' political opponent a short time before the election. A common Rove tactic is to create whispering campaigns about political opponents, including accusations they are gay, a tactic employed against Texas Gov. Ann Richards when George W. Bush ran against her. Rove used push poll questions asking voters their impression of Richards if they knew her staff was dominated by lesbians. Rove's step-father, incidentally, later lived an openly gay life with a same-sex partner after divorcing his mother, who committed suicide. George H.W. Bush would fire him from his 1992 re-election campaign after he got caught leaking negative information about a close Bush campaign ally to columnist Robert Novak.

Rove's dirty tricks operation reared its ugly head again when he ran George W. Bush's race for president in 2000 during the Republican primaries. Suggestions that McCain was not a natural born citizen because he was born in Panama while his father was serving in the Navy emerged. Rumors were circulated via fliers during the South Carolina primary that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock, that he was gay and that his wife was a drug addict. McCain was accused of being guilty of treason because of things he told the Vietnames while being tortured in a POW camp in Vietnam for five years. Other rumors were spread that McCain was mentally unstable and had actually gone insane while a POW in Vietnam.

As a Fox News analyst today, Rove's attacks against Ron Paul have been especially sharp and always focus on marginalizing him and his supporters as much as possible. Rove claims not to be working on behalf of any of the candidates, but his public statements leave no doubt that Romney is the candidate that he believes should be nominated by the Republicans in 2012. Fox News commentators all ape the negative attacks Rove fuels during his appearances on the cable news network. Fox News, not surpisingly, did all it could to tarnish Paul over the Huntsman video despite absolutely no evidence that anyone associated with his campaign had anything to do with its production. Yes, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that only the mind of someone like Karl Rove would have created the controversial Huntsman video. Watch as Fox News blames it on Paul's people without any substantiation. I can barely stand to watch Fox News any more because of the way it has permitted a low life like Rove to manipulate the political discussions in this country.

UPDATE: says its analysis points to the Jon Huntsman campaign itself as likely being behind the attack video against him, which makes it all the more sinister if true.

Your analysis needs to be on the Daily Paul.

Bill said...

I think that you are right on target with this one. Its kind of like when the local municipal candidate goes out and steals all of his own yard signs and says that he thinks that his opponent is taking them.

Rove is pure evil

Jonathan Poston said...

This might prove interesting to your readers as well: Exclusive Interview With Gov. Huntsman's Chinese Intern via @LearnChineseBiz


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Adventure Time with Finn and Jake Wiki

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Tress MacNeille (born June 20, 1951) is an American voice actress best known for providing various voices on the animated series The Simpsons, Futurama, Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Disney's House of Mouse, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, and Dave the Barbarian.

She voiced Dr. Erik Adamkinson's father and the Urchin in "Everything's Jake."

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Thursday, September 18, 2008

Aether and sectarian community

At the moment, we understood the significance of Aether particle models in physics we should put the question: if this concept can help the mainstream physics understanding so well, why the mainstream physicists are ignoring this concept so obstinately even at the case, they become familiar with it? Aren't these people sufficiently intelligent and creative to intercept such ideas?

Not at all, their stance is highly substantiated. The true is, the mainstream physics as a whole has changed into conservative, closed sectarian society in certain extent, by the same way, like the Holy Church of medieval era. Here are even some common aspects of both societies: for example, the Holy Church had managed its Malleus maleficarum, while the mainstream proponents have their Crackpot index, i.e. the list of less or more formal rules, which enables the mainstream proponents to distinguish the "truth" from "crackpot and fringe science" without thorough analyzing of true content of subject.

For every sectarian comunity is characteristic its biased approach to mistakes due its closed surface asymmetry. While the normal gnoseologic approach based on evolution considers the presence of mistakes as a nonvital, but unavoidable mutations in thinking, the sectarian society avoids to accept that and it covers its conceptual mistakes, whenever possible. The missunderstanding and false refusal of Aether concept is such a mistake, but not the only one. We can face the same behavior of mainstream towards the false refusal of cold fusion or the existence of many "paranormal" phenomena. At the moment, such concepts are throwen out, it becomes quite difficult for mainstream science community to reconsider or even admit them again - their refusal simply becomes an integral part of ideology. While with respect to Poppers methodology the scientific method is completely symmetric: because every hypthesis/theory should be considered untrue by definition, every negation of hypothesis is another hypothesis, which should be handled with caution as well.

Another well pronounced aspect of sectarian society is its adherence to internal formal rules ("scientific method"), which the thinking of individuals must follow (the formal thinking in particular), while ignoring the way of thinking of the rest of society - despite the fact, the formal thinking makes the understanding of concept more difficult in many cases. For sectarian communities is characteristic the long "incubation period" for novices (a "novitiate"), connected with thorough brain washing and repeated formal examines of "ready state" of novices, as practiced in high schools. By analogous way, the learning of physics involves a long term studies of its formal approach without true understanding of subject at its natural, intuitive level.

The character of contemporary educational system is adjusted by the way, the students can never met with such intuitive understanding of physics for years, so they cannot handle and use it at all during their further scientific carrier. This approach establishes the state of psychical dependence on subject, because the novices are simply worrying about abilities, which have spent so lotta of time and effort by learning of. No wonder such people will try to ignore the non-formal approach in physics obstinately whenever possible, and their educational activities in physics will remain constrained to formal description, but not explanation of subject, the finding of new paradigms the less.

But the formal approach has even its common sociological aspects - not only the strictly individual ones. Every sectarian community cultivates its specific language and formal approach (Latin words, formal math), which enables it to communicate by less or more fluous ways internally, but it enables to separate it from the rest of society by creation of less or more artificial information barriers. It prohibits the rest of society to understand, what the mainstream scientists really doing for public taxes, and to determine, if it can be useful or even safe for the rest of society at all (expensive and dangerous LHC experiments as an example). This artificially kept absence of feedback simplifies the scientists the asking for new and new money for research, while keeping their sovereignty over choice of the further subject of research. We can say, the contemporary scientists are druids and medicine mans of modern era, whose trying to keep their way of understanding of reality in secret. This can be another reason, why the common scientists aren't very happy from Aether concept, as it reveals clearly, the complex and highly formal way of physics interpretation is unsubstantiated. If they admit the Aether concept, then just in the form of sufficiently obscured way, like "vector/scalar field", or something similar less comprehensible one.

Such approach is nothing strange or new from AWT perspective. Inside of each multicomponent system (like the scientific society composed of many people) an emergent phase transition occurs, which is followed the formation of droplets and other artifacts separated from the rest by density gradient of information. Such droplets exhibits the behavior of boson condensate, which means the information is shared internally a much easier, then with their neighborhood, which is the manifestation of censorship of close-minded totalitarian and sectarian society. By such way, the mainstream science serves as an islands of communism and totalitarian thinking with respect to rest of society, not just because of its mandatory way of sources privatization without free market feedback, but because of its way of information handling, too.

The formation of boson condensate state is the manifestation of low energy state (i.e. cooling or informational crisis) and its typical behavior is, the droplets of resulting phase cannot dissolve in its environment, being quantized. Instead of this, the small droplets will evaporate without change of their state on behalf of these larger, more successful ones (the evaporation of rain droplets, or Hawking evaporation of black holes as an exaggerated example). By the same way, most of people, when facing the lack of arguments, it cannot change theirs stance, while insisting on it obstinately - until they're defeated by weight of arguments. This is the source of thixotropic and brittle behavior of sectarian communities toward foreign ideas (a sort of Meissner effect of boson condensates) - while from inside perspective (where these ideas remains separated by phase interface) they're appear superfluous, smoothly communicating and internally consistent.

 John A. Wheeler: We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

Zephir said...

"If you believe in your research then fight for it. Fight for the truth." And fight is just what Technion Professor Dan Shechtman did.

When he announced his discovery of five-fold symmetric crystals — a pattern that was considered impossible under the prevailing scientific paradigm — no one believed him. But he persevered and his subsequent work turned the non-believers into enthusiasts about quasicrystals, a new form of matter.

Prof. Shechtman has since received numerous prizes in recognition of his discovery of quasicrystals, now dubbed “Shechtmanite.” The practical applications can been found in surgical equipment, the manufacture of super strong steel, and even in shavers.

Zephir said...

In discussions I occasionally met with opinions, the physicists behind LHC are behaving like single homogeneous sectarian society, that agree on everything. Actually, CERN physicists are behaving so...

For me it's symptomatic, CERN scientists are refuting obstinately to organize public scientific conference about LHC safety, as Prof. Rossler proposed. This stance is significant by itself, because scientists like doing conferences about everything remotely possible or even impossible.

This stance just indicates, group of CERN physicists remains separated even from the rest of scientific community - not just from the rest of layman society. They're dangerous ignorants, convinced about their truth in sectarian way and they're avoiding of public confrontation.

For example, CERN physicists are refuting to apply peer review of their publications, claiming the "external peer review is less stringent than our internal peer-review process" and that "only people 'qualified' (i.e. checked for loyalty) to truly review the work are within the collaboration."

They're publishing collectively, despite the list of authors exceeds many thousands of items - such cheating is indeed advantageous for most individuals, because scientists are honored for number of publications and their citations.

CERN community is saying, it's "...a cognitive bubble that you can't escape - that you don't want to escape" - another typical sign of sectarian society, characterized by brain washing and sacrificing identity.

Well - and we all paying this from our taxes...

Zephir said...

Is Peer Review Broken?

Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review.

Zephir said...

John A. Wheeler: "We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

Richard Feynman (quoted by G.F.Giudice): "I do not understand why journalists and others want to know about the latest discoveries in physics even when they know nothing about the earlier discoveries that give meaning to the latest discoveries"

Zephir said...

Kurt Kleiner, New Scientist, 30 August 2005: Most scientific papers are probably wrong"

Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.

Zephir said...

If scientists want to educate the public, they should start by listening

Zephir said...

Dirac is one of the leading physicists of the 20th century, but his philosophical statements are symptomatic of the idealism that has infected modern physics; take for example the quote: "This result is too beautiful to be false; it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." [Paul Dirac, The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature, Scientific American 208 (5) (1963)]

Zephir said...

Philip Gibbs wrote the rules of an Anti-Crackpot Index as a parody of John Baez's Crackpot Index.

Zephir said...

M. I. Sanduk: Does Society Exhibit Same Behaviour of Plasma Fluid?
For example, Japan streets have no names. Eastern culture is oriented to holistic & collectivist thinking: the target is not important, the way is. The ways aren't important, the situation is. AWT explains this approach with density of population.

Zephir said...

Are you quack?

Zephir said...

Regarding crackpots/quacks... in physics, the Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft and physicist Warren Siegel provides an additional clue, how to identify them