Author: VD

L’amara vita

Italians aren’t sweating this, but the European banks certainly are:

The Italian 5-year is yielding 6.87% while the 10 year is now 6.77%. The curve-inversion is very bad and is a stark warning: Get ready. This has not yet managed to get to the 2yr (6.38%) Pundits have opined that due to the relatively long duration of the bond portfolio outstanding it’s not a “big deal.” They’re wrong.

This is a very big deal. One year ago, the Italian 2-year was at 2.010 and the 10-year was at 3.924 The Italian 2-year is now rapidly approaching where the Portuguese 10-year was one year ago. What this indicates is that the end of the Euro and the end of the EU in its present form will likely take place within one year. Greece and Ireland were sideshows. Italy is the main event.

Teaching lawyers to lie

Granted it sounds rather like teaching fish to swim:

The University of Illinois acknowledged Monday that its law school reported and/or published inaccurate admissions data in six of the last 10 years. The university, in a prepared statement, said it had determined that Paul Pless, the law school’s former assistant dean for admissions and financial aid, who resigned last week, was solely responsible for the inaccuracies. It also found that the law school lacked adequate controls to prevent, deter and detect such actions, a situation that it said it is taking steps to correct….

The university’s investigation determined that the college reported and or published inaccurate LSAT and GPA data for the class of 2008 and for the classes of 2010 through 2014.

And they’re just heartsick about this ever so embarrassing rogue employee, gosh darn it! The truth is that ALL law schools blatantly lie about the employment prospects of their graduates. All of them. Every single one. And it would almost certainly be a major benefit to the economy and the nation if they were all shut down tomorrow.

Mailvox: is God on our side?

JH wonders:

I have read your coloumn faithfully for years, and have come to admire your level-headed and logical approach to the problems you present.

I have a question. Most social conservatives declare that life begins at conception, thus concluding that all abortions are murder. If you take this stand then you must conclude that America has the blood of 50 million innocent lives on her hands.

What right do we have then to drop bombs on ” ragheads and goat herders ‘ and the like if this is so, and how can we possibly think that God will bless our troops in foreign wars when we can’t possibly be on HIS side?

It is so. And America has no more right to bomb the goat herders of the Middle East than Rome had to invade Pontus, Armenia, and Parthia. Nor does America have any better reason to believe that God will bless their invading troops than the Romans or the National Socialist-era Germans did. Gott war nicht mit der Wehrmacht, their belt buckles notwithstanding, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that a nation whose government increasingly denies and rejects God, a nation that has slaughtered more of its own children behind closed clinic doors than the Moloch-worshipping Canaanites ever threw into the fires, enjoys divine favor.

America was founded on predominantly Christian principles, but she no longer lives by them. She is profligate, gluttonous, murderous, and repressive. She can no longer be reasonably described as either the land of the free or the home of the brave, but rather the land of the fat and the home of the indebted. I concluded some time ago that America was already finished in the historical sense, but it may take some time for most Americans to realize it or for America’s foreign policy to reflect that reality. This is entirely normal, few Britons understood that their empire was in decline until the sun had already set upon it.

It would, of course, be deeply ironic if the neocons were to get their way and America were to eventually learn of her loss of global superpower status not too terribly far from where Marcus Licinius Crassus lost his seven legions and met his death at the hands of the Parthians. Interestingly enough, Crassus, rather like Bush and Obama, failed to abide by the legal forms of making war before launching his ill-fated invasion.

VD and me

I can’t think why Jamsco didn’t think to entitle his post thusly:

Ah, Junior High. The Golden Years. The Transition Years. Yes, Vox was a geek. Or maybe geek-ish. (Actually those words don’t really fit. How about ‘Not the pinacle of coolness’?) Now, obviously he didn’t rise near the level of awkwardness that Jamsco flew to. Here’s an illustrative story….

Allow me to set the record straight on a few things:

1. I was never a part of the cool crowd at church. We left it while I was still in junior high. And I never thought they were particularly cool anyhow. In retrospect, they struck me as future burnouts. Then again, perhaps Jamsco and I have different people in mind.

2. Inflation was already exceedingly high in 1980. What I actually said was that Reagan would increase the value of money, (not the quantity), by raising interest rates, which is what Paul Volcker subsequently did. Of course, Volcker didn’t actually increase the value, he merely reduced the rate of the decline in value. Do cut me some slack. I was twelve.

3. It wasn’t a comic book, it was Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, which was actually only The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, which completely mystified me at the time. My actual Tolkein paperbacks were far too precious to take on a canoe trip where they would get wet and warpy. All right, on second thought, I suppose it could be considered a comic book.

4. Jamsco is confused as to why he remembers the eight feet. One cliff was about 20 feet high, the other was eight feet higher. I wasn’t afraid of the height, but I was definitely afraid of failing to clear a jutting tree branch below that one had to leap over from the higher cliff. I can remember wondering if you’d end up impaled there or if the branch would snap and you’d end up drowning in the water. The other cliff you could simply drop straight down. I don’t actually remember many of the guys going off the higher one except for a few of the older guys, although Jamsco may well have done so. However, I was badly sunburned that day; I haven’t been down the Apple River since.

5. Jamsco can relax. The “really neat” passage is an actual quote, but it wasn’t him.

6. My sincere apologies about the comic book… if it was me. I tend to doubt it, though, as I didn’t collect comic books – unless one counts the Bakshi – and I can’t recall ever seeing a Superman comic or any other comic around our house at any time. That being said, it does sound like me. I am so notoriously bad about remembering to return books that I simply refuse to borrow them anymore even if they are actively pushed on me.

(Game for Nerds tangent. In college, I went out with a librarian who looked up my record with the county library, which dated back to when I was twelve. Her exact words: “Oh, you are BAAAAD.” So, kids, that’s how to impress that sexy librarian with the glasses and ponytail who sits there smoldering behind the desk with her nose buried in a book. Check out sufficiently interesting books and don’t return them.. I doubt you even have to read them.)

I can’t honestly say anything negative about Jamsco. He was invariably nice to me and to everyone else, and if he was as awkward as he was tall, I never thought that was a big deal. If I had to pick out one person from that time I always thought was a fundamentally decent human being, Jamsco would have been first on the list. Although, it occurs to me that I forgot to address one more thing.

7. Vox is occasionally wrong.

Gauging interest

I’ve been hearing from a few people here and there that they would be interested in seeing me write a basic economics textbook that could be used as a homeschooling resource. I have to admit that while the idea is of some interest to me, it isn’t something that I’ve ever contemplated too seriously in the past because most textbooks are written by academics with PhDs who sell them to captive college audiences. And, of course, there is no shortage of them, so why would the world need another one?

On the other hand, a look at Greg Mankiw’s textbook, which is used at Harvard where he teaches, offers a very strong counterpoint to that argument. Consider what he declares to be the Ten Principles of Economics in his textbook entitled Principles of Economics:

1. People Face Tradeoffs.
2. The Cost of Something Is What You Give Up to Get It
3. Rational People Think at the Margin
4. People Respond to Incentives
5. Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off
6. Markets Are Usually a Good Way to Organize Economic Activity
7. Governments Can Sometimes Improve Market Outcomes
8. A Country’s Standard of Living Depends on Its Ability to Produce Goods and Services
9. Prices Rise When the Government Prints Too Much Money
10. Society Faces a Short-Run Trade-off between Inflation and Unemployment

Reading this, my first thought is that it is no wonder some of his students walked out of his class. My second one is that it is no mystery why Mankiw failed to see the 2008 crisis developing and still fails to recognize the current economic depression. My third thought is that perhaps a text on basic economic principles and history is in order after all.

When I look at Mankiw’s principles, I see two reasonably solid ones, (1,2), four that are obviously incorrect or incomplete to the point of being misleading, (3,5,7,10), and four that are merely irrelevant due to being incomplete. (4,6,8,9).

Anyhow, I have to finish the current novel first, which will be sometime next summer, but it’s not too early to start taking notes and looking at the deficiencies of current textbooks. So, the two things I’d be interested in knowing is how many people might be interested in an electronic econ textbook priced around $4.99 and what areas merit being covered. For example, Felsenburgh suggested that a proper economics education should begin with the School of Salamanca, but that is obviously insane to anyone who has actually read Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought. I don’t think even homeschooled students would be able to stay focused on an economics course that begins with a diverse group of people predominantly grouped together on the basis of their arguments for the legitimacy of usury.

This isn’t to say that the Salamancans aren’t important or denigrate their contributions to economic thought, only that they are not exactly the ideal point of entry to the field.

WND column

Transfer or Tea Party?

Most Americans opposed TARP. They saw no reason to use taxpayer money for bailing out the very financial institutions that had been parasitically feeding off them for decades. But America is not a democracy. It is no longer even a representative democracy. The banking bailout, the GSE bailout and the subsequent automotive bailout were all rammed down the unwilling throats of the American public by the Goldman-controlled Treasury Department with the help of the Bush administration and congressional Democrats. It was rather like a doctor forcing a rape victim to pay for her own chemotherapy because it would benefit her rapist.*

Bipartisan support for the bailout made it clear to all and sundry that at the end of the day, the supposed divide between the Republican and Democratic parties is an imaginary one. Republicans and Democrats are nothing more than a unitary bank party.

*I know this makes no sense. That’s the point. Neither did the bailouts.

VPFL Week 9

86 Cranberry Rhyneauxs (3-5-0)
77 Greenfield Grizzlies (5-3-0)

49 GroverBeach Quixotes (4-4-0)
46 Moundsview Meerkats (5-3-0)

64 Green Reverends (4-3-1)
61 RR Redbeards (2-5-1)

67 MS Swamp Spartans (4-4-0)
61 Bailout Banksters (4-3-1)

86 Bane Sidhe (4-4-0)
80 Macau Marauders (3-4-1)

That was disappointing. I’d given up on Week 8 before the season even started, given that 4 of my starters were on a bye week. But a good performance from Foster and Turner and a solid one from Christian Ponder substituting for Aaron Rodgers would have sufficed to do the trick… if the doggone Dallas kicker had scored more than one of the 10 points projected. C’est le NFL.

Mailvox: what am I missing here?

Speaking of interlocutors, one of my occasional atheist emailers sent this in response to yesterday’s Mailvox. MD wrote:

‘ . . . the moment they decide to attempt to convince others that they are correct, they become targets.’

Never has there been a greater endorsement of the ‘new atheist’ movement than that last sentence! You’re cleverer than saying weak stuff like that.

I genuinely do not understand the point he is making here. The idea would appear to be that the New Atheism has made targets of Christians and other evangelical theists because they are incorrect. But I don’t see that this is the observable case at all. It seems to me if that X is attempting to convince others he is correct and Y decides to make X a target in response, the onus is therefore on Y to show that X is incorrect.

So, where do Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or any of the New Atheists ever attempt to show that Billy Graham or John Wesley or Thomas Aquinas are incorrect? They very seldom attack anything that is even remotely recognizable as Christian theology, preferring instead to take on what appear to be poorly remembered Sunday School versions of it. The Courtier’s Reply of PZ Myers – which, to be fair, other New Atheists besides Richard Dawkins cannot be assumed to endorse – outright attempts to justify atheists knowing nothing about what they are so ineptly criticizing.

I even remarked on this bizarre failure to actually address the most basic Christian theology in TIA: “While Harris doesn’t once cite minor Christian intellectual figures such as Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, John Wesley, G. K. Chesterton, or even C. S. Lewis, he does find it relevant to provide one reference to Tim LaHaye, thirteen references to Hitler, Himmler, and Hess, and six whole pages dedicated to Noam Chomsky. Because, after all, no one is more suited to explain the Christian faith quite so well as an elderly author of pop religious fantasies, a trio of dead Nazis, and a left-wing Jewish linguist.”

Now Dawkins does mention Aquinas and the Five Proofs in The God Delusion, but he does little more than cry “infinite regress” and demonstrate that he has missed the point of them. (I did like his point about the natural terminator, although it doesn’t actually serve to refute any of the Five Proofs since they concern beginnings rather than ends.) He also shows that he has never actually read the Summa Theologica; it is telling to note that Dawkins immediately proceeds from his cursory glance at the Five Proofs to the Ontological Argument without realizing that Aquinas rejected it more than 700 years ago in Part 1, Question 2, Article 1 of the Summa.

“OBJECTION 2: Further, those things are said to be self-evident which are known as soon as the terms are known, which the Philosopher (1 Poster. iii) says is true of the first principles of demonstration. Thus, when the nature of a whole and of a part is known, it is at once recognized that every whole is greater than its part. But as soon as the signification of the word “God” is understood, it is at once seen that God exists. For by this word is signified that thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. But that which exists actually and mentally is greater than that which exists only mentally. Therefore, since as soon as the word “God” is understood it exists mentally, it also follows that it exists actually. Therefore the proposition “God exists” is self-evident.

REPLY TO OBJECTION 2: Perhaps not everyone who hears this word “God” understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body. Yet, granted that everyone understands that by this word “God” is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.”

So, it seems to me that far from being the greatest endorsement of the New Atheist movement, my statement demonstrates its impotence, its ignorance, and its intellectual dishonesty.

They’re not all wrong

Harvard students walk out of Greg Mankiw’s basis economics class:

Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.

As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.

On the one hand, this protest makes no sense. They’ll get no shortage of Keynesianism from Mankiw, even if most of the explicit Keynesianism won’t be provided until a subsequent macro class rather than in what is Harvard’s equivalent of Econ 101. But whether you prefer to describe Mankiw as a neoclassical or a monetarist, he’s still a Samuelsonian attempting to manage the economy in macroeconomics terms. He’s a Keynesian heretic, and would be better described as a quasi-Keynesian than an anti-Keynesian, Steve Keen’s opinion on the correct categorizations notwithstanding.

On the other, they’re absolutely right. Contra most academic programs, including the one in which I received my degree, Adam Smith is neither basic or fundamental. A proper education in economics should begin with Cantillon and Turgot.

Mailvox: it’s not about the interlocutor

AA wonders why it’s so hard to convince atheists of anything:

I’ve been debating atheists on message boards for about 5 years now and while I’m getting better at writing, I don’t think I’m seeing a lot of results. I’m just wondering, do you think there’s a place for people like me to debate on forums and then just read your blog to get ideas and material? Or is it better to carry out debates on blogs? Also –I don’t know if you have an adderall habit or what but I’m amazed at how often you post — do you do something for your attention span and work ethic?

The quote from Bartleby’s sums it up:

“He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.”
~Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

It’s a tautology. Most atheists don’t believe in God because they don’t believe in God. If you listen to their stories and read their books, it is readily apparent that most of them became atheists between the ages of 10 and 17. There are various theories concerning why this happens, but the observable fact of the matter is that their atheism is actually less rational and less based on any reasoning than the average college student’s political party identification. All the appeals to science and so forth are nothing more than ex post facto rationalizations.

Hence all the false claims about Biblical knowledge and the attacks on Sunday School theology. What passes for their knowledge is usually the dimly remembered childhood church indoctrination. I can’t think of a single atheist who has ever been able to tell me the structure of an argument from the Summa Theologica, much less the actual content of any of the 610 arguments contained within it. And the next atheist I meet to have read Tertullian or any of the Latin Fathers except Augustine will be the first. Their ignorance isn’t merely limited to Christianity either, as they seldom know anything about the sacred works or theology of other religions except perhaps a little Greek and Norse mythology.

That being said, I am entirely open to hear other explanations for why an atheist remains an atheist after having his purported reasons for becoming an atheist destroyed from actual atheists.

The reason for combating atheism isn’t to convert the atheist. You will never see any such results. That simply isn’t going to happen because no atheist will ever cease being an atheist simply because all of his rationalizations have been shown to be factually incorrect, logically fallacious, or otherwise irrational. And that’s completely fine. The reason for shooting them down over and over again is to neutralize and counteract their effect on the weak-minded, who are even less inclined to think than the average evangelical atheist. I seldom intentionally attack atheists who make no attempt to convince others that gods and the supernatural do not exist for precisely this reason; I don’t care what they believe or do not believe. Their lack of belief has no effect on me or anyone else.

But the moment they decide to attempt to convince others that they are correct, they become targets. So, my advice is to keep doing what you’re doing, keep refining and improving your arguments, and you will likely prevent dozens, if not hundreds of people, from falling for the false arguments and incorrect logic being presented by evangelical atheists.

As for the frequency of my posting, I simply make a habit of it by sticking to a schedule. Two posts per day, period. Usually, that ends up meaning three or four on weekdays. It takes very little time; the average one probably takes between 10-15 minutes, so 2-3 posts is like watching one sitcom per day. That’s not a lot of work. I’ve recently taken the same approach to my writing and it’s been very effective. In 102 days since I started writing the first novel in the Arts of Dark and Light series, I’ve written 84,269 words, leaving me exactly 2.3 days ahead of an aggressive schedule. Only another 210,731 to go…. As for adderall, I’ve never heard of it. My only drugs of choice are cappucino and vino rosso. Three cups of the former and one or two glasses of the latter daily is my limit.

As Ecclesiastes reminds us, it’s all vanity. But one hopes that even so, some of it may be useful to others and will ultimately prove to be to the glory of God.