Author: VD

Vibrancy in Norway

An explosion in Oslo:

6.01pm: John Magnus, chief foreign correspondent of Oslo’s VG newspaper, told the Guardian he was sitting at his desk when the massive explosion in central Oslo today blew him off his chair.

It was 3.26 in the afternoon. The whole building was shaking. It was dancing. There was glass flying through the newsroom. I was on the far side of the building from where the prime minister’s office is. The entire glass front of our building has been blown out …

I saw people screaming and covered in blood. There were at least four people I saw who looked lifeless with their faces covered. We’ve had it confirmed that two people are dead but there are other locations that the emergency services have not reached yet.

Naturally, this bombing will no more lead the Norwegian people to reconsider the wisdom of permitting Muslim immigration than the vast increase in the number of rapes committed by Muslim men. But it should. The multiculturalists will be quick to point out the mathematically obvious fact that that most Muslims don’t set off bombs. But this is irrelevant. Because it is also a fact that if a nation does not permit Muslims to enter its borders, it is far less likely to ever suffer any such incidents.

Expansionist Islam offers a challenge to the freedom of religion, (a right that does not actually exist in most countries outside the United States), that few secularists or Christians are presently capable of understanding. It should be eminently clear by now that simply repeating the multicultural mantra that “diversity is our strength” is not going to serve any purpose. At some point, it is going to become abundantly clear to everyone on all sides that the separatist practices of the past were not “outdated raciss bad-thought”, but the result of observation and experience.

UPDATE – According to the latest reports, the killer was a native Norwegian opposed to Muslim immigration, the Norwegian Labour Party, and the Worker’s Youth League. The political camp appears to have been the main target and the bombing merely a diversion. If this is indeed the case, it will represent the long-simmering immigration invasion moving to the inevitable next stage, as it looks as if the killer’s objective may have been to reduce the size of the next generation of left-wing quislings. Regardless, the possibility that certain political policies may have provoked such a violent response cannot logically be taken as any sort of rational justification for the continuation of those societally destructive policies.

From Wikipedia: “The Workers’ Youth League (Bokmål: Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, Nynorsk: Arbeidaranes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF) is the youth organization affiliated with the Norwegian Labour Party. AUF was formed in April 1927, following the merger of Left Communist Youth League and Socialist Youth League of Norway. Its ideology is social democracy and democratic socialism. The current leader is Eskil Pedersen. Many former leading figures in AUF have gone on to serve in significant positions in government, such as the incumbent Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg.”

The Charlie Brown Republicans

Surely Lucy won’t pull the football away this time!

Republicans led by naïve supply-siders are preparing, for the third time in my life, to sell their souls on spending cuts in exchange for tax-rate reductions that are small, ineffective, and sure to be temporary. Ronald Reagan got his tax cuts, but he went to his grave waiting for those spending cuts. George W. Bush got his tax cuts, and ended his presidency with spending soaring and his entitlement-reform program in the garbage. And now certain Republicans are starting to slobber over the Gang of Six plan, because it reduces the top income-tax rate to 29 percent. Overall, the plan is supposed to be a tax increase — a $1.2 trillion one — but it sweetens the deal with rate cuts, and rate cuts turn Republicans into useless piles of goo.

The rate cuts, we are told, are “pro-growth.” Growth is the great magical unicorn that will deliver us from the burden of making hard decisions, we are promised.

But the important drivers of our deficit are entitlements, mainly centered on health care, the cost of which is growing at about three to four times the rate of GDP growth. We aren’t going to grow our way out of that problem — not at 2 percent, not at 5 percent. We’ll simply keep spending, pile up more debt, and have a debate like this again in a couple of years, if we’re lucky — or in a couple of weeks if we aren’t.

Nothing short of comprehensive reform of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is going to stabilize our public finances. The Gang of Six deal contains only very vague language about “efficiency” in health-care spending, and it actually makes Social Security reform more difficult by introducing procedural barriers. It’s a terrible deal, and Republicans would be fools to take it.

As usual, the establishment Republicans are assuming that the threat of a SECOND OBAMA TERM will make 2012 THE MOSTEST IMPORTANTEST ELECTION EVAH and cause the rebellious Tea Party element to dutifully fall in line and vote them back into office. And they may well be right, again.

On the other hand, increasing numbers of Americans appear to be increasingly aware of the charade and of the irrelevance of the bi-factional game in comparison with the economic issues. If House Republicans are willing to raise the debt ceiling, then what difference does it make if the Magic Negro, Captain Underoos, or Al’s Pal happen to be seated in the Oval Office as the economy begins to deleverage?

The brilliance of U.S. strategery

Jim Lacey on the death of U.S. military strategy:

I teach strategy to Marines and other military officers for a living. The classes hear ad nauseam that if your plan does not include any directions as to how to carry it out, and how to obtain resources for it, then you do not have a strategy. You have an aspiration. The NMS has a lot of aspirations. There are several dozen of them in the first few pages alone. One has to wade through eight pages of aspirations before coming to: “The core task of our Armed Forces remains to defend our Nation and win its wars.” Wow! I would have led with that one.

Military strategists might wonder why the authors of the NMS made them wade through a third of the document before getting to the crucial reason of why we maintain a military in the first place. One might even wonder if the NMS authors really mean that winning wars is job number one, since elsewhere in the document you find: “Lastly, we will be prepared to act as security guarantor — preferably with partners and allies, but alone if necessary — to deter and defeat acts of aggression.” Lastly? Really? Since page one says, “Our foremost priority is the security of the American people, our territory, and our way of life,” one wonders what activities are so important that the military has moved defeating aggression to last in its order of concerns.

In related news, the U.S. Army recently reported that its officers will no longer utilize wargames as part of their military training, but will instead incorporate a rigorous program that includes The Ungame, “a non-competitive learning game of conversation that fosters listening skills as well as self-expression”, Dance Dance Revolution, and the popular teen party game Spin the Bottle. Two card games, Uno and Mille Bournes, were also given serious consideration, but the former was rejected as being “too competitive” while the latter was deemed to be a potentially negative influence on young officers due to its glorification of excess speed and failure to respect legal speed limits.

When asked for comment, Brigadier General Shaniqua Rodriguez expressed reservations about the new policy, saying: “The Ungame be cool and I rockin the hells outta DDR, but I ain’t kissing no mans nohow. I don’t play that shit. And what the White Man got against Uno? It be too brown and shit? They raciss!”

UPDATE: General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, announced that “Uno, Chinese Checkers, and that African game where they clap and hop over sticks” would be added to the Army’s new training schedule, effective immediately. He also announced that he would not attempt to kiss Brigadier General Rodriguez even if the bottle pointed in her direction, commenting that “while she is fly, she is one crazy-ass Lebanese.”

The white flag waves

I’m sure you’re nearly as surprised as I am to learn that the House Republicans not only caved on the debt ceiling, but caved in a preemptive manner:

A conservative proposal to raise the debt ceiling — known as “Cut, Cap and Balance” — passed the House with bipartisan support late Tuesday, by a vote of 234 to 190. Five Democrats (Boren, Cooper, Matheson, McIntyre and Schuler) voted with the majority, while nine Republicans (Bachmann, Broun, Canseco, DesJarlais, Griffith, Walter Jones, Mack, Paul and Rohrabacher) voted ‘no.’

What is this cunning plan, precisely?

“Under the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” legislation, Congress would raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion (the amount requested by President Obama to get him through the 2012 election). However, that increase would go into effect only if both houses of Congress pass — with two-thirds majorities — a balanced-budget amendment (BBA) to the Constitution and send it to the states for ratification. In addition, the plan calls for significant spending cuts to next year’s budget — about $111 billion — and firm caps on federal spending at 18.5 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. According to White House data, given current trends, spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP this year and will hover around 22.5 percent for the next five years. (The legislation will make no immediate changes to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security.)”

Significant spending cuts? $111 billion is about 7 percent of the 2011 deficit. Spending needs to be reduced to 18.5 percent of GDP or less now, not ten years from now. This is a craven and abject collapse on the part of the House Republicans and Bachmann’s vote against it shows that they know this to be the case.

A failure of atheist cheerleading

Apparently Miss Myers didn’t get the message that all books written by New Atheists are to be blindly defended, tooth and claw, rather than criticized for the flaws that are apparent to any intelligent reader. I was both impressed and vastly amused by her scathingly dismissive review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, as it was even harsher and more contemptuous than my own review of it.

So, to summarise:

1. Utilitarianism is right, but not any more justifiable than anything else. But who cares what other people think, anyway?

2. Because utilitarianism is right, we don’t have to be loopy post-modernists.

3. Science can tell us what makes us happy. Here’s a smattering of scientific studies about the brain.

Why in the hell do they give out book deals so easily? This book isn’t about convincing others, or providing novel ideas. It’s about pandering to atheists with very little knowledge of philosophy and ethics and an abundance of arrogance, telling them science is with them, and then reiterating how immoral people who like FGM and throwing acid in girls’ faces are and how we don’t have to listen to them because We Are Right. This is nothing but a convoluted rehashing of utilitarianism that still falls to the same old criticisms, and an immense waste of time unless you really like a good ignorant circlejerk.

It would certainly be interesting to see Miss Myers review Sam Harris’s two previous books, to say nothing of the other books I addressed in The Irrational Atheist, with the same skeptical eye. Regardless, it appears she will make a more challenging champion of atheism than her father ever has because she is willing to pay attention to the words as written and to think for herself rather than to simply parrot centuries-old talking points and froth at the mouth like some sort of performing bearded clown monkey.

It appears that I wasn’t the only one to notice the similarity in our conclusions concerning Harris’s book. Unbelievable, PZ’s daughter is the female version of Vox Day. What’s next? anti-feminism, repeal of women’s right to vote, border control and Austrian economics?

We can always hope that sweet reason will triumph, even if we harbor few expectations of it. And certainly, the intrinsic problem of utilitarian consequence pointed out by Miss Myers is not dissimilar to the famous Austrian explication of the impossibility of socialist price calculation. I must say, however, that she was perhaps a little unfair to Sam Harris in failing to give him credit for at least attempting to make a necessary case that so many other atheists have avoided, and in some cases, even claimed to be irrelevant. Ironically, given my past suspicions about him, Sam Harris may in some ways have turned out to be the most intellectually honest of the evangelical atheists. His blithely candid arguments are at least relevant, even if they reliably reveal his carelessness and inability to construct a valid argument on solid foundations.

The sinking of the Hermanator

I did warn you that he was intellectually over-matched:

This guy is not longer a joke, he’s simply despicable. Chris Wallace asked Herman Cain about a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. After arguing that Islam doesn’t qualify as a religion or something under the 1st Amendment, they got to the heart of the matter.

“So Wallace asked the inevitable question: does any community have the right to ban mosques? “Yes, they have a right to do that,” Cain replied, without skipping a beat. He later added that, while he is not willing to discriminate based on religion, “I’d rather err on the side of caution.””

Cain has a rather convoluted understanding of the US Constitution, at least when it comes to it’s applicability to Muslims in this country. I didn’t like John McCain’s attempts to rewrite the 1st Amendment through campaign finance reform laws and I don’t like candidates for President like Cain who think some people may only build houses of worship at the sufferance of their fellow citizens.

I’m not saying that Cain’s instincts about the inevitable curtailment of religious freedoms aren’t on target, as there are real doubts about whether the concept of religious freedom can survive a large Islamic population any better than the right to bear arms survived the introduction of nuclear weapons. And there are certainly major problems with the way secular officials around the nation are violating the First Amendment in favor of Islam. Even so, to argue that Islam isn’t a religion is simply absurd, on par with the assertion that the Federal Reserve doesn’t need an external audit because it performs so many internal ones.

As a general rule, Americans look disfavorably upon any politician who attempts to narrow the scope of the Bill of Rights, particularly with regards to the First and Second Amendments. If you don’t want mosques built in your community, the correct time to deal with the issue is not permitting immigration from countries filled with people who are inclined to want to build mosques.

The mortgage fraud continues

This is, of course, shocking news given that the banks had promised – cross their heart – that they would stop doing what they originally claimed wasn’t happening:

Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven’t read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures. County officials in at least three states say they have received thousands of mortgage documents with questionable signatures since last fall, suggesting that the practices, known collectively as “robo-signing,” remain widespread in the industry.

The documents have come from several companies that process mortgage paperwork, and have been filed on behalf of several major banks. One name, “Linda Green,” was signed almost two dozen different ways. Lenders say they are working with regulators to fix the problem but cannot explain why it has persisted….

In Guilford County, N.C., the office that records deeds says it received 456 documents with suspect signatures from Oct. 1, 2010, through June 30. The documents, mortgage assignments and certificates of satisfaction, transfer loans from one bank to another or certify a loan has been paid off.

It’s a mystery, to be sure. In other news, car thieves announced that they are working with insurance companies to fix the problem of automotive theft, but cannot explain why it has persisted.

Sovereign debt expanding

The centralizers always believe that going big will be a solution, but all it means is that the postponed bust will be bigger.

What this chart shows is the way that governments have attempted to arrest the ongoing debt deleveraging by swapping private debt for theoretically more secure “sovereign debt”.  However, as the incipient defaults of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and possibly Italy demonstrate, sovereign debt is no more intrinsically secure than any other form of debt; there have been hundreds of sovereign debt defaults in the last 200 years.  This chart shows that the explosion of government debt in the last two years is not limited to the USA, which is why the coming contraction is going to be a) worldwide, and b) an order of magnitude larger than the 1929 – 1940 depression.

WND column

The Third Bush

The president, who has at times been known as Barack Obama, is clearly in trouble. No president except FDR has ever been re-elected with an unemployment rate higher than 9 percent. The erstwhile Barry Soetoro was an anti-war candidate who currently presides over no less than six foreign wars (three of them of his making), he has betrayed practically every campaign promise he made while running for president and he has apparently never met a Goldman Sachs executive he didn’t want to nominate to his cabinet. The only surprise about his low approval ratings, 42 percent according to Gallup and -15 as per Rasmussen’s Presidential Approval Index, is that they aren’t even worse.

It is clear that a Republican candidate should have little problem beating Obama in the 2012 presidential election, assuming he even decides to run for re-election. (I have been skeptical of the assumption that Obama would even be on the 2012 ballot since July 2010.) Gallup has the generic “Republican candidate” leading Obama by an 8 percent margin, 47 to 39. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, they cannot put forward a generic candidate, but must select a specific one.