#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Weinergate expands:
BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com have reported throughout the morning about the emergence of new details in the Weinergate saga, after a young woman came forward with new information that tends to undermine severely the theory that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was the victim of a “prank” or a “hack.”
Weiner’s wife Huma could not be reached for comment, as she was fully occupied with her duties servicingserving Secretary of State Clinton.
This belated announcement demonstrates why you should never, ever, pay much credence to official government statements about major events:
Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said Monday.
The nuclear group’s new evaluation, released Monday, goes further than previous statements in describing the extent of the damage caused by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. The announcement will not change plans for how to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the agency said.
THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. DO NOT PANIC! THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. ALL THE REACTORS ARE STABLE… okay, well, there was maybe a meltdown. Um, three, actually, if you insist on being precise.
Mark Perry omits a key factor in attempting to defend international free trade:
Bottom Line: To argue against free trade among countries, one would also have to object to free trade among American states, counties, cities and individuals, see my edits below of Fletcher’s article that hopefully make this point.
That simply is not the case. In fact, Perry misses a vital point, which is that in order to argue FOR free trade among countries, one has to accept a similar free flow of labor between countries as presently exists between American states, counties, and cities. And how sizeable is that free flow?
In 2009, 4.7 million Americans moved from one state to another. Keep in mind that the entire American employed labor force is only 140 million. If we conservatively divide the number of domestic migrants by the average household size of 2.6, we’re looking at 1.8 million workers, 1.3 percent of all American workers, who moved intrastate.
This suggests that if the world were to adopt international free trade, more than a million Americans would need to move to China, Mexico, Japan, Germany, and Canada in order to find employment on an annual basis. It would be necessary to know the amount of intrastate trade vesus international trade to provide a precise estimate of how many Americans would need to emigrate every year, (53% of them to China), under a free trade regime, but I find it unlikely that many Americans are likely to prove supportive of a trade system that would require them to move to places like India and Bangladesh as freely as it now forces residents of Detroit and Minneapolis to move to Scottsdale and Naples.
Being an American expatriate myself, I know much better than most that it is possible to change one’s international residence. And due to my extensive, long-term international experience, I can say that I find this particular aspect of the free trade argument to be naive to the point of absurdity. Most American expats to even first-world European countries don’t last two years due to the significant language and cultural differences. The concept is a complete non-starter and therefore the equivalence is false.
One reason I prefer economics to finance is that timing has never been my strongpoint. I thought the tech bubble was going to pop in 1998. I wrote a column in 2002 that commented on the expansion of the housing bubble and noted that this was likely to have a negative effect on the global financial system, but never imagined that the bubble could go on as long as it did or that real-estate prices would rise to such elevated levels. So, given this track record of prematurity, it should be no surprise that it has taken longer for the economic consensus to recognize that the global economy is caught up in a very large economic contraction than I anticipated.
But it is coming, nevertheless. Consider the following two headlines from last week:
“‘WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF A GREAT, GREAT DEPRESSION'”
– Drudge Report, June 1, 2011
“U.S. house price fall ‘beats Great Depression slide'”
– The Independent, June 1, 2011
Naomi Wolf explains that she likes herself better and is actually more attractive now that she’s in her late 40s and no one wants to have sex with her. Unsurprisingly, now that she’s gotten older, she has concluded that age, like beauty, is also a myth:
Recently, I was at a party, and a man who, like myself, was in his late 40s, arrived with a woman 20 years younger. It took only a few moments of conversation before the rest of the group realized that the two had very little in common. And yet I did not feel the frisson of envy among the men present, nor did I see a bristle of jealousy from any of the stylish, accomplished women in their 40s. In fact, the mood of both genders was tender, almost pitying. The man may have imagined that he was showing off the youth of his date the way he might show off a new Maserati; but parading her around like an acquisition seemed only to make his friends feel sorry for him….
There are many other delightful surprises about being at this stage on the journey. I don’t miss the brutal sexual harassment that young women receive from men — and I love the far gentler flirtation or civil compliments from cab drivers and park chess players my own age or older. On the street, young women are told: Give me some. Older women hear: I love your eyes.
It is certainly amusing to see a woman whose entire literary career was based on her attractive-by-New-York-writer standards try to rationalize away the fact that she is past her sell-by date. It’s also remarkable that she managed to write about the changes in women’s attitudes and bodies over the last two decades without once seeing fit to mention the enfattening of America; Naomi has clearly packed on more than a few pounds herself.
Any time you see a woman describe “magnetic and dynamic women my own age” you know perfectly well she is referring to childless women fast approaching menopause who are filled with boundless hate for the young women their male peers are dating. Wolf’s attempt at a bemused zen-like pose is about as convincing as unemployed female college graduates babbling about how “strong and independent” they are as they move home to spend a year deciding what graduate schools Daddy is going to pay for.
The punchline which reveals the entire point of the article is this pathetic attempt at a neg: “[I]n my own circles, at least, it is considered more macho for a man to have an accomplished woman his own age on his arm. His ego, it is understood, can take it.”
Right, because men pursue beautiful young women in order to be macho. It’s not sex and beauty that interests them, but female approval. This woman clearly doesn’t know the first thing about men. One of these days, someone is going to have to inform women that their endless shaming tactics only work on other women and gamma males they don’t want to have sex with in the first place.
Florida police demonstrate their stalwart respect for the law they are supposedly enforcing:
Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer. Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling “you want to be fucking paparazzi?”
Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer’s back pocket as he was laying down on the ground. And finally, they took him to a mobile command center where they snapped his photo and demanded the phone again, then took him to police headquarters where they conducted a recorded interview with him before releasing him.
But what they didn’t know was that Narces Benoit had removed the SIM card and hid it in his mouth, which means the video survived.
People are going to have to get proactive with the police and force them to get used to the idea that all of their actions, legal and illegal, are going to be recorded. What everyone should start doing as a matter of course is pulling out their phone or camera and film, or even just pretend to film, every police officer they encounter no matter what he is doing. It is absurd that public employees should think they can assert that their official duties, which take place in public and are funded by the public, merit any sort of privacy.
And any policeman who seizes and destroys private property in the manner described should be charged with a misdemeanor for a first offense, a felony for a second.
One of the most effective arguments for vaccines is that they have significantly reduced the death rate from the various diseases against which they are supposed to protect. And while there is little question that things have improved, there is unfortunately real cause to doubt that they have improved anywhere nearly as dramatically as nearly everyone on both sides of the issue assumes:
The National Vaccine establishment, supported by Government grants, issued periodical Reports, which were printed by order of the House of Commons, and in successive years we find the following statements:
In 1812, and again in 1818, it is stated that “previous to the discovery of vaccination the average number of deaths by small-pox within the (London) Bills of Mortality was 2,000 annually; whereas in the last year only 751 persons have died of the disease, although the increase of population within the last ten years has been 133,139.”
The number 2,000 is about the average smallpox deaths of the whole eignteenth century, but those of the last two decades before the publication of Jenner’s Inquiry, were 1,751 and 1,786, showing a decided fall. This, however, may pass. But when we come to the Report for 1826 we find the following: “But when we reflect that before the introduction of vaccination the average number of deaths from small-pox within the Bills of Mortality was annually about 4,000, no stronger argument can reasonably be demanded in favour of the value of this important discovery.”
This monstrous figure was repeated in 1834, apparently quite forgetting the correct figure for the whole century given in 1818, and also the fact that the small-pox deaths recorded in the London Bills of Mortality in any year of the century never reached 4,000. But worse is to come; for in 1836 we have the following statement: “The annual loss of life by small-pox in the Metropolis, and within the Bills of Mortality only, before vaccination was established, exceeded 5,000, whereas in the course of last year only 300 died of the distemper.” And in the Report for 1838 this gross error is repeated; while in the next year (1839) the conclusion is drawn “that 4,000 lives are saved every year in London since vaccination so largely superseded variolation (3).”
The Board of the National Vaccine Establishment consisted of the President and four Censors of the Royal College of Physicians, and the Master and two senior Wardens of the College of Surgeons. We cannot possibly suppose that they knew or believed that they were publishing untruths and grossly deceiving the public. We must, therefore, fall back upon the supposition that they were careless to such an extent as not to find out that they were authorizing successive statements of the same quantity as inconsistent with each other as 2,000 and 5000.
The next example is given by Dr. Lettsom, who, in his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee in 1802, calculated the small-pox deaths of Great Britain and Ireland before vaccination at 36,000 annually; by taking 3,000 as the annual mortality in London and multiplying by twelve, because the population was estimated to be twelve times as large. He first takes a number which is much too high, and then assumes that the mortality in the town, village, and country populations was the same as in overcrowded, filthy London! Smallpox was always present in London, while Sir Gilbert Blane tells us that in many parts of the country it was quite unknown for periods of twenty, thirty, or forty years. In 1782 Mr. Connah, a surgeon at Seaford, in Sussex, only knew of one small-pox death in eleven years among a population of 700. Cross, the historian of the Norwich epidemic in 1819, states that previous to 1805 small-pox was little known in this city of 40,000 inhabitants, and was for a time almost extinct; and yet this gross error of computing the small-pox mortality of the whole country from that of London (and computing it from wrong data) was not only accepted at the time, but has been repeated again and again down to the present day as an ascertained fact!
In a speech in Parliament in defence of .vaccination., Sir Lyon Playfair gave 4,000 per million as the average London death-rate by small-pox before vaccination—a number nearly double that of the last twenty years of the century, which alone affords a fair comparison. But far more amazing is the statement by the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter, in a letter to the Spectator of April, 1881, that “a hundred years ago the small-pox mortality of London alone, with its then population of under a million, was often greater in a six months’ epidemic than that of the twenty millions of England & Wales now is in any whole Year.” The facts, well known to every enquirer, are: that the very highest small-pox mortality in the last century in a year was 3,992 in 1772, while in 1871 it was 7,912 in. London, or more than double; and in the same year, in England and Wales, it was 23,000. This amazing and almost incredible misstatement was pointed out and acknowledged privately, but never withdrawn publicly!
The late Mr. Ernest Hart, a medical man., editor of the British Medical Journal, and a great authority on sanitation, in his work entitled The Truth about Vaccination, surpasses even Dr. Carpenter in the monstrosity of his errors. At page 35 of the first edition (1880), he states that in. the forty years 1728—57 and 1771—80, the average annual small-pox mortality of London was about 18,000 per million living. The actual average mortality, from the tables given in the Second Report of the Royal Commission, page 290, was a little over 2,000, the worst periods having been chosen; and taking the lowest estimates of the population at the time, the mortality per million would have been under 3,000. This great authority, therefore, has multiplied the real number by six! In a later edition this statement is omitted, but in the first edition it was no mere misprint, for it was triumphantly dwelt upon over a whole page and compared with modern rates of mortality.
Now, a very good argument in favor of the smallpox vaccine is that the disease has largely been eradicated, even in nations where the hygiene and sanitation does not rise to the level of nineteenth century London. But it does no one any good, and the pro-vaccine cause no service, to resort to citing fictional numbers in order to claim that public health has dramatically improved as a result of certain vaccines.
Given the following factors:
1. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the statistical measure for the size of the national economy.
2. The formula for calculating GDP is C+I+G+(x-m).
3. In the most recent BEA report, current dollar GDP was 15,010 billion. Exports (x) were 2,020 billion and imports (m) were 2,591 billion.
4. In Q1-11, international trade reduced the size of the US economy by $571 billion. Without any international trade at all, GDP in Q1-11 would have been 15,581 billion, representing a healthy rate of 4.8 percent annual growth from the 14,871 billion of the previous quarter instead of the 0.9 percent reported.
This is the challenge: justify the continuation of international free trade utilizing reason, logic, and conventional macroeconomic theory in light of these figures. This means no resorting to Austrian-based skepticism concerning the validity of economic statistics or ideological objections to government intervention. For the purposes of this exercise, we are assuming that the Samuelsonian metrics are valid, relevant, and a legitimate foundation for national policy.
To be honest, I can think of worse fates:
As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells. Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.
Brutal workouts during the day followed by playing games all night… throw in some alcohol and three hours at a downtown night club on the weekends and that pretty much describes my twenties.
Some bad news this morning. Joel Rosenberg, the SF/F author, Second Amendment advocate, and a friend of mine, died of a heart attack last night. He was 57. The OC has more information at the Friday Challenge.
If you haven’t read his books before, I highly recommend beginning with Not for Glory. It contains one of my favorite short stories, about the dangerous relationship between the treacherous general Shimon Bar-El and his nephew Tetsuo.