Author: VD

Be very afraid

It would seem the solution to cowbell is MORE COWBELL:

“Today there are very substantial risks, to be sure, but the economy is growing, unemployment is falling and financial conditions are normalized,” said Summers, who was director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2010.

Summers said the “central irony” of a financial crisis is that it’s caused by too much confidence, borrowing and lending, and is resolved by more confidence, borrowing and spending.

There is no irony there because it isn’t a solution. This is exactly what I meant by “buying time” and what others have meant by “extend and pretend”. There is little chance that Summers actually believes this, but the financial charlatans of the world now have no choice but to keep clinging to the tiger’s tail while hoping for a miracle.

Send Congress home

Why, exactly, are we bothering to elect Senators and Representatives in the first place now that they have handed hand over control of the money supply to a private bank and war powers to an unholy combination of the executive branch, NATO, and the United Nations? Not only is this not democracy, it’s not even representative democracy, much less in accordance with the Constitution.

In an effort to satisfy those arguing he needs to seek congressional authorization to continue US military activity in accordance with the War Powers Resolution, President Obama wrote a letter to congressional leaders this afternoon suggesting that the role is now so “limited” he does not need to seek congressional approval.

“Since April 4,” the president wrote, “U.S. participation has consisted of: (1) non-kinetic support to the NATO-led operation, including intelligence, logistical support, and search and rescue assistance; (2) aircraft that have assisted in the suppression and destruction of air defenses in support of the no-fly zone; and (3) since April 23, precision strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles against a limited set of clearly defined targets in support of the NATO-led coalition’s efforts.”

A senior administration official told ABC News that the letter is intended to describe “a narrow US effort that is intermittent and principally an effort to support to support the ongoing NATO-led and UN-authorized civilian support mission and no fly zone.”

“The US role is one of support,” the official said, “and the kinetic pieces of that are intermittent.”

From the beginning of the U.S. military intervention in Libya, the Obama administration has cited the 1973 War Powers Act as the legal basis of its ability to conduct military activities for 60 days without first seeking a declaration of war from Congress. The military intervention started on March 19; Congress was notified on March 21. Those 60 days expire today.

One merely wonders how a military target being clearly defined or in support of a coalition effort makes bombing it any less an act of war.

The religion of Apple

You weren’t just imagining the cult-like behavior of the average Macintosser:

Apple devotees are notorious for their steadfast dedication to the computer and gadget manufacturer, standing in line for hours and sometimes days just to be the first to try out a new piece of hardware. According to a new study, the areas of the brain which produce that tenacity in Apple fans are the same spots that fuel religious fervor.

Scientists using an magnetic resonance imagine (MRI) machine presented Apple fans with images of the company’s popular gadgets. Upon doing so, they found brain activity that mirrors how a religious person’s brain reacts when presented with a picture of their chosen deity.

As Chesterton once said, when people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything. Including, apparently, Steve Jobs.

The downfall accelerates

It’s really impossible to pretend that Americans don’t deserve to have their country overrun with barbarians. France has banned the burqah, Switzerland has banned minarets… and 11 U.S. states are providing affirmative action to illegal immigrants:

This week, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley signed a bill to require the state’s public universities to give undocumented aliens — generally illegal — in-state tuition privileges. The bill, known as the Dream Act, is already the law in ten other states, including California, New York, Texas and Illinois. But critics argue that the bill will give illegal aliens better treatment than Americans and legal immigrants — thanks to existing diversity policies at universities.

When one reads history, one often finds oneself astonished at the apparent inability of various political and military leaders to foresee the obvious consequences of their actions. When I was reading Mahan’s reasonably detailed summary of the long struggle for naval supremacy between Britain and France, it was remarkable to read about France’s stubborn unwillingness to change its naval doctrine despite its consistent ineffectiveness in wars spanning hundreds of years and at least three different forms of government. So, I have no doubt that the historians of the future will marvel in disbelief at the epic, self-destructive short-sightedness of the American political class and the bovine placidity of an American public that meekly accepts their inept governance.

Mailvox: now, who said atheists are fat?

A few days ago, one of the less intellectually gifted atheists here was insisting that atheists are not anymore inclined to be overweight than anyone else. That may or may not be true, but it’s hard not to notice that one of the many Biblical precepts rejected by militant atheists of the evangelical variety is the notion of the human body being a temple of God.

PZ’s response to Pharyngula readers pointing out the obvious in this picture was more than a little amusing: “Cinnamonbite and MonkeyBoy are hereby invited to submit photographs of themselves so I can post them and everyone can imagine all kinds of hideous things about them.”

I’m not sure what sort of pagan temples these bodies might indicate, but I must confess that the terms “Lovecraft”, “frog-like” and “Innsmouth” spring insensibly to mind.

A tacit admission of depression

Karl translates Alan Blinder’s unusually frank remarks in the Wall Street Journal:

The only reason we have not recognized an economic Depression is because of utterly unsustainable government borrowing and spending of money it does not have and which it has no hope or intent to ever take in via taxes in the future. In other words, the Government has been lying to you.

There has been no economic recovery and we are in an economic Depression right now and have been since 2008.

There was no economic recovery after the 2001 Nasdaq collapse. The government borrowed and spent about 5% of GDP at the time every year to fake a recovery and we ran a debt-based false “recovery” when in fact we were in a five year long recession marked by an orgy of false “wealth” through bubbling home prices.

Now we’re borrowing and spending 12% – more than double that amount – a year to fake a recovery that has shown up in stock prices, and it mathematically must end the same way.

This is exactly what I attempted to warn everyone of in my economic columns in 2008 and in RGD. GDP is a terrible measure of economic growth because it is so easily gamed through the G component, government spending. What the 78% increase in government debt since the second quarter of 2008 has done is to create $4.1 trillion of fake growth. Needless to say, this is substantial in a $14 trillion economy.

The ironic thing is that if the pre-Keynesian measures that Keynes himself utilized in determining economic growth and contraction are used, it would already be recognized that we were in a depression due to the number of jobless people across the country. But due to the development of sophisticated statistical measures, the government is now able to claim that there is “real” economic growth even as the employment-population ratio continues to fall. Even many economists have forgotten that metrics such as GDP and U3 are merely measures of an observable underlying reality.

But as I have repeatedly pointed out, the map is not the territory, and unfortunately, the present economic map is becoming increasingly inaccurate.

A delusional world of his own

Newt Gingrich isn’t merely a joke candidate, he has either gone seriously off his rocker or he has his staff approaching near-Clintonian levels of shameless spin doctory:

“The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding,” Tyler wrote. “Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

Gingrich has been finished as a politician for more than a decade. It is a remarkable testimony to the myopic narcissism of the American political class that he is still in denial over it. It’s not the Washington elite that is opposed to Gingrich; they’re the only ones who still take him seriously at all. And they have no need to destroy a man who makes a habit of kneecapping himself. More importantly, the Republican grass roots are not in the least bit interested in a fat little double-talking adultererous Washington insider who completely fumbled his golden opportunity to effect genuine change in government 17 years ago.

Gingrich never had a chance in the first place, but with his self-destructive comments on the Ryan plan, he rendered himself an embarrassment and an absurdity. Gingrich isn’t merely done, he’s rotting in the political compost pile.

Mainstream dodos

I have a feeling this sort of stunt is likely to backfire on Esquire:

In a stunning development one day after the release of Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President, by Dr. Jerome Corsi, World Net Daily Editor and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah has announced plans to recall and pulp the entire 200,000 first printing run of the book, as well as announcing an offer to refund the purchase price to anyone who has already bought either a hard copy or electronic download of the book.

In an exclusive interview, a reflective Farah, who wrote the book’s foreword and also published Corsi’s earlier best-selling work, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak out Against John Kerry and Capricorn One: NASA, JFK, and the Great “Moon Landing” Cover-Up, said that after much serious reflection, he could not go forward with the project. “I believe with all my heart that Barack Obama is destroying this country, and I will continue to stand against his administration at every turn, but in light of recent events, this book has become problematic, and contains what I now believe to be factual inaccuracies,” he said this morning. “I cannot in good conscience publish it and expect anyone to believe it.”

Apparently producing wish-fantasies and simply making things up is now what passes for “satire” in the mainstream media. Corsi’s book is a best-seller, just as we all expected it would be from the start. The amusing thing is that most of the people who “didn’t get it” were Obama fans who were citing the Esquire article as proof that the forged birth certificate is real.

Note to would-be rapists

While the consensual defense is a perfectly reasonable one, and no man should ever be convicted on the mere basis of a he-said she-said accusation, it’s not a defense that is going to hold up when you a) initially denied that any sort of sexual encounter ever took place and b) you are claiming innocence by reason of an alibi.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s defense attorney looks set to claim the French politician’s alleged assault on a Manhattan hotel maid was actually a consensual sexual encounter. During Strauss-Kahn’s arraignment hearing Monday lawyer Ben Brafman told a packed criminal courtroom, “The evidence, we believe, will not be consistent with a forcible encounter.” The New York Post cited a source as saying, “There may well have been consent.”

Now that the alibi defense has disappeared, I’m curious to know if the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are going to start crying anti-semitism as soon as the consensual defense falls apart, (his accuser is a Muslim, after all, and therefore must be assumed to be a top al-Qaeda operative), or if they’ll try running with the “too big to jail” argument first.

NB: One wonders about the wisdom of centralizing the global financial system and turning it over to an idiot who is dumb enough to not only rape an African immigrant, but an African immigrant who may have HIV or AIDS. Now that would truly make for poetic justice.

Mailvox: a leader in spite of herself

Anon writes about the structure of her marriage and wonders how she can modify it:

We are a mix of #3 and #4. My husband has always joked that he “got married so he wouldn’t have to make” certain decisions. Several years later my career blossomed, we moved out of state for my job, and I now make 50% more than he does. I believe that may be the root of his non-committal behavior. Early in our relationship he was very much “in charge” and VD’s post made me realize how much I miss that.

Last year we lost our first child – she was stillborn. Since then he just does whatever I want or ask. I don’t take advantage (seriously), but his lack of leadership is astounding. I can usually get him to make decisions on big ticket purchases, but not much else.

I fully admit that I am a control freak at times – feel I must care for the house, the husband, the pets, and my career. With our recent tragedy I truly want to simplify my life and allow him to take a much larger role in the running of our lives. How??

First, condolences, etc. Miscarriages and stillbirths can be emotionally difficult, but they do happen and should not dissuade a couple from trying again. Second, as the issues this raises are arguably more relevant to Alpha Game, I have responded to it there.