Author: VD

Debt outstanding 2005 – 2010

The Z1 report released earlier this week looks superficially positive from a mainstream perspective.  Total credit increased from $52.3 trillion to $52.6 trillion, which is nearly back to the pre-bust level of $52.9 trillion in Q1 2009.  This is in keeping with the theme of a fragile, but real economic recovery.  However, a closer look at the debt by sector reveals that it is merely more of the same pretend-and-extend at work, with public debt filling in the gap created by deflating private debt.  Whereas the financial sector debt has contracted $2.9 trillion (16.7%) and the household sector has contracted $500 billion (3.7%), the federal government sector debt has nearly doubled with an increase of $4.1 trillion (78%).   This means that the government debt (federal, state, and local), has now increased from 16% of the total debt market in 2005 to 22.5% now.

Notice that state and local government debt has been increasing even as their ability to service their debt has dramatically declined.  This increase cannot continue, which is why more political conflicts like the one in Wisconsin can be expected and why more state and local governments will be expected to default on their debts.  Moreover, we can expect the decline in household debt to pick up speed in the near future, since many defaults are not being registered yet and the only area of growth has been student loans.  As more home defaults enter into the system and more prospective students begin to understand the declining value of university credentials, we can be confident that the household sector will begin to contract at a rate approximately 5x faster than before.

This will put more pressure on the federal government to increase its rate of debt expansion beyond the 5.5 percent per quarter growth that it has been averaging since the crisis began in Q3 2008.  I estimate that in 2011, the federal government will have to continue expanding its debt at a rate of at least 6% per quarter in order to prevent total credit from contracting.

Decertified!

The NFLPA turns down the proffered deal:

Unfortunately, the players’ union has notified our office that at 4pm ET it had “decertified” and is walking away from mediation and collective bargaining, presumably to initiate the antitrust litigation it has been threatening to file. In an effort to get a fair agreement now, the clubs offered a deal that would have had no adverse financial impact upon veteran players in the early years and would meet the players’ financial demands in the latter years.

The union left a very good deal on the table. It included an offer to narrow the player compensation gap that existed in the negotiations by splitting the difference; guarantee reallocation of savings from first-round rookies to veterans and retirees without negatively affecting compensation for rounds 2-7; ensure no compensation reduction for veterans; implement new year-round health and safety rules; retain the current 16-4 season format for at least two years with any subsequent changes subject to the approval of the league and union; and establish a new legacy fund for retired players ($82 million contributed by the owners over the next two years).

I’m mostly with the owners on this one, for all that I hate their greedy, parasitical dependence on public stadiums. About the only shareholders with a worse deal than NFL owners are the banks, who pay out more in salaries and bonuses than they make in profits. While I don’t think that going to an 18-game season makes any sense at all, I am completely against the NFLPA’s attempt to turn the NFL into Premier League Football where Manchester United, Chelsea, and Arsenal are able to spend 3x more on players than their opponents.

UPDATE: As expected, the NFL has responded by locking out the players.

Japan tsunami

I learned that the Japanese people are quite familiar with earthquakes when I studied there. My host family assured me that the kerosene heaters – which were used to warm the rice paper-walled rooms – had an automatic off-switch so that when they fell over in an earthquake during the middle of the night, they wouldn’t burn down the house and everyone in it. And there are a surprising amount of earthquakes there, judging by the number of times I woke up in an ice-cold room. So, the Japanese people are very accustomed to earthquakes and prepare accordingly. But there isn’t any amount of preparation short of moving away from the coast that can do much to mitigate the damage from a natural catastrophe of this magnitude.

Not all women are like that

As per my comment yesterday, I’m pleased to announce that Susan Walsh, the intrepid hostess of Hooking Up Smart, is one of the contributors to Alpha Game.  As with all rules, the maxim of never listening to what a woman says about what women want has its exceptions, and Susan’s insights on male-female relations are always worth taking into account.  She kicked things off with an excellent inaugural post at Alpha Game today:

From Urban Dictionary:  NAWALT: acronym for ‘not all women are like that.’

Repeated endlessly by women to men in hopes that if men hear NAWALT frequently enough, they’ll believe it.  The reality is that all women ARE like that (manipulative, abusive, sociopathic, destructive, drama-oriented, liars).

The acronym NAWALT has its origin in the belief that women as a collective are complicit in the implementation of injustices against men during the last 40 years. As you can see from the more commonly used meaning above, it’s come to signify the degenerate nature of all women, on all fronts.

The fact is that all women are not created equal any more than men are, and all women don’t behave indentically any more than alphas behave like omegas. This doesn’t render the insights of Game any less legitimate, it merely means that the application of those insights needs to be more intelligent and judicious than some of the more xtreme literalists at the Chateau tend to believe.

Atheism and Islam

“There’s also pretty general agreement on which religions are the toxic worst. These would be the religions that combine particularly crazy superstitions with a blood-soaked historical record. We atheists think of these as deadly memetic plagues, occasionally found in relatively well-behaved quiescent phases but prone to bloom into full-fledged insane murderousness whenever the next charismatic nutcase wanders along to remind them what they’re really about.

And which two religions are at the very top of the threat-potential list? No prizes for guessing that they are Christianity and Islam, not necessarily in that order. Both have relatively tolerable minorities (Christianity’s Quakers and Unitarians, Islam’s Sufis) but have extremely dangerous and powerful fundamentalist groups that effectively dominate the discourse inside their communities.

An accident of our time, post-9/11, is that Islam currently appears the more dangerous of the two. This is a case both Christoper Hitchens and myself on this blog have argued, despite our shared detestation of Christianity. And it’s why the notion that Western militant atheists would run en masse to Islam in preference to Christianity is especially absurd. That would be trading from bad to worse.”

One of the things I pointed out in The Irrational Atheist is the fundamentally non-scientific perspective of the average militant atheist.  Like the “Dark Ages” philosophers they cite so ignorantly and inaccurately as evidence of their supposed intellectual superiority, they regularly utilize false logic in the place of the observable, empirical evidence.  Thus, they insist that Christianity is indicative of mental illness despite the fact that Christians are happier, live longer, and are much less likely to commit suicide than atheists.  They declare that humanity will become more secular in the face of statistics that show religious growth exploding around the planet.  And they insist that Christianity is liable “to bloom into full-fledged insane murderousness whenever the next charismatic nutcase wanders along” even though it is a matter of historical record that atheist leaders are 580 times more likely to kill at least 20,000 of their own followers than Christian leaders and the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 MILLION percent worse than the worst slaughter committed by a Christian leader.

It is always amusing, in light of the martial record of the last ten centuries, to see that the two most-cited examples of Christianity’s supposed predilection for warfare date back to 1095 and 1618.

As with his earlier post on Game, Eric Raymond demonstrates that he hasn’t bothered to do even the smallest amount of relevant research before opining on the matter.  If he had, he would have learned that a) militant atheists do not attack specific religions on the basis of their threat potential, but rather on the basis of the religion to which they are primarily exposed, b) many atheists support the growth of Islam in the West as an alternative to the Christianity for which they harbor a pathological hatred, c) Islamic expansionism is not “an accident of our time”, and d) Christianity is not, and has never been, anywhere near as blood-soaked or crazily superstitious as the paganism that it replaced or the neo-paganism that has replaced it in the post-Christian West.

One can quite reasonably point out, as Raymond has done, that supporting Islam in the place of Christianity is trading from bad to worse.  But that doesn’t change the fact that many atheists are doing precisely that, which we must conclude is due to the fact that most atheists are irrational.

The left of the right

The Right-Wing News polls a collection of so-called “right-of-center” bloggers, thus revealing that the right-wing blogosphere is a) not particularly intelligent, and b) barely to the right of the New York Times token conservative. Consider their list of most unpopular figures:

10) WorldNetDaily: 60.6%
10) Michael Savage: 60.6%
9) Christine O’Donnell: 60.7%
7) Ron Paul: 64.7%
7) Mike Huckabee: 64.7%
6) David Brooks: 71.2%
5) Pat Buchanan: 71.6%
4) Kathleen Parker: 77.8%
3) Joe Scarborough: 80.6%
2) David Frum: 87.5%
1) Meghan McCain: 93.8%

So, most of the “right wing” bloggers dislike the leading paleo-conservative, the leading libertarian Republican, and the largest right-wing Internet site. Now look at who they like for president:

8) Ron Paul: 35.3%
8) Mike Huckabee: 35.3%
7) Mitt Romney: 44.8%
6) Newt Gingrich: 54.4%
5) Mitch Daniels: +76.1%
4) Michelle Bachmann: +83.6%
3) Jim DeMint: +87.9%
2) Sarah Palin: 89.8%
1) Chris Christie: +98.6%

This shows that the so-called right vastly favors an elephantine RINO over the only candidate who has any clue about the dreadful economic and geo-strategic situations in which the nation finds itself. Hell, they favor Newt Gingrich over Ron Paul! But at least give them credit for preferring Palin to Captain Underoos and the Huckster; they may be short-sighted and foolish, but they’re not complete idiots.

In other words, you can safely conclude that this is not the group that will be leading the charge for human freedom or a Constitutional restoration.

Of sets and subsets

In which I explain the difference between a sexual hierarchy and a socio-sexual one:

There appears to be an amount of confusion relating to the difference between Roissy’s binary hierarchy and my more graduated hierarchy. However, it’s not difficult to distinguish between the two hierarchies, nor is there any contradiction between them. Roissy’s hierarchy is solely sexual in nature, whereas mine is socio-sexual. Therefore, his two categories are supersets of my seven categories.

I was a little surprised to learn that it was necessary to spell this out, as it isn’t hard to observe and it is a natural consequence of the connection between social status and sexual options. It’s hardly rocket science. But as you muse over the matter, keep in mind that snowflaking is no means of assessing the validity of anything, much less categories that encompass hundreds of millions of people.

Today also featured the first-ever guest post at Alpha Game, a piece on economic signaling theory contributed by Le Cygne Gris. I’m not at all averse to guest posts, just keep in mind that they should be longer than the average post and concern things that the regular contributors are unlikely to cover.

And finally, I’m pleased to announce a popular Game blogger will be contributing to Alpha Game on a regular basis.

Wisconsin Republicans show some backbone

The Senate outflanks the Democratic fleebaggers.

The Wisconsin Senate succeeded in voting Wednesday to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers, after Republicans outmaneuvered the chamber’s missing Democrats and approved an explosive proposal that has rocked the state and unions nationwide.

“You are cowards!” spectators in the Senate gallery screamed as lawmakers voted. Within hours, a crowd of a few hundred protesters inside the Capitol had grown to an estimated 7,000, more than had been in the building at any point during weeks of protests…. All 14 Senate Democrats fled to Illinois nearly three weeks ago….

I don’t think the side whose elected representatives ran away has a lot of room for calling anyone else “cowards”. The only cowardly thing the Republicans have done is to exclude police and fire unions from the new law, but I don’t think that’s what the protesters meant. As for the calls for a general strike, Governor Walker will be hoping that the unions try it as this will give him the chance to shatter the public unions for good. There is a term for politicians who take on and break unions in economic hard times, and that is “respected head of government”. Don’t forget that union-breaking was the early signature of both Reagan and Thatcher. If the unions are foolish enough to go to the wall on this, despite getting played so badly, and Walker crushes them, both the Republican nomination and the White House will be his for the taking.

UPDATE: The Democratic Left is showing its newfound, post-Arizona respect for political civility: “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.”

Mailvox: rage of the entitled elderly

Juddsnell reveals the entitlement mentality of those whose primary benefit to society consists of sitting on ice floes:

Suck it up if you are so freaking superior to the greatest generation or the boomers than fix it and quit making excuses. Until then you are all pathetic losers. Blame it on grandma and grampa and mommy and daddy. Cant believe how many of you whiners complain they didn’t leave you something. You deserve nothing you freaking credit card addicts. Save your money drive a ten year old car and be an example instead of a whiney pathetic class of overindulged wimps. Only mistake your boomer parents made was to listen to Dr Spock and not beat your ass when you got too lippy. Your self indulged youthful superiority complex makes me puke!

Juddsnell is doing nothing more than projecting here. Because he feels entitled to living off the generations that are paying for the Social Security, Medicare, and prescription drug entitlement handouts that vastly exceed the amount of money he paid in, he therefore assumes that Generation X and Y are whiners. But we’re not whining, we are merely noting the readily observable fact that since Grandpa and Grandma left nothing to Mommy and Daddy, there is not a chance in Hell that our Baby Boomer parents will leave behind anything but massive debts, a ruined economy, and a vibrantly disintegrating society.

Of course, because the Baby Boomers are far too self-centered a generation – did they ever mention that they changed the world? – to fix the giant Ponzi scheme that they mistakenly think will support them in retirement, they aren’t going to do anything until the system reaches the mathematically inevitable breakdown. This means that it is going to be those very “pathetic losers” and “credit card whiners” who will not have any choice but to fix the system.

And guess how it will be done? By ending all the debt-funded payments to the entitled elderly like Juddsnell, Mommy, and Daddy, who are responsible for digging this massive hole. It wasn’t the Grasshopper Generation that created the prescription drug entitlement during the Bush administration after all. The Baby Boomers may not have created the original problem, but they not only didn’t try to fix it, they blatantly exacerbated it. But Social Security is going to end, Medicare is going to end, and Medicaid are going to end, and they’re all going to shut down faster than anyone imagines at present.

And then, instead of decrying the younger generations for daring to spend money they don’t have on themselves, Juddsnell will be castigating them for refusing to spend it on his useless, wrinkled ass. And the vibrant peoples who were imported as substitutes for the missing millions of Generations X and Y aren’t going to argue with us and insist that they be taxed more to keep elderly gringos alive.

Zombie apocalypse in the making

This explains all the recent movies and TV shows. It was a warning from the PTBs: killer fungus turning rainforest ants into colonies of zombies

Sure, they say it’s just ants now, but how long will it be before scientists employed by the U.S. government start experimenting with the fungus? You know they won’t be able to resist playing with it anymore than they left the killer WWI flu virus alone. Or worse, what if the fungus is extraterrestrial… and by extraterrestrial, I mean from Yuggoth!