It is not hard to understand why the idea of military intervention in support of the Libyan rebels battling against the Gadhafi regime is tempting to some Americans. Responsible for both the Lockerbie bombing and the Berlin disco bombings that killed both American soldiers and civilians, there is little that is not reprehensible about Muammar Gadhafi. Nor has there ever been even a pretense of democratic legitimacy about the government of The Brother Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which came to power in a conventional third-world “colonel’s coup” in 1969.
Author: VD
Fantasy, Romance, and the Omega author
What is the essential difference between Fantasy and Romance? The lines appear to be increasingly blurred these days. While the RWA didn’t include the teen romance of the Twilight series on its list of bestselling romance novels, the current list includes books from the Ghostwalkers and Immortals After Dark series and one can hardly walk through a grocery store, let alone a bookstore, without encountering an interspecies love triangle between a woman, a vampire, and a werewolf. For some reason, it would appear that two vampires, or alternatively, two werewolves, seldom share common tastes in human women. So there is magic and the supernatural in Romance and there is no dearth of love and sex in Fantasy. So what is the difference?
Aside from the covers, arguably the most reliable method to distinguish between the two is this: In Romance, men typically pursue women. Sometimes they even ravish them. In Fantasy, on the other hand, men are almost invariably surprised by female interest in them.
Read the rest at the Black Gate.
The piggies squeal
Britain’s banksters are upset that their central banker isn’t running interference for them ala Mr. Bernanke:
Bankers, businessmen and economists joined together to dismiss the bulk of the Bank of England Governor’s comments, with some even questioning whether he should remain in his post.
One senior banking source, at one of the UK’s top five banks, went so far as to brand Mr King “an embittered old man with no appreciation of reality”.
The anger follows an interview the Governor gave to The Daily Telegraph yesterday, in which Mr King said that the finance industry needs urgent reform and that there is a risk of a second banking crisis.
I know I’m surprised that the banks don’t see a second financial crisis coming. Why should they, when they didn’t see the first one until it arrived either? Meanwhile, in other news, one of Britain’s biggest banks just announced that it is moving to Hong Kong. What a smart decision was made by the British government in twice offering HSBC, which collected $3.5 billion from the U.S. Treasury’s bailout of AIG, in twice offering to bailout HSBC in the last three years. It’s probably fortunate for the U.K. that HSBC didn’t accept either offer.
The downside of status
In their rush to declare themselves alphas, before whom men cower and women tremble with anticipation, what is often forgotten by perfectly normal deltas and gammas is that socio-sexual status very often comes at a price.
We are not alone
An announcement of extraterrestrial life:
We are not alone in the universe — and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.
That’s the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology…. Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.
“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”
If a great many scientists say extraterrestrial is impossible despite the fact that they can’t possibly know with any degree of certainty, we can safely conclude that it will be discovered relatively soon, assuming it hasn’t been already. But I’m less interested in yet another exercise in the foolishness of scientists throwing away their credibility in unscientific opining than I am in this question: would the proven existence of extraterrestrial life tend to support the Christian view of Creation or undermine it? Or would it depend upon the form in which that extraterrestrial life takes?
Game blogging
Although the econ blog concept didn’t end up working out quite as well as I’d envisioned, I think Twitter is actually a better vehicle for that. However, I have noticed there is a good deal of continuing interest in Game theory, in fact, more than I can reasonably bring myself to devote to it on this blog. Since I’m presently working on a Game-related project, I think the time has come to set up a separate blog devoted entirely to the subject. My idea is to have seven bloggers, of which I will be one, each presenting the perspective of the one of the categories I have described in the socio-sexual hierarchy: Alpha, Sigma, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Omega… plus one ♀. I’m open to bloggers who already have blogs, there are two or three few people I’d very much like to participate, but in general I’m more interested in those who aren’t already blogging regularly.
If you’re interested, please mention it here, then email me a sample post along with your age, marital status, religious faith, and which perspective you think you could accurately represent. I would prefer a mix of married and single, religious and irreligious, older and younger. Note that I’m not interested in exercises in self-justification, such as explaining why you’re really a “stealth alpha” even though your last date was with a transsexual streetwalker in Las Vegas five years ago nor do I want Tucker Max fiction cribbed from old editions of Penthouse Forum. Roissy already has the “I am Alpha, hear me roar” aspect of the subject well-covered, so what I’d like this new blog to bring to the table is both the painful stories of the past and the accounts of transformation, both successful and unsuccessful, from the present.
I’m still going to discuss the subject here as I have been doing, but I will also post there several times per week. Please don’t volunteer unless you can reasonably commit to posting three times per week since a good blog should average around three posts per day. I don’t know if anyone will be interested in blogging, or for that matter, reading such a blog, but I figured it doesn’t hurt to throw the idea out there to you all.
In tangentially related news, it’s time to clean up the blogroll. So many are now defunct that my plan is to nuke them all and only keep those bloggers who tell me they are still active. Let me know if you want to stay on the blogroll or be added to it in the comments here with a) the blog name and b) the URL.
It’s because you collectively suck
Teachers are in shock at the contempt in which they are held:
The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.
“You feel punched in the stomach,” said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees’ two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor’s plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights…. Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.
Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.
Perhaps the reason for this scorn might have something to do with little facts such as these:
About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000. The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, the proportion was 23 percent.
I would argue that most public school teachers don’t even deserve minimum wage, for the obvious reason that they can’t do their jobs. Fire them all, tear down the system, and replace it with a technological spin on homeschooling for those parents who can’t homeschool. I guarantee the results would not merely be superior, but vastly superior.
A long-awaited dance
I can’t pretend that I’m anywhere nearly as excited as a lot of epic fantasy fans are, but I will probably re-read the series in order to refresh my memory before reading the next book in the series:
Great news for fans of epic fantasy today: The great George R. R. Martin has announced on his web page that the long, long-awaited 5th book in his SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series is almost done. No kidding this time. A DANCE WITH DRAGONS will be hitting stories on July 12, 2011. Although previous dates have been set and then cancelled, Martin says this one is “for real.”
I generally enjoy the Fire and Ice series, but I thought the last book, divided into two, bordered on the tedious and didn’t advance the story much. Like pitchers, writers tend to lose their fastball abruptly, and often without any warning. I suspect Martin’s inability to finish the book in a reasonable time frame after turning in a relatively mediocre, (in comparison with the standard he’d previously set, you understand) prior novel doesn’t bode well for A Dance with Dragons, but I will be pleased to be proved wrong in July.
Mailvox: the replay link
Cocomoe sends a link for the benefit of those who couldn’t listen live yesterday:
The Vox Schiff interview can be relistened and relistened to here for free Mar 3 hour 1: (Vox starts at minute 27). I thought Vox did real well and even better the 2nd time you listen and get Schiff to be more background.
Actually, I don’t feel as if I even began making a case, for as I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I had no idea that there was going to be a debate about inflation. I was told that we’d be discussing inflation and deflation in the context of Bernanke’s recent testimony to Congress. So, what you’re hearing is my attempt to be polite and avoid simply telling the host “congratulations, you’ve figured out the basics of supply, demand, and the quantity theory of inflation, which has only been around since Ssu-Ma Chien in the second century BC.” There is literally nothing that Schiff is saying that any economics student didn’t learn in Econ 101 except the bit about the Federal Reserve Notes. That doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong about high rates of inflation coming, only that repeating what the Wall Street Journal has been saying since April 2008 isn’t telling anyone anything new nor does it explain in any way the various anomalies that I have noted in the money supply and the credit markets. Just saying “housing is an asset”, which isn’t even true in the case of housing, is not a meaningful response, let alone a substantive rebuttal. For all that there are multiple definitions of inflation, all of them include the concept of a general increase in prices and there can be no price inflation if wages and housing prices are falling even though prices are rising in other sectors.
“The only Chinese with notable views in the more strictly economic realm was the distinguished second century B.C. historian, Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145c. 90 BC)…. Ch’ien was one of the world’s first monetary theorists. He pointed out that increased quantity and a debased quality of coinage by government depreciates the value of money and makes prices rise. And he saw too that government inherently tended to engage in this sort of inflation and debasement.”
– Murray Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, pp 26-27.
By the way, here are the specifics on the incidences of default versus hyperinflation in Europe since 1800 that I mentioned in the interview. There have been 73 sovereign defaults compared to 20 total years of hyperinflation in Austria (2 years, 1,733%), Germany (2 years, 2.22E+10%), Greece (4 years, 3.02E+10%), Hungary (2 years, 9.63+26%), Poland (2 years, 51,699.4%), Russia (8 years, 13,534.7%). Similar ratios are seen in Latin America and Africa. However, high rates of annual inflation are quite common historically and the USA is actually quite unusual in having had only one year since 1800, 1864 to be precise, where inflation exceeded 20 percent. One thing inflationistas might find interesting is the fact that hyperinflation is NOT necessarily dictated by the increase in the quantity of money, because in at least two cases, those of Germany and Hungary, the amount of inflation exceeded the increase in the money supply.
UPDATE – WND has a nice, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek article on RGD hitting #1 in its category on Amazon. Of course, the headline is a little unfortunate, as I would hope demand for it hasn’t actually peaked at this point.
The unacceptable inevitable
What happens when the unstoppable political force meets the inevitable political issue?:
In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was “unacceptable” to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security “unacceptable.”
Doesn’t matter. Here’s the numbers. Show me what we’re going to do about it.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare comprise 56.7% of the federal budget ($2.1 trillion.) Defense comprises another 18.7% (about $700 billion.) And interest, today, is a paltry 4.6% (primarily due to ZIRP). Interest expense will double even if we don’t add one more dollar of debt to the Federal side.
Not might double, will double.
And will do quite a bit more than that when interest rates return to historic norms. Color me skeptical that the Tea Party is going to be any more successful in holding the Republican Party’s feet to the fire when two-thirds of them won’t even look at the elephant in the room. Playing ostrich and declaring the inevitable to be unacceptable just isn’t going to accomplish anything.