Author: VD

Digging a deeper hole

This astonishing display of madness should settle the question about who runs the country, Washington or Wall Street:

Just a few months ago, amid populist anger at the Fed for failing to prevent the financial crisis of 2008 and bailing out Wall Street, Congress was talking of stripping the central bank of its supervisory oversight of banks or forcing it to submit to congressional audit of its interest-rate decisions.

Instead, the new law gives the Fed more power and a better tool box to help prevent financial crises. It will become the primary regulator for large, complex financial firms of all kinds, such as American International Group, the insurer which built a massive derivatives portfolio that regulators didn’t see until it was too late.

So, the Fed created the debt boom, which led to the subsequent credit crunch and the initial stages of Great Depression 2.0. And rather than auditing the central bank, Washington has elected to give it more powers. This should end well.

The future is free

To virtually no intelligent observer’s surprise, Rupert Murdoch’s paywall is failing:

My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world. The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I’ve been corresponding about the paywall reported to me on his recent conversation with an A-list entertainment publicist: “What was really interesting to me was that this person volunteered a blinding realization. ‘Why would I get any of my clients to talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can’t even share a link and they aren’t on search. It’s as though their writers don’t exist anymore.’”

What the professional journalists and their corporate paymasters have forgotten is that they are on the wrong side of not one, but two issues. Everyone knows that the corporate media are on the wrong side of the cost equation. But what they don’t realize is that the corporate media are quite often on the wrong side of the quality equation as well these days.

Now, my daily readership of 7k blog readers is absolutely tiny compared to however many people visit the Fox News and Sunday Times sites, but is there anyone who would put the track record of a single economics writer for one of those sites against mine? And if you start factoring in other independent economics writers like Mike Shedlock, Karl Denninger, and the Mises Institute collective, you can see how the cumulative free readerships not only rival the corporate readerships, but enjoy a substantially higher quality of material as well.

Given the influx of corporate investment from places like Mexico and Saudi Arabia, we can count on the mainstream media product to become more and more irrelevant, while the free media that is a marketing adjunct to its producers’ primary careers continues to improve in quality.

Why scientific evidence is less valid in law

Richard Dawkins and other atheist science fetishists are much bothered by the fact that scientific evidence is considered less reliable, and therefore less uniformly admissable in court, than eyewitness evidence and documentary evidence. This is not because they are deeply concerned about the various legal systems of the Western democracies, (although I daresay I can testify better than most what an absurd miscarriage of justice they represent), but rather because the elevation of testimonial and documentary evidence above scientific evidence strikes a mortal blow to their primary argument against the existence of God, gods, and the supernatural.

While the more ignorant atheists stupidly attempt to argue that there is no evidence for God, atheists who are sufficiently familiar with the dictionary to avoid being so easily dismissed tend to set their sights on elevating scientific evidence over other forms of evidence in the interest of laying a foundation for their science-based arguments. However, demonstrating their near-universal incapacity for logic, these atheists turn instinctively to science in a misguided attempt to prove the superiority of scientific evidence to all other forms of evidence and thereby manage to guarantee their own failure by missing the point about the nature of evidence, the way it is acquired, and most importantly, its ultimate purpose.

For there are at least three reasons scientific evidence is not only considered less reliable by the courts than eyewitness testimony, but it is CORRECTLY considered less reliable than eyewitness testimony.

1. The dynamic nature of science. For some reason, scientists believe the public has a short memory and think it’s perfectly fine to sweep all their past mistakes and erroneous assertions under the table and pretend that their conclusions are typically static and reliable. And from the scientific point of view, it probably is, since it is in the interest of the scientific community to reach consensus and keep everyone more or less on the same page. The present scientific system is set up to encourage consensus and discourage any challenging of the present status quo; as we have seen in the ever-shifting sands of the AGW/CC discourse, the facts change much more often than the consensus diagnosis and concomitant policy prescription. However, in a court setting, there is no consensus and the interests of the two sides are diametrically opposed. It is not possible to sweep any of the many past mistakes and erroneous assertions under the table and the existence of any past alterations of the relevant theory will used to weaken, if not entirely discredit, the validity of the present science. So, science is not credible in an inherently oppositional setting due to its dynamic nature. Given that nature, science is usually in the position of an eyewitness who is forced to admit that he testified not-X prior to testifying X. And given the history of science, it is a very simple matter for any skilled lawyer to demonstrate that there is much more than a shadow of a doubt, there is in fact a reasonable mathematical probability, that science will once again testify not-X in the near future.

2. Science is not scientific evidence. Whereas the science that underlies the evidence presented may be relatively reliable, this does not make the evidence itself reliable. Even if we assume that scientists are pure and holy – and we have no shortage of evidence demonstrating otherwise – the production of scientific evidence relevant to a court case requires a number of actions by scientists and non-scientists that permit considerable room for error. In a country where the police routinely plant drugs during arrests and are often proven to be liars whenever there is a film record available to contradict their written reports, it would be deeply illogical to imagine that scientific evidence is not tainted by the unreliability of the human element involved no matter how reliable the underlying science is believed to be. The testimony of an impartial witness with a faulty memory is logically far more trustworthy than scientifically impeccable evidence presented by a collection of government employees who possess strong financial and personal incentives to produce a guilty criminal party.

3. Science is not, as actual scientists keep trying to remind the science fetishists, in the business of providing proof. Therefore, attempting to utilize science as a means of proving something beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt is a misuse of science and amounts to little more than attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole.

More atheist ignorance

Ilya Somin demonstrates that ignorance of theology is no basis from which to pontificate about the nonexistence of God:

Atheism is not a complete theory of the nature of the universe. Rather, as I discussed here, atheism is simply a rejection of the existence of God, by which I mean a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and completely benevolent (the definition [traditionally] accepted by [the vast majority of adherents] of the major monotheistic religions). One can reject the existence of God without believing that we “can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.”

There are numerous arguments against God’s existence that don’t depend on any particular theory of the origins of the universe. In my view, the “problem of evil” is one of the strongest. For a good and accessible summary of the major arguments for atheism that don’t require explanations for the nature of the universe, see David Ramsay Steele’s recent book Atheism Explained. The “new atheists” whom Rosenbaum attacks also don’t rely on any comprehensive theory of the universe in making their case against the existence of God. Writers like Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have their flaws; but believing that they can explain the origins of the universe isn’t one of them.

If that’s your strongest argument, you had better give up on atheism now. The so-called problem of evil is one of the most ignorant arguments that can possibly be made against the Christian God’s existence, let alone various other conceptions of the Divine. The existence of evil is absolutely central to the Christian faith, so it requires a remarkable amount of theological cluelessness to claim that the existence of observable evil can possibly serve as any sort of evidence against the Christian God. Moreover, anyone with an even cursory familiarity with the Bible, or for that matter, CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, knows that “the god of this world” is not the Creator God. And finally, Sunday School theology notwithstanding, there is no serious Biblical claim for Divine omniscience; the various claims to God’s knowledge tend to involve a complete knowledge of human nature.

But no doubt “the problem of evil” is a serious objection to a God in whom no one of any religion actually believes, let alone worships.

Mailvox: Uber Dawks strikes three

You can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him!

I did not mean “objective scientific evidence”, I mean any objective evidence at all. The Bible is not an objective piece of evidence, scientific or otherwise. Wrong. Try again in our bonus round. Reading the comments on your blog this morning, it seems that none of your ilk can come up with anything either. The Courtier’s Reply is still looking mighty valid.

Finally, not that I need to justify any credentials, but since your ilk has been speculating, I am a Ph.D. candidate in Evolutionary Psychology at a prestigious major university. My views are not the minority among atheists, but the majority. Go to Pharyngula and you’ll see that I’m not alone. Read Dawkins more polemical work, read Sam Harris or Chris Hitchens, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been tackled at length by these great thinkers.

Also, for all the mocking of my celebrity atheist paragraph, I was not appealing to these men to validate atheism, but rather to show that the atheist in that comic is a grand caricature, representative of the kind of narrow thinking that you Christian fundies are known for.

evidence
–noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
2. something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign.
3. Data presented to a court or jury in proof of the facts in issue and which may include the testimony of witnesses, records, documents, or objects.

Evidence is any information so given, whether furnished by witnesses or derived from documents or from any other source.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly what one would call concerned about the opinion of anyone who believes that there is no evidence for the existence when God even after the difference between “evidence” and “scientific evidence” has been pointed out to him. I am probably the least likely man on the planet to be moved by the arguments of anyone who genuinely believes Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are, and I quote, “great thinkers”. This is surely the very worst site on the Internet to make an appeal to Pharyngula and as for The Courtier’s Reply, it requires the sort of innumeracy and complete philosophical ignorance we have come to expect of butterfly collectorsbiologists to take it seriously. But I have absolutely no doubt that his maleducated and irrational views are the majority among atheists; that is precisely why I titled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”.

The thing that is so ridiculous about the definitionally challenged “no evidence” argument is that even third-rate minds like Dawkins know that it is hopelessly incorrect. The existence of testimonial and documentary evidence for God is the very reason Richard Dawkins wrote an essay arguing for the superiority of scientific evidence over eyewitness evidence in The Devil’s Chaplain, although scientific evidence is less valid in a court of law than eyewitness evidence and is rightly considered much less reliable than documentary evidence of the sort that the Bible represents.

Anyhow, I’m sure we all wish the PhD-to-be great success in his future career in the gastronomical service industry.

A tale of two problems

Unsurprisingly, Apple takes the fascistic approach to information about the iPhone’s quality problems:

Consumer Reports, the non-profit magazine, on Monday published a review online that stated it had tested three iPhone 4s in controlled settings and found that touching the lower left corner “can significantly degrade” the signal, causing dropped calls. Apple deleted references in several online discussions to the consumer group’s online posting, leading VentureBeat and investment blogs to pounce on what they described as censorship in the Apple-hosted forums. Apple declined to comment on the forum issue; it has previously intervened to eliminate records of criticism on other topics….

Apple had earlier fanned the flames by denying there was any reception problem. It originally said the real culprit was software that displayed a higher number of “bars” than appropriate, indicating greater signal strength than was warranted. Touching the left corner therefore showed a precipitous drop in connectivity instead of a minor pullback, Apple said, and it promised to fix the display issue with a software patch.

I can sympathize with Apple’s irritation in having to deal with this mess, but not their response. After shipping our new product, our customers discovered three hardware problems, which were primarily the result of the factory not following the design closely enough. Not our fault, but definitely our responsibility. We immediately reported these problems on our site and expect to be able to announce how we plan to resolve everything for our customers to their satisfaction by the end of this week.

Apple, on the other hand, prefers to obfuscate and deny. Perhaps that’s part of what makes them a great and successful company, but I don’t agree with that support strategy any more than I agree with their technofascist approach to design.

Lest you wonder

Why the business and economics coverage at The Atlantic is so abysmal. Megan McClueless, the “libertarian” who voted for Obama, tries another take on Game:

My off the cuff observation was a genuine one; this whole thing sounds like what girls used to do.  And in fact, at some level the PUAs have to know that it’s not really particularly manly.  Why do I think this?  Because if your girlfriend (however temporary) caught you mimicking Tom Cruise in front of the mirror, or spending your spare time trolling message boards for magic tricks to impress women with . . . well, would she be more enamored, or would she slither out of bed in disgust and start looking for her clothes?

I am not against people attempting to upgrade their social skills, nor am I horrified at the thought that “beta” males will somehow sneak into the gene pool; after all, I live in the city often called “Hollywood for Nerds”.  But the combination of artificiality, superficiality, and manipulation in the PUA manifestos makes it really hard not to snicker.

We have certainly reached a nadir of understanding when a method which was originally developed and is still primarily used to have sex with women is denigrated as unmanly.  And to appeal to a hypothetical girlfriend’s opinion is to miss the point entirely.  What horrifies McClueless is the idea that after 40+ years of relentless feminist indoctrination, the men of the West have shattered the pedestal of intrinsic female superiority that had been so painstakingly constructed.  Ironically, it takes the non-economist Roissy to explain the core of the matter to the credentialed economist.

The herculean efforts required of the vast majority of men to seduce women that strike McArdle as unseemly and calculating when compared to the relatively easy go of it women in their prime years have when setting about to seduce men is just a reflection of the biological inequality between the sexes in their value on the sexual market. Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, and all that. McArdle is mistaken to assume this disparity in degree of mating effort caused by intrinsic sex differences is proof of men’s venality or women’s nobility.

The CDC statistics indicate that the primary sociosexual problem is that 75% of the women are primarily attracted to only 10% of the men. There is little that can be done about the demand side since women like what they like, so the solution has to come from the supply side. This is in everyone’s interest, male and female alike, since an expansion of the supply of men who are attractive to women will have the effect of lowering the high price women are forced to pay for the privilege of receiving Alpha attention.

But McArdle’s inept critique is a helpful reminder of an important maxim. Never pay any attention to what a woman says about what attracts women. Pay attention to what she does. And more importantly, who she does.

Mr. One-term

In fairness, he probably wasn’t even eligible for that one-term anyhow:

Contrary to pretty much every projection until now, Democratic control of the Senate is also starting to coming into question. While Mr Obama’s approval ratings have continued to fall, and now hover at dangerously close to 40 per cent according an ABC-Washington Post poll published on Tuesday, the fate of his former colleagues in the Senate looks even worse.

In the past few days polls have shown Republican challengers taking the lead over previously safe Democratic incumbents, such as Barbara Boxer in California and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. Indeed, given the uniformly negative direction in the numbers, it is now quite possible the Republicans could win the Senate seats formerly held by both President Obama in Illinois, and Joe Biden, vice-president, in Delaware.

Add to that the continuing woes of Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic majority leader, in Nevada, where the Republican party’s recent nomination of Sharron Angle, a far-right and highly eccentric Tea Party supporter, appear to have had no positive effect on Mr Reid’s prospects, and the Grand Old party has a good shot at taking control of both houses of Congress. Worse for Mr Obama, political scientists say that at this stage in the calendar, there is almost nothing he can do about it.

Forget re-election, I don’t think Obama is even going to be on the ballot in 2012 regardless of whether Democrats lose the House or both the House and Senate. And this doesn’t have anything to do with various state efforts to force presidential candidates to prove their natural-born citizenship, I think that he’s going to face multiple challengers in the Democratic primary and end up withdrawing ala LBJ.

If you’re a Democratic politician, you have to be terrified right now. As bad as Obama has been for the country, he has been even worse for his political party. They’re facing a difficult choice between internecine insurrection and total obliteration in 2012.

Mailvox: catching up on history

BG asks about the Crusades:

I’ve been reading your blog, and comments, for years now, stealing countless hours of productivity from my employer. My brother-in-law, a younger man, who I don’t think is saved but is searching, just emailed me asking me to tell him about the Crusades. He said what information he has found so far has been confusing. I haven’t talked to him yet. He knows I know a lot, but I really haven’t studied the Crusades. Can you or one of the Ilk, please direct me to a good source? I don’t expect to take up your time, but any thoughts on the topic would also be greatly appreciated.

I would start with Stephen Runcimen’s three-volume History of the Crusades. I would then read John Julius Norwich’s three-volume history of Byzantium, which gives a solid background for the events that led up to the Crusades. What those ignorant of Byzantine history don’t understand – which is probably more than 95 percent of the people who bring up the Crusades in casual conversation – is that the Crusades were not an offensive campaign in any way, shape, or form, but rather a defensive one for which more than one desperate emperor of Byzantium had spent years pleading.

MN, on the other hand, has a pair of questions related to American history:

I’ve emailed you once before, and I just want to say thanks again for your blog and column. I’m 24 and I can honestly say that in the year or so since I started following your work, my critical thinking abilities have developed more than in the 12 years of public school and 4 of college combined.

Anyway, being that today is America’s Independence Day, I was thinking about its history, specifically the Civil War. I’m able to effectively rationalize most of my beliefs about it, but I am having trouble with a couple things that I hoped you might help with:

1. I believe I’ve recall you writing that had you been around in 1860, you would have fought for the South. I’m undecided on what I would’ve done. Certainly, the southern states’ sovereignty was being infringed and they had the right to defend it. However, how do you justify defending the institution of slavery? While I do not believe in human equality in any real sense, to my mind, the idea of slavery seems in blatant conflict with both the Declaration of Independence and the ‘Life, Liberty, and Property’ part of the 5th Amendment. I also believe that one of the few legitimate functions of our government is to uphold these basic rights, so in that sense, I can rationalize that perhaps the North was justified. The only counter I can come up with is that slaves were not considered citizens, and thus not afforded these rights.

2. I also believe you’ve called Lincoln the worst president in American history. Because he wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights and ended any notions of state sovereignty, I agree with you to a point. Its to a point because, from some things I’ve read, Lincoln’s plan had he lived was to ship all of the slaves back to Africa or the Caribbean as part of the reconstruction progress. In my opinion, this would absolutely have been the correct move, both at the time and in hindsight from 2010. If this is true, can you really call Lincoln the worst president ever, or were his violations of the Constitution too egregious to overcome? I can’t say that he’s worse than guys like FDR, Wilson, or Obama.

My answer to question one comes in two parts. First, as a libertarian, I would prefer an institution of voluntary private slavery to the present system of federal slavery that is in effect today. Either I own myself or another party does. If I am prevented from selling something, in this case my body, then it is obvious that I do not legally own it. Someone else does. In the present United States the government claims legal ownership of its citizens, as evidenced by the Selective Service Act and the income tax, so it is a little bizarre for present-day involuntary slaves of the state to posture about their opposition to historical involuntary private slavery. Note that the fact your owner has not elected to draft you is of no more significance to your legal and factual status as a slave to the state than the fact that the owner of a field slave in the 1800s did not require him to work in the fields on a particular day.

As to the second part, state sovereignty is not conditional. For good or ill, either it exists or it does not. Also, slavery could not possibly have been the primary issue inspiring secession due to the fact that four slave states remained in the Union. But regardless of whether or not slavery was the secondary or tertiary factor beyond the pre-war economic rape of the South by the North, that is totally irrelevant with regards to the question of whether a sovereign state had the right to secede from a voluntary union or not. The great evil of the Civil War and the irrelevance of slavery can be seen by the fact that the Union is no longer voluntary, but is imposed by force to this date even though private involuntary slavery is now a dead issue.

Regarding the second question, my opinion of Lincoln has absolutely nothing to do with his plans regarding the former slaves. The reason he is by far the worst president is because he murdered the American Republic and imposed the American Empire on the American people at a tremendous cost in American blood. He was America’s Caesar, and like Caesar, he received a fitting reward for his treasonous crime against his country.

UPDATE – In answer to the inevitable and illogical argument that the Southern States secession was all about slavery, consider the following analogy. Suppose you want to fly a flag, as permitted by the rules of your homeowner’s association, but the committee that runs the homeowner’s association suddenly decides they don’t want you to fly one. They show up at your house unannounced to inform you of their decision, then barge into your bedroom in order to confiscate any flags that they might find. If then you punch the head of the committee in the face, was your desire to fly a flag the cause?

Hmmm

Read this list of personal characteristics:

Witty, i.e. smart
Irreverent
Secure
Sadistic
Perceptive
Impulsive
Narcissistic
A natural at negging
Ridiculous in his peacocking
A terrible relationship prospect

Now, that list could have been compiled 15 years ago to describe me with the exception of the Peacocking and the Impulsive. Probably more smart than witty, more’s the pity, but there you go. Anyhow, based on how things turned out for Spacebunny and me, there just might be hope for Russell Brand maintaining a successful marriage. Or rather, there might have been were he not a Hollywood celebrity. I also think it’s interesting to note how his marital choice of Katy Perry, she of the execrable pop music and the evangelical Christian background, tends to underline the hierarchy of female attractiveness I explained a few days ago. Miss Perry’s expansive endowment notwithstanding, there is no way she is one-half as pretty as at least one-quarter of the girls to whom Mr. Brand has, in the immortal words of Lebronze, taken his talents.