Author: VD

Exploding government debt

Carlton has a nice series of charts providing a graphic representation of the rapid growth of U.S. debt over at the RGD blog:

Even more striking is the annual percentage change in the debt. Between 2002 and 2006 there is a surge in growth, presumably to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, peaking in 2003 at around 9%, but the growth begins to slow down again until 2008, when it surges over 11%, and then in 2009 it jumps to almost 19%.

Needless to say, the recent post-2007 surge is in direct contradiction to the 10% contraction in private debt that has taken place over the same period.

It’s never enough

Once more, a woman attempts to shame men into not responding rationally to consequences of female actions:

There is a message to be delivered to men, and it may not be popular. We hear a lot about the injustices visited on fathers over divorce and access: for the record, I am largely on their side and dislike the thoughtless and sentimental favouring of mothers in residency disputes. We also hear a bit about the flailing ineffectiveness of the former Child Support Agency. What we do not often hear is the bald, uncompromising truth that if you father a child, you set up a non-negotiable duty.

Sorry, men, but it really is so. We may live in a shag-happy porno culture, where flings and “hotties” and zipless one-nighters are seen as the norm; we may be liberal about divorce, stepfamilies and serial cohabitation. Some of this is good, some of it bad. But none of it negates biology, or the entry-level ethical fact that when a sexual act creates a human child, that child is as much of a moral burden to its father as to its mother. Unless it is a matter of sperm donation or formal adoption with a clear contract, the man has, at the very least, a duty to monitor the child’s physical safety.

This is absolutely and utterly false under the current legal regime. It is totally unconscionable to claim that men who have been forcibly stripped of their paternal rights by the unilateral decision of the mother supported by the anti-paternal legal system have any duty whatsoever to the children that have been taken away from them. If it is the man’s decision to leave the family, then yes, his paternal responsibilities remain intact. If he fathers a child unintentionally his paternal responsibilities remain, barring the commission of intentional fraud on the part of the mother.

But if his paternal responsibilities have been stripped from him by the unholy alliance of ex-spouse and state, if he has been threatened with the full force of the law if he so much as attempts to contact them without the permission of the mother, then the onus for the children’s well-being lies with those who have assumed the full responsibility for it. It is absurd to write, as this woman does, that “men who turn aside from this duty should be looked at askance, stigmatised as dishonest weaklings.” The fact is that men who do not turn aside from this “duty” under these circumstances and this system are doing nothing more than enabling it. The writer’s real agenda is revealed in this sentence.

“Most mothers do their best but some are weak, depressed, drugged, or just lovelorn and intimidated by violent boyfriends.”

In other words, it’s the same old line that is based upon the underlying assumption that because women are children who can’t be held responsible for their actions, every female failing must ultimately be blamed on men. Clearly the logical solution is beyond her, which is to stop permitting mothers to unilaterally exclude fathers from the lives of their children. The concept is really not that hard to understand. Assuming that one considers the rule of law to be legitimate, once a man has been stripped of his status as a father by other parties, he no longer has any paternal responsibilities. They have been assumed by the parties that stripped it from him.

Sexbots > rainbow-striped unicorns

This was the attempted rebuttal of one Roissy reader, presumably female, to his warning of sexbots on the technological horizon:

A sexbot won’t be your cook, cleaner, masseuse, secretary, arm candy, and public sex kinky bitch. She won’t be social with you, won’t laugh at your jokes, won’t adore you madly, and won’t make you feel alive and fulfilled.

Well, that should certainly end the silly notion that a Victoria’s Secret sexbot line might harbor some appeal to men. Everyone knows that romance has far more appeal to men than a combination of sex and cutting edge technology, right? One wonders if this individual has ever talked to a real man or woman.

I imagine more than a few men read that and immediately thought “On the other hand, she also won’t be my surrogate mother, thought police, social fuhrer, and ISO 9000 examiner. She won’t prefer TV to sex, won’t glare at me when I am insufficiently obedient to her momentary whims, won’t disrespect me, and won’t make me feel as if at any moment I am going to lose half of everything I have ever worked for.”

Some men are certainly fortunate enough to be married to beautiful women who love them and treat them well. However, I very much doubt that describes most men, especially the betas and gammas. And the simple fact is that men have no intention of trying to bitch, complain, and nag society into changing to accommodate their preferences, instead they are going to do what they always do and quietly go about finding a more acceptable solution. I’m just hoping that the technologists get those artifical wombs working before the sexbots are perfected, otherwise it is certain that it is the technophobic who will inherit the Earth.

There are very few equity investments I would advise making in this economy. AI-controlled sexbots, preferably with a solar-powered option, is definitely one of them.

RGD for $4.95

If you were interested in picking up a copy of The Return of the Great Depression but hadn’t gotten around to it for one reason or another, WND is offering it for only $4.95 today. A hardcover for what used to be a paperback price, not a bad deal.

There is no Labour, there is no Tory

David Cameron’s backtrack on the promised Lisbon referendum was more revealing and will arguably be more electorally self-destructive than George Bush’s disavowal of “Read my lips.”

it is interesting to see that the Conservative lead started to narrow shortly after the Tories reneged on a pledge to hold a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty in the event that they were to be elected…. Then there was the spectacle of Ken Clarke, the most Europhile senior Tory, being dispatched to meet with EU high-ups in Brussels.

It is now clear that the so-called Conservative party is totally useless, they’re nothing more than the centrist wing of the UK’s EU party. Those who wish to see the restoration of a strong and independent UK, or at least an independent and sovereign England, shouldn’t even consider voting Tory. In effect, there is no Labour, there is no Tory, there is no LDP, there is only the BNP on the left, the EU party in the center and UKIP on the right. As of now, those are the only relevant choices for UK voters, which comes down to voting UKIP or abstimmen auf Deutsch.

Ender’s scenario

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that I am a highly skilled gamer. I have been playing a variety of strategy, arcade, console, and computer games for nearly five times longer than Malcom Gladwell claims it takes to become unusually skilled at something. Now, I’m not a freakish game savant like Big Chilly, who has blown away even the most hard-core gamers away by playing through console games that he’s never played before without losing a single man. (Note: by hard-core, I don’t mean guys who like to play the occasional PS3 game online, but junior high friends who happen to be long-time editors at the one of the game industry’s leading magazines.) But if you give a me a shot or two at any given game, I can usually figure out the basic mechanics and figure out how to make effective use of them.

A teenage friend of ours once challenged me to a game of Maddens. He was in high school, was better than all his friends, and was utterly convinced that he would have no problem at all pwning the old guy. Not even a gentle pre-game reminder that I’d been playing Maddens since the original Genesis game dented his confidence. A 63-7 loss, on the other hand, just about had him in tears. Score one for the Original Gaming Generation!

Anyhow, Advanced Squad Leader is the Game of Games in my opinion. It occupies six shelves in my office, and while I’m not a rulesmeister or a member of the tournament elite, I can more than hold my own. I started playing Squad Leader and Cross of Iron by myself when I was ten, and over the years I never lost a single scenario at the monthly TCASL meetings, was well on the way to victory playing the Red Barricades campaign game as the Germans when we had to stop playing, won my beach in the two-day Normandy landings in Geneva, and have a ROAR record over .800. I now have the pleasure to be introducing a young commander to the game, and it’s wonderful to see the combination of interest, wonder, and awe at the vast horizon of possibilities that the game system contains.

We’ve started out with the excellent ASL Starter kit that MMP put together. I have to admit that I’d been a little annoyed by the switch to custom starter kit boards, since the first scenario I’d ever designed had been accepted for publication when the kit was going to make use of the standard boards. (It was a unique setup that involved the use of the Japanese counters against the Germans in a simulation of the 442nd’s rescue of the Lost Battalion.) But it’s really well-done, the abridged rules make for relatively easy reading, and the bite-sized scenarios are perfect for beginners. We started with scenario S1 Retaking Vierville, as you do, and my young apprentice chose the defending Americans with my encouragement since it’s usually a little easier on defense.

The image above showed how it finished. He was too cautious, as beginners usually are, and I took advantage of that to quickly grab the victory condition building hex L3. I didn’t give him time to react to that, and even briefly managed to punch two squads with an 8-1 leader into a second VC building, M4, before being broken and driven back by point-blank fire from three elite squads of 7-4-7 paratroopers. The key tactic was sending my reserve of two Fallschirmjager squads with a 9-1 leader to ambush the incoming American reinforcements coming from the north. They bounced back quickly from breaking thanks to their 9-2 leader, but it delayed their attack on the western edge long enough that not even repeated charges from a pair of HoB-created fanatic squads managed to drive all my second-line Grenadiers from L3.

He wasn’t bothered by the loss, as I’d warned him beforehand that it’s possible to play for a long time before you chalk up your first win, particularly if your only opponent is a very good player. We went on to play S2 War of the Rats, and again I had the attacking Germans. I thought his setup was much too exposed to the initial German prep fire, and expected that my death star under the command of the 9-2 leader would quickly blow a hole in the heart of his defense and allow me to hit the remnants from both sides after I rolled over his two conscript squads in the east and took the key VC L6 building with the 9-1 platoon. Things went exactly as I expected, the bulk of his forces were broken and my eastern platoon had L6 open for the taking when I made the mistake of deviating from the plan and advancing into close combat in the hex marked with the yellow-bordered red star in order to finish off the one remaining squad.

That was when he hit on a 1 in 36 chance and eliminated all three of my squads and my leader… and I blew my kill roll. That left me with no troops on the eastern side, which would permit him to regain control of all the buildings I’d just taken and force me to grab those buildings before his shock group of three 5-2-7 squads under a 9-2 showed up as randomly determined reinforcements. It looked pretty good for me, as they didn’t show up in turn four and I was rapidly rolling up his forces until two of my squads got locked in melee in the hex marked with a white-bordered red star with a half-squad in the process of taking control of the last Russian-controlled hex of building L6. Despite reinforcing the melee, I just couldn’t kill that conscript half-squad, which slowed me down enough so that I only had one squad in position to shoot at the reinforcements as they moved up hexrow O to claim VC building O6. I finally killed the half-squad and brought all my forces to bear on the shock group. I forced them out of O6, but my need to focus on the reinforcements allowed his broken 7-0 to rally a broken conscript squad in M2 and move in behind my forces to reclaim L6 and win the game.

Big Chilly plays ASL from time to time, so he knows how difficult it is to beat a more experienced player. He absolutely howled with laughter when he found out that my young apprentice not only wasn’t discouraged after playing his first two scenarios, but had actually beaten me without me pulling any punches. We discussed how his early decision to attack all three of my squads and leader at a 1-4 disadvantage instead of the more usual one-to-one attack had led to the timely snake-eyes looked like beginner’s luck, but concluded that it was actually the right decision to make given that 1 in 36 was probably better odds than you’d normally give a boy to beat a veteran ASL player.

“Did you give him the Balance?”

“No! I didn’t.”

“Good grief! He’s Ender!”

The next day, Ender and I set up S3 Simple Equation. Ender wanted to play the Americans despite being warned that it was a little more difficult being the attacker. And then he beat me again!

Mailvox: the implications of evolution

John C. Wright responds to the recent CNN report on religion, political tendencies, intelligence, and evolution that cited a 6-point average IQ advantage for liberal atheists:

I love how these ‘Just So’ stories always just so happen to flatter the person telling it. Just for the sake of contrast, I’d like to see an evolutionary sociobiologist
say something along the lines of: “Being an atheist, like being a sociopath, is a defective mutation of the genes human beings use to recognize meaning in life. Robbed of this basic faculty of human thought, atheists tend to retreat into paranoid fantasies of superiority, as if their inability to grasp reality were a result of greater, rather than lesser, intellectual activity.

“Consequently they tend to be bookish, and selfish, and to cut social ties to family and friends: but this crippling isolation and arrogance, ironically, allows some of them to score well on I.Q. tests, which do not, after all, measure those social skills that tribes of hunter-gatherers need to survive.

“The fact that no civilization and no tribe in the history of the world has been atheist, except for a very few malignant Twentieth Century regimes of unparalleled savagery and bloodshed, might indicate why atheism has had no positive influence on the philosophy, art, culture, law or advancement of civilization since the dawn of time. Natural selection culls this unfavorable mutation, and only in the
luxurious modern day, when science can keep alive even worthless and backward members of the bloodline, has it been possible to preserve a statistically significant moiety of this evolutionary dead end.

“Sufferers of what is now called ‘The Dawkins Syndrome’ are generally acknowledged to be harmless irritants in their host sociieties, but, as the cases of Russia and China make abundantly clear, when this dangerous ‘meme’ of self-centered defensive arrogance spreads to others, the result is genocidal levels of mass murder.”

There are several amusing aspects to this. First, I find it very funny indeed to see people whose IQs are more than thirty points lower than mine attempting to cite a six-point average IQ advantage as proof of their superior intelligence, and therefore, their belief systems as well. I’m impressed, to be sure, albeit not exactly in the way they intended. An appeal to authority is bad enough, but an appeal to average statistical advantage is insane.

Second, this appears to be confirmation of something I described in TIA. Atheists are going to be more intelligent than the average by literal self-definition. The ability to understand and identify with an abstract concept that departs from the norm requires some basic level of intelligence, which excludes many less intelligent and non-religious individuals who are by every meaningful definition atheists but do not self-identify as atheists. Libertarians, for example, would benefit from the same self-selecting mechanism. It is possible that the Kanagawa study corrected for this identification bias, but that is unlikely as I am unaware of any study of atheism and religion that has done so.

To me, the most interesting and counterintuitive discovery is the reported link between sexual exclusivity and male atheism. That surprised me, although I suppose it shouldn’t have if I had thought about it more. Now, one can’t read too much into this yet, since we don’t know what exactly what “sexual exclusivity” means, but it does tend to contradict what one would expect given the male atheist obsession with religious sexual restrictions. The hint is the divergence between male and female atheists, so my suspicion – and at this point it is nothing more than that – is that the Kanagawa report will provide some evidence of the link between atheism and social autism. The dichotomy between the theoretical sexual freedom of the male atheist provided by his belief system and his actual sexual limitations caused by his sub-standard attractiveness to women suggests that male atheists, on average, are more inclined to be gamma/omega males whose sexual options are more restricted than the norm. This hypothesis is supported by observing the consistently gamma behavior of male atheists on this site and around the Internet in general.

Mailvox: broken windows and the stimulus of WWII

CH asks about a common economic misconception:

I follow your columns so I thought you’d be able to answer this question for me, if you would. As you have stated, the Democrats are Keynesians and believe they can spend their way out of recession. Benanke cites the Great Depression as evidence of this. I know that FDR’s policies of spending didn’t lift us out of the Great Depression (they made it worse), but it is often noted that WWII did lift us out of said Depression. How can this be? How did that work? It seems to me that the militarization of our industries were funded by the Government. This put people to work and sent many to war equipped with the products of our industries and therefore operated as a large Government “stimulus”. I am trying to see Bernanke’s logic, if I am correct, that the spending the Government did to fund the war was what it took to get the economy going. This in effect is what the Dems are trying to reproduce by simply dumping money in the economy, putting people to work and creating a false demand, to bring us out of this recession. The war was true demand, sure, but wasn’t the war really a big fat stimulus? Government gave money to industries who put people to work, who paid taxes and spent money, allowing industry to produce more product, etc. I’m very confused how all this worked. Please set me straight!

First, let me note that it’s not only the Democrats who are Neo-Keynesians. Most Republican politicians are too; the monetarism of the Chicago School is little more than a Keynesian heresy that focuses on monetary policy and leaves fiscal policy out of the equation. Now, it is true that WWII helped lift the USA out of the Great Depression, but not for the reasons that the economically illiterate, historically clueless, and logically challenged usually cite. The stimulus involved in producing hundreds of thousands of ships, tanks, and airplanes and employing millions of men did not bring about the post-war economic recovery, it was the effective use of those men and materials in destroying the industrial infrastructure of Italy, Germany and Japan that did. While economists such as Henry Hazlitt and Thomas Sowell rightly cite Frederic Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy and point out that there is nothing productive or wealth-generating about turning steel into a rusting hulk on the bottom of the ocean, they forget that destroying an economic competitor’s industrial infrastructure at no cost to your own, then providing consumer goods and the means of rebuilding that infrastructure is very productive and wealth-generating indeed.

Let us call it Vox’s Addendum to Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy. Or, if you prefer, the Broken Window Martial Motive. Bastiat’s parable goes thusly:

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact, that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—”It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”

Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

If, however, the shopkeeper happens to live in the next town over, his window is broken, and the house belonging to his neighbor the second glazier is burned down with the second glazier inside it due to the vagaries of violent inter-village relations, the six francs the shopkeeper will spend on repairing his broken window will be six francs that did not previously circulate within the first town’s economy, and which the shopkeeper, living in the second town, was never going to spend on shoes or books produced in the first town. Therefore, it is a good thing to break windows, so long as the windows are broken in the neighboring town at a cost that is exceeded by the benefit to be gained from fixing them.

“In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented, [unless the accident happens to take place in the neighboring town. – VD]”

This means that while most wars are economically destructive, wars that offer the likely prospect of destroying the industrial base of one or more advanced economies without putting the nation’s own industrial base at risk are economically beneficial. By way of statistical evidence in support of this conclusion, note how the annual rate of commercial bank loan growth was much higher immediately after WWII – 25% in 1947 and 21.5% in 1950 – than it ever has been since.

In fairness, science bloggers are rather stupid

At least, the sort of science blogger I’ve encountered over the years, such as Myers, Brayton, and Orac, are. They have reliably proven to be narrowly educated, logic-challenged, emotionally incontinent individuals with reading comprehension problems and an astonishing ignorance of recorded history. They don’t seem to grasp that their paranoid “defense” of science against the hordes of creationists slavering to, well, put stickers on textbooks for fifth-graders who can barely manage to read or count to fiver doesn’t pass for science or its defense in the eyes of any rational observer. You’d think science bloggers would worry a lot more about the economy than stickers and school boards, but then, they’re economic illiterates too. But let the science journalists speak for themselves:

Today who is treated with the most skepticism by the general public? Science journalists and climate scientists. Even Big Pharmacy marketing departments who have found a golden egg in the vaccine industry have more trust among the public.

Ghosh went on to say something that I know resonated with everyone in the room. Journalists, he said, “do not defend science. Ask the awkward questions.”

So Ghosh does not blame bloggers for the demise of science journalism, he seeks to get them back on the right path and once again become the “trusted guides” they once were regarding complex climate issues. With him on the panel was Mariette DiChristina of “Scientific American”, who nodded at all the right places while he spoke, yet does not seem to realize that her magazine is a culprit along with the rest of them. “Scientific American” is not a trusted guide, it is more like a tour guide in Istanbul who takes you on a tour that will always end at his brother’s carpet store. And with that decrease in credibility has come a decrease in readership and jobs while a magazine like “The Scientist” still has high regard among scientists and casual science readers alike.

Kennedy had the most vitriol. He did not dislike all blogs, he said, he read blogs on environmental policy and politics – in other words, he was willing to settle for opinion and lack of expertise on matters outside the science field – he just couldn’t find a single one in science worth a darn. Only large newspapers and high end journals deserve to survive.

Of course, most of this is simply Old Professional Media bitching about the Uncontrollable Amateur Media. It’s still pretty funny, though, to see the editor-in-chief of Science ripping to shreds the very individuals who flatter themselves as being the brave guardians of science and secularism against the threat of a new religion-inspired Dark Ages.* “Not worth a darn” is a bit more generous than I would grant, but it’s certainly an apt description.

*I know. And you know. But they don’t, which tends to underline my point.

UPDATE – Ed Brayton underlines my point about science bloggers and their relative lack of intelligence in both his failure to understand the logical irrelevance of the question he wanted to ask Washington as well as his amusing inability to keep his story straight.

“As for your challenge to debate, I will consider it – if you can give a coherent answer to the following question”
– Ed Brayton, February 26

“Ellis Washington did not challenge me to a debate.”
– Ed Brayton, March 1

Yeah, I’m sure Ed is one FEARSOME debater. He’s probably doing the right thing by evading Washington, because even if Washington is a scientifically illiterate fool, that doesn’t mean that Brayton won’t shoot down his own argument without any help from Washington. And Ed, perhaps your own readers needed it spelled out for them, but everyone else understood that you didn’t believe anyone could answer your irrelevant question. That was kind of the point about how you’re using it avoid the risk of embarrassing yourself.

Which you’ve now managed to do anyhow. No wonder the real science journalists have almost as much contempt for your kind as I do.

I kind of want one

So, Markku, would you mind popping over and grabbing a pair?

“There are tanks all over the forest, abandoned,” an unnamed reporter on the video says. “If you need one, come and get it.” Locals in a nearby village said the tanks had been sitting there for almost four months covered in snow. The armoured vehicles were identified as a mixture of T-80 and T-72 battle tanks, the workhorses of the Russian army.

It’s a tough choice. But I’d have to go for the T-80 due to its superior mobility. It doesn’t get great gas mileage, but then, do you really care what gasoline costs when you’ve got a 125mm main armament in lieu of a credit card?