Author: VD

Beyond EPIC FAIL

This account of a debate between Thomas Woods and Tom McInerney, ING Chairman & CEO Insurance Americas, fairly well sums up the disastrous ignorance of the global financial elite. Keep in mind, the clueless wonder is an Econ major from Colgate with an MBA from Tuck:

The extent to which [McInerney], ING Chairman & CEO Insurance Americas was outmatched, though, was revealed in this almost embarrassingly funny episode. McInerney had mentioned that Bernanke was a diligent and knowledgeable student of the Great Depression. So, when it came time for the Q&A, one audience member asked Woods to briefly explain the Austrian view of Great Depression and how it might differ from Bernanke’s view. After Woods did this, McIerney took the stage, and as if he were about to unload a devastating blow against Woods, said to him, “this might seem like a bit of an attack. Don’t take it too personally.” And then…. he began to rant about … the relatively small size of the country of Austria. I kid you not.

Some audience members began to laugh; others cringed, as McInerney dug his hole deeper while under the illusion that he was unleashing a deadly zinger. Woods kept trying to stage whisper that Austria had nothing to do with the school of Austrian economics, but McInerney, undeterred, plowed on. Thus, when Woods took the stage he said, “this might seem like an attack, but don’t take it too personally…” And then Woods commented that we may as well say we shouldn’t listen to Milton Friedman, since the GDP of Chicago is pretty low.

And this sort of thing is just one of the many, many reasons that I’m deeply unimpressed with appeals to academic, professional, or scientific authority. Perhaps McInerney should have pleaded the Courtier’s Reply as it’s almost, though not quite, as deeply stupid as his soliloquy on the Austrian economy.

And it gets worse. Thomas Woods comments: “Of course people are right to observe that relatively few people get exposed to Austrian economics. The point here is that I had just finished a 40-minute presentation on the subject.”

No wonder McInerney’s company needed a bailout. I have little doubt it will soon need another one.

Dawkins, the historical dimwit

Someone really needs to tell the old coot to stop babbling about anything but biology and atheism. As I demonstrated in TIA, the man simply doesn’t know a damn thing about history:

HH: Well, you repeatedly use the analogy of a detective at a crime scene throughout The Greatest Show On Earth. But detectives simply can’t dismiss evidence they don’t want to see. There’s a lot of evidence for the miracles, in terms of eyewitness…

RD: No, there isn’t. What there is, is written stories which were written decades after the alleged events were supposed to happen. No historian would take that seriously.

HH: Well, that’s why I’m conflicted, because in your book, you talk about the Latin teacher who is stymied at every turn, and yet Latin teachers routinely rely on things like Tacitus and Pliny, and histories that were written centuries after the events in which they are recording occur.

RD: There’s massive archaeological evidence, there’s massive evidence of all kinds. It’s just not comparable. No…if you talk to any ancient historian of the period, they will agree that it is not good historical evidence.

HH: Oh, that’s simply not true. Dr. Mark Roberts, double PhD in undergraduate at Harvard has written a very persuasive book upon this. I mean, that’s an astounding statement. Are you unfamiliar with him?

RD: All right, then there may be some, but a very large number of ancient historians would say…

HH: Well, you just said there were none. So there are some that you are choosing not to confront.

RD: You sound like a lawyer.

HH: I am a lawyer.

RD: Oh, for God’s sake. Are you? Okay. I didn’t know that. All right. I will accept that there are some ancient historians who take the Gospels seriously. But they were written decades after the events that happened, and they were written by people with an axe to grind, written by disciples. There are no eyewitness written accounts. The earliest New Testament…

HH: I understand you believe that, Professor. I do. But what I don’t understand is how you can use the analogy of the Latin teacher or the detective, when it breaks down given your dismissal of evidence you don’t see fit to deal with squarely?

RD: I think that’s a very, very specious comparison, because the Latin teacher is dealing with enormous numbers of documents. Remember, my Latin teacher is supposed to be confronted with skeptics who don’t even think the Latin language was ever spoken. And there’s huge amounts of documentary evidence of the Roman Empire. We’re talking about the entire Roman Empire here. There’s enormous amounts of eyewitness accounts written down at the time. It just is no comparison.

HH: Actually, it is. It’s actually a very persuasive…in fact, the arguments for the manuscript evidence of Christ and His doings is much stronger than anything, for example, Tacitus or Pliny wrote. It’s just much stronger

It’s probably just as well that Dawkins hides from debate because he’s completely incompetent. Hugh Hewitt is far from a master debater in my opinion, and yet he caught Dawkins making blatantly false statements about history and historians, forced him to drastically change his definition of evidence from the one he utilizes in his books – the “enormous amount of eyewitness accounts” is a hilarious remark if you’re familiar with his previous statements about the value of eyewitnesses – and encouraged him to make an appeal to documentary evidence that was a sharp dagger in the hearts of dictionary-challenged atheists across the Internet. And notice that while Hewitt can name a specific historian in support of his position, Dawkins doesn’t… because he can’t. Just all… er, ah, lots.

Now, understand that no sane historian or archeologist rejects the Bible as historical evidence. At most, they reject specific details… rejections which archeological history indicates that they will probably be forced to eventually recant. Among other things, the Bible is one of the primary sources for calibrating the Egyptian Chronology – ironically, it turns out, as anyone familiar with Rohl’s New Chronology will know – and it has repeatedly shown itself to be more accurate than the dynamic archeological consensus. From the “mythical” Assyrian empire to Roman tax rolls and titles of Greek officials, the Bible has consistently shown itself to be an extraordinarily reliable historical document. Were it not for the supernatural elements that material reductionist scientists find impossible to believe, no one would even think to question it.

“The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phrases of which still appear periodically, has been progressively discredited. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history.”
– William F. Albright

Richard Dawkins continues to keep digging himself in deeper. By the time he discovers just how completely wrong he was, he will have destroyed the greater part of his scientific legacy.

A minor, but legitimate intervention

Actually, far more of this sort of thing is in order:

The Obama administration plans to order companies that received huge U.S. government bailouts last year to sharply cut the compensation of their highest paid executives, according to a person familiar with the decision. The seven companies that received the most assistance will have to cut the annual salaries of their 25 highest-paid executive by an average of about 90 percent from last year, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not been announced. This person said Wednesday that the Treasury Department will announce the deep pay cuts within the next few days.

Look very closely at any commentator, so-called conservative or otherwise, who complains about this action by the White House being somehow “anti-capitalist”. If he was also a supporter of the bailouts last November, you should never, ever, consider taking him seriously again, because he’s either an untrustoworthy hypocrite or he’s too dumb to even realize his inconsistency. Once the government stepped in to socialize a corporation’s losses, that corporation lost the right to privatize its profits or even manage itself independently. From an economic perspective, the only thing more disastrous than a pure socialist system where both profits and losses are public is a fascist system where profits are private and losses are public.

No doubt this is merely a token act meant to discharge the growing public fury with Goldman and the other giant vampire squidsfinancial institutions. If Obama was serious, he’d announce a retroactive 95 percent tax on all bonuses paid in 2008 or later at institutions that received government assistance since August 2008 and accept Paul Volcker’s advice to beginning breaking up the big banks. Of course, what he should actually do is force the banks to mark the values of their assets to market, obey the law and have the FDIC initiate Prompt Corrective Actions as they are legally bound to do, and shut down every big bank that is insolvent. But he’s neither smart enough to understand the need to do this nor courageous enough to do so in the face of opposition from the influential vampire squidsfinancial institutions. And so the debt spiral continues….

A lefty contemplates his banishment

For the moral crime of questioning aspects of the AGW/CC charade:

For better or worse I have a much better sense of how the liberal slime machine works in practice, having been inside now a bit. This is all the more ironic because I consider myself to be cut from a similar political cloth to many of those who are engaged in all out war against me. Here are a few reflections.

Here is how it works. The really giant fish — public intellectuals like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman — confer authority on the big fish of the liberal blogosphere. They do so by applauding the work of the big fish and saying that they trust them. This is a useful exchange because the big fish amplify the writings of the giant fish in the blogosphere and do the dirty work of taking down their political opponents by playing some gutter politics that the giant fish would rather not be seen playing. This has the effect of establishing the big fish as people to be listened to, not because they are necessarily right about things, but because the giant fish listen to them and the giant fish set political agendas…. The giant fish then get plausible deniability from engaging in what might seem to be less-than ethical behavior, the big fish get the ego-strokes of acknowledgment from the giant fish and the occasional top-line billing among favorable-leaning media. Similarly the minnows get to parlay inexpertise into a small role in the politics of personal destruction, and are cited by the big fish, but never by the media or the giants, which would be unbecoming.

On a tangential note, I always find it a little peculiar how often an item is published by WND, or occasionally, even posted on my blog, and then shows, completely unattributed, on one of the more nominally mainstream sites. I think Steve Sailer is probably the most surreptitiously cited but least-quoted writer on the right.

Anyhow, it shouldn’t surprise the professor that the left relies so heavily on personal attacks and appeals to authority. First, they’re authoritarians. Second, they certainly aren’t going to argue the science on the subject, because none of it supports their position. And third, if they were informed and capable of arguing logic, they wouldn’t be leftists in the first place.

The facade crumbles

The era of Fed extend-and-pretend appears to be fast approaching an end:

On Monday the Federal Reserve held a major reverse repo test, as was announced by the NY Fed and by Zero Hedge. We have subsequently received several unconfirmed reports that the conducted test has been a disaster (we have calls into the Federal Reserve to confirm or deny this, we are eagerly awaiting their reply).

In related news, Karl Denninger reports that JP Morgan/Chase is down to only $21 billion in actual cash. But don’t worry, they have lots of other assets… unfortunately, most of them are the sort that keep showing up at only 50 percent valuations whenever a bank is seized by the FDIC. All of the professional economists have been saying that the crisis is over for months now. I, on the other hand, don’t think that the next stage has even begun yet. But surely all the experts can’t be wrong… again!

Of might and right

One of the tangential topics that has come up in relation to yesterday’s discussion of the mistitled and oft-misapplied Euthyphro Dilemma is the question of whether the concept “God’s Game, God’s Rules” is equivalent to declaring that “might makes right”. Setting aside the obvious and unproven assumption that might inherently does not make right, I think it is quite easy to demonstrate that the authority of the Creator God to establish a code of rules that make up human morality does not derive from His might, however great that might be, but rather from His act of creation.

Consider, for example, the National Football League. The NFL organization owns and creates the rules of the game, by which the players on the field are expected to abide. Now, the NFL certainly possesses greater might than any one player and arguably even more than all the players combined. But, the NFL is significantly less mighty than, just to pick one example, the People’s Liberation Army. Now, no one disputes the right of the NFL to change the rules so that the penalty for offsides is fifteen yards instead of five, even if we think the change is a ridiculous one. But is this right determined by the NFL’s might? I don’t think so.

Why not? Because if the right to determine the rules was simply a matter of might, then it would be entirely proper for the PLA, which already owns vast quantities of corporations around the world, to land a division in Manhattan, forcibly seize the NFL offices and unilaterally declare a change to the offsides penalty. There would be no rational justification for complaining about this action, except of course for the same objections to the desirability of the rule change that would have applied in the previous scenario. So, unless you are willing to accede to the right of the PLA to change the NFL rules on the basis of its might, it is obvious that there must be a significant distinction between creative ownership making right and might making right, even if might is a necessary component of the original creation.

I also think it is relevant to point out that one cannot reasonably subject the NFL to its own rules. I am certainly unaware of any sitting commissioner ever being penalized for holding or pass interference.

RGD: the second review

Chad the Elder of the Fraters Libertas reviews RGD:

Let me start by passing on a shocking piece of information: Vox Day is not an economist. That may lead some to discount his views on matters economic, but in this case it proves to be beneficial. He approaches the subject as an outsider and is not wedded to any particular school of economic theory from his background. This allows him to be rather dispassionate in his analysis and also forces him to be more vigorous in his research since he doesn’t come into it with a great deal of experience.

It also makes The Return of the Great Depression a more understandable and entertaining read than your average economic tome. That’s not to say its been dumbed down or overly simplified. Vox takes on some rather weighty and complicated economic topics. But, as he previously did in The Irrational Atheist, he does so in his own unique voice (Vox’s vox?). Even while explaining the inner workings of the money supply or the components that make up GDP, he maintains his straight-shooting style infused with the mix of cynicism and sarcastic humor that readers of his blog have come to expect.

I have to admit, after the complete, utter, and admitted failure of mainstream economics to foresee or forestall the present crisis, or to present potential solutions beyond increasing the amount of debt-funded spending, I would think that not being a credentialed economist would be seen as a strength rather than a weakness these days. If the basic theory is bad, learning more sophisticated ways of playing with it is not going to help you understand anything.

In which an epidemic of pain is foreseen

Among the 18-24 black t-shirt wearing crowd. These new guidelinescould add billions to the cost of health care reform:

Federal drug agents won’t pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration. Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.

It’s hardly full legalization, but the Obama administration is taking one tiny step in the right direction. One must give credit where credit is due.

You don’t know Euthyphro

I’ll be addressing Luke’s fourth letter in a day or three, but in the meantime, I couldn’t possibly let this very funny comment by drj pass unremarked. As I pointed out in TIA, half-educated atheists often like to resort to the Euthyphro Dilemma, but because they haven’t actually read Plato, they have absolutely no idea that the argument doesn’t merely fail due to moral arbitrariness or because of its intrinsic inapplicability to a non-polytheistic concept of the divine, it first fails on the basis of a dishonest, logically invalid, and admitted modification of an integral definition by Socrates.

What’s funny is… the Euthyphro dilemma is supposed to work on people like Vox. Its supposed to confront them with a reductio ad absurdum – that it should to be absurd to think morality is arbitrary, evils are actually goods when commanded by the right being, and that all statements about the goodness of God become meaningless. What can you do though, when one simply fails to recognize the “absurdum”, in reductio ad absurdum?

Drj clearly doesn’t realize there is no absurdum to be recognized because the attempt to reduce the argument to the required tautology falls apart before it is completed. Any time you encounter someone appealing to Euthyphro in a discussion of religion or morality, you can be very confident that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. See TIA pp 291-300.

RGD: reviews

Right Condition reviews The Return of the Great Depression:

Once in a while, a book comes along that shakes so many of your core beliefs that you are left questioning either the integrity of what you have read or your own knowledge. In this particular case, I had the privilege of a sneak peek at The Return of the Great Depression by Vox Day and with most certainty can state, it is the latter. RGD as it shall be referred to from now on, as can be inferred from its title makes a very compelling case as to the state of our economy and where this nation is potentially headed. However do not be misled by its name, for this is much more than a prophecy, it is principally and foremost an economic text diligently spending the majority of its efforts in explaining why we are standing on the edge of a precipice.

Chad the Elder of the Fraters Libertas reviews RGD:

Let me start by passing on a shocking piece of information: Vox Day is not an economist. That may lead some to discount his views on matters economic, but in this case it proves to be beneficial. He approaches the subject as an outsider and is not wedded to any particular school of economic theory from his background. This allows him to be rather dispassionate in his analysis and also forces him to be more vigorous in his research since he doesn’t come into it with a great deal of experience.

It also makes The Return of the Great Depression a more understandable and entertaining read than your average economic tome. That’s not to say its been dumbed down or overly simplified. Vox takes on some rather weighty and complicated economic topics…. if you want to read an informative, thoughtful, and even sometimes entertaining book on the current economic situation, you can’t go wrong with The Return of the Great Depression.