Author: VD

When you hand over control, you hand over control, and there’s not much point about crying over the fact that you lost it later:

Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money. The government insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic….

After 35 years in America, I never thought I would see this. I still can’t quite believe we will sit by as this crisis is used to hand control of our economy over to government. But here we are, on the brink. Clearly, I have been naive.

The Bush administration bluffed the banks and Obama is taking advantage of it. This is how the expansion of government in a two-party system usually works! It’s the Counterpush principle, the Nixon-to-China concept. The party which is supposedly against something is used to punch a hole through the wall of popular opinion, then the other party exploits the breach.

Grow and Die

“Grow or die” is one of the corporate mantras of the late 20th century. The peculiar shape that corporations now take, courtesy of the perversion of capitalism that is modern finance-driven corporatism, requires constant growth. Rather like great white sharks, which must keep swimming to avoid suffocation, modern corporations have had to keep growing to avoid seeing their stock prices punished by an increasingly avaricious Wall Street.

From 1948 to 1985, the financial sector accounted for around 12 percent of American corporate profits, never reaching 20 percent nor dipping below 5 percent. After 1985, however, the profits of the sector rose dramatically, going from 19 percent in 1986 to 41 percent in 2000. That meant that more than 40 cents out of every corporate dollar of profit was paper profit, not generated by actual wealth-generating activity, but by monetary inflation and corporate gambling….

The chancellor admits his error and pushes the date of anticipated economic recovery further into the future:

THE chancellor, Alistair Darling, has admitted that he and his Treasury officials got it wrong over the length and severity of the recession and that he will be forced to tear up his economic predictions…. “I thought we would see growth in the second part of the year,” he said. However, the chancellor now thinks any recovery will come later: “I think it will be the back end, turn of the year time, before we start seeing growth here.”

I anticipated this, as you may recall, last October: “Increasing government spending to escape a recession? Now, there’s a new concept! Considering that Darling’s brilliant plan has literally been textbook macroeconomics for the past five decades, what are the chances that this is somehow going to fail? Infinity to one against or Infinity squared to one?“

As an encore, I’m going to go out on a massive limb and predict that Jim Cramer is completely incorrect in declaring, on April 2, 2009, that the depression is over and a new bull run is commencing:

Throughout that day, the “Mad Money” host told viewers of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” CNBC’s “Street Signs” and finally on his own program that the Depression was over and that we were on the verge of a bull run for the financial markets. “We have reached the land of a thousand bull dances – phoney maroney, why? Because the market swallowed its Prozac,” Cramer said on CNBC’s “Mad Money” April 2. “And right now, right here on this show – I am announcing the Depression over!”

There will probably be a nice bear market rally. I correctly anticipated the first leg of it a few weeks ago when I told the shorts to get out. But, sometime during 2010, Cramer is going to be eating mega-crow about this absurd announcement.

Fortunately for Hitchens, if not his credibility, it’s only metaphorical this time:

The debate went exactly as I expected. Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child. Perhaps Hitchens realized how bad things were for him after Craig’s opening speech, as even Hitchens’ rhetorical flourishes were not as confident as usual. Hitchens wasted his cross-examination time with questions like, “If a baby was born in Palestine, would you rather it be a Muslim baby or an atheist baby?” He did not even bother to give his concluding remarks, ceding the time instead to Q&A.

That summary, by the way, was not provided by an evangelical Christian, but an atheist blogger known as Common Sense Atheism. He wasn’t the only one, as John Loftus of Debunking Christianity even predicted that Hitchens would get his head handed to him. A similar summary of the debate by a Christian in the audience can be found here. As is so often the case when the theist knows how to take the offensive, the atheist barely even attempts to defend himself against straightforward attacks on his arguments, but instead attempts to evade them because he simply doesn’t have any defense to offer.

Doug Geivett’s concise summary of Hitchens’s performance should suffice to finish him as a serious disputant on the subject: “While Hitchens did make arguments, they were largely unfocused, sometimes disconnected, and often irrelevant.” The honest observer of any creed, or lack of creed, will note that this could serve equally well as a description of the man’s book on the subject.

Skepdude apparently lacks a dictionary:

First, I would like to see what evidence he is referring to when he says that “all of the available evidence demonstrates rather conclusively that the objects of their ridicule are, as a point of fact, rather more intelligent”, because I suspect he’s using a very unorthodox definition of evidence here.

Logical and empirical evidence. Or, to be more specific, logical, documentary and statistical evidence. Let us consider the most readily available example: Since I am known to possess, at a bare minimum, a Mensa-required +2SD IQ, it is obvious that most of my atheist critics are statistically bound to fall well short of that not-terribly-impressive level. In further support of this observation, I have seen many run-of-the-mill atheists, the vast majority of whom use logic and grammar in such a manner as to indicate a moderate-to-average level of intelligence, describing individuals such as Alister McGrath, Dinesh D’Souza, and me as if we are uniformly possessed of a sub-standard level of intelligence. (It is, of course, amusing to see an atheist suggest that I might elect to make use of an unorthodox definition of evidence, when almost every single atheist claim that “there is no evidence for God’s existence” requires ignoring the standard definitions of evidence provided by every English language dictionary from American Standard to Webster as well as the definitions used in the American legal system.) I could point to dozens of these spurious accusations of stupidity on Scienceblogs alone, but it is perhaps more usefully ironic to note that a prime example of what I am describing can be found right there in the first comment on Skepdude’s post.

Amusing, but inconsequential. Skepdude’s much more serious error follows, however, when he writes:

Bit hypocritital no? First he says that our primary form of “debate” is calling people stupid, which of course must be wrong, then he turns around and presents his argument/debate which basically amounts to nothing more than calling us fools. Now, I’m nothing but a mere run of the mill internet atheist, who is mentally inferior as demonstrated by all the available evidence, but this sort of reasoning sounds a little….well…..stupidfoolish to me!

This is precisely the same sort of thing we have seen so often before. Call it the First Law Fandango. Because Skepdude possesses an above-average intelligence, he assumes that because he does not understand what an individual of superior intelligence has written, that individual and/or his reasoning must be stupid, foolish, hypocritical, etc. But there is a basic logical flaw in his errant attempt to find hypocrisy here, because it is eminently obvious – based on the readily available documentary evidence – that a single reference to a well-known Bible verse is neither a) an argument, nor b) my primary form of debate. So, no, not in the least bit hypocritical.

Shall we pull out the telestrator? Very well. Even if I had been making an argument there in the second of those two sentences – which I was not, I was merely offering scriptural support for my assertion that atheism has been around for a very long time and will probably always exist so long as there is conceptual space for it – a single argument does not dictate any specific form of debate, much less define my primary form of debate. In fact, a keen observer might even be able to detect that my primary form of debate is to read the other side’s material, point out the verifiable errors that were made in that material, and then show how those errors render the other side’s conclusions unviable. Then, use the demonstrable fact of those errors and that unviability to justify all sorts of terrible intellectual abuse. The main variant, of course, is to begin with the abuse, then demonstrate why the abuse is fully justified.

There is rather a great deal of evidence showing this to be my primary form of debate; there is at least a book full of it. However, we know that most atheists reject both documentary and testimonial evidence out of hand, which leads one to wonder what sort of scientific evidence could be sufficient to prove my hypocrisy or lack of it to Skepdude… and upon what he could possibly attempt to base an actual argument in support of his implication. At times, I seriously begin to wonder if the most useful definition of atheism is “epistemological incoherence”.

When one attempts to forcibly remake society, it’s almost impossible to guess how the Law of Unintended Consequences is going to cause things to go awry. But it will always strike somehow:

These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.

I don’t have much that’s positive to say about the Chinese Communists. But I rather doubt that they anticipated, or desired, mass kidnappings as a result of their literally inhuman One Child policy. Since we’ve already seen some bizarre behavior of this type in the West, particularly among women, it will be interesting to see if children become more of a commodity as they become less common outside the religious communities.

It seems Mr. Teleprompter must have missed the flight:

Barack Obama, the World’s Greatest Orator (™all news organisations), didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson asked him a question about who was to blame for the financial crisis. Normally word perfect, Obama ummed, ahed and waffled for the best part of two and a half minutes.

It’s not exactly a mystery. As I’ve shown before, the man doesn’t possess a superior intelligence and he is almost completely unable to speak coherently unless he’s reading. Notice how much Obama laughs when he’s interviewed… he uses it as a means of covering up the fact that he cannot construct complete sentences on the fly.

Seriously, who is still babbling things like this by the time they reach the END of a statement: “I’m a great believer in looking forwards than looking backwards.” Did the newspaper blow the transcript or is this some sort of presidential ebonics?

Earlier this week, I had the excellent fortune to run into a friend I met last year. I don’t use the word “amazing” very often, but he is a genuinely amazing pianist. It’s not that he did things with the piano I hadn’t seen before, it’s that he did things I’d never even heard of before. Yesterday evening he put on a performance, at least part of which I know was impromptu, that was musically spectacular.

To describe the man as talented doesn’t half do him justice, and ironically, unlike many individuals who aren’t anywhere nearly as gifted, he’s an intelligent and personable guy who is remarkably down to earth. I highly recommend checking out his music if you happen to have any appreciation for the piano.

When your economic model fails again and your economy is once more on the verge of collapse, what’s the solution? Do the same thing but big it up!

World leaders on Thursday heralded the G20 summit as the day the world “fought back against the recession” as they put on a show of unity that lifted global markets and mapped out a new future for financial regulation. Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, host of the summit, said the meeting marked the emergence of a “new world order”, as he unveiled what leaders claimed was a $1,100bn package of measures to tackle the global downturn, including support for lower income countries and a $250bn plan to boost the international money supply.

There’s a pattern at work here. After the 1987 Asian currency fiasco nearly sunk Wall Street, the Fed managed to inflate the tech equity bubble. When that blew up in 2000, they used the martial response to 9/11 and the housing bubble to reinflate. Now, since their usual national tools have failed, they’re attempting to throw the combined weight of the G20’s resources at the problem, based on the same precisely the same set of assumptions that have repeatedly made the problem worse!

This action doesn’t “save the world”, in fact, it makes it much more likely that what was mostly an American depression from 1929 to 1940 will be repeated on a scope that is an order of magnitude larger. If we’re unfortunate, it will also be on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger as well.

The fundamental problem isn’t a lack of resources, it is a misallocation of resources. Giving GM more money isn’t going to cause more people to want to buy GM cars, it merely postpones the inevitable collapse and increases its economic and social costs. And don’t forget what happened the last time the media announced the world’s salvation… in February 1999.

PZ Myers provides amusement by worrying about the economic crisis harming America’s “intellectual infrastructure”:

One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective.

But where is the evidence that America’s universities are its intellectual infrastructure? It’s a self-serving assumption, and a problematic one when considered in a realistic light. The comments are an absolute gold mine of comedy – to which I have referred before – as the hard scientists begin by beating up on the humanities and the fake sciences until eventually both sides join hands, sing Kumbaya, and reach a general agreement that Womyns’ Studies and Postmodern Philosophy are just as important as Biology and Physics and that every academic discipline should be lavishly funded by the taxpayers.

However, the Pharyngulans are confusing theory with reality here, as they discuss what the liberal arts are theoretically supposed to be as opposed to what they actually are at an American university. This is ironic, as their community is one of the foremost examples of how an American university system does not teach one how to think ; indeed, it does precisely the opposite as one will not find a less thoughtful, more dogmatic individual than the average American academic.

And, as others have noticed, it’s becoming evident that the best and brightest coming out of America’s most elite universities are actively contributing to America’s economic demise. There is arguably a stronger case for shutting down the universities entirely than there is for not reducing their funding; paying to obtain a piece of paper calling itself a university degree is no longer tantamount to obtaining what passes for an education. From politics and business to economics and the liberal arts, the American university system has been a massive failure.

““It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Angel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. “We can look the other way, but come on. The chief executive officers of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”