Author: VD

Some readers didn’t understand why I included two chapters dealing with science in TIA. This endorsement of Obama should suffice to explain their relevance to those who didn’t grasp the connection between science fetishism and the New Atheists. Read it and see if you don’t agree that each and every individual who endorses it should be stripped of their science degrees and their intellectual pretensions:

Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.

Science, is there anything it can’t do? It sounds amazingly like the parody of the Corinthians-style ode to science I pointed out in the chapter entitled “Darwin’s Judas”. Even more amazing, these fetishists truly don’t see how they have made a quasi-religion of the object of their adoration. On a closely related note, one of our more thoughtful critics, Dominic Saltarelli, emailed me yesterday:

While I’m sure there’s plenty for us to disagree on in other matters, I just took a swim in some “secular, liberal, progressive” waters, and am still washing the sewage off. I tried talking a little sense into them regarding economics, because this is a crowd that sees the current economic situation as a fundamental failure of capitalism. So I tried injecting some facts into the discourse

It was like hitting vampires with sunlight. The venom some of these people resorted to in defense of just a damn economic model was, disheartening, to say the least. Having had this experience, whenever some refers to “Atheism as a religion” or to an “atheistic religion”, I think I know exactly what they’re talking about now, and it isn’t pretty nor something I wish to be associated with.

Just wanted to let you know, that I feel your pain.

He does indeed. Science fetishists, economically vacuuous secularists, liberal progressives… they’re not precisely the same, but there’s certainly a significant amount of overlap. And in each and every case, there is a near complete inability to apply even the most rudimentary logic to the subject at hand as well as an intense, emotional reaction to having their ignorance punctured with the verifiable facts.

And all of this is setting aside the obvious absurdity of the idea that the scientific socialist Obama could possibly be a champion of Reason and Science.

Delaware provides proof that suspicions of the obvious were well-merited:

Delaware State Police stopped Alvina Vansickle from purchasing a .22-caliber pistol for self-defense because she was too old and a woman, said Superintendent Col. Thomas MacLeish. The outrage that followed led to the revelation that Delaware State Police had been keeping lists of gun buyers for years; state law requires them to destroy these records after 60 days.

Did anyone seriously believe that they weren’t going to keep those records? Does anyone seriously believe that they aren’t going to use those records for the purposes of confiscation the first time they think they can get away with it?

If these polls are historically accurate, then Obama is going down in flames next Tuesday:

TRICK OR TREAT: GALLUP SAYS OBAMA +2

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows Barack Obama attracting 50% of the vote nationwide while John McCain earns 47%.

The state-by-state is the important count, of course, but state polls tend to lag the national ones by a few weeks. Always shift the polls by five percent to account for the pollsters’ pro-Democratic interpretations. And remember, “enthusiastic young voters” tend to talk about voting a lot more than they vote.

UPDATE – As I said: “Analysts have predicted that new voters, young voters and Hispanic voters will turn out in record numbers in this election. But as Nevadans continue to flock to the polls, turnout among those three groups is lagging, at least in the early going. While turnout statewide was nearly 25 percent through Sunday, it was just 20 percent among Hispanic voters, 14 percent among voters under 30 and 15 percent among those who didn’t vote in the last three elections, according to an analysis of state early voting records through Sunday prepared by America Votes, an organization that works to mobilize voters.”

Spacebunny alerts us to a musical development that actually makes band camp geeks look cool and sexy by comparison. As for me, I can’t help but admire the way in which they embrace the ethos.

I await with great amusement the explanations of how your band camp or marching band was actually the height of your high school’s social pyramid.

I haven’t been very posty today, mostly because I’ve been looking into what may – and I do stress the word “may” – be one of the most shameless attempted ripoffs in the game industry that I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying something, if you know some of the companies with which I’ve worked in the past.

Anyhow, a few of the facts are yet unclear so I won’t say anything more about it now, although all the news is actually out there on the Net so theoretically it might just barely be possible to figure out what I’m alluding to here. So, If you’re bored or need a break from Rothbard, do feel free to take a few wild stabs at it.

UPDATE – Upon further review, everything is kosher. No ripoff, no problem. More on this in a few months.

The real Dr. Doom, not the Iranian wannabee:

swissinfo: How does the present crisis differ from previous ones?

M.F.: In the past few years everything went up – shares, commodities, consumer goods, real estate values, art and even bonds. Such a combination is extremely unusual. We saw the biggest investment bubble in the history of humanity. The current situation is possibly worse than the global economic crisis of 1929. And that is thanks to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke [the former and current US Federal Reserve Board chairmen]. These two gentlemen must account for massive errors.
swissinfo: Governments are offering guarantees and are pumping thousands of billions into the markets. Is that a mistake?

M.F.: Yes. The losses are there and someone has to bear them. There are two possibilities. Banks go under and the stakeholders are left with nothing, as is the case with Lehman Brothers, or governments pump money into the financial system so that the incompetent financial clowns in Bahnhofstrasse [Zurich’s financial centre] and Wall Street can continue to eat in fancy restaurants.

I am clearly in favour of the first because the consequences of these state interventions are massive budget deficits. To finance these, governments have to acquire money. For that they have to borrow money, which makes state debt and interest payments soar. US economists have come to the conclusion from the trends that there will be a US state bankruptcy.

Don’t get too excited about the coming bear rally that should be kicking off soon. It doesn’t mean that anything is over, it’s just the usual down-up-down business.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to start turning those pages. Today, Voxiversity II kicks off with our group study of America’s Great Depression by Murray Rothbard. You can download the entire book on PDF or bookmark the online text at the Mises Institute. However, Voxiversity I participants tended to find having the physical text on hand to be helpful, so you may wish to consider ordering the book from the Mises bookstore if you haven’t done so already.

Let me know if you’re planning to participate so I can keep a rough count of how many start and how many finish. Last time, we had about 100 start Thucydides and about a third that number completed it. I don’t actually care, I’m just curious about these things. The first reading assignment is the five Introductions to the five editions and the first quiz and subsequent discussion will be this Saturday.

CS emailed to ask: “I am interested in participating in Voxiversity II…. I know sweet f— all about economics (although I’m trying to learn) – am I too far behind in terms of background knowledge or is it worth it to give er’ a go??”

I would actually encourage those who don’t know anything about economics to participate, first because few of those who studied economics in college learned anything about Austrian theory anyhow, second because this will present an unusual opportunity to ask as many questions as you like of a fair number of people who have a decent grasp of the material. I would also encourage those who have such training to be patient and avoid the use of jargon when answering questions, i.e. don’t just say “marginal utility” or “IS/LM” and expect everyone to know what you mean.

In other, unrelated news, after consulting the OC, I have decided we will do the Summa Elvetica surge on Election Day so we can watch the Amazon numbers climb as the election returns come in. This will only be a 12-hour surge, so make sure to place your orders between 12 noon and 12 midnight EST on Tuesday, November 4th.

Once you’ve paid off your debt, it’s time to go shopping:

Americans have cut back on buying cars, furniture and clothes in a tough economy, but there’s one consumer item that’s still enjoying healthy sales: guns. Purchases of firearms and ammunition have risen 8 to 10 percent this year, according to state and federal data.

My guess is that the regulars here account for at least 1.5 of that 10 percent. It brings a tear to my eye just thinking about how y’all are doing your Keynesian damndest to keep the American economy from contracting.

I’m just talking about the Republicans, mind you. The reason is that the neocons and other faux-conservatives doubt her malleability and they are frightened of her star power:

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain’s camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain’s decline.

“She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

“I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said.

Palin’s vice-presidential revolt is interesting. She did exactly as she was told once selected, which got her into a lot of trouble. She’s not unintelligent; her weird answers and stilted performance in the early interviews were signs of someone who has been completely overcoached and is trying not to make a mistake. It’s important to remember that this was her first appearance on the national stage and she held her own in the vice-presidential debate despite being unprepared for the Biden BS storm.

(Someone like Biden is very difficult to handle if you’re not prepared for shameless lies, but if you are, they’re the easy people in the world to publicly demolish. The challenge is to be able to correctly anticipate the direction of their BS and have the facts on hand to discredit them once they start making stuff up.)

Neocons like Frum and Kristol, and RINOs like David Brooks and Ben Stein dislike Palin because she’s insufficiently impressed with the East Coast imperative, and despite her Christian Zionism so typical of the average evangelical, she simply doesn’t share their Israel-uber-alles perspective. While many of her views run pretty much in parallel with theirs, she’s not wedded to them, which makes her untrustworthy in their eyes. For example, what real conservative populist is going to continue funding foreign aid or further American adventures in the Middle East after another year of economic carnage?

The economic situation means that whoever wins this year is likely to be a one-and-done president. Palin is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2012, so unless the New York-Washington Republican axis can blame a McCain loss on her somehow – which is absurd in light of the stock markets’ meltdown, if Obama wasn’t such a ridiculous candidate McCain would be losing in a huge landslide – she will be the favorite to win the general election. So, expect a significant part of the “conservative” commentariat to devote itself to destroying Sarah Palin over the next few years while attempting to build up other, less conservative figures in the mode of Giuliani and Romney.

Jindal and Bloomberg are the two obvious possibilities at this point in time. Normally, I’d say Bloomberg would be a ludicrous stretch, but then, they tried it with the Lisper, so who knows where the line is. Of course, Palin should never have paid any attention to the handlers in the first place. That was her fundamental mistake.

UPDATE – Right Wing News just published a poll which tends to support my contention. The vast majority of Republican bloggers love Sarah Palin, so it’s pretty much only the supposedly conservative media commentators, whose allegiance to conservative principles is extremely dubious anyhow, who dislike her. And note my votes in bold below, I was one of only six who expressed a negative view of her.

2) Do you think Sarah Palin has been a plus or a minus to the ticket?

A) Minus: 9% (7)
B) Plus: 91% (68)

3) How do you feel about Sarah Palin as a candidate?

A) I really like her!: 80% (61)
B) She’s so-so.: 12% (9)
C) I’m not a big fan!: 8% (6)

Today’s column concerns the economic situation, but it is, admittedly, a bit unusual. I don’t expect critical analysis or anything, but I shall be very disappointed in those who don’t recognize the source. And yes, I will be posting specific information about Voxiversity II later today.