Category: Uncategorized

Correcting the NYT

The New York Times has Europe precisely backwards as falsely equates fascism with populism. In Europe, it is the anti-immigrant populist parties that are pro-democracy and anti-fascism; some of them are openly left-wing. Fascism is not returning to Europe, it is already there in the form of the openly anti-democratic and corporatist European Union.

Across the Atlantic, however, populism is resurgent. Indeed, many fear that the European Parliament may be at risk of a right-wing populist takeover following elections in May 2014. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front has, for the first time in that country’s history, pulled ahead in polls for the European Union election. Ahead of the elections to the European Parliament, Ms. Le Pen recently announced her intention to form a “Eurosceptic” alliance with the Dutch politician Geert Wilders , whose right-wing Party for Freedom demonizes Islam and attacks immigration.

In Italy, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who controlled politics in that country for decades, peppered his Thatcherite free-market nationalism with spectacular doses of scandal, shady dealings and corruption. In his wake, “populism from above” has given way to a staunchly anti-political populism from below. Beppe Grillo, a comedian turned activist, sent shock waves through the establishment in February when his Five Star Movement won 25 percent of the vote. Mr. Grillo, who in the run-up to the election called for a referendum on whether to keep Italy in the euro zone, stressed the need to wrest power from the oligarchic elite and return it to the people. Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who took office in April, recently warned that populism posed a threat to European Union stability.

While they may seek the breakup of the European Union, most of these new European populist movements don’t aim to eliminate democracy altogether. In Greece, however, the emergence of a strand of populism deeply rooted in the fascist past is particularly troubling. The country’s crippling financial ills, and Brussels’ insistence on austerity measures, have generated populist responses that evoke the worst of interwar European fascism. The neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which won 7 percent of the vote in Greece’s 2012 parliamentary elections, openly uses a logo resembling a swastika. Its supporters have perpetrated violent physical attacks on immigrants and political opponents (including murder); its party line includes anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Similar sentiments are also on the rise in Hungary, where the nationalistic, anti-immigration, anti-Semitic Jobbik party is in line to become the second-largest in Parliament.

With their radical stance against pluralism and minority rights, Greece’s right-wing populists and their Hungarian counterparts — along with dozens of anti-European Union parties poised to win seats in next year’s parliamentary elections — make today’s burgeoning European brands of populism much more frightening than their Latin American counterparts.

There is nothing at all frightening about the much-needed resurgence of nationalism in Europe. The European people have turned aggressively against multiculturalism and mass immigration, and because the European media is dominated by social democrats rather than the rabid immigrationists that run the US media, the reporting is considerably more even-handed there. The article fails to note that there are twice as many Golden Dawn members murdered by its political opponents than there are Golden Dawn-affiliated murders or to point out that its anti-democratic political opponents have actually tried outlaw the party.

Europe isn’t religious in the same sense that America is, but on the other hand, their sense of belonging to an identifiably Christian nationalist culture tends to runs more deeply and is firmly entrenched in many of the most secular Europeans. They have seen the consequences of multiculturalism and most of them hate it. And unlike Americans, even the most famously tolerant Europeans, the Swiss, have a history of practicing rigid ethnic, religious, and linguistic cleansing.

In a comment on a previous post that is relevant here, Steve notes that
everything we used to believe concerning the positive aspects of both the European Union and American
left-liberalism were based on lies: “The same people who used to skate by on “commitment to scientific
truth, democracy, and tolerance” are increasingly discarding the velvet
glove in favor of the iron fist now that science is strongly suggesting
they are wrong, the popular will is moving against democracy, and their
“tolerance” is now proven to go only one way –  towards tolerating
sexual perversion,anti-Christian religious persecution, and anti-white
racism.”

Media bias: the conclusive proof

Many people have argued over the years, in the face of the obvious evidence, that the media cannot be systematically biased to the Left because it would not make business sense to spurn more than half the population as customers. However, the recent decision by A&E to fire its biggest and most lucrative TV star because it is more concerned about catering to homosexuals than making money vividly demonstrates that politics and propaganda are more important to the media companies than making a profit:

A&E has placed Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson on indefinite hiatus following anti-gay remarks he made in a recent profile in GQ. “We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson’s comments in GQ, which are based on his own personal beliefs and are not reflected in the series Duck Dynasty,” A&E said in a statement. “His personal views in no way reflect those of A+E Networks, who have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely.”

These are companies that never fire anyone for anti-Christian or anti-Republican remarks, but they’ll act with alacrity against anyone who says anything critical of the sexually abnormal. Notice that Alec Baldwin didn’t get fired for his many and various rants until he offended homosexuals one too many times.

And if you watch A+E, why are you supporting “strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community”?

As for the statement by the spokesman of GLAAD, I shall await with interest his next statement on Muslim theology. “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe,” GLAAD spokesperson Wilson Cruz said.

The fact is that a queer propagandist like Wilson Cruz obviously no more knows what “true Christians believe” than he knows what “true Martians believe”. The true and Biblically-based Christian belief is that self-identified homosexuals are unrepentant sinners whom God regards as abomination because they identify themselves with their sin. It is absolutely impossible to be a Christian and an unrepentant homosexual for the obvious reason that Christianity requires repentance for one’s sins.

Everyone on the planet is fallen. And no one chooses their particular flavor of temptation. But we are all responsible for our own actions, we all choose whether to give into our temptations or not, and we all choose whether to repent of those moral failures, those sins, or not.

Well, the “science” is settled, after all

The great hallmark of science is silencing all dissenting voices, right?

A content editor on Reddit’s science forum wrote Monday that the site has banned climate-change skeptics, and asks why more news outlets haven’t done the same.

“About a year ago, we moderators became increasingly stringent with deniers,” Reddit content editor Nathan Allen wrote in grist. “When a potentially controversial submission was posted, a warning would be issued stating the rules for comments (most importantly that your comment isn’t a conspiracy theory) and advising that further violations of the rules could result in the commenter being banned from the forum.”

Allen explains that climate change became an ironically heated topic among commenters on Reddit’s science forum, /r/science, which he described as “a window into the Ivory Tower” for “non-scientists” to connect with experts like himself.

Climate-change believers accused skeptics of being bought out by “big oil,” while the skeptics accused believers of being on the take from “big green.”

Despite the provocative comments on both sides described by Allen, and Reddit’s reputation as “passionately dedicated to free speech,” the self-described “PhD chemist” decided it was time for the skeptics to go.

“After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor,” Allen said. “As a scientist myself, it became clear to me that the contrarians were not capable of providing the science to support their ‘skepticism’ on climate change.”

Do these global warming idiots ever go outside? When record lows are being set all over the world and every climate model they’ve ever cited has been spectacularly wrong, you would think that they would at least consider the possibility that their assumptions are incorrect.

By the time the global warming charade finally gives up the ghost, scientists are going to be considered about as credible as used car salesmen. Global warming, or climate change, or whatever you want to call it is less scientific than “scientific socialism” and is even more easily seen to be obvious nonsense by the layman.

What’s amazing is that half the people who applaud this sort of thing will also tell you that the Catholic Church forcing Galileo to recant was the worst crime in human history. Which would seem puzzling until one recalls MPAI. At this point, I suspect a new Ice Age is probably more likely than genuine global warming.

Pets.com redux

Anyone else scenting a familiar odor? That rancid aroma of greed, fraud, cigarettes, and overpriced cologne? It smells like 1999 to me:

Pinterest is a lovely website. It provides something the internet has never had before (virtual window shopping and muffin JPEG fetishism) in a snappy, tidy package. It’s very popular, particularly within the inscrutable Midwestern Mystery Zone, which baffles most tech companies, small and large alike. It’s aspirational picture-collecting at its most refined, and certainly could end up being the way people plan future purchases. Maybe. Someday. There’s no way to be sure.

And then there’s Snapchat, the pubescent pic-sharing app du jour, enough of a phenomenon to tilt teens away from Facebook, and a cultural spike unto itself. It’s fun! It’s a very fun, very smart, very simple toy—and there’s nothing wrong with that. The world needs things that are amusing and little else, lest we all be crushed beneath cloud services and spreadsheets. Fun is fine, and it’s certainly proven popular for Snapchat’s founders.

But these are both massive maybes bridging chasms of financial uncertainty. Maybe Pinterest will drive sales, and be able to keep a cut for itself. Maybe Snapchat will be able to turn its huge demographic reach among vulnerable young minds into revenue, and hold on to its trend status. Maybe. But that’s almost $8 billion (estimated) dollars pinned on a maybe, the sort of breathless, thoughtless speculation bubble dreams are made of. It’s $8 billion in maybe snapped against two companies that haven’t even tried to make money.

In the immortal words of Public Enemy’s Chuck D: “Here we go again….”

Cracks in the wall of debt-delusion

Or in other words, Paul Krugman discovers debt. On May 12 of 2012, Paul Krugman confessed that he had no idea what Steve Keen was talking about with regards to how debt deflation reduces demand:

“Keen then goes on to assert that lending is, by definition (at least as I understand it), an addition to aggregate demand. I guess I don’t get that at all. If I decide to cut back on my spending and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to someone else, this doesn’t have to represent a net increase in demand. Yes, in some (many) cases lending is associated with higher demand, because resources are being transferred to people with a higher propensity to spend; but Keen seems to be saying something else, and I’m not sure what. I think it has something to do with the notion that creating money = creating demand, but again that isn’t right in any model I understand.” (Minsky and Methodology (Wonkish), March 27, 2012)

However, it has become so obvious that without growing debt, people cannot afford to pay for things, (thereby reducing demand), that even Paul Krugman has finally noticed, Neo-Keynesian models of exogenous debt be damned. But, as is his wont, Krugman pretends to have known this all along:

“Start with the point I’ve raised several times, and others have raised as well: underneath the apparent stability of the Great Moderation lurked a rapid rise in debt that is now being unwound … Debt was rising by around 2 per cent of GDP annually; that’s not going to happen in future, which a naïve calculation suggests means a reduction in demand, other things equal, of around 2 percent of GDP.” (Secular Stagnation Arithmetic, December 7, 2013)

And notice his comment about debt rising by around two percent of GDP annually; is he finally paying attention to L1 only 11 years after I first warned about it? This is an astonishing development and may represent the first big cracks in the epic Keynesian wall of delusion concerning the exogenous, and therefore innocuous, nature of domestic debt.

In RGD, I demonstrated that debt not only effects demand, but prices as well. That’s why we can be certain that housing prices will not recover anytime soon and college tuitions cannot continue to rise, as their elevated price levels are almost entirely the result of the post-2001 explosion of easy credit. In fact, I even explained the connection between debt and demand in my proposed modification of the core mechanism of the Austrian Business Cycle on a post entitled The Limits of Demand back in June 2009:

“I suggest the cycle can be better understood if we broaden our
perspective when looking at the middle phase of the cycle and consider
how the expansion of bank credit will also lead to malinvestment for
reasons that are not dependent upon the shifting production ratio
between capital goods and consumer goods by utilizing a price-based
variant of the Keynesian acceleration principle. This begins with
recognizing the obvious causal connection between increased bank
credit and price distortions, since cheap credit permits consumers to
purchase goods at prices they could not otherwise have afforded; this is
what cheap credit is expected to do and is the reason loan
consolidations and other forms of consumer credit are advertised on
television. The easy availability of cheap credit permits the purchase
of houses, college tuitions, and cars by a much broader range of buyers
than would otherwise be the case, so as the law of supply and demand
dictates, an increase in the availability of debt will lead to an
increase in demand which will necessarily drive the price of those goods
being purchased by debt higher relative to the price of goods not being
purchased by debt.”

The converse of the bolded text is of course also true, hence my expectation of economic contraction following the debt-deflation as well as my observation of economic stagnation as a result of the current debt-disinflation. But then, I don’t have a Nobel Prize or anything.

Eco on the disappearance of the book

Umberto Eco considered a failed prophecy of Marshall McLuhan in light of recent developments in e-publishing in an article published on October 30, 2013 in L’Espresso.
At the start of the Seventies, Marshall
McLuhan announced some profound changes in our ways of thinking and
communication. One of his intuitions was that we were entering into a
global village, and in the universe of the Internet we have certainly
seen the verification of his vision. However, after analyzing the
influence of the printing press on the evolution of the culture and
our individual sensibilities in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan
announced, in Understanding Media and other works, the sunset
of alphabetic linearity and the newly arisen dominance of images. To
hypersimplify this, he anticipated that the masses “will no longer
read anymore, they will watch TV, (or the strobing lights of the
disco).”
McLuhan died
in 1980, just as we were entering the daily world of the personal
computer. (There appeared models that were more or less toys and
experimental objects at the end of the Seventies, but the mass market
began in 1981 with the IBM PC.) If McLuhan had lived
a few more years, he would
have had to admit that
even in a world apparently
dominated by images,
the personal computer was establishing a
new alphabetical civilization.
It may be true that the preschoolers of today use iPads, but all the
information we receive from the Internet, email, and SMS are based on
our knowledge of the
alphabet. Computers perfect the situation imagined in Hugo’s The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the
archdeacon Frollo, indicating first a book, and then the cathedral
seen from the window, rich with images and other visual symbols,
says: “this will kill that”. With all its
multimedia links, the computer certainly
possesses the characteristics of being the instrument of the global
village, and it has the capacity to revive again the “that” of
the Gothic cathedral, but it still
fundamentally rests upon neo-gutenbergian
principles.

To return to the alphabet, the invention of
the ebook has provided the possibility to read alphabetic texts on
screens instead of paper. And on these screens one can expect to read
yet another series of auguries predicting the disappearance of the
book and of the newspaper, (in part suggested by some declines in
sales.) One of the favorite sports of every unimaginative journalist
over the years is to ask the men of letters how they see the coming
demise of the world of print. It is not enough to argue that the book
remains of fundamental importance to the transmission and
conservation of information, or that we have scientific proof that
books printed 500 years ago have survived wonderfully while we cannot
scientifically demonstrate that the magnetized storage systems
presently in use can survive for more than ten years. (Nor can we
verify this, since computers today cannot read a floppy disk from the
Eighties.)

Now, however, there are some
disconcerting occurrences that have caught the attention of
journalists, although we have not yet grasped their significance and
their eventual consequences. In August, Jeff Bezos of Amazon bought
the Washington Post, and while announcing the decline of the daily
newspaper, Warren Buffet recently acquired some 63 local newpapers. As
Federico Rampini observed in Repubblica the other day, Buffet is a giant
of the Old Economy and he is not an innovator, but he has a rare
acuity for discerning investment opportunities. And I suspect
that other sharks of Silicon Valley are also moving against the
newspapers.
Rampini asked if the final blow will
not be Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg purchasing the New York Times.
Even if this doesn’t happen, it is clear that the digital world is
overtaking print. What about commercial calculations, political
speculations, and the desire to preserve the press as a democratic
watchdog? I don’t feel that I have a sufficient grasp on the situation to
interpret these various facts correctly. However, I think it is interesting to
consider the possibility of the reversal of another famous prophecy. Perhaps
Mao had it wrong and one must take the paper tiger seriously.

Boycotting Israel

I have to admit, I’m of two minds concerning the various academic and corporate boycotts of Israel.

An American organization of professors on Monday announced a boycott of
Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians, signaling that a movement to isolate and pressure Israel
that is gaining ground in Europe has begun to make strides in the United
States.

On the one hand, it is egregiously unfair to single out Israel for its unfair treatment of the Palestinians. Israel does not treat its non-Jewish citizens as equals, but the Palestinians still have it better than many people in many other countries. I have absolutely no problem with Jews possessing a Jewish state and practicing an Israeli form of apartheid in order to maintain it.

On the other hand, it is fitting to see those who were anti-South African apartheid getting a taste of their own medicine. Despite the ties between the two so-called pariah countries, many Israelis were vociferously supportive of the South African boycotts and even of the ANC’s terrorist activities. For example, Arthur Goldreich was the head of the ANC’s logistics committee and provided weapons to the terrorist arm of the ANC. Since so many Jews have actively worked to undermine white apartheid, to deny the Boers a Boer state, and to end American segregation over the years, it’s hard to feel any pity for them when observing that the anti-apartheid machinery they helped create has now turned on them.

In war or in politics, the challenge is that the other side always learns from the successes of the other. And the effective strategist should never lose sight of the fact that he will eventually have to face whatever weapon he first directs against the opposition.

The unconstitutional NSA

It’s about time the violation of the 4th Amendment is addressed by the courts:

For the first time since the revelation of the National Security
Agency’s vast dragnet of all Americans’ telephone records, a federal
court has ruled that such surveillance is “significantly likely” to be unconstitutional. In a scathing 68-page opinion
peppered with exclamations of incredulity, United States District Judge
Richard Leon, of the Federal District Court of the District of
Columbia, found that the seven-year-old phone-data collection program —
which was established under the Patriot Act and has been repeatedly
reauthorized by a secret intelligence court — “almost certainly”
violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable
searches.

Reaching into the 18th century from the 21st, the judge wrote that James
Madison “would be aghast” at the degree of privacy invasion the data
sweep represents. The ruling by Judge Leon, who was nominated to the bench by President
George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, was remarkable for many reasons, but
mainly because there were real people sitting in open court challenging
the government’s lawyers over the program’s constitutionality.

The plaintiffs, led by Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist,
sued the government after the program came to light. A similar suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union is in a federal court in New York. Judge Leon’s opinion took issue with the government’s reliance on a 1979
Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which upheld the police’s
warrantless capture of phone numbers dialed from the home of a robbery
suspect on grounds that the suspect had no reasonable expectation of
privacy in the numbers he dialed.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully expect the Roberts Supreme Court to decide that blanket surveillance is not an unreasonable search. After all, there is always an emanation or a penumbra out there somewhere to imagine and cite. But, in doing so, its actions will only underline the fact that the Constitution is now null and void.

And that will permit for the pro-Constitutional side to finally get in the game and start redefining the living, breathing version to its own liking.

Events in the East China Sea

Things still appear to be heating up between China and Japan:

Events in the East China Sea since 2009 have thrust to the forefront the following frightening question: will China and Japan imminently go to war? Conventional answers in the affirmative point to the deep level of historical mistrust and a certain level of “unfinished business” in East Asian international politics, stemming from the heyday of Showa Japan’s imperialism across Asia. Those on the negative often point to the astronomical economic costs that would follow from a war that pinned the world’s first and third largest economies against its second in a fight over a few measly islands, undersea hydrocarbon reserves be damned.

I can’t pretend to arbitrate between these two camps but I find that far too many observers sympathize with the second camp based on rational impulse. Of course China and Japan wouldn’t fight a war! That’d ruin their economies! I sympathize with the Clausewtizean notion of war being a continuation of politics “by other means,” and the problems caused by information asymmetries (effectively handicapping rational decision-making), but the situation over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands can result in war even if the top leaders in Tokyo and Beijing are eminently rational.

Political scientist James D. Fearon’s path-breaking article “Rationalist Explanations for War” provides a still-relevant schema that’s wonderfully applicable to the contemporary situation between China and Japan in the East China Sea. Fearon’s paper was initially relevant because it challenged the overly simplistic rationalist’s dogma: if war is so costly, then there has to be some sort of diplomatic solution that is preferable to all parties involved — barring information asymmetries and communication deficits, such an agreement should and will be signed.

Of course, this doesn’t correspond to reality where we know that many incredibly costly wars have been fought (from the first World War to the Iran-Iraq War). So, if wars are costly — as one over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands is likely to be — why do they still occur?

There are some interesting thoughts there, but no one who has even a modicum of familiarity with military history will find the idea that war cannot happen because the observer does not believe it to be in the best long-term economic interests of the two nations involved to be credible in any way.

The tolerance charade

As expected, the non-Christian groups who begged and pleaded for tolerance show none the moment they feel they are in power:

A girl guide group faces being thrown out of the national association after refusing to force members to drop God from the oath…. The Guiding Promise was altered earlier this year so that members now swear ‘to be true to myself and develop my beliefs’ rather than the original ‘to love my God’.

This is why it is always a massive mistake for Christians to give into the demands for tolerance from non-believers and other faiths in the first place. They inevitably refuse to grant the very same tolerance they demanded. If you don’t keep out the infiltrators, they will eventually take over your organization and pervert it. Tolerance is not a virtue, it is nothing more than weakness and self-inflicted vulnerability.

The secularists have made it abundantly clear that there is no room for Christianity in their godless society.

After 24 years of litigation, a federal court revealed in an emotional hearing that it has ordered the famous Mount Soledad Cross removed from a veterans memorial, holding it is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Since 1913, a cross has stood as the centerpiece of the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial in San Diego, surrounded by nearly 3,000 granite plaques, individually honoring war heroes from every American war, from the Revolutionary War to Iraq and Afghanistan.

So be it. It is time for Christians to again begin constructing Christian civilization without the godless and the pagans as their society collapses into moral degradation and economic stagnation. We did it before. We can do it again.