Category: Uncategorized

How institutions die

As various Christians at Northwest Christian University fall about congratulating themselves for being so open and accepting of having an atheist student body president at their nominally Christian institution, the reality is that this likely marks the beginning of the end for the school.

A student from a Christian university in Oregon ditched the privacy of the confessional and went public about his faith, writing in the school newspaper: “I am an atheist. Yes, you read that correctly, I am an atheist.”

Eric Fromm, 21, a senior at Northwest Christian University in Eugene published his thoughts about not believing in God in the Beacon Bolt, the student-run online newspaper — despite the fact that his university is a Christian school.

Although Fromm didn’t share the religious beliefs as the school, he said in his post he decided to enroll because Northwest Christian had a “solid communications program.”

“Before I enrolled, I visited the campus to make sure that the chapel services were comfortable enough that I could fulfill the requirement,” he said. “No one was speaking in tongues or handling snakes, so I decided to stay.”

But Fromm didn’t feel at peace.

“Every day I’m burdened by the fact that my peers might reject me because I’m different from them. I won’t be rejected because of my race or social class, but simply because of the fact that I don’t believe in God — because I am an atheist,” wrote Fromm in his post.

The university should promptly expel Mr. Fromm, return his senior year tuition, and make it clear that it is a Christian university and not a secular one. Christianity is not about acceptance. It is not about tolerance. It is about separating the wheat from the chaff and dividing the sheep from the goats. In his own words, Jesus makes it perfectly clear that he did not come to bring peace. He is, in fact, the dividing factor.

If the university does not expel Mr. Fromm, then it is quite clear that it is no longer a Christian institution. It is merely another secular institution with religion classes. What’s next, churches with atheist pastors….

Now, there is nothing wrong with secular institutions that welcome everyone and practice religious and ideological ecumenicism. There is a place for such things. Atheists are welcome here, for example. But not only is there no place for inclusive Christian institutions, such institutions have no rational reason to exist in the first place. To those who will say “well, what is wrong with permitting atheists attend/teach/work at religious institutions” the answer is quite simple: look at what has happened to the Ivy League universities, the Episcopal Church, and every other Christian institution that decides to be led by the principle of tolerance rather than doctrine-based exclusion.

Every institution that doesn’t actively police its membership will be invaded, taken over, and subverted by its opponents. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the Cub Scouts or the Communist Party. It’s not an accident that Mr. Fromm pursued a leadership position, then promptly went public with his atheism.

Just look at that smug, self-satisfied face. You can see that he is absolutely delighted for having been able to pull one over on the university. The remarkable thing is that he managed to control himself from his inclination to lecture everyone about his adolescent concept of the life, the universe, and everything. And despite the fact that he wasn’t rejected by the school, he still managed to produce a conventional work in the oppression genre.

Three free ebooks

I had a few Kindle Select days that were about to become unusable, so AMB is free today. Only the text version, however, not the audiobook.  And as I belatedly discovered, The Wardog’s Coin and The Last Witchking are also free today. This may be considered a harbinger of an announcement to come next week.

In case you missed it the other day, you may want to check out the custom Vox Popoli toolbar. I’ve found it to be unexpectedly useful for searching this blog as well as rapidly switching between the recent posts for commenting purposes. I need to create some new icons for the Games, Books, and Daily section, but it will automatically update when I get around to it.

Obama’s economic end game

Post-Obamacare, it is only a matter of time before other American industries eventually go the way of electronics retail in Venezuela. But it could work! Just think about how many plasma TVs Best Buy could sell if every American under the age of thirty was compelled to buy one on pain of a substantial fine!

Thousands of Venezuelans lined up outside the country’s equivalent of Best Buy, a chain of electronics stores known as Daka, hoping for a bargain after the socialist government forced the company to charge customers “fair” prices.

President Nicolás Maduro ordered a military “occupation” of the company’s five stores as he continues the government’s crackdown on an “economic war” it says is being waged against the country, with the help of Washington.

Members of Venezuela’s National Guard, some of whom carried assault rifles, kept order at the stores as bargain hunters rushed to get inside.

“I want a Sony plasma television for the house,” said Amanda Lisboa, 34, a business administrator, who had waited seven hours already outside one Caracas store. “It’s going to be so cheap!”

It’s a one-track road downhill once the government embarks upon the road of “fixing” the economy. Of course, the wealthier the society is when the process begins, the longer it takes to break the economy and the fewer people understand what is happening as they live through it.

Most people still don’t realize that America is considerably less wealthy than it was in 1990, because the illusion of being permitted to spend someone else’s money leads them to believe that they genuinely have more wealth. It’s like watching a child running around with Daddy’s credit card, thinking he’s rich, only on a national scale.

Advice on a wedding day

Morpheus of Just Four Guys is getting married, so I thought I’d give him a few points of advice:

Congratulations and best wishes to Morpheus and his new bride. As a long-time married man, I thought a few words of advice might not be amiss:

  1. Never hesitate to admit when you are wrong and apologize as soon as you realize that to be the case.
  2. Never admit you are wrong when you believe that you are not. Stand
    your ground in the face of her tears and hold firm in the face of her
    anger. Never appease in the interest of short-term peace.
  3. Learn
    to let things go. In every conflict, there is a point at which there is
    a choice between conflict and conversation. When you choose conflict,
    let your choice be a conscious
    one and not a reaction.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

VPFL Week 9

79 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-2)
74 Suburban Churchians (4-5)

58 Mounds View Meerkats (4-5)
45 Bane Sidhe (5-4)

76 RR Redbeards (5-4)
48 63Mercury Marauders (4-5)

66 Bailout Banksters (4-5)
65 Boot Hill Hangmen (2-7)

66 Bradford Gamma Rays (3-6)
60 Fromundah Cheezheads (7-2)

The Redbeards appear to be climbing back into it, even as I completely forgot to start Alfred Morris for this week. This is, as always, your NFL open thread, in which we will conspicuously fail to worry overmuch about the loss of the Vikings starting quarterback to injury.

Explaining the college bubble

Richard Cantillon explains some of the effects of the college bubble in An Essay on Economic Theory… in 1730.

The Labor of the Plowman is of Less Value than that of the Artisan

A LABORER’S SON, AT SEVEN to twelve years of age, begins to help his father either in keeping the herds, digging the ground, or in other sorts of country labor that require no art or skill.

If his father has him taught a trade, he loses his assistance during the time of his apprenticeship and is obligated to clothe him and to pay the expenses of his apprenticeship for many years. The son is thus dependent on his father and his labor brings in no advantage for several years. The [working] life of man is estimated at only 10 or 12 years, and as several are lost in learning a trade, most of which in England require seven years of apprenticeship, a plowman would never be willing to have a trade taught to his son if the artisans did not earn more than the plowmen.

Therefore, those who employ artisans or professionals must pay for their labor at a higher rate than for that of a plowman or common laborer. Their labor will necessarily be expensive in proportion to the time lost in learning the trade, and the cost and risk incurred in becoming proficient.

The professionals themselves do not make all their children learn their own trade: there would be too many of them for the needs of a city or a state and many would not find enough work. However, the work is naturally better paid than that of plowmen.

The key is in the second to last sentence. The problem that the USA and many other countries are facing is that they have encouraged too many young men, and far too many young women, to pursue college degrees, so there is now a massive surplus of degree-holders for the needs of the various nations where academic credentials have been subsidized and fetishized.

In a free and sustainable economy, the number of college students would be significantly reduced due to the combination of the cost and opportunity cost of a college education. But because demand has been artificially inflated by student loans, government grants, and the willingness of parents to go into debt on behalf of their children, the level of current malinvestment  in college education is extraordinarily high. The fact that student loan debt can no longer be legally discharged was the first indication that the education bubble had reached its terminal point of expansion.

Longer lifespans and longer working lives justify spending more time and money in acquiring professional skills than in Cantillon’s day, but not indefinite amounts of either. And unless the student acquires skills that increase the value of his labor during that time, the entire process is a waste of both.

The irony is that the average college student is probably less valuable than the unskilled plowman now, because while he still lacks any useful skills, he also is unwilling to work hard at anything he is actually capable of doing.

UPDATE: “In 2008 there was $730 billion of student loan debt outstanding, of
which the Federal government was responsible for $120 billion. Five
short years later there is $1.2 trillion of student loan debt outstanding
and the Federal government (aka YOU the taxpayer) is responsible for
$716 billion. Using my top notch math skills, I’ve determined that
student loan debt has risen by $470 billion, while Federal government
issuance of student loan debt has expanded by $600 billion.”

Juxtaposition

A conversation on Twitter:

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 7 Nov
If you spend all your time trying to convince people you’re just as important as somebody else, you’re really probably not.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 7 Nov
Conversely, if you spend all your time trying to convince people that somone else isn’t important, they may be.

Marko Kloos ‏@markokloos 7 Nov
@scalzi This is of course APROPOS OF NOTHING and doesn’t refer to ANY PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL we may know.

To which one can only resort to the cruel tactic of quoting Mr. Scalzi:

“All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don’t get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa”

 

As it happens, Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever has averaged just under 20,000 Google pageviews per day in 2013, which figure includes the occasional spike derived from external sources. That’s not bad; I leave the question of whether it indicates a degree of importance or not up to the reader. But since we’re discussing comparisons, there is also this from Alexa this morning:


scalzi.com
111,031 Global rank
46,471 USA rank

voxday.blogspot.com 
107,993 Global rank
23,066 USA rank


It should be amusing when my number two blog also passes up what used to be such an important science fiction site next year. What is ironic about these comparisons is that it was not my intention to target Scalzi himself when I first began comparing VP to Whatever last year. The comparison was a direct response to a few rabbits from his warren who were asserting, falsely, that this blog was irrelevant and insignificant because so few people read it. Scalzi himself had always indicated that he was aware that the blog readership here was considerable, if not necessarily of a size comparable to his own.

However, in the process of setting the facts straight, Mr. Scalzi’s own dishonesty was inadvertently uncovered – 50,000 DAILY READERS – and months later he is still trying to spin the situation and salvage the illusion of his self-importance. Apparently the Participation Hugo is not enough and the mere fact of my citing verifiable statistics in correcting the false claims of others is somehow proof of his continued significance. But adding to the degree of difficulty he faces here, he is trying to do this while simultaneously pretending to not care about how the truth undermines the entire foundation of his career as a novelist.

It’s not remarkable that he’s willing to shoot for such an ambitious reinterpretation of objective reality. He is a gamma male, after all, and spin, exaggeration, and deceit are his idiom. What is remarkable is that people like Marko Kloos repeatedly fall for it. Or at least pretend to fall for it. Then again, I suppose one must keep in mind that Bernie Madoff managed to fool a lot more people a lot longer to considerably more profit than John Scalzi has.

That being said, I don’t mind coming right out and saying that I don’t think I am more important than Mr. Scalzi. In fact, in the world of SF/F, it is patently obvious that I am considerably less important than its biggest con man since L. Ron Hubbard. It will do no one any good to curry favor with me and it could even do them an amount of professional harm given the way that petty little world works. I merely believe I am a better, smarter, more substantial writer than Mr. Scalzi, and a writer with more interesting ideas…. ideas that happen to be my own.

Just not that smart

Proud, yes. Arrogant, sure. But not particularly intelligent. I also very much doubt that Obama is a pathological liar. He strikes me as more the classic example of Dunning-Kruger, thinking he is very clever when he quite clearly is not.

NBC’s Chuck Todd scored a huge interview with President Obama Thursday and opened things by immediately drilling down on the president’s relentlessly repeated lie that under ObamaCare you can keep your current  insurance plan if you like it. The full interview is even more impressive than the clips that have been going around. Even after he elicits a “sorry” from Obama, Todd keeps after the point for almost ten minutes.

Ultimately, though, Todd came away with the impression that Obama doesn’t believe he lied. And Todd is probably right, which is a little unnerving.

During his own interview on the Hugh Hewitt show Friday with guest host Carol Platt Liebau, Todd said, “You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get.” Here is Todd’s entire quote:

You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get. I mean, I think that that’s, he’s taken issue with that before with folks off the record, and I got it’s a sensitive issue, felt like he did not sit there and say he intentionally lied. He said that he wanted to, he thought he was going to be able to keep this promise. I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.

If Obama has convinced himself he didn’t lie, that borders on pathological.

Stupid people tell stupid lies and deny that they did so on a regular basis. Remember, this is the same guy who went off on bitter clingers while trying to convince them to vote for him. We’re not dealing with a rocket scientist here, but rather an affirmative action president.

Why there is hope for Europe

And why it is more likely that it is America that will end up experiencing third world status:

As right-wing populists surge across Europe, rattling established political parties with their hostility toward immigration, austerity and the European Union, Mikkel Dencker of the Danish People’s Party has found yet another cause to stir public anger: pork meatballs missing from kindergartens.

A member of Denmark’s Parliament and, he hopes, mayor of this commuter-belt town west of Copenhagen, Mr. Dencker is furious that some day care centers have removed meatballs, a staple of traditional Danish cuisine, from their cafeterias in deference to Islamic dietary rules. No matter that only a handful of kindergartens have actually done so. The missing meatballs, he said, are an example of how “Denmark is losing its identity” under pressure from outsiders.

The issue has become a headache for Mayor Helle Adelborg, whose center-left Social Democratic Party has controlled the town council since the 1920s but now faces an uphill struggle before municipal elections on Nov. 19. “It is very easy to exploit such themes to get votes,” she said. “They take a lot of votes from my party. It is unfair.”

It is also Europe’s new reality. All over, established political forces are losing ground to politicians whom they scorn as fear-mongering populists. In France, according to a recent opinion poll, the far-right National Front has become the country’s most popular party. In other countries — Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland and the Netherlands — disruptive upstart groups are on a roll.

This phenomenon alarms not just national leaders but also officials in Brussels who fear that European Parliament elections next May could substantially tip the balance of power toward nationalists and forces intent on halting or reversing integration within the European Union.

Unless you live in Europe, you probably cannot understand why its long term prospects are actually better than the USA’s. For some reason, probably because they only visit a few of the largest cities, Americans tend to be under the impression that there are far more Muslims in Europe than there are. They also don’t understand that left-wing European intolerance would make the average KKK member look like a multiculturalist.

Remember, both the post-Lenin Soviets and the National Socialists were left-wing parties that were strongly nationalistic. Whereas in the US, nationalism is very weak and only a right-wing phenomenon, in Europe, it spans the political spectrum. Notice that the votes for the “right-wing” nationalists come from Left and Right; in the UK, the BNP draws from Labor whereas UKIP is draining the Tory Party dry. Whereas the rise of the new parties has the mainstream parties visibly terrified, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street remain the object of late-night TV jokes.

There are three primary reasons for the difference in outlook between Europe and the USA. They are as follows:

  1. Parliamentary systems
  2. Trans-ideological nationalism
  3. No popular pro-immigrant mythology

The parliamentary systems are more favorable to third parties. Whereas the Tea Party has gone nowhere and accomplished nothing, several anti-central, anti-globalist parties are on the verge of taking control of their national parliaments. As in the USA, the established parties have allied against them, but that has only bought them a little extra time before being voted out. The American system is much more conducive to effectively barring policies and politicians deemed non-mainstream.

I’ve already explained the trans-ideological nature of European nationalism. A French Communist and a French Gaulist are both French before they are communists or gaulists. And to both of them, a Senegalese individual is still Senegalese and therefore not French, whether he is communist or a Gaulist.

The absence of the mythology of the melting pot is also important. No one in Europe except a few idiot university students genuinely believes in what isn’t true of the USA and has no application in Europe. The EU has turned out to be a fraudulent, corrupt, Germanic empire and most of Europe will celebrate when it inevitably collapses.

Now, I hope both the nations of Europe and the USA will come to their collective senses and cast off the multicultural myths that have Western civilization hurtling towards collapse and conquest. But, on the basis of the political tectonics, at this point, Europe actually, unexpectedly, appears to be in better shape, mostly because far more of them already recognize who their villainous elites are and what they have done.

Schadenfreude for the suckers

I have absolutely no sympathy for these idiots. Absolutely none at all. Go cry a freaking river, along with the Ann Althouses, David Brooks and Peggy Noonans of the world, all of whom bought into the idea that the Detroit model would be a good one for America:

Wagner and her husband retired early. She was a nurse for 35 years and championed Obamacare, until she received a letter from her insurance company saying it was canceling her policy.

“I was really shocked … all of my hopes were sort of dashed,” Wagner said. “’Oh my gosh President Obama, this is not what we hoped for, it’s not what we were told.’ “

She was shocked further to learn that for the same coverage she would pay 35 percent more and have a higher deductible. “Our premium for next year is going up to over $1,000 a month for two of us and we’re two fairly healthy individuals,” Wagner said.

This is just one minor Federal change to healthcare. Imagine how shocked and upset they are going to be when they finally realize what the long-term effects of the 60 millions immigrants, 50 million abortions, and 40 million additional women working they supported turn out to be.