Category: Uncategorized

Published may not mean printed

It should be fascinating to learn how the forward-thinkers at the SFWA, whose two most recent presidents have staunchly and repeatedly denied that there was any need for authors to be concerned about imminent changes in the publishing industry related to ebooks, deal with the news that the major publishers appear to be moving away from contractually obligating themselves to release print versions of the books they publish:

The idea that any standard deal from a major
publisher guarantees a print format release—which was previously a
foregone conclusion—is something agents no longer take for granted, with
some expressing concern that the big houses are starting to hedge on
print editions in contracts.

While e-book-only
agreements are nothing new—all large publishers have imprints that are
exclusively dedicated to digital titles—a handful of agents, all of whom
spoke to PW on the condition of anonymity, said they’re worried that
contracts from print-first imprints will increasingly come with clauses
indicating that the publisher makes no guarantee on format. The agents
say this is a new twist to the standard way of doing business….

One of the difficulties with reporting on changes
to book publishing contracts is that all new contracts, as Applebaum
rightly noted, are open to negotiation. However, there are standards of
doing business, and the agents speaking out said they feared that if
vague language about format begins to crop up on a regular basis, they
will need to start advocating for a format they were universally
guaranteed in the past.

Despite their dismay,
agents and other insiders who spoke to PW said they were not necessarily
surprised by the move, given the current marketplace. There is growing
pressure on publishers to release books quickly, and to do so in the
formats that will bring in the most revenue. Because so many book deals
are made well in advance of the titles’ release dates, publishers have
always had to gauge the future relevancy of topics and authors. Now
publishers also have to attempt to anticipate the future
bricks-and-mortar landscape when signing contracts. As some insiders
explained, it’s a very different situation when the question goes from,
“How many copies will Barnes & Noble take?” to “Will Barnes &
Noble be around?”

Considering how McRapey had a complete meltdown when Random House established its digital-only imprints, it should be deeply amusing to see his reaction when this starts happening, to say nothing of the rampant panic amidst the less successful SF/F authors, as they will not only be limited to trivial advances, they won’t even be able to point to their print books to differentiate themselves from the self-published ebook authors anymore.

The fact is that print books don’t really make much economic sense anymore. There is too much risk attached to them given the rules of the distribution system. I think this will most affect paperbacks, particularly trade paperbacks. There will always be a small percentage of book lovers who demand hardbacks, but if I’m a publisher who faces the possibility of eating some 5,000 paperback returns, why take that risk?

Take ATOB, for example. I’ve sold 15x more ebooks than hardcovers, and that is to a group of unusually book-friendly readers who are disproportionately inclined to buy my books. I’ll continue making the hardcovers available, (because, let’s face it, the monsters do look well on the shelf), but they are a sideshow, they are not the primary product.

Perhaps more importantly, as the authors of the article noted, once Barnes & Noble goes down, there won’t be a large enough retail market to make it worth their while producing print books for it. It may be another year or two before the publishers make the leap, but don’t be surprised if they do so sooner than that, given the growing financial, competitive, and distribution-related pressures on them.

Women Ruin Everything: schoolboy edition

Fred Reed explains why women need to be removed from the business of publicly schooling boys and education should be segregated on the basis of sex:

The thrust of current social propaganda is that the sexes are identical in all important respects. They are not. The differences are great. It is time we stopped pretending otherwise.

First: By their nature, females are far more interested in social relationships than in academic substance. If you are a man, ask yourself how often you have serious intellectual discussions of politics, science, history, or society with women as compared to men. Seldom. Degrees and exceptions, yes. Still, seldom.

Second: Women are totalitarian. Men are happy to let boys be boys and girls be girls. Women want all children to be girls. In school this means emphasizing diligence—neat homework done on time, no matter how silly or academically vacuous—over performance, meaning material learned. Women favor docility, orderliness, cooperation in groups, not making waves, niceness and comity. For boys this is asphyxiating.

Third: Women prefer security to freedom, males freedom to security. In politics, this has ominous implications for civil liberties. In the schools this means that wrestling and dodge ball are violence, that tag might lead to a fall and scraped knees, that a little boy who draws a soldier with a rifle is a dangerous psychopath in the making. This is hysteria.

Fourth: “Therapy.” This disguised witchcraft is very much a subset of the female fascination with emotional relations. It allows them to talk endlessly about their feelings. Men would rather be crucified. Thus everything becomes a “disorder.” Among these absurdities are things ilke Intermittent Explosive Disorder (appropriately, IED), and Temper Irregulation Disorder. These disorders have only been discovered since women took over the schools….

Fifth: In the United States, women simply dislike men. Saying this causes eruptions of denials. If you believe these, I´d like you to meet my friend Daisy Lou the Tooth Fairy. Check the ranting of feminists, the endless portrayal on television of men as fools and swine, the punitive political correctness and the silly anti-rape fantasies on campus.

In the schools this hostility takes the form of the passive aggression behind the predatory niceness. “We´re boring him to death, keeping him miseable, and sending him for psychiatric reprogramming because we care so much about him.” Uh, yeah.

Now, I do believe women can effectively educate boys in one particular circumstance, which is homeschooling. A mother has a very different relationship with her son than a random 30 year-old woman who wants nothing more than for him to sit there in silence not disturbing her for 6 hours every day. I would personally favor a Federal ban on public education and tearing down the school buildings. But in the meantime, Fred’s recommendation is a rational step in the right direction.

The soft tyranny of the feminized public schools will come to an end sooner or later. And the sooner, the better. As for the lack of male teachers, men would be a lot more interested in teaching boys if they didn’t have to put up with a bureaucratic system that is built around union benefits, teaching credentials and insane theories of education that can’t match the results of methods that were used more than 2,400 years ago.

Mailvox: the Fed imbalance

JD asks about the Fed’s balance sheet:

Fed balance sheet may not return to normal until 2019?  What does this mean to lay people?  Would you enlighten The Dread Ilk, please?

The short version is that quantitative easing, which is the Federal Reserve’s euphemism for “printing money” under the current monetary regime, is not working in terms of returning the economy to full employment or stimulating economic growth. However, the Fed doesn’t dare stop QEn because doing so would almost instantly crash the stock market and hurl the global financial system into crisis, if not collapse. So, the program is going to continue indefinitely, which we already know due to the appointment of Janet Yellen, who is even more expansionary-minded than the man named Helicopter Ben.

Wikipedia has a good definition of quantitative easing: “Quantitative easing (QE) is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to prevent the money supply falling when standard monetary policy has become ineffective. A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying specified amounts of financial assets from commercial banks and other private institutions, thus increasing the monetary base. This is distinguished from the more usual policy of buying or selling government bonds in order to keep market interest rates at a specified target value.

“Expansionary monetary policy typically involves the central bank buying short-term government bonds in order to lower short-term market interest rates. However, when short-term interest rates are at or close to zero, normal monetary policy can no longer lower interest rates. Quantitative easing may then be used by monetary authorities to further stimulate the economy by purchasing assets of longer maturity than short-term government bonds, and thereby lowering longer-term interest rates further out on the yield curve. Quantitative easing raises the prices of the financial assets bought, which lowers their yield.”

This is why the stock market is up considerably since early 2009 and why corporate borrowing is up when the other private borrowing sectors are down. The reason that the QE program has continued for nearly five years now is that it hasn’t had the triggering effect that it was supposed to have in 2009 or any subsequent year. This is exactly what I have been talking about for years, in pointing out that the Fed cannot expand the money supply in the same way that was done in Weimar Germany and in Zimbabwe, because there are material and significant differences in the way the Fed “prints” money and the way past governments have printed money.

The Fed won’t simply print money in the traditional manner because the coterie of investment institutions they serve can’t profit that way; it is all inflationary downside without a leveraging upside. The US government could certainly do it, of course, and all it would have to do is completely shake off the chains of Wall Street first. So, needless to say, printing trillions of dollars and distributing them to the citizenry is not going to happen.

Given that they STILL haven’t taken the simple step of forgiving mortgage debt to free up disposable income, it should be obvious that they’re not going to indiscriminately hand out cash to everyone either.

My case for debt-deflation doesn’t rest on the physical impossibility of money printing, but on the improbability of Wall Street voluntarily giving up the goose that has laid so many dollar-filled eggs for 100 years. I think they will kill the economy before they give up control, especially since widespread bankruptcies and foreclosures taking place under the present regime would put huge swaths of U.S. property in their hands. It is very much a heads they win, tails you lose situation.

As for 2019, they might as reasonably have given a date of fiver. If you look at L1, it is very clear that all QE has done for the last five years is prevent the bottom from falling out completely while encouraging an astonishing amount of malinvestment via the corporate and federal sectors. So, I anticipate more of the same until the household sector defaults begin, which should set off the third, and more serious, stage of the financial crisis.

Timing? I don’t do timing. How will the crisis be resolved? I don’t know. These things cannot be known until they happen. All we can know for certain is that the present course of credit disinflation and substitution of private debt for public debt is not going to continue indefinitely, since it would result in the complete socialization of the national economy by 2030.

A Magic Broken in audiobook

I am very, very pleased to announce that A MAGIC BROKEN is finally available in audiobook. Narrated by Nick Afka Thomas, it is one hour and 45 minutes long and Amazon is selling it for $6.08. If you would like to hear a sample of it, you can do so at Amazon or download a sample.

Nick is already hard at work recording THE WARDOG’S COIN, and if there proves to be sufficient interest in the audiobooks, afterwards he will begin the yeoman’s task of narrating A THRONE OF BONES.

I’m quite happy with Nick’s work and I was surprised to find that I even prefer his voice to Roy Dotrice’s, the highly regarded narrator of George R.R. Martin’s work. It’s a very different approach, and a more subtle one that I find both less jarring and easier to understand.

If you’re an Audible member, I think you may even be able to download it for free.

In defense of Intelligent Design

While I am an evolutionary skeptic rather than an Intelligent Design advocate, (by which I mean that I am skeptical that the Theorum of Evolution by Natural Selection as per the current Neo-Darwinian Synthesis is the correct factual explanation for the way in which one species is transformed into another), one thing that has always struck me as strange about the attempts of evolutionists to criticize the advocates of Intelligent Design as an alternative is that their criticisms were consistently irrelevant.

The various proposals of ID never struck me as markedly less falsifiable than those of TENS, considering how many tenets of TENS have been historically falsified and subsequently “revised”, to be polite. But not until I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was I able to articulate what was bothering me about the common evolutionist criticisms of ID, which tend to revolve around ID not being a science because it is untestable and does not involve research, experimentation, and observation.

For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists explains why Intelligent Design is not science and attempts to refute what it describes as ID’s primary claims:

There is scientific controversy over evolution: There is no debate about evolution among the vast majority of scientists, and no credible alternative scientific theory exists. Debates within the community are about specific mechanisms within evolution, not whether evolution occurred.

Structures found in nature are too complex to have evolved step-by-step through natural selection [the concept of “irreducible complexity”]:  Natural selection does not require that all structures have the same function or even need to be functional at each step in the development of an organism.

Intelligent design is a scientific theory: A scientific theory is supported by extensive research and repeated experimentation and observation in the natural world. Unlike a true scientific theory, the existence of an “intelligent” agent can not be tested, nor is it falsifiable.

Intelligent design is based on the scientific method: Intelligent design might base its ideas on observations in the natural world, but it does not test them in the natural world, or attempt to develop mechanisms (such as natural selection) to explain their observations.

Setting aside the very arguable point of whether one can reasonably consider TENS a science under these parameters, when one reads how Kuhn describes the way in which one scientific paradigm gives way to another, it should be more than obvious that even if ID is complete and hopelessly incorrect, such criticisms are wholly misplaced and betray a basic failure to understand the philosophical foundations upon which all science rests.

In XII. The Resolution of Revolutions, Kuhn writes:

“Any new interpretation of nature, whether a discovery or a theory, emerges first in the mind of one or a few individuals. It is they who first learn to see science and the world differently, and their ability to make the transition is facilitated by two circumstances that are not common to most other members of their profession. Invariably their attention has been intensely concentrated upon the crisis-provoking problems; usually, in addition, they are men so young or so new to the crisis-ridden field that practice has committed them less deeply than most of their contemporaries to the world view and rules determined by the old paradigm. How are they able, what must they do, to convert the entire profession or the relevant professional subgroup to their way of seeing science and the world? What causes the group to abandon one tradition of normal research in favor of another?

“To see the urgency of those questions, remember that they are the only reconstructions the historian can supply for the philosopher’s inquiry about the testing, verification, or falsification of established scientific theories. In so far as he is engaged in normal science, the research worker is a solver of puzzles, not a tester of paradigms. Though he may, during the search for a particular puzzle’s solution, try out a number of alternative approaches, rejecting those that fail to yield the desired result, he is not testing the paradigm when he does so. Instead he is like the chess player who, with a problem stated and the board physically or mentally before him, tries out various alternative moves in the search for a solution. These trial attempts, whether by the chess player or by the scientist, are trials only of themselves, not of the rules of the game. They are possible only so long as the paradigm itself is taken for granted. Therefore, paradigm-testing occurs only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy puzzle has given rise to crisis. And even then it occurs only after the sense of crisis has evoked an alternate candidate for paradigm. In the sciences the testing situation never consists, aspuzzle-solving does, simply in the comparison of a single paradigm with nature. Instead, testing occurs as part of the competition between two rival paradigms for the allegiance of the scientific community.”

As puzzle solvers wholly engrossed in the existing paradigm, biologists and evolutionists are the very last people that we should expect to either have a reasonable perspective on the limits of their consensus paradigm or to be able to appreciate the potential superiority of the new one.

Intelligent design represents a potential new paradigm, not a better way of solving the existing puzzles under the current paradigm. To expect it to do so is irrational. And while it may be true that biologists are not yet cognizant of the second crisis of Darwin, the fact is that TENS is observably awful at the sort of puzzle-solving that most more reputable sciences reliably deliver.  As per Kuhn, if ID ever begins to show a superior ability to solve the puzzles that TENS can’t, then and only then should we expect to see its advocates begin to abandon the old paradigm in favor of the new one.

None of this should be taken as a statement that I am an advocate of Intelligent Design. I am not; I have not considered the matter in any significant detail and I see little reason to do so unless and until it can solve some of the problems that TENS cannot. But anyone with even a reasonable amount of intellectual honesty should resist the urge to dismiss a proposed new paradigm for reasons that cannot possibly be considered relevant to the matter.

Mailvox: the wages of public school

MY writes about the problems her family is having with her niece:

I’m writing this on behalf of my sister, whom I’m very close to.  I have a niece who is giving her parents a great deal of grief lately. I debated writing this but I don’t think we could get a perspective like yours from anywhere else, if you would be so kind. X is 13 and on a fast track to making some very bad choices. She is very dependent on her friends and bends to peer pressure to a ridiculous degree. She does not socialize with her siblings unless forced to and is rude and distant.

A few weeks ago her dad asked to look through her iPad, something they randomly do from time to time. X refused and ran out of the room with it. When they finally got it from her my sister says she couldn’t figure out why X wanted to hide it as there was nothing incriminating on it. I told her I thought she erased things. We know this to be true now.

As punishment her parents took the iPad away. They caught X sneaking into their room at 3am, stealing it back. She is now indefinitely banned from her iPad.

A few nights ago my sister noticed her phone missing. On a hunch she decided to check X’s room after X fell asleep. She found the phone and a series of texts from a instant messenger site on it. The texts were to a couple people. One was a boy and of course, the text had a vulgar sexual nature to them. The boy was asking her if she twerked and X was flirting back with him. The other texts were to a girl, making plans to hang, and X noted that she had to make sure to call the friend on a land line so her parents wouldn’t get suspicious about her texting.  Another text was from a high school boy. I’m not sure what he said to her but this particular boy is known to have fathered a child by another middle school girl. So my sister puts the phone on her night stand and waits. X sneaks back in and takes the phone again back to her room. At this point mom and dad both get up to confront her. They go take the phone back and find not only has X erased the texts but she also took the app off the phone.

-My sister substitutes at the school X attends. Another mom who works there, mother of one of X’s friends, showed my sister a series of texts on her daughter’s phone from X. The texts were loaded with crude song lyrics, f-bombs, and the word “bitch” in all its uses.  The girlfriend did not use the vulgarities that X used.

-X has, obviously not taken any responsibility for her behavior. She claims the texts to the middle school boy about twerking were just jokes and she has never met the high school boy, etc. She can’t explain how the high school boy knows who she is. She is sulky, short-tempered, self-obsessed, entitled, and generally lazy at home.

My sister and her husband have gone through some major financial upheavals in the last 5 years. My brother-in-law now works for my dad but is not making enough yet for my sister to quit her job again. My sister is thinking of pulling them all out of school next year. I note this because my first response was to suggest pulling X out of school among other things. They have removed all the electronic toys from the house and store them at my dad’s office. They also took the door completely off her room.

They are a traditional family that regularly attends Latin mass and my sis is just stunned by this behavior. I am too honestly. None of the other three kids are like this. Her behavior is very self-destructive for her age. Short of pulling her out of school, how to you change a 13 year old’s character? How can they provide consequences in a way that will get a positive response instead of this nasty, passive aggressive sulking? How do you get a child this self-obsessed to stop focusing on herself and show empathy and affection for her family? What resources would you recommend?

It’s important to note that this sort of thing is always a possible consequence when children are abandoned to a public school environment. It’s not an inevitable consequence, to be sure, but there are always going to be those children who are, by character, more susceptible to it than others, regardless of their upbringing. I strongly favor homeschooling for all children, but especially for those with weak, easily-influenced characters.

My recommendation would be to pull X out of school immediately. The nature of the problem exhibited is serious enough to justify drastic action, especially in light of her blatant lying, stealing, and other Machiavellian actions. The other children can probably wait until next year if they are not showing any signs of similar behavior. But the school year has barely begun and there is a very good chance that X will get herself into trouble of one sort or another in the next eight months.

As SB pointed out, these problems aren’t something that started overnight. They are character problems, they are firmly implanted, and they will require a long period of boot camp-style attitude readjustment.So, in addition to pulling her out of school and the solid steps the parents have taken to deny her communications and privacy, they should rely upon the method proven to work by various militaries throughout the world. For the next six weeks, they should put her to work until she is too exhausted to find trouble.

By Christmastime, X should be an expert in grouting, deep-cleaning, and every surface in the house should be sparkling. And then there is a credible threat hanging over her head when the strictures are gradually relaxed; every time she is tempted, she’ll be weighing whether it is worth another six weeks of hard manual labor.

All socialization outside the house and parental supervision should be barred until further notice. X is a child, she is a dependent, and as long as her parents are legally liable for her actions, they have the right and the responsibility to prevent her from indulging in her short-sighted, self-destructive tendencies.

There are no guarantees, of course. Despite her parents’ best efforts, X may become an overweight mudshark with a meth habit and two abortions under her belt by the time she is 18. Or she may turn it around completely. Regardless, the probability is that if her parents don’t directly and forthrightly address the situation with consistency and resolve, she will destroy her life in one way or another. Unfortunately, some people are just naturally self-destructive.

One of the hardest things to accept as a parent is that we cannot make our children’s choices for them. What we can do is decide upon the primary influences upon them. In the case of the child who is greatly susceptible to peer pressure, the answer is straightforward: take care to ensure that her peers are positive influences rather than negative ones.

Wait, politicians lie?

I fail to see how the news that millions of Americans will lose their private insurance under Obamacare is supposed to be any surprise whatsoever:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

Barack Obama is easily the least honest president since Richard Nixon. And he has no pressure on him to be honest since he not only has the press covering for him, but relies upon the support of the two most gullible portions of the population. But, let’s face it, this isn’t going to stir any outrage among the “Obama gwan pay mah mortgage” crowd. It may spark a momentary skepticism in a few white urban liberals, but only until someone reminds them that Republicans are evil and racist, at which point they will dutifully abandon their crimethink.

“Science has lost its way”

At this rate, the science fetishists who lob accusations of “anti-science” at everyone who notices the dishonesty, fraud, and shameless rent-seeking in modern professional science are going to find themselves at war with the entire world. One can hardly describe the Los Angeles Times as an organization of Bible-thumping Republicans who hate science because they believe humans rode dinosaurs.

In today’s world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you’d think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.

You’d be wrong. Many billions of dollars’ worth of wrong.

A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending
millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few
of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn’t
be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described
fresh therapeutic approaches.

But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t unique. A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany
similarly found that only 25% of published papers on which it was basing
R&D projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which
the firm had sunk huge resources should be abandoned. Whole fields of
research, including some in which patients were already participating in
clinical trials, are based on science that hasn’t been, and possibly
can’t be, validated.

Remember this the next time someone tries to claim there is “no evidence” because the evidence isn’t scientific. Because, based on the ACTUAL DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE presented here, published, peer-reviewed science has between a 75 percent and an 89 percent chance of being FACTUALLY FALSE.

In addition to making it clear that science is not even a serious contender for being a means of determining the truth, this also explodes what I have repeatedly pointed out concerning the myth of science being self-correcting. The more scientists pout and cry about criticism rather than getting their house in order, the more people will come to understand that they are little more than a professional union attempting to coast on the achievements of their predecessors.

Troll Ban: Kilo Papa

In light of his epic performance on yesterday’s homeschool thread, Kilo Papa, the atheist troll with the blasphemous Kirk Cameron fascination, is henceforth banned. And given that this is hardly an isolated example, I find it strange that anyone is still surprised that scientists have published papers supporting my hypothesis that a degree of neurally atypical autism is, at the very least, a potential causal factor in an individual’s atheism.

Keep this atheist-in-action in mind the next time an atheist attempts to inform you that atheism is the default position of intelligent, rational people who are happy and socially well-adjusted. I’m not sure which I find more unsettling, the fact that there are people who believe this is their only shot at existence and yet choose to spend it this way, or the fact that there are almost certainly people out there who will genuinely feel that this was a superbly convincing defense of the public schools.

11:34 PM
Ahh, the “godless agenda” of public schools. Yeah, that goddamn math, science, history, English, and even home economics!!!!! Arrrrrggghhh!!!! We just need to get Jeezus back into the educational system and everything will be all right!!!! Preach on, brother!!!!! Praise Jeezus, praise his holy fucking name!!!!!!

3:44 PM
Ahh, yes, let’s let’s replace educated, trained professionals with untrained religious retards who think the Earth is 6000 years old, Noah had dinosaurs on his ark, a man lived in a fish, and global warming is make believe. Truly, I say unto you, religion is the position you take when stroke, injury, or stupidity have invaded your brain.

4:49 PM
At least they have college degrees. And “two” is most likely the limit for the average Christian retard. Except when it comes to their Sarah Palin autographs. Then they extend to three.

4:57 PM
Hey GG, so glad you could take time away from your gerbil experiments to comment. Actually, I learned my “awesome debate skills and impressive moral views” from your mother…….during breaks when she was stroking my balls and licking my cock. Thanks for asking, though!!!

5:03 PM
The idea that your filling your seven (get a fucking condom, idiot) children’s heads with ”scripture” and logic is so pathetically preposterous as to be laughable!!! I hope that your children are able to eventually escape the brainwashed lunacy of religious belief that you are saturating their poor, indefensible brains with. You should be ashamed, you pathetic idiot.

5:07 PM
I wonder if you ever pull head out if your ass long enough to
contemplate the asinine horse shit that seems to constantly stream from
your pathetic excuse for a brain.

5:14 PM
Hey CG, (aka grandma) Thanks for taking time away from your vaginal rejuvenation pamphlet in order to comment. If you’re the product of home schooling, then I feel sorry for your deluded, brainwashed children. Homeschooling, because what we need more of is Kirk Cameron’s!!!!

5:33 PM
JDC, how long have you been out of your Bi-Polar medication? Did you perhaps have to concentrate on your Viagra meds instead?

6:27 PM
“Poo flinging monkeys” Wow!! That was a real shot at you, Mangrove!

8:53 PM
Stg58/Animal Mother. You are reeling from being an idiotic twit. Just in case you were confused.

9:13 PM
Hi Patrikbc, How much time have you spent thinking about my “man pleaser” today? I thought I felt an extra tingle. It was so good of you to take time away from your gonorrhea treatments in order to comment.

11:34 PM
Ahh, the “godless agenda” of public schools. Yeah, that goddamn math, science, history, English, and even home economics!!!!! Arrrrrggghhh!!!! We just need to get Jeezus back into the educational system and everything will be all right!!!! Preach on, brother!!!!! Praise Jeezus, praise his holy fucking name!!!!!!

The most effective rebuttal to all of this vulgar rhetoric came from Harsh: “kilo papa, if you are a product of public schools, I definitely am homeschooling mine.”

Anyhow, while I dislike banning people, it has become clear that there are certain individuals who have literally nothing to offer the discourse despite being given every opportunity to demonstrate otherwise. So, I’m creating a new label, Troll Ban, which should help address any false charges that I am banning people because their arguments are too effective, and should also prove useful in identifying trolls if they show up under another name.

So, when a person is banned, I will collect their various comments into a single post like this so that the historical record of why they were banned will remain easily accessible to everyone in the future.

The MIN campaign

From Wikipedia circa 2023:

Moar Inflation Now (MIN) was an attempt to spur a grassroots movement to stoke inflation, by encouraging personal borrowing and unrestrained spending habits in combination with expansionary public measures, urged by Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and Secretary of the Treasury Paul Krugman. People who supported the mandatory and voluntary measures were encouraged to wear “MIN” buttons, perhaps in hope of evoking in peacetime the kind of solidarity and voluntarism symbolized by the V-campaign during World War II.

The campaign began in earnest with the establishment by the Federal Reserve, of the National Commission on Inflation, which Yellen closed with an address to the American people at Jackson Hole, asking them to send her a list of ten inflation-increasing ideas. Ten days later, Krugman declared deflation “public enemy number one” before Congress on October 13, 2017, in a speech entitled “Moar Inflation Now”, announcing a series of proposals for public and private steps intended to directly affect supply and demand, in order to increase inflation to the desired rate of 10 percent per annum. “MIN” buttons immediately became objects of ridicule; skeptics wore the buttons upside down, explaining that “NIW” stood for “No I Won’t,” or “Not In Weimar,” or “Need Immediate Wank.”

In his book What the Fucking Fuck Was I Thinking?, Ben Bernanke admitted that the thought “This is unbelievably stupid” crossed his mind when Moar Inflation Now was first presented to the Clinton administration by his successor at the Federal Reserve. However, according to revisionist self-historian Paul Krugman, increasing the money and credit supplies was never meant to be the centerpiece of the pro-inflation program and the mass corporate bankruptcies, collapse of the US debt markets, and subsequent catastrophic failure of the global financial system only prove how much worse the economic situation would have been without the triumphant success of the MIN campaign.