Category: Uncategorized

I don’t think this bodes well

Zerohedge picks up an unusual report on gold flows:

This is one of those stories about the gold market that almost seems too wild to be true since the numbers are so extraordinary. According to a Reuters article from earlier today, Australian bank Macquarie has reported that gold is flooding out of London and into Switzerland at a mind-boggling rate. Specifically, 240 tons were exported in May alone and 797 tons during the first half of 2013. That means gold is being exported at a annualized run rate of 17x the 92 tons exported for all of 2012. That’s insane.

Moreover, it seems a lot of that gold is being sent to Switzerland so that the 400oz bars can be melted down into different sizes that are more amenable to Asian sensibilities. So, as many of us suspected all along, what has happened is lobotomized Westerners have sent much of their gold to Asia just as the financial system prepares to melt down again.

 This could be an interesting autumn.

A father’s concern

A new soccer season has begun and I was talking to Ender after our practices yesterday. He happened to mention, in passing, that he’d gotten into another fight with his teammates towards the end of last season. This wasn’t anything new. Like me, he’s an outsider by nature, and although he gets along fine with his teammates most of the time, the fact that he only joined this team two years ago, was the youngest on the team last year, and is observably different than the others tends to make him an occasional target given the usual group dynamics.  Things are also a little more rough-and-tumble here in Europe because fighting in school is largely ignored by the teachers unless someone gets badly hurt.

His first season with the club, he had to beat up the son of the assistant coach, (who is a teammate of mine), which didn’t faze anyone, including the boy’s father, since the kid is a little fireball who can be set off by anything.  (Ironically, despite the fact that this boy and Ender dislike each other, they play very well on defense together, much better than any other two defenders or midfielders. The father and I both find this very amusing.)

That season Ender also had to deal with two other boys egging a third boy on to attack him, and sent the boy running away crying by smashing his cleats into the boy’s face after blocking his punch.  When I asked him why he hadn’t used any judo techniques, he shrugged and said that he had been holding his cleats in his right hand and it hadn’t occurred to him to drop them.  The two instigators tried lying to the coach and claimed Ender attacked all three of them, but the coach is no idiot, and to the third boy’s credit, when asked about the situation he told the truth and exposed the other two boys.

This year I noticed the star of last year’s team, X, who had always been fairly friendly to Ender, being just a little colder to him than usual at the field.  When I asked what was up, Ender explained that he had beaten up X and his friend towards the end of the second season. I was more than a little surprised to hear this, not so much because he was outnumbered, but because X is an exceptional athlete, is bigger and older than Ender, and is easily the strongest, fastest player on the field.  I mean, the boy could play with my veteran’s team and not only hold his own, but probably be one of the top five players on the field.  He’s also a year older than Ender, and this year has gone up to play on the team that is one level below the adult first team. Judo or no judo, X would have been the one player I would have expected to get the better of Ender in any physical encounter.

Ender explained that X’s best friend, L, was acting up and threw a kick at him, so he caught the foot and walked it forward, thereby putting L on the ground. Seeing his best friend go down, X jumped in, caught Ender from behind and threw him down by his shoulders.  However, while going down, Ender went to hook X’s leg and ended up catching his knee, he then rolled, came up, punched X in the face, then put him in a judo lock and told him to knock it off.  Thus ended the encounter, with no one seriously injured. But X’s pride as the undisputed alpha male of the team had been bruised, hence the uncharacteristic coldness. On the other hand, Ender rather bemusedly observed that all the other players have been strangely respectful this season.

I’m not entirely sure he has put two and two together yet. I’ll explain it to him one of these days.

As a father, I was naturally concerned about this, so I asked Ender if the punch he had thrown was a jab or if he had made the common mistake of leading with the rear hand. When he indicated the latter, I began to point out why that had been a risky move, as one always wants to open the opponent without risking the exposure intrinsic to a rear hand.  But when I asked him why he’d led with the rear despite having been repeatedly told not to do so, he explained that at the time, X was doubled over and clutching his knee, therefore he was already open, there was no risk using the rear hand, and Ender could deliver more force with it.

I haven’t really sparred with him yet or trained him anywhere nearly as much as I should have.  But somehow, I think he’s going to be just fine.

Anti-racism in action

NK Jemison on the dangers posed to vibrant Americans by Australians:

“My father was afraid for me to come to Australia. He mostly made jokes about it — “Good, you’ve got dredlocks, maybe
they won’t think you’re Chinese”, stuff like that. But I know my
father, and I know when the jokes have a serious undercurrent. Now,
mind you, I travel alone all the time, and I’m not always traveling to
places that are friendly to Americans, or women, or black people…. I say all this so you will understand the context of my father’s fear, when I told him I was going to Australia.”

The Associated Press on the dangers posed to Australians by vibrant Americans:

Two Oklahoma teens have been charged with first-degree murder in the
fatal shooting of an Australian baseball player, while a third player
has been named as an accessory. Christopher Lane was out for a
jog in an Oklahoma neighborhood when he was shot and killed by three
“bored” teenagers who decided to kill someone for fun, police said.

How many innocent people have to die, murdered by vibrant Americans, before the non-vibrant stop trying to convince themselves that race does not exist, that all human sub-species behave exactly the same, and that forced desegregation is of material benefit to society?

These murders and white-beatings by feral vibrants are not an accident.  They are anti-racism in action. This particular case also demonstrates how the Obama administration’s new vibrant dispersal plan is likely to have more negative consequences than most people think, as one Market Ticker commenter observes:

“Duncan, OK, according to Wiki, had a population of 22,505 as of the 2000
census, of which just 1.07% were black. So there were a grand total of
just over 225 blacks in the entire town, and here’s 3 of them just up
& shooting someone for kicks.” 

John Derbyshire was right.

Ensnaring the sophists

There was an interesting synchronicity between one of McRapey’s recent tweets and a text from the Organon that I was reading at the gym yesterday.


15 Aug

It’s interesting how many people clearly think they can argue well, who in fact can’t argue their way out of a paper bag.
I found his characteristically self-inflating implication to be more than a little amusing there, coming as it does from an individual who makes habitual use of the sophistical tactic that Aristotle described in De sophisticis elenchis as “ambiguity”, and, when called on it, once tried to justify its use because “a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago”.  I imagine the educated reader can identify the logical fallacy there.

Now, it’s probably true that a lot number of people overrate their ability to argue; I may have helped a few of them better understand the effective limits of their ability right here on this blog. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what one thinks of one’s own ability to argue, what matters is what those who have actually observed one’s arguments think of them.

In any event, what I find more interesting than a perfectly normal inability to correctly self-assess is how most people are completely unable to expose false arguments despite the fact that the tools for doing so have been readily available for literally thousands of years. 

Rhetoric may be a little complicated for some to follow, but On Sophistical Refutations is relatively straightforward, it’s short, and it is well worth reading as it specifically identifies a number of basic tactics that are repeatedly utilized by those who are presenting invalid arguments, or as is often the case, presenting a false refutation of another’s argument.

 “Those ways of producing the false appearance of an argument which depend on language are six in number: they are ambiguity, amphiboly, combination, division of words, accent, form of expression. Of this we may assure ourselves both by induction, and by syllogistic proof based on this-and it may be on other assumptions as well-that this is the number of ways in which we might fall to mean the same thing by the same names or expressions.

“Arguments such as the following depend upon ambiguity. ‘Those learn who know: for it is those who know their letters who learn the letters dictated to them’. For to ‘learn’ is ambiguous; it signifies both ‘to understand’ by the use of knowledge, and also ‘to acquire knowledge’. Again, ‘Evils are good: for what needs to be is good, and evils must needs be’. For ‘what needs to be’ has a double meaning: it means what is inevitable, as often is the case with evils, too (for evil of some kind is inevitable), while on the other hand we say of good things as well that they ‘need to be’. Moreover, ‘The same man is both seated and standing and he is both sick and in health: for it is he who stood up who is standing, and he who is recovering who is in health: but it is the seated man who stood up, and the sick man who was recovering’. For ‘The sick man does so and so’, or ‘has so and so done to him’ is not single in meaning: sometimes it means ‘the man who is sick or is seated now’, sometimes ‘the man who was sick formerly’.

“Of course, the man who was recovering was the sick man, who really was sick at the time: but the man who is in health is not sick at the same time: he is ‘the sick man’ in the sense not that he is sick now, but that he was sick formerly.”

Aristotelian ambiguity is a tactic that is often used by sophistical interlocutors by claiming the right to assign to their opponent the only possible meaning of a word that the opponent has used, even when the other meanings of that word are much more readily applicable and the opponent has declared that the assigned meaning was not the meaning utilized.  The fact that this requires both a) mind-reading, and, b) the opponent’s ignorance of his own word-choice seldom slows the sophistical leftist down.

But then, Aristotle understood that for some people, the perception, (50,000 claimed daily blog readers), is much more important than the reality, (4,000 actual daily blog readers).

“Now for some people it is better worth while to seem to be wise, than to be wise without seeming to be (for the art of the sophist is the semblance of wisdom without the reality, and the sophist is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom); for them, then, it is clearly essential also to seem to accomplish the task of a wise man rather than to accomplish it without seeming to do so.”

It’s worth noting that sophists who favor ambiguity-based refutations are extremely vulnerable to having their
tactics used against them.  By
intentionally utilizing a word that has multiple definitions, including some
that are less than helpful to your case, you can be certain that the sophist will
latch onto the definition they perceive to be damaging to your argument and
thereby leap eagerly into the trap. He will do so because his objective in an argument
is usually focused on disqualifying his opponent in the eyes of the crowd rather than in genuinely refuting his opponent’s argument.

Naked authoritarianism

We appear to be rapidly reaching the end of the grand pretense of liberal democracy:

While the much publicized Sunday morning detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda at Heathrow on his way back to Brazil, in a stunning move that as we subsequently learned had been telegraphed apriori to the US, could potentially be explained away as a desperate attempt at personal intimidation by a scared, and truly evil empire in its last death throes, it is what happened a month earlier at the basement of the Guardian newspaper that leaves one truly speechless at how far the “democratic” fascist regimes have fallen and  fondly reminiscing of the times when dictatorial, tyrannical regimes did not pretend to be anything but.

For the fully story, we go to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger who, in a long editorial focusing on the tribulations of Greenwald, his partner, modern journalism and free speech and press in a time of near-ubiquitous tyranny when the status quo is questioned, happened to let his readers know that a month ago, after the newspaper had published several stories based on Snowden’s material, a British official advised him: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.”

It gets better: after further talks with the British government, Rusbirdger says that two “security experts” from Government Communications Headquarters, the British NSA equivalent, visited the Guardian’s London offices and in the building’s basement, government officials watched as computers which contained material provided by Snowden were physically pulverized. One of the officials jokes: “We can call off the black helicopters.”

Reuters adds that according to a source familiar with the event said Guardian employees destroyed the computers as government security experts looked on.

What is shocking is that as Rusbridger explained to the gentlemen from Whitehall, they had no jurisdiction over the forced destruction of Guardian property as it has offices in New York, that Greenwald himself was in Brazil, and that future reporting on the NSA did not even have to take place in London. That did not stop the UK government’s punitive measures, and obviously neither did pleas, before the computers were destroyed, that the Guardian could not do its journalistic duty if it gave in to the government’s requests.

In response, he wrote, a government official told him that the newspaper had already achieved the aim of sparking a debate on government surveillance. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying.

What is most shocking is that the UK government was apparently dumb enough to think that by forcing the Guardian to destroy its own hardware it would actually destroy some of the underlying data. It is this unprecedented idiocy that is most disturbing, because when interacting in a game theoretical fashion with an opponent one assumes rationality. In this case, what one got instead, was brute force and sheer, jawdropping stupidity.

If you still do not understand that government and force can NEVER be trusted to uphold human liberty and basic human rights without being held strictly accountable to the people at all times, with no exceptions, you are part of the problem.  And protesting “what if bad people might do bad things if we don’t let the bad people in government do whatever they want whenever they want without telling us” is not a credible counterargument, it is tantamount to voluntarily placing a dunce cap on your own head and drooling.

Burying the evidence: the SFWA Report

It appears the SFWA really doesn’t want the public to be able to learn why the SFWA Board “voted for the expulsion” from the organization of an unidentified member.

Kate Baker
Date: August 19, 2013, 3:52:59 PM CDT
Subject: DMCA Take-down Notice – Request

Requester: Kathryn Baker – Operations Manager SFWA
Organization: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
On Behalf of Copyright Holder: Matthew Johnson – Regional Director – SFWA

Work infringed – SFWA_report.pdf

Title: Evidence regarding the complaints made against Theodore Beale
Report to the Board of Directors of SFWA
Matthew Johnson
Canadian Region Director

Referring piece: This is an internal and private document written by Matthew Johnson. No one has been given permission to post,copy, edit the report/article in parts or in whole. We ask that you work in accordance with DMCA take-down procedures to remove the copyrighted piece from the link above.

Sincerely,

Kathryn Baker, Operations Manager – SFWA

This is an astonishingly hypocritical move by SFWA, especially in light of how Matthew Johnson both broke the SFWA Forum rules and infringed my own copyright by copying my Forum posts, blog posts, and blog comments, and distributing them in his report without permission. But I suppose they had to decide what makes them look worse, this DMCA Take-down Notice-Request or the Board Report itself.

I’ve already arranged for access to the document titled “SFWA_report.pdf” to be removed from the ISP as I expect it is only a matter of time before the report becomes a matter of public record. I trust the irony of a writer’s organization fighting to prevent information from reaching the public does not escape the average reader here.

In the meantime, one can still get the gist of Mr. Johnson’s report by reading my formal reply to it: Response to SFWA Board Report. One can also read my detailed response to each section of the report below.

Explaining the Flynn Effect

I think this philosophy of testing may explain the dichotomy between the fact that people are getting progressively more intelligent according to IQ tests while becoming observably more stupid in terms of their behavior:

In a pretty amazing YouTube video, Amanda August, a curriculum
coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that
getting the right answer in math just doesn’t matter as long as kids can
explain the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong
answer.

“Even if they said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain
their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really
in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture
but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on
the how,” August says in the video.

Less than inconceivable

While liberals are staggered with the probability that the Lightbringer would be more accurately described as the Liebringer, I think the defense has a fairly credible case. Not a very flattering one, to be sure, but credible:

But just as it is utterly absurd to claim Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t lie before Congress (and some reporters thankfully admitted that truth in the open), it has now become almost silly to insinuate or assume that the president hasn’t also been lying. Why? Because if that’s true — if indeed he hasn’t
been deliberately lying — then it means he has been dangerously,
irresponsibly and negligently ignorant of not only the government he
runs, but also of the news breaking around him.

Think about three recent presidential declarations. A few weeks back, the president appeared on CBS to claim that the secret FISA court is “transparent.” He then appeared on NBC
to claim that “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” Then, as
mentioned above, he held a press conference on Friday to suggest there
was no evidence the NSA was “actually abusing” its power.

For
these statements to just be inaccurate and not be deliberate, calculated
lies it would mean that the president 1) made his declarative statement
to CBS even though he didn’t know the FISA court was secret (despite knowing all about the FISA court six years ago); 2) made his declarative statement to NBC but somehow didn’t see any of the news coverage of the Snowden disclosures proving the existence of domestic spying and 3) made his sweeping “actually abusing” statement somehow not knowing that his own administration previously admitted the NSA had abused its power, and worse, made his statement without bothering to look at the NSA audit report that Gellman revealed today.

So
sure, I guess it’s possible Obama has merely been “wrong” but has not
been lying. But the implications of that would be just as bad — albeit
in a different way — as if he were deliberately lying. It would mean
that he is making sweeping and wildly inaccurate statements without
bothering to find out if they are actually true. Worse, for him merely
to be wrong but not deliberately lying, it would mean that he didn’t
know the most basic facts about how his own administration runs. It
would, in other words, mean he is so totally out of the loop on
absolutely everything — even the public news cycle — that he has no idea
what’s going on.

The reason the Left has such a hard time understanding Obama’s behavior is because they are inextricably wedded to a false assumption, which is that he is highly intelligent.  I have been pointing out for years that the guy not only isn’t particularly bright, but he isn’t even particularly interested in his presidential responsibilities.  It’s hard for the media, particularly the political media, to understand that latter point because nearly everyone in the political game is in it for the power.

The reason the Right has such a hard time understanding Obama’s behavior is because they are inextricably wedded to a different false assumption, which is that Obama has an agenda. He doesn’t. He’s never been in politics for the power. He doesn’t give a damn about what he can do and he doesn’t have a particular agenda. Forget the Republican paranoia; I don’t think there has ever been a post-FDR president who was less likely to even think about seeking four more years.

Obama got into politics for the same reason rock stars get into music. He can’t wait to get on the Clinton lecture circuit, have no responsibilities, get away from Michelle, and travel around the world with his very close male friends being applauded for walking on stage and reading his teleprompter. I still contend that if the decision had been left up solely to Obama, he would not have run for re-election. He not only made the second term Reagan look like a paragon of presidential engagement in his first term, but has rendered himself the lamest of ducks without even being crippled by a major internal scandal or losing the Senate.

Obviously, what Obama has been saying about the NSA is not true. But when one considers both his intelligence and his observable level of interest in his presidency, I think Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that it is the alternative explanation that is the correct one and he has no idea what is going on in his administration.

It’s not that Obama lied to you, my progressive friends, it’s that you lied to yourself about him.

Mailvox: the futility of cancer

Nate explains both why left-wing parasites are driven to take over organizations and why their takeovers always end in the eventual demise of the organization:

They never learn. They don’t understand civilization, and they don’t
understand power. That’s why they are never able to successfully build
organizations in the first place. So they have to take over the
organizations others have already built and try to use them for their
own goals. They think that the organization itself… the name… is
what makes it relevant. So they imagine if they can just get control of
it… all that power will be theirs.

So they break the very tools they are planning to use to fix the world.

Then
they stand there with a dumb look on their face… trying to drive a
nail with a broken hammer… and cannot understand why it isn’t working.

This process is as true of the Episcopalian Church and the Boy Scouts of America as it is of the SFWA.  Some believe that destruction was always the aim, but I don’t think that is true of the average parasite who joins an organization. I think in most cases they genuinely wish to “improve” the organization and do not understand that their desired improvements will kill it.

I’ll write more on this in the next day or two, in my response to NK Jemisin’s call for further “reconciliation”. What is interesting is the way in which Nate’s description here perfectly describes her approach to “improving” SF/F.

Their analytical abilities don’t appear to exceed that of the average cancer cell. The current SFWA is rather like a collection of cancer cells congratulating themselves on how much they have improved the body they are inhabiting and celebrating the way in which they have driven most of those disgusting, unprofessional white blood cells out.  And it is not hard to imagine their alarm when suddenly the body that sustains them begins to cease functioning, for no particular reason at all.

This is something that the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling may wish to keep in mind, lest it one day find itself going the same route as SFWA.  And speaking of SASS, the organization released a statement entitled: “Statement on the expulsion of a member by another writers’ organization“

In response to requests for comments regarding the decision of another writers’ group to formally expel a lifetime member, SASS Secretary and spokesman Lou Antonelli makes the following statement:

“Although the subject in question was exercising his free speech rights under the First Amendment to the US Constitution, that has nothing to do with the standards of conduct and behavior within a private organization

“Like any private club, the organization in question is allowed to police its membership according to its regulations and bylaws. This is an internal discipline issue and not a matter of concern to the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling.

“The by-laws of the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling clearly state that members should not discuss religion or politics within its auspices, and its members are expected to treat each other with respect. Those are our bylaws, and each group operates according to its own bylaws and policies.

I note that not only does SFWA have no standard of conduct and behavior, but it previously had one that was, if I recall correctly, junked during the Russell Davis administration.  As the SFWA’s statement demonstrated, the current Board believes it can throw anyone out of the organization at any time for no particular reason at all.  If I hadn’t made it clear to everyone that I was the member to whom the statement referred, no one would outside the SFWA Board and its confidants would even know with certainty who the expelled member was.

Of course, it would certainly be amusing if the Board’s assumptions turned out to be incorrect, would it not?  Because in that case, I would not even be expelled at all. And it occurs to me that someone inclined towards conspiracy theory might even conjecture that the reason the SFWA Board refused to publicly identify the expelled member is because they know very well that the expulsion was not legitimate, that it was a sham expulsion, and they are attempting to avoid being sued for damages once the illegitimacy of their action is established.

Credit and price inflation

Karl Denninger understands the intrinsic connection between the two:

The availability of “cheap credit” has made everything from houses to furniture to TVs to cell phones to cars more expensive.  Virtually everyone shops a “payment” now instead of a price. 

Why else would you hear all the car dealers telling you how they can get you into a new car for “two-ninety-nine!” instead of telling you the price is $24,923? 

That’s simple — everyone buys a payment.

House — same deal.  Do you qualify for a house or for a payment? You know the answer — and the big scam nowdays (and has been for the last decade) is finding ways to get around the down payment — actual cash on the table has been reduced to record lows, with the goal for many being zero.

Then there’s student loans, as Taibbi recently went off on and which I’ve been covering for years.  They are alleged to make college “more accessible.”  Nonsense; what they do is enslave young people who are our most-vulnerable due to lack of life experience and being that these debts cannot be discharged except under extraordinary circumstance they’re one of the worst forms of debt slavery.

The truth is that the basic laws of economics tell you that when there are more buyers willing to pay a given price irrespective of how or why the price of that item will tend to rise.  This is true whether the thing is a car, a house, health care, college tuition or anything else.

Ultimately this forces anyone who wants said thing to use credit to obtain it as the ability to pay cash dwindles away.

And that, ultimately, destroys the middle class by making the true cost of such pulled-forward demand rise so high that it cannot be afforded at all.

So long as the government coerces this behavior for its own benefit so it can hand out money to its favored few, whether those be “poor” people (with iPhones of course) or defense contractors this cycle continues until it is either voluntarily abandoned or it is forced to stop by impact with the zero boundary.

“Impact with the zero boundary” is exactly what I described in my “limits of demand” in which I suggested an alternative mechanism for the Austrian Business Cycle. This points to the core flaw of the inflationista perspective, which is that even if the government prints an unlimited amount of money, it still has to somehow get into the hands of the people who are going to spend it on goods and services.

The federal government does an amount of this through its income transfer programs, which are now better understood as distributed inflation programs. The problem is that the very act of distribution tends to reduce the willingness of the recipients to do anything productive, as could be seen in this Rattlife clip from Fox News.  And the horrified tone of the reporter explains why significantly expanding these programs is politically untenable; keep in mind they would need to increase by a factor of more than TWENTY in order to compensate for five years of credit disinflation.

That leaves expanding the credit base as the other option, which is precisely what the Federal Reserve has been trying to do.  But here it runs into the “pushing on a string” problem due to its inability to print more borrowers.  It’s not so much that the banks won’t lend as the banks can’t find anyone credible to lend to as about 40 percent of the loans they are presently holding are already in default.

About the only thing the federal government can do at this point is expand its student loan guarantees to the home mortgage and credit card markets. However, that terrifies Fed officials, who are already looking at the fact that only 10.8 million of the 28 million federal student loan borrowers in the US are making any payments on their student loans.

Which points to the quasi-Soviet nature of the problem where the federal government pretends to give money to banks to lend out to borrowers and the borrowers pretend they are going to pay it back. Expanding the sham to mortgages and credit cards may buy a little more time, but it’s not going to fix anything. It is certainly not a credible basis for economic growth.