Category: Uncategorized

Descent into barbarism

It may not be only the economic statistics that are fictional:

Flying in the face of the traditional image of a country seen as the land of good living, ‘France, A Clockwork Orange’ claims that mainstream politicians and the media have long masked a far more disturbing reality: it is rapidly descending into mindless violence and incivility. “Nobody should ignore the reality,” the book claims, namely that “every 24 hours 13,000 thefts, 2,000 attacks and 200 rapes” take place in France – figures far higher than official national statistics.

Now, I don’t spend much time in France, so I have no way of verifying who is telling the truth and who is hiding or exaggerating it here.  But the fact that the book has become a national bestseller tends to indicate that there is something amiss with regards to the reported French criminal statistics, especially since we know that the FBI’s criminal statistics are less than entirely consistent where racial matters are concerned.

But it is worth noting that just as cultural integration tends to split the difference between the criminal tendencies of different cultures, economic integration tends to split the difference between living standards.  The intellectuals on the Left are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they have made an epic mistake of historical proportions, in devaluing and ruining their own cultures under the mistaken impression that this would somehow be of benefit to the rest of the world.

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

It’s not a question of fault.  It’s a question of actions and consequences. The best thing the West can do for the rest of the world is to preserve itself and serve as a positive example towards which it can aspire, not ruin itself in a futile attempt to transform other cultures through the magic of mass geographic relocation.

Everyone is an inequalitarian

Even the self-declared equalitarians.  How can we know?  Because, as I show at Alpha Game, even the most ardent nominal equalitarians often are, by their own inadvertent admission, observably inferior beings.

The hallmark of the inferior being is not hypocrisy, or the mere
appearance of hypocrisy.  Everyone with ideals fails to live up to them
at some point or another.  One’s failure to live up to a standard is not at all the same thing as denying the standard applies to oneself.  The hallmark
of the inferior, the sure sign of the self-admitted inferior, is the
individual who demands others live up to standards that he refuses to
accept for himself.

 Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Interracial relations in a nutshell

This anecdote effectively summarizes the African approach to all things European and explains why both multiculturalism and the White Man’s Burden were always doomed to failure:

The government was hoping to disenfranchise the estimated 30,000 white Zimbabweans by making those with actual or potential foreign citizenship actively choose to be Zimbabwean. But it mainly affected the more than one and a half million black Zimbabweans, many of them poor farmworkers, who had paternal links to the former Central African Federation and elsewhere.

How stupid.  And how quintessentially human. It doesn’t matter what quasi-human sub-species you happen to be.  It doesn’t matter if you are a white Soviet or a black Zimbabwean.  So long as you are more concerned with bringing down others than improving yourself, you will always fail.

The Euro has failed

So much for the idea that the EU and its euro would lead to more economic freedom rather than less.  Time finally ran out on what was always a vast con. Cyprus passes a law installing capital controls, thus prohibiting money transfers out of the country:

While it is unknown if the Cypriot parliament will agree to, and enact into law, the Troika-demanded deposit haircuts, after the shocking vote of mutiny against Merkel earlier this week that saw not one politician vote for the Europe suggested deposit tax levy (and even the ruling party abstained), a vote which will once more take place tomorrow, moments ago Cyprus became the first Eurozone country to officially implement governmental capital controls into legislation. At this point it had no choice: whatever happens with the deposit haircut, or with everything else, it is now inevitable that the local Cypriots will do all they can to pull as much money from domestic banking system as possible following the complete loss of faith and trust in banks, which is why the government had no choice but to intervene with its own “controls.” Sadly, this marks a milestone in the development of the Eurozone – it’s all downhill, and accelerating, from here.

Nor is the banking debacle limited to Cyprus any longer, as Spain has announced its intention to steal from Spanish depositors:  “the Spanish Minister of Finance & Public Administration announced this week a tax or bank levy (probably 0.2%) to be imposed on bank deposits, without details on which deposits will be affected or timing.”

It is time for the disastrous Euro experiment to end.  Now.  Bring back the Deutsche Mark.  Bring back the Franc.  Bring back the Lira.  The Euro has failed.

UPDATE: The news out of Cyprus just keeps getting better.

“According to the rapidly shifting plan, depositors with
the biggest local bank, Bank of Cyprus, may see losses up to 25%…. Cyprus’ second largest bank, Cyprus Popular Bank, aka Laiki bank, where it appears the bulk of Russian cash is stored, will fare far, far worse with
deposit haircuts up to a stunning 70% on the table, and that is after
capital controls ease enough to allow for the deposit withdrawals!”

How not to be SFWA president III

John Scalzi tweets concerning his admirable commitment to intellectual discourse: “I’ve blocked or muted an incredible number of appallingly stupid people today. Seriously, it must be a record.”

Of course, you have to keep in mind that McRapey defines “appallingly stupid people” as anyone who disagrees with him and dares to ask him a question that he is incapable of answering without exposing his intellectual limitations.  The Gamma Rabbit knows very well that he can’t hold his own in any environment where he can’t control the microphone.

Keep on keeping on, Johnny.

The Secret Names of Selenoth

Daniel reviews A Throne of Bones from a literary perspective:

Subtext flows fast through the story, providing a skeleton that never
shows through the story’s skirts. However, if you want elegant critiques
on the distancing effects of television, the nature of cruelty, the
excellence of warfare, the culture of the Church, the narrowness of
postmodern expectation, the daft inner workings of pseudoscience, the
shortcomings of theory versus application, the invisible nature of
Modalism, or the psychological impact of human flight you’ll find them,
like a rake in his prime, waiting, ready and rich.

But this is a
book designed with a single primary purpose, to revive epic fantasy as a
rooted form, and most readers of fantasy are going to receive this
story as such.

They will not be disappointed.

Names are
important in A Throne of Bones, and I’ll highlight two: Selenoth, the
continent upon which the action takes is, a nod, I believe, to the
element selenium, which occurs naturally in volcanic areas. Considering
the photosensitivity of the material, it seems natural that the land
provides an elemental basis to the development of Selenoth’s primeval
magic.

Even more interesting, however is the name of the main
country: Amorr. Yes, it is a play on the legendary “secret name” of
Rome, which provides a clever signal that this strange society will in
some way mirror the Roman republic. However, more deeply, it is also a
direct tip to the Latin word for “love” and this is where, if the magic
of Selenoth draws the bow, the arrow of Amorr strikes the heart.

Day
is, after all, an incorrigible romantic, and not of the hopeless
variety. The nostalgia, realism and richness of Selenoth is crystalized
through the lens of Amorr, and, to put a fine point on it, love is all
around. Love in degraded, if happy, form in the camp followers and
brothels among the soldiery. Love between sibling reavers on a mission
to draw former victim states into an alliance against certain doom. In a
scene stunning, dreadful, long-coming but still shocking scene, love
grips in stoic, complex anguish.*

The raw and needful love
between man and wife. Long-distance love between the clever (yet
earnest) and the cruel (yet sympathetic). Love of complex relational
intrigues. Love of language. Love of order. Love of family, of honor, of
duty.

Love of dragons. Love of gold. Love of knowledge. Love of
good men, of good life, of good death. A love of the hope that all
things, not some or most, will pass away, and yet that all things, not
some or most, will be restored by the hand of the Almighty. Every page,
for its grit and realism, its tragedy, folly and danger, the thwarted
plans, curses, whoredom, brutality, the death of youth, the loss of
ideals, the temporary victory of murder and evil, is an out and out love
letter to the Immaculate. Death, in all its towering, all-consuming
bleakness, is small, and soon to be swallowed by a love so great it lays
its life down, and in defeat, quite literally overcomes all.

A
Throne of Bones is doorstopping fantasy for far more than its physical
dimensions. Metaphysically, it shuts the door to the world we know and
provides an escape to a better reality, and one far more dangerous than
the one in which we now dwell. It expresses longings (to master dragons,
to find treasure, to save the world on a mission from God, to restore
and enjoy the family, to live abundantly and in reality, enjoy and
defend the relationships that matter, and many, many more) in such
richness of detail.

An aside: fantasists are the bastard children
of organized theology. I don’t mean that fantasy is allegory, and
certainly not direct, symbol for symbol theology. Instead due in part to
the fact that every fantasy, from Phantastes to His Dark Materials, are
created worlds that don’t pop into existence at random. They each have
creators who can’t help that they leave traces of themselves in the
handiwork of their model worlds. While science fiction is typically a
practical exercise or applied thought experiment in galactic or atomic
creation, fantasy distinguishes itself by fabricating the middle ground:
the world as it is commonly known. A Throne of Bones expresses a
theology that views an Almighty who is coming to restore all things, and
the things, even in corrupted state, have their origins in good. Evil
is small and dark and nothing, whose major temporary advantage is its
ability to poison hope and occlude the truth.

Ensoulment, the
major theme of the previous novel in the series, Summa Elvetica, gets to
play in A Throne of Bones in a way that was impossible when it was the
primary pack mule for the plot of the previous work. As previously
established, love is not possible without ensoulment. What is most
fascinating is to see the care in which the author has ensouled each of
his own characters, down to the idiotically short-lived and naturally
evil goblin cannon fodder.

Forget if elves might be ensouled. Can goblins win a fight?

The
book has tremendous surf. There are waves of no fewer than seven
chapters that are powerful, climactic, moving: not just great writing,
but great in meaning. I have been surprised to see (more than once)
complaints about dropped plot threads (such as the dragon) which to me
were quite obviously not dropped, characters that do not naturally
develop (such as Severa) who seems to me to very naturally develop and
comparisons to A Song of Ice and Fire where I see very little
resemblance.

A major criticism I have of the book is something I
naturally expected after reading a chapter or two: music. The book
itself is not lyrical, but technical (though elegant in technique), but
the world of Selenoth, especially with its peculiar response to the
Immaculate, simply cries out for various bits of poetry, hymn and common
song to be in greater evidence. Aside from a muscular (and welcome)
public recitation of poetry (during which Corvus, the listener, falls
asleep!) they are not.

I know, I know. Bad form knocking a book
an entire half-star (out of ten) for what it did not include, but it
really was that noticeable. It isn’t like the author hasn’t included
poetics in previous works: the decision had to be conscious, and all I
can say is that I missed the music. The reader gets smells, sights,
sounds, textures and action, but the lack of music is curious. The
lyrics are there, mixed in with more mundane plot-drivers – they are
simply not drawn out and set to music to make it more obvious for the
reader. There are prayers, but no psalms.

On the other hand,
despite an off-hand reference to musicians, there are also no minstrel
bards to be found, and of that I can’t complain.

Despite its
length, A Throne of Bones is a fast read, and perhaps would benefit from
the occasional gear-shifting song cycle or original poem, just to
remind the reader to linger and look around a moment longer.

Of
course, to truly succeed, the series will need to out-do itself until
the penultimate book (where, if the series is to be great, it must peak,
then echo that peak through the final book and achieve an elegant
slight downslope), which will certainly be a challenge, perhaps an epic
one. However, I simply can’t express the joy in knowing this is a
planned set – a part of a larger story (but don’t worry, this one stands
just fine on its own. Though it ends with a satisfying suspense, it is
no annoying cliffhanger. It will build expectation for what comes next,
but also satisfies.) – and that I have only just begun a lifelong escape
into the reality of Selenoth and Amorr: or, as I think of their secret
names – Magic and Love.

A Throne of Bones (Vox Day, Hardcover Edition)
9 out of 10

*One
note on this, yet trying to avoid major spoilers* – the scene of
anguish is subtle and intensely complex, and argues, in a very brief
moment, a detailed theological argument. I view it as a significant
underpinning to the way the world of Selenoth “works” from a creator’s
point of view – a creator who fully intends to restore all things, and
one who therefore allows space for a man to work out many critical and
seemingly impossible choices for himself.

While every author enjoys knowing that his readers enjoy his work and appreciates support, it is a particular pleasure to read substantive reviews written by those readers who not only enjoy the book, but show a deeper understanding of it as well.  Daniel is too generous, I think, in that while there was some development of Severa’s character it was too crude and clumsy due to the time constraints; I tend to find female characters more difficult to write because their motivations and thought processes are so different from my own.  And his criticism concerning the lack of music is well-placed; there is a distinct lack of melody to accompany the constant rhythm of the legions on the march.

I did, however, agree with him concerning how neither dragon story amounted to any sort of dropped plot-thread.  While I freely admit to favoring subtlety and dropping hints to labored explanations of precisely what happened in all circumstances, that’s not the same as simply leaving a plot point unaddressed. My philosophy is to refrain from telling the reader any more than the perspective character can reasonably expect to know, and I’m not going to divert a character’s inner dialogue for the purposes of exposition any more than is absolutely necessary. 

I was impressed that Daniel correctly nailed both meanings of the city’s name; those who thought it was simply a singularly inept attempt to disguise the name of Rome clearly don’t know much about Roman history.  There are various theories concerning what Pliny described as “the other name of Rome which it is held sinful to disclose except during the rites of the mysteries”; some say it was Amor, others Hirpa.  I incline towards the Amor theory myself, thanks to a number of historical plays on words in both Latin and Greek that juxtapose Roma, Amor, and Eros.

Anyhow, I take this sort of review as a challenge to, as Daniel suggests, see each book outdo the next.  I don’t know if my skills are up to the task, but if I fail it will not be through a failure to try.

In related news, I expect Hinterlands to release The Wardog’s Coin in ebook next week, which will consist of the title story and “Qalabi Dawn”.  For those who would like to obtain a physical copy of the ebooks, Hinterlands will be publishing a hardcover version of Summa Elvetica in May, that will possess a newly designed spine to match those of the Arts of Dark and Light series, and in addition to the titular novel, will contain the following stories: “Master of Cats”, “Birth of an Order”, “A Magic Broken”, “The Wardog’s Coin”, “Qalabi Dawn”, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, and “The Last Witchking”.  I don’t know the exact page count yet, but it should be around 450 pages.

Inflation vs deflation VIII

As is probably becoming rapidly apparent, this debate over inflation vs deflation, despite its esoteric nature, is turning out to be much more practical and relevant than anyone would have previously imagined it to be. The events in Cyprus make this more a discussion of current events than a purely academic matter.  In his most recent post on the subject, Nate began with an admission concerning that we are both talking about the same definition of fiat in one sense of the term.

 Broad definition…  narrow
definition…  it is readily apparent the
broader definition is what I am referring to here. But one must remember that I
am actually no longer using Mises’ definitions at all. I am defining money as
it relates to the commodity competition… not its nature.  I call it fiat money not because it has
government force behind it, but because it is that government force that makes
the commodity win the commodity competition and therefore become the
money.  Credit money doesn’t exist at all
in physical form and thus doesn’t compete in the competition and is not
actually money.  

Why he calls it fiat doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this debate.  However, while he is right to say that credit money is not actually money, (you may recall that I defined it as a “money surrogate”), he is incorrect in stating that it doesn’t exist in physical form.  It does exist; the paper dollars you hold in your pocket and the paper Euros that the depositors in Cyprus are presently unable to obtain are both representatives of a form of credit money.  Now it is true that the paper to mark all current credit claims are seldom, if ever, printed, this doesn’t change the fact that some of them are printed and that they are actual physical representations of the outstanding credit claims.

What is important to note… and what Vox is missing… is that
it when the credit money is created by time-shifting like this is not
considered inflationary.  The interest is
rewarding those who have saved, and it all washes out in the end.  The interest rate, which is the price of
time-shifting money, fluctuates as demand for time-shifting increases and
decreases… and that.. all by itself… mitigates the boom and bust cycle created
by the lending.  As more people borrow,
the price of borrowing goes up… bringing that number back down.  As fewer people borrow the price is lowered
so more will borrow… bringing the number of borrowers back up.  We find a happy medium where the interest
rate is moving around, but the purchasing power is relatively stable.  The risk banks take when leveraging money also
influence that price… which we call the interest rate. All of this works
together nicely.  Which is why when Mises
talks about inflation he always talks about government. 

This is indeed how it is supposed to work.  It is how economists are taught that it works.  But it doesn’t work this way and Nate is incorrect in stating that the creation of credit money is not inflationary.  There are several ways of demonstrating that this is the case.  The one I will utilize here is to look at the supply and demand curve and what happens when credit money is injected.

The creation of credit money always has an immediate effect on prices because it increases the applicable demand.  I shouldn’t need to draw any SD curves, as we can see the effect that expanded home loans had in the housing market, that increased student loans have on the price of tuition, and even in the health care market, where governments borrow the money that is used to pay for the “free” health care delivered to indigent patients.  No cash is being printed, and yet credit money is being created, transactions are taking place, and prices are rising.  While these effects are localized to the relevant markets I suspect the reason why economists historically failed to connect them to the broad increase in price levels that is usually described as inflation is because until relatively recently, it was not possible to obtain general, pre-approved credit for even the smallest transactions.


The economists failed to anticipate either the “credit card” or the debit card, which allows the depositor to tap directly into the credit expansion system without the need to interfere with the expansion by withdrawing the physical debt markers.  And those few who did failed to grasp the full extent of the eventual consequences.  This is why the bankers and governments are so firmly against cash economies; it is actually less about control and tracking, (although obviously governments appreciate the potential benefits of the latter), but because a wholly digital system theoretically allows for unlimited credit expansion… from the traditional perspective.
That is how it is supposed to work.  And when its working like that… we can look
at the amount of money in a given account that exists above and beyond the
deposits in that account and we call it credit money.  Because it exists above and beyond the
deposits in the account, it has no physical representation.  The coins, or dollar bills, do not
exist.  I need you to be clear on
this.  I have a checking account with say…$45,000
in it.  If I go to the bank and ask them
for $45,000 in cash… they will laugh in my face.   However, debit cards are swiped, and the
credit money is accepted exactly like cash is accepted.  That is the miracle.  And it is a miracle… of faith.  
The key phrase being “when it is working like that”.  Nate is correct on all the details here, except that he is still failing to recognize that it is ALL the money in a given account that is credit money, not merely “the amount of money in a given account that exists above and beyond the
deposits in that account”.  This should be abundantly clear in light of the Cypriot situation, where the banks cannot open because, despite their nominal billions on deposit, they have literally no paper markers left to give out even though there are numerous levels of government that are capable of declaring fiat markers to represent those credit claims.  The problem is not that there is no government to print the fiat, but rather, the fact that no one wants to be stuck with the underlying credit claims.
So now that we understand borrowing and lending we can
discuss what is wrong.  And what is wrong…
is the central bank.   Central banks
break the link between savers and lenders. 
Rather than the deposits being the source that creates the leverage, you
now have a central bank that is merely using the deposits to rationalize its
decisions to expand credit.  The deposits
of savers are reduced to mere justification. 
  
The central bank sits on high, and manipulates the interest
rate… which eliminates its ability to mitigate the booms and busts of the business
cycle.  Then on top of that… the evil
bastards then set themselves up as the Credit Gods… passing out credit as they see
fit… attempting to manage an economy every bit as much as the communists ever
did, and failing just as spectacularly.
If you get nothing else… I hope and pray you grasp
that.  
I can’t argue with anything here, except to note that as has been demonstrated with MF Global, the deposits themselves are, quite literally and legally, loans from the depositor to the bank or fidiciary entity.
So if you have made it this far you now realize that the
money in your checking account doesn’t actually exist.  its not that the
banks just don’t keep that much cash stored.  There isn’t that much
cash in existence.  Not even close.  
So now that the terror has sunk in… what is the urge that
you’re squelching down right now?  Is it the urge to go borrow more money?  Or is it the urge… to go get your cash and
stick it under your bed?
Exactly.  And now you
see why Vox’s measure of the money supply is incorrect.   M1 is the real
money.  M2 and TSM2 are close approximations of the
purchasing power currently available… though obfuscated through
shenanigans.  Z1… well Z1..  Is just a measure of claims on money.  It
doesn’t reflect a limit on new future
claims.  At best it can serve as an
indicator of how much new credit money is being created.  Z1 will never
be able to show deflation.  That’s because Z1 doesn’t show a credit
limit…
it shows a credit balance.  See if I have
a $5000 credit limit on my credit card… and I owe $5000… then my credit
card is
showing up as $5000 on the Z1 report.  If
I pay my credit card down to a balance of $2000, then my credit card is
showing
up as $2000 on Z1 which Vox would then say is a reduction in purchasing
power
of $3000.  This is incorrect.  My high credit is still $5000.  I can go
spend that $3000 in credit money any
time I want to.  Z1 is certainly a
valuable tool, but it is a limited one.  Now…
as has been said… one cannot print borrowers… so if the rate of credit
growth
is slowing, or going down instead of up it can mean bad things…for
example the
delivery system for new credit can be interrupted.  That said, if one
considers the nature of the
financial abomination that we have before us, I can certainly not fault
Vox for
going that way.  However, it is not where
I go.
Here is where Nate begins to go more seriously awry.  M1 and M2 are not real money anymore than Z1 is, they are merely money substitutes whereas Z1 is a money surrogate that encompasses them both.  I recognize that Nate is not using the Misean definitions any longer, but I don’t see that his rationale for refusing to do so is necessarily justified or even relevant to determining the inflation/deflation question.  More importantly, his distinction between credit limit and credit outstanding is, if not necessarily false, entirely irrelevant.  It is only credit outstanding that matters; the “limit” is an entirely artificial one that, in this case, represents the extent to which the bank is willing to enable Nate to expand the credit supply.  But that’s not an actual limit in the sense that Nate’s decision to not use his potential credit or even to pay down his outstanding credit is, which is the limit I mentioned in Limits of Demand when I proposed it as an alternative mechanism for powering the Austrian Business Cycle.  Nor is there any macro credit limit; this is why Bernanke and the European Central Bank imagine, erreoneously, that they can expand it indefinitely as they see fit.

But, as we saw in 2008, outstanding credit can and will contract.  Even a slowed expansion of the sort we have seen since 2009 can have a deleterious effect on an economy which depends on a reliable 2.4 percent growth rate per quarter.
The whole reason credit money works, is
because there is a faith-based link from that credit money directly to
cash.  Thus, the money, right now, is cash.  What you’re seeing is
precisely what happened
in the Great Depression.  People wanted
their cash.  They hid it inside walls and
buried it in jars.  Banks collapsed destroying
massive amounts of credit money, but folks still wanted their cash.  But
Vox fails to recognize a critical
underlying difference between then, and today. 
He looks at those in control… the government and the central bankers…
and he sees them expanding credit.  He
understands the system better than almost everyone, including the
central
bankers, and thus he uses that understanding to predict how the system
will
behave.  He expects it to behave the way
it behaved in the 1930s. 
The link is stronger than Nate asserts.  These days, credit money is cash and cash is credit money.  And Nate also credits me with more confidence than I actually possess.  I know the system won’t behave the way it did in the 1930s, in fact, that is precisely what concerns me most.  Unlike before, the banks are not being permitted to collapse, which is why Z1 hasn’t collapsed yet either.  But the bad loans still exist even though they still haven’t been written off.  We are in strange and unpredictable waters here.
I have to take you back again to the competition which
Vox , to his peril, ignores. So we have these commodities battling it
out
in a competition of demand.  Not supply.  Demand. 
The one most in demand wins and becomes the money.  The demand is the
key.  People want that commodity.  They want it badly and everyone knows
they
want it badly.  So because everyone knows
they want that commodity badly… everyone knows that they will be able
to
trade that commodity.  They have faith…
faith friends… that they will be able to exchange that commodity in the
future
for other goods and services they require
That’s all good and well if we’re talking about something like
Gold or Platinum or Silver.  People want
it because of what it is… and what it is will not change.  But fiat money?  Well… they want it because of all manner of
government related enhancements.  If it
weren’t for those enhancements… they wouldn’t want it at all.  But those enhancements exist…  so long as
the people have faith in that government. And that is why I define it as fiat
money.

I suspect Nate has made a fatal error here, because recent events show that faith in government, in the banking system, and even in cash itself is rapidly dissolving.  Everyone now understands that the Cypriot banks don’t have 7 billion cash euros in their vaults, but more importantly, they now also understand that the government can instantly make 10 percent of it disappear regardless of whether if it was in cash form or not.

And when money surrogates, money substitutes, or solid money itself disappears, that is a deflationary action.  Our continued differences of opinion notwithstanding, I think we’ve now covered sufficient theoretical ground that we can move on to the practical aspect of the debate, so I will conclude by asking Nate three questions. 

  1. If the expected outcome is, as he suggests, inflationary, due to the central bank printing presses why has the European Central Bank not simply used the bank holiday to print the required 13.5 billion euros and allowed its customers to withdraw as much of it happens to suit them?  
  2. Why is the ECB risking the Cypriot banking system, the wrath of the Russian depositors, and the fate of the European Union itself on these various schemes rather than simply printing the cash and permitting its withdrawal?
  3. Imagine an American analog, where a bank with billions in deposits but already emptied of all its cash was simply shut down without the usual FDIC shell game of “transferring its deposits” to another bank.  Would this be a deflationary action?

Elephants never learn

Dr. Carson is the GOP’s newest Magic Negro:

Dr. Benjamin Carson was a political unknown just weeks ago. Audience members at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland last week cheered Dr. Carson, on screen, after he said, “Let’s just say if you magically put me in the White House ” Then with a single speech delivered as President Obama looked stonily on, he was lofted into the conservative firmament as its newest star: a renowned neurosurgeon who is black and has the credibility to attack the president on health care.

In his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last month, Dr. Carson criticized the health care overhaul and higher taxes on the rich, while warning that “the P.C. police are out in force at all times.”

Overnight, he was embraced by conservatives including those at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which proclaimed, “Ben Carson for President” — a suggestion Dr. Carson helped feed at a high-profile gathering last weekend, the Conservative Political Action Conference. He was interrupted by sustained cheers when he coyly said, “Let’s just say if you magically put me in the White House…

I mean, didn’t they just go through this with what’s his name, the Federal Reserve guy, Alan Keyes?  I mean, J.C. Watts, that is to say, Colin Powell, or rather, Herman Cain. It is clear that a lot of Republicans are far more concerned with acquiring a useless anti-raciss card than they are with the direction of the country.  They are elevating totems rather than candidates, and worse, totems that will never be recognized by those they are seeking to placate.

US politics are now an identity game.  Democrats have already established that they are the brown, black, and yellow party, so unless Republicans realize that they are, whether they like it or not, the white party, and begin to plan their strategy accordingly, they not only cannot win intentionally, they aren’t really even in the game.  It’s like watching a rugby team trying to play football without bothering to learn what the rules are.

It is long past time for conservatives to realize that one cannot continue to play by centuries old Anglo-Saxon rules after one permits a large quantity of non-Anglos who neither know nor care about those rules to invade the playing field.  The great irony is that the Republicans of the sort one finds on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who cling to the outdated notion of a creedal United States, genuinely consider themselves to be pragmatists.

I expect that like his predecessors, Dr. Carson will, sooner or later, inadvertently reveal himself to be considerably less conservative than all of his newfound fans ever imagined.

The EU pulls out the gun

Steal or die are the current orders from Brussels:

Our foreign correspondent Richard Spencer is in Nicosia. He, along with Bruno Waterfield, Tom Parfitt and Alex Spillius, explain the implications of the ECB’s liquidity cut off. They write: The European Central Bank will switch off the cash life support taps for banks in Cyprus wiping out £1.7 billion in British savings after next Monday unless the island signs off on a radical debt-cutting programme with the eurozone and International Monetary Fund.

Unless a deal is in place the euro’s central bank will withdraw “emergency liquidity assistance” leading to the immediate collapse of the two largest Cypriot banks and a financial crash in Cyprus. Cypriot banks are totally reliant on the ECB for funding and have taken over €9.1 billion in an emergency programme to ensure cash does not run out.

However, the Cypriot Parliament, courtesy of their Russian-instilled spines, is insisting that it will not approve any “deposit haircut”.  Next week could be interesting.

On a tangentially related note, those of you waiting for the next entry in the Inflation/Deflation debate need to relax and be patient.  In addition to all the excitement of the Cypriot affair, I’ve been finishing up the new Selenoth ebook that will be published soon, (next week if all goes smoothly), as well as addressing an amount of game-related business.  While the debate is important, it has not been a priority this week.

WRE: technology conference edition

It is customary for women to lament the way men are openly hostile to their presence when they insert themselves into hacker fests and technology conferences.  And yet, it is hardly difficult to understand why men tend to be less than enthusiastic about opening themselves up to be patrolled by volunteer speech police and self-appointed equality cops.

A Playhaven developer was fired after making sexual jokes in the audience during a keynote session at PyCon, a conference for Python developers. Now Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, is getting rape and death threats via Twitter.

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner, and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

    Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…
    — Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The developer on the left, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was apparently fired by PlayHaven for the incident.

Adria Richards, having successfully gained the attention she was there to seek, tries to justify her actions in the usual self-lionizing language: “Adria Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl,
saying that she took the comments for as long as she could, but when
she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a
stand for her, and all the women who have not considered technology as a
career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible
for her to do so.”

What Richards clearly doesn’t realize is that she is the parasitical ass clown making it more difficult for women to pursue technology as a career path.  What sort of idiot employer would want to hire disruptive, self-seeking, controlling employees actively looking for causes to fight instead good engineers who will simply do their jobs and may happen to tell a mildly offensive joke now and then in the process?  At this point, I have no doubt that the conference organizers are regretting their decision to permit Adria Richards to attend.

After all, who wants to attend the sort of conference where merely being overheard by a fellow attendee comes with a proven risk of losing your job?  I’m not a Python developer, but if I was, I’d certainly wouldn’t bother to clear a spot on my calendar for it.  And as a game developer, I’m certainly going to be looking at PlayHaven with a deeply skeptical eye going forward.

As one female developer – in other words a woman who actually works in the industry, as opposed to patrols it on behalf of her equalitarian ideology – correctly observed: “Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech.”  It does.  It absolutely does. People like Richards are parasites who have no place in technology because they contribute nothing, they create nothing, they construct nothing, they only destroy.  They only seek to destroy.

Even the lowly white knights who desperately desire to be considered good and proper equalitarians understand the problem:  “She damages the reputation of everyone trying to make this industry more
female-friendly. She’s done the opposite of making men and women feel
more comfortable working together; now men will be looking over their
shoulder every time a woman is present in the workplace or a conference
because hey, she might do what Adria did. This is not an environment
anyone wants to work in.”

It is reported that 20 percent of  the 2013 attendees at PyCon were female.  If the men who attended this year have any sense at all, that percentage will be considerably higher next year.  Meanwhile, those of us who don’t give a quantum of a damn about making “industry more female-friendly”, but are focused on creating compelling, entertaining, and useful technologies, see our skepticism vindicated.  Again.

UPDATE:  Apparently SendGrid was unimpressed with their employees decision to evangelize feminist speech control rather than SMTP relay services.  It is a wise move on their part, and should serve as an object lesson to other would-be though police.

“Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.“