Category: Uncategorized

A Hultgreen-Curie near miss

Frankly, I’m surprised the woman didn’t somehow manage to trip, fall, break her neck, and expire on the field during the tryout:

It was always a long shot that Lauren Silberman would wind up impressing an NFL team so much during a regional combine that they wound up signing her for a chance to compete to become their kicker this summer.  It’s a much longer shot after her day at the New York/New Jersey Regional Scouting Combine, held at Jets headquarters in New Jersey, ended early because of an injury. Mike Garafolo of USA Today reports that Silberman landed awkwardly after her first kickoff, which traveled just 16 yards, and then asked to see a trainer after a 14-yard kick on her second try.

To put those distances into perspective, Ender was kicking 20-yard field goals when he was eight years old. Video of this epic and historic kick, which marks a major step forward in the long march towards Fempire, is below.

Inflation vs Deflation IV

Nate has put together an excellent response entitled Mount Chapter 3, the full significance of which I suspect even he doesn’t recognize yet, but which I will begin to illuminate in my next post on the subject:

So… now here we sit happily atop Mount Chapter Three.  Ain’t the view grand?  Now… with all of this as a basis of monetary understanding… we can address Vox’s traps… I mean… questions.

1. Are gold and silver commodity money?  All gold and silver?  Money is a condition that can be deferentially diagnosed by behavior.  Are they functioning like money?  Then they are money.  Its the behavior that makes them money.  It is the commercial commodity that lends subjective value and thus allows us to categorize them in LVM’s terms.

2. Are the Federal Reserve Notes, in both cash and deposit form, commodity money or fiat money?  The standard answer is fiat.  But in reality FRN’s have characteristics of both credit money and fiat money.

3.Does TMS2 represent your definition of the money supply? No.  like M2  it is only a useful tool for estimation.  It is flawed… but it serves for watching trends.  I am agnostic on the claim that money supply can even be measured  accurately.  But I lean toward it being a pure impossibility.  Its like watching ants at a huge ant mound.  You have no idea how many ants are actually there…  guessing is pointless… but you can stand back and watch them and tell if the swarm is growing or shrinking.

4. What are the various components of TMS2, commodity money, fiat money, or some combination therein?  Given the nature of my explanation of Chapter 3’s 4 types of money… its abundantly clear that all categories in TMS2 are fiat money.  Many are credit money as well… but its impossible to parce in our banking system due to the various shenanigans… AND… if you listen to Ludwig… well…

“As a rule it is not possible to ascertain whether a concrete specimen of money-substitutes is a money-certificate or a fiduciary medium” 
– Human Action( p. 433)

With apologies to Vox, he has taken a large list of money substitutes and asked me to  do what Mises says literally cannot be done.

Read the rest of it there.  As for those who are concerned about the score, I think I can assure you, that is almost certainly the least interesting aspect of this debate.  Not, of course, that I am conceding anything in the slightest.  I am just as capable of seeing the obvious as anyone else, the difference is that I also see that which is, apparently, considerably less obvious.

Avanti Grillo

The Italian euro-elite is plotting against the Italian people and their right to self-determination again:

Italian officials say the Bank of Italy’s governor Ignazio Visco is front-runner to take over as premier despite warnings that this will be seen as an elitist ploy. It is far from clear whether the Democrats (Pd) in charge of the lower house will back the idea.  The plans amount to a near replica of the outgoing team of Mario Monti, though one greatly weakened by the earthquake upset in the elections a week ago. Almost 57pc of the vote went to groups that vowed to tear up the EU-imposed austerity agenda.

Stefano Fassina, the Pd economics chief, said his party is vehemently opposed to “any form of technocrat government, new or old”, insisting that the election result must be respected. Mr Fassina said 90pc of the country had rejected the Monti agenda and warned that it would be a grave error to try to force through the same reviled plans a second time.

Comedian Beppe Grillo repeated his vow to “bring down the old system” and dismissed the latest talks as cattle market trading by a depraved political class trying to circumvent the will of the people. “I repeat for the umpteenth time, the Five Star Movement will not back any government. It will vote law by law in keeping with its platform,” he said.

“We’re not a political party, we’re a civic revolution. This country is in ruins with two trillion in debts and we have to rebuild it from scratch,” he told a scrum of journalists. In a rhetorical play on the slogans of 1789 and 1917 he exhorted “all citizens” to descend on parliament.  Mr Grillo repeated his call for an “online referendum” on the euro and vowed to buy back €600bn of Italian bonds held by foreigners if his movement gains power, a de facto default and withdrawal from the EMU system. 

The “comedian” is terrifying the bankers and the politicians because he’s made it clear that he will not be co-opted by alliances and payoffs.  Naturally, this refusal to join them means those who are observably anti-democratic fascists are attempting to smear him as a fascist.  They are frightened, quite reasonably, that Grillo will lead Italy out of the Euro and possibly the European Union as well.  As, one hopes, he will.

To put it into American terms, this is as if Ron Paul had run third party for president, no one won, and it was declared that Ben Bernanke would be appointing himself president.  Needless to say, the 90 percent of Italians who voted against Monti, the Italian equivalent of Alan Greenspan, who for the last year has been acting as prime minister despite never being elected to anything, are not at all pleased about this.

Meanwhile, in the land of the free, Americans sit complacently on their $53 trillion in debt and continue to support the very Republicans and Democrats whose policies created it.

More shirts from McRapey

Sadly, while McRapey’s latest t-shirt endeavor has received considerably more press than his Gamma Rabbit line, Amazon has decided to stop selling them due to their overly rapey theme.  We can only hope that his next project, Gamma Rabbit thongs for cisgendered men, will prove to be more successful.

Mailvox: impeccable girl logic



How can one possibly hope to refute these fiendish adversaries?  Or to confound their impeccable and diabolically clever arguments?  And seeing as how Miss Paradis is not only breaking out logic, but Latin, I can only conclude she must be a witch!  In fear and desperation, I attempted to dismantle her argument, but there were simply no flaws to be found!

  1. I did, indeed, write that widespread rape makes a society uncivilized whereas widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable.
  2. And in doing so, I did, without question, show a certain lack of empathy.
  3. And furthermore, this dreadful dearth of empathy did inspire the Paradis sisters to collect THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE DOLLARS from similarly disgusted individuals and give it to an incest charity… in my name!

Thereby proving, beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt, that my thesis concerning the demographic unsustainability of widespread female employment and the relative damage it causes to society vis-a-vis widespread rape can only be completely and totally incorrect.

I stand corrected.  Quod sherat demonstrandum.

UPDATE:  Miss Paradis expounds upon her dialectical approach: “I’m not attempting to refute an illogical argument. The argument is
based on false premise and was meant only to be inflammatory, either
that or your ‘super intellect’ has no understanding of capitalism.”

Inflation vs Deflation III

Nearly twenty years ago, I reached the finals of a karate tournament.  It was the third and final point-fighting tournament of my brief career and the first one in which I wasn’t ejected in the first match for “excessive contact”.  (I never liked point-fighting, which is essentially a version of tag.)  My opponent in the final was a good friend from my dojo, a sort of pocket Hercules who could do six reps at 275 and whose nickname was Terminator.

Our sensei encouraged the referee to let things go for once, we both fully unleashed on the other, but after the scheduled two minutes was up and the score was only 2-2, the referee turned to our sensei before the overtime and said “do these guys fight each other every day or something?”  No matter how fast and hard we threw our kicks and punches, it was very hard to penetrate the other’s defenses because we both knew perfectly well what the other guy was intending.

In like manner, because Nate and I are both familiar, and more or less in accordance, with Austrian School economics, a lot of this debate is likely to strike readers less familiar with it as pointless.  But rest assured, it is not.  It is precisely because the windows of opportunity are going to be small that an amount of testing and probing for weakness is going to be required.  Also, as a long-time reader of this blog, Nate is very familiar with my approach to critical discourse and is going to be exceedingly wary of the various traps I habitually lay for my interlocutors.  So, be patient and try to resist the urge to try to leap ahead, because this is not going to proceed immediately to the superficially obvious chasm, which is the different opinions concerning debt, that separates us.

In his first response, Nate indicated his acceptance of the monetary tradition of Turgot with two critical addenda.  He writes:

Note that nowhere in either of Vox’s proposed definitions do we find this critical factor.  Turgot omits it.  Law omits it.  Mises, Rothbard, Salerno.. and pretty much every other Austrian has agreed that the key factor of money is the fact that it completes a transaction.  Completing a transaction is the one thing that money does, that nothing else does.  In the interest of charity and goodwill… I will suggest that Turgot’s characteristics of money are all fine with me… provided that we remember that the value supposedly stored by the money is subjective, and, we add the requirement that I have hitherto beaten into the ground.  It must serve to complete the transaction.

I have no objection to either addendum and am content to accept it as a reasonable definition of money for the moment, although I reserve the right to propose alternative definitions should this definition prove to be insufficient in the course of the debate.  So, this leaves us with the following characteristics of money:

  1. A medium of exchange
  2. A unit of expression
  3. An object of commerce i.e. an exchangeable good
  4. A tool of economic calculation
  5. An intrinsic store of subjective value
  6. A completer of transactions

Before I proceed further, I must first explicitly answer the question Nate posed to me:

Lots of things store value.  Lots of things can be used to estimate value. Lots of things can be employed to aid in an exchange.   Money does all of those things.  But money is the only thing that does all of those things, and completes an exchange without creating a need for another transaction.  True or false?

Again, for the sake of argument and in the interest of charity and goodwill, I can only answer one way: true.  Armed as we now are with this expanded definition of money, we can proceed to begin considering the question of the money supply.  In doing so, I would recall to Nate the following two statements by Mises, with which we already know, from his previous post, he is almost surely familiar.

“We may give the name of commodity money to that sort of money that is at the same time a commercial commodity; and that of fiat money to money that comprises things with a special legal qualification. A third category may be called credit money, this being that sort of money which constitutes a claim against any physical or legal person. But these claims must not be both payable on demand and absolutely secure; if they were, there could be no difference between their value and that of the sum of money to which they referred, and they could not be subjected to an independent process of valuation on the part of those who dealt with them.”
  –  Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 61

“The nominalists assert that the monetary unit, in modem countries at any rate, is not a concrete commodity unit that can be defined in suitable technical terms, but a nominal quantity of value about which nothing can be said except that it is created by law. Without touching upon the vague and nebulous nature of this phraseology, which will not sustain a moment’s criticism from the point of view of the theory of value, let us simply ask: What, then, were the mark, the franc, and the pound, before 1914? Obviously, they were nothing but certain weights of gold.”
  –  Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 66

The same, of course, is true of the thaler, or dollar, of which the U.S. version is 24.057 grams of silver.  This, naturally, leads me to conclude with the following questions, to which I should like to see Nate’s answers:

  1. Are gold and silver commodity money?
  2. Are the Federal Reserve Notes, in both cash and deposit form, commodity money or fiat money?
  3. Does TMS2 represent your definition of the money supply?
  4. What are the various components of TMS2, commodity money, fiat money, or some combination therein?

Spain attacks democracy

Italy and Greece have already flirted with post-democracy, now it is Spain’s turn to do the same.  It’s informative to see how the various governments facing secession movements appear to take them considerably more seriously than those who can’t see past the status quo, so seriously that they’re even willing to throw democracy and self-determination overboard if need be:

The Spanish government has launched a legal challenge against Catalonia’s recent “declaration of sovereignty”, in the latest move by Madrid to halt the region’s march towards independence.

The government said it would ask Spain’s constitutional court to nullify the Catalan parliament’s January declaration, which stated that the “people of Catalonia have, for reasons of democratic legitimacy, the nature of a sovereign political and legal subject”.

The resolution is intended to pave the way for a regional referendum on independence, and reflects the recent surge in separatist sentiment in Spain’s most important economic region.

It’s a little amusing to see journalists raise the indebted state of the regions seeking secession and sovereignty as if it is an anti-secessionary pressure.  The reality is that debt is an excellent reason to secede, as a sovereign can borrow more easily and default at will.

70,000 readers per day!

One thing you have to keep in mind when dealing with the Left is that
leftists very seldom tell the truth about anything.  They depend upon misleading others.  That is why, if you notice a leftist is putting
particular stress on something, that is a glowing-red, beeping signal
that if you look a little closer, you’ll discover that whatever they are claiming is, if not entirely false, at least somewhat exaggerated.

Item 1: Rachel Maddow.  “A
poster on Twitter, upon seeing what he thought were very similar posts
referencing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s show, did some searching and
found out that Maddow has been using phony twitter accounts to boost her
“mentions” on the popular website.  As can be seen by screenshots
collected by a tweeter named @LeftyBollocks, Maddow has massive amount
of accounts posting the exact same claim that “Confession: I yell at my
TV while watching Rachel #Maddow talk about filibuster reform in the
same way most people do during football.”

Item 2: John Scalzi.   “Handily
demolishing the burger that he had chosen over a Midtown restaurant’s
fancier Mediterranean fare, Mr. Scalzi was anything but grim; he smiled
readily and giggled heartily. He is comfortable with the business of
promotion: An affable speaker, he is familiar with the patois of fandom
and is adept at generating buzz through the nerd mafia of like-minded
collaborators. He already reaches up to 50,000 readers a day through his
popular blog, “Whatever.” (“Taunting the tauntable since 1998” is the
slogan on its home page.)”

Item 3: 2012 Nebula Awards.  The SFWA Nebula ballots went out today.  As usual, Tor had 2 of the 6 nominations for Best Novel, but as Tor’s defenders are quick to point out, that could be accounted for by the fact that it publishes the most novels in the increasingly mislabeled field of “science fiction”.  However, even more questionable is the fact that three of the seven Best Novelette nominees were published on Tor.com, which is one fewer nomination than Asimov, Analog, F&SF, and Black Gate received for all short fiction combined.  Another apparent anomaly was that two writers, Aliette de Bodard and Kenneth Liu, received five nominations between them for the three shorter fiction awards, up from three last year.  Now, it would appear that either the two writers are the second comings of Asimov and Heinlein who will dominate the field of science fiction for decades to come or there is something else at work here.

The numerate among us
will recognize that 50,000 readers per day is 18.25 million readers per
year.  Now recall that McRapey was more than a little pleased to have hit 8.2 million in 2012,
up from 5.4 million in 2011.  That 8.2 million refers to
Wordpress views that amount to 7.8 million in Google pageview terms.  Now to
demonstrate how absurd that shows the “50,000 readers a day” claim to be, note that two months into 2013 I am presently right on pace to hit 25,309,493 readers
in 2013 by the NYT metric.  That’s 69,341 daily, which rounds nicely up
to 70,000 readers per day!

How seriously would
you take me if I claimed I had up to 70,000 readers per day?  That’s
precisely how seriously you should take any the posturing of any left-winger
about his popularity, his influence, or even his “bestselling” status, said the three-time Billboard top 40 recording artist.

These examples demonstrate why you should never,
ever give anyone on the Left even the smallest benefit of the doubt.  They always, at
the very least, stretch the truth.  They sockpuppet.  They pretend to
read things they have not.  They claim to have bought things they have
never seen.  They claim to have published three books when they have
only published one.  This reliable pattern of left-wing dishonesty is why I don’t
hesitate to call out fake reviewers and point out apparent shenanigans
even before I have gathered the incontrovertible and conclusive proof; experience and pattern
recognition have taught me that where there is the smoke of anomalies
and numbers not adding up, there is usually the fire of someone who is
“comfortable with the business of promotion” and “adept at generating
buzz”.

It is always unwise to place any trust whatsoever in those who live by attempting to redefine reality through their lies.

Inflation vs Deflation II

Nate responds with his first post: The Trap Unsprung, Mostly:

It becomes readily apparently that Vox has decided to very politely insult me.  Curious.. Cruelty artists are not often known for their subtlety.  Regardless… insult it is. That is what you call it when a skilled opponent opens up a chess match by going for a 3 move check mate.  The insinuation is you may fall for it.  Well thanks mate… Why didn’t ya just accuse me of licking the window of the short bus all the way to the Midvail Academy of the Mentally Challenged?

You may be wondering what all of this maneuvering is about.  If you’ve read Return of the Great Depression (and you should dammit) you know that Vox’s depressionist case is based on debt disappearing.   All is not totally lost for him if debt doesn’t count as money… but it complicates matters for him considerably.  If he can just show that debt is money and debt is disappearing… then he is in very good shape indeed.  If he can’t show debt is money… he can still make an effective case… it is just harder.

Ever the war gamer… Vox is trying to take the high ground.  He knows it doesn’t win him the battle… but this amounts to Getting There First with the Most.

Read the rest of it there.  He’s not wrong about my intentions although I was actually going for a 2-move checkmate that he didn’t spot.  I will post my response tomorrow; while this doesn’t require weekly posts; one per day is sufficient.  And to those who are wondering when we’re going to get past the money definitions to the central question, I will simply say “relax, enjoy the journey, and try to grasp the significance of what is being discussed on the way”.  We will definitely get to the more mundane aspects of the topic, but most of you should know enough to expect the unexpected by now.  

What “austerity”?

Paul Krugman appears to be moderately pleased that another bearded Scots-Irish hippie has publicly joined the ranks of the anti-austere.

Will it make any difference that Ben Bernanke has now joined the ranks of the hippies?  Earlier this week, Mr. Bernanke delivered testimony that should have made everyone in Washington sit up and take notice. True, it wasn’t really a break with what he has said in the past or, for that matter, with what other Federal Reserve officials have been saying, but the Fed chairman spoke more clearly and forcefully on fiscal policy than ever before — and what he said, translated from Fedspeak into plain English, was that the Beltway obsession with deficits is a terrible mistake.

First of all, he pointed out that the budget picture just isn’t very scary, even over the medium run: “The federal debt held by the public (including that held by the Federal Reserve) is projected to remain roughly 75 percent of G.D.P. through much of the current decade.”

He then argued that given the state of the economy, we’re currently spending too little, not too much: “A substantial portion of the recent progress in lowering the deficit has been concentrated in near-term budget changes, which, taken together, could create a significant headwind for the economic recovery.”

Finally, he suggested that austerity in a depressed economy may well be self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: “Besides having adverse effects on jobs and incomes, a slower recovery would lead to less actual deficit reduction in the short run for any given set of fiscal actions.”

Speaking of the Federal Reserve, I note the following numbers:  526.5    560.9    465.4    338.4    378.7    261.4    477.8    344.5    390.1    367.8    260.3    92.7    389    326    398.3    198.2    229.8.

Those are the numbers, in billions, that represent the quarterly increase in federal debt as reported by the Federal Reserve’s Z1 credit report.  That is a $6 trillion INCREASE in just over four years, which more than doubled the federal government’s outstanding debt.  There is no austerity.  In fact, the idea that the sequester somehow amounts to imposing austerity is rather like a drunk claiming that because he did 20 shots last night and planned to do 24 shots tonight, only doing 22 shots represents teetotalism.

They simply don’t make ascetics like they used to.