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Mailvox: the existence of evil

JB has a question:

I have never heard this question answered before.  If there is no God (or Devil) why is there evil?

The reason you haven’t heard it answered before is because most atheists shy away from explicitly revealing the true extent of their beliefs.  I’ve pinned a few atheists down on this, and to a man, they have admitted that they don’t actually believe in the existence of evil.  Of course, this doesn’t prevent them from making rhetorical use of the concept and insisting that it is the Christian concept of God that is truly evil and so forth.  In doing so, they are either being deceptive or inconsistent.

But the only position on evil that is consistent with rational materialism is that there is no such thing as essential evil or essential good, these are merely subjective labels that are inconsistently applied to various human behaviors and natural events.  Of course, this is not an aspect of atheism that most atheists are eager to advertise, since so many people already tend to consider them amoral or even immoral by definition.

This is one of the reasons I entitled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”.  Most atheism is irrational, as the atheist attempts to reconcile his continued belief in the existence of some sort of objective good or evil while simultaneously denying the existence of its only possible source.  Of course, it’s not the irrational atheist one has to worry about, it is the rational atheist who realizes that in the absence of a lawmaker, there is no law except that which he wills.

That is the reality, though.  If there is no God, there is no good or evil.  This is also the core of my argument for the existence of God; because we materially experience evil, we must logically conclude that God exists.

Hair of the dog

Another green shoot sighting!

For the first time since the Great Recession hit, American households
are taking on more debt than they are shedding, an epochal shift that
might augur a more resilient recovery.

For two of the last three quarters, American households’ total outstanding borrowing on things like credit cards, mortgages and auto loans has increased after falling for 14 consecutive quarters before then. Some economists even see an end to the long, hard process of deleveraging — as they refer to the cutting of debt relative to income or the nation’s economic output. That process, they say, has been a central reason for the extraordinary sluggishness of the recovery.

This increase in household debt is a sign of desperation, not recovery.  There are two times when households increase debt, when things are going well and when things are going very bad.  It defies credibility to think that household finances have improved when unemployment remains historically high and food stamp usage is at all-time highs.

To me, the key indicator of the next stage of the economic collapse may be college loan debt.  It is the only debt sector that has remained strong and grown since 2008.  Graduates who can’t find work have returned to school with the objective of improving their employment prospects and they are going more deeply into debt in order to do so.  This is the last gasp of the education bubble which Instapundit and others have been warning for the last three years.  Once awareness of the fact that more academic credentials do not ensure employment, only a deeper debt hole, begins to sink in with parents and students, we can expect to see a dramatic decline in education-related borrowing.

Note this section in particular: “Americans have also improved their personal balance sheets by slashing their outstanding credit card debt to $855 billion today from more than $1 trillion in 2008, according to Federal Reserve data. But student debt has continued its inexorable march higher, a “worrisome” trend that economists say could stop young workers from starting new households or could eat into their spending on other goods and services.”

It is interesting to see that the idea there is a relationship between debt growth and economic growth is finally percolating into the mainstream economic coverage.  Back in 2002, when I first publicly warned about the potential effects of the housing bubble on the financial system, almost no one understood what I was talking about.  Perhaps in another 10 years, it will finally be acknowledged that there hasn’t been any economic growth since 2001 as all of it has been nothing more than an artifact of expanding debt.

We’ll see, won’t we

Obama supporters overseas are talking up Nate Silver as if he is a silver bullet to the werewolf of Mitt Romney’s campaign.  I just want to put this article on record so I can reference it after the election:

Nate Silver is Mitt Romney’s nemesis. Not intentionally; although he admits to being an Obama supporter, his whole career is predicated on getting his predictions right. Like he did in 2008, when “Poblano” accurately predicted the result of 49 of the 50 states, and all 35 senate races…. In fact, Silver is proving so damaging to their chances that Republican’s are drawing up a strategy for countering him. “Nate Silver continues to lead the Democrat Graveyard whistling choir”, Republican blogger Robert Stacy McCain wrote on Tuesday. National Review decried “Nate Silver’s Flawed Model”. “Everyone but Nate Silver thinks Obama’s lead is evaporating fast”, said Business Insider.  But the truth is we don’t. And the Romney camp knows it.

Here’s a prediction. As the election clock continues to tick down, and the momentum narrative continues to melt away, the attacks on Silver will intensify. We should expect a Fox News feature. More negative blogs. Maybe even a smear or two.  But the number’s don’t lie. At the start of this week, Barack Obama’s chances of winning Ohio were 70 per cent. Today they’re at 75. Wisconsin has moved up to 86 per cent, Nevada 78, Iowa 68, New Hampshire 69, Colorado 57, Virginia 54. Overall, his chance of wining is now put at 73 per cent, his highest for 18 days. That’s not momentum; that’s Omentum.

Barack Obama is holding a steady course to the presidency. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Poblano.

And yet, I seem to recall it wasn’t all that long ago that Obama’s chances were supposedly at 80 percent and Nate Silver was busily informing everyone that Romney’s post-convention bounce was minimal.  I note, furthermore, that the article doesn’t happen to mention 2010, when Silver was still providing five reasons that Democrats could hold the House as late as November 1st.  Nor should we forget that he claimed in August 2011 that the GOP majority was at risk and control of the House would be a tossup in 2012.

I don’t support Romney nor do I have anything personal against Nate Silver.  It’s just that after reading so much of Dawkins, Harris, and Hauser, I have developed a heightened sense for spotting a pseudo-scientific charlatan when I see one.  If things play out as I expect them to play out, with Romney winning an election that isn’t particularly close and the Republicans winning a comfortable majority in the House, Nate Silver will be publicly seen for the fraud I suspect him to be.

A sickness in Britain

After literally years of coverups by the BBC and the police, Scotland Yard finally appears to be something about the infestation of celebrity pedophiles in Britain:

Police are on the verge of arresting up to a dozen household names accused of sex abuse but missed an incredible seven chances to trap paedophile Jimmy Savile while he was alive, it has been revealed.  Scotland Yard is to act ‘within days’ as it emerged the pervert DJ abused at least 300 people because he was allowed to rape and sexually assault victims unhindered for decades.

Savile is believed to have had accomplices and celebrities named by victims – some huge TV stars – will be quizzed over serious sex assault allegations as police warned: ‘we will come for them’.

It’s informative to compare the BBC’s general lack of interest and insistence on absolute proof before permitting any mention of the situation to the public with how it behaved when covering similar child abuse cases committed by Catholic priests.  In light of this and Penn State, we’re rapidly learning that the problem isn’t the priests per se, it is with the bureaucracies that are more interested in protecting the interests of the institution than the children with whom their members come into contact.

And, of course, it tends to support my philosophy of never trusting any man who is inordinately interested in children.  Normal adult men find children to be tedious and teenagers to be obnoxious.  They tolerate them, they don’t actively seek out their company.  It never surprises me when a trusted, much-loved man who “just loves children” turns out to be a predator, for as with Willie Sutton and his banks, pedophiles will always go where the children are.

Note too that the police have been lying about their previous inaction:  “[D]espite their action now, police blew more than half a dozen chances to arrest Savile while he was alive.  The Met, who had previously said they had no record of complaints about the pervert’s campaign of abuse, have now confessed that one woman spoke to them in the 1980s as did another lady in 2003.”

How long will it be before the FBI finally begins to overturn rocks in Hollywood and investigate the gay pedophiles infesting the film industry?

A portrait in irony

Our favorite “Nobel Prize”-winning economist, Paul Krugman, laments Mitt Romney’s successful stealing from the Democratic playbook:

Mitt Romney has been barnstorming the country, telling voters that he
has a five-point plan to restore prosperity. And some voters, alas, seem
to believe what he’s saying. So President Obama has now responded with
his own plan, a little blue booklet containing 27 policy proposals. How
do these two plans stack up?

Well, as I’ve said before, Mr. Romney’s “plan” is a sham. It’s a list of
things he claims will happen, with no description of the policies he
would follow to make those things happen. “We will cut the deficit and
put America on track to a balanced budget,” he declares, but he refuses
to specify which tax loopholes he would close to offset his $5 trillion
in tax cuts. 
Actually, if describing what you want to see happen without providing
any specific policies to get us there constitutes a “plan,” I can easily
come up with a one-point plan that trumps Mr. Romney any day. Here it
is: Every American will have a good job with good wages. Also, a
blissfully happy marriage. And a pony. 

So Mr. Romney is faking it. His real plan seems to be to foster economic
recovery through magic, inspiring business confidence through his
personal awesomeness.

Translation: Romney has no economic plan for economic recovery except for appealing to the pagan economic gods of the animal spirits.  Which, if you will recall from your reading of the General Theory, is pure Keynesian economics.  I find it absolutely hilarious that the great Keynesian champion is directly criticizing the very heart of the economic theory that forms the basis for his own Neo-Keynesian synthetic approach.

As an added bonus, he damns the man he is attempting to defend by faint praise.  He writes: “Mr. Obama’s booklet comes a lot closer to being an actual plan. Where
Mr. Romney says he’ll achieve energy independence, never mind how, Mr.
Obama calls for concrete steps like raising fuel efficiency standards.”

Translation: it’s not an actual plan, but it is “a lot closer” to being one.  But one either has a plan or one does not; how is “raising fuel efficiency standards” any less fake than “cutting the deficit”?  It’s not any more specific, it’s merely a smaller generality.

The reality is that neither presidential candidate has a plan that goes beyond “print and pray”.  Neither Romney or Obama can do anything to foster economic recovery, as they have outsourced that responsibility to Helicopter Ben Bernanke, who appears grimly determined to demonstrate that no matter how many times it is proven that one cannot inflate one’s way to prosperity, if one has a hammer, the problem MUST be a nail.

NWA were optimists

This police officer appears to have gotten confused with regards to his sworn duty to serve the people of New York City:

Six-year NYPD veteran Gilberto Valle, 28, who worked in Harlem, was
arrested Wednesday by federal officers on a conspiracy to kidnap charge
Wednesday. The U.S. Attorney’s office said Valle conspired with
multiple, unnamed people “to kidnap, rape, torture, kill, cook and
cannibalize a number of women.”

“Gilberto Valle’s alleged plans to kidnap women so that they could be
raped, tortured, killed, cooked and cannibalized shocks the
conscience,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a prepared
statement. “This case is all the more disturbing when you consider
Valle’s position as a New York City police officer and his sworn duty to
serve and protect.”

I’ll save everyone time and list the usual protests now: “Only a few rotten apples on the force who are cannibals.”  “Most police have never raped, tortured, or eaten anyone.”  “Officers are trained not to eat anyone unnecessarily.”

Obama is out of control

In case you doubted that Obama is sabotaging his re-election campaign, Matt Drudge brings the following incident to your attention:

When asked whether he had a message for a six-year-old supporter,
President Barack Obama took the opportunity to describe his opponent
Mitt Romney as ‘a bullshitter’.

The extraordinary comment – most
American newspapers decline even to print such a word – came at the end
of an interview with ‘Rolling Stone’ in which Obama was asked possibly
the softest softball question ever lobbed at him.  As he left the
Oval Office, Eric Bates, executive editor of ‘Rollin Stone’, told Obama
that he had asked his six-year-old if there was anything she
wanted him to say to the president and she had responded: ‘Tell him: You
can do it.’

According to Bates, Obama grinned and said: ‘You know, kids have good instincts. They
look at the other guy and say, “Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can
tell.”‘

Now, he’s not wrong.  Mitt Romney is a bullshitter supreme.  The man is the flippiest of flip-floppers and naturally produces a prodigious quantity of the stuff.  As, of course, does Obama, athough he is not so much a bullshit artist as a mid-witted con man.  But there are certain things you simply do not say when you are, or are at least popularly supposed to be, the President of the United States.

At this point, it clearly isn’t enough to just keep the man away from the press corps, his handlers are going to have to gag him and hide him in a closet until November 2nd.  I mean, he can’t even talk to his most fervent supporters without committing silly gaffes.

Mailvox: hey, free book

Hunter Riley, the author of a book on metal investing, is giving it away until Halloween.  I get a lot of questions concerning the subject, so if you’re interested in metals, this would be a reasonable place for you to start.  He writes:

I just wrote and published a book on Amazon.com about how to start
investing in gold and silver. I am giving the book away for free for 5 days starting this Saturday 10/27 and lasting until 10/31. 
Its called Stack Silver Get Gold.  
I thought your readers might appreciate a free kindle book on how to begin investing in gold and silver without getting ripped off.

 It’s #1 in commodities and has good reviews, to say nothing of the fact that it’s impossible to beat the price.  It normally goes for $9.99.  Have a look if you’re so inclined.

The importance of IQ

As much as people slaver to denigrate and discredit it, the statistical fact of the matter is that IQ is actually more important than most people believe when it comes to certain types of success.  While it’s not necessarily a surprise that college grades and years of education strongly correlate with IQ, (which may be the cause of the common confusion of academic credentials with intelligence), it may be a surprise to learn that IQ is a better predictor of successful job performance than openness, extraversion, agreeableness, confidence, or even conscientiousness.

IQ surpasses any single Big Five personality factor in the prediction
of the two academic outcomes, college grades (r = .45) and years of
education (r = .55). Big Five conscientiousness is by far the best
personality predictor of grades (r = .22).…Conscientiousness predicts
job performance (r = .13; corrected r = .22) better than does any other
Big Five factor, but not as well as IQ does (r = .21; corrected r =
.55). The importance of IQ increases with job complexity, defined as the
information processing requirements of the job: cognitive skills are
more important for professors, scientists, and senior managers than for
semiskilled or unskilled laborers.…In contrast, the importance of
conscientiousness does not vary much with job complexity….

Now, we all know the brilliant guy who has wasted his 175 IQ by spending twenty years in search of the eternal buzz.  I do, anyhow, he used to live in my basement.  But such individuals are complete outliers, what matters more is the advantage that the moderately intelligent man with the 115 IQ has over the even more moderately intelligent 105 IQ guy.

For some reason, the discussion of IQ differences makes people uncomfortable; it doesn’t matter how obviously intelligent one is, people still find it offensive in a way that they never find a tall man being straightforward about his height is.  This is strange, because one can’t do much more about one’s intelligence than one can about one’s height.  One can, perhaps, attempt to make more efficient use of it, but then, a tall man can strive to avoid slouching as well.  Is it because we value IQ more than height, is it because it seems a more intrinsic element of ourselves, or is it merely that height is more readily observed by the average individual?

Regardless, the reality is that the more everyone realizes that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is merely a tool and a natural advantage little different than any other genetic gift, the better off everyone will be.  Being smart doesn’t make one any morally better or intrinsically wiser; the myopic foolishness of the cognitive elite is one of the greatest dangers that face humanity today.  But pretending that a potential danger does not exist is stupid and short-sighted, especially when one necessarily has to pretend that the antidote to that danger doesn’t exist as well.

If you don’t think it makes sense to treat a normal individual like a retard, then it should not be hard to understand that you cannot communicate with a brilliant individual as if he were a normal one.  And on the societal level, the goal should not be to try to make the retards normal or the normals brilliant, (such efforts are futile), but rather, to endeavor to teach each group of individuals wisdom and strong moral character to the best of their capacity to understand and apply it.  Even one conscientious and confident normal individual of good character can do wonders for correcting the ills caused by a gaggle of highly intelligent, evil-minded fools.

End the pretense

The UK’s central banker, Mervyn King, finally admits what was always apparent.  One wonders how long it will take Helicopter Ben to do likewise:

Warning that the next generation may have to live with the consequences of
past excesses “for a long time to come”, he said Britain’s banks needed to
drop the “pretence” that their debts will be repaid.

“I am not sure advanced economies in general will find it easy to get out of
their current predicament without creditors acknowledging further likely
losses, a significant writing down of asset values, and recapitalisation of
their financial systems,” he said.

“Only then will it be possible to return to a more normal provision of the
vital banking services so crucial to an economic recovery… Just as in
2008, there is a deep reluctance to admit the extent of the
undercapitalisation of the banking system in parts of the industrialised
world.”

He compared the situation to the “pretence that debts could be repaid” in the
1930s and added: “We must not repeat that mistake.”

They’ve already made the critical mistake, which was failing to shut down the UK’s zombie banks and attempting to prop them up with massive amounts of money printing, government-incentivized lending, and stock market pumping.  But further financial raping of the economy for the benefit of the banks isn’t going to restore them or the economy to health.