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Mailvox: atheist debate

TS appears to have learned his formidable debating skillz from the late Christopher Hitchens. He wrote, apropos of nothing, and without so much as a subject matter:

I don’t recall Hitchens ever arguing a point solely by explaining how he “feels” about it. I fear that while your vocabulary may display the results of some kind of education, your ability to reason indicates a resolute refusal to truly learn or listen.

To which I responded: Assuming your memory isn’t flawed, you’re either a complete moron or you haven’t actually read any of Christopher Hitchens’s books. In fact, I would be very interested to know what you feel is the substantive and non-emotional metric by which Hitchens argued God is not great. But considering the possibility that it is your recollection that is the problem, precisely what point do you believe I have argued on the sole basis of my feelings? Deflation vs inflation? Ricardian comparative advantage?

TS responded:

I never claimed that you argue with emotion. I was responding to your message that accompanied the “demotivator” on your website that showed, for some reason, Hitchens with no shirt on. My “feelings” on matters of science are irrelevant, since science is not bridled with emotion. Hitchens is very emotional. What I wrote was that he, from my recollection, does not argue solely based on his emotions. If he did that, you could certainly lump him into the same category as the philsopher, “Dr.” Craig or indeed the televangelists you see on TV. But, he does not. Name calling is not necessary but, unfortunately, it is not surprising. Faith, one could argue, is strictly emotional, if you consider that by it’s very definition, is the belief in something for which there is no evidence, or in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary. I would submit that a rational person could only have strong faith in something, for which there is no evidence or overwhelming evidence to the contrary, only if they have been compelled to do so from an early age or have some other emotional revelation about that something. While I have the disadvantage of being as you put it a “moron” (that was the only possible conclusion, since I have read Hitchens), I “feel” no need to be angered by an email. Settle the fuck down.

Dude, it’s a demotivator! Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris all ran around acting like complete assholes and more than merited such contempt. But the idea that someone’s “ability to reason” is determined by a demotivator – which, in that particular case, I didn’t even create – is deeply and profoundly stupid. And no, one cannot reasonably argue that faith is “strictly emotional”.

U3 vs EPR

It’s not the 8.3% U3 that matters, but rather the 58.4% EPR, which is down 0.2% from last month. That means unemployment is still rising as a percentage of the population, regardless of the number of new jobs reported.

Wrong on trade, wrong on money

Gary North isn’t merely a deceitful free trade dogmatist, he’s also off-base when it comes to monetary theory too:

John Exter — an old friend of mine — argued in the 1970s and 1980s that monetary deflation has to come, despite FED policy. There will be a collapse of prices through de-leveraging.

He was wrong. Why? Because it is not possible for depositors to take sufficient money in paper currency notes out of banks and keep these notes out, thereby reversing the fractional reserve process, thereby deflating the money supply. That was what happened in the USA from 1930 to 1933. If hoarders spend the notes, businesses will re-deposit them in their banks. Only if they deal exclusively with other hoarders can they keep money out of banks. But the vast majority of all money transactions are based on digital money, not paper currency.

Today, large depositors can pull digital money out of bank A, but only by transferring it to bank B. Digits must be in a bank account at all times. There can be no decrease in the money supply for as long as money is digital. Hence, there can be no decrease in prices unless it is FED policy to decrease prices. This was not true, 1930 to 1933.

Deflationists never respond to this argument by invoking either monetary theory or monetary history. You can and should ignore them until one of them does answer this, and all the others publicly say, “Yes. That’s it! We have waited since 1933 for this argument! I was blind, but now I see! I’m on board! I will sink or swim with this.”

First, North clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about with regards to money from the Austrian perspective, which is why he is, like Friedman and the monetarists, focused on M1 rather than Z1. He makes the same mistake that Robert Wenzel made when trying to criticize Karl Denninger and me back in 2011, because he is only considering commodity money and fiat money, and thereby fails to take credit money into account, which, as Mises points out, must be considered in a developed monetary system.

In a developed monetary system, on the other hand, we find commodity money, of which large quantities remain constantly in circulation and are never consumed or used in industry; credit money, whose foundation, the claim to payment, is never made use of; and possibly even fiat money, which has no use at all except as money.
– The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 103 (1953)

Like the proverbial gorilla reading Nietzsche, Gary North looks at the historical monetary statistics but fails to understand what they mean. He ludicrously claims “there can be no decrease in prices unless it is FED policy to decrease prices”, an assertion easily disproved by citing the housing market, which has shown a steady decline in home prices since 2006 despite the desperate efforts of the Federal Reserve to prop them up. More importantly, North doesn’t understand that the reason the broader price declines indicative of deflation have not taken place at any point in the last 70 years is due to the constant growth of outstanding credit over that time, from $355 billion in 1946 to $54.6 trillion in 2012, an amount which absolutely dwarfs the $2.3 trillion in M1 that North erroneously believes to be the controlling factor.

North is factually incorrect. The vast majority of all money transactions in the current economy are not based on digital money, they are based on credit money. Please note that I am once more saying something that North falsely claims has never been said, as I am invoking both monetary theory and monetary history to make the deflationary case. One may reasonably attempt to argue that it is incorrect, but it is a blatant lie to claim that it has not been made. I’ve even addressed the obvious delta between M1/M2 and various measures of inflation that tends to cast doubt upon the monetarist position in the past.

The reason that prices didn’t collapse and monetary deflation didn’t occur in the 1970s and 1980s because none of the required deleveraging took place. Credit money continued to expand throughout, as debt outstanding was $1.6 trillion in 1970 and $12.8 trillion in 1989. Why are the deflationists likely – not certain – to be correct today when they were wrong before? Because the long-predicted deleveraging is finally taking place in the two largest credit sectors, Household and Financial.

Household has been deleveraging since Q3-2008 and is presently down $1 trillion. Financial has been deleveraging since Q4-2008 and is presently down $3.4 trillion. The only reason this private deleveraging hasn’t shown up as general deflation is due to the $5.6 trillion increase in Federal leveraging; the Federal government has literally doubled its outstanding debt in four years.

In addition to ignoring the fact that credit money is a much more important factor than fiat money, be it paper or digital, Gary North clearly doesn’t realize that everyone with any exposure to the economy will sink or swim on the Federal government’s ability to continue substituting its own ability to leverage for private sector deleveraging. So long as the government can continue to borrow and maintain that ratio, it can stave off deflation. But unless it can borrow infinitely, it cannot do so forever.

Another mass killing

Teenager kills 8, wounds 5!

Sigh…. Another senseless, unnecessary tragedy caused by America’s primitive lack of gun control…. wait a minute:

A teenager killed eight people with a knife and wounded five more in northeast China after falling out with his girlfriend, state media said Thursday.

In other words, a guy with a SCARY ASSAULT RIFLE managed to kill all of four more people than a guy with a knife. So much for the gun control argument.

Aztlan rising II

Well, at least we can be pleased that the reconquistadors aren’t actually physically attacking the American players… at least not yet:

If the U.S. soccer team were hoping for the home advantage during Saturday’s Gold Cup final then they were in for a nasty surprise. Despite being the ‘home’ side in California’s Rose Bowl stadium, the majority of fans – most of them American born of naturalized Mexicans – booed and jeered the U.S. team.

The surprising scenes were followed by angry outbursts from U.S. team goalkeeper Tim Howard, who was visibly shaken after the entire post match ceremony was conducted in Spanish…. The Americans were not even spared in the trophy ceremony after Mexico’s 4-2 win – booed for one final time as they were announced as runners up.

California is done and gone already, most Americans simply don’t realize it yet. If one thing is clear from all my history reading, it is that most people don’t recognize the historical patterns at work until they are complete. It’s only a matter of time before the California Mexicans refuse to recognize U.S. sovereignty over them or the land they have peacefully reclaimed in the same way they presently refuse to recognize America’s national team.

So much for integration.

Too soon

It is very slowly becoming apparent to everyone but the mainstream economists that the USA has been in a depression since 2008:

The Great Depression that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke claims to have averted has been part of the background radiation of our economy since at least 2008.

It’s just that like radiation — it’s invisible.

We’ve called it the recovery, the jobless recovery, the slogging recovery and more recently the fading recovery. We’ve measured modest growth in our nation’s gross domestic product to record that our so-called Great Recession ended in June 2009. And now we are saying that if this disappointing growth suddenly disappears, as currently feared, we will be in a new recession.

There is nothing more depressing than hearing about a new recession when you haven’t fully recovered from the last one. I take heart in suspecting that in a still-distant future, historians will look back with clarity and call this whole rotten period a depression.

Which, of course, is very close to what I have been repeatedly saying since early 2009, as The Return of the Great Depression was published on October 29, 2009, the 70th anniversary of the Black Tuesday crash on Wall Street. And some of you may recall the following failed economic prediction for 2011, which is looking at least partially correct for 2012.

One U.S. state and at least three major cities (100k population plus) will attempt to file for bankruptcy or federal bailout. (It’s unclear if states can file for bankruptcy and public employee unions will oppose the city filings.)
– December 31, 2010

“San Bernardino [pop. 210,000] on Wednesday became the third California city to declare insolvency, joining Stockton [pop. 291,707] and Mammoth Lakes [pop. 8,234] after officials say they filed an emergency petition for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.”
– August 1, 2012

Now, you are certainly welcome to dismiss my economic predictions due to my inability to pinpoint the precise timing with which these events will occur. But even in light of my temporal inaccuracy, I think it is worthwhile pointing out that these predictions are completely contrary to those made by the vast majority of economists and economic observers, many of whom are still talking about the ongoing recovery in the fourth year of the Great Depression 2.0. This failure to note the readily apparent is not unprecedented, as Megan McCardle noted in 2009.

I don’t want to push the Great Depression analogy too far, but what’s surprising when you go back to primary sources from 1930 is the optimism. I don’t mean to imply that everyone thinks things are just swell. But while you know that they are facing the worst economic decade of the twentieth century, they don’t. They’re expecting something more like the recession that followed World War I.

What was the big difference between the recovery from the 1920-21 recession and the non-recovery from the 1929-30 depression? Then, as now, the federal government decided to fight the economic contraction with economic stimulus. The reason that the Great Depression 2.0 will be much bigger and last much longer than its predecessor is because the debt overhang is larger and the stimulus attempts have not only been larger, but are global in their scope.

Gary North still hates Americans

Gary North is apparently foolish enough to continue shopping around that inept and deceptive article wherein he blatantly lies about the opponents of free trade and the arguments and critiques they present. Previously on Lew Rockwell, the same article is now featured by the Mises Institute:

I have found over the years that when I debate with people who promote tariffs, meaning sales taxes on imported goods that are enforced by people with badges and guns, they always adopt arguments that apply only to America’s side of the border. They refuse to adopt those very same arguments for people on the other side of the border.

I challenge defenders of tariffs to state their arguments in terms of both of the people who want to trade, not just the American. The ethics and economics of restricted trade surely apply to the person who wants to trade on the other side of the invisible line known as a national border. If the arguments for restricted trade apply to the American economy, then surely they apply to the other nation’s economy. Logic and ethics do not change just because we cross an invisible judicial line. I take this position because I want the pro-tariff person to face the implications of his position.

Of course, Mr. North doesn’t hold himself accountable to the same standard as he flees from the obvious and inescapable conclusions that are logically dictated by his dogmatic free trade positions. Despite his challenge, I can almost guarantee he won’t address this argument for restricted trade, which transcends economics and applies to Americans, Frenchmen, and Chinese alike. Consider:

1. Free trade, in its true, complete, and intellectually coherent form, is not limited to the free movement of goods, but includes the free movement of capital and labor as well. (Note, for example, that the “invisible judicial line” doesn’t magically become visible when because human bodies are involved.)

2. The difference between domestic economies and the global international economy is not trivial, but is substantive, material, and based on significant genetic, cultural, traditional, and legal differences between various self-identified peoples.

3. Free trade is totally incompatible with national sovereignty, democracy, and self-determination, as well as the existence of independent nation-states with the right and ability to set their own laws according to the preferences of their residents.

4. Therefore, free trade must be opposed by every sovereign, democratic, or self-determined people, be they American, Chinese, German, or Zambian, who wish to preserve themselves as a free and distinct nation possessed of its own culture, traditions, and laws.

I invite Gary North or any other advocate of free trade to dispute or attempt to correct that argument. Now let’s consider the facts. Free trade advocates often claim that there is no reason for any difference between the U.S. domestic economy and the international economy. They believe there should be no more barriers between sovereign nation-states than there are between the several and united American States. And yet, look at the difference between labor mobility in the USA versus the European Union.

In the former EU15, only about 0.1% of the working age population changes its country of residence in a given year. Conversely, in the US, about 3% of the working age population moves to a different state every year,

These institutional and cultural differences suggest comparing internal geographical mobility in the US with the situation within EU Member States rather than between Member States. In doing so, the figures narrow the ‘mobility gap’ between Europe and the US. Between 2000 and 2005, about 1% of the working age population had changed residence each year from one region to another within the EU15 countries, compared to an overall interstate mobility rate of 2.8%-3.4% in the US during the same period of time.”
– Peter Ester and Hubert Krieger, “Comparing labour mobility in Europe and the US: facts and pitfalls”, 2008

What this means is that US workers are about 3x more willing to change their state of residence than European workers are willing to change their region of residence within national borders, and 30x more inclined to change their state of residence than Europeans are inclined to change their country of residence, even though the US state-to-state change likely involves a bigger geographic move than the EU country-to-country one.

It should be noted that increasing this country-to-country labor mobility rate within the EU is not only a major goal of the EU economic advisers, but the explicitly stated reason for this goal is their belief that increased labor mobility is required in order to increase economic growth.

Now, let’s look at what that annual 3 percent intra-US mobility translates to in terms of the overall population. The statistics are as follows for Americans between the ages of 25 and 44:

US overall 50.5 percent
East 54.3 percent
Midwest 65.0 percent
South 47.3 percent
West 40.2 percent

This is why the Midwest has changed much less over the last 40 years than either the East Coast or the West Coast; more Midwesterners stay in the Midwest and maintain their laws and cultural traditions. But more importantly, note what this signifies for the USA if the apostles of free trade were ever able to achieve their goal of permitting international trade to take place on the same terms as American domestic trade in a manner that realized the anticipated economic benefits: very nearly half of all American workers would be expected to leave the USA by the average age of 35!

This vast exodus of young Americans would say nothing, of course, of the hundreds of millions of non-American workers who would be expected to enter the USA, with all of the various consequences to be expected as a result of immigration that is an order of magnitude larger than the current wave.

The logic of free trade is inescapable. It amounts to a choice between a steadily declining living standard if free trade is limited to goods and capital versus the total destruction of the nation and the replacement of a majority of its population within a single lifetime if it is pursued to the full beneficial extent of the concept.

To paraphrase North, if you still refuse to give up the idea of free trade as a desirable means to increase the wealth of nations, then you should at least admit to yourself and others that you favor the total destruction of national sovereignty, the elimination of the U.S. Constitution, and the end of America and other historical nations. It’s time to come clean. You favor the politics of ein Welt, ein Recht, ein Volk.

In much the same way that those who support high tax levels cannot understand the counter-intuitive fact that the higher tax rates do not always lead to higher tax revenues, free trade advocates fail to understand that reducing national trade barriers will not always lead to increased wealth or liberty. If one believes that America was ever any sort of paragon of wealth and freedom, then it is obviously insane to advocate any policy that will cause America to return to the global average with regards to either, even if that policy would tend to raise the global average to some degree.

Propping up the propaganda machine

Why is a charity giving massive grants to for-profit corporations?

The Ford Foundation awarded a $500,000 grant to the Washington Post to expand its government-accountability coverage, the foundation’s second major grant to a for-profit newspaper this year. The foundation made its first for-profit newspaper grant to the Los Angeles Times this spring.

This grant underlines both the importance that the globalists place on controlling the public narrative as well as the fact that the traditional media vehicles are on their last legs.

The curse of the wereseal

Okay, ladies, time to fess up. Who fucked the selkie?

A new influenza strain found in New England harbor seals could potentially threaten people as well as wildlife, new research suggests.

“There is a concern that we have a new mammalian-transmissible virus to which humans haven’t been exposed yet. It’s a combination we haven’t seen in disease before,” report editor Dr. Anne Moscona, professor of pediatrics and of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, said in a journal news release.

Mammalian-transmissible. But how ever could a seal virus be transmitted to humans? I fear we all know. There are stranger things, Kinsey, than have been dreamt of in your scientific research….

“A spurious doubling”

In which we learn that the global warming scammers are as statistically inept as the biologists:

Using Leroy 2010 methods, the Watts et al 2012 paper, which studies several aspects of USHCN siting issues and data adjustments, concludes that:

These factors, combined with station siting issues, have led to a spurious doubling of U.S. mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 – 2008.

Other findings include, but are not limited to:

· Statistically significant differences between compliant and non-compliant stations exist, as well as urban and rural stations.

· Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.

· Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.

· Urban sites warm more rapidly than semi-urban sites, which in turn warm more rapidly than rural sites.

· The raw data Tmean trend for well sited stations is 0.15°C per decade lower than adjusted Tmean trend for poorly sited stations.

· Airport USHCN stations show a significant differences in trends than other USHCN stations, and due to equipment issues and other problems, may not be representative stations for monitoring climate.

This is the sort of scientific debacle that became inevitable once the definition of “science” is broadened to include editorial and statistical analysis. It is particularly problematic because most of the scientists who are messing around with the statistics and simulations that serve as the entire basis of their “science” have no more statistical training, and considerably less simulation design experience than I do.

I have tremendous respect for the utility of the scientific method as a knowledge tool. The problem is that much, if not most, of what presently passes for science has literally nothing to do with the scientific method. Which, of course, lends itself to the corruption, fraud, and incompetence that is so reliably demonstrated by the climate “scientists”.