Category: Uncategorized

Obama paraphrased

“I should have told better lies.” Joseph Farah on Obama’s illuminating answer to a question about the biggest mistake of his first term:

“The mistake of my first term . . . was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” he said. “And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

What’s so hilarious about this answer is it’s Bart Simpson-like juvenile appeal: Imagine Bart up to his neck in some kind of mischief. He gets caught. The principal of his school asks him if he has any regrets. He responds, “Yeah, I wish I had a better story to tell. I wish I could talk my way out of this.”

I would say the biggest mistake of Obama’s first term wasn’t his failure to present better fairy tales to the American public. That’s not even in the top ten. But number one was failing to endorse Ron Paul’s attempt to audit the Federal Reserve. A close second would be his nomination of Ben Bernanke to continue as Federal Reserve chairman. Concerns about policy and the popularity of the White House policies are considerably less important than having absolutely no idea if the information upon which those policies are based even has any basis in reality.

The danger of a “gun-free zone”

The Denver Batman shootings once more demonstrates that cardboard signs are an inadequate means of disarming mass killers:

Gun advocates say the movie theater where a Colorado gunman opened fire Friday, killing 12 and wounded 58, has a strict policy against firearms on its premises – even for patrons with concealed handgun permits.

Cinemark Holdings Inc. owns 459 theaters and 5,181 screens in the U.S. and Latin America – including the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., scene of the mass shooting. The company does not appear to post its firearms policy on its website. WND’s after-hours calls and emails to Cinemark had not been returned at the time of this report.

Dudley Brown, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, told ABC News the Aurora Century 16 movie theater’s policy prohibits firearm carry.

That helps explain why no one shot back. It’s kind of hard to do so when your gun is locked in the trunk. Now, I tend to doubt Holmes targeted the movie theater because he knew of the policy – although he was certainly smart enough to have been aware of it and taken it into account – but this intentional disarming of the theater crowd should give gun advocates the ability to punch back twice as hard when the gun control activists do their usual song-and-dance in the post-mortem of a shooting.

Interracial illegitimacy

A few months ago, I commented that when I was at Disneyland, I saw white families, I saw black families, and I saw single white women with mulatto children. As it turns out, this wasn’t simple happenstance, because based on the statistics reported by the CDC, a white woman has better than a 2 in 3 chance of being married to the white father of her children. A black woman has slightly worse than a 1 in 3 chance of being married to the black father of her children. But a white woman has barely a 1 in 10 chance of being married to the black father of her children.

You can check the math and see the posts from Susan Walsh and Steve Sailer that inspired me to have a look at the data at Alpha Game.

This is why you must carry

The Batman shooting in Denver:

A masked gunman shot dead 14 people and wounded 50 others at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie in Denver. The 6ft tall man, dressed in black and wearing a gas mask opened fire at the showing of The Dark Knight Rises in a mall in Aurora, Colorado and set off a smoke or tear gas bomb.

Witnesses said that the man, thought to be in his early twenties, burst through the emergency exit at the front of the auditorium, wearing body armour, and began firing into the audience with a rifle and two handguns as he made his way up the stairs, picking his victims at random.

It will be interesting to see if Obama is dumb enough to try running on gun control after this. The gas mask bit is certainly unusual and one wonders if the shooter was inspired by Bane or perhaps the local airport.

Mailvox: a correction on Hazlitt

I finally banned the highly unpleasant Unger a few days ago, after first forcing him to back up his claim about my supposed errors on the subject of free trade, then examining those claims and determining them to be almost entirely false. I don’t mind being criticized in the slightest, but the mistakes have to be genuine and the corrections not only correct, but substantive, otherwise the criticism is actually worse than worthless because it reduces the amount of attention that can be paid to more significant matters.

I value substantive criticism, which is why I am willing to tolerate highly critical jerks so long as their criticism is dialectical and correct, or at least reasonably founded. On the other hand, I’m not the least bit interested in rhetorical critics or permitting dogmatic ideologues to litter the comments with their emotional incontinence here on a regular basis.

That being said, Unger did point out one legitimate mistake when I wrote “Here Hazlitt ironically forgets that as a champion of free trade, he cannot assume an increased tariff of $5 on sweaters means five cents less spent on 100 other American products.” I should have written “an increased price of $5 on sweaters”. Of course, he promptly revealed his customary intellectual dishonesty by making the ludicrous claim that this mistake not only rendered Hazlitt’s original point correct – it did not – but somehow invalidated everything I had written about the flaws in Hazlitt’s chapter on free trade.

In which I demonstrate a gross misreading and consequent misrepresentation of Hazlitt, which you’ve ignored for the better part of a week now, because I’m unarguably right and the point is critical enough to where the whole essay now needs to be scrapped.

The essay was more crap, and proof that Vox is singularly incapable of understanding an argument. I haven’t the time to go point by point, but Vox’s reasoning, or lack thereof, with regard to point 3, is typical of the piece, and since most of the other points depend in one way or another on the validity of that point’s reasoning, it make an excellent target. And since Vox didn’t even bother reading what Hazlitt actually said, it makes a very easy target.

First, Hazlitt said nothing about a $5 tariff on anything at all, least of all sweaters. Hazlitt wrote – emphasis added for the benefit of the semiliterate: “We can perhaps make this last point clearer by an exaggerated example. Suppose we make our tariff wall so high that it becomes absolutely prohibitive, and no imports come in from the outside world at all. Suppose, as a result of this, that the price of sweaters in America goes up only $5.”

Just to make absolutely sure that there’s no excuse for anyone to misunderstand what Hazlitt wrote – not that there was any excuse before, and not that it will stop some of you publik-skuled clowns from continuing to misunderstand: Hazlitt presents an hypothetical example of America isolating itself from the world. It once traded; henceforth it will not import anything. The country is not imposing a $5 tariff on sweaters or any other doodads. The actual tariff amount is left unspecified. It could be ten gazillion dollars per item for all anyone cares. The point is that it is prohibitive and completely effective. And the $5 figure Hazlitt gives is something else entirely – namely, the effect of this prohibition is to raise the price of sweaters $5.

Now you should see, immediately, that historical data like ‘imports presently represent 17.3 percent of GDP’ are irrelevant. If you do not, you’re a walking argument for eugenics, and I address myself solely to your intellectual betters. Under Hazlitt’s hypothetical example, imports represent precisely 0% of GDP, along with 0% of every other possible economic metric, and, while I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun with any complicated math shit, I have to say that this likely has something to do with them not existing.

Shit. I said I was going to limit myself to (point) 3, but I can’t help but poke some fun at (point) 6, too. Yes, tariffs and the lack thereof are totally irrelevant to the question of employment. Barring legal restrictions, former steel workers can flip burgers, do laundry, or even sell their affectionate manly embraces for coin, and whether they will do any of those things or hold out for other employment has nothing whatsoever to do with trade theory. Any evidence purporting to show a link between trade policy and long-term unemployment is nonsensical, for the same reason any evidence purporting to show a link between trade policy and Martian ice cap expansion is nonsensical: the causes are elsewhere.

First, let me admit to my misreading. Unger was correct to point out that Hazlitt does not, as I had said, postulate the imposition of a $5 tariff on imported sweaters, but rather a complete ban on imports that has the effect of raising the prices of domestic sweaters by $5. So far, so good. Mea culpa.

However, Unger is completely wrong to claim that this mistake invalidated, or even altered in the slightest, my correction of Hazlitt and that this additional $5 now spent on sweaters means that 100 other domestic producers are not robbed of 5 cents each, but rather 4.14 cents apiece. His claim about the irrelevance of previous imports is not only incorrect, but underlines how his ability to reason is demonstrably lower than that of those he asserted were “a walking argument for eugenics”.

Unger himself admits that the tariff wall did not previously exist, but is a change from the previous situation. He writes of the nation-state: “It once traded; henceforth it will not import anything.” This means that of the additional $5 now being spent on the sweaters due to the unspecified tariff wall, 17.3 percent of it was previously being spent abroad, just as stated in the case of the erroneous $5 sweater tariff. The 100 other domestic producers cannot be losing the entire $5 amount to the sweater manufacturers because they were only receiving a maximum of the $4.14 cents that was being spent domestically anyway.

So, despite the misreading, my correction of Hazlitt stands. Moreoever, it should be readily apparent that because the erroneous substitution of a specific $5 tariff for an unspecified tariff wall with a $5 effect didn’t alter the correctness of my critique on that point, it is not critical enough to require the scrapping of the other 22 identifications of Hazlitt’s errors. This is little more than wishful thinking and blatant dishonesty on Unger’s part.

While I genuinely value honest criticism, this sort of exaggerated rhetoric is simply ridiculous, adds nothing to the debate, and in fact detracts significantly from it by wasting time on nonexistent and insubstantial matters rather than genuine ones. It would have been perfectly reasonable to simply point out the misreading without attempting to use the mistake as a foundation upon which to build a fictitious case in defense of Hazlitt. Some mistakes are critical, others are not, and the honest critic will always be careful to distinguish between the two. Note that I did not claim that Hazlitt’s 86-cent error in any way invalidated his entire case for free trade, it merely happened to be a minor mistake which tends to illustrate the careless and outdated nature of his reasoning.

UPDATE: Just to underline Unger’s unusual combination of ineptitude and dishonesty, he popped up here to complain about how I initially omitted the part now seen above in italics.

“How nice of you to ‘selectively quote’ (read: lie about) what I wrote. You left out a paragraph, which explained what Hazlitt said and why he was right. I said a few days ago that you weren’t a fraud, but it looks like I was wrong.”

Of course, I omitted it because it was irrelevant, neither helping his case nor hindering mine. In fact, I probably should have left it in, since “most of the other points depend in one way or another on the validity of that point’s reasoning” is obviously a false assertion. This sort of thing is precisely why I ban incompetent but energetic critics like Unger; it doesn’t matter how many times you show them to be wrong, they will just keep swinging wildly and ineffectively at you. Leaving out irrelevant elements of an argument is selectively quoting, but it is most certainly not lying about anything. Selective quoting can be dishonest but it is not, in itself, an indication of dishonesty by the person quoting.

The state of the kleptocracy

Barry Ritholtz provides a useful summary of the crimes committed by the financial sector, complete with links and sources:

Laundering money for drug cartels. See this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis)

Laundering money for terrorists

Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments.

Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide.

Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them.

If it is not eminently clear that there is no rule of law whatsoever in the USA, this should suffice to prove it. It should come as no surprise that financial crime and corruption are on the upswing, as it has become increasingly obvious, even to those who don’t pay any attention to the financial sector, that the entire system is a criminal enterprise run by short-sighted financial gangsters. However, since they’re fast running out of other people’s cows to milk, as exhibited by the fact that less than one-third of the people who owe $1 trillion in school loans are repaying anything, the whole structure appears to be rapidly approaching collapse.

Some say it will end in fire (inflation), others in ice (deflation). But either way, it will end.

In the meantime, be sure to start a corporation and hire yourself before committing any crimes. Then fire yourself, and tell the police that you are no longer with the company when they come to investigate. They will then turn the matter over to the appropriate regulatory agency, which will fine the corporation about five percent of the profit you made from your illegal acts. This is what passes for criminal justice in America circa 2012.

The outdated myth of integration

There is a fundamental logical error being displayed in the assumption that because Italian, German, and Swedish-speakers learned English and integrated substantially – although not wholly – into American culture, other ethnic groups will necessarily do so, particularly given the way in which technology reduces any need to do so:

They were born in the UK, but many second and third generation immigrants speak or understand hardly any English, it was revealed today. Their poor understanding of the language means they are unable to take notes or understand basic instructions on training courses ranging from engineering to electronics. Experts warn that low standards of English in some minority groups have been blamed for widening ethnic divisions and creating communities where it is the second language.

There are several reasons why immigrants are no longer integrating much, if at all, into the larger cultures. The first reason is that they come from different ethnic groups. It is a mistake to assume that all cultures and national identities are equally willing to submit themselves to another one. Italy, for example, wasn’t even a singular nation until 1870 and the Irish hadn’t been independent for centuries, so it should come as no surprise that they did not cling to national identities that many of them did not even possess in the first place.

The second reason is demographic. To what culture and social mores is a new Guatemalan immigrant to southern California going to integrate when most of the people surrounding him in his new place of residence are Spanish-speaking Mexicans? Once immigration is permitted beyond certain highly restricted levels, the possibility of integration is necessarily reduced, if not eliminated entirely. And the third reason is technological. With Skype and satellite entertainment systems, it is entirely possible to live in a foreign country without any actual contact with the local populace and culture beyond the occasional visit to the grocery store. I’ve known English-speakers living in Italy who after 15 years of living there still don’t speak twenty words of Italian; they have no intention or need to integrate.

Natural enemies

Louis CK observes that feminists and comedians are natural enemies. And he also demonstrates on The Daily Show that whereas backing down and apologizing is neither funny nor courageous, kicking fascistic feminists demanding male subservience to female sensibilities in the teeth can be a bit of both.

LCK: For me, any joke about anything bad is great. Any joke about rape, the Holocaust, the Mets, whatever — any joke about something bad is a positive thing.

JS: You have now crossed the line, mister!

LCK: I’ve read some blogs during this whole thing that has enlightened me with things I don’t know. This woman said something how rape polices women’s lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t dress a certain way, because they might — that’s stuff I didn’t know. And it’s a part of me now in a way that it wasn’t before and I can still enjoy a good rape joke….

Here is the last thing I want to say about it. This is also about men and women. Because a lot of people are trading blogs and stuff about this with each other. Couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes. But they’re both making a classic gender mistake. The women are saying here’s how I feel about this. But they’re also saying my feelings should be everyone’s primary concern. Now the men are also making this mistake, they’re saying your feelings don’t matter, your feelings are wrong, your feelings are stupid. If you’ve ever lived with a woman, you can’t step in shit worse than that, than telling a woman her feelings don’t matter. So, to the men I say listen, listen to what the women are saying about this. To the women I say now that we’ve heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute and let’s all get back together and kill the Jews. That’s all I have to say about it.

JS: Send your complaints to Brian Williams, care of NBC….

The Sports Guy was right

Women ruin everything. Everything. This is why women have to be ruthlessly kept out of places to which their sex have neither created nor contributed anything. In most such cases, literally the only thing women truly care about accomplishing is adding more women.

Co-producer Philippa Boyens addressed some changes made for the movie adaptation, especially the addition of a new character or two, something that could be seen as heresy by the literary community or Tolkien fans. Boyens said the story felt weighed down by males, so they created a female elf, being played by Evangeline Lilly and seen briefly in the footage.

“We created her to bring that feminine energy,” Boyens said. “We believe it’s completely within the spirit of Tolkien. We didn’t want her to be a ploy.”

What. The. Fuck? Tolkien’s novels are a masterpiece. A classic. They define a genre. So Philippa Fucking Boyens decides she can improve upon them by adding a female character to do what, discuss tampons and boy bands? Does Tokenlass spend her screen time regaling the dwarves with tedious gossip about elves that none of them have ever met? Does she have sex with Borin before making a hypergamous upgrade to Thorin, then demanding that the dwarves replace their battleaxes and warhammers with lighter ones that she can carry?

The problem with Jackson’s LOTR trilogy wasn’t the omission of Tom Bombadil but the addition of the idiotic dialogue invented by Boyens; HBO’s adaptation of A Game of Thrones is much superior due to the fact that Martin himself is being used to create the additional dialogue required by the new medium. Now, I’ll still watch The Hobbit when it comes out. Like The Lord of the Rings, the source material is too good to be ruined by the “contributions” of Ms Boyens’s script. But it’s unsurprising that the Tolkien estate is less than ecstatic about Jackson’s films, which fortunately means there will be future films that will be conceived and advertised as being more faithful to Tolkien’s text instead of presenting the Ms Magazine version of them.

Anyhow, to Hell with Boyens, her feminine energy, and her fear of an excessively male story.

The great intergenerational con

America should have known the Boomers were evil from the moment they made “never trust anyone over the age of 30” mantra. It’s always the liar who assumes everyone else is lying:

Today’s youth, both here and abroad, have been screwed by their parents’ fiscal profligacy and economic mismanagement. Neil Howe, a leading generational theorist, cites the “greed, shortsightedness, and blind partisanship” of the boomers, of whom he is one, for having “brought the global economy to its knees.”…

The screwed generation also enters adulthood loaded down by a mountain of boomer- and senior-incurred debt—debt that spirals ever more out of control. The public debt constitutes a toxic legacy handed over to offspring who will have to pay it off in at least three ways: through higher taxes, less infrastructure and social spending, and, fatefully, the prospect of painfully slow growth for the foreseeable future.

In the United States, the boomers’ bill has risen to about $50,000 a person. In Japan, the red ink for the next generation comes in at more than $95,000 a person. One nasty solution to pay for this growing debt is to tax workers and consumers. Both Germany and Japan, which appears about to double its VAT rate, have been exploring new taxes to pay for the pensions of the boomers.

The huge public-employee pensions now driving many states and cities—most recently Stockton, Calif.—toward the netherworld of bankruptcy represent an extreme case of intergenerational transfer from young to old. It’s a thoroughly rigged boomer game, providing guaranteed generous benefits to older public workers while handing the financial upper echelon a “Wall Street boondoggle” (to quote analyst Walter Russell Mead).

It’s not just in the USA either. The “youth movement” was international, and so, unsurprisingly, is the cancer of Boomer-created debt. It’s fine to blame today’s young for taking on credit card and school loan debt, but let’s not forget that it is the Boomers who created the massive public debt as well as making it impossible for those who followed them to do what they did, and shed their school loan debt in bankruptcy.

Fortunately, the time is rapidly approaching when the younger generations can band together and permit the Boomers to experience the consequences they deserve by shutting down their overly generous pensions and refusing to pay for their medical care. They’ll keep voting for anyone who promises to serve their self-centered interests, but that will become increasingly irrelevant as more states and localities simply don’t have the wherewithal to live up to their contractual obligations.