Category: Uncategorized

Impeccable and ironic timing

As per Robert Prechter’s socionomic principle of the habitually delayed reaction of government to events, it is often a counterintuitive indicator of coming war when the democracies cut their military forces to minimal levels, which is why these British force reductions are somewhat ominous:

n which case Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, is taking an enormous gamble when he claims that the 20 per cent reduction in the size of the standing Army will be made up for by a sizeable increase in the number of reservists to 30,000. Ever since the Coalition announced last summer that it was downsizing the Army from around 102,000 to 82,000 as part of its cuts to the MoD budget, senior officers have been struggling to find a way to maintain some semblance of its war-fighting capabilities while reducing this once proud institution to its smallest size since the Duke of Wellington took on Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

Their task has been made all the more difficult by the knowledge that the Government’s decision to shed 20,000 jobs was dictated entirely by budgetary requirements rather than any grand strategic vision for our Armed Forces. For the changes announced by Mr Hammond yesterday are simply designed to cut spending. As most officers know only too well, the demands made on the 100,000-plus Army during a decade of almost continuous combat operations have stretched its resources to breaking point.

Nor is there any reason to believe – despite the Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, due to be completed by the end of 2014 – that the next decade will not be as challenging.

It’s interesting to see that the British Army is now smaller than it was after the disarmament program that followed the Great War and preceded World War II. There are obvious parallels to “the Geddes Axe” and the 10-Year Rule.

“In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Britain faced serious economic woes and heavy defence cuts were consequently imposed by the British Government in the early 1920s as part of a reduction in public expenditure known as the “Geddes Axe” after Sir Eric Geddes. The Government introduced the Ten-Year Rule, stating its belief that Britain would not be involved in another major war for 10-years, and was abandoned in 1932.”

In the interwar period, the Regulars were reduced to 115,000, supported by a 150,000-strong reserve, the Territorial Army. That compares to today’s planned British Army of 82,000 plus 30,000 reservists. It’s interesting, is it not, to see how the force minimization tends to correspond to periods of economic weakness. The historical patterns are suggesting that large-scale war is on the horizon, the question is where and with whom?

However, it is the USA that matters most in this regard, and I don’t think its forces have been cut quite as drastically yet. So, I suspect we’ll need to see similar cuts in the USA, and more economic contraction, before this part of the pattern can be considered complete.

History speeds up

From Zerohedge:

I would also like to quickly note that mainstream economists back in 2011 were predicting the U.S. would reach 101% of GDP by 2021. It is now 2012, only one year later, and we have already crossed the 101% marker.

I may have to rethink that 2033 estimate….

Just because they are awesome

In general, my rock tastes tend to run more to the barely repressed violence that is Disturbed, but this nondescript little English guy in a red suit with no flashy guitar pyrotechnics or moves like Jagger is a capital-R ROCK STAR in a way that Axl Rose and other overly self-conscious performers could never be. The guitar line is so simple, and yet so awesome when it kicks in. You can see the crowd just waiting for it.

The futures of America

The argument that race and culture do not matter with regards to the construction and maintenance of civilization is not only historically dubious, but is deeply and profoundly anti-scientific:

The stench of sewage permeates the run-down streets, which have the second highest crime rates of anywhere across the country. Of its 70,390 residents, a staggering 40 per cent are out of work, with many having been ‘on the scrapheap’ from the ‘formal economy’ for generations.

The population has plummeted by more than 40 per cent from its 1950 level of 120,000, but there is little hope for those who remain. City budgets are being slashed, nearly half of the police force has been axed in recent years and the public library system is now almost non-existent.

Seventy thousand people and they not only can’t manage to build anything or prosper, they can’t even maintain the basic order and infrastructure they inherited from their grandfathers. What is the difference between a thriving metropolis of 124,000 thousand people and a dying one of little more than half that?

There are a number of factors, of course, but it would dishonest to fail to note that one of the significant ones appears to be the decline in the white percentage of the Camden population to only 17 percent. Stagnation and moderate decline are already apparent in the USA with whites now accounting for 72.4 percent of the population, down from 89.8 percent in 1940; if we hypothesize a link between between race and civilization, we can use that as a basis for predicting a significant decline in the standard of American civilization on the basis of “minority” births now outnumbering the number of births to the white majority.

Now, whites have no monopoly on civilization and there are obviously a number of great non-White civilizations. But they are almost uniformly Asian. So, it is also possible that the recent influx of Asian immigrants, who now outnumber Hispanic immigrants, could eventually permit the maintenance of a functioning civilization, albeit one that is likely to be a blend of Eastern and Western civilizations rather than a Western one. This would tend to indicate a reasonable amount of societal prosperity, but significantly reduced individual rights, an emphasis on bureaucracy, an end to the pretense of democracy, and technological stagnation.

There are worse fates. An Asio-America post-Aztlan secession may, in fact, represent the optimal non-violent outcome, presuming present trends prevail. Civilization is subject to entropy, which must be actively combated by each successive generation; any failure to do so assures that civilization will eventually return to Man’s natural state of barbarism. As Camden shows, a mere two 30-year generations is sufficient to reduce it to that natural state.

On rights

The conflict between the idea that Man has an intrinsic right to free trade and the observation that virtually no man has ever been able to engage in most of the activities that are necessarily aspects of that supposed right got me thinking about the concept of rights.

Now, there is obviously a significant difference between the “human rights” asserted by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the supposedly unalienable rights laid out in the US Declaration of Independence. The former are entirely conditional and are subordinate to both national law, (namely, such limitations as are determined by law meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society) as well as the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

The supposedly self-evident rights of the Declaration of Independence are clearly nothing of the sort, in that they are observably wrong. All men are not created equal in any way, genetically, legally, or spiritually, and furthermore, these rights are totally contingent upon the Creator by whom they are endowed. Atheism and a number of theisms necessarily preclude the existence of these rights.

But in either case, it seems obvious to me that neither is a reasonable basis for any rights upon which a case for free trade, or many other human actions can be made. Therefore, I think it is necessary to go back and look at what is the definition of the rights of Man. It’s not my purpose to consider all of the various 18th century theories about this, but rather to begin at the beginning, which is to say that in order to be coherent, consistent and materially relevant, a right must be something that a) applies to an individual, b) supersedes all other claims by all other parties, c) is consistent with observable human action in the real world.

So, for example, a claimed right to breath oxygen would potentially fit all of these categories, whereas the right to vote would not, since no one has ever observed a right to vote regardless of where they live or possess citizenship. A right to shelter cannot exist, since the competing right to property has historically taken precedent.

I propose, then, the following definitional metric. A right of Man is that for which the individual can justly, morally, (and in ideal terms, legally), kill another individual for attempting to deny him.

What are the proposed rights that can fit within this metric? The right to life, clearly. The right to self-defense is equally apparent. The right to think, the right to believe, the right to speak, the right to eat, the right to void, and the right to sensory input are not only self-evident, but inherent to the being of Man. But do any of the other rights that we habitually assume to exist on the mere basis of the fact that they were historically asserted actually hold up from this perspective?

The Standard Model survives

I still suspect it will be refined considerably, but it appears that for the present, it remains in play:

Scientists believe they have captured the elusive “God particle” that gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together. The historic announcement came in a progress report from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator.

Professor John Womersley, chief executive of the Science and technology Facilities Council, told reporters at a briefing in London: “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

“Discovery is the important word. That is confirmed. It’s a momentous day for science.”

Scientists say it is a 5 sigma result which means they are 99.999% sure they have found a new particle.

I’ll admit that I was hoping for an outright negative result, not because I have anything against physicists or physics, but because their Standard Model hasn’t permitted them to make any significant material advances in quite some time. Hence the philosophical diversions of string theory, multiverse theory, and so forth. But, one can only work with what is actually there, and as an armchair economist, I somewhat envy a model that actually works reasonably well as a predictive model.

However, given the possibility that the characteristics of the particle are still unknown – and what an astonishing surprise to learn that more study, (translation: money), is needed to determine those characteristics – we can still hope for something unusual in this new “Higgs-like” particle that will upset the consensus apple cart and pave the way for some new scientific breakthroughs.

Hultgreen-Curie strikes again

Yet another pioneer is struck down by the infamous Hultgreen-Curie syndrome:

Maria De Villota, 32, from Spain, was taking part in her first test for the F1 team at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire this morning when she inexplicably crashed into a support truck for her team after completing her opening lap. After treatment by trackside paramedics, she was taken to the local Addenbrooke’s Hospital. One of only two females in test-drive roles at F1 level, she was running the rule over the Marussia car which will be raced by Timo Glock at the British Grand Prix in Silverstone this weekend.

Inexplicable… and yet somehow entirely predictable.

Another day, another whitewash

It doesn’t seem to matter how much the banks steal or how much fraud they commit, no one ever goes to jail:

Regulators delivered the first blow in a major investigation into whether big banks had improperly set key interest rates that affected how consumers and companies borrowed money around the world.

On Wednesday, Barclays agreed to pay $450 million to resolve accusations that it had tried to manipulate rates to benefit the bank’s own bottom line. At the height of the financial crisis, regulators say, the big British bank reported bogus figures that in some cases had influenced a benchmark for student loans, credit cards and mortgages.

The Barclays deal, struck with regulators in Washington and London and the Justice Department, caps a multiyear investigation that yielded one of the largest regulatory penalties tied to the financial crisis. The settlement is the first in a series of potential cases against other financial firms, including HSBC, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase….

Some of the most troubling actions, regulators say, occurred between 2007 and 2009. As bank financing costs rose to new highs after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, regulators worried that firms might have submitted low interest rate figures that underpin Libor, making their financial positions look stronger. Amid speculation that the bank was struggling to raise money, Barclays’ senior management asked employees to lower the rates submitted to the Libor committee, according to the regulatory filings. Management wanted the bank’s rates in line with rivals.

The way these things are reported is always in a manner suggesting that there were some complex financial details that are hard to understand or report accurately, but the LIBOR-fixing was pretty simple. Barclays and the other banks simply reported false prices, claiming to have loaned money at higher rates and borrowed money at lower rates than they did, depending upon what served their interest at the time. Since the interest rate is determined by this activity, that activity was fraudulent and affected anyone borrowing money at that time.

An assistant attorney general says: ““For this illegal conduct, Barclays is paying a significant price.” But once more, no criminal charges. So, the message is clear. Commit all the fraud you like. Commit all the crime you want. Steal without hesitation or remorse. If you’re caught, you’ll merely be fined pennies on the dollars you stole. So when you read about the corruption in Rome and other historical societies, don’t deceive yourself into thinking that Man has progressed in any way beyond the technological. It’s no different, and in fact, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau once pointed out, the Romans abided by their own laws better than any other historical society, and far more than Americans do.

Mailvox: SAVE US CAPTAIN UNDEROOS

RC has a different perspective on the national priority:

You behave as authentic Anti-America. NO ONE, can be as EVIL as OBAMA. Romney may not be your choice. Althought, compare Romney to the EVIL Obama, shows your bias against Mitt Romney and your lack of love for this country. Any one is better than the INCOMPETENT/LIAR/MARXIST MUSLIM/FALSE/PHONY/CORRUPT OBAMA, and all the thugs without any principles, that is destroying this country, very fast.

And so Charlie Brown charged bravely, bravely, for the football. Surely THIS time Lucy won’t pull it away, he assured himself.

Mailvox: by George, they’ve got it!

Nick comments: “It is expected that scientists will announce Wednesday that they have wholly relied on circumstantial evidence to “prove”, via inferences, beyond all resonable doubt (or, if you prefer, 5-sigma certainty) the existence of the “God Particle”.”

It will certainly be amusing if it turns out that the scientific media is reading the tea leaves wrong and CERN is summoning famous particle physicists to Switzerland in order to announce the failure of the Standard Model. But that won’t be half so hilarious as if their announcement of the proof of Higgs boson is eventuall followed by a reluctant admission that it doesn’t actually exist in spite of all their sigmas.

It seems scientists don’t pay much attention to finance, as it is remarkable how often the mathematically impossible black swan shows up to crash the party.