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Worse than I thought

Karl Denninger notes that the big banks are presently trading at less than half book value:

The very acts that led to the crash of 2008 are back in play, and they’re doing the same thing to market volatility. Banks are still hiding derivative exposure, claiming that they need these “customized” products for customers (and refusing to exchange-trade all of them.) Banks are still holding assets on their balance sheets at what the market judges to be a fantasy value – not only is their stock price half of book value or less in many cases, but we know there’s nobody with actual money who believes the claimed valuations on the balance sheet are real, as if they did they’d buy up all the stock and get the assets at half price – an instant 100% (or more) capital gain.

Who wouldn’t do that, if they believed the banks? Every one of these institutions with deeply-underwater balance sheets – Bank of America and Citibank in particular – would be bought out tomorrow. The fact is that nobody believes these marks are real. Nobody. It would only take one “somebody” with money who would pounce on such an opportunity – if it was real. And there are lots of people with money.

I repeat: There is not one entity with funds that believes these banks are honestly reporting asset values. NOT ONE.

And here I was telling that nice Canadian anchorwoman just last week that based on the FDIC seizure reports, I estimated around $3 trillion of $7.6 trillion in reported big bank assets were completely nonexistent. Mea culpa. It would appear I was too optimistic by at least $800 billion.

Ah well, that’s close enough for biology, anyway.

Voxic Shock 1.8: Economist Steve Keen

In this week’s podcast, I interview Australian Post-Keynesian economist, Steve Keen, who is among the first economists – if not the very first – to systematically incorporate debt into a Keynesian macroeconomic model.  Interestingly, he appears to harbor even more contempt for the Neo-Keynesian likes of Krugman and Stiglitz than I do; he believes them to be little more than conventional neo-classicals subject to most of the same errors of assumption as their Chicago School rivals. He even goes so far as to state that if their Samuelsonian formulas are Keynesian, then he must be an Anatine economist.

Correcting the butterfly collector

As various studies have reported, biologists are the least intelligent of the science majors. And as a perusal of any biology major’s curriculum will show, most of them are completely uneducated in history, in logic, and in philosophy. There isn’t even much use of the actual scientific method in their “science”; there is a reason that hard scientists have long denigrated them as “butterfly collectors. While Richard Dawkins is the most notorious example of a biologist who foolishly attempts to opine outside his area of expertise, at least he usually appears to have some idea of what he is talking about when biological evolution is the subject. PZ Myers, on the other hand, is so intellectually undisciplined that he cannot keep even simple things straight when the subject he teaches at his community college is the topic at hand:

1. Of course biologists have considered alternate mechanisms! Coyne argues for selection as a mechanism of speciation (by pleiotropic side effects of genes that are selected for other functions), and Futuyma argues for speciation by drift.

2. Similarly, mechanisms of abiogenesis have been proposed that suggest selection, but also chance or as a necessary outcome of the physico-chemical properties.

3. The structure of DNA was analyzed by its chemistry, not it’s evolutionary history, obviously, but as this paragraph even concedes, the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution.

4. Nope. Structure of DNA was determined in 1953; the neo-Darwinian synthesis occurred in the 1930s-1940s with the integration of genetics into evolutionary biology. It was genetics (especially population genetics) that established evolution as the only reasonable explanation for the history of life on earth.

5. The precise taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx was not a specific prediction of evolutionary theory. Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs strengthens the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs.

6. If you examine the family tree of Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia, what you should see is that the taxonomic re-evaluation of Archeopteryx merely moves it from the Paraves branch to the nearby Deinonychosaurian branch…hardly a “wildly wrong” model.

7. Vox Day has not described anything yet which shows evolution being wrong. Adjusting the precise timing of evolutionary events by millions of years is a reasonable response to new data which does not falsify the underlying hypotheses of relatedness.

8. Again, this discovery does not demonstrate the opposite of what evolutionary biologists have been claiming, and actually makes for a better fit with other data about ancient bird ancestors; moving Archaeopteryx from a first cousin to a second cousin of the ancestor of modern birds isn’t a radical idea that invalidates evolutionary biology.

The big picture is even more damning for Vox Day. Of course we have huge volumes of information supporting the theory of evolution, that suite of mechanisms and principles that describe the broad course of evolutionary history, including common descent and descent with modification. And also there are a multitude of details that aren’t completely known — we have millions of species on this planet, and only a fraction have been studied in depth. The theory of evolution does not hang on the exact lineage of any two species out of those millions…it hangs on the fact that there is a lineage.

Vox Day is quite the poseur — he pretends to know better than real scientists, when he can’t even tell the difference between hypothesis and data.

First, let me begin by addressing PZ’s remarkably foolish comment at the end. He knows perfectly well that I know the difference between hypothesis and data, this is just his characteristic posturing in a groundless attempt to argue from the lectern. His pretense that anyone, let alone a superintelligence of my confirmed cognitive capacity, might have any difficulty distinguishing the two concepts accomplishes little more than to imply he teaches a remarkably low caliber of student. Second, I will note that I don’t pretend to know better than real scientists, I often prove that I know better than they do.

Consider, for example, the public statements of the illustrious Paul Krugman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and 2008 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics versus Vox Day, level 72 Dwarf Hunter and one-time Pooyan world champion, concerning the price of gold in 2002, the housing market in 2005, the success of the Obama stimulus plan in 2009, the economic theory of the Austrian School, or even the historical expenditures of the Hoover administration in 1929-1933. Back when gold cost $325 per ounce, Krugman was declaring gold to be “just a metal” and pushing the Fed to create a housing bubble while I was writing columns urging readers to stay out of real estate and invest in “the barbarous relic” instead. Gold is now at $1,750. Case-Shiller is now at 125.41 and falling; it’s already below the 126.13 of Q3-2002. So you see, Dawkins and Myers are neither the first nor the last scientists to have been my bitches.

I have no need to rely upon any pretense of superior knowledge when I can cite numerous empirically confirmed demonstrations of it. PZ would have done much better to question if my proven ability “to know better than real scientists” translates from economics, economic history, and finance to evolutionary biology, global warming, and other quasi-scientific subjects. No doubt PZ considers himself a real scientist, so let’s see how he did with his seven specific points.

1. PZ failed to comprehend the point of what I wrote when I asked when any evolutionist has reconsidered the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions based upon it. Obviously, I am well aware of the existence of proposed “alternate mechanisms”, otherwise I would not openly mock the “Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow” aka TE(p)NSBMGDaGF in the Voxicon.

The point was not that no one has ever proposed an alternative method, but rather, that alternative methods, (or as I prefer to call them, evolutionary epicycles), are invariably proposed in lieu of contemplating the possibility that the basic hypothesis is simply wrong. When an astrophysicist or an economist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is usually that the hypothesis is incorrect. When an evolutionary biologist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is always that the hypothesis cannot possibly be to blame, there must be some missing factor that has not been properly taken into account. If evolution by natural selection has not taken place, then evolution by some other mechanism must have taken place; the logical conclusion that the core hypothesis is simply incorrect and evolution did not take place is seldom, if ever, considered an option.

2. PZ’s answer is completely irrelevant. There is zero evidence that abiogenesis ever took place, robustly imagined mechanisms for it notwithstanding. To claim that because there was no life before, but there is now, ergo abiogenesis occurred, is the very sort of philosophy that science has largely come to supplant. Evolutionists tend to wisely punt on the logically-dictated abiogenetic foundation upon which their materialist assumptions rest, but there is no reason anyone should permit them to do so. It’s rather like economists who attempt to leave debt out of their equations. The numbers may all add up nicely without it, but leaving out the most important element tends to call the entire model into question.

3. PZ could actually have claimed some very limited credit for evolutionary theory on the basis of Linus Pauling’s contribution to the discovery of DNA, but instead he demonstrates that he completely failed to comprehend the point. It is irrelevant that he believes “the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution”. That is surely true, but it doesn’t change the truth of my statement that evolutionary theory was not required for the development of DNA. In fact, it’s rather like saying the consequences of the beheading were profoundly important in their effects on the criminal’s future activities.

4. The timeline of Mendelian genetics, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, and the discovery of DNA are not relevant here. The salient point is that DNA, which required no assistance from evolutionary theory to develop although it did receive some as per Pauling’s aforementioned contribution, has exploded numerous decades-old assumptions by the evolutionists, including the Tree of Life and the very concept of speciation itself. As DNA is better understood, (which understanding requires absolutely nothing from evolutionary theory), there is a reasonable probability that it will eventually undermine the entire idea of evolution and not merely the natural selection mechanism. Still, the only reason evolution is still considered even remotely relevant to actual science that does not revolve around the increasingly futile efforts to provide a solid scientific foundation for a proof of evolution is due to the perceived connection between DNA and TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. No scientist attempting to improve DNA identification or unravel the mysteries of junk DNA finds it terribly useful to incorporate natural selection into their research. Indeed, to the extent that researchers concern themselves with the evolutionary utility of “junk DNA”, they are arguably hindering their research by chasing a rotting red herring. It’s rather like the way Keynesians avidly investigate global savings rates while paying no attention to the various debt/GDP ratios.

5. What a load of historically revisionist nonsense. Anyone who grew up in the 1970s can remember the pride of place that Archaeopteryx held in evolutionary theory. It was a “missing link”, it was cited as proof of evolution in our elementary school textbooks. It still has its own Wikipedia entry: “The first remains of Archaeopteryx were discovered just two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx seemed to confirm Darwin’s theories and has since become a key piece of evidence for the origin of birds, the transitional fossils debate, and confirmation of evolution.” Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs suggests that more dinosaurs had feathers, it doesn’t strengthen “the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs”, primarily for what should be the obvious reason that the significant avian is no longer avian.

6. PZ skates over the fact that the erstwhile bird is no longer a bird, but merely a another type of dinosaur, means that it is not the transitional species it was once believed to be. This not only serves to demolish the scientific importance of Archaeopteryx, but also undermines the confirmation of Darwin’s theories that its “first bird” claim once supported.

7. This is an absurd statement. PZ here illustrates why real scientists, whose predictive models are actually expected to perform to high degrees of accuracy, hold the butterfly collectors in scientific contempt. The reason Daniel Dennett was forced to appeal to astrophysics rather than evolutionary biology when he praises science is because the latter lacks the “amazingly accurate results” that has generated so much respect for the former. Evolutionary biology has simply never delivered any reasonable predictive results in over 150 years and has been responsible for an incredible number of frauds as well as false predictions. When Samuelsonian economists attempt to get away with margins of error measured in the billions of dollars – the most recent Q1-2011 revision of GDP amounted to a $225 billion error – people rightly conclude their models are fundamentally flawed. Given the similar scales involved, there is no reason evolutionary biologists should not be held to the same standard.

8. As I wrote in my previous post, this is just another demonstration of the intrinsic unfalsifiability of the butterfly collector’s art. When he’s wrong, when a bird is not a bird or a transitional species, but merely another dinosaur, it really means he’s more right than ever! This is ridiculous. When I said that Hillary Clinton would win the 2008 Democratic nomination, it did not make me more right than ever when Obama actually won it. It made me wrong.

As for the supposedly damning big picture, I am perfectly content to await further developments. I further note that as those “huge volumes of information” continue to expand, the evolutionary theorists have been forced to concoct ever more complicated and grandiose evolutionary epicycles to attempt to keep Darwin in the picture. Both the core concepts of “species” and “natural selection” have been increasingly called into question by advances in genetics, and it will not surprise me if further advances force the eventual junking of TENS in any of its reasonably recognizable forms.

Still, just to be clear, I am not, nor have I ever been, an evolution denier. I am merely a strong evolution skeptic, and it is worth noting that my perceptive and public doubts about natural selection are increasingly being supported by firm believers in TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. One of the many reasons that I remain confirmed in my skepticism to date is the constant historical revisionism of PZ Myers and many other True Believers in the cult of Darwin as well as their staunch refusal to abide by the same standards of evidence that even the practitioners of an arcane quasi-science like economics do.

As an added bonus, these three comments from the astute economic observers at Pharyngula will likely provide considerably entertainment to those who have read The Return of the Great Depression.

“Well, you gotta give him credit for consistency. He is all wrong about Keynesian economics, too. It is the neo-Keynsians, not the freshwater types, whose models have correctly predicted the economic mess we are in today. The evidence (completely ignored by what Krugman calls the “Very Serious People) is pretty clear about this.”
– SES

I’d trust Vox Day on economics as much as I do on science. Zero.
– Raven

One notes the comparison with pleasure. Keynesian economics, like evolutionary biology, has an outstanding record of success, and has become the foundation for a vast amount of productive work in its field.
– JRE

The myth of the atheist martyr

Although the movie has apparently come and gone without so much as registering a blip with anyone, Armarium Magnum’s detailed demolition of the Hypatia legend is still worth reading.

While Sagan is the best known propagator of the idea that Hypatia was a martyr for science, he was simply following a venerable polemical tradition that has its origin in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“A rumor was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.”

Like Gibbon, Sagan links the story of the murder of Hypatia with the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was torched by another Christian mob. In fact, Sagan presents the two events as though they were subsequent, stating “[the Library’s] last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia’s death” (p. 366) and that “when the mob came …. to burn the Library down there was nobody to stop them.” (p. 365)

In the hands of Sagan and others both the story of Hypatia’s murder and the Library’s destruction are a cautionary tale of what can happen if we let down our guards and allow mobs of fanatics to destroy the champions and repositories of reason.

This is certainly a powerful parable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t correspond very closely with actual history.

It is interesting how often atheists accuse Christians of believing fairy tales, considering how they are obviously prone to concocting their own. Is it projection or merely an ironic coincidence? And this is also a useful reminder that a lack of belief in God is not necessarily tantamount to believing unquestioningly in science while remaining completely innocent of history.

You couldn’t be more wrong

John Maynard Keynes on “the gold cage” and the benefits to Great Britain of exiting the gold standard:


My favorite part is when he announces that prices won’t rise as a result of going off the gold standard. The price of gold then was around £5. Today, it’s £1,095. And of course, as we all know, Great Britain is still the industrial powerhouse of the world….

History happens

James Delingpole provides an email that explains why it is more than a little perilous for those who aren’t familiar with London and its various boroughs to attempt to reach any reasonable conclusions about the recent riots on the sole basis of the media coverage:

Funniest interview ever on Sky. Female Sky reporter interviewing a white guy who has had his shops burned. He said to her, the arsonists/looters were all black. She said to him, you can’t say that, there must have been white guys there as well. He thought about and then said, ok they were not all black, i was the only white guy there. Is that ok to say?

This guy states this with a totally dead pan face without a hint of the pc faux pas.

She again corrects him and states nervously you just cant say they were all black, he responds, but they were i was there. Unbelievable. The interview describes the state of our society in a nut shell.

The reason that the multiculturalists and post-racialists and race deniers all consistently put themselves in such ludicrous positions is that they are fundamentally at war with observable reality. Their delusional left-wing allies in the media and government do their best to keep the raw facts from being presented without some sort of balance or spin, but eventually reality simply overwhelms it. And the multiculti position simply isn’t tenable in the long run; do they seriously think that people really aren’t ever going to notice that downtown suddenly looks like Mogadishu or that their cousin’s apartment building was burned to the ground?

Societies can only deny reality for a limited period of time. Eventually, the society will either expel the invaders, collapse entirely, or be conquered outright by the invaders. And the eventual outcome may well vary from nation to nation. It’s important for Americans to remember that mass immigration is a relatively new thing to modern England, it was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 that led to Enoch Powell’s prophetic “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. Nor is the level of vibrancy anywhere nearly as high in Europe as it is in the United States, it’s merely more visible because it is so heavily concentrated in the large urban areas. But these changes take decades, sometimes even centuries, which is why the average individual is incapable of ever doing more than assuming that the present status quo will always continue, world without end, amen.

Incidents such as the three-day London riots are actually a positive sign that the multicultural end game will be reached long before most societies reach a point that would require civil war to resolve. Once the Euro and the European Union collapse, which could quite conceivably occur the next two years, the great transnational experiment of the last fifty years will have finally begun to reach its inevitable end and we can hope for a return to a healthy and relatively peaceful nationalism rather than the lethal and expansive form that was seen in Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s. The post-global nationalism should be very different than the pre-WWII version, since its focus will be internal rather than external.

This doesn’t mean that the globalists won’t be using the collapse of the transnational structures as an excuse to “fix” the problems it causes by pushing global centralization. That is the obvious and inevitable next step from their perspective. But because they are battling against reality as well as economic gravity, and because their arguments are so visibly absurd, there is no reason to assume they will be successful in their efforts. History merely happens, it does not progress.

Visitation

I don’t usually pay too much attention to the traffic here, but I am genuinely excited about the fact that we’re about to hit 11,111,111 visitors in a minute or two here. 31 more to go!

Next up, 22,222,222!

One bankster down…

I guess this officially makes it a global depression:

A South Korean stock broker jumped to his death from a high-rise office amid worldwide market turmoil. The 48-year-old broker, identified only as “Seo,” sent text messages to colleagues expressing regret over severe losses, just minutes before leaping to his death Wednesday in the city of Daegu, according to Chief investigator Lee Kang-ho.

Of course, given the total lack of shame and remorse demonstrated by Wall Street in 2008 when the banks looted the American taxpayer to make up for their gambling losses, one tends to suppose they’ll probably need a little help. But we can always offer them encouragement.

Ever more efficiently killing girls

It is interesting, if entirely predictable, to see how the equalitarian perspective is rapidly shifting from the mother’s right to kill her unborn child to contemplating a legal ban on the mother being permitted to know the sex of her unborn child:

Blood drawn from expectant mothers could offer parents an earlier sneak peek at their baby’s sex than methods currently used in the U.S., researchers said Tuesday. The test may be particularly valuable for families that harbor sex-linked genetic disorders like hemophilia, they add. Because such disorders mostly strike boys, knowing that the baby is a girl could spare the mother diagnostic procedures, such as amniocentesis, that carry a small risk of miscarriage.

“It could reduce the number of invasive procedures that are being performed for specific genetic conditions,” said Dr. Diana Bianchi of Tufts University School of Medicine, who worked on the new study.

But other researchers voiced concerns, saying it could be misused to terminate a pregnancy if the baby isn’t of the desired sex.

“What you have to consider is the ethics of this,” said Dr. Mary Rosser, an obstetrician and gynecologist at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York. “If parents are using it to determine gender and then terminate the pregnancy based on that, that could be a problem,” she told Reuters Health. “Remember, gender is not a disease.”

Au contraire, Dr. Rosser. If you accept the abortionist position, then fetal gender is a terminal disease if the mother determines it to be so. Needless to say, with this new scientific advance, we can expect the ratio of male/female births to increase significantly in the next ten years. Isn’t feminism wonderful? Thanks to feminism, women can vote for Democrats, work full-time even if they don’t want to, compile impressive STD collections and own all the cats they want… assuming they can manage to survive the increasingly hostile environment of their fully informed mother’s wombs.

The equalitarians appear to have failed to consider that if demographic concerns and sexual birth ratios are to be considered a legitimate basis for legal policies, there should be no qualms about passing federal laws requiring women to get married and bear their first child prior to the age of 25.

The Prince of Porn

That title isn’t even remotely fair. But who can be expected to resist such a perfect conjunction of rhetoric and alliteration? R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing is not an erotic trilogy, it is an interesting, original, large-scale fantasy series that happens to incorporate, to its detriment, some pornographic elements and an amount of inept philosophizing. But since my review sparked a relatively lively debate over whether this is a fair and accurate characterization of the three novels concerned, I thought it would be sensible to appeal to the judgment of an esteemed intellectual who has provided us with a fail-proof method of determining whether a movie is pornographic or not.

I speak, of course, of Umberto Eco and his famous essay “How to Recognize a Porn Movie”:

Pornographic movies are full of people who climb into cars and drive for miles and miles, couples who waste incredible amounts of time signing in at hotel desks, gentlemen who spend many minutes in elevators before reaching their rooms, girls who sip various drinks and who fiddle interminably with laces and blouses before confessing to each other that they prefer Sappho to Don Juan. To put it simply, crudely, in porn movies, before you can see a healthy screw you have to put up with a documentary that could be sponsored by the Traffic Bureau.

There are obvious reasons. A movie in which Gilbert did nothing but rape Gilbertina, front, back, and sideways, would be intolerable. Physically, for the actors, and economically, for the producer. And it would also be, psychologically, intolerable for the spectator: for the transgression to work, it must be played out against a background of normality. To depict normality is one of the most difficult things for any artist – whereas portraying deviation, crime, rape, torture, is very easy.

Therefore the pornographic movie must present normality – essential if the transgression is to have interest – in the way that every spectator conceives it. Therefore, if Gilbert has to take the bus and go from A to B, we will see Gilbert taking the bus and then the bus proceeding from A to B.

This often irritates the spectators, because they think they would like the unspeakable scenes to be continuous. But this is an illusion on their part. They couldn’t bear a full hour and a half of unspeakable scenes. So the passages of the wasted time are essential.

I repeat. Go into a movie theater. If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic.

Since both the excruciating crusade to Shimeh and Prince Kellhus’s journey to find his father bordered on the interminable, with the only relief being the occasional battle, philosophical pontification, penetration of the prostitute Esmenet by various parties, or the torture of a Tleilaxu Face Dancer(1), the matter can clearly be regarded as settled. It is also worth noting that in his essay, Eco points out how “portraying deviation, crime, rape, torture, is very easy”. Ergo, reliance upon them in a literary work is not evidence of a work’s brilliance or greatness or realism, but rather testifies to the author’s incapacity, laziness, deviancy, or limited moral palette.

We know that Bakker is neither incapable nor lazy. Aside from his fictional meanderings, we have no reason to believe Bakker is any more deviant than anyone else. He’s Canadian, not Japanese, after all.(2) So, we can safely conclude on the basis of last February’s discourse on uncertainty and amorality that it is his limited moral palette, which stems from the affectation(3) that uncertainty is the highest moral good, that is responsible for Bakker’s frequent resort to pornographic elements in The Prince of Nothing.(4) There is, after all, little room to appeal to the reader’s emotions or moral sensibilities on the basis of a character’s insufficient uncertainty, indeed, the limitations of this peculiar moral palette is such that it is difficult to even justify any action at all on the part of any character intended to be presented as heroic or ideal.

(1) Consult skin-spy, whatever.
(2) True fact: 95% of all the world’s weirdness comes from Japan. You’ll see more deviance on a public bus in Tokyo than in a Toronto S&M dungeon.
(3) And it is an affectation, nothing more. It’s always amusing to see how rapidly a post-moralist devolves into vulgar morality when forced to choose between his steadfast disapproval of a traditional moral judgment and his professed uncertainty.
(4) Note that I wrote the following months BEFORE reading any of Bakker’s fiction: “Let a hundred nihilistic anti-heroes blossom into the murderous child rapists of their creators’ moralblind fantasies.” That’s how perfectly predictable his “creatively transgressive” attempts to shock the reader into perceiving black amid a thousand shades of grey were.