Category: Uncategorized

The white flag waves

I’m sure you’re nearly as surprised as I am to learn that the House Republicans not only caved on the debt ceiling, but caved in a preemptive manner:

A conservative proposal to raise the debt ceiling — known as “Cut, Cap and Balance” — passed the House with bipartisan support late Tuesday, by a vote of 234 to 190. Five Democrats (Boren, Cooper, Matheson, McIntyre and Schuler) voted with the majority, while nine Republicans (Bachmann, Broun, Canseco, DesJarlais, Griffith, Walter Jones, Mack, Paul and Rohrabacher) voted ‘no.’

What is this cunning plan, precisely?

“Under the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” legislation, Congress would raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion (the amount requested by President Obama to get him through the 2012 election). However, that increase would go into effect only if both houses of Congress pass — with two-thirds majorities — a balanced-budget amendment (BBA) to the Constitution and send it to the states for ratification. In addition, the plan calls for significant spending cuts to next year’s budget — about $111 billion — and firm caps on federal spending at 18.5 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. According to White House data, given current trends, spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP this year and will hover around 22.5 percent for the next five years. (The legislation will make no immediate changes to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security.)”

Significant spending cuts? $111 billion is about 7 percent of the 2011 deficit. Spending needs to be reduced to 18.5 percent of GDP or less now, not ten years from now. This is a craven and abject collapse on the part of the House Republicans and Bachmann’s vote against it shows that they know this to be the case.

A failure of atheist cheerleading

Apparently Miss Myers didn’t get the message that all books written by New Atheists are to be blindly defended, tooth and claw, rather than criticized for the flaws that are apparent to any intelligent reader. I was both impressed and vastly amused by her scathingly dismissive review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, as it was even harsher and more contemptuous than my own review of it.

So, to summarise:

1. Utilitarianism is right, but not any more justifiable than anything else. But who cares what other people think, anyway?

2. Because utilitarianism is right, we don’t have to be loopy post-modernists.

3. Science can tell us what makes us happy. Here’s a smattering of scientific studies about the brain.

Why in the hell do they give out book deals so easily? This book isn’t about convincing others, or providing novel ideas. It’s about pandering to atheists with very little knowledge of philosophy and ethics and an abundance of arrogance, telling them science is with them, and then reiterating how immoral people who like FGM and throwing acid in girls’ faces are and how we don’t have to listen to them because We Are Right. This is nothing but a convoluted rehashing of utilitarianism that still falls to the same old criticisms, and an immense waste of time unless you really like a good ignorant circlejerk.

It would certainly be interesting to see Miss Myers review Sam Harris’s two previous books, to say nothing of the other books I addressed in The Irrational Atheist, with the same skeptical eye. Regardless, it appears she will make a more challenging champion of atheism than her father ever has because she is willing to pay attention to the words as written and to think for herself rather than to simply parrot centuries-old talking points and froth at the mouth like some sort of performing bearded clown monkey.

It appears that I wasn’t the only one to notice the similarity in our conclusions concerning Harris’s book. Unbelievable, PZ’s daughter is the female version of Vox Day. What’s next? anti-feminism, repeal of women’s right to vote, border control and Austrian economics?

We can always hope that sweet reason will triumph, even if we harbor few expectations of it. And certainly, the intrinsic problem of utilitarian consequence pointed out by Miss Myers is not dissimilar to the famous Austrian explication of the impossibility of socialist price calculation. I must say, however, that she was perhaps a little unfair to Sam Harris in failing to give him credit for at least attempting to make a necessary case that so many other atheists have avoided, and in some cases, even claimed to be irrelevant. Ironically, given my past suspicions about him, Sam Harris may in some ways have turned out to be the most intellectually honest of the evangelical atheists. His blithely candid arguments are at least relevant, even if they reliably reveal his carelessness and inability to construct a valid argument on solid foundations.

The sinking of the Hermanator

I did warn you that he was intellectually over-matched:

This guy is not longer a joke, he’s simply despicable. Chris Wallace asked Herman Cain about a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. After arguing that Islam doesn’t qualify as a religion or something under the 1st Amendment, they got to the heart of the matter.

“So Wallace asked the inevitable question: does any community have the right to ban mosques? “Yes, they have a right to do that,” Cain replied, without skipping a beat. He later added that, while he is not willing to discriminate based on religion, “I’d rather err on the side of caution.””

Cain has a rather convoluted understanding of the US Constitution, at least when it comes to it’s applicability to Muslims in this country. I didn’t like John McCain’s attempts to rewrite the 1st Amendment through campaign finance reform laws and I don’t like candidates for President like Cain who think some people may only build houses of worship at the sufferance of their fellow citizens.

I’m not saying that Cain’s instincts about the inevitable curtailment of religious freedoms aren’t on target, as there are real doubts about whether the concept of religious freedom can survive a large Islamic population any better than the right to bear arms survived the introduction of nuclear weapons. And there are certainly major problems with the way secular officials around the nation are violating the First Amendment in favor of Islam. Even so, to argue that Islam isn’t a religion is simply absurd, on par with the assertion that the Federal Reserve doesn’t need an external audit because it performs so many internal ones.

As a general rule, Americans look disfavorably upon any politician who attempts to narrow the scope of the Bill of Rights, particularly with regards to the First and Second Amendments. If you don’t want mosques built in your community, the correct time to deal with the issue is not permitting immigration from countries filled with people who are inclined to want to build mosques.

The mortgage fraud continues

This is, of course, shocking news given that the banks had promised – cross their heart – that they would stop doing what they originally claimed wasn’t happening:

Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven’t read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures. County officials in at least three states say they have received thousands of mortgage documents with questionable signatures since last fall, suggesting that the practices, known collectively as “robo-signing,” remain widespread in the industry.

The documents have come from several companies that process mortgage paperwork, and have been filed on behalf of several major banks. One name, “Linda Green,” was signed almost two dozen different ways. Lenders say they are working with regulators to fix the problem but cannot explain why it has persisted….

In Guilford County, N.C., the office that records deeds says it received 456 documents with suspect signatures from Oct. 1, 2010, through June 30. The documents, mortgage assignments and certificates of satisfaction, transfer loans from one bank to another or certify a loan has been paid off.

It’s a mystery, to be sure. In other news, car thieves announced that they are working with insurance companies to fix the problem of automotive theft, but cannot explain why it has persisted.

Sovereign debt expanding

The centralizers always believe that going big will be a solution, but all it means is that the postponed bust will be bigger.

What this chart shows is the way that governments have attempted to arrest the ongoing debt deleveraging by swapping private debt for theoretically more secure “sovereign debt”.  However, as the incipient defaults of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and possibly Italy demonstrate, sovereign debt is no more intrinsically secure than any other form of debt; there have been hundreds of sovereign debt defaults in the last 200 years.  This chart shows that the explosion of government debt in the last two years is not limited to the USA, which is why the coming contraction is going to be a) worldwide, and b) an order of magnitude larger than the 1929 – 1940 depression.

WND column

The Third Bush

The president, who has at times been known as Barack Obama, is clearly in trouble. No president except FDR has ever been re-elected with an unemployment rate higher than 9 percent. The erstwhile Barry Soetoro was an anti-war candidate who currently presides over no less than six foreign wars (three of them of his making), he has betrayed practically every campaign promise he made while running for president and he has apparently never met a Goldman Sachs executive he didn’t want to nominate to his cabinet. The only surprise about his low approval ratings, 42 percent according to Gallup and -15 as per Rasmussen’s Presidential Approval Index, is that they aren’t even worse.

It is clear that a Republican candidate should have little problem beating Obama in the 2012 presidential election, assuming he even decides to run for re-election. (I have been skeptical of the assumption that Obama would even be on the 2012 ballot since July 2010.) Gallup has the generic “Republican candidate” leading Obama by an 8 percent margin, 47 to 39. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, they cannot put forward a generic candidate, but must select a specific one.

The subjective unicorn

In which I both praise and criticize the esteemed publisher of Black Gate’s recent blog post concerning The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and the balance of sex with regards to Black Gate contributors. First, I believe it is entirely admirable to investigate one’s motivations underlying one’s actions. Second, in a free society, a publisher is, and should be, free to publish whatever and whomever he wants. I take no exception to all-female anthologies, neither am I troubled by collections of stories that are entirely devoid of female contributors. Third, I entirely support John in his efforts to strike what he considers to be a reasonable balance between excellence in fiction and equitable sexual contributions primarily because it is clear that his modified approach has not caused the quality of the magazine to suffer. As an early subscriber, I think the magazine has grown consistently stronger under his direction.

Read the rest at the Black Gate

The danger of Wikipedia

The nice thing about Wikipedia is that you can always find a quote for every subject. The dangerous thing about it is that you can easily find yourself applying such quotes incorrectly when you clearly don’t know a damn thing about the subject:

The easy thing now might be to proclaim that debt is evil and ask everyone — consumers, the federal government, state governments — to get thrifty. The pithiest version of that strategy comes from Andrew W. Mellon, the Treasury secretary when the Depression began: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Mellon said, according to his boss, President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”

History, however, has a different verdict. If governments stop spending at the same time that consumers do, the economy can enter a vicious cycle, as it did in Hoover’s day.

The minor point that David Leonhardt omitted from his article is the small fact that Hoover didn’t listen to Mellon. Mellon’s strategy was never enacted. Hoover overrode the objections of his “liquidationist” Secretary of the Treasury and embarked upon a spending program that was increased faster, in percent of GDP, than anything that FDR subsequently did. The failure of Herbert Hoover was not a failure of austerity, it was the same failure of Keynesian interventionism that FDR repeated.

There are 112 comments from the educated readers of the New York Times following the article. Not a single one points out this fundamental error. So, it appears that the old adage about those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it is more than a little applicable to the present situation.

Captain Underoos makes two bad hires

Dean Baker, who is among those who foresaw the 2008 meltdown, notes that Romney’s economic advisers didn’t:

That’s right, the Washington Post told readers that the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is relying on two economists, Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard, who completely missed the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy. Unfortunately the Post neglected to mention this fact to readers.

Since Romney is making his ability to manage the economy the centerpiece of his campaign it would have been worth noting that his two top economic advisers were unable to see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. This might raise some questions about Mr. Romney’s competence.

It probably won’t, since there is practically no one in the media, still less the opinion pages, who knows the first thing about economics. But it certainly should.