Category: Uncategorized

WND Column

9/11 is now a joke

Although a few cynical observers anticipated that Barack Obama, the erstwhile peace candidate, would not end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – remember, he beat out Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination largely on the grounds of her pro-war positions – no one was cynical enough to foresee that his occupation of the presidency would lead to the U.S. military fighting no less than six wars in its third year under his command.

Republicans who have resolutely supported the ongoing wars of democratic imperialism over the last 10 years are long overdue to answer some very serious questions about the strategic sanity of America’s continuous military aggression, particularly now that American troops have returned to the site of their last military defeat in Somalia.

A cogent argument for isolationism

It would appear that some members of one of the world’s more more vibrant cultures fail to fully appreciate the willingness of the U.S. government to encourage the mass migration of their fellow citizens or its position on the evils of certain pharmaceuticals:

A spray-painted sign threatening death for U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents was found Friday next to a school in a northern Mexico state capital, officials said. Addressed with profanity to “Gringos (D.E.A.),” the unsigned graffiti warned: “We know where you are and we know who you are and where you go. We are going to chop off your (expletive) heads.”

One wonders how long police enthusiasm for the drug war will persist once they find themselves actually fighting the sort of war where they are no longer considered off limits. Why would anyone in Mexico even have an opinion on U.S. agencies if said agencies were not interfering in Mexican internal affairs? One tends to doubt many Mexicans harbor similar ill will towards the Dutch equivalent of Housing and Urban Development.

The Crüel World of R. Scött Bâkkër

After some back-and-forth discussions pursuant to my opining on the New Nihilism of George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie and others in a post entitled The Decline and Fall of the Fantasy Novel, I found myself interested in the works of my interlocutor, who happened to be the author of The Prince of Nothing series as well as a second series entitled The Aspect Emperor. It’s too soon to write a review, as I have only finished the first book in the series, The Darkness That Comes Before. However, there are already five things that are readily apparent about Mr. Bakker’s fiction:

Read the rest at The Blâck Gátë

The original MPAI

“[B]efore some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people one cannot instruct.”
– Rhetoric, Aristotle

With the benefit of an additional 2,333 years of human history, the only way this statement could be improved upon would be to replace the word “some” with “most”.

Check under the math

It’s always a good idea to verify that you’re not being subjected to a snow job. Or worse, subjecting yourself to one:

One of the most common errors in applied mathematical analysis is to fail to notice when a mathematical argument proves too much. This occurs when the same argument can be deployed more generally than in the particular case being considered, and in other cases where it can be deployed it leads to conclusions that are clearly absurd.[2] Though this can occur more generally — in nonmathematical reasoning — it is a particularly acute danger in applied mathematics, due to the fact that understanding mathematical arguments generally requires a high level of training and intellectual effort. It is very easy to get lost in equations and theorems and fail to see the forest for the trees.
An Example of Applied Mathematics Going Horribly Wrong

Let me give you an example of this phenomenon in action. The Australian government recently announced that it will attempt to enact legislation to impose a tax on industrial carbon-dioxide emissions, with some of the revenue being earmarked as compensation for affected consumers. At a pro-government political rally in Sydney, a young activist proudly displayed what he clearly thought to be a devastating economic argument in favor of this “carbon-pricing” scheme.

To those readers who have not studied neoclassical microeconomics, this is probably just a big bunch of gibberish. But to those who have, it should look quite familiar. The graph is a “utility analysis,” which purports to show that imposing a tax on polluting products (which increases their price) and simultaneously giving compensation back to consumers would make them better off than they were initially — in other words, it purports to show that the Australian government’s proposed scheme, or something like it, would make people better off.

This is a classic example of a mathematical analysis that proves too much. Notice, in the graph in the sign, that the two products are labeled “C” (for clean products) and “P” (for polluting products). Although they are labeled in this way, the fact that the horizontal axis represents the consumption of polluting products plays absolutely no part in the analysis. There is nothing in the graph representing the pollution that these products cause, and so the label is merely a name. The letter “P” is nothing more than an algebraic symbol, one that could just as easily stand for pies, pastries, printers, pizzas, polka lessons, picture frames, pole dancing, ponies, popcorn, pool tables, poppy-seed muffins, pornography, postcards, potatoes, potpourri, poultry, pumpkins, puppies, pudding, or any other good or service (including goods and services that don’t start with the letter “P”).

Thus, by the exact same mathematical argument, the graph implicitly purports to show that a government can make people better off by taxing any good and then compensating the consumers of that good. Though the government taxes the polluting products in the graph, the sign maker could just as easily have switched the labels on the axes so that the government taxes the clean products, and the result, according to the same analysis, would still be a consumer who is better off.

Actually, one of the problems that I occasionally encounter is that if I spend too long analyzing something, it eventually all starts to look completely nonsensical. I thought I had finished a draft of the third inflation video last night, then found myself going back and checking on a few details… and eventually got to the point where even a simple calculation like the difference between nominal and real GDP was beginning to look like an ancient series of glyphs scratched out by the Mad Arab. At one point, I had either proved that inflation cannot, in fact, exist, or that there has not been any economic growth since approximately 1566. Color me skeptical.

I don’t think it helped that I’d been reading a few chapters from the Aristotle’s Rhetoric earlier in the day. Which, I notice, makes it clear that the sign referenced in the article is an enthymeme attempting to pass itself off as a syllogism. However, as Mr. O’Neill adroitly demonstrates, it is only an apparent syllogism and therefore the enthymeme is a false one.

Anyhow, I am prescribed a solution: close the spreadsheets, put down the Aristotle, and find a nice, mindless novel to read. As it happens, I’d been meaning to get around to R. Scott Bakker’s books anyhow. So don’t expect much in the way of insight or brilliance this weekend.

Mexicans in Minnesota?

Operation Wetback II is long past overdue:

Many middle class people are leaving the state for Texas, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, where taxes and the cost of living are lower. In the past decade, 1.5 million more people left California for other states than came to California from another part of the United States, according to analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.

New births and international immigration make up the difference, but even immigration has slowed from sky-high rates in the 1990s, according to demographers, as people such as Maribel Mota, a recent arrival from Mexico, find themselves unemployed and behind on rent in the Golden State.

Mota, a 38-year-old who spoke to CNN through a translator, said she wants to go to Minnesota, where she hears there are more job opportunities and rent is lower. She’ll trade sun for snow, she said, if it means she can make ends meet.

No doubt those Californians won’t take long before setting about californicating their places of refuge. The problem is that if the legal immigrants are not sent back along with the illegal ones, it won’t be more than 20 years before the Aztlan independence movement becomes an issue. It’s pretty simple. Either the idiotic “melting pot” ideal is not only abandoned but aggressively rejected or the nation collapses amid civil war.

The rats abandon ship

Turbo Timmy is looking to leave:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has signaled to White House officials that he’s considering leaving the administration after President Barack Obama reaches an agreement with Congress to raise the national debt limit, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It’s telling that he thinks it is safe to assume that the Republicans, for all their brave talk about not raising the debt limit, are going to cave, wouldn’t you say?

More and smaller wars

The post-WWII period has not been as peaceful as is usually presumed:

We may think the world enjoyed periods of relative freedom from war between the Cold War and 9/11 but the new research by Professor Mark Harrison from at the University of Warwick’s the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, and Professor Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University, shows that the number of conflicts between pairs of states rose steadily from 6 per year on average between 1870 and 1913 to 17 per year in the period of the two World Wars, 31 per year in the Cold War, and 36 per year in the 1990s.

Professor Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick said: “The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913.”

One of the key drivers is the number of countries, which has risen dramatically – from 47 in 1870 to 187 in 2001.

As the historically aware observer increasingly gathers, the second-worst president in the history of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, has an awful lot for which to answer. It is largely his pre-neocon vision of world democratic revolution and declaration of U.S. support for tribal self-determination around the globe that is behind this increase in the amount of international conflict. I note that this study does not take the rising amount of intra-national violence into account, or the historical picture would likely look even worse.

The Costs of War

All the clueless, self-styled “conservatives” who think they can simultaneously support small government and foreign wars need to have “$4 trillion” stamped on their small, sloping foreheads. No amount of militarily and historically illiterate blathering about how “we gots to kill dem ober deah so’s dey doan kills us heah” is going to change the fact that borrowing trillions of dollars in order to kill a few hapless goat humpers is demonstrably neither a sustainable nor an effective approach to war:

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released Wednesday. The final bill will reach at least $3.7 trillion and could be as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaida leaders behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion. Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020.

The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due and many billions more in expenses that cannot be counted, according to the study.

I’ve heard some say that the “isolationism” of Ron Paul and others is dangerous and crazy. The fact is that if you do not subscribe to that “isolationism”, you are without question historically illiterate, militarily ignorant, and a complete, unmitigated financial moron. That $4 trillion spent on the unnecessary Bush-Obama wars could have been used to completely eliminate all of the state and local government debt in the country while reducing outstanding federal debt by 16 percent.

What profit it a nation to guard the borders of Germany and South Korea while leaving its own unmanned?