Category: Uncategorized

Killing Ireland to threaten Spain

This article by a professor of economics at Dublin College is easily the most informative summary of the disaster presently facing Ireland, and by extension, the financial world.

The one thing you need to understand about the Irish bailout is that it had nothing to do with repairing Ireland’s finances enough to allow the Irish Government to start borrowing again in the bond markets at reasonable rates: what people ordinarily think of a bailout as doing.

The finances of the Irish Government are like a bucket with a large hole in the form of the banking system. While any half-serious rescue would have focused on plugging this hole, the agreed bailout ostentatiously ignored the banks, except for reiterating the ECB-Honohan view that their losses would be borne by Irish taxpayers. Try to imagine the Bank of England’s insisting that Northern Rock be rescued by Newcastle City Council and you have some idea of how seriously the ECB expects the Irish bailout to work.

Instead, the sole purpose of the Irish bailout was to frighten the Spanish into line with a vivid demonstration that EU rescues are not for the faint-hearted. And the ECB plan, so far anyway, has worked. Given a choice between being strung up like Ireland – an object of international ridicule, paying exorbitant rates on bailout funds, its government ministers answerable to a Hungarian university lecturer – or mending their ways, the Spanish have understandably chosen the latter.

I didn’t realize that Geithner, the ex-NY Fed Secretary of the Treasury, was so directly involved in saddling the Irish taxpayer with the losses that would have otherwise been taken by the banks that were bailed out. I don’t see how it is possible to read this and still convince oneself that the world’s economic and financial problems of 2008 are in the past it’s perfectly clear that the global financial system hasn’t been fixed in any way, shape, or form, it is only that extend-and-pretend has gone from the national to the intercontinental level.

As I noted yesterday, despite my very contrarian predictions of a continued decline in housing prices, I actually appear to have underestimated the speed, and likely the eventual extent, of the collapse. In the same way, my predictions that the banks and governments of the world would reinforce their failure by taking it to the next level appears to have somewhat on the conservative side as well.

Ireland and Greece are already toast. They are almost guaranteed to default sometime within the next two years. What sort of domino effect this will kick off can’t be accurately predicted, but it seems reasonable to assume that the bankruptcy of an entire nation or three will be more calamitous than the mere failure of a single Austrian Creditanstalt.

Too optimistic, again

Well, you can’t say I didn’t repeatedly warn you about this housing “double-dip” coming. The problem, of course, is that it’s not just a dip.

Home values posted the largest decline in the first quarter since late 2008, prompting many economists to push back their estimates of when the housing market will hit a bottom.

I suppose there must be a silver lining in what some consider to be the ongoing hyperinflation… without it, you might be able to buy a house for $30k soon.

Overestimating the military

Fred presciently cautioned the nation several weeks prior to America’s somewhat exaggerated celebration of its SEALs:

When I was at Parris Island in a previous geological epoch, a large sign in Third Battalion conspicuously said, “The Most Dangerous Weapon in the World: A Marine with his Rifle.” This didn’t rise to the level of nonsense. Few Marines are as dangerous as a hydrogen bomb, and Marines in general are just pretty good light infantry, well-equipped as an expeditionary forces.

But you can’t tell fresh young troops, “You’re maybe a bit above average, but the Afghans are much tougher people, having been raised fighting and living on dried goat-meat, and they know the terrain, whereas you will have no idea where you are and your equipment and tactics are badly unsuited for the region, so it’s going to be hard slogging.” Not optimal for recruiting. More profoundly, men in combat arms want to feel inexorable, deadly, the best. Whether they actually are doesn’t occur to them until the war starts. A satisfying state of mind is what is wanted.

This preference for mood over reality runs through their careers. Constantly they are told that they are “the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and effective fighting force the world has seen.” This is not a statement of fact but of mandatory enthusiasm. The Pentagon’s record since WW II has been a sorry one. Further, effectiveness, training, and so on are relative to a particular situation: a force well-equipped for desert war against aging Iraqi armor is not necessarily equipped to fight guerrillas in Quang Tri or Helmand.

But soldiers, romantics pretending to be realists, do not think in these terms…. In their elevated estimation of their powers, (which is not personal egotism) militaries routinely underestimate the difficulty and duration of their wars.

I have to admit, I have been more than a bit underwhelmed by the supposedly exemplary performance of the strike team that is reported to have killed Osama bin Laden. All of the congratulatory posturing on the part of civilian America strikes me as more than a bit ignorant. While I’m glad there were no American casualties, if you manage to lose a $15.6 million helicopter in exchange for killing a few elderly, unarmed men, it’s not exactly indicative of superlative performance in the mode of Hannibal at Cannae.

What many Americans don’t realize is that many militaries sincerely believe they are the best in the world. The British can’t mention their armed forces without reflexively adding “of course, man for man, the best army in the world.” The Canadians think their air force is the best, the Israelis think that defeating Arab armies some 40 years ago makes theirs the best.

The fact of the matter is that the quality of a military force and its material is significantly less important than how it is utilized. Mahan’s historical treatise on sea power makes it abundantly clear that there were numerous occasions when the French, or the French and the Spanish, had better ships and more of them, but failed to seek battle at the crucial junctures and therefore lost what were eminently winnable wars. Indeed, the French could have easily become the dominant sea power and were well on their way to doing so, but the Sun King, Louis XIV, was fatally distracted by trivial continental endeavors and thereby threw away the formidable naval machine that Colbert had built up for him.

The more military history one reads, the more one realizes that much of the discussion of the spear’s head is virtually beside the point. This isn’t to take anything away from the heroism and the personal sacrifices made by the soldiery, but rather, to point out that such things should not be permitted to go to waste by an overly politicized officer class and politicians who blithely decide to invade foreign countries regardless of the level of the national interest.

And it is impossible to argue with Fred’s observance that the U.S. military is no different than any other in its inability to realistically forecast the difficulty and duration of its engagements.

WND column

The End of Europe

Few Americans realize that the European Union is among the most deceptive institutions on the planet. It is even less democratic than the Third Reich ever was, with ambitions that rival the erstwhile thousand-year plans of the late, unlamented Reichskanzler.

Born amidst deceit and lies that dwarf those told by the most famous 20th century titans of mendacity, the Eurofascists not only kept their totalitarian political aims under wraps, but outright denied that they had any intention of infringing national sovereignties. For more than 40 years, they swore up and down that their only objectives were economic, until the moment that their vast bureaucratic infrastructure appeared to be sufficiently emplaced to permit a naked grab for overt political rule.

But fittingly, since economics was the sword they used to conquer an unwitting Europe, economics is also the sword by which their dark visions of a Fourth Reich will die

NB: I note that I am no longer one of the very commentators anticipating the demise of the European Union:
The vision of a united Europe still has a powerful hold on the elites of Europe, who see the transfer of power from nation-states to an unelected bureaucracy as insurance against future wars and, if truth be told, a relief from democratic pressures. In addition, the prospect of a euro that would replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, or at least weaken its role in world trade, has a powerful hold on the French, who make no secret of their antipathy to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. The “European project” won’t go quietly into the night. But it just might go noisily into the ashcan of history if the Germans decide they cannot convert the Greeks into hard-working, tax-paying euro-citizens worthy of continuing handouts.

NB2: Holy cats, I didn’t notice this on the first read-through:
“Ireland’s debt now appears to be bigger, in relation to its economy, than the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War,” according to economist Anatole Kaletsky.

At the Black Gate

Now, I recognize that this is an announcement that will appeal to approximately 12 people on the planet. But, since one of them is me and another one is our well-loved Publisher and Editor, that makes this announcement of particular relevance for this blog. As I mentioned some time ago, one of my less obtainable objectives in life has been to actually play a certain space wargame that is virtually unplayable by anyone who happens to either lack a large quantity of floor and/or table space that can be left safely unmolested for weeks or has what passes for a reasonable modicum of a life. The problem with monster wargames, you see, is that they combine all the worst qualities of gaming in one intimidating product. Not only are they far more complicated than the average wargame, thus significantly reducing the number of potential opponents, but they take an incredibly long time simply to set up, never mind play. As an added bonus, the large quantity of constituent components usually means that they are more expensive than the norm, but they make up for being more expensive by being less graphically elaborate than most games because no game publisher in his right mind is going to go to the risk of printing what is usually something between a labor of love and a labor of lunacy on the part of a detail-oriented monomaniac.

Read the rest if you are among the few, the proud, the well-travelled.

Mailvox: when God makes you lie

Jamsco heroically attempts to explain why using a word in a manner that doesn’t mean what it actually means isn’t an indication of intellectual dishonesty:

The following is meant to be a debriefing of the two days of debating Calvinism. Some of what follows I’ve already stated in comments.

A. I’m developing a theory about you and the way you run your blog.

You’ve addressed the suggestion by others that you are very passionate about this subject (Calvinism) by giving statistics about the number of posts you’ve made relating to the subject. But this doesn’t really address the manner in which you interact with commenter once you choose to jump into it.

To be sure – once you’re in – you’re in all the way. And you’re in it to win. What this means, unfortunately, is that you are not in it to learn.

When someone comments with disagreement to your post or a subsequent comment – from your standpoint, the comments come in one of three ways.

1. A comment that you can pick a part and show that they contain error.
2. A comment that you can’t really see a flaw in (I imagine these are fairly rare). I assume you generally ignore these.
3. A comment that is a curve ball with some kind of oddity which thwarts you of an opportunity to slam it.

It’s this third kind that frustrate you the most and are the most likely to draw out from you cries of “lies!”

For example: WRF3’s definition of the Bible (Anything that teaches us about God). Now it is a weird definition, but for all you and I know, it’s something he’s been thinking about lately and it’s his honest definition and he’s been wanting to mention it somewhere and thought he’d take the opportunity. But you dislike it, because it screws up where you want to go with the conversation (in your attempt to show . . . something about how foolish reformed commenters are – i.e to ‘break him down’). So you call him ‘not intellectually honest’, when you don’t really have evidence of it.

To be clear, Vox, you should have strong evidence before you call someone dishonest even if you mean ‘dishonest with yourself’. And even if you have strong evidence, it might be wise to let it pass and let others be the judge.

Let me begin by stating that I dislike the “weird definition” of “the Bible” because it is, in fact, a completely false and deceitful definition and would be a grotesque insult to my intelligence at half its staggering height. This portion of Jamsco’s email – the quoted portion is but an excerpt – amounts to little more than an attempt to justify blatant and outright intellectual dishonesty of the sort that I so regularly point out among the New Atheists. It is a beautiful exhibit of what has been described as “Humpty-Dumpty language”, after the famous passage from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:

“There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ “
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’ ” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is, ” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty. “which is to be master—that’s all.”

It’s ridiculous to say that WRF’s mendacious definition of “the Bible” thwarted me of an opportunity to slam his hapless argument anymore than Sam Harris’s inventive uses of the term “faith” prevented me from completely eviscerating the very conceptual foundation of his best-selling book. Longtime readers may recall it took me all of one email to force him to publicly declare that he was actually criticizing “tribalism” rather than religious faith per se. And yet, we find ourselves waiting in vain for the next edition of The End of Tribalism. Indeed, I requested a definition of the Bible from WRF3 expressly in order to illuminate for everyone else what I already knew to be a dishonest argument. I wasn’t frustrated at all; Jamsco is merely mistaking my scorn and contempt for this sort of easily anticipated behavior for frustration. And scorn and contempt are more than well-merited regarding for argument that rests upon the idea that the most famous historical written document in the world is Sunday School teachers. That’s not only wrong, it’s a category error.

I don’t call Calvinists – or whatever those who subscribe to notions of divine omniderigence and/or omniscience and/or perfect goodness prefer to call themselves – liars because I am frustrated by them, I am calling them liars because the positions they are holding are inconsistent and therefore require them to lie whether they do so consciously as with the example of WRF3 or unconsciously as I suspect is more often the case.

For example, it is incredibly easy to show the doublethink required of a omniderigiste who asserts that God doesn’t lie. If I believe that God wills and actively causes all events that take place, and I also observe that lies are told, then I have absolutely no choice but to conclude that God tells lies and is therefore a liar. None. It doesn’t matter how massive an edifice of epicycles I construct to rationalize away the existence of lies that I observe, or even tell myself, I have to choose between being intellectually dishonest or give up my dogma. In the case of every “Calvinist” with whom I have ever engaged, I have observed that they eventually resort to intellectual dishonesty sooner or later, although I will freely admit that few of them do so as blatantly or as knowingly as WRF3 did. Just to be fair, I don’t believe most of them genuinely realize what they are doing.

That’s why I was certain that I would be able to find inconsistencies and incoherencies in Piper’s writings before I had read a single one. It’s the same reason that I know, without even the shadow of a doubt, that a Keynesian is going to produce some deceptive sleight-of-tongue whenever he finds himself forced to confront the observable fact both inflation and unemployment are rising. I don’t need to know what the specific deviation from either fact or logic will be in order to be 100 percent certain that it will be there to be found, because logic dictates that if the dogma has not been abandoned, then the error has to be there. It’s rather like knowing that there must be a bug in the code because one can observe that the program isn’t working.

I think two things are worth pointing out here. First, anyone who engages in “Humpty-Dumpty” talk is not only a liar, but a purposeful deceiver. I have been mocked in the past at times for arguing from the dictionary, but the main reason I resort so readily to the dictionary is that it is a source that is entirely objective from my perspective. Resorting to such objective sources eliminates a tremendous amount of weasel room both on my part and on the part of others. If I was only interested in winning, why would I ever do this? I can play pedantic and semantic games as well as anyone, but I prefer to avoid them for the most part.

Second, I don’t think it would be accurate to conclude that I am preemptively declaring victory when I am simply pointing out the clear, readily observable errors of others. In the case of the likes of Piper and WRF3, because their position is intrinsically self-contradictory, they have not only lost the argument before I ever entered it, they already knew they had lost it. If they weren’t aware of this, they wouldn’t need to engage in such dreadful contortions and abuses of the language. And that, of course, is not only what bothers me, but is why I consider them to be such intellectual snakes even when they are otherwise decent people.

It seems the New Atheism is not on the rise

Contra the assertions of various factually- and logically-challenged individuals, the evangelical efforts of Richard Dawkins and his Scarlet-A campaign would appear to have fizzled:

A national UK survey out Monday found no traces of an “autism epidemic,” despite earlier reports that the developmental disorder has been rising quickly in recent decades. Researchers found nearly one percent of Britons older than 16 years have autism, a rate that is similar to that seen in children. Younger people were no more likely to be affected than older ones, however, which would have been expected if the condition were truly on the increase.

“It was surprising to all of us,” said Dr. Traolach Brugha, a psychiatrist at the University of Leicester, who worked on the study. “If this study is correct, it does put a big question mark over the autism epidemic.”

On a related note, I was more than a little amused to encounter John Keegan’s assertion of the way in which most people naturally “flee the company” of “the compulsively argumentative” while reading The Face of Battle today. But if it is not a mild form of autism that renders so many atheists completely incapable of recognizing it is their behavior that people despise and not their lack of belief, what else may serve to explain this compulsively argumentative truculence?

The ritual Republican self-castration

And so begins the familiar process of manipulating the Republican grass roots and saddling them with a status quo Republican approved by the red faction of the ruling party:

Who does best against Obama? Paul. The congressman from Texas, who also ran as a libertarian candidate for president in 1988 and who is well liked by many in the tea party movement, trails the president by only seven points (52 to 45 percent) in a hypothetical general election showdown. Huckabee trails by eight points, with Romney down 11 points to Obama. The poll indicates the president leading Gingrich by 17 points, Palin by 19, and Trump by 22 points.

As one commenter at National Review noted, “So Pawlenty is the “top-tier” candidate at 5%, and Ron Paul is the “non-major” candidate at 8%. Nope, can’t see where charges of bias might come from.”

It not remarkable how a powerful congressman who performs well in the polls, raises more money than the other candidates, is more intellectually formidable than any of them, and was proven to be correct about both the endless nature of the foreign interventionism of the last decade and the fragility of the banking system is automatically deemed “unelectable” and a “minor candidate”. What is remarkable is the large number of mindless, thoughtless Republicans who, despite their feigned disdain for it, blithely accept the mainstream media’s assertions and obey the stage management of the party elders.

And so we’ll see all the faux conservatives pushing the ludicrous likes of Captain Underoos, Newt Gingrich, and the feckless Tim Pawlenty. For those non-Minnesotans not familiar with Pawlenty, all you need to know is that he is a spineless wet noodle of a politician with the moral principle of a Clinton.

What is worse than federal “help”?

“Help” from the United Nations:

Five thousand dead, 300,000 ill, and a medical emergency that has already lasted six months; now the people of Haiti have someone to blame for the cholera outbreak which has swept through their earthquake-ravaged country: the blue-helmeted peacekeepers of the United Nations.

An official report into the ongoing epidemic, which began last October, has concluded that it was almost certainly caused by a poorly constructed sanitation system installed at a rural camp used by several hundred UN troops from Nepal.

The virulent strain of cholera bacteria began infecting locals after faecal matter from their base seeped from badly designed septic pits into the Meye River, a tributary of the Artibonite River in the country’s central region.

The United Nations is far worse than the joke many people believe it to be. If it ever obtains the genuine global power it seeks, the 5,000 Haitians it killed in the last six months will look like the smallest of rounding errors.