Category: Uncategorized

Decline is a choice

VDH skillfully elucidates the historically obvious:

Does “decline” mean inevitable collapse, like an aging person whose mind and body have become enfeebled? That was certainly the view of the ancients, who felt civilizations had finite life-spans (see Jacqueline de Romilly’s The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors.) Do environmental catastrophes, resource depletion, or foreign armies end societies? They can, as the complex pyramidal societies from the Minoans and Mycenaeans to the Mayans and Aztecs learned.

All that said, decline is far more often a choice, not a preordained destiny. There was no reason that Athens at 338 B.C. needed to lose to Philip at Chaironeia or even that the loss there meant the end of Greek freedom. Macedonian forces were a fraction of the size of a far larger Persian force that had swept from the north into a far weaker Athens in 480 B.C. No law said that drama of the quality of the Orestia, Oedipus, Ajax, Bacchae, and Medea had to give way to the sitcoms of Middle and New comedy of the fourth century B.C. By September 1945, England had far more of its industrial base intact than had Germany or Japan, and had suffered far fewer losses, both material and human, since 1939 than either of the defeated Axis powers whose entire national ideologies had been rendered bankrupt and their people reduced to global pariahs. Why, then, did a country that produced the sort of four-engine bombers en masse that its wartime adversaries could not, or a Spitfire fighter better than any produced by Japan or Germany until the advent of the jet, end up decades later with unsold Jaguars while Mercedes and Lexus swept world markets? And why did a bombed out Frankfurt and Tokyo (200,000 incinerated in March 1945 alone) rather quickly out-produce a less damaged Liverpool (e.g., 4,000 killed in the blitz) or Manchester? Clearly the UKchose a path in 1945-9 that a once flattened Germany and Japan did not.

If Rome was supposedly “doomed” by the 5th century A.D., why did the Eastern Empire last another 1,000 years? Why was 1978 America a very different place than either 1955 or 1985 or 1996?

What the deeply knowledgeable VDH fails to acknowledge is that America does not face a choice because America has already collectively made it. Decline is no longer merely an option, it is a strong probability.

VDH notes two of the most significant factors, but fails to note that they are done deals. The explosion of wealth he cites was largely fraudulent, being based on a massive expansion of debt on the part of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and to a lesser extent Generation X that robbed from the following generations. The inevitable debt-deleveraging, combined with the tens of millions of largely useless immigrants, now all but guarantees decline. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee fall, however, only a retreat from a historically exceptional nation to an unexceptional one where the citizenry is helplessly subject to the whimsical rule of an aristocratic class. That this aristocracy is one of credentials and connections rather than blood and birth does not change its intrinsic lack of regard for the will of its subjects.

An inexplicable burial at sea

Apparently we are going to have to take the U.S. government’s word for bin Laden’s death:

After bin Laden was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in Pakistan, senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition. That practice calls for the body to be buried within 24 hours, the official said. Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted terrorist would have been difficult, the official said. So the U.S. decided to bury him at sea.

I’m not saying that Osama bin Laden isn’t dead. For all I know, he’s been dead since 2001, if not before. But it strikes me that if you wanted to make your own words more look suspiciously incredible, you would be hard-pressed to top the recent actions of the Obama administration.

“Hey, here’s an ineptly produced computer file that clearly isn’t a simple copy of the document that supposedly no longer existed in the first place!” “Hey, we killed the bad guy, but we had to ditch the body before anyone else could take a look at it and confirm it’s actually him. Maybe if we just wave our hands and talk about DNA that nobody else has, someone will buy it.”

The whole point of engaging in a helicopter raid rather than simply dropping a daisy cutter was to obtain the body. As one British journalist noted: “The decision to carry out a helicopter assault was incredibly risky but the US Navy SEALS and the CIA pulled it off. The huge advantage is that it means that bin Laden’s body was recovered – any speculation that he remains alive is likely to be shortlived.”

Unless, of course, the body is immediately thrown into the sea…. But whether the most recent reports of bin Laden’s death is real or not, they should at least serve as an excuse to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq before Libya heats up in response to Qaddafi’s likely efforts at retaliation following the reported death of his youngest son. I find myself wondering if the unexpected cancellation of the royal honeymoon has anything to do with the probability that Qaddafi has his terrorist network aimed at Britain and France these days.

I’m not saying they needed to stick bin Laden’s head on a pike at the White House, but providing independent confirmation from a third party such as the Saudi ambassador or one of his family members would have been significantly more convincing than a press release about a body dumped in the ocean.

UPDATE – Bin Laden may well be dead. Presumably photos will soon be released to prove it. But that will not change the fact that the U.S. government lied in claiming that his body was buried at sea in accordance with Islamic ritual. “Muslim clerics said Monday that Osama bin Laden’s burial at sea was a violation of Islamic tradition that may further provoke militant calls for revenge attacks against American targets. Although there appears to be some room for debate over the burial — as with many issues within the faith — a wide range of Islamic scholars interpreted it as a humiliating disregard for the standard Muslim practice of placing the body in a grave with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca. Sea burials can be allowed, they said, but only in special cases where the death occurred aboard a ship.”

That’s two known lies in two days out of the Obama administration. They may be telling the truth about other things, such as Obama’s birth certificate or Osama’s death. But one is most certainly not justified in accepting anything they say at face value.

WND column

More Questions than Answers

It is truly remarkable to witness the speed with which the mainstream and conservative media have revised their collective opinion about Obama’s birth certificate. The reader may recall that for most of the last three years, the media have been insisting that Obama released his genuine birth certificate when, in fact, all he had released was the short form “Certification of Live Birth.”

The atheist’s lament

Why, oh why, he wonders, do those stupid and evil Bible thumpers who know nothing about science, and shouldn’t be allowed to vote or raise their own children, dislike someone so objectively wonderful as me?

Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.

Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.

Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.

It never ceases to be amusing when socially inept assholes take the trouble of listing the reasons why they believe people should like them. Never mind the fact that the guy shows himself to be both disagreeble and dishonest in the very article where he is lecturing America for not liking him.

It’s really not that hard to explain. No one likes people who offer them unsolicited advice, much less tell them what to do from an unwarranted position of assumed superiority. And as anyone who knows more than two or three atheists has experienced at one point or another, far too many atheists simply do not understand the concept of “live and let live”. No one hates atheists because they don’t believe in God; agnostics don’t believe in God either. People tend to dislike atheists because so many of them are socially autistic jerks who are simply a massive pain in the posterior. The whining about Christian incivility is as hilarious as it is untrue; many atheists are so emotionally undeveloped that they cannot bear to be treated in the same manner that they habitually treat everyone else.

If everyone thinks you are an obnoxious prick, the solution is not to attempt to argue them out of their opinion, but rather to stop behaving like an obnoxious prick. And to think these are the very people who believe they are more rational than everyone else.

NB: I am obviously not describing all atheists here. There are plenty of perfectly likeable and intelligent atheists who are quite willing to leave others to live and believe as they like. But if the gentleman writing in the Washington Post is going to attempt to defend the likeability of atheists in very broad and general terms, he must accept the validity of contrarian evidence given in the same manner.

Stay away from fatties

They’re contagious:

It may seem like bad news for the thin among us, but socialising with people heavier than yourself could make you put on weight…. where two people who are friends for a long time, and where one is heavier than the other, the thinner friend tended to increase in weight by up to 57 per cent over time.

No offense to the heavyset, you understand, it’s just that it’s catching….

Of course the White House is lying

Given the Obama administration’s unique combination of shamelessness and incompetence, I won’t be in the least bit surprised if we should eventually learn that the birth certificate that was finally released last week turns out to be a fake too:

In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib: “Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.

The Chronicle’s report is accurate.

If the White House has indeed decided not to ban our reporter, we would like an on-the-record notice that she will remain the San Francisco print pool reporter.”

I was on some of those calls and can confirm Ward’s statement.

The contrast in administrations is easily apparent. The Clinton White House used to assassinate its wayward members with impunity and successfully conceal its connection to the killings within minutes. The Soebarkah/Soetoro White House, on the other hand, apparently can’t even forge a convincing government document when it has two years to get it right.

NFL second round

As requested. I don’t have much to add, except that I really wouldn’t mind the Vikings drafting another quarterback just to increase the odds that we might end up with a half-decent one. But we probably need offensive linemen.

Econ doesn’t stick

This may explain why today’s economists are so hapless; they simply don’t know the relevant core principles:

Unfortunately, however, most students seem to emerge from introductory economics courses without having learned even the most important basic principles. According to one recent study, their ability to answer simple economic questions several months after leaving the course is not measurably different from that of people who never took a principles course.

What explains such abysmal performance? One problem is the encyclopedic range typical of introductory courses. As the Nobel laureate George J. Stigler wrote more than 40 years ago, “The brief exposure to each of a vast array of techniques and problems leaves the student no basic economic logic with which to analyze the economic questions he will face as a citizen.”

Another problem is that the introductory course is increasingly tailored not for the majority of students for whom it will be their only economics course, but for the negligible fraction who will go on to become professional economists. Such courses focus on the mathematical models that have become the cornerstone of modern economic theory. These models prove daunting for many students and leave them little time and energy to focus on how basic economic principles help explain everyday behavior.

But there is an even more troubling explanation for students’ failure to learn fundamental economic concepts. It is that many of their professors may have only a tenuous grasp of these concepts, since they, too, took encyclopedic introductory courses, followed by advanced courses that were even more technical.

It may sound cool, at least to dorks, to be a quant or a wonk. But all the technical expertise in the world doesn’t do you any good if you don’t get the core concepts right. That’s why, in RGD, I attempted to begin at the beginning and leave as much jargon and econometrics out of it as was reasonably possible. I was fortunate, as about half my econ professors had a fairly sound grasp of the core concepts. But given the more common nature of those who didn’t, it doesn’t surprise me to learn that their sort are in the majority. As I’ve mentioned before, I once met a nominal econ major from a big state school who had never heard of Keynes or the General Theory.

On the royal wedding

Needless to say, I haven’t exactly been paying a lot of attention to the marriage of the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, but it’s inescapable over here. So, a few observations:

1. The two princes make a good pair. Unlike so many politicians, they always come off as two men you wouldn’t mind hanging out with. Even on a formal state occasion. If it’s merely an act, they’ve got it down. And the British people obviously have great affection for them.

2. The bride looked very pretty. A streamlined bridal gown always beats fluff and poofery, in my opinion. I still don’t understand the whole train thing, though.

3. The little groomsmen in their red coats were cute.

4. Prince Charles has aged remarkably well for a man who looked like a prince of dorks in his prime. Of course, as SB commented, there was nowhere to go but up.

5. I wish they’d had a mike on the Duke of Edinburgh. He always has some hilariously inappropriate comment for every occasion.

6. The service was remarkably and explicitly Christian for a nation that is supposed to have moved beyond all that Dark Age mysticism. The selection of Romans 12 for the Bible reading was well done.

7. I think it is vastly preferable for a woman to not vow to obey her husband than to vow it when she does not mean it. I am much more inclined to trust a woman who values her word enough to refuse a knowingly false vow than a woman who will blithely agree to say anything.

8. Don’t ask me about the NFL draft. I can’t think about the NFL draft. I’m still in denial. I just hope Spielman knows what he’s doing by selecting Ponder. He’s smart, so here’s hoping that the idea is that he’ll be better able to read NFL defenses than his more highly rated peers.