Category: Uncategorized

They never learn

Just in time to get burned again:

As a historic bull market reaches its second birthday, everyday investors are piling back into stocks, finally ready for more risk and hoping the rally has further to go. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index has almost doubled since March 9, 2009, when it hit a 12-year low after the financial crisis. And the Dow Jones industrials are back above 12,000, about 2,000 points shy of their all-time high.

Little-guy investors appear to be on board. Since the beginning of the year, investors have put $24.2 billion into U.S. stock mutual funds, according to the Investment Company Institute. They withdrew $96.7 billion in 2010.

The March 2009 rally has certainly lasted longer than I thought it would, but I very much doubt it has much more left in the tank given that valuation ratios are higher than they were in 2000 and the strong hands are passing on stocks to the weak ones. With QE2 winding down, consumer credit growth coming entirely from the federal student loan industry. Karl Denninger notes:

This is one of the most-outrageous abuses I’ve ever seen perpetrated on anyone. It radically exceeds anything done to the subprime and ALT-A borrowers in that the young adults abused by this practice are by definition simply due to age and experience ill-equipped to understand what they’re getting into. They are relying on the adults advising them, from High School and College counselors to “Financial Aid” officers and their parents. To put a number on this abuse the cumulative damage inflicted on our youth between the first of 2009 and January of 2011, just two short years, is almost two hundred and twenty-four billion dollars.

Very little of that expanded credit is going to be paid back. And it can’t be defaulted, which means that the interest payments are going to cripple consumer spending from 2009 forward. With the market up, the positive GDP numbers and declining U3 unemployment, I understand why the unsophisticated buy into the recovery story. But it’s all a credit-inflated illusion and the illusion isn’t going to last much longer.

How much longer? I couldn’t possibly say with any degree of certainty. But back in 2008, I warned of coming problems in March. So, if the pattern repeats, the problems should come to a head in September.

Of orcs and “alphas”

While I tend to roll my eyes at alphas and their burning need to have their social superiority recognized, I don’t see fit to falsely denigrate them. They may not be the brightest collection of men on the planet, but neither are they orcs. They don’t have green skin and they certainly don’t ride warpigs. This is why I never cease to find it amusing how men who are new to the theory of Game and don’t know the first thing about it are so prone to triumphantly declaring themselves an alpha… or even “a natural alpha“.

Also, DJ has contributed his first post to Alpha Game, which is an intriguing application of Game to his workplace.

UPDATE: RM has contributed his first post as well. He is an omega, and I defy any man to read his story without feeling some sense of empathy or admitting that Game is more than a cheap trick for pick-up artists to use on barsluts. In some cases it has the potential, in a very literal and material sense, to be a lifesaver.

The temples of Reason crumble

David Brooks explains, though only in part, why enlightenment humanism has failed:

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions….

[The present] body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

Brooks is looking in the right direction, but he’s not looking far enough. Man is not merely an emotional being, but a spiritual one. He seeks purpose and meaning in addition to happiness and joy. A new humanism that attempts to incorporate emotion into its rationalist models will certainly improve upon the dreadful performance of the previous models, but is still going to fall considerably short of effectiveness as the continued failure of utilitarianism in all its various permutations demonstrates.

The humanist model of the British enlightenment is certainly superior to the French one. But so long as humanists cling stubbornly to their dogmatic secularism, in the face of an increasing body of scientific evidence demonstrating the superiority of the religious models in terms of health, demographics, societal stability, and human happiness, even their improved models of human behavior are doomed to certain failure.

I have pointed out many times before that man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing creature. Man’s behavior cannot be understood or reliably anticipated until both his rationalizations and his purposes in concocting those rationalizations are reasonably understood.

A lesson in equality

In which coma girl teaches an object lesson in equality and the wisdom of not initiating physical violence:

A father-of-two accused of punching a woman so hard in a dispute over a parking space that she now she lays in a coma is claiming that she threw the first punch, and that he was acting in self-defence. The altercation took place on February 25 when 4ft 11in, 100 pound Lana Rosas, 25, was standing in the space she was saving for her boyfriend on 14th street in New York’s East Village and refused to let 35-year-old, 150-pound Oscar Fuller park there. The argument that followed left Rosas lying in the street unconscious with blood pouring from her mouth. She has been in a coma at Bellevue Hospital ever since the February 25 incident….

Manhattan prosecutors said in court papers that Fuller hit Rosas ‘with so much force that the woman flew off of her feet, was knocked unconscious and hit her head on the ground.’

Obviously, there is no way to know exactly what happened unless there is security camera footage, but if Fuller’s version of events is accurate, he deserves to be fully exonerated and Rosas should be charged with assault upon her recovery. Assuming that Fuller was, in fact, attacked by the woman and punched several times in the face, he did absolutely nothing wrong or illegal in throwing a single punch at his attacker, however hard it might have been. No one feels any sympathy for a smaller man who is dumb enough to start a fight he can’t finish and there should be absolutely none for a woman who does exactly the same thing. Conversely, if Fuller punched Rosas for simply attempting to hold the parking place, he should be found guilty of the count charged. But the fact that he is only facing a single count of second-degree assault despite the seriousness of the woman’s injuries tends to indicate that at least part of Fuller’s story is supported by the evidence.

And for all those would-be women warriors out there, notice that this was a relatively fair fight between the sexes as Fuller is a little guy who only outweighed Rosas by 50 pounds. It’s not as if he was a 250-pound construction worker; if he had been, Rosas would likely be dead already. Tough girl posturing and fantasies about female martial prowess notwithstanding, women simply are not capable of winning serious physical altercations with men, even with men who are physically smaller than they are. Ignorance has consequences and the consequences can be deadly.

The way to prevent these sorts of stupid tragedies from taking place is not to continue attempting to brainwash boys with outdated nonsense by telling them “you should never hit a girl”. All that does is to destroy adult credibility in young male eyes as boys will inevitably notice that despite all the equality talk, girls are very seldom punished for hitting them, even when unprovoked. The answer is to teach everyone, boys and girls alike, not to initiate physical violence. Both men and women must understand that no one has any right to attack another individual without the expectation of facing violent retaliation.

The more distasteful that a woman finds the idea of men beating down women in response to being attacked, the more she should be committed to telling women not to attack men. After all, how hard is it to not physically attack someone, especially someone bigger, stronger, and faster than you are? It is long past time for women to understand that they lost the privilege to be considered off-limits to retaliatory violence the moment they collectively demanded legal equality with men.

Freudian fraud finally finished

Amazing. The fact that psychiatry is a completely bogus pseudoscience concocted by the lunatic ravings of an Austrian pervert couldn’t kill off credentialed talk therapy for more than 100 years, but simply making insurance companies pay for such “therapy” appears to have it on the edge of extinction in less than a decade.

Alone with his psychiatrist, the patient confided that his newborn had serious health problems, his distraught wife was screaming at him and he had started drinking again. With his life and second marriage falling apart, the man said he needed help. But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient.

Is there any chance we can force insurance companies to pay for Neo-Keynesian economics while we’re at it? But in light of how we were contemplating earlier those white-collar jobs that can be automated, it occurs to me that psychiatry is clearly an occupation that can be easily replaced with software programs that are much cheaper than psychologists or even social workers. How hard can it be to make a synthetic speech program that asks “so how does that make you feel”, “I’m sensing you harbor some ambivalence about your mother”, and “I’m just going to prescribe you Xanax and we’ll see how that works for you.”

The demon that lurks

This is about as flawless a portrait of a Gamma Male that anyone could possibly paint. It includes a description of the demon that lurks inside the twisted, affection-starved heart of every Gamma, a demon that can only be exorcised by the powerful ritual of a pretty woman’s unsolicited smile.

UPDATE: In related news, I have invited JY to fill one of the Delta roles at Alpha Game. He is young, Christian, and engaged, which should help put to rest the notion that Game is only for Pick-Up Artists. His first post, Stumbling toward Alpha, is now up.

Krugman is correct!

Will wonders never cease! Of course, I note that what he gets right is an observation on education and technology that has absolutely nothing to do with economics. It would appear his track record of uniform failure on that subject remains spotless:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers. And legal research isn’t an isolated example. As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

It is actually not a question. Everyone is wrong to the extent that they believe education has anything to do with macroeconomic success, and this is easily observable even if one omits the technology factor. In Tunisia, for example, 57 percent of those entering the labor market have college degrees. The comparable figure in the United States is 30 percent. But the Tunisian unemployment rate among those college graduates is 45 percent, three times higher than the national rate. That’s why so many of them who participated in the recent revolt a) spoke English, and b) had the time to participate.

What those who make a fetish of education simply fail to understand is that knowledge – particularly knowledge of the sort that is sufficiently codified to be included in a college textbook – is not intrinsically valuable to anyone. It makes no difference to me if you happen to know the date of Agincourt, the periodic table of the elements, or the correct way to utilize Pascal parameters. Your knowledge of those things isn’t going to produce any value to me, since profit is only created through human action.

The fallacious idea underlying the link between education and economic growth is that expanding an individual’s knowledge base will enable him to engage in more economically productive action. But this completely depends upon a) what that knowledge is, b) the ability and willingness of workers to translate knowledge into action, and c) the utility of those actions in producing goods and services that customers want or need. In most cases, the education that is being provided fails on all three points.

Producing more lawyers, social workers, and Womyn’s Studies majors is not going to generate any productive economic activity, indeed, it is guaranteed to generate activity that will increase economic contraction by inhibiting the free flow of goods and services. Combine that with the development of technologies that will significantly reduce the need for human service providers such as lawyers, paralegals, engineers, and teachers, and there is a perfect storm of mass white-collar unemployment on the horizon, not only in the United States, but all around the world.

WND column

The Tripoli Trap

It is not hard to understand why the idea of military intervention in support of the Libyan rebels battling against the Gadhafi regime is tempting to some Americans. Responsible for both the Lockerbie bombing and the Berlin disco bombings that killed both American soldiers and civilians, there is little that is not reprehensible about Muammar Gadhafi. Nor has there ever been even a pretense of democratic legitimacy about the government of The Brother Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which came to power in a conventional third-world “colonel’s coup” in 1969.

Fantasy, Romance, and the Omega author

What is the essential difference between Fantasy and Romance? The lines appear to be increasingly blurred these days. While the RWA didn’t include the teen romance of the Twilight series on its list of bestselling romance novels, the current list includes books from the Ghostwalkers and Immortals After Dark series and one can hardly walk through a grocery store, let alone a bookstore, without encountering an interspecies love triangle between a woman, a vampire, and a werewolf. For some reason, it would appear that two vampires, or alternatively, two werewolves, seldom share common tastes in human women. So there is magic and the supernatural in Romance and there is no dearth of love and sex in Fantasy. So what is the difference?

Aside from the covers, arguably the most reliable method to distinguish between the two is this: In Romance, men typically pursue women. Sometimes they even ravish them. In Fantasy, on the other hand, men are almost invariably surprised by female interest in them.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

The piggies squeal

Britain’s banksters are upset that their central banker isn’t running interference for them ala Mr. Bernanke:

Bankers, businessmen and economists joined together to dismiss the bulk of the Bank of England Governor’s comments, with some even questioning whether he should remain in his post.

One senior banking source, at one of the UK’s top five banks, went so far as to brand Mr King “an embittered old man with no appreciation of reality”.

The anger follows an interview the Governor gave to The Daily Telegraph yesterday, in which Mr King said that the finance industry needs urgent reform and that there is a risk of a second banking crisis.

I know I’m surprised that the banks don’t see a second financial crisis coming. Why should they, when they didn’t see the first one until it arrived either? Meanwhile, in other news, one of Britain’s biggest banks just announced that it is moving to Hong Kong. What a smart decision was made by the British government in twice offering HSBC, which collected $3.5 billion from the U.S. Treasury’s bailout of AIG, in twice offering to bailout HSBC in the last three years. It’s probably fortunate for the U.K. that HSBC didn’t accept either offer.