In their rush to declare themselves alphas, before whom men cower and women tremble with anticipation, what is often forgotten by perfectly normal deltas and gammas is that socio-sexual status very often comes at a price.
Category: Uncategorized
We are not alone
An announcement of extraterrestrial life:
We are not alone in the universe — and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.
That’s the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology…. Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.
“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”
If a great many scientists say extraterrestrial is impossible despite the fact that they can’t possibly know with any degree of certainty, we can safely conclude that it will be discovered relatively soon, assuming it hasn’t been already. But I’m less interested in yet another exercise in the foolishness of scientists throwing away their credibility in unscientific opining than I am in this question: would the proven existence of extraterrestrial life tend to support the Christian view of Creation or undermine it? Or would it depend upon the form in which that extraterrestrial life takes?
Game blogging
Although the econ blog concept didn’t end up working out quite as well as I’d envisioned, I think Twitter is actually a better vehicle for that. However, I have noticed there is a good deal of continuing interest in Game theory, in fact, more than I can reasonably bring myself to devote to it on this blog. Since I’m presently working on a Game-related project, I think the time has come to set up a separate blog devoted entirely to the subject. My idea is to have seven bloggers, of which I will be one, each presenting the perspective of the one of the categories I have described in the socio-sexual hierarchy: Alpha, Sigma, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Omega… plus one ♀. I’m open to bloggers who already have blogs, there are two or three few people I’d very much like to participate, but in general I’m more interested in those who aren’t already blogging regularly.
If you’re interested, please mention it here, then email me a sample post along with your age, marital status, religious faith, and which perspective you think you could accurately represent. I would prefer a mix of married and single, religious and irreligious, older and younger. Note that I’m not interested in exercises in self-justification, such as explaining why you’re really a “stealth alpha” even though your last date was with a transsexual streetwalker in Las Vegas five years ago nor do I want Tucker Max fiction cribbed from old editions of Penthouse Forum. Roissy already has the “I am Alpha, hear me roar” aspect of the subject well-covered, so what I’d like this new blog to bring to the table is both the painful stories of the past and the accounts of transformation, both successful and unsuccessful, from the present.
I’m still going to discuss the subject here as I have been doing, but I will also post there several times per week. Please don’t volunteer unless you can reasonably commit to posting three times per week since a good blog should average around three posts per day. I don’t know if anyone will be interested in blogging, or for that matter, reading such a blog, but I figured it doesn’t hurt to throw the idea out there to you all.
In tangentially related news, it’s time to clean up the blogroll. So many are now defunct that my plan is to nuke them all and only keep those bloggers who tell me they are still active. Let me know if you want to stay on the blogroll or be added to it in the comments here with a) the blog name and b) the URL.
It’s because you collectively suck
Teachers are in shock at the contempt in which they are held:
The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.
“You feel punched in the stomach,” said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees’ two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor’s plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights…. Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.
Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.
Perhaps the reason for this scorn might have something to do with little facts such as these:
About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000. The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, the proportion was 23 percent.
I would argue that most public school teachers don’t even deserve minimum wage, for the obvious reason that they can’t do their jobs. Fire them all, tear down the system, and replace it with a technological spin on homeschooling for those parents who can’t homeschool. I guarantee the results would not merely be superior, but vastly superior.
A long-awaited dance
I can’t pretend that I’m anywhere nearly as excited as a lot of epic fantasy fans are, but I will probably re-read the series in order to refresh my memory before reading the next book in the series:
Great news for fans of epic fantasy today: The great George R. R. Martin has announced on his web page that the long, long-awaited 5th book in his SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series is almost done. No kidding this time. A DANCE WITH DRAGONS will be hitting stories on July 12, 2011. Although previous dates have been set and then cancelled, Martin says this one is “for real.”
I generally enjoy the Fire and Ice series, but I thought the last book, divided into two, bordered on the tedious and didn’t advance the story much. Like pitchers, writers tend to lose their fastball abruptly, and often without any warning. I suspect Martin’s inability to finish the book in a reasonable time frame after turning in a relatively mediocre, (in comparison with the standard he’d previously set, you understand) prior novel doesn’t bode well for A Dance with Dragons, but I will be pleased to be proved wrong in July.
Mailvox: the replay link
Cocomoe sends a link for the benefit of those who couldn’t listen live yesterday:
The Vox Schiff interview can be relistened and relistened to here for free Mar 3 hour 1: (Vox starts at minute 27). I thought Vox did real well and even better the 2nd time you listen and get Schiff to be more background.
Actually, I don’t feel as if I even began making a case, for as I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I had no idea that there was going to be a debate about inflation. I was told that we’d be discussing inflation and deflation in the context of Bernanke’s recent testimony to Congress. So, what you’re hearing is my attempt to be polite and avoid simply telling the host “congratulations, you’ve figured out the basics of supply, demand, and the quantity theory of inflation, which has only been around since Ssu-Ma Chien in the second century BC.” There is literally nothing that Schiff is saying that any economics student didn’t learn in Econ 101 except the bit about the Federal Reserve Notes. That doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong about high rates of inflation coming, only that repeating what the Wall Street Journal has been saying since April 2008 isn’t telling anyone anything new nor does it explain in any way the various anomalies that I have noted in the money supply and the credit markets. Just saying “housing is an asset”, which isn’t even true in the case of housing, is not a meaningful response, let alone a substantive rebuttal. For all that there are multiple definitions of inflation, all of them include the concept of a general increase in prices and there can be no price inflation if wages and housing prices are falling even though prices are rising in other sectors.
“The only Chinese with notable views in the more strictly economic realm was the distinguished second century B.C. historian, Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145c. 90 BC)…. Ch’ien was one of the world’s first monetary theorists. He pointed out that increased quantity and a debased quality of coinage by government depreciates the value of money and makes prices rise. And he saw too that government inherently tended to engage in this sort of inflation and debasement.”
– Murray Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, pp 26-27.
By the way, here are the specifics on the incidences of default versus hyperinflation in Europe since 1800 that I mentioned in the interview. There have been 73 sovereign defaults compared to 20 total years of hyperinflation in Austria (2 years, 1,733%), Germany (2 years, 2.22E+10%), Greece (4 years, 3.02E+10%), Hungary (2 years, 9.63+26%), Poland (2 years, 51,699.4%), Russia (8 years, 13,534.7%). Similar ratios are seen in Latin America and Africa. However, high rates of annual inflation are quite common historically and the USA is actually quite unusual in having had only one year since 1800, 1864 to be precise, where inflation exceeded 20 percent. One thing inflationistas might find interesting is the fact that hyperinflation is NOT necessarily dictated by the increase in the quantity of money, because in at least two cases, those of Germany and Hungary, the amount of inflation exceeded the increase in the money supply.
UPDATE – WND has a nice, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek article on RGD hitting #1 in its category on Amazon. Of course, the headline is a little unfortunate, as I would hope demand for it hasn’t actually peaked at this point.
The unacceptable inevitable
What happens when the unstoppable political force meets the inevitable political issue?:
In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was “unacceptable” to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security “unacceptable.”
Doesn’t matter. Here’s the numbers. Show me what we’re going to do about it.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare comprise 56.7% of the federal budget ($2.1 trillion.) Defense comprises another 18.7% (about $700 billion.) And interest, today, is a paltry 4.6% (primarily due to ZIRP). Interest expense will double even if we don’t add one more dollar of debt to the Federal side.
Not might double, will double.
And will do quite a bit more than that when interest rates return to historic norms. Color me skeptical that the Tea Party is going to be any more successful in holding the Republican Party’s feet to the fire when two-thirds of them won’t even look at the elephant in the room. Playing ostrich and declaring the inevitable to be unacceptable just isn’t going to accomplish anything.
The winners write it
The economic history, that is. I’m not a bankster, so it must be the tiger’s blood. Regardless, RGD is the #1 ebook in Economic History.
A patient explanation
Roissy attempts to explain Game, very slowly, to the uninitiated mainstream:
First, everyone needs to stop throwing around the word douchebag so lazily and haphazardly. Douchebags aren’t hopeless with women. Just the opposite. Douchebags are pricks and assholes — usually gauche and lower class — who inexplicably do well with women. (Well, inexplicable to anyone who isn’t a reader of the Chateau. We here know the reason why chicks dig jerks.) Think of hotchickswithdouchebags.com, or some of the cast of Jersey Shore.
Most douchebags are naturals with women, probably because they aren’t smart enough to question their unwavering self-confidence. In fact, the best naturals with women mostly occupy the left hand side of the bell curve. The truly dangerous skirt chasers are the naturals with smarts. There aren’t many of them, but they do exist. They are unstoppable forces of nature, owing partly to their concomitant suite of dark triad traits.
I found this part to not only be succinct, but exceedingly amusing, as it happened to come on right on the heels of Spacebunny informing me that I am “a very bad man”. Note, however, that Roissy specifically denies the idea that Game is tool with just one application, which should be completely obvious given this description of its essence.
That women’s behavior can be so analyzed means that women’s actions can be predicted, and subsequently that men with this knowledge can tailor their behavior to get the most out of their interactions with women. Knowledge is a powerful thing, and knowing what’s up does, in fact, shift the balance of sexual power in men’s direction by removing the inscrutability and whimsy that has been the prerogative of women since time immemorial. Game means that it is no longer simply a matter of dumb luck when men get sex and love.
Game is no more limited to use by pick-up artists in night clubs than a screwdriver is limited to use by murderers in stabbing someone to death. Unless you seriously wish to deny that a) female behavior falls into patterns and is predictable to some degree, or b) knowledge of those patterns can be useful to men in a variety of applications, logic dictates that Game will be of use to nearly every man on the planet.
Be prepared
Since it doesn’t do to wing it before discussing economics with someone who has a reasonably sophisticated grasp on the subject, I thought I had better acquaint myself with the latest statistical updates before attempting to talk about them in public. What is interesting to note in all of this recent inflation hysteria is that the rate of increase of the CPI-U measure of price changes and the M2 money supply measure are both presently below their 50-year average. Below is a chart showing the change in CPI-U and M2 on a monthly basis since January 2008.
The average annual growth over this period is 1.44% for CPI-U and 6.16% for M2. That sounds like a lot, but to put it in perspective, the average annual growth over the 51 years from January 1960 to January 2011 is 4.13% for CPI-U and 6.86% for M2. It’s far below the record three-year periods of 1978-1980 in which CPI-U averaged 11.6% growth per year, or when M2 growth averaged 12.2% growth in 1977-1979. And while it is absolutely correct to doubt the veracity of these government-published figures – anyone who goes through the M2 statistics won’t miss the discrepancy between various H6 reports for the exact same month – but since these statistics are being used to support the inflationary case, the fact that they are not increasing at an unusually rapid rate must be taken into account.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that gold, oil, and commodity prices are all increasing. Neither have I failed to note that other prices are continuing to fall. The collapse of housing prices, down 31.4% from their 2006 Case-Schiller peak and falling at an annual average rate of 7.9% over the three years covered in the chart above, are much more indicative of a deflationary environment rather than an inflationary one. How do we balance these contradictory indications? I expect that is a question that Mr. Schiff will probably want to discuss.
Now, in the video entitled Four Keynesian Inflations, I explain why attempting to measure inflation in terms of CPI and GDP makes absolutely no sense, despite the fact that this is how the financial media always describes it. But, even if we accept the idea that inflation is the rate of dollar price changes (CPI) in excess of the rate of economic growth measured in dollars (GDP), it should be obvious from the chart entitled Inflation 1960-2010, which subtracts Real GDP from CPI-U, that inflation is neither at a historically high level nor is it even increasing at the moment. I think the chart demonstrates even more clearly that the Samuelsonian metrics involved are almost completely worthless as they clearly do not measure what they purport to measure, but since they presently frame the context of the mainstream economic analysis, it is necessary to take them into account.
Since we’re apparently also going to be discussing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, it may be helpful to read his most recent report to the Congress if you want to follow along.