Category: Uncategorized

Joel Rosenberg arrested

It looks like the Minneapolis police department is determined to test its ability to flout the concealed carry law:

Rosenberg was in police headquarters to pick up some documents, and he came packing not only his handgun but a video camera. The video captured Sgt. Palmer confronting Rosenberg about his gun before taking the weapon away with all the decorum of a father scolding his bratty son.

Rosenberg argued he had permission to carry inside City Hall and later filed a complaint against Palmer. Palmer insisted that Rosenberg was violating a court order that bans guns on the premises. The warrant that was issued yesterday for Rosenberg’s arrest agrees with the latter opinion.

Rosenberg says he notified the sheriff’s department of his intent to carry a weapon into the office that day, while the warrant says the sheriff has no record of that.

Notice that the police position depends upon the sheriff having no record of something it doesn’t even openly deny. Which means that they’re doing what the police always do when they’re in the wrong – they’re lying – so I hope Joel has a record of his conversation with them. I recently dealt with a company that swore they had no record of my contact with them; they were trying to bill me for a contract I’d canceled months. They tried to pull the same “we have no record” line and didn’t drop it until I sent them a copy of the email I’d sent them which also referred to the conversation I’d had with them.

Shameless. And here’s an interesting thought. If the police are the servants of the public, why is it legal for the police to lie to the public and illegal for the public to lie to the police? Good luck to Joel. It should be a matter of real pride for him to be publicly declared “Minneapolis’s most rabid gun advocate”.

And yes, fantasy fans, he is THAT Joel Rosenberg.

Central bank or teenage girl?

In which Jon Stewart attempts to figure out if Ben Bernanke is printing money or not:

Default and devalue

Iceland shows that the arguments put forth by the banksters and the europhiles are simply incorrect:

Iceland’s real gross domestic product grew by 1.2 percent in the July-September period from the previous quarter, the first quarterly increase since the same period in 2008. Iceland entered a slump after its overleveraged financial sector collapsed in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy.

Like Ireland and Greece, Iceland has taken a large dose of austerity measures to rebuild its economy. Unlike Ireland and Greece, however, Iceland allowed private banks to fail, and its currency, the krona, has declined by about 46 percent against the dollar since the start of 2008.

“Excluding the financial system, the real economy is doing well,” Arsaell Valfells, a professor of business and finance at the University of Iceland, said in telephone interview. Retail spending was still shrinking, he said, but the export sector, consisting mainly of fish, aluminum and tourism, was improving.

Just as a man cannot serve two masters, a government cannot serve two economies. The USA and Europe have chosen to preserve the financial economy at the cost of the real economy. Iceland chose the opposite. Needless to say, Iceland made the wiser choice because there are a lot more people in the real economy than the financial one. More importantly, the real economy is not a parasite completely dependent upon the financial economy, which is why putting the interests of the financial economy first is bound to be disastrous when viewed from a longer term perspective.

Mailvox: On the secrets of the state

An interested party asks for elucidation on my attitude towards the legitimacy of state secrets:

I have read your column for years, sometimes in agreement, and sometimes not, and am so not surprised at your position on the most recent Wikileaks affair. Given that position, I am curious as to whether you would agree with the statement that no state may morally conceal any of its actions, intentions, or internal communications. If not, how would you qualify the statement to render it acceptable to you? I am also interested in whether you would draw a distinction between the concealment just mentioned and the provision of intentionally false or misleading responses — lies — in answer to requests for information. Finally, I would ask whether you might see any basis for differentiation between individual or state concealment or lies.

The question requires some clarification before it can be answered. First, what sort of state is it? Second, from whom is the state concealing its actions, intentions, and international communications? In the case of a state that is ruled by a sovereign monarch, in which “l’etat, c’est moi”, then the state can morally conceal its actions, intentions, and communications from anyone it pleases. In the case of a state in which the people are sovereign, (which is to say that the people are the state), the state cannot morally conceal its actions, intentions, and international communications from the people, which is to say itself.

It is completely false and historically illiterate to argue, as some would have it, that it would be self-destructive for a state in which the people are sovereign to retain no secrets. Quite the opposite is true; because most great powers fall to internal corruption prior to their conquest by external parties, it is the ability of powerful elements within the state to conceal information from the rest of the state that leads to the subversion of the state and its eventual transformation and collapse.

The example of war, so often cited in support of state secrets, actually supports the contrary case even more strongly. While it might have been more difficult make the D-Day landings, the more significant point is that they never would have needed to be made had the American people not been led blindly into World War I, which allowed the stage to be set for the rise of Hitler, the National Socialists, and the conquest of France. In the same manner, the informants who are supposedly endangered by the Wikileaks releases would never have faced any danger if the American people had been in full possession of the facts with regards to Afghanistan and Iraq; those invasions would never have taken place.

Obviously, it is worse for the government to lie in request for information; sins of commission are generally considered worse than sins of omission. But in a supposedly free and democratic society, there is no place for either. And finally, the difference between a state lie and an individual lie is that in the case of the former, (assuming a nominally free and democratic state), the state is lying to itself whereas the individual is lying to someone else. Needless to say, whether one is a state or an individual, one who lies to himself is very unlikely to make optimal decisions. And that is precisely the practical problem that underlines not only the immorality, but the self-destructive foolishness of state secrets.

In a state where the people are sovereign, state secrets are maintained for one reason and one reason only: to permit certain elements of the state to operate freely without taking into account the will of the other elements of the state. This is why state secrets are intrinsically authoritarian and invariably lead to the loss of human liberty over time. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that mine is a “naive” position, as the self-styled geopolitical realists like to describe it. It is nothing of the kind, being an extremely cynical one instead.

Neuroscience is racist

It looks like Sam Harris is going to be very, very disappointed where the science of brain imaging experiments looks to be headed:

Following up on the cultural differences between Asians and Americans, one study published in Neuroimage found that when faced with the same image, people’s neural responses are totally different. Scientists found that when American subjects viewed a silhouette in a dominant posture (standing up, arms crossed) their brain’s reward circuitry sparked. Not so for Japanese subjects. For the Japanese, their reward circuitry fired when they saw a submissive silhouette (head down, arms at sides). This physiological response matches a well-known behavioral difference: Americans favor and encourage dominant behavior. Japanese culture reinforces submissive culture.

So, instead of neuroscience providing a scientific means of defining morality outside of religion, it looks as if it will be providing a scientific means of defining racial and/or cultural superiority outside of morality. All of Harris’s reasoning in support of scientific morality, which was constructed in support of his hypothesis of differences in religious and non-religious beliefs and put forth in The Moral Landscape, can now quite reasonably be utilized in support of scientific racial and cultural superiority.

How fortunate for everyone that his reasoning is so completely flawed.

The Fifth Definition

Paul Krugman explains why Keynesian economists have now begun to switch to a fifth definition of inflation, “core inflation”, that is distinct and increasingly distant from the Keynesian school’s theoretical, official, textbook, and practical definitions.

Since I’m taking a break from shoveling, I thought I might take a few minutes to address an issue that seems to confuse many people: the idea of core inflation. Why do we need such a concept, and how should it be measured? So: core inflation is usually measured by taking food and energy out of the price index; but there are alternative measures, like trimmed-mean and median inflation, which are getting increasing attention.

First, let me clear up a couple of misconceptions. Core inflation is not used for things like calculating cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security; those use the regular CPI.  And people who say things like “That’s a stupid concept — people have to spend money on food and gas, so they should be in your inflation measures” are missing the point. Core inflation isn’t supposed to measure the cost of living, it’s supposed to measure something else: inflation inertia….

The standard [core inflation] measure tries to do this by excluding the obviously non-inertial prices: food and energy. But are they the whole story? Of course not — and standard core measures have been behaving a bit erratically lately. Hence the growing preference among many economists for measures like medians and trimmed means, which exclude prices that move by a lot in any given month, presumably therefore isolating the prices that move sluggishly, which is what we want.

And then these great minds of the dismal science wonder why their models don’t work in either a predictive or an explanatory manner. Of course, the reason they need to keep coming up with these additional “definitions” is because not because the “measures have been behaving a bit erratically” but because the conclusions that are based on the definitions don’t line up with what is visibly taking place in the actual economy.

The red line is the standard “core inflation” CPI-FLENS measure that Krugman is citing in his second “Core Logic” post; the blue line is the standard CPI-U.  However CPI-FLENS cannot possibly measure the inflation inertia because the practical application of the various Keynesian definitions of inflation requires something to measure those price changes against.  Simply removing some of the more volatile (and generally higher) prices from the price index only smooths out the price index while tending to reduce it.  Since inflation – and therefore its inertia – depends upon the comparison of those price changes with changes in the production of goods and services, (in practical terms, with GDP minus the price increase of one’s preferred index, be it CPI-U or CPI-FLENS), anything that leaves GDP out of the equation cannot be considered the inflation inertia anymore than the mere change in prices can be considered inflation if it does not take the change in production into account.

Republicans plot betrayal

The incoming House Majority Leader is considering whether he can get away with keeping Ron Paul out of the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee panel that oversees monetary policy in order to protect the Federal Reserve from any uncomfortable oversight:

Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn’t final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.

If this happens, it will be a strong indication that the Tea Party is either going to split in two or split from the Republican Party.  And this should tell you all you need to know about whether the House Republicans are going to govern any differently than they did the last time they were in power.

That’s why she’s the frontrunner for 2012

Mike Potemra posts an email from Claire Berlinski:

Palin is probably the only GOP candidate Obama could beat right now. She runs, 90-year-olds who have never dreamt of voting in their lives will register for the first time to vote against her. And I wouldn’t blame them. I don’t hate her, as some think. I just cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would look at her and think, “I trust her to hold the most powerful office in America at a time of uniquely grave national peril.” It’s mind-boggling.

It’s not mind-boggling, it’s ludicrous. Not the idea of Palin winning the Republican nomination, but the idea that the opinion of a Jewish woman living in Paris, whose family connection to America is but a single generation, is even remotely relevant to the probable primary voting behavior of American Christians living in Iowa, Florida, Texas, and Ohio. And since the “uniquely grave national peril” comes from the Federal Reserve, not a few third world goathumpers who haven’t managed to do so much as take out a single Christmas tree or lemonade stand in nine years, Palin will almost surely continue to become more popular because she is the only Republican politician besides Ron Paul who has been speaking out against Bernanke’s futile attempts to keep the insolvent banks afloat.

I am not a Palin fan myself; I’m a libertarian and Ron Paul is the only Republican for whom I would vote. But Palin has the political starpower and common sense synchronicity with popular opinion that the other candidates completely lack. I mean, Newt Gingrich? Trig Palin has a better chance of being elected president in 2012 than that fat little troll does. John Bolton? Mitt Romney couldn’t even beat the corpse of John McCain. The only Republican who looks capable of beating Palin for the nomination right now is the New Jersey governor, Christie. That’s why I expect to see the moderate elite fire up a Draft Christie campaign soon.

So much for inflation

Apparently QE III is in the cards:

In an effort to thwart counterfeiting, the US Government has implemented a $100 bill design so difficult to print even the U.S. Treasury cannot print them. The government needs to burn $110 billion in flawed $100 bills, more than 10% of all existing cash. The cost of printing the flawed bills was a mere $120 million.

If inflation is derived from the money supply, then burning 10% of the the entire currency stock should cause prices to fall, right? Given the current M2 figure of $8,767 billion, this bonfire of the Franklins should result in an immediate 1.3% reduction in the rate of inflation.

Mailvox: the daughter of the Devil and other emails

SF presents a succinct case:

Two wrongs don’t make a right, you fool.

That may be true, but the more salient point is that one right does. Bill helpfully illustrates the importance of owning a dictionary, or at least a passing familiarity with the English language:

Back in the real world, this was known as treason and the perpetrator would tried and hung. That is the way that true Americans feel about the betrayal of their country. These are also the ones that have fought and served their country, something, more than likely unknown to the likes of you and your kind. Sad that people have died defending the rights of traitors!

It is sad that Julian Assange should have so treasonously betrayed all those Americans who died defending his rights when the British invaded Australia… or something. Important rights like the freedom of speech, which that traitor should have known better than to exercise! Seriously, what is it with these conservatives who can’t seem to figure out that you cannot commit treason against a country to which you owe no allegiance?

GL, on the other hand, quite liked the column:

I purposefully read Barbara Simpsons article before yours and my mind was going off like it was Chinese New Year. I wanted so much to e-mail her and either yell in her face to shut her stupid illogical lying mouth or conversely to quietly tell her how wrong she was on so many levels. Fortunately I read your article before I did and now my mind is perfectly at ease. You said what I would have wanted to say if only I had been articulate, smart and cruel enough to say it.

And then there was this masterpiece of reason from JT:

I usually disagree with just about everything you say and usually just toss off your doffus opinions as probable doobie influence, but this time I so vehemently disagree I have to comment. You sit behind your PC in, no doubt, your cushy chair in your very cushy home, just like that little weasel you think is a hero, and make comments that are so unreal I can smell the pot. Join the military, put yourself in danger—not just the danger of getting sores on your butt by sitting too long in one position behind your PC screen—real danger—people shooting at you, people lobbing grenades at you, people hiding behind women and children and firing at you and you may have some kind of credibility.

But since you have never done anything to put yourself in that kind of danger, as my son has done by serving on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have no idea how disgusting your hero worship of this little piece of vermin is. You are as disgusting as the Wikileaks Weasel. I used to think that libertarians were just as dangerous as liberals. I’ve now had to change my mind. You’re even more dangerous.

To which I responded: “Julian Assange is not putting anyone in any danger that George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not already put them. The fact that the truth may be dangerous does not justify the lie. You talk about others being disgusting, but you are daughter to the Devil, the Father of Lies.”

I am dangerous, Ice…man.

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