Category: Uncategorized

The heroism of WikiLeaks

And the lunacy of Government Newspeak. We have truly reached a point of no return if the provision of accurate information to the people about what their supposedly democratic government is doing is equated with terrorism by their so-called leaders:

The incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says WikiLeaks should be officially designated as a terrorist organization. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the panel’s presumptive next head, asked the Obama administration today to “determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization,” putting the group in the same company as Al Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway.

“WikiLeaks appears to meet the legal criteria” of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, King wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reviewed by CNET. He added: “WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.”

If WikiLeaks meets the legal criteria of a “U.S.-designated terrorist organization” then so does Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Governments always want to operate in the dark and keep their subjects in ignorance, which is why Julian Assange should not be assailed by the American people, he should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, regardless of whatever his motivations in making all of this information available to the public might be.

WikiLeaks is nothing more or less than a technological blow for American freedom. Assange is no traitor; the accusation doesn’t even make sense considering that he has absolutely no connection with the United States. But it should come as no surprise to the readers of this blog that the verbal attack against the organization is being led by one of those freedom-loving Republicans.

Moreover, the crocodile tears of those in the media who fear that the release of information to the public will “get people killed” is absolutely ludicrous given their support for the ongoing military occupations that have killed hundreds of thousands more people than any number of leaks possibly could. In fact, to the extent that WikiLeaks permits Americans to force an end to their leaders’ pointless and unpopular wars, it will almost certainly save lives. After all, when one considers that numerous American leaders have waxed bellicose about the need to go to war to prevent Iran getting nukes, wouldn’t it be pertinent for them to know that China is actively helping Iran obtain them?

“More than 250,000 classified State Department reports made public on Sunday reveal that China was urged to stop shipments through Beijing of missiles from North Korea to Iran, and that Saudi Arabia’s monarch urged the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Mailvox: an atheist reconsiders

A former atheist sends a note regarding his abandonment of atheism:

I write today to point out that, despite the criticisms to which I am sure you are subjected, your writing does in fact have an effect. At about the age of 15, like so many other teenagers, I flatly rejected the concept of God and refused to acknowledge the validity or presence of religion as a determining force in human life. I believed that science and materialism had all the answers and that the very idea of God was ridiculous, having been disproven quite thoroughly by scientific examinations of, for example, the Big Bang and evolution.

However, as I grew older and (hopefully) wiser, and moved from Asia to Britain and then America, I came face-to-face with the natural consequences of secular materialism. I came to understand fully the true horrors that Godless secularism has inflicted upon Man, and as I read and learned more I came to realise that science does not, in fact, offer true answers but only raises more questions. That isn’t a bad thing- but pretending that science can answer all questions most certainly is.

It wasn’t until I became a libertarian and started reading the writings of other libertarians that I came across your blog and your books. Eventually, I did read The Irrational Atheist late last year after reading one of Richard Dawkins’s books. I was much struck by the fact that while I remembered almost none of Dawkins’s arguments in The God Delusion, and found the few arguments that I did remember to be quite poor, I remembered and found myself agreeing with far more of your arguments from a much shorter and more precise book. It was at that point that I fully and flatly rejected the arguments of the New Atheists.

Now that I have started reading the Bible, have watched Lee Strobel’s documentaries The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith, and have read more widely around the issue, I simply cannot call myself an atheist any longer. I’ve no doubt that you have a fair amount of contempt for agnostics- you probably view them as being a bit wishy-washy, and I’ll readily admit you’ve got a point- but that’s about as close as I can come so far to calling myself religious. It’s just that, as I realised not much more than a few months ago, I’ve made my peace with God- or at least, the Judeo-Christian conception of God.

And that brings up my final point in this missive: I’ve discovered that religions are not, in fact, created equal, and I now wonder why it took me so long to figure that out. For instance, the God of the Old Testament strikes me as having a massive case of OCD, judging by His incredibly obtuse fussing over the details of the Ark of the Covenant, His Temple, and the manner in which He is to be worshipped in the Book of Exodus. The various pagan religions of the world are often deeply disturbing in their lack of respect for human life, and offer only conflict between one divine entity and another as the answer to even the most basic questions about “why things happen”. And I have a particular dislike of the anti-Semitic, delusional, sociopathic, warmongering, deceitful paedophile that Allah calls his “prophet”. I doubt I can fully accept Christianity either, but I guess I’ll figure that out as I go along.

So I write to you simply to say thank you for forcing me to think more clearly about economics and faith. I think I’m a better man for it, and I doubt I would have been able to do so had it not been for your blog posts and books. I don’t always agree with what you write, but I do find your arguments to be thought-provoking, and that’s what’s important. I hope you continue to write and educate others, and look forward to much more of your writing in the future.

First, let me be clear in stating that it is Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists who think poorly of agnostics, not me. (For example, Dawkins addresses what he calls “the poverty of agnosticism” and describes it as “fence-sitting PAP”.) Having been an agnostic for more than two decades, I am deeply sympathetic to those who can neither believe nor disbelieve. And second, while I primarily write for my own entertainment, I am pleased to learn that from time to time some individuals believe it to have a salutary effect on their intellectual development.

On a tangential note, one thing I found particularly interesting was the age at which the emailer decided he was an atheist. It appears many atheists become atheists in their late childhood and early teens; this was the case for both Dawkins and Hitchens, among others. This is potentially signficant because in many cases, it also appears that their intellectual and emotional development largely comes to a halt at that point. One cannot read the New Atheist books without marveling at how fundamentally juvenile they are despite the age of the authors. The possibility of a connection between these two observations makes an amount of sense given how much more certain we are of our knowledge in our youth than we are once we have the benefit of more experience. And following this train of thought, it becomes apparent that it may even explain, at least in part, the disproportionate number of atheists in academic science. It is at least the very possible that this over-representation is more the result of a dearth of real-world experience than a surfeit of high intelligence.

WND column

The Paper Altar

The irony is enormous. After spending more than 100 years striving for Repeal and Home Rule in a partially successful attempt to win their independence from Great Britain, the Irish people have found themselves caught in a much crueler subservience to the bureaucrats of Brussels and the bankers of Berlin. In what is misleadingly being described as an “Irish bailout,” the Irish are about to reap the bitter harvest of two massive mistakes: joining the euro and permitting their government to take responsibility for the debts owed by their giant insolvent banks.

VPFL Week 11

102 Blackmouth Banksters (7-4-0)
101 Moundsview Meerkats (2-8-1)

86 Valders Quixotes (8-3-0)
79 MS Swamp Spartans (5-5-1)

86 Bane Sidhe (7-4-0)
52 RR Redbeards (4-6-1)

97 Greenfield Grizzlies (5-5-1)
71 Meigs Marauders (5-6-0)

88 Judean Rhyneauxs (6-5-0)
74 Winston Reverends (4-7-0)

This is getting too absurd for words. I just scored more points than anyone else had previously scored all season… and still lost by one thanks to a kicker who scored nothing. But the Grizz are on a tear with a three-game winning streak just in time for a playoff run.

A first whack

Don’t expect too much out of this little video on inflation and the CPI. It’s a first effort and I’m not shooting for professional quality or auditioning for a radio show here. The point is simply to transmit information in an alternative medium to the written text. I made a mistake in setting the screen capture size too low and I think I also neglected to spend enough time discussing what the CPI-U is; anyhow, I would welcome suggestions for improvement.

The Voxiversity YouTube channel is located here.

Christianity and paganism

Being ignorant of history, the secularists of the West are naive in the extreme. Having been raised the fruits amidst the societal inertia of the civilization once known as Christendom, they errantly conclude that the heat will remain once the fires have been quenched simply because it takes time for the embers to die down. Even for the committed and militant atheist, this account of a modern-day Saul’s unexpected conversion to Christianity should underline the central need for civilized religion to compete with the attractions of other religions.

In the course of those days the priest has a vision: he meets the devil who tells him he will become a great warrior. The devil says to increase his power he must continue the rituals of child sacrifice and cannibalism. The initiation is complete and the priest is now one of the most powerful leaders in West Africa. The priest is 11 years old. As prophesied, the boy priest grew up to become one of Liberia’s most notorious warlords: General Butt Naked….

It was the summer of 1996 and his clansmen were caught up in a ferocious battle. It was decided that a sacrifice was needed. As the rockets rained down, a mother brought her three-year-old daughter to him. Something about the child struck the pitiless General and for the first time in his life he hesitated. As he relives the moment with me, his face becomes contorted.

‘The child was very unusually beautiful and kind. Most of the children are brought to me by the elders, they’re crying, they’re fighting. This child was peaceful,’ he recalls. ‘I thought, “This child must not die.” I struggled.

‘Of all of the thousands that I killed, I wish I did not kill that little girl . . . ‘ his voice trails off. He is close to tears for the first and only time. ‘Right after killing her, I had my epiphany.’

He claims he saw a white light in the shape of a man. A voice told him, ‘repent and live or refuse and die’. He believes it was Christ.

The impact was immediate. From that day the killing, the sacrifices and cannibalism ended and Blahyi entered a period of turmoil that led his men to believe he had gone mad. Within months he had left the Butt Naked Brigade and by the end of September 1996 he was baptised in the sea near Monrovia.

Few in the West are conversant with the similarly hideous practices of the pagan Europeans that preceded their conversion to Christianity. From the flaming human sacrifices of the druids to the ritual rape-and-murders of the Viking funerals, Europeans have been historically prone to behavior that is no less abhorrent to modern sensibilities than the cannibalistic devil-worship of Africans today. There is no evidence whatsoever that a progressive secular society can survive for more than three generations; most of the evidence tends to indicate that it can’t even survive one.

The great irony is that the position of the scientific, anti-religious progressive is ultimately based on a non-scientific and religious foundation: an unshaken belief in the perfectability of Man and the inevitability of human progress towards religion-inspired behavior without religious belief.

The mystery of female infidelity

The Telegraph can’t figure it out:

Why are so many married women having affairs? Gone are the days when adultery was so taboo that affairs generally happened by accident. Now increasing numbers of women set out to stray as if extramarital sex was just one more thing on their to-do list.

It’s hardly rocket science. The decline of religious faith across the West, the expansion of female employment to the middle and upper middle classes, the increase in the average amount of female sexual experience prior to marriage, and the elimination of significant divorce penalties for women have combined to create a generation of women less inclined to take their marital vows seriously than those that preceded them.

In the same way that putting a ring in a bull’s nose doesn’t make it any less a bull, putting a ring on a slut’s finger will not make her any less a slut. Once the narcissistic excitement of All-About-the-Bride Day wears off, the chances are that she’ll return to form. I don’t trust the self-reported statistics that claim 34% of married women are unfaithful, but one would expect female infidelity to exceed male infidelity so long as a) men increasingly seek to avoid marriage and b) the short-term negative post-marital consequences for men significantly exceed those for women. This is why every man contemplating marriage must be very careful to consider his prospective wife’s a) religious dedication, b) desire to work outside the home, and c) sexual history. There are no guarantees, of course, but the cold statistical reality is that some marriages possess higher probabilities of lasting success than others, so if at least two of those three factors are not in operating your favor, you’ll be better off passing and finding another woman.

UPDATE: That being said, it’s not terribly surprising to learn that the science behind the infidelity reports appears to be not so much sub-par as nonexistent. “This survey is so savagely incompetent that I am in awe at how many different media outlets covered it. . . . If a slot machine were as rigged as this survey, the gaming commission would shut down the casino.”

The number of wives and husbands who have ever been unfaithful appears to be in the 15″% to 18% range, which is less than half that commonly reported in the newspapers.

Vox Academy

Like many others, including Bill Gates, I was very impressed with Khan Academy’s creation of 1,600 short online lectures on various subjects from the French Revolution to calculus. However, I was more than a little underwhelmed with the short collection of economic lectures, especially when the very first one on inflation began by getting the very definition of inflation wrong. So, I have begun producing a short series of video lectures on the difference between inflation and the Consumer Price Index using OpenOffice Impress in combination with the Camtasia software that Mr. Khan uses for his lectures. I hope to have the first one uploaded to YouTube this weekend; they don’t take very long to make so my goal is to produce one per week and incorporate a quiz at the end of each series.

I’m not a fan of lecture-based learning myself, but I have learned that I am in the distinct minority in my preference for reading rather than listening or viewing. Hence the experiment. My question is this: what subjects beyond an inflation series would be of interest to the Ilk? Some of the various ideas that have occurred to me are a chapter-by-chapter study of Paul Samuelson’s Economics, a critical series addressing Sam Harris’s latest book, a series on Shakespeare or Dante in the vein of Isaac Asimov’s massive doorstop, or, of course, a series on the prospects for a Japanese naval invasion of the American West Coast in 1942. Does anyone have any better ideas?

Krugman dabbles in Austrian theory

Needless to say, he doesn’t do so consciously nor does he show any signs of having learned the relevant empirical lessons. But in this particular situation, he is correct in placing the blame for the present Irish debacle on a credit bubble and in recommending the right economic policy:

The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations….

In early 2009, a joke was making the rounds: “What’s the difference between Iceland and Ireland? Answer: One letter and about six months.” This was supposed to be gallows humor. No matter how bad the Irish situation, it couldn’t be compared with the utter disaster that was Iceland.

But at this point Iceland seems, if anything, to be doing better than its near-namesake. Its economic slump was no deeper than Ireland’s, its job losses were less severe and it seems better positioned for recovery. In fact, investors now appear to consider Iceland’s debt safer than Ireland’s. How is that possible?

Part of the answer is that Iceland let foreign lenders to its runaway banks pay the price of their poor judgment, rather than putting its own taxpayers on the line to guarantee bad private debts. As the International Monetary Fund notes — approvingly! — “private sector bankruptcies have led to a marked decline in external debt.”

Where Krugman goes awry is in stating that the Irish are “bearing a burden much larger than the debt — because those spending cuts have caused a severe recession so that in addition to taking on the banks’ debts, the Irish are suffering from plunging incomes and high unemployment.”

It’s not the spending cuts that have caused the severe recession, it is the debt-deflation that inevitably followed the end of the credit bubble that caused it. And while Krugman is correct to note that the Keynesian solution to “restore confidence” is not working, he doesn’t realize that is because it is irrelevant and cannot work. He does, however, recognize that his usual recommendation of currency devaluation (printing away the debt) is not an option due to the financial straightjacket imposed by the Euro, which leaves the correct option of the Irish government defaulting on the bank debts, which is exactly what Austrian theory dictates should have been done in the first place.

Liberty in the UK

It is long past time for Britain to move from euroskepticism to exiting the European Union:

THE Daily Express today becomes the first national newspaper to call for Britain to leave the European Union. From this day forth our energies will be directed to furthering the cause of those who believe Britain is Better Off Out.

The famous and symbolic Crusader who adorns our masthead will become the figurehead of the struggle to repatriate British sovereignty from a political project that has comprehensively failed.

After far too many years as the victims of Brussels larceny, bullying, over-regulation and all-round interference, the time has come for the British people to win back their country and restore legitimacy and accountability to their political process.

Here is to the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, and other major British newspapers soon following suit. The European Union is an anti-democratic, anti-human liberty, totalitarian institution that is the realization of Napoleon’s dream. Like Napoleon’s empire, it will collapse, and the sooner Britain is out of it, the better.