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Mailvox: fixing historical illiteracy

BN inquires on where to start:

I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to suggest a starting point for a person like myself who has become more and more interested in fixing my historical illiteracy problem. I’m looking for both advice on what to read in terms of a decent survey of world history and also what particular portions of human history are worth diving into and reading up on in finer-grained detail than the survey level. I’m not even sure where to start because it seems like drinking from a fire hose with all the possible resources out there. Any advice?

I would start by dividing up world history into sections and deciding where to go from there. Here is how I tend to think of them.

Ancients: Greeks, Romans, Egyptians.
Medieval: England, Crusades, France, Germany
Renaissance: England, Italy, Netherlands
Generals: Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon
Asian: China, Japan, Post-WWII
American: Colonial, 19th Century, Civil War, 20th Century

While one could argue in favor of the Khmer kings or the Mayan empire, if you are up on those six general topics, you will at least be much more historically literate than nearly anyone you will encounter in casual conversation. For a brief overview, I would start with something like The Columbia History of the World. Then pick whatever topic looks most interesting at the moment and select two books/series for each of the subsections that I listed above, one historical and one original.

For example, if you picked Ancients, an excellent start would be Plutarch’s Lives, which pairs the lives of famous Greeks with famouse Romans. Then, for an original document, I would suggest reading Caesar’s Commentaries on the Conquest of Gaul and the Civil Wars. More to come….

Mailvox: In which a solution is proposed

The prophetic tale of the Great Home Distribution:

“The house next door has stood empty for four months now, ever since our neighbors were foreclosed on and evicted. The bank isn’t even trying to sell it. Instead, a week or
two ago they sent over a crew to blow out the waterlines, fill ’em with antifreeze, and basically winterize the place, as you would do if you had a cabin in the deep north woods and were planning to close it up for the winter.

The kicker: the bank involved is one of those “evil” banks that’s currently in the news for possible mortgage fraud.

So here is my question for you: how soon do you think it will be before the fed.gov starts seizing such houses (since the title trails are hopelessly f*cked-up anyway), declaring them Affordable Housing, and redistributing them to the Deserving Poor?

After all, it’s worked so well in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. If you can seize the property of wealthy landowners and redistribute it to the peasants, you can count on the loyal support of the peasants in the next election — or riot.

Can’t you just see The Chosen One and his teleprompter up there on the podium? Thundering, “If we lose this election, the Republicans will take away your home!” (Because after all, once the gov’t has given it to you, it’s yours, right? Even if you didn’t work for it, don’t deserve it, and they had to steal it from someone else to give it to you?)

Interesting times, indeed. Figure the first couple such houses will go, with great fanfare, to the widows and families of Iraq and Afghan war casualties, or to a few wheelchair-bound disabled vets themselves. After all, who could object to giving extravagant gov largesse to widows, orphans, and cripples?

Then, once it becomes old news, the Great Redistribution begins…”

One nation, under fraud

An excellent article that not only sums up the relevant issues, but provides some stunning examples of how deep and pervasive the banking fraud is:

Tomorrow, a bank—not your bank, but any bank—could evict you from your home. Even if you didn’t know the bank was foreclosing. Even if your mortgage is paid off. Even if you never had a mortgage. Even if the bank doesn’t hold a single piece of paper that you signed. And major banks not only know this fact, but have spent millions of dollars to defend it in court. Why? The answer starts with a Jacksonville homeowner named Patrick Jeffs.

In 2007, Deutsche Bank sued Jeffs for his home, which is a necessary step in the process of foreclosing on a homeowner in the state of Florida. Curiously, despite the fact that he immediately hired a law firm to defend his property when he found out about the foreclosure, neither Jeffs nor his attorneys were at the trial. That’s because it had already happened. Deutsche won by default because Jeffs wasn’t able to travel backwards in time to attend, even though the trial featured a signed affidavit indicating that he had been served his court summons.

The only problem with the summons Jeffs supposedly received was that it had been conjured out of thin air.

In June of this year, a Florida court ruled that the document was fraudulent, as the person who was supposed to make sure Jeffs was served had mysteriously received a copy of the summons before the lawsuit had even been filed, and Jeffs never even saw the copy. The text of that ruling was posted on various financial news websites in September. The lawyers that Jeffs hired to defend his case say that fraud such as this is not uncommon. It’s a widespread problem, and it has cost countless families their homes.

“I think it’s safe to say that 95% of the foreclosure cases in Florida involve some form of fraud on the part of the bank,” David Goldman of Apple Law Firm, PLLC told The Daily Caller in a phone interview. “It’s probably closer to 99%. And the court system is helping them get away with it.”

…Banking officials happily told the Florida court system in 2009 that the documents had been shredded. At the time, lenders were trying to prevent some foreclosure rule changes, so they sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court. Among other things, the letter stated that it was standard practice to destroy mortgage papers once the mortgages were sold into MERS in order to avoid confusion. (“A” for effort on that front.) Something funny happens when tearing up a contract, and it might best be explained by a certain common phrase. That phrase is, “Tearing up a contract.” Unless very specific conditions are met, the contract becomes null. Void. Not worth the paper it is printed on.

It is now totally impossible and downright dishonest for anyone to attempt to somehow blame the ongoing collapse of the U.S. financial system on irresponsibly indebted homeowners or minor clerical errors on the part of low-level bank employees. Exposing the full extent of the fraud and placing the financial responsibilities where they belong will bring the housing system to a screeching halt, as indeed it must. But it is not a question of risking the breakdown of the system nor can the banks threaten to hold the system hostage because the system is already broken, having been fatally sabotaged by the mass mortgage transfer fraud (it’s far more than mere foreclosure fraud) of the mortgage banks.

Someone asked the other day if this explosive situation was really all about the short-sighted greed of bankers and if the bankers could really have been so incredibly stupid. To which the only answer is: yes, apparently. This is an object lesson in repeatedly looking the other way and NOT enforcing the rules; all that accomplishes is to teach the offending parties that they can up the ante on their offensive behavior.

Read the whole thing. It’s very informative and not a little eye-opening, even for confirmed cynics.

Captain Underoos is back!

Because the lesson that the Republican leadership has taken from the growth of the Tea Party and the implosion of the Obama administration is that what the party really needs is an Obamacare neo-Democrat with good hair and granny underpants who couldn’t beat the corpse of John McCain in 2008.

Mitt Romney’s political operation raised $1.7 million from July through September, again pacing the field of prospective 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls.

The former Massachusetts governor, who lost a bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and is widely believed to be preparing another run, has built a robust political operation including political action committees at the federal level and in five states with strategic significance in the pending battle for the Republican nomination: Iowa, New Hampshire, Alabama, South Carolina and Michigan.

Sweet Lincoln, but the Republican elite really are a determinedly self-destructive lot, aren’t they! Even moderate Democrats are howling for less government, so naturally the Republicans are trying to figure out how to put forward yet another Big Government RINO.

Mailvox: Game and the Christian man

AG asks for advice on dealing with the cold equations:

I’m a 22 years old Christian male. I’m by no means a natural alpha, but I’m a pretty bright guy and it is quite easy for me to make myself attractive to women. Social reticence becomes “aloofness”, not knowing what to say (and not saying anything) becomes “mysteriousness” — you get the idea. Maybe it’s not that simple, but from experience I know that attracting women is not tough for me. My dilemma is this: every Christian male I know seems to either be a reformed badboy (like you) or very beta. With the court system completed stacked against men, a failed marriage can completely destroy a guy. What’s a guy like me to do? Let out my inner badboy for the next 8 years and then beg God for mercy or just be the nice Christian beta and hope everything works out? Neither option seems appealing at all. You’re one of the few people I can think of that is a Christian and views women and modern America in a realistic way. I can’t figure out what to do and I would really love to hear your thoughts.

Paul is quite clear on sinning that grace might abound and it is no wiser to indulge in rampant sex for a few years with the idea that you’ll eventually set it aside than it is to decide to spend the next eight years in a coked-up state before getting clean. I remember one evening at the Digital Ghetto when the White Buffalo, Big Chilly, Horn, and Micron were all happily ensconced around Bongzilla. (I stayed very far away from the herb after an unpleasant experience with a PCP-laced joint at DV8.) Micron had cracked a joke about how they were all killing brain cells, but Horn protested that he had read a study reporting that it took ten years of regular marijuana usage to have a negative impact on one’s brain.

At which point, Big Chilly smiled – he had gone to high school with Horn – and said: “And how long have you been smoking?” At that point, he had three years left, but that was more than 15 years ago and he certainly hasn’t quit. So, the point is that you’re kidding yourself if you think you can simply dive into the corruption of the world and expect to come out clean on the other side according to your schedule.

But no one said you have to be the nice Christian beta either. Alpha isn’t the notches on the bedpost; they are merely the consequence of the attitude. If you are a leader, a woman will follow you anywhere, including to church. I have seen it happen. And a Christian man shouldn’t consider himself bound to act like a beta, let alone gamma, around women, in fact, he should be totally indifferent to the opinion of the scarlet women of the world, which is a fundamentally alpha quality.

I think you are confusing Churchianity for Christianity in equating betatude with faith. If you’re afraid to correct someone because it might hurt their feelings, if you can’t open your mouth without deprecating yourself, if you are more afraid to tell a woman not to gossip or stuff her face than tell an adulterer that his behavior is wrong, you are a Churchian using Christianity as an excuse for your inner gamma. You’ve already learned that you don’t have to be an arrogant bastard in order to get the girls’ hamsters spinning madly, trying to figure you out. Now you just need to take the next step and learn how to open your mouth without taking three steps back.

The reason Game works is that it is a pale, corrupted reflection of the truth. But what is its most central message? It sounds like one of Paul’s most important themes! For neither God nor Game have given you a spirit of fear. The Christian man should approach a woman to whom he is attracted with the same total lack of fear as the most hardened master of Game; if she’s not the one, then what do you care if she rejects you? The sooner she does, the better!

The limits of human attraction

In response to Retha’s attempt to protest that sin is not attactive to Christian women:

Are you trying to say you know me better than I know myself? Vox, when you make comments about women in general, you speak a lot of truth. But do not assume to know how any one particular women you never met will react or have reacted to something. I know from experience that this was not how I reacted to a serial fornicator who tried dating me.

Retha’s response reveals some interesting aspects of the differences between the male and female minds here. First, this is a spectacular example of female solipsism; she is attempting to rebut the concept that Christian women are not immune to female hypergamy by citing a single example of her own failure to be attracted by a sexually successful suitor. Second, it is an blatant theological error to claim that Christian women are not attracted to sin, indeed, the fact that the Bible bans women from positions of leadership within the Church and household make it rather clear that they are to considered more spiritually susceptible to sin, and therefore presumably more attracted to it, than men. Given that all men and women alike are fallen, it is absurd for her to claim that she, or any other Christian woman, is immune to the appeal of the world. As Billy Graham is once supposed to have said: “if you don’t think sin is fun, you’re not doing it right.”

With regards to the question of whether I know her better than she knows herself, I can only answer that because her response is a very conventionally female one, there is little reason to believe that she is a behavioral outlier beyond her creditable commitment to her faith. In other words, given a reasonable portion of the information that she possesses regarding any situation involving male-female interaction, I believe that not only me, but many men of sufficient knowledge of Game would be able to predict her future actions better than she can because they have no rationalization hamster nor hormonal cycle clouding their perceptions.

Women are not static creatures. They are extraordinarily dynamic, which is one of the things that makes them so fascinating and so unpredictable to those who do not recognize the primary motivational factors involved. As economists are gradually coming to accept, human behavior is seldom rational by any exterior metric. And the interior metrics of women tend to vacillate greatly, and more to the point, often without them consciously realizing they have changed. Some of these vacillations are predictable, which is why male predators are able to anticipate and take advantage of female dynamism with such reliable success.

The fact that Retha found one serial fornicator unattractive doesn’t indicate that it was his success with women alone that turned her off unless he was significantly higher status than her. Hence the “a little bit of beta” that is advised for alphas who are slumming. (In such cases, the woman’s rationalization hamster can’t spin its wheel fast enough to convince her that she’ll be able to hold his interest over time, so she rejects him first in proactive self-defense.) Given that Retha has, according to her, rejected literally every man that has ever expressed interest in her throughout the course of her life, it should not at all surprising that she rejected the serial fornicator too. Was the unattractiveness of sin the sole reason for that particular rejection? It’s doubtful, especially since he is neither the first nor the last male sinner she will encounter.

But Retha is not wrong in stating the completely obvious. There are always statistical outliers and when you play the probabilities, you will certainly lose from time to time. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Retha is one of the few women to whom the bad boys genuinely hold negative appeal and that she would be more sexually attracted to a meek and virginal omega than an arrogant and experienced alpha. I don’t buy it for a second, but it is at least possible. Thanks to the Internet, we know the limits of human attraction are disturbingly wide, perhaps even boundless. (You know that somewhere out there, there is a site for people who are deeply attracted to molluscs. With pictures.)

In summary, the answer is yes, unless you happen to be a statistical freak of some sort. One should always assume that a woman is going to behave like a normal woman unless one is in possession of reliable information indicating otherwise, just as one should always assume that a man is going to behave like a normal man. Now, we are not mere animals. We have the capacity to rationally control our behavior. But the very fact that we need to exert that control over our irrational instincts indicates that they a) exist, and b) influence our feelings, thoughts, and behavior in a potentially predictable manner.

Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

I suspect that some of you will be interested to hear that I picked up a copy of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris today. I’m planning to finish reading Cicero’s letters before I dive into it, but you can anticipate a review in about two weeks or so. I’ve also sent an email to his publicist requesting an interview; while Sam and I have exchanged email in the past, that’s on a different computer that is presently stowed away. But note that any interview I do will be a non-critical one; it will not be a debate. The point of a literary interview is to help the author accurately get the views expressed in his book out to the public, not to criticize them, and I’m not interested in limiting myself to interviewing authors with whom I more or less agree.

As you know, I refuse to pronounce judgment on a book, any book, without reading it, although I certainly don’t mind expressing my uninformed doubts should I have them prior to doing so. In this case, I have to applaud Sam for having the intellectual courage to seize the bull by the horns; unlike his fellow New Atheists (except Daniel Dennett), he has recognized the weak point of the lack of universal warrant and is attempting to do something about it. As to whether he has the intellectual firepower to successfully make his case, well, that may be another matter entirely. We shall presently see.

I couldn’t quite resist reading the first page or three… and all I’m going to say at the moment is that it is clear that unlike his fellow atheist Michael Shermer, Sam is unfamiliar with the core concepts of the Austrian School of Economics. Those who are familiar with how I operate and can put two and two together should be able to figure out why this seemingly unrelated field is relevant as well as where I’m going with this, in fact, I have even mentioned this specific issue in the past. I also found two major – at this point, I shall merely describe them as points of interest – in the first three pages.

As for that sound you hear, it is merely the blades being sharpened. Just in case they should turn out to be necessary, you understand.

The dryer test

One of Catkiller’s readers poses a dilemma:

You have a matching washer and dryer. The washer breaks down to a point it would cost more or as much to repair as it would to replace. Fortunately, it is under warranty and the warranty company replaces the washer with a very nice new washing machine. However, the washer and dryer no longer match. The dryer functions fine, but it is older and a different brand than the new washer.

Do you replace the dryer? Does it even occur to you to consider replacing the dryer?

In which the verdict is announced

Roissy deigns to issue a bull on the Duke Powerpoint and does not disappoint:

I wasn’t interested at first, having scanned the notorious Powerpoint and concluded that it was just another story of a whore riding the (alpha) cock carousel who happened to forego discretion and publicize her sluttery, nothing to see here move along dystopia down the hall and to your left. But a closer inspection of Owen’s tell-all reveals a river of scorned subconsciousness that the mainstream feminist bloggers have predictably failed to notice – this chick was rejected by each and every one of these high status men she banged.

“But how can that be?”, some of the duller among you will ask. “None of the men turned her down for sex.”

Don’t you know it’s different for women? Failing to get laid is not how women are rejected; they are rejected when they don’t receive romance, love, and long term commitment….

Bottom line: a male Karen Owen would actually see his sexual market value *rise*, while Owen’s value as a girlfriend and potential wife has undoubtedly fallen. This — plus the raw hypergamy on display by her choice of sexual partners and her ability to effortlessly fulfill that limbic impulse — is the underlying message of Owen’s cutesy confessional. And it’s the message that the legacy media, the middle-aged vicars of vicariousness, and the feminists are trying hard to miss.

I didn’t bother reading the Powerpoint myself, having reached that season of life where Cicero and game design documents are vastly more interesting than yet another vicarious rehash of the college years. But this is exactly the same conclusion I reached based on what I saw in the Deadspin and Jezebel articles; a plain, but sufficiently slender 6 with the usual hypergamous instincts fornicating over her socio-sexual value with higher status young men who would never consider dating her, let alone marrying her. Roissy nailed it, right down to the expected manface.

Madonna/Whore is more than a male psychological complex, it is also a significant life choice that women have to make regardless of whether they are consciously aware of making it or not. There are exceptions, of course, as there must be in applying a binary principle to a population of 150 million, but in general, if a young woman has reason to believe she has a reasonable shot at attracting an alpha with whom to settle down, she has to forgo the short-term option of spending four to twelve years riding the alpha carousel if she wants to marry one. And she can’t be tempted into imitating the behavior of the lower-ranking young women who can never hope to do more than take the occasional carousel spin because in doing so she lowers her own rank.

Because all questions of value are intrinsically economic in nature, the vital Austrian question of time preferences – spend now or save and spend later – therefore applies. And it should not be surprising that so few young women grasp this fairly obvious fact, since they are natural and instinctive Keynesians who tend to believe that spending their resources magically creates more demand for them. But one shouldn’t have to study economics to understand that it is scarcity that drives high-priced value.

Bankrupting the big banks

The Great Foreclosure Fraud is not about clerical errors or defaulting homeowners. It never was. It’s about the way in which the U.S. banks selling mortgage-backed securities fraudulently ripped off the pension funds the taxpayer-owned GSEs, and the foreign banks.

In addition to Fannie and Freddie, there are millions… billions… trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities out there that are now very much in doubt. And the pension funds have been pushing for some time now for information about the securitizers, the big banks who bought the mortgages and put them in pools and sold the MBS, whether they should have to buy back the mortages for not meeting the contractual requirements. Those may have varied from contract to contract, but I guarantee that every one of them required that there be proper paperwork and a right to foreclose if the debts aren’t paid. If those banks have to buy back all that stuff, it’s a big liability….

There’s a pretty good chance that if they had to buy back a lot of those mortgages because they did not meet the contractual representations and warranties as it’s called, the mortgages were not what they were required to be and in almost every contract if they weren’t what they were required to be the back was required to buy them back, that’s probably more than they can buy back. We may be back where we were two years ago. There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday morning where someone said this is going to be so bad for the banks we might have to have another TARP. That ain’t gonna happen, not in this lifetime…. we certainly aren’t going to give the banks, or lend the banks, more money to get them back to solvency.
– Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC)

The reason the giant banks are desperately trying to avoid turning over the mortgage-backed security documents and resisting subpoenas is because they will be forced into bankruptcy as soon as any of the investors get their hands on them.

UPDATE: Citi delineates the three possible outcomes:

Levitin articulated three possible outcomes to the aforementioned issues and assigned an equal likelihood to each. In his best case scenario, these issues are deemed merely technical in nature and are successfully resolved but it takes at least year to do so and all foreclosures are delayed by at least a year. Levitin disputed the claim by banks that these issues can be resolved in a month or so and attributed the banks’ claims to “legal posturing.” In the medium case scenario, litigation ensues and it takes years to sort out these matters. In the worst case scenario, the aforementioned issues become a “systemic problem” which causes the mortgage market to grind to a halt as title insurers refuse to insure mortgages involving existing homes.

He left out the fact that in the medium scenario, all of the MBS-selling banks go bankrupt. Which is to say, the big four with their $7 trillion in assets, (45% of which I have estimated are worthless), at the very least.