#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
It didn’t get started right, but at least it got started.
MIN at NO Vikings Saints
CAR at NYG Giants
ATL at PIT Falcons
CLE at TB Browns
DEN at JAX Jaguars
IND at HOU Colts
MIA at BUF Bills
DET at CHI Lions
OAK at TEN Titans
CIN at NE Bengals
ARI at STL Cardinals
SF at SEA 49ERS
GB at PHI Packers
DAL at WAS Cowboys
BAL at NYJ Ravens
SD at KAN Chargers
CB has a request:
I’ve seen you mention several times before how gays have killed Broadway. I recently mentioned that to someone who jumped down my throat about being ‘ignorant’ and ‘homophobic’ and the other crap liberals throw at people. I was wondering if you knew any articles or statistics to throw back at him to shut him up. I mean I have no raw data to confirm it, it just seems observably true. Like the sky being blue. Got anything more concrete I could hit him with. I’d love to shut him up.
It’s easy enough. According to The Broadway League, there were 39 shows running a combined 1,070 weeks that sold 8.4 million tickets in the 1989-1990 season. That is 7,850 tickets sold per show-week. In the 1999-2000 season, there were 37 shows running a combined 1,460 weeks that sold 11.38 million tickets. That is 7,794 tickets sold per show-week. In the 2009-2010 season, 39 shows ran a combined 1,464 weeks resulting in 8,121 tickets per show-week.
So, despite a 24% increase in the US population over the last 20 years, Broadway attendance has remained relatively flat. Consider the stock market and the housing market by way of comparison; it would be considered an epic disaster if the Dow returned to its January 1990 level of 2,707 (now 10,463) or the Case-Shiller index returned to its January 1990 level of 75.58 (now 138.03). Broadway’s gross revenues have increased 106% in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last two decades, which is why the superficial observer is likely to erroneously conclude that it is in good shape, but it must be kept in mind that this increase is primarily the result of a 45% increase in show-weeks and therefore gross costs as well.
However, the situation is almost certainly somewhat worse than it looks. The reason is that the 2009-2010 statistics are exaggerated due to a recent change from “Net Gross” to “Gross Gross” and “Paid Attendance” to “Total Attendance”. Hence the change from “tickets sold” to “tickets” in the 2009-2010 season. During the 2008-2009 season, for which the previous statistical metric remained relevant, tickets sold per show week were already flat at 7,848. That means Broadway required ten percent more shows and 478 more show-weeks than the 1989-1990 season in order to stay even on average paid attendance.
One can, of course, quite reasonably argue that there are other factors involved in causing this 20-year attendance stasis, but there can be no argument that stasis and relative decline do not exist. And given this, there can be little doubt that the content, particularly the increasingly homo-esoteric nature of it that appears to have begun in earnest in 1991 with the premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia in National Themes, is one of the significant causal factors.
The easily observable fact is that equality does not exist. It is a myth. It simply does not exist in any material or legal sense.
Judges have been told to treat female criminals more leniently than men when deciding sentences. New guidelines declare that women suffer disadvantages and courts should ‘bear these matters in mind. The rules say women criminals often have poor mental health or are poorly educated, have not committed violence and have children to look after.
I think it’s particularly interesting that these UK rules declare that women criminals have not committed violence, especially if the reason that they are criminals is because they have committed violent crimes. It’s not hard to understand that Londonistan is going to look more and more attractive as it is compared with the lunatic secular alternative on offer.
Okay, try not to die laughing, everyone. Especially you, Nate. As it happens, it would appear I need to consider buying a riding mower. John Deere X304 or MTD Yard Man 42-inch? Normally, I’d go for the former on the basis of JD quality, but I’ve heard that there have been issues of late and I can probably get better service from the MTD dealer.
LR asks about low interest rates:
So this may be a dumb question, but I was reading an article that was talking about the returns bank were receiving on home loans (5-6%) and the returns that savers were receiving on their savings accounts (practically nothing) and how elderly people that had previously been able to live off of Social Security and the interest from their savings were now having to spend their principal. My question is why don’t people take their savings out of the banks so that the banks then have to compete for their business by offering decent interest rates? If enough people did this, could it force the banks to operate differently?
Because people primarily use banks as a place to store their money. They aren’t going to take the risk of stuffing their cash under a mattress and only one in a thousand Americans utilizes precious metals as a store of value, so the Fed has realized that it can crush depositors with impunity without having to worry about mass withdrawals. In other words, what you’re describing is theoretically possible but realistically implausible. If people aren’t withdrawing their money because two percent of the banks are failing every year, they’re not going to withdraw it over zero interest either.
MB wants to know if a Republican sweep in November can stave off economic contraction:
I’m hearing from a few pundits that if the Republicans take the House (at least) the stock market will pick up because business will trust that no more insane bills will pass for two years or more. They’ll “trust” that govt won’t make things worse. If the equities market does swing up, when will this Depression hit home if the day of reckoning keeps getting postponed?
There might be a very short term bump, but the reality is that the central problem with the economy isn’t the Obama administration, the health care act, or the business community’s inability to calculate future employment and regulatory costs. The central problem is the massive amount of debt that is crippling the private sector and no amount of change in the political makeup of Congress is going to change that. Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to expect that the Republicans aren’t going to do pretty much the same thing that they did before and resolutely defend the interests of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve against the futile fury of the electorate.
MM asks about different waves of immigration:
I would like to first say that though this is my first time to write you, I enjoy reading your blog, and I do so regularly. Second, I would like to ask you a question regarding immigration, I have been reading your posts on that subject, and would like to get a clearer picture of your opinion on the subject (or maybe of the US history as well).
Here is my question: I would like to understand how you differentiate what happened during the 16th and 17th centuries (even the US as a nation was founded by early settlers from other countries or at least their children) from the immigration which is recently happening in the US? If you can label the latter as detrimental do you consider the former to have been so as well?
Again, you mentioned in a previous post that there were 3.3 million more people in the US every year during the period (1997-2010). Do you think that this is necessarily a bad thing to the US nation? What if the 3.3 million were not mostly Mexicans, Somalis and people from the third world, but rather wealthy and skilled western Europeans, would that be okay?
The main differentiation between the various waves of immigration was ethno-cultural. The English and Dutch immigrants were very different from the later Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants. They, in turn, were very different from the later Asian, African, and South Central American immigrants. The significance of these ethno-cultural differences is much greater than most people can imagine, let alone understand.
For example, the present American public school system would not exist were it not for the heavy German influence, hence the term “kindergarten”. Having grown up in Minnesota, I can testify the reason the upper Midwest is so inclined to the left is due to the German/Scandinavian heritage of the immigrants who settled there; this is the reason that the University of Wisconsin, Madison is more socialist than the erstwhile Patrice Lumumba University and why Democrats in Minnesota are more properly known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
So, I don’t regard the formative Anglo-Dutch immigration to have been harmful; that was the America of the Constitution, after all. The German/Irish/Scandinavian immigration transformed the Constitutional Republic into a Progressive Democratic Empire and laid the groundwork for the present Third World immigration that will convert the Democratic Empire into an Authoritarian Oligarchy. I consider that to be detrimental, but those who prefer authoritarian oligarchs will obviously feel otherwise.
In answer to the last question, one percent new immigrants every year is simply too much for any nation that is even nominally democratic. If you consider that the average presidential vote margin is around 3.5 percent, such an immigration rate means that new immigrants can theoretically control national elections within a single electoral cycle. Immigration and democracy are simply not compatible and I am confident this will soon become eminently apparent as the recent wave of immigrants transform the areas they settle into plausible replications of the lands from whence they came.
At least they’re not burning Korans. Because, you know, that might upset someone a lot more than merely slaughtering innocent civilians:
A dozen U.S. soldiers are facing trial accused of being part of a ‘kill team’ that allegedly killed Afghan civilians in an arbitrary fashion – and they even collected their victims fingers as trophies of war. Five soldiers have been charged with killing three Afghan men ‘for sport’. And seven more are accused of covering up the murders.
I’m a little surprised the federal appeals court that legalized torture the other day hasn’t weighed in to declare that it is illegal for federal employees to be put on trial for murder on national security grounds. By the way, that decision was even worse than you probably thought, as it barred torture victims the chance to prove that they were tortured even if they only presented evidence that was not classified information.
You can lead an atheist to logic, but on the evidence of this professor of philosophy, it’s going to take him at least a decade to follow it:
In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.
How I arrived at this conclusion is the subject of a book I have written during this recent period (tentatively titled Bad Faith: A Personal Memoir on Atheism, Amorality, and Animals). The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it. Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ (see Issue 78) are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.
Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it. The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort? In sum, while theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, i.e., God, I now take the non-existence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, i.e., morality.
Now that Marc “Moral Minds” Hauser has been exposed as a scientific fraud and Sam Harris has spiraled off into weird neuro-Buddhist utilitarian psychophilosophy, it is well past time for atheists to stop avoiding the rational consequences of their godless belief systems and admit what was always obvious to everyone from the start. As I have repeatedly explained to the sort of maleducated overestimator of his own intelligence that actually believes that there is a genuine dilemma to be found in Euthyphro, the essence of morality is, and has always been, God’s Game, God’s Rules. Therefore, no God = no Rules. It takes some serious education to sufficiently confuse an otherwise intelligent individual to the point that it takes him more than a decade to recognize this basic and patently obvious logic.
Hard Atheism isn’t a bad name for the concept, but there is already a more accurate one. It’s called Rational Atheism.
Citi’s chief economist takes the concept of financial insanity to new heights:
To restore monetary policy effectiveness in a low interest rate environment when confronted with deflationary or contractionary shocks, it is necessary to get rid of the zlb completely. This can be done in three ways: abolishing currency, taxing currency and ending the fixed exchange rate between currency and bank reserves with the Fed. All three are unorthodox. The third is unorthodox and innovative. All three are conceptually simple. The first and third are administratively easy to implement.
The first method does away with currency completely. This has the additional benefit of inconveniencing the main users of currency—operators in the grey, black and outright criminal economies. Adequate substitutes for the legitimate uses of currency, on which positive or negative interest could be paid, are available.
The second approach, proposed by Gesell, is to tax currency by making it subject to an expiration date. Currency would have to be “stamped” periodically by the Fed to keep it current. When done so, interest (positive or negative) is received or paid.
The third method ends the fixed exchange rate (set at one) between dollar deposits with the Fed (reserves) and dollar bills. There could be a currency reform first. All existing dollar bills and coin would be converted by a certain date and at a fixed exchange rate into a new currency called, say, the rallod. Reserves at the Fed would continue to be denominated in dollars. As long as the Federal Funds target rate is positive or zero, the Fed would maintain the fixed exchange rate between the dollar and the rallod.
This helps explain why gold prices have remained so strong despite declining debt and the deflationary environment. The one scenario that makes sense for the price of gold to continue to rise despite deflation (an increase in the value of money due to a decrease in the available supply of it) is if the “store of value” aspect of that money is increasingly under threat. Gold prices rising during deflation indicates that the increasing value of gold as denominated in non-gold goods and services is rising faster than the increasing value of money is rising against them, which is basically what we have been observing for the last two years.
All three of these Citi-endorsed suggestions go significantly beyond the Helicopter Ben’s conventional Keynesian lunacy. It wouldn’t only destroy the global economy, but as Mike Shedlock points out, it wouldn’t even accomplish the increase in credit that the banks are attempting to create in the first place. Implementing any of these three measures, but especially the first, would be rather like burning down the house to collect on fire insurance when you haven’t bothered with the minor step of taking out an insurance policy on the place first.
So this proposal to abolish currency should eliminate any last vestiges of doubt that the banks are a) insane with greed, b) incompetent, and c) totally uninterested in the well-being of the rest of the country. It seems increasingly obvious that abolishing the banking industry would be a much better idea.
The Vikes will win tonight. The reason is simple. The Vikings reliably beat the team that most recently dealt them a big loss. All Vikings fans know this. In fact, the very first NFL football game I ever attended was a Monday Night Football game in which the Vikings beat the Steelers 17-6 at the old Met stadium. This was, of course, two seasons after the Vikes lost to the Steelers 16-6 in Super Bowl IX.
Minnesota was, and probably is, a better team than the defending champions. (Winning the Super Bowl makes a team the league champion, it does not somehow prove it to be the best team in the league.) The fact that the Vikings took the Saints to overtime despite losing five turnovers as a visiting team is a strong indication that they could have, and probably should have, won last year’s NFC Championship. But they didn’t, and it was not exactly the first time they lost a big game they really should have won. Either way, it’s only Week One, so don’t get too excited or too depressed regardless of how the game turns out.
I’m just glad it’s football time again.
But only if it isn’t secret:
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.
If you don’t understand that the US has completely abandoned even the pretense of the rule of law by now, you’re probably not going to recognize it until either guillotines and/or pyres have been set up on the Mall or you find yourself in a detention camp. This is a truly remarkable and totalitarian decision by the federal court. It has declared that the mere possibility of exposing secret government information to the electorate – in a nominal democracy – trumps all of the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator and delineated in the Constitution.
It was a terrible mistake for the Supreme Court to create the abominable “state-secrets privilege” 50 years ago; this assertion of a privilege to secretly torture and assassinate is merely the inevitable consequence of expanding the central state’s power to conceal its actions from the citizenry.