Category: Uncategorized

Keynesians are so predictable

I’m so good, I can not only tell you that a mainstream economist is going to be wrong, I can even tell you what his excuse for being wrong is going to be. Here’s Paul Krugman’s ex post facto explanation for why the stimulus failed:

What’s going on here? It’s basically the Fifty Herbert Hoovers problem. Because state and local governments can’t run persistent deficits, and because aid to those government was shortchanged, cutbacks at lower levels of government have undermined expansion at the federal level. Overall government purchases have actually grown more slowly than the economy’s potential output.

This is, of course, his alternate explanation. His primary explanation, which everyone anticipated, was that the stimlus was too small. Even though it was $187 billion larger than he said it had to be. It should be noted that Krugman is attempting to kill two errors with one rationalization here, as he’s also attempting to explain why he was wrong to predict that Germany’s economic performance would be worse than the USA’s due to their rejection of further stimulus.

The Gay Old Party strikes again

Do you know, I honestly didn’t know Ken Mehlman was supposed to be straight. I was surprised to learn that Karl Rove had been married… I always figured he was gay too. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because if you don’t understand that the Republican Party leadership is a bunch of moderate Democrats attempting to keep the Republican grass roots reasonably in line, you can’t possibly understand how American politics works.

Game and Two-ahd-a-Half-Men

Derbyshire explains why it is an effective and PC-subversive television show:

For a strictly limited time period, we’re permitted take a break from official reality to ponder unpalatable truths.

In a post-Malthusian society that has shed most customary constraints on mating (class/race/religious endogamy, arranged marriage, doweries, etc.) and un-hitched sex from procreation, mating is an open Darwinian struggle. Beautiful young women and men gifted with the seductive arts (“game”) mate a lot; plain women and gauche men are left in the dust.

Inside a pretty woman there is often a slut, who can be awakened by a man with good “game.” But …

… ceteris paribus, a woman’s desire for long-term commitment is greater than a man’s.

Meek provider-type males with no “game” rather frequently end up having their life blood, and bank balance, drained away by whiny self-centered ex-wives.

Ambitious, worldly parents are resented by their offspring, and …

… such parents in turn regard the less successful of those offspring with mild contempt.

Kids, even intelligent kids, often dislike school. Boys particularly dislike the feminized PC pablum that forms the curriculum of the average American public school today. They would sit all day eating junk food, watching TV cop shows, and playing Call of Duty on a GameBoy if they could.

Low-class white women are often obese and coarse.

It is also interesting to watch how being engaged to Chelsea is rapidly turning Charlie into a gamma as he fails test after test with her. The minute she turns a stern look on him and says his name in a deep voice, he caves. I don’t know if this is the result of new writers attempting to “tame” him and thereby ruin the show or if they are setting the stage for Charlie to stand his ground as a man and declare non servium while bringing the show to a close in a glorious blaze of alcohol and escorts as Alan marries the annoying woman instead.

I assume the former, however, since Chelsea didn’t seem the sort who would hold any significant appeal for Charlie from the beginning. But then, I tend to catch the show sporadically and out of order, so I could easily be missing something. In any event, it would appear Charlie Sheen may be the last American hero to be permitted to the masses on television.

The watermelon approach to gun control

Using the environment as an excuse for disarming the citizenry:

Will Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson make a back door move to ban lead bullets the day before the November 2 elections? Several environmentalist groups led by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) are petitioning the EPA to ban lead bullets and shot (as well as lead sinkers for fishing) under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Although EPA is barred by statute from controlling ammunition, CBD is seeking to work farther back along the manufacturing chain and have EPA ban the use of lead in bullets and shot because non-lead alternatives are available.

This won’t go over well, to put it mildly. Forget their rapidly diminishing chances of hanging onto the House and Senate, if the EPA is dumb enough to attempt this one, you can pretty much take out the Democratic Party and shoot it.

Revised!

The revision was, of course, UNEXPECTED!

The nation’s gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy’s output — grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the April-to-June period, the Commerce Department said Friday. That’s down from an initial estimate of 2.4 percent last month and much slower than the first quarter’s 3.7 percent pace.

Anyone still think my prediction of at least one negative quarter for GDP in 2010 is going to be incorrect? Heck, if you consider that they lowered the Q2 number by one-third from only one month ago, Q2 might be reported negative before the end of the year. And remember, that’s the map. The territory has been negative no matter what the map says now.

Advancing on their backs

The reason many female executives are so desperate for respect they never receive is because so many of them know perfectly well they don’t merit it.

34% of executive women claim they know a female colleague who has had an affair with a boss. Furthermore, 15% of women at the director level or above admitted to having affairs themselves. And worse, 37% claim the action was rewarded: they said that women involved in affairs received a career boost as a result.

If 15% are prepared to admit it, the Rule of Three suggests that about half of all female executives are advancing their careers on their backs. Progress!

Happy Unicorn Day!

Carrie Lukas illustrates why conservatives should be slow to embrace the leadership of women who call themselves conservatives:

August 26 has been dubbed “Women’s Equality Day,” in celebration of the anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Passage of that amendment was the culmination of years of hard work and dedication on the part of America’s noble suffragettes, and it is indeed amazing to think of all of the progress women have made in our society in the ninety years following that breakthrough.

It is amazing… amazingly horrific. Let’s contemplate exactly what that progress has meant in material terms:

1. Millions of murdered babies, disproportionately female.
2. A significant reduction in marriage rates and a large increase in divorce rates thanks to pro-female divorce laws and the heavily female-biased family court system.
3. The doubling of the female work force suppressing wages and creating a vicious cycle where married women who don’t want to work are forced to do so because their husband’s real wages are lower than in 1973. To forestall the expected ignorance-based protests, I invite you to first consider what happens to the price of a commodity when the supply increases faster than the demand.
4. National insolvency.
5. A massive increase in sexually-transmitted disease.
6. A significant reduction of personal freedom for men and women alike.

It will be interesting to see if a nation that institutes female suffrage can remain sovereign and at least nominally free for even 100 years. The UK gave up its national sovereignty to the EU only 81 years after it instituted women’s suffrage. The US might make it, but it’s by no means a sure thing.

It’s important to remember that because the vast majority of the women identify themselves by the herd and by sex rather than as individuals, they will usually see themselves as women first and [fill in the ideological identification] second. Thus we have the absurdity of a self-styled “conservative” woman celebrating profoundly anti-conservative and avowedly progressive progress.

As I have stated several times before, there is no such thing as equality! It does not exist in material terms, legal terms, moral terms, scientific terms, or spiritual terms. There is no evidence for it because it simply does not exist. Women who traded societal wealth and material freedom for nonexistent “equality” have made a terrible bargain since they literally traded something for nothing. The foundation of the suffrage argument is the false assertion that voting is freedom. My counterargument rests on the verifiable assertion that voting does not equal freedom. That is the crux of the matter.

Doing the jobs Americans won’t do

Including, it would appear, border patrol:

Gunmen from a drug cartel appear to have massacred 72 migrants from Central and South America who were on their way to the U.S., a grisly event that marks the single biggest killing in Mexico’s war on organized crime.

For thousands of years, invaders have been repelled with lethal force. Now the US government expects the American people to believe that there is nothing that can be done to prevent literal millions from invading the southern border. This isn’t “immigration”, it is a plain and simple migration and if history has taught us anything, it is that a nation that refuses to defend itself from migration will cease to exist. Migrations almost always end in a great deal of violence and territorial partition, so there will almost certainly be more of this sort of thing in the future. Note that if the US had controlled immigration along the southern border and limited it to a small and digestible number, the murdered migrants would probably never have left their home countries and would be alive today. Their blood is metaphorically on the hands of the open borders crowd.

Yet mainstream media will shed copious tears over the dead migrants that they didn’t cry over all the Germans slain in the process of pursuing their dreams of a new life and new opportunities in France and Russia. The most interesting aspect of the story, however, is only tangentially related to migration. It is assumed that the massacre was committed by the Zetas, an unusually violent organization which was “initially formed by Mexican army forces who defected to the other side.”

Atheism does kill

So much for the No True Atheist arguments blaming all that 20th century atheist slaughter on communism. It is even peer-reviewed science:

Atheist doctors are almost twice as likely to take decisions that speed up death for very ill patients as those who are deeply religious, research has found…. The findings, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, showed that doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than any other group to have given continuous deep sedation until death, having made a decision that they knew could or would end life.

The more important question, of course, is how much more likely atheist doctors were to strangle their patients with their bare hands or to perform horrific scientific experiments upon them. I expect that percentage would be rather more than double. Unfortunately, it would appear the study didn’t cover that one.

What I find amusing is that the same atheists who deny there is any historically demonstrated atheist predilection for killing will read that piece and find themselves thinking “yeah, what’s wrong with that?” Although considering the bureaucratic nationalized morass that is the NHS, I suppose it’s possible that most of the doctors in Britain are communists these days.

The feet, they vote too

Intel CEO reminds Washington that capital is mobile. Especially human capital:

Otellini’s remarks during dinner at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum here amounted to a warning to the administration officials and assorted Capitol Hill aides in the audience: Unless government policies are altered, he predicted, “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”

The U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business, Otellini said, that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe–this is the bitter truth.”

I think he is dead on target here. My father was a pioneer in the computer graphics industry and he’s certainly not creating any new technologies or jobs in prison. I was one of the leaders in bringing graphics hardware to the computer game industry – no one believes this but you can look it up in the Computer Gaming World archives – and have invented a few things from a next-gen sound card to the world’s most advanced mouse and an AI system. I left the country more than a decade ago because I saw signs on the horizon of what Otellini is now pointing out. Furthermore, I run into Americans moving abroad to set up businesses on a regular basis, not every day, but a lot more often than I did 10 years ago. Between the high corporate taxes, the inflexible bureaucracy, the insane amount of regulations and paperwork required, and the global reach of the Internet, it simply doesn’t make much sense to start any business that isn’t a location-tied service one in the USA anymore.

As Schumpeter explained, no entrepeneurs means no economic growth, which means declining societal wealth and eventually grass hut city time. Unfortunately, most people are demanding even more government and they’re getting what they vote for while John Galt votes with his feet.