Category: Uncategorized

They’ll get what they deserve

Connecticut Republicans reject Peter Schiff in favor of Vince McMahon’s daughterwife.

In the Nutmeg State Linda McMahon (48%) handily beat former Congressman Rob Simmons (29%) and financier Peter Schiff (22%). In November she’ll face non-Vietnam Vet and AG Dick Blumenthal in a poltical steel cage match.

Most republican voters have clearly learned nothing, those commentators waxing enthusiastic about the tea party notwithstanding. This is much like choosing John McCain over Ron Paul, only we are now two years into the Great Depression 2.0. I am skeptical that a spendthrift entertainment mogul is going to do anything if she gets to Washington but borrow and spend.

The inflation test

Inflationistas have long insisted that the Fed can “print” all the money it wants. Deflationistas argue that it can’t. And now, we are beginning the process of finding out who is correct:

Fed Looks to Spur Growth by Buying Government Debt. Federal Reserve officials decided to reinvest principal payments on mortgage holdings into long-term Treasury securities, making their first attempt to bolster growth since March 2009 to keep the slowing U.S. economy from relapsing into recession.

The conventional inflationist argument is that the government can print as much paper as it wants. The problem with that is that in the US system, the government doesn’t print any paper, the Fed prints it and the government borrows from the Fed. So, the revised inflationist argument is that the purchase of Federal government debt is effectively the same thing as simply printing paper. I am dubious of this, as I am confident that the addition of these two intermediary steps with all the various complications they likely entail will derail the assumed equivalence. And then, of course, there is the question of whether the government can create debt as fast as it can print money even with the Fed promising that it will buy some of that debt. It is, after all, a mistake to assume that because the Fed has shown a willingness to buy a small portion of the newly-issued Federal debt, it will be willing to buy all of the newly-issued debt for an indefinite period of time. Which, you will note, is necessary if the equivalence is to hold.

I, for one, have seen absolutely no sign that the Federal Reserve is willing to put the interests of the national economy ahead of the health of its member banks, let alone itself. Have you? And remember, the $8 trillion in the M2 money supply is dwarfed by the $53 trillion in outstanding debt. The theoretical “printing” of the former will have to make up for the decline of the latter. Do the math.

She’s not alone

In fairness, her experience was worse than most. You know going in that you’re not going to get a real job with a degree in Women’s Studies or Sociology. But this woman was sold a totally worthless piece of paper for $70,000.

Carrianne Howard wanted to design video games. But her $12 an hour gig as an industry recruiter didn’t work out, so now she is stripping at a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Howard told Bloomberg. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”

I happen to know a reasonably significant percentage of the game designers in the industry. For example, yesterday I got a call from a very successful old school game designer in Australia about an idea we’ve been kicking around for about a year, and in the course of the conversation we discovered that he had signed a game to the same guy in England who had offered me a job around that time. In other words, we had nearly found ourselves working on the same project. It’s a fairly small world. And I have never met anyone who has a degree in game design. It’s one of the more shameless educational scams out there. If you want to get into game design, study programming, play a lot of games, and pursue an internship as a tester.

Still, most people never learn. The punchline is that she’s saving her money… for a business degree.

Homogamy and civilizational decline

Ross Douthat writes a pretty good column in the New York Times explaining how the anti-homogamy side has made a mistake relying upon irrelevant arguments. He also reiterates the one they should have been making from the start:

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage. It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes. Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.

Douthat also inadvertantly mentions the source of the problem, as the supplementation of those later ideas, especially the fictional “equality” of the sexes has been far more destructive to Western civilization than homogamy will if the judicial activists are successful in imposing their antidemocratic will upon the people. In fact, I tend to see homogamy and its assorted ills as being much more a late-stage symptom than a causal factor when it comes to societal collapse.

But that doesn’t change the easily observable fact that the forces pushing homogamy and open homosexuality are actively engaged in attempting to destroy one of the more successful civilizations in human history. As I showed in yesterday’s WND column, there is no genuine “progress” being made here, social or moral, this is simply a return to the pagan decadence of a society that was in decline 18 centuries ago. The observations of one of the first historians of women, Alfred Brittain, made at the turn of the 20th century about Roman women, was an insightful harbinger of the subsequent success of the suffrage movement.

“Julia represented the prevalent social conditions of her time. Licentiousness, like a cancer, was eating into the heart of Roman society; and this was to grow still worse. It must be admitted also that female degeneracy kept pace with the increase of woman’s influence in the political world. Livia and Agrippina the Elder were exceptions; but the rule was, and has been in all history, that the activity of women in State affairs was accompanied by an abundance of meretricious amatory intrigues. It is a remarkable fact that in the history of the Roman woman–and possibly this statement might be given a much wider application–there is no instance where any individual woman designedly helped to bring about the enactment of a law for the public weal. Female politics always had for their object the advancement of the female politician’s own personal interests or those of some male favorite.”

To be fair, there have been the occasional exceptions over the last 100 years, such as Margaret Thatcher, but then of course she was declared to be “not of the gender woman” by fellow members of her sex for her sin of deviating from the female political pattern.* What is ironic is that so many individuals who greatly cherish certain fruits of Western civilization, such as the science fetishists to give one example, completely fail to recognize that the societal decline they are lauding as “social progress” is much more likely to destroy the aspects of Western civilization that they enjoy, such as wealth, technology, science, free speech and relative political freedom, than it is to eliminate the moral and cultural aspects that they despise. To repeat my comment from yesterday, ignorant pagans rutting in filth and poverty are not capable of funding either the development of new technologies or the expansion of the scientific knowledge base. There are no science labs in grass huts.

*This was a direct quote from a female professor at my university.

Science gets it wrong… again

So much for “the biggest thing in the history of biological sciences” and “the scientific breakthrough of the century, perhaps of all time”.

“We Have Learned Nothing from the Genome”

SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far?

Venter: Close to zero to put it precisely. . . . [W]e have, in truth, learned nothing from the genome other than probabilities.

SPIEGEL: Did it at least provide us with some new knowledge?

Venter: It certainly has. Eleven years ago, we didn’t even know how many genes humans have. Many estimated that number at 100,000, and some went as high as 300,000. We made a lot of enemies when we claimed that there appeared to be considerably fewer — probably closer to the neighborhood of 40,000! And then we found out that there are only half as many. I was just in Stockholm for the 200th anniversary of the Karolinska Institute. The first presentation was about the many achievements the decoding of the genome has brought. Then I spoke and said that this century will be remembered for how little, and not how much, happened in this field.

One needn’t insist that the Human Genome Project was entirely useless – it wasn’t – to learn the very important lesson that asking scientists how government money should be spent is a terrible idea. Let’s face it, “a cure for cancer” is the scientific translation of that old politician’s standby: “for the children”. Science would appear to be our best bet for curing cancer prior to the Eschaton, but that doesn’t mean handing over blank checks to every flim-flam artist with a PhD and a white coat is a sensible investment that justifies the opportunity cost.

And, of course, like the Neo-Keynesians, the Darwinians will never admit that this expensive and cataclysmic failure of so many scientific predictions and expectations casts a degree of doubt upon the reliability of their pseudo-scientific model. The historical and scientific fact is that the world of genetics isn’t anywhere nearly as simple as their evolutionary model had led them to believe it was.

Anticipating the excuse

Paul Krugman finally produces what was always a totally predictable excuse for the failure of the Obama stimulus package:

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump. That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.

Krugman’s excuse for the failure of the Bush (2008) and Obama (2009) stimuli isn’t even new. Consider the following passage from a brilliant book written by an astonishingly handsome author more than one year ago:

Ironically, there is no shortage of historical examples to support the idea that even those who nominally subscribe to an empirical approach don’t hesitate to abandon their empiricism when the data doesn’t support their theories. Consider, for example, how two decades of failing mainstream economic policies in Japan have no more caused mainstream economists to conclude that their theories are incorrect than 70 years of economic failure in the Soviet Union caused socialist economists to abandon Marxism. Some excuse is always found to explain away the theory’s failure and rationalize its continued application; if the fiscal stimulus was not too small or too late, then the interest rate hikes were too large or too early. If the federal government’s expansionary efforts were unsuccessful during the New Deal, then it must have been due to their being overwhelmed by the contractionary policies of the state and local governments.
– The Return of the Great Depression, 134

There’s really no reason to read Paul Krugman’s columns when you can read this blog and anticipate what he’s going to be writing one year later. Because Neo-Keynesians never learn from the inevitable failures of their economic models. In the Telegraph today, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes: “In Japan itself core CPI deflation has reached -1.5pc, the lowest since the great fiasco began 20 years ago. 10-year yields fell briefly below 1pc last week. Premier Naoto Kan has begun to talk of yet another stimulus package. “The time has come to examine whether it is necessary for us take some kind of action,” he said.”

WND column

Social Conservatives on Steroids

It is a basic principle of socionomics that economic boom times are strongly correlated with social liberalism, while economic contractions tend to be accompanied by social conservatism. This has been observed over thousands of years; the Lex Oppia of 215 B.C. was the most famous of the sumptuary laws that were passed by the Roman republic in response to the recession that took place during the second Punic war. Twenty years later, with Carthage defeated and the launch of a huge investment boom based on conquest and colonization, the Lex Oppia was repealed after the women of Rome rioted for days over the right to display their wealth in the same manner as non-Roman women.

Past as prologue

The New York Times embraces the myth of “the new normal” in an attempt to evade the obvious:

The new normal challenges the optimism that’s been at the root of American success for decades, if not centuries. And if it is here, the new normal could force Democrats and Republicans to rethink their traditional approach to unemployment and other social problems.

Some unusual suspects, like Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Business and an economic adviser to George W. Bush, are talking about a new, expanded role for the government in addressing the problem. In particular, Mr. Hubbard favors investing more in education to retrain workers whose jobs are never coming back. “If there is a new normal, it’s more about the labor market than G.D.P.,” he said. “We have to help people face a new world.”

For his part, Mr. Gross, also a free-market advocate, believes that it’s time for the government to spend tens of billions on new infrastructure projects to put people to work and stimulate demand.

First, if you believe it is time for the government to spend billions of dollars to put people to work and stimulate demand, you are not a free market advocate. Second, how is spending government money to “stimulate” the economy anything but a traditional approach to unemployment? The problem is debt and adding more public debt to the equation is only going to make matters worse. You would think this would be obvious, given that both Hoover and FDR tried spending billions of dollars to put people to work and what they got was the Great Depression. It is intriguing, but not surprising, to see all of the politicians and media figures so intent on taking the very actions that will cause the outcome they hope to avoid. What is remarkable is that they are doing this with the benefit of hindsight.

Get over yourself already

First, “psychiatric therapy” is complete, utter, and total BS. It’s not therapy of any kind, it’s nothing more than paying someone to listen to you talk about your favorite subject under the guise of a pseudo-scientific veneer. A pastor (religion) or a pill (science) would do anyone more good. Some of us see this right away, it takes others 40 years of incessant “therapy” from a multitude of “therapists” to realize it. Second, it’s obvious that what is wrong with the author is nothing more than an extreme case of conventional female narcissism. That being said, reading this endless solipsism of the self-centered mind does nicely illustrate how a focus on yourself is ultimately crippling and provides women with a warning of the peril presented by constant snowflaking.

The truth of the matter was that in more than 40 years of therapy (the only person I knew who may have been at it longer than me was Woody Allen, who once offered me his own analyst), I never developed a set of criteria by which to assess the skill of a given therapist, the way you would assess a dentist or a plumber. Other than a presentable degree of intelligence and an office that didn’t set off aesthetic alarms — I tended to prefer genteelly shabby interiors to overly well-appointed ones, although I was wary of therapists who exhibited a Collyer Brothers-like inability to throw anything away — I wasn’t sure what made for a good one. I never felt entitled to look at them as members of a service profession, which is what, underneath all the crisscrossing of need and wishfulness, they essentially were…. Just as some people believe in the idea of soul mates, I held fast to the conviction that my perfect therapeutic match was out there. If only I looked hard enough I would find this person, and then the demons that haunted me — my love/hate relationship with my difficult mother (who has been dead now for four years), my self-torturing and intransigently avoidant attitude toward my work, my abiding sense of aloneness and seeming inability to sustain a romantic relationship and, above all, my lapses into severe depression — would become, with my therapist’s help, easier to manage.

The byline says: “Daphne Merkin is a contributing writer. She is working on a book based on an article she wrote for the magazine about her struggle with chronic depression.” Of course she is. It’s eminently clear that she couldn’t possibly write about anything other than her own precious little snowflake self.

Quote of the Day: “Neurotics are a rabble, good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless.”
– Sandor Ferenczi, President of the International Psychoanalytical AssociationSigmund Freud

However, I’m not saying that all therapists are con artists. The ones who actually help people are those who provide a service politely telling people to stop acting like self-destructive morons. But that’s not “therapy”, that’s just being paid to cushion the obvious blow.