Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: you can’t stop the signal

That doesn’t mean that the IT fascists won’t try to prevent their serfs from hearing it:

“Well, it’s official. My company’s IT department has, as of today, blocked Vox Popoli as a “Fringe Usenet Group.” This also came with a stern talking to by the IT department head to me personally about the inappropriate, off color nature of the Ilk. Be proud, VD.”

It’s certainly an interesting categorization, given that the blog is not, and has never been, a Usenet Group. Please feel free to tell the IT department head from me, personally, that no amount of foolish devotion to corporate fascism is going to save his job from the contracting global economy. Since IT doesn’t produce income, it’s a luxury and in most cases a counterproductive one at that.

The fact is that it really doesn’t matter if anyone reads this blog or not. It doesn’t matter if anyone believes anything I write or not. What is going to happen will happen whether the cubicle serfs or their corporate overseers like it or not. And you can’t stop the signal.

The original Dr. Doom speaks

Marc Faber pronounces his verdict:

Central banks will never tighten monetary policy again, merely print, print, print.

Bubbles used to be concentrated in one sector or region in the 19th century, but off of the gold standard this concentration has ended.

“The lifetime achievement of Greenspan and Bernanke is really that they created a bubble in everything…everywhere.”

“Central banks love to see asset prices go up,” and their policy reflects their desperation to perpetuate this.

US housing bubble that Greenspan could not spot (even though he has recently spotted bubbles in Asia) stands in stark contrast to that of Hong Kong in 1997, where prices fell by 70%, yet none of the major developers went bankrupt; this was a result of a system not built on excessive debt like that of the US.

“You have to ask what they were smoking at the Federal Reserve,” during the housing bubble, as prices were increasing by 18% annually when interest rates started to steadily rise in 2004.

Over the last couple of years, when the gross increase in public debt has exceeded the gross decrease in private debt, markets have risen, whereas when private debt growth has outpaced public debt growth, markets have tanked.

However, last year Economist Gregory Mankiw articulated the position which according to Faber essentially echoes that of Fed #2 Janet Yellen and pervades much of the Fed generally, that “The problem is that people are saving money instead of spending, and we have to get the bastards spending to keep the economy going,” so the key is to inflate the money supply at something like 6% per annum. Thus, Faber says “As far as I’m concerned, the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates at 0, precisely 0…in real terms”.

I understand and respect his case, but for reasons I have delineated in RGD, I do not think the hyperinflation scenario will proceed as Faber assumes. That being said, I agree that the central banks will leave their interest rates at zero; the more important question is if that will ultimately have any relevance to anything during an ongoing debt-deflation process. Notice that contra both Keynes and Friedman, very liberal monetary policies are not instigating growth of the money supply.

The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history.

Watch Oprah, mostly

In which a decades-old question is answered:

In her own writings, Mosher was acutely aware of her foresight, and of the possibilities that lay ahead for women once sex became less of a secret and gender less of a burden. “Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman’s real capacities are,” Mosher wrote in 1923. “She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?”

My suspicion is that the men of my generation and the following one have a far lower opinion of “woman’s real capacities” than the men of Mosher’s generation did. Mostly because we have the advantage of seeing what women have done with the physical, economic, racial, and civic freedom that Mosher anticipated: Twilight, Oprah, Girls Gone Wild, Prohibition/War on Drugs, and the current debt/GDP ratio pretty much covers it.

No amount of male cynicism could possibly have anticipated a post-patriarchal world in which female professors would utilize their astrophysics degrees in order to teach lesbianism in Hindu film as part of a Women’s Studies program. The moment of that fortuitous discovery, for which I will always be deeply grateful to my interlocutor at the time, Mr. John Scalzi, was the precise one at which my loathing for feminism transformed into a genuine appreciation for the vast amount of intrinsic humor it offers. And the more I have learned about the history of feminism, the more I read about the optimistic hopes and dreams of its antecedents and activists, the more amusing its absurd reality has become.

Explaining sigma. Again.

I find it remarkable that so many men here have demonstrated such a difficult time understanding that being a social outsider, for whatever reason, does not in itself have anything to do with the social category I describe as sigma. It’s really not a difficult concept once you understand that the Game theoreticians, with their binary score/no score perspective, would consider sigmas to be a sub-category of alpha. Remember, their whole goal is to a) educate men about the realities of female behavior and b) teach betas to simulate alpha behavior in order to have a better chance of achieving their goals, whatever those goals might be. So, the more refined categories are unnecessary for their purposes even though a few of the synthetic alpha techniques they recommend are more reminiscent of sigma behavior than alpha dominance.

Perhaps an image of a social scene might help better illustrate the categories in a manner everyone will comprehend.

Alpha: The tall, good-looking guy who is the center of male and female attention. The classic star of the football team who is dating the prettiest cheerleader. The successful business executive with the beautiful, stylish wife. All the women are attracted to him, all the men want to be him or at least his friend. At a social gathering like a party, he’s usually the loud guy telling self-flattering stories to whom several attractive women are listening with big, interested eyes. Alphas are only interested in women to the extent that they exist for the alpha’s gratification, physical and psychological.

Beta: The good-looking guys who aren’t as uniformly attractive or dominant as the Alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to women, and do well with them. At the party, they are the loud guy’s friends who showed up with the alcohol and who are flirting with the tier one women and pairing up with the tier two women. Betas tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic manner, but they don’t have total illusions about them either.

Deltas: The normal guys. They can’t attract the most attractive women, usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are reasonably in their league. This is ironic, because deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him and so he will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his non-stop dancing attendance upon her. This is the vast majority of men. In a social setting, these are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making the occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them; if a man talks about his better half or is an inveterate White Knight, he’s probably a delta. They like women, but find them confusing and are a little afraid of them.

Gammas: The outsiders, the unusual ones, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter. Often intelligent, reliably unsuccessful with women, and not uncommonly all but invisible to them, the gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex mostly depending upon whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. These are the guys who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time; gammas supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho-jealous ex-boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly narcissistic doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party, they are in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there… sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have have a worship/hate relationship with women which is directly tied to their current situation.

Omega: The truly unfortunate ones. The losers who were never in the game. Sometimes creepy, sometimes damaged, often clueless, and always undesirable. They’re not at the party. It would never have crossed anyone’s mind to invite them in the first place. Omegas are either totally indifferent to women or hate them with a borderline homicidal fury.

Sigma: The outsiders who don’t play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow. The alphas hate sigmas because they are the only men who don’t accept or at least acknowledge their social dominance. (NB: Alphas absolutely hate to be laughed at and a sigma can enrage an alpha by simply smiling at him.) Everyone else is vaguely confused by them. At the party, it’s the guy who stops by to say hello to a few friends accompanied by a tier one girl that no one has ever seen before. Sigmas often like women, but also tend to be contemptuous of them.

So, hopefully that makes everything a little more clear. To me, it is lunacy to attempt to describe yourself in some manner that you think is “better”. No one cares what you think you are and your opinion about your place in the social hierarchy is the one that matters least. There is no good or bad here, there is only what is observable social interaction. Alphas seemingly rule the roost and yet they live in a world of constant conflict and hierarchical testing. Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one doesn’t become immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one’s childhood. Betas… okay, betas actually have it pretty good. But the salient point is that you can’t improve your chances of success in the social game if you begin by attempting to deceive yourself as to where you stand vis-a-vis everyone else around you.

What he said

I’ve told you this before. But the Dark Lord articulated it better:

CR Maxim #57: Never trust a woman’s advice on how to please women. Her advice is designed for alpha men she already finds attractive and from whom she seeks signals of attainability and commitment.

It’s vital to understand that women have pretty bright lines regarding who they find attractive and who they do not. You’re placed in one category or the other in the first five seconds. And while it’s always possible to make yourself less attractive to a woman, there is virtually nothing you can do to make yourself more attractive to a woman except to be seen dating a woman who is more attractive than she is.

Too much principle

Ross Douthat reveals the intrinsic and incoherent dislike for principle harbored by the pragmatic Republican:

Like many outside-the-box thinkers, they’re good at applying their principles more consistently than your average partisan, but lousy at knowing when to stop. (Hence the tendency to see civil rights legislation as just another unjustified expansion of federal power.) And like many self-conscious iconoclasts, they tend to drift in ever-more extreme directions, reveling in political incorrectness even as they leave common sense and common decency behind.

It isn’t surprising that two of the most interesting “paleo” writers of the last few decades, [Samuel] Francis and Joseph Sobran, ended their careers way out on the racist or anti-Semitic fringe. It isn’t a coincidence that the most successful “paleo” presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, opposes not only America’s interventions in Iraq, but the West’s involvement in World War II as well. It isn’t surprising that Ron Paul kept company in the 1990s with acolytes who attached his name to bigoted pamphleteering.

And it shouldn’t come as a shock that his son found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

Douthat is correct to say that Rand Paul could have and should have avoided a discussion of the merits of a 46 year-old law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 isn’t on any libertarian’s top 10 list of Federal actions that require overturning. In fact, it probably isn’t even on anyone’s top 25 list. But Douthat’s criticism of Paul’s principles naturally leads to the question of how much principle is too much? How much good is too good? And precisely how much principle should be, ideally, be cast aside in order to reach an optimum balance between principle and pragmatism? The illogic stems from ignorance; Douthat has clearly never stopped to think that the civil rights act, however justifiable, was in fact an expansion of central state power with all of the long-term danger that presents. He obviously has never thought about World War II in a critical manner, viewing it instead as a mystic and hallowed event that is beyond question. And he adroitly skips over the fact that the only reason Francis and Roberts ended up on what he calls a “fringe”, despite the fact that their views are far more popular in the mainstream public than those of their neo-conservative foes, is because they were exiled by the neocons after their successful conquest of the conservative media’s high ground.

Rand Paul is hardly “undone”, no matter how much Douthat and the other faux conservatives in the Republican Party would like to believe he is a political dead letter. The America of 2010 simply doesn’t view the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the same manner that the America of 1980 did. The liberal white guilt that fueled the civil rights of the 1960s and diversity of the 1990s is all but dead, having been slain by the Vibrant Society, and besides, what does a Mexican or Somali immigrant care about 18th, 19th, or even 20th century American history anyhow.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Americans have ideologically devolved to the point that they are simply too unprincipled to elect principled politicians, in which case it doesn’t matter whether men like Rand Paul are elected or not. Because an unprincipled electorate will fully merit the fate that appears to be in store for them.

Mailvox: the thin, blue, and not very bright line

A police officer responds to today’s column on public pensions:

Some public pension systems are over the top. Here in Oregon, most public employees contribute nothing to their pension funds. When I was a police officer in SoCal, my pension fund was a contract. I contributed so much per paycheck and it was matched by the public entity I worked for. Periodic raises and benefits were negotiated without threat of strike or public demonstration.

I chose police work because I liked it. No one held a gun at my back and said be a cop. Just as no one held a gun at another man’s back and told him to be a carpenter. You accept the good and bad as with any profession. As far as my pension is concerned, it is subject to the same cutbacks as any pension system would be given the current economic downturn. Plus, I pay for any increase in medical premiums for me and my spouse, just as millions of other retirees do.

Lastly, to make the statement about police officers not risking their lives like a Marine in Afganistan shows your ignorance. A police officer is under the gun every single day he or she is on the job. Every time you knock on a door, you do not know who or what is on the other side. Statistics show it. People can do four years in the Marines and never hear a shot fired in anger. I suspect that you, Mr. Day were never in the military and have never worked a shift in a patrol car. How pathetic.

To which I responded thusly: “It would appear that police work doesn’t require much in the way of mathematics or logic. If you believe being a policeman is more dangerous than being a combat soldier in a war zone, you clearly don’t know the first thing about statistics. In any case, no amount of potential danger justifies being paid over $100k per year for not working. Especially when there is no money to pay for the non-delivery of services.”

Our police friend makes a massive error of basic logic by comparing all HYPOTHETICAL police danger to ACTUAL Marine Corps combat zone danger. It’s true that some Marines can serve four years and never hear a shot fired in anger, but most police serve their entire career and never hear one either. I would have thought this was obvious, but since it might benefit our enbadged protectors to have it spelled out slowly for them, I shall herewith do so.

800,000: Total number of US police officers
126: Number of US police officers “killed” in the line of duty in 2009.

70,000: Total number of US troops in Afghanistan
318: Number of US troops killed in Afghanistan in 2009

Obviously, a police officer is 28.8 times less likely to be “killed” in the line of duty than a soldier is to be killed while stationed in a combat zone. Furthermore, the reason that I put quotes around the term “killed” is that barely half the police “killed” were, in fact, purposefully killed by anyone. The 126 number includes heart attacks, car accidents, and even one entitled “accidental” which could be anything from slipping in the shower to autoerotica gone awry. The comparable number is actually 58, which means that the average soldier currently faces 62.7X more risk of death than does the average policeman.

I don’t think the “danger” argument is one that police would be wise to utilize in order to justify why they are paid so much more in salary and pension plans than America’s soldiers.

WND column

Pulling the Pension Plug

The Founding Fathers understood the inherent risks of democracy. This is why they did not establish a proper democracy in America, but rather a strictly limited form of representative democracy in a republican structure. They did this in fear of the tyranny of the majority and to place a limit upon the momentary passions of the general public.

However, it has become clear that limited representative democracy has evils of its own that are arguably more pernicious than the vagaries of unlimited democracy. As American history demonstrates, representative democracy rapidly devolves into an system where various interest groups band together and form a kleptocracy wherein the government is little more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from the people to the interest groups.

The poor will always be with you

In which the New York Times’s best liberal writer flirts with the idea of reviving Western imperialism after belatedly discovering that not everyone is inclined to behave like an upper middle class liberal New Yorker:

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

Naturally, Kristof thinks the idea is to give – GIVE – women more control. How very white and neo-colonial of him to decide how Africans should live their lives. And, as PJ Tobia, who is not PJ O’Rourke, points out, they already have control, indeed, the African social system appears to be arranged so that women can keep their men happily occupied with doing nothing but drink while leaving them free to get the work done.

The best part about all of this is that these guys are able to sit around long enough to get drunk on a drink that has almost no alcohol content. For one thing, their wives know exactly where they are, whom they are with, and what they are doing, and don’t have a big problem with it. For another, as these men sit and drink, the village comes to them. Boys will make the rounds of each Chibuku bar, selling cigarettes. A village woman will arrive with pieces of meat on a skewer or hardboiled eggs with little baggies of salt and hot-pepper flakes on the side. Down the street someone may be roasting corn or making maize fritters. The whole community does their part so the drinking can continue uninterrupted.

In short, the drinkers of Africa have it made. Sure, they have no healthcare, the literacy rate is among the lowest in the world, and December through March is the “famine season,” but they can drink and hang with their friends pretty much all day. Also, the word “nag” doesn’t even exist in any of the more than two-dozen languages spoken in the region.

What rural African regions lack in material wealth, infrastructure, and modern conveniences, they more than make up for in drunken leisure time.

When you put it that way, it’s clear there are worse ways to spend your life. Raise your carton of Chibuku and drink to great grass hut matriarchy!

No sympathy

Given the present anti-father legal regime, why would any man feel any pity whatsoever for this clueless British mother who signed custody of her son away to her dead husband’s relatives?

Rebecca Jones signed legal papers written in Arabic and witnessed by her dead husband’s family – believing they were about an inheritance for her boy Adam. But instead the documents gave full custody to 77-year-old Mariam Al Madhaiki – who immediately swept the frightened child away from Rebecca and enrolled him in an Islamic school in Qatar. Last week, to Rebecca’s dismay, Sharia judges in the Middle East state THREW OUT her appeal to win him back after a seven-month battle – despite Adam sobbing in court: “I want my mother.”

The judges ruled she can see her son twice a week for just FOUR HOURS, supervised by cops in a room. Now the 43-year-old mum from Sheffield is going to the High Court to try to get justice over what she calls a “kidnap”.

“I was tricked into it. This is completely against the rights of my child and me as his mother,” she said.

So she lost custody of her son. Boo freaking hoo. Precisely how is that any worse than what happens every single day to men who are divorced by their wives, robbed of their children, and stripped of their assets? At least she had the option to NOT sign a contract she couldn’t read in a foreign country and she still gets to see him every week. Moreover, she doesn’t have to foot the bill for his expenses or the lifestyle of her in-laws either.

Notice the tone of the article. Newspapers don’t even bother to report on men losing their children because it happens so often and it is something that many journalists outright support. But if a mother loses custody of her child, then naturally it must be grounds for an international incident.

To be honest, I have zero sympathy for any Western woman who is foolish enough to get romantically involved with an Arab man these days regardless of how the relationship eventually implodes. The difference between Western and Middle Eastern legal and marital norms have been well known for at least two decades now, so there’s no excuse for claiming one didn’t know about them. And of course they all act charmingly modernized at first, it’s not as if anyone was ever likely to get a date riding around on a camel shrieking “death to the infidel!”