Category: Uncategorized

The 20 coolest atheist t-shirts according to the Daily Telegraph:

1) Zeus to Reason
Because the Cult of Reason turned out so well the last time.

2) Distrusted minority
When raising consciousness backfires.

3) What would Dawkins do?
If The God Delusion is a reliable indicator, string a few irrelevant anecdotes together and call it science.

4) Atheist wine club
Correction: whine club.

5) Which day did God make all the fossils?
It depends. Are you talking about Eoanthropus dawsoni or Hesperopithecus haroldcookii?

6) No one has been stoned to death by atheists
Because atheists prefer starving people to death, shooting people to death, gassing people to death, and beating people to death with shovels.

7) God works in mysterious ways
This is how Christians know you have not read the Bible.

8) Dawkins&Dennett&Harris&Hitchens
Snippy&Phony&Screwy&Silly. The four intellectual dwarves of atheism.

9) Born OK The First Time
A successful entry does not dictate a successful exit.

10) Atheists do it unsupervised
And unmarried and childless. And not very often.

11) Atheists have morals too
A morality of one is not a functional moral system.

12) Don’t pray in my school, and I won’t think in your church
It’s not your school. And who the Hell are you to tell anyone else what to do or where to do it?

13) Imaginary friend
Now explain the other 93 percent.

14) Sleep with an atheist
Add to your STD collection.

15) Science, Dawkins, Rock&Roll
Social life as sausage fest.

16) iFraud
Because annoying Christians, Jews, and Muslims hasn’t made atheists unpopular enough already.

17) Roman Lions
Arguably not the best way to argue that atheists do not harbor the desire to kill vast quantities of innocent people.

18) Separation of church and state
Amen.

19) Wait, what?
Dinosaur rodeo rocks!

20) Darwin is my homeboy
Charles Darwin is dead. In another 150 years, Darwinism will be too.

This seems to be a rather strange way of talking about the recovery that supposedly began in April, May, and August, depending upon whom you believe:

“Despite some encouraging signs in the global economy, it is difficult to predict the timing and pace of any economic recovery.

I wouldn’t be surprised if GDP turns positive soon in a “better than expected” shock. But, as even Paul Krugman has pointed out, unemployment is the more significant statistic despite it being designated a lagging indicator. What we’re likely seeing is the result of the increased politicization of economic statistics, which has caused the divergence of the metric from the object of measurement.

Pat Buchanan wonders if America is coming apart:

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg. Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

America isn’t coming apart, America is dead. Ideally, the remains would be divided in three. There would be two coastal nations where the Left could celebrate diversity, experiment with godlessness and homosexuality, experience the true joys of vibrant multiculturalism, and enjoy the economic advantages of open immigration and socialism. And there would also be a third nation in the middle, a White Christian conservative hellhole that would guarantee the right of immediate and permanent expatriation to the liberal paradises to the east and west for any of its citizens who yearned for the panoply of “rights” on offer. Would-be emigrants attempting to leave paradise for the reactionary hell would be shot on sight, of course. The lessons of Californication and Mexification were already old when Alaric was attempting to settle his Goths in the Eastern Empire.

The right of self-determination is supposedly so sacred to Americans that they have gone to war everywhere from Germany to Afghanistan in order to preserve it. It will be ironic if it is denied to them once it becomes clear that the Union not only is not worth preserving, but cannot possibly be preserved.

CNN is taking the art of the unscientific poll to new heights:

Fifty-six percent of people questioned say they had a very positive reaction to the speech, with 21 percent indicating they had a somewhat positive reaction and a equal amount suggesting they had a negative reaction…. The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted just before and just after the president’s speech, with 427 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points. The sample of speech-watchers in this poll was 45 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican.

This is getting absolutely absurd. Why doesn’t CNN just question members of the Obama administration and announce 100 percent American support for his health care speech while they’re at it? If I was a Democrat or an Obama supporter, I would be furious at the total incompetence of my side’s intelligence. Do they genuinely believe it’s going to somehow help the administration to be putting obviously false information out there?

As for the “You lie!” comment, well, all I have to say is that there is no question that Obama was clearly lying about illegal immigrants receiving government health care. Obama is not a king and the American people are neither serfs nor slaves. It seems to me that etiquette does not demand sitting in silent witness as blatant lies are being told. If Obama doesn’t want to risk being interrupted, he should give a speech without a live audience. If he knows he’s giving a speech to a live audience, perhaps he should consider not saying things that everyone knows is not true.

Ian, PeterAnthony, and Gadspeed, please send me your emails today – or if you’ve gotten an invite, please accept it and check out your team – or those three teams will be reassigned to someone else interested in playing. The Meerkats are chilling. It’s too soon to get excited. They’ve won the regular season title before, they’ve scored the most points, but now it’s time to claim a championship.

Ryan Grim shows how the Federal Reserve has bought the academic economists:

The Huffington Post reviewed the mastheads of the American Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Monetary Economics.

HuffPost interns Googled around looking for resumes and otherwise searched for Fed connections for the 190 people on those mastheads. Of the 84 that were affiliated with the Federal Reserve at one point in their careers, 21 were on the Fed payroll even as they served as gatekeepers at prominent journals. At the Journal of Monetary Economics, every single member of the editorial board is or has been affiliated with the Fed and 14 of the 26 board members are presently on the Fed payroll.

It’s no secret that the financial economists employed by the big banks are untrustworthy, being little more than stock market cheerleaders, but the academic economists are arguably even less reliable. This is an excellent article by the Huffington Post, the best I have ever seen published there. The best part is when Milton Friedman is quoted in a damning 1993 letter: “I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results.”

While same sort of corruption and monolithic thinking revealed in the economics profession can be seen in other scientific disciplines as well, the difference is that it is more difficult for the Federal Reserve to maintain control of the field despite its massive finances because economic events so easily overwhelm the intellectual edifice that the Fed has constructed.

Alan Greenspan himself has said that the whole intellectual edifice of mainstream economics has collapsed. I very much agree, and further note that it is Greenspan and the organization that employed him which is largely to blame.

Thomas Friedman explodes the myth of the intrinsic liberal attachment to democracy as well as underlining Jonah Goldberg’s basic thesis:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

Remarkable. No sooner do the Democrats have the benefit of a Democratic White House, Senate, and House of Representatives than they start calling for autocratic rule because they dislike the limitations which the remaining tatters of the Constitution place on their ability to achieve their goals. Sooner or later, the Left always ends up pining for a dictator.

Can you even imagine how they’d be howling “Nazi!” at any right-wing writer who wrote in open favor of autocracy? If, at this point, you don’t understand that Communists, socialists, National Socialists, Fascists, Democrats, and neocons are all just different flavors of would-be autocratic authoritarians, you are simply ignorant of ideological history.

JG himself weighs in thusly: “I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it’s the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearend for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn’t picky in this regard). This is the argument for an “economic dictatorship” pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It’s the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives.”

So for the love of your bell-bottoms, pre-Raphaelite hair, and shaggy gay mustaches, just shut up and deal with it already. The Beatles are not cool and even if we assume that they were at some point in the distant past, they have not been for literal decades, except, of course, in the manner that a corpse is cold.

But why should kids care about a group their grandparents danced to forty years ago? There is always a sneaking suspicion that the continued obsession with The Beatles is driven by media nostalgia.

They don’t care. Their parents don’t care. No one under the age of sixty is obsessed with The Beatles except for a few retro-crazed would-be hipsters pretending they are John Cusack selling LPs at independent record stores. And even their obsession is only ironic. As I see it, The Beatles were little more than the Jonas Brothers of their day, which is very, very far from even beginning to approach anything that can reasonably be described as cool. So they wrote a lot of pop songs, had some big hits, and met with a Tiger Beat reception in America. BFD.

Can you even imagine an elderly Generation Xer writing an article about Duran Duran entitled “Are They Still Cool?” in the year 2027?

If you happen to dig The Beatles, then pick up the new Guitar Hero game and have yourself a groovy time. But please also accept the fact of your own mortality and understand that the world does not revolve around the ephemeral tastes of your generation. It never did.

Camille Paglia is deeply displeased with her own Democratic Party:

How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past….

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue.

It’s nice to see a genuine 60s liberal noticing that today’s Democrats are the very slavish servants of the authoritarian State they claimed to oppose back then. Of course, the Republican Party isn’t much better and La Paglia doesn’t hesitate to point that out.

Supporting one of the two major parties these days is more akin to cheering for a sports team. All you’re doing is declaring which group of self-serving thieves you wish to benefit by allowing them to make your decisions for you.

Joseph Peden gives an interesting lecture on inflation in the Roman Empire:

I’ve been asked to speak on the theme of Roman history, particularly the problem of inflation and its impact. My analysis is based on the premise that monetary policy cannot be studied, or understood, in isolation from the overall policies of the state. Monetary, fiscal, military, political, and economic issues are all very much intertwined. And they are all so intertwined because any state normally seeks to monopolize the supply of money within its own territory.

Monetary policy therefore always serves, even if it serves badly, the perceived needs of the rulers of the state. If it also happens to enhance the prosperity and progress of the masses of the people, that is a secondary benefit; but its first aim is to serve the needs of the rulers, not the ruled. This point is central, I believe, to an understanding of the course of monetary policy in the late Roman Empire.

We may begin by looking at the mentality of the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning at the end of the 2nd century AD and looking through to the end of the 3rd century AD. Roman historians refer to this period as the “Crisis of the 3rd Century.” And the reason is that the problems of the Roman society in that period were so profound, so enormous, that Roman society emerged from the 3rd century very different in almost all ways from what it had been in the 1st and 2nd centuries.

The intrinsic link between the interests of the state and the economic policies it pursues is why I suspect that the discipline of political economy is more integral to understanding the way the world operates than the theoretically objective science of economics. The problems that we are facing, courtesy of our fiscal and monetary authorities, are far from new. While the particular form they take is different, the core issues remain the same.