Category: Uncategorized

Joel Rosenberg fires off a rather good one:

Tom Maddox is an SF writer of fairly minor import. His major professional accomplishment, from this remove, is that he hangs out with his buddy, William Gibson, of (deserved, even though I don’t care for it) Neuromancer fame, who he, well, kind of worships. Back in the day, he was a frequent infestation, err, presence on Usenet, promoting Gibson (pbuh) in every context. It was kinda like when my six-year-old discovered Britney Spears.

Then one day, some guy writes in and asks something to the effect of “Which came first, Gibson’s Neuromancer or the movie Bladerunner?”

I happen to quite like William Gibson’s work. His more recent novels are arguably better than the original cyberpunk stuff with which he made his name. But he’s not a literary demigod either and his accomplishments don’t require embellishment.

JB queries local eddies in the psycho-social continuum:

I enjoyed your exploration in the angels trilogy of the psychology of two school shooters superficially similar to Dylan and Klebold. I wonder if you have seen this article offering a different story than the “bullying” line for Dylan and Klebold’s behavior.

I am not deprecating bullying as a factor since loneliness is a major part of the human suffering of psychopathy. But I suspect after reading that it was not bullying but psychopathic nihilistic contempt for humanity that best explains the massacre. I noted three points from the article:

1) Harris went quiet and planned for a year, allowing many people on the hit list to graduate
2) The planned massacre revolved around explosives, was orders of magnitudes larger, and was aimed at targets beyond the school
3) Harris seems to fit the psychopathic mastermind personality so well – the article develops a more comprehensive picture of his words and actions over time than the “bullying did it” articles I’ve seen

What do you think of the figures tossed around, that 1% or 4% are psychopaths? Could one say that you and Bane are both ones? Over the last month I have been induced by life evidence to evaluate my psychological profile, then a close friend’s, and that is how I came across the Columbine article.

It was an interesting article. Harris was certainly an intriguing personality; I’m rather pleased that my fictional portrayal appears to have gotten the dynamic between the two killers generally right. In answer to JB’s questions, I think the percentages are exaggerated, as the imprecision alone is sufficient to indicate. And I don’t believe that either Bane or I can be reasonably described as pyschopathic even though both of us might superficially appear to score higher than the average on the Hare checklist. To paraphrase something Bane once said, ruthlessness is often nothing more than a comprehensive understanding the range of the available choices and a willingness to act on the basis of that understanding. But we’re both far too accepting of our personal responsibilities and far too little impressed by our places in the vastness of Creation to ever qualify as being even remotely psychopathic.

I will admit that the highly intelligent are probably more prone to being inaccurately viewed as a bit psychopathic, although it’s not reasonable to always blame a lack of empathy for holding people in contempt; many, if not most, people are genuinely contemptible in one way or another. For example, holding an individual in contempt because he is a relative retard incapable of basic reading comprehension or formulating substantive criticism is not tantamount to denying his equal value as a human being in possession of a soul. It simply means that his opinions are of no value. I believe there is no shortage of evidence to demonstrate that this is true most of the time for most of the 6 billion individuals on the planet.

However, it’s also true that those who favor the abstract over the material, as most intellectuals do, operate in a manner that can appear to be similar to psychopaths in that they don’t tend to pay a great deal of attention to individual matters. But this is generally an issue of focus and perspective, not incapacity. The significant difference can be seen in the way that genuine intellectuals don’t take criticism personally because they know that it is their ideas that are the real target; the psychopath, on the other hand, invents slights and takes great personal offense at imaginary provocations because he believes that everything revolves around him.

This does not, however, mean that they have even the first inkling of a glimmer of a clue:

THE top suits and some of the on-air talent at CNBC were recently ordered to a top-secret meeting with General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker to discuss whether they’ve turned into the President Obama-bashing network, Page Six has learned.

“It was an intensive, three-hour dinner at 30 Rock which Zucker himself was behind,” a source familiar with the powwow told us. “There was a long discussion about whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much. There’s great concern that CNBC is now the anti-Obama network. The whole meeting was really kind of creepy.”

Too conservative. Beating up on Obama too much. Fox News, one would assume. But no, it’s CNB-freaking-C! Right, that’s the problem. You just keep telling yourself that, Schmucker, as your network fades slowly to black.

Item 1: “Mexico has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. It is in many ways similar to the United Kingdom, except with much more severe prison terms for even the smallest gun law violations.”

Item 2: “16 dead in Mexico shootout ahead of Obama visit.”

What is shocking and confusing gun control advocates is that the effect of the usual media coverage of guns has flipped on them. It used to be that coverage of a firearm-related massacre caused the average individual who didn’t think much about guns to react emotionally in favor of gun control laws. But, because so many of massacres have taken place where guns were already illegal, the emotional reaction to massacre coverage now tends to take the form of thinking: “the victims were helpless and the police were worthless… I’d really better buy a gun so that at least I’ll have a chance to defend myself.”

It’s striking and societally significant, to be sure. But the shift away from male employment is still not the primary cause for concern.

The percentage of adult American women who are employed climbed from about 37% in 1965 to about 55% in 2008, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Bureau of Economic Research. We hear less concerning the percentage of adult American men who are employed, which fell from about 81% in 1965 to 69% in 2008. The share of men in the United States with a job is at its lowest point ever.

That long-term trend is now accelerating. Since the current recession began in December 2007, men have lost the vast majority of jobs. Of the 5.1 million jobs that have disappeared, a full 20% have been lost in construction, almost entirely by men. Another 20.6% of jobs have been lost in male-dominated manufacturing. Meanwhile, employment in the female-dominated fields of education and health services has increased by 12% since the recession began. In total, 78% of the jobs lost in this recession have been lost by men, according to BLS statistics compiled by Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress. (Men comprised only about 54% of the workforce going into the recession.)

The Wall Street Journal indicates that the “stress tests” aren’t intended as anything but pure government propaganda:

It isn’t clear precisely what information the government might disclose. It remains possible the data won’t be specific to individual banks. But some within the administration believe a certain amount of information needs to be released in order to provide assurance about the validity and rigor of the assessments. In addition, these people also are concerned that the tests won’t be able to fulfill their basic function of shoring up confidence unless investors are able to see data for themselves.

The entire exercise is nothing more than a bizarre neo-Keynesian spin on “restoring animal spirits”. A serious test of banking stability would simply report the data gathered – which should be made public given the massive taxpayer investment in the banks – which would then allow anyone to decide if the state of the banks merited confidence or not.

But all this hand-wringing over precisely what information can be selectively released without causing more damage than it avoids indicates that the point is simply to convince the gullible that everything is fine and the financial authorities have it all under control. Given how many times people on both sides of the political spectrum have fallen for this line, it’s no wonder they’re giving it another go.

Just in case you’re not convinced that it’s all smoke-and-mirrors, both Calculated Risk and Roubini have been contemplating whether it’s only the “baseline case” for the tests that is invalid or whether the “adverse case” has already been exceeded:

Roubini concludes: “Actual macro data for 2009 are already worse than the more adverse scenario in the stress tests. These are not stress tests but rather fudge tests.”

I agree there is no real stress test, and the more adverse scenario is the real baseline. But I think it is premature to say that the more adverse scenario is meaningless.

I loved this contribution from a commenter: “The containment is spreading at an accelerating rate….”

View 2009 Tea Parties in a larger map

Yes, I’m skeptical that anything of note will come of it. But it’s nice to see the scope of American discontent even so. And anything that the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover can’t be all bad. If you happen to attend one today, let us know how it went. Glenn Reynolds has a summary in the Wall Street Journal:

The good news for Republicans is that, while the Republican Party flounders in its response to the Obama presidency and its programs, millions of Americans are getting organized on their own. The bad news is that those Americans, despite their opposition to President Obama’s policies, aren’t especially friendly to the GOP.

And, for once, I find myself in complete agreement with Michelle Malkin: “Practice what you preach when it matters. Not after the fact.”

I’d quite like to see a few Republican politicians punched in the face at these events. The damned whores did NOTHING when they were in power, so to see them attempt to coopt a popular movement in order to retrieve what they threw away is particularly disgusting.

By choice, believe it or not:

A Federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a man who was barred from the New London police force because he scored too high on an intelligence test. In a ruling made public on Tuesday, Judge Peter C. Dorsey of the United States District Court in New Haven agreed that the plaintiff, Robert Jordan, was denied an opportunity to interview for a police job because of his high test scores. But he said that that did not mean Mr. Jordan was a victim of discrimination.

Judge Dorsey ruled that Mr. Jordan was not denied equal protection because the city of New London applied the same standard to everyone: anyone who scored too high was rejected.

This old link came up in relation to a recent Slashdot article about an arrest based, in part, upon a college student’s suspicious possession of a dual-boot Linux system. If that’s not enough to convict, I don’t know what is; it’s surprising they didn’t shoot him on the spot. It would be amusing to determine who is less intelligent, on average, police or schoolteachers. My money is on the schoolteachers, as we already know that their average IQ is in the vicinity of 91.

John Hood belatedly recommends principle over pragmatism at NRO:

The lesson for conservatives is never to be tempted in the midst of panic or entreaties by purportedly “conservative” politicians to abandon our basic principles of constitutional government and human action. These principles are tools and guardrails, not handcuffs or roadblocks.

It’s great advice, but more than a bit late. Because it’s shameful that so many “conservatives” at National Review supported the first round of bailouts. And the second round. And, in some cases, the subsequent rounds. Because, you know, if it’s a REPUBLICAN president signing a massive emergency spending bill, well, then it really must be an emergency!