Category: Uncategorized

In which the nearly irresistible Brontë reference is manfully resisted:

Ann Althouse, 58, is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who blogs about politics, law and cultural whatnots in a sharp, occasionally ribald tone. She admires Rush Limbaugh, voted for George Bush in ’04 and Barack Obama in ’08. She attracts derision and applause from 500,000 monthly visitors. The jeers spiked ever since the March 22 announcement on her blog that this divorced mother of two adult sons, stalwartly single for more than 20 years, is engaged to a commenter known simply as “Meade.” Except for her closest readers, the blogosphere was taken by surprise.

Good for Ann. And, for that matter, Meade. I don’t think it speaks well of Kaus, Sullivan, or anyone else who mocks the upcoming nuptials. People meet in all sorts of varying circumstances, many stranger than this, and at least the medium of a blog provides two individuals the ability to get to know each other on a philosophical plane without the usual fog of pheromones, looks, and other physical complications obscuring the larger issues.

So, I hope you will join me in wishing the two of them very well.

A woman has the bright idea to hire only women for her new media startup. Hilarity ensues:

Five years ago, I was working as a TV executive producer making shows for top channels such as MTV, and based in Los Angeles. It sounds like a dream job and it could have been – if I’d been male. Working in TV is notoriously difficult for women. There is a powerful old boys’ network, robust glass ceiling and the majority of bosses are misogynistic males.

Gradually, what had started out as a daydream – wouldn’t it be great if there were no men where I worked? – turned into an exciting concept. I decided to create the first all-female production company where smart, intelligent, career-orientated women could work harmoniously, free from the bravado of the opposite sex.

Anyone who has any experience of women in the office can probably guess how well the experiment worked out, but the story really has to be read in order to appreciate the comedic fullness of the disaster. Her conclusion: “[I]f I were to do it again, I’d definitely employ men. In fact, I’d probably employ only men.”

Now, I don’t mind employing women myself; in certain detail-oriented roles I tend to prefer them. There are no shortage of women who make excellent employees, especially those whose personal strengths fit their responsibilities well. But these women usually tend to get along well with men and have no problem being held to objective standards. The problem is that the pettiness and narcissism to which many women are prone is an absolute workplace cancer, especially if a woman with such tendencies finds herself in a position of power over anyone.

Whoschad and wife make the move:

I’ve been a reader of your blog for quite awhile now. Anyway, my wife and I decided to take the plunge and homeschool our kids. I remember you mentioning something about Spacebunny having some online resources for this, but I couldn’t find anything posted when I looked.

Congratulations, I very much doubt you will regret it. I’m sure a lot of people will have suggestions for you, and SB also has the aforementioned discussion group. As for online resources, here are a few little reading aids.

It’s hardly shocking that economists are taking a dim view of the TARP program:

The government’s official view that toxic assets are incorrectly priced due to illiquidity “fire sales” is wrong, a new study by Harvard and Princeton finance professors suggests…. This latest paper effectively demolishes the “fire sale” view. It draws three important conclusions.

Many banks are now insolvent.
“…many major US banks are now legitimately insolvent. This insolvency can no longer be viewed as an artifact of bank assets being marked to artificially depressed prices coming out of an illiquid market. It means that bank assets are being fairly priced at valuations that sum to less than bank liabilities.”

Supporting markets in toxic assets has no purpose other than transfering money from taxpayers to banks. 
“…any taxpayer dollars allocated to supporting these markets will simply transfer wealth to the current owners of these securities.”

We’re making it worse.
“…policies that attempt to prevent a widespread mark-down in the value of credit-sensitive assets are likely to only delay – and perhaps even worsen – the day of reckoning.”

The Wall Street bailout was never about stabilizing the economy, much less fixing it. It was simply a means of insulating the banks from the consequences of their actions and the consequences that their actions have had on the economy. Years before the current crisis became evident, it was apparent that Washington runs for the benefit of the bankers, not the electorate. Which is why, as more and more economists are coming to realize, it simply isn’t going to work.

“What the Obama team is proposing is disconcertingly similar to the actions of Japanese Prime Ministers Hashimoti, Obuchi, and Mori in 1995 and 1998: Rather than ask the legislature for straightforward recapitalization money, you have the political leadership preferring to risk overpaying current owners of toxic assets rather than forcing sales. For all of Japan’s supposed intervention in markets, its government still lacked the stomach for taking over banks, let alone closing them.”

Keen economic historians will probably recall that Japan was not exactly known for its economic growth during this time. This isn’t to say that I support nationalizing the banks, as the UK has done, only that nationalization is actually a less disastrous approach.

JW asks if he is wasting his time protesting with the Tea Party:

What are your thoughts of the coming tax day tea parties on April 15th? I know that “protests” are nearly always irrelevant for creating change, but I also think that it is one the very few things a can do to create change despite the very insignificant chance that it will change anything. Perhaps a blog post in the near future can help provide so more outside insight on whether or not I am wasting my time standing outside with a stick and John Galt T-shirt.

Yes, I’m not a big fan of protests myself, as to me they usually appear to be events that are manufactured in order to provide an rationale for pushing something that is in the works anyhow. But the reaction of the media in attempting to bury these anti-government protests indicates that they are important; if nothing else, it makes it clear to the rest of the nation and the world that America is not supinely submitting to its financial rape.

Will it change anything? I don’t see how it really can. Washington demonstrated its complete contempt for public opinion in forcing the House of Representatives to vote until it got it right on the Wall Street bailout despite the overwhelming opposition of the American public, and it’s no secret that I have long believed the die is already cast. But, is it worthwhile? I think that it probably is, especially for those conservatives and Republicans who rightly feel conscience-stricken about putting Bush and the GOP into power in 2000. Even if such protests are little more than the difference between striking out while swinging and getting caught looking, the distinction is one of character and conscience. Also, as Daniel Hannan pointed out last week, you just never know what is going to be the last straw on the camel’s back.

So, I fully support the Tea Party movement, in fact, I think that would be an excellent name for a third party not just focused on limited government, but genuinely limiting the size and scope of government.

When you hand over control, you hand over control, and there’s not much point about crying over the fact that you lost it later:

Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money. The government insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic….

After 35 years in America, I never thought I would see this. I still can’t quite believe we will sit by as this crisis is used to hand control of our economy over to government. But here we are, on the brink. Clearly, I have been naive.

The Bush administration bluffed the banks and Obama is taking advantage of it. This is how the expansion of government in a two-party system usually works! It’s the Counterpush principle, the Nixon-to-China concept. The party which is supposedly against something is used to punch a hole through the wall of popular opinion, then the other party exploits the breach.

Grow and Die

“Grow or die” is one of the corporate mantras of the late 20th century. The peculiar shape that corporations now take, courtesy of the perversion of capitalism that is modern finance-driven corporatism, requires constant growth. Rather like great white sharks, which must keep swimming to avoid suffocation, modern corporations have had to keep growing to avoid seeing their stock prices punished by an increasingly avaricious Wall Street.

From 1948 to 1985, the financial sector accounted for around 12 percent of American corporate profits, never reaching 20 percent nor dipping below 5 percent. After 1985, however, the profits of the sector rose dramatically, going from 19 percent in 1986 to 41 percent in 2000. That meant that more than 40 cents out of every corporate dollar of profit was paper profit, not generated by actual wealth-generating activity, but by monetary inflation and corporate gambling….

The chancellor admits his error and pushes the date of anticipated economic recovery further into the future:

THE chancellor, Alistair Darling, has admitted that he and his Treasury officials got it wrong over the length and severity of the recession and that he will be forced to tear up his economic predictions…. “I thought we would see growth in the second part of the year,” he said. However, the chancellor now thinks any recovery will come later: “I think it will be the back end, turn of the year time, before we start seeing growth here.”

I anticipated this, as you may recall, last October: “Increasing government spending to escape a recession? Now, there’s a new concept! Considering that Darling’s brilliant plan has literally been textbook macroeconomics for the past five decades, what are the chances that this is somehow going to fail? Infinity to one against or Infinity squared to one?“

As an encore, I’m going to go out on a massive limb and predict that Jim Cramer is completely incorrect in declaring, on April 2, 2009, that the depression is over and a new bull run is commencing:

Throughout that day, the “Mad Money” host told viewers of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” CNBC’s “Street Signs” and finally on his own program that the Depression was over and that we were on the verge of a bull run for the financial markets. “We have reached the land of a thousand bull dances – phoney maroney, why? Because the market swallowed its Prozac,” Cramer said on CNBC’s “Mad Money” April 2. “And right now, right here on this show – I am announcing the Depression over!”

There will probably be a nice bear market rally. I correctly anticipated the first leg of it a few weeks ago when I told the shorts to get out. But, sometime during 2010, Cramer is going to be eating mega-crow about this absurd announcement.

Fortunately for Hitchens, if not his credibility, it’s only metaphorical this time:

The debate went exactly as I expected. Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child. Perhaps Hitchens realized how bad things were for him after Craig’s opening speech, as even Hitchens’ rhetorical flourishes were not as confident as usual. Hitchens wasted his cross-examination time with questions like, “If a baby was born in Palestine, would you rather it be a Muslim baby or an atheist baby?” He did not even bother to give his concluding remarks, ceding the time instead to Q&A.

That summary, by the way, was not provided by an evangelical Christian, but an atheist blogger known as Common Sense Atheism. He wasn’t the only one, as John Loftus of Debunking Christianity even predicted that Hitchens would get his head handed to him. A similar summary of the debate by a Christian in the audience can be found here. As is so often the case when the theist knows how to take the offensive, the atheist barely even attempts to defend himself against straightforward attacks on his arguments, but instead attempts to evade them because he simply doesn’t have any defense to offer.

Doug Geivett’s concise summary of Hitchens’s performance should suffice to finish him as a serious disputant on the subject: “While Hitchens did make arguments, they were largely unfocused, sometimes disconnected, and often irrelevant.” The honest observer of any creed, or lack of creed, will note that this could serve equally well as a description of the man’s book on the subject.

Skepdude apparently lacks a dictionary:

First, I would like to see what evidence he is referring to when he says that “all of the available evidence demonstrates rather conclusively that the objects of their ridicule are, as a point of fact, rather more intelligent”, because I suspect he’s using a very unorthodox definition of evidence here.

Logical and empirical evidence. Or, to be more specific, logical, documentary and statistical evidence. Let us consider the most readily available example: Since I am known to possess, at a bare minimum, a Mensa-required +2SD IQ, it is obvious that most of my atheist critics are statistically bound to fall well short of that not-terribly-impressive level. In further support of this observation, I have seen many run-of-the-mill atheists, the vast majority of whom use logic and grammar in such a manner as to indicate a moderate-to-average level of intelligence, describing individuals such as Alister McGrath, Dinesh D’Souza, and me as if we are uniformly possessed of a sub-standard level of intelligence. (It is, of course, amusing to see an atheist suggest that I might elect to make use of an unorthodox definition of evidence, when almost every single atheist claim that “there is no evidence for God’s existence” requires ignoring the standard definitions of evidence provided by every English language dictionary from American Standard to Webster as well as the definitions used in the American legal system.) I could point to dozens of these spurious accusations of stupidity on Scienceblogs alone, but it is perhaps more usefully ironic to note that a prime example of what I am describing can be found right there in the first comment on Skepdude’s post.

Amusing, but inconsequential. Skepdude’s much more serious error follows, however, when he writes:

Bit hypocritital no? First he says that our primary form of “debate” is calling people stupid, which of course must be wrong, then he turns around and presents his argument/debate which basically amounts to nothing more than calling us fools. Now, I’m nothing but a mere run of the mill internet atheist, who is mentally inferior as demonstrated by all the available evidence, but this sort of reasoning sounds a little….well…..stupidfoolish to me!

This is precisely the same sort of thing we have seen so often before. Call it the First Law Fandango. Because Skepdude possesses an above-average intelligence, he assumes that because he does not understand what an individual of superior intelligence has written, that individual and/or his reasoning must be stupid, foolish, hypocritical, etc. But there is a basic logical flaw in his errant attempt to find hypocrisy here, because it is eminently obvious – based on the readily available documentary evidence – that a single reference to a well-known Bible verse is neither a) an argument, nor b) my primary form of debate. So, no, not in the least bit hypocritical.

Shall we pull out the telestrator? Very well. Even if I had been making an argument there in the second of those two sentences – which I was not, I was merely offering scriptural support for my assertion that atheism has been around for a very long time and will probably always exist so long as there is conceptual space for it – a single argument does not dictate any specific form of debate, much less define my primary form of debate. In fact, a keen observer might even be able to detect that my primary form of debate is to read the other side’s material, point out the verifiable errors that were made in that material, and then show how those errors render the other side’s conclusions unviable. Then, use the demonstrable fact of those errors and that unviability to justify all sorts of terrible intellectual abuse. The main variant, of course, is to begin with the abuse, then demonstrate why the abuse is fully justified.

There is rather a great deal of evidence showing this to be my primary form of debate; there is at least a book full of it. However, we know that most atheists reject both documentary and testimonial evidence out of hand, which leads one to wonder what sort of scientific evidence could be sufficient to prove my hypocrisy or lack of it to Skepdude… and upon what he could possibly attempt to base an actual argument in support of his implication. At times, I seriously begin to wonder if the most useful definition of atheism is “epistemological incoherence”.