Category: Uncategorized

The OC emails yet another confirmation that I am more highly evolved than the sad evolutionary relics so amusingly known as homo sapiens. It seems my instinctive skepticism of expert advice is actually the result of a favorable neurological mutation:

Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a study to determine the neural mechanisms involved in financial decision-making under risk when a financial expert gives advice. Study findings show that expert advice suppresses areas of the brain responsible for making value judgments. Conversely, those regions of the brain show activity when outside advice is not involved in the decision-making process.

At least, I assume that’s the conclusion the OC was drawing. I’m not actually sure, as it’s somewhat difficult for Internet Superintelligences to cycle down to the pedestrian level of the literary genius.

Jim Manzi does yeoman’s work in pointing out that the demand-deficiency model upon which the fiscal and financial authorities are relying has failed before:

I decided to go back through the now-public Fed minutes from the 1970s methodically to try to see the decision process they went through with the information available to them at the time that they had to make decisions. It didn’t take long to hit pay dirt. In the August 1970 Fed meeting discussion notes, you see this statement that is eerily similar to the CBO’s current report:

“Moreover, the upturn would be starting from a point where there is substantial underutilization of resources, as evidenced by a 5 percent unemployment rate and an operating rate in manufacturing at well under 80 per cent of capacity. In these circumstances, there is virtually no risk that economic recovery over the year ahead would add to the inflationary problem through the stimulation of excessive or even robust demand in product or labor markets.

Inflation turned out to be a huge problem, of course, but hindsight is 20/20. People weren’t stupid in 1970. We don’t have some “new science” of economics available to us now that they didn’t then; presumably those who were pretty arrogant about how we can’t repeat the mistakes of earlier policy-makers because we’re so much smarter now are a little more humble after the past 12 months.

So, “no risk” of inflation in 1970. How did that one work out for you, again, Keynesians?

Mary Kathryn Gallagher Lopez is a poster girl for what happens when you send a woman to do William F. Buckley’s job:

I appreciate the kids’ wanting Rihanna to take some responsibility for her situation. She’s an adult, after all, as is Brown. And if she gets beaten, she should get the heck away from the person responsible. And as a best-selling artist, she has the financial freedom to extricate herself from her trouble. But where’s the outrage over what Brown is accused of doing? There’s something off when so many people blame the victim, not the aggressor.

Or, perhaps, you know, they’re blaming the actual aggressor for the situation, you clueless twit! I pay far less attention to American celebrity nonsense than the NRO gang does, and even I know that it’s been in the news for weeks that the black girl singer probably hit the black guy singer first. It’s only the entire basis of the guy’s legal defense, after all. It was fairly obvious from the start anyhow, since the most logical reason that Brown would have bitten Rihanna’s fingers was that his hands weren’t free when she went after his face. If – if – she was going for his eyes, that also might explain what otherwise looks like an extreme reaction.

“Sources say Rihanna was the first one to strike — slapping and striking Brown “numerous times” while he was driving, after seeing the text message from another woman. Supposedly, this version of events is reflected in the official police report.”

While I never had the need to use more than a single backhand to deal with a violent woman even before I became a Christian, I have no problem whatsoever with a man beating the absolute hell out of a woman who attacked him first. In like manner, I also have no problem with a bigger man beating the absolute hell out of a little man who attacks him. It’s simply not that hard to refrain from physically attacking another individual, the vast majority of men and women throughout history have demonstrated that humans beings are perfectly capable of living their entire lives without initiating violence. And from the materialistic perspective, removing violence-initiators from the gene pool should be regarded as a positive action on behalf of human evolution in a positive direction, regardless of the sex of the evolutionary dead-ender.

It’s really not that difficult. Either women are children and should be treated accordingly, or they are adults and should be treated accordingly. There is no reasonable middle ground here. While one may elect not to retaliate for Christian reasons – and I can testify that I have seen God claiming the vengeance that is His in a vastly amusing manner – there is no legal, moral, or social rationale for granting women carte blanche to initiate violence. If you choose to attack an individual who is more physically capable than you and get the smack beaten out of you, you’re not a victim. You’re just stupid.

Even the Keynesians are abandoning the sinking ship of the Obama administration now. As well they should:

The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

All bad economics are rooted in a single concept: objective value. This was most obvious in the Marxist form of assigning an input factor, but it’s also implicit in the Monetarist notion of government-backed paper currencies. Since there is no such thing as objective value – subjective value is the heart of Austrian theory, which states that all values are intrinsically dependent upon the moment and the acting man – any political action or economic theory based upon it is bound to fail.

In the case of the Paulson/Geithner plan, they are substituting “true value” for objective value, but it doesn’t matter what it’s called, the relevant point is that it diverges from what anyone is actually willing to pay for it at this moment in time.

No bonuses, no bailouts
I am not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. In fact, I have never voted for either a Democrat or a Republican in any of the past presidential elections for which I was eligible to vote. Ronald Reagan and Ron Paul are the only two Republicans for whom I would have been willing to vote; I was too young to vote for the former, and the Republican Party prevented me from having the opportunity to vote for the latter.

Needless to say, nominating John McCain looks just as foolish in retrospect as it did at the time. It seems he wasn’t quite as electable as his media champions repeatedly insisted he was….

A former Star & Sickle journalist also views Nicolas Kristoff’s lament for days gone by with a skeptical eye:

I’m not saying this is utter rubbish (how’s that for a left-handed compliment), but I am convinced that the so-called objectivity, nothing-but-the-facts model really doesn’t do the trick, especially when the facts are being chosen, ordered and told by reporters, 80 to 90 percent of whom are liberals.

It’s remarkable that after all this time, there are still only a few journalists such as Eric Black who are capable of recognizing that, in hindsight, maybe they weren’t collectively all that objective after all. I’ve known a fair number of journalists over the years, from NPR stars to wannabees putting in their time at the little local papers, and I can count on one hand the number that didn’t hold completely predictable left-liberal views on every major issue.

It was particularly amusing when I sent in three sample columns when the St. Paul Pioneer Press decided they wanted a new columnist to replace their token conservative who was departing. Keep in mind that at the time, I was not only their video game columnist, but I’d written one or two editorial page pieces on technology issues that no one there had been capable of grasping, such as the Unabomber’s manifesto and, more importantly, was the only columnist at the paper to be nationally syndicated in years. I can’t remember what the third column was, but the first two were explaining how the economics of taxpayer funding for sports stadiums didn’t add up and showing that conceal carry laws never lead to the oft-predicted bloodbaths.

The editor was very uncomfortable in trying to explain that while my writing was good enough for the Tech page, I just “wasn’t right for the Editorial page”. Translation: “your opinions aren’t right for any opinion page over which I have any say”. Needless to say, I was shocked that I didn’t get the slot. I think he seriously thought I was crazy, as opposing taxpayer-funded stadiums is downright heresy to any newspaper editor who depends on filling up his Sports page with news about the local team and selling advertisements to their fans.

I’m not in the least bit bitter about it, but I’m certainly not shedding any tears for the gatekeepers either as the technology-enabled barbarians storm the gates. Nor, I think, is any other right-of-center newspaper reader who had to put up with that faux objectivity for decades. In the news business, you don’t have to tell people what they want to hear, but you really do have to avoid insulting their intelligence. Newspaper readers may read at only a eighth-grade level on average, (or, more likely, that’s just the lowest common denominated target for which editors aim), but even an elementary school child can detect when you’re pulling one over on him if you do it every single freaking day.

This post brought to you courtesy of the Fraters Libertas, who, after yesterday’s post, I doubt I’ll be visiting on NARN anytime soon… I am renegade, Ice…man.

Powerline’s John Hindraker finally sees fit to take exception to an unconstitutional action by the Congress. And, as you’d expect of a staunchly tone-deaf Republican, he’s outraged by the Congressional attack on the bailout bonuses:

I’m stupefied to find that some people are defending the constitutionality of Nancy Pelosi’s discriminatory, confiscatory and retroactive tax on people who receive bonus income from companies that got TARP money. I would have considered it a bright line rule that the government can’t identify a class of unpopular people and impose a special tax on them. What’s next? A 100% income tax on registered Republicans, retroactive to last year? If Pelosi’s bill passes muster, why not?

Spare me. Hindraker and his fellow Republicans defended one abuse of the Constitution after another when it was George Bush and the Republican-led Congress spying on Americans and invading countries without declaring war. They ridiculed Ron Paul when he pointed out those and other massively unconstitutional issues such as the paper dollar, foreign aid, and the various military occupations around the world. They worked hard to elect the Senate’s champion of the unconstitutional banking bailouts, John McCain, and many of them, including Hindraker, publicly supported the bailouts.

Now he’s trying expressing outrage over one more Congressional unconstitutionality that might take a bonus away from a high-income banker? This isn’t just hypocrisy, it’s utter political idiocy. Good luck getting the pitchfork-bearing masses worked up about the theoretical plight of a banking employee married to a wealthy lawyer. (That was a remarkably explicit example, by the way, does his wife work for Wells Fargo or something?) Regardless, the lawyer Hindraker clearly doesn’t understand that most Americans would vastly prefer to see this theoretical lawyer garrotted with piano wire than to see his wife take home a $10,000 bonus from a bailout bank if given a choice between the two. Hindraker may consider a mere $10k bonus to be a paltry sum, but it is 18 percent of the 2007 median Minnesota household income.

And Wells Fargo wasn’t “forced” to take the bailout money. (Hindraker omits to mention that it was the Republican Bush administration, not the Democratic Congress or the Obama administration that “forced” them to take it.) Wells Fargo could have refused it. They didn’t.

The United States entered the lawless territory of a banana republic a long time ago. It’s a pity that it took influential Republicans like the Powerline guys so long to notice it, but that’s what happens when you prefer to defend the people in power and ignore the abuses they are committing. Back in September, when it still mattered, Hindraker said his “instinct has been to support the bailout proposal“. Now his instincts tell him that “there is nothing wrong with the AIG bonuses“.

With all due respect, Mr. Hindraker, your instincts suck. You were on the wrong side then and you’re on the wrong side now. Once you have embraced the expansion of federal power, you don’t get to complain that you don’t like the particular direction in which it is now expanding. If, under heavy pressure from the Republican White House, Congress hadn’t handed over billions to the banks, the bonus tax that so outrages Hindraker wouldn’t exist. But if you’re going to hook for a living, you’d better understand that every now and then, your pimp is going to bitch-slap you.

The presidential gaffe machine is clearly operating on all cylinders:

After comparing his bowling to the Special Olympics on “The Tonight Show” Thursday, President Obama called Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver to apologize before the program even aired. “He expressed his disappointment and he apologized, in a way that was very moving,” Shriver said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It’s important to see that words hurt, and words do matter. And these words that in some respect can be seen as humiliating or a put-down of people with special needs do cause pain, and they do result in stereotypes.”http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5604161

I love the way that Obama keeps screwing up and the media tries to frame his efforts to make things right as a sign of his depth and sensitivity. Bush’s communications were tragedy; the man tried but he just couldn’t speak smoothly. This guy’s are just pure farce. Didn’t I tell you his administration would be an unending source of amusement?

And the punch line is that this is the guy that liberals genuinely believe is going to fix the economy!

Nicolas Kristoff mourns the media’s loss of control:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves. That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices.

I don’t dispute that people seek out information that confirms their prejudices, as I’ve noticed that very few individuals of any stripe go out of their way to acquaint themselves with how rival ideologies think. And of those who do visit sites belonging to what, for lack of a better term, we shall call “the other side”, a large percentage oare trolls who have no intention of actually paying any serious attention to what they are skimming in the interest of seeking grounds on which to base what is usually a shallow and spurious criticism.

But the assumption underlying Kristoff’s concerns are ludicrous. All of the major organs of the mainstream media have been uniformly left-liberal for generations. The Wall Street Journal that Kristoff bravely declares he is going to force himself to read is one of the few notable exceptions, along with Human Events and The Washington Times. The appearance of talk radio, then Fox News, and now online alternatives doesn’t mean that everyone is now locked in an echo chamber, it means that conservatives and libertarians are finally able to escape being subjected to constant left-liberal assault.

Left-leaning individuals like Kristoff are still safely ensconced in the same liberal echo chamber they’ve always inhabited, and the recent revelation of JournoList shows how much the left’s media elite prefers groupthink to the marketplace of ideas. The only thing that has changed is that now everyone, of all political stripes, isn’t forced to listen to just one side of the story anymore.