Category: Uncategorized

It’s bad enough when Keynesians run amok in government. But it’s worse when they seemingly can’t even figure out how to correctly apply their own economic model:

Britain’s highest earners face paying a new 45 per cent top rate of income tax, which is to be announced by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in the pre-Budget Report. Those earning more than £150,000 a year will fall into the new band, which the Government plans to use to claw back money to pay for an unprecedented £120 billion borrowing bill.

The Keynesian model calls for spending increases and tax CUTS to stimulate the economy out of contraction. Darling, supposedly an avowed Keynesian, is doing exactly what Paul Krugman faults FDR for doing during the Great Depression. But that’s merely how it appears on the surface. The reality, of course, is that this is little more than an easily evaded political measure meant to counteract the reduction in VAT and disguise the fact that UK budget deficits are going to soar.

UPDATE – Not that it’s significantly less crazy on the other side of the Atlantic: “The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.”

We would be better off being governed by a group of individuals randomly selected from the phone book than by the collection of graduate degree holders currently in office:

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday. Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone insist that they are more intelligent on the basis of their university degree. A college degree – especially from an elite school – increasingly becoming stronger evidence of ignorance than intelligence and often represents a combination of the two. The fact that one might possess a superior intellectual capacity in no way dictates that it has actually been used in any way, much less to obtain accurate information.

So, I estimated the bottom for what appears to be an incipient depression. Before you discover what it is in Monday’s column, go ahead, take your best shot, and offer your rationale for it. I want to see US GDP and year… alternatively, if you don’t see a contraction ahead, explain why not.

As has probably been apparent by my complete ignoring of it, I have zero interest in the so-called “Emergent Church”. I’ve yet to hear anything interesting or positive about it, and I’m not in the least bit surprised to hear that they’re little more than intellectually immature, emotional Episcopalians in the process of moving away from Christianity in favor of a New Age unitarianism:

One of the key leaders of today’s most cutting-edge church movement has opened an Internet discussion on the issue of same-sex marriage with the bold proclamation that he believes “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and queer” individuals can and should live out their sexuality in – and blessed by – the Christian church. “I now believe that GLBTQ can live lives in accord with biblical Christianity (as least as much as any of us can!),” writes author and church leader Tony Jones, “and that their monogamy can and should be sanctioned and blessed by church and state.”

Based on that picture, I don’t find it at all hard to believe that Mr. Jones will be announcing his own incipient homogamy in the near future. And based on his blog, the guy appears to have the reasoning capacity of a chipmunk. Look, Florence Nightingale, the only way one can reasonably connect an AIDS death with the church is if one’s friend was getting overfriendly with a gay priest. Seriously, what is wrong with these cretins?

“I want to do that!”

“Don’t do that.”

“But I want to… you can’t stop me!”

“Dude, just don’t. You’ll be sorry.”

“Waaah! Look what’s happened to me! It’s all your fault!”

“WTF? I told you not to, you moron.”

“You made me do it with your hostility and oppression and disapproval!”

“What part of ‘don’t do that’ did you not understand?”

This attempt at a critique of my refutation of Richard Dawkins’s “Ultimate 747” argument in TIA by Touchstone of Debunking Christianity should amuse some of you. Microphone Jones correctly pointed out the primary flaw; I added some additional points on the 21st comment. I have to say, there are few individuals I find funnier than those who attempt to defend an argument by saying that if the argument had been different than it actually is, it would be correct.

This is the best part:

Dawkins does not spell out a formal definition of organizational or algorithmic complexity in his book. But you don’t have to be a super-genius to get familiar with the concepts as they are used in science and information theoretic application. I haven’t read Day’s section of “theistic bodycounts” from wars versus “atheistic bodycounts”, but Day’s supporters on my list regale me superlatives of Day’s phenomenal research capabalities. If he’s got such capabilities, he shot all his efforts in previous chapters; Day simply punts here and decides to equate complexity with information.

Oops. That’s a really major blunder. Just in casual terms, complexity is a description of the “number of discrete and differentiated parts”, and information is “reduction in uncertainty”. Complexity and information are related on some level, and those terms do often occur together in computing and information theoretic contexts. But complexity is not information, any more than mass is acceleration.

It is a really major blunder. But the problem here is that the idea of equating complexity with information did not originate with me. You see, I’m not the one who wrote that Richard Dawkins’s Argument from Improbability is rooted in “the source of all the information in living matter”, or brought up the problem of “continually monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe”, or referred incredulously to “bandwidth” contra simplicity. That would be, well, Richard Dawkins.

One can only criticize the existing argument. If Dawkins has something besides sheer quantity of information in mind there, I should very much like to know precisely what it is. But until he offers a convincing definition of complexity that fits his argument, the Ultimate 747 simply will not fly.

UPDATE – This has turned out to be even funnier than I’d thought! When posting my comment at Debunking Christianity, I skipped right over this rather telling bit written by Touchstone in the comments there: “Dawkins is pointing out a structural deficiency in the argument from complexity, that’s all. It’s not an argument for the non-existence of God, just pointing out the poverty of one of the arguments *for* God’s existence.”

“The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.”
– Richard Dawkins, TGD p. 113

“[T]he argument from improbability – the “Ultimate 747″ gambit – is a very serious argument against the existence of God.”
– Richard Dawkins, TGD p. 157

Touchstone not only reads what isn’t there, he obviously can’t read what actually IS there. There is no theistic “argument from complexity” and* Dawkins not only asserts that the Ultimate 747 is an argument for the nonexistence of God, he vows that he has “yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer” to it. (Technically, that may still be true; I’m not a theologian.) Just as Petrarch reversed the metaphor of the “dark ages”, Dawkins is explicitly attempting to reverse the argument from improbability to argue for the non-existence of God.

Touchstone admits he hasn’t read TIA and I suspect he hasn’t really read The God Delusion either. Regardless, it is readily apparent that he is not competent to serve as a reliable interpreter of Dawkins’s poorly articulated intentions.

*I am told that Touchstone meant to write either the Argument from Design or Irreducible Complexity here, both of which certainly exist. However, both are only tangentially related and neither indicate that Dawkins’s argument is not what Dawkins claims it to be, an argument for the nonexistence of God.

67 Mounds View Meerkats (8-3-0)
45 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-6-1)

54 Burns Redbeards (7-4-0)
39 Black Mouth Curs (3-8-0)

77 Judean Peoples Front (5-6-0)
47 Valders Valkyries (5-6-0)

66 Winston Reverends (4-7-0)
41 Masonville Marauders (3-7-1)

52 Alamo City Spartans (8-2-1)
52 Silver Spooners (5-3-3)

I summon and invoke the dread spirit of JOHN SCALZI! (He waits for the appearance of a sulferous orange smoke, which unaccountably fails to appear.) Ahem… zoe ghost brigade old man war android dream whatever… (gestures madly) JOHNATHAN MICHELANGELO SCALZI IL SECONDO SUBITO VIENIQUA!!!

Be not alarmed. I’m merely putting the dark sorcery of the Law of Internet Invocation to the test. I note that the explanation for it, though quite correct, isn’t entirely comprehensive. Unlike my more famous SFWA colleague, I don’t often search for myself via the various search engines; clicking on the Technorati link is about as far as I usually go. However, people email me links when others have written something about me or my books on a near-daily basis. That’s how I got word of the New Oxford Review’s review of TIA, for example.

Anyhow, once we’ve got John in the salt circle, what shall we order him to do? I think I should like to know three hypothetical Obama administration deal-breakers that would cause him to consider not supporting Obama in 2012?

This is where I find things to start getting very interesting, because I think there are some areas where Rothbard’s assertions are, at a minimum, debatable. But keep in mind that the answers are based on the source material, not absolute truth as you understand it to be.

Chapter 4 next week. Economic contractions don’t take holidays.

Daniel Hannan points out the obvious:

We tried to warn you. We said that the bail-out would fail. We pointed out that nationalisation never worked. We predicted that the seizure of the banks would be accompanied by heavy-handed state intervention in their procedures.

Sure enough, stock exchanges have continued to plummet, several banks (notably, as Ambrose reports, in Ireland) are looking for additional bail-outs, and the banks that have already been expropriated are being told by ministers how much to lend and to whom – which is, of course, precisely what caused the crisis in the first place. The next thing, no doubt, is that they will be told to meet the government’s ethnic quotas, to redistribute a proportion of accounts of more than £50,000 to customers with credit problems, and create a number of sinecures for prominent Labour supporters. That’s what happens in socialist economies.

No idea is so bad and fails so completely that you can’t find academics and politicians attempting to repeat it on the grounds of it having been insufficiently implemented.

I’m not surprised that someone should shoot himself after reading The God Delusion. The thought of suicide has to cross any intelligent individual’s mind upon reading it and realizing that there are literally hundreds of thousands of dim-witted individuals eligible to vote who genuinely believe TGD to be a masterpiece of science, philosophy, and reason rather than the insubstantial bit of intellectually fatuous, snipe-and-dodge evangelical atheism it actually is. Such a waste. It’s tragic to think that after reaching the correct logical conclusion to Dawkinsian moral logic, the unfortunate young man didn’t see fit to shoot the pretentious Archbishop of High Church Atheism first.

A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

“He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong,” the relative wrote. “I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn’t wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences – that was all there was – just social consequences.

“He mentioned the book he had been reading ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith.

Now, obviously the young man wasn’t particularly intelligent or he wouldn’t have found Dawkins’s shoddy logic and nonexistent scholarship to be the least bit convincing. But the possibility of this sort of thing happening is one of the reasons I wrote The Irrational Atheist – readers may recall my assertion that sociopathy and suicide are among the logical consequences of rational atheism – and arranged for free electronic copies of it to be made available to anyone who might like to peruse it. In fact, Dawkins and company really should embrace TIA; its exposure of their fallacious arguments just might save their lives from one of their pathetic young converts one day.