Category: Uncategorized

So much for the scientists’ climatology models. There hasn’t been any global warming in ten years:

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend – and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

Okay, science fans, who is willing to step up and put their trust in science up against my skepticism of it. The global warming experts are saying that 2013 will be hotter than 1998. I’m saying that it won’t be, based on nothing more than my distrust of the motivations underlying what passes for “global warming” science.

If, in five years, I’m proven wrong, I will publicly acknowledge that the science of global warming merits more respect than I have hitherto shown it. If you’re wrong, you will publicly acknowledge that my scientific skepticism is more reliable than this application of the scientific method as well as the scientific judgment of all the scientists who subscribe to the theories of global warming and global climate change.

There’s a bit of sob sisterhood about the terrible burden born by the modern woman in this article, but it’s still interesting to see that in order to have it all, the Compleat Women of the 1980s went about their lives rather differently than the Future Cat Ladies of America are now:

And that, it seems, is the key difference between then and now. Weldon, Kitzinger and Hughes were never conventional working women…. There was no grand plan: they simply got married, had children and worked for a living, albeit not always in the kind of high-powered office-based jobs that women undertake nowadays.

While employment and degrees will always be there, children and men interested in fathering them will not be. It is the height of illogic for a young woman to make a priority of pursuing a degree and a career if having a family is a life objective. Those who find this tremendously complex concept too difficult to accept on its face should take a look at the long-term societal objectives of those who have been encouraging education-first thinking among girls, one of which is to reduce the human population. Then, do the math. If you can.

And if you happen to be a career woman who is deliriously happy with feline companionship and didn’t never nohow need a man in the course of your barren walk to the end of your genetic line, please do us all a favor and have a nice chat with Fluffy and Mr. Tiddles instead of demonstrating your total lack of reading comprehension to everyone here. It’s called an IF-THEN statement, deal with it.

While I have a certain amount of sympathy for Ms Marcotte’s annoyance at posted “reviews” and one-star ratings by non-reading critics – note how the review of TIA rated “most useful” begins “I only managed to read the first 3 chapters of this book” – I can’t help but laugh at the unintentional irony contained in her complaint about them:

Anti-feminists who haven’t even read my book are posting negative “reviews” at Amazon. I hate to bleg, but I’d be so grateful if people who actually know what they’re talking about and aren’t motivated by a white hot hatred of women could counterbalance that.

It’s so weird how a bunch of men who’ve never met me hold me personally responsible for the fact that they’re too obnoxious to get laid or have women look at them with much besides disgust.

It’s even weirder how a woman complaining about men judging her book without reading it would simultaneously pronounce judgment upon their sexual attractiveness to women without possessing any information about them except their dislike of her book. What an interesting metric of sexual attraction! Unfortunately, with the likes of Amynda, this sort of obtuse cluelessness is not so much predictable as inescapable.

As for reviews, it’s pretty simple. If you haven’t read the book, your opinion is irrelevant and anyone who would review a book without reading it in its entirety is a ridiculous cretin. This is true of intellectual zeroes in every camp, I have no more respect for the clueless theist who writes a negative review of The God Delusion than for the autistic atheist who writes a fictional one of The Irrational Atheist. If you want to criticize something, then read it. If you can’t be bothered, then keep your yapping little mouth shut and leave the discussion to the adults.

And it’s about time:

Marking a radical departure from traditional book-publishing practices, HarperCollins Publishers says it will launch a new book imprint that won’t accept returns from retailers and will pay little or no advances to authors.

I’m excited about this, because it will give newer authors more of a fair shake. One thing that I’ve always hated about the conventional publishing model is that a publishing company tends to put its efforts behind those books that it gave the biggest advance rather than the ones that have the greatest sales potential. This tends to cause the inexpensive book with potential to disappear without a trace – since no one has ever heard of it – without doing much for to aid the success of the more expensive one. Back when The World in Shadow was published, Pocket Books put a major effort behind a really bad series of foreign novels to which they had acquired the American rights while putting no effort behind my book or the book of another insigificant author.

The foreign series flopped despite an expensive marketing campaign which included endcaps in every Barnes and Noble, while my book sold just well enough for them to sign me to another book in the series. The other guy’s book didn’t, which is why Pocket Books didn’t publish his next one, a book that just happened to be entitled The DaVinci Code.

The publishing model is simply broken, so it’s good to see that publishing companies are exploring more rational new options. And on that score, some congratulations are in order, as The Original Cyberpunk and his wife have announced their new endeavor, Rampant Loon Press.

Pharyngulans may need to consider doing an intervention soon, as PZ, inspired by his starring roles in “Expelled” and “The Dicky D Rap”, appears to be going overboard with his newly acquired habit of crashing conference calls:

In the “just plain bizarre” category, some “dude,” as our colleague Chris Cillizza, a.k.a, “the Fix,” tells us, got on today’s conference call with Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist Mark Penn, communications director Howard Wolfson and deputy communications director Phil Singer and asked whether Clinton could “talk sexy” in her ads so he could “pinch the squid.”

As a plastic philosopher once said, Math is hard!

Carolyn Kaufman, 33, has a doctorate in clinical psychology and teaches college in Columbus, Ohio. She is a perfect example of a woman who has everything except a date. “I have this crazy belief that I have the right to expect my potential partner to be at least as successful as I am, and to have as many things to offer as I do,” she says….

Even Kaufman’s dream of marrying her equal may be wishful thinking: Experts say that highly accomplished men tend to marry women who are lower on the professional and educational food chain than they are, traditionally choosing women over whom they can exert control.

Spacebunny emailed me this article, which is of the sort that always provides both of us with a good deal of amusement. The first amusing thing is the female notion of success – Kaufman isn’t successful, she’s merely managed to sit through sufficient years of schooling and get a job teaching afterwards. BFD. Second, for the Nth time, what men want and what women want are two very different things. When I look at every successful guy I know, defined as an annual income of at least $500k, I notice four things about their relationships, and they all are in long-standing relationships complete with children, if not necessarily marriages.

A) The women range from pretty to smoking hot.
B) Both the men and the women tend to view their roles as complementary, not identical. It’s a division of labor thing, do-it-all-and-have-it-allers wouldn’t understand.
C) The man doesn’t want his wife to work, he wants her to be available in his rare down time. Her primary complaint tends to revolve around there not being enough of that down time.
D) The women are more likely to not have a college degree at all than to possess an advanced degree.

Believe me, a guy who owns a private company with 45 million in revenue isn’t impressed by a college teacher and he certainly couldn’t care less about the paper she bought from a paper-selling institution. What smart, educated, “successful” women are apparently too stubbornly stupid to recognize is that what they have worked so hard to achieve is not what most men want, and they bring almost nothing to the table as far as successful men are concerned. And it’s not a question of control, that’s ridiculous, as a man has far more control over his employees than over his wife. The strong preference for a non-ambitious mate is much more a matter of allowing him to step out of his driven and competitive existence every now and then and take it easy for a change.

Miss Kaufman is entirely correct, her belief is crazy. It is both crazy and self-defeating how many women believe, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that racking up accomplishments will somehow make them more desirable, when all they’re actually doing is rendering themselves less desirable to the sort of men they want most, while simultaneously reducing the pool of men that are potentially acceptable to them.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with holding out for what you want. But if you’re going to play against probability, it helps to understand that you are doing so. I didn’t like hearing Big Chilly tell me when we were seven that I was never going to be an NFL quarterback – in fact, I punched him, thus setting off our one and only fight – but as it turns out, he was entirely right.

Chad helpfully summarizes Richard Dawkins’s hilariously autistic response to “The Dicky D Rap”:

1. Video posted around 11:00 PM

2. 1 hour and 44 minutes later, Dawkins implores his more intelligent readers to help inform him as to whose side the video is on (his side, or not his side). He then pokes fun at people that think things are funny that he doesn’t understand just in case it turns out to be ‘not on his side’. Comment #151544

3. Dawkins now presumably goes to sleep.

4. Nearly nine hours later, he wakes up and checks the post again. He sees that his fellow scientific elites like the video, but also don’t understand it. Dawkins tries to get in a little dig on postmodernism, but just ends up making fun of his posters. Comment #151685

5. Nine and a half hours after posting, Dawkins wonders how his fellow comrades could laugh at something they don’t understand. He then lauds ‘The Life of Brian’ as the pinnacle of comedic evolution. Comment #151704

6. A couple minutes after the last post, he gets in another jab at Postmodernism. Comment #151713

7. Under chastisement for his humbuggery, Dawkins admits that Daniel Dennett popping his head up from out of nowhere is, in fact, funny. Comment #151715

8. Nearly ten hours after posting the video, someone postulates that the humor is derived from the silly dancing bodies (not the satire). Dawkins seems to accept this theory and thanks the poster for his intellect. Comment #151723

9. Sixteen hours after first watching the video, Dawkins finally realizes that it is, in fact, making fun of ‘his side’. Dawkins defends himself again by saying that he didn’t understand it. Comment #151849.

10. Seventeen hours after posting, Dawkins attempts to comprehend the humor by equating similar scenes of incongruousness that Monty Python has also done. Dawkins has apparently not yet pondered why, if this were the only thing funny about the video, he did not ‘catch on’ before this. Dawkins chalks this up to the video not being funny, and dismisses the obvious conclusion that his head is too big to see the satire behind it. Comment #151889

11. The next day, Dawkins chimes in again to defend his Ph.D. status to a poster who dared presume questioning it. Comment #152142

12. Nearly 36 hours after posting, Dawkins discovers what a ‘grill’ is and waxes philosophic as to why Sam Harris would have one in the video. The conclusion he comes up with is that it adds no humor to the video and should not have been put in. Comment #152168

13. After a full three and a half days after first watching the video, Dawkins (obviously perturbed at the fact he didn’t get that he was the butt of the joke, when every other non-elite who saw it could tell in an instant) attempts to equate the video with ‘The worst poem ever written’. He then satisfies himself by settling on the conclusion that this is the only reason why people might like it. The final analysis is that it’s not only ‘not good’, and not even ‘pretty bad’, but so incredibly bad, that it is in fact, good. He gets in a snobbish comment about the Bible for good measure. Comment #153061

This tends to support what I have suspected ever since reading The God Delusion. The scientist-king has no clothes; Richard Dawkins is simply not very intelligent. He’s a mere popularizer, not a creator, and I’d be willing to bet that every single successful game designer of my acquaintance has a higher IQ than him, in fact, I’d even bet that their average IQ exceeds his by a standard deviation. After all, it takes a particularly deluded individual to not only make EIGHT glaring errors in the central argument of his landmark literary contribution, but to simultaneously claim that refutation of the logical train wreck is impossible.

Dawkins betrays every sign of the 1SD-2SD IQ individual, who tends to think that because he is rather more intelligent than the average, he is therefore brilliant. He isn’t, as his dependable inability to perceive the glaring flaws in his own arguments and his hilarious failure to understand when he is being blatantly mocked illustrates very nicely indeed. It’s no wonder Dawkins shies away from debating anyone brighter or better-trained than journalists and decrepit Anglican priests, he knows perfectly well that if he did, he’d get abused so badly that Child Protective Services would have to be called in to pick up the pieces.

Also, anyone who thinks The Life of Brian is funnier than Monty Python and The Holy Grail is clearly a blithering chowderhead.

Helicopter Ben can’t quite bring himself to admit the obvious:

“Recession is possible, but recession is a technical term,” he said, during testimony to the powerful Capitol Hill committee. “I’m not ready to say whether or not the US economy will face such a situation. It’s clearly a period of very slow growth extending back to the fourth quarter of last year, and we are trying to set our policies appropriately for that situation.”

Here’s yet another prediction. GDP will not only retract in Q1, but will continue to retract in the third and fourth quarters of 2008, contra the publicized estimates of most professional mainstream economists:

most forecasts suggest the first quarter will be the most difficult of the year and that in the back half of the year … we will see the economy perform a lot better,” Gutierrez said.

I’m not in the least bit concerned about a recession. They happen and they’re no big deal. What I’m concerned about is the increasing probability of a serious depression thanks to Helicopter Ben’s inability to learn anything from his studies of the Great Depression.

This week’s interview is with Dr. Frank Shostak, Chief Economist at MF Global and a noted scholar of Austrian economics. Download Voxonomics 1-3.

Related Reading:

An Introduction to Austrian Economics by Thomas C. Taylor

In Defense of Austrian Theory

The Fallacy of Inflation Fighting

Money and Inflation: The Tendency to Deny Reality

How Much Money Should There Be

I’m just going to warn you right now, tomorrow’s Voxonomics will be a bit more esoteric than the previous two. But I really enjoyed the interview, I mean, if you’re not genuinely amused at the ironic prospects of what could almost be described as Austrian econometrics, well, you’re probably not in my profoundly miniscule target audience.

Although, if you’re clueless about economics and wonder what the difference between Keynesianism and monetarism is, you may want to consider giving it a whirl anyhow.