Category: Uncategorized

I am impressed. Amanda Marcotte makes a nearly flawless post on the housing market chicanery:

* First, mortgage lenders, in a bid to get their numbers and commissions up, start shopping out mortgages to customers who can’t quite reasonably afford the houses on their salaries.
* They often convince people to buy into these mortgages by making the payments small—at first. They do this by putting people into variable rate loans that start off at temptingly low rates, and once people sign on the dotted line, the rate jacks up incredibly high.
* Then the mortgage lenders sell the papers on these loans to investment banks, who use them to back up securities.
* Housing prices continue to rise.
* Hope that the bottom doesn’t fall out, because you know, there’s no such thing as dramatic crashes after a market’s been artificially inflated.

She left only the first step out, which was the Federal Reserve methodically slashing interest rates to historically low levels. It’s not just the ARMs that are the problem – although they are the first to fail – but also higher fixed rates preventing those who would like to sell their homes from being able to do so. Other than that omission, it’s a better analysis than you’ll find on Fox News or CNBC.

Perhaps we’ll make an Austrian out of her yet. Look into M3 if you really want to get a handle on why the USD is low and the stock market is high.

Dr. PZ Myers demonstrates the educational shortcomings of the professorial class:

I’ve often wondered what these “positive qualities” of belief might be. They’re always assumed to be there, so no one bothers to iterate them — but seriously, I see no virtue in unfounded faith in weird old superstitions.

1. Longevity: People with religious faith live seven years longer. I suppose this may not be seen as a benefit if you’re a fat, lonely atheist with a drug problem.
2. Psychological health: People with religious faith suffer less depression, are less likely to require medication for mental illness and are far less likely to kill themselves.
3. Evolutionary fitness: People with religious faith are more likely to marry, more likely to have children and have more children.
4. Happiness: People with religious faith are happier.
5. Health: People with religious faith are less likely to be obese. They also recover from surgery faster.
6. Sex: People with religious faith are more content with their sex lives.
7. Art: Religion inspires better, longer-lasting art than non-religious inspirations.
8. Good government: religious regimes are far less likely to murder large quantities of the citizenry than non-religious regimes, much less atheist regimes.

There’s more, such as the lower incidence of drug and alchohol dependency, but that should help PZ get started. With the exception of 7 and 8, there are plenty of scientific studies to back up all of these assertions. And there’s massive quantities of historical data supporting 8.

Now what, I ask, are the positive qualities of atheism that make up for being an unhappy, unmarried, chubby, short-lived alchoholic in therapy and contemplating suicide over a lackluster love life?

Such a shock:

You Are 26% Feminist

No one would consider you a feminist. You believe women should hold on to traditional gender roles. Well, that’s not the world we’re living in anymore. Time to wake up to the 21st century!

Typical mindless blather. I’d like to send the woman who wrote those last two sentences to the Parisian banlieus or certain parts of London. It seems that coastal feminists haven’t noticed yet, but there are more female slaves in the West than there were 100 years ago and the fastest growing part of the population in most Western countries is the one that believes in cliterectomies and honor killings.

You’ve got three choices, ladies. Traditional Christian bondage, the Islamic burqah or the secular brothel. You’re within a decade of getting as close to Happy Happy Unicornitopia as you’re ever going to get; the inevitable counterreaction hasn’t even begun yet and it’s going to be a remarkable bitch.

If you’re lucky, you’ll look beautiful in chains.

Britons have had enough:

The country’s biggest foreign visa consultancy firm has revealed that applications have soared in the last seven months by 80 per cent to almost 4,000 a week. Ten years ago the figure was just 300 a week. Most people are relocating within the Commonwealth – in Australia, Canada and South Africa. They are almost all young professionals and skilled workers aged 20-40.

And many cite their reason for wanting to quit as immigration to these shores – and the burden it is placing on their communities and local authorities. The dearth of good schools, spiralling house prices, rising crime and tax increases are also driving people away.

I think another part of this emigration is dislike for the EU’s master nanny state. After 8 years of Hillary Clinton, it’s possible that American emigration will be up as well, although the increasing popularity of homeschooling could prove to be a foundation that will turn America around. The key is turning off the immigration tap and keeping taxes from getting out of hand.

I was reading some Indian history the other day, and periodically, when the tax collectors would get out of control, entire regions would voluntarily depopulate. This isn’t a new phenomenon.

Scott Adams sets off our angry atheist acquaintance, Austin Cline:

Scott Adams frequently reveals persistent and deep-seated ignorance when he strays very far into scientific and philosophical matters on his personal blog. Many times in the past he has, for example, demonstrated no real understanding of science or evolution whenever he writes anything on those topics. More recently he demonstrated an equal absence of understanding about both atheism and agnosticism.

It’s very simple. Agnosticism is a belief in the lack of evidence for God’s existence. Atheism is a symptom of a personality disorder which inordinately affects developmentally challenged young men.

Watch and learn. Science will confirm this in the relatively near future.

A Ron Paul supporter makes the presidential candidate’s case to skeptic John Derbyshire:

Mr. Derbyshire, when you turn your back on the Temptation of Ron Paul, all you are doing is expressing despair that the Gordian knot of money, power, influence, and bureaucratic paperwork that is currently strangling Washington and the country can ever be challenged. President Bush used to speak of the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.’ When you relegate Ron Paul to only a dream, you are only confessing the lowest expectations for any vision of America other than the status quo. “

“I suggest that you find the courage to follow your dream. I know I can say without the slightest chance of contradiction that you will never find a man with more honesty, courage, decency, or integrity to hitch your dreams to than Ron Paul.”

If you simply want to vote for a winner, then vote for Hillary Clinton because Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney cannot defeat her. If you value conservative, libertarian or republican principles, you must support Ron Paul. There are no other reasonable options.

This is hilarious, or at least it would be if it wasn’t directly related to the historic murder of thousands of religious individuals:

China asserted the communist government’s right to recognize Tibetan Buddhist reincarnations of the lamas that form the backbone of the religion’s clergy. All future incarnations of living Buddhas related to Tibetan Buddhism “must get government approval,” the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the State Administration for Religious Affairs.

You know what? I don’t care. It’s still funny.

As if we didn’t know:

Another emotional disability that bright girls, myself included, suffer from is low self-esteem. Career girls are adept at appearing confident and are often hideously controlling, which is really to disguise our great fear of being out of control. Intimacy means a higher potential for rejection and the risk of being hurt.

“And being hurt means our feelings are forced to the surface and we have to deal with them, which is painful and scary…. Let’s face it, none of us clever girls are very happy, are we?”

The most amusing part is how one supposedly intelligent woman ends up concluding that her problems with relationships stem from her not being self-centered and demanding enough. It’s just proof that no matter how intelligent they might be, some people are simply incapable of learning.

I’m not a proponent of the EQ concept, but I’ve always found women who insist that they are strong and independent to be tremendously fragile; one can usually reduce them to helpless tears within a minute or two at any time. Women don’t know how to trash talk and very few have had the benefit of having to constantly prove themselves in various forms of objective competition from a young age, so any openly expressed bravado is almost always false.

(It’s not true, on the other hand, that quiet men are the most confident, for example, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird weren’t exactly silent about their skills on the basketball court. For men, calling your shot beforehand is a motivational game, it’s a way to call yourself out and remove any excuse for failure.)

Anyhow, there’s no doubt that smart, career-oriented women are best left to their careers and cats. That’s the life they chose, so leave them alone to lead it and don’t screw up your own by getting involved with that sort. Any man will be much happier with a woman who values marriage and children more than legal briefs and Powerpoint.

I’ve never paid any attention to the cottage industry of learning how to pick up women, mostly due to my stunning good looks and familial wealth. While I’m not as handsome as any of my brothers, all of whom are former models and never had to do much more than smile at a women in order for her to find them perfectly fascinating, the towering arrogance which invisibly radiates from me like fallout from Chernobyl tended to make up for that unfortunate deficiency.

Even so, this interview with the professor of pick-up artistry, Mystery, is interesting for two reasons. First, he identifies the fundamental challence for men: “A woman wants to align with a man of high value. How can a man systematically convey his value to a woman if she won’t even let him?” This is the central issue, because you can’t win the game if you’re not even allowed to step on the field.

Second, he shares a vital truth that every man, single or married, needs to understand, not merely intellectually, but at the deepest emotional level: “What a woman says she wants and what she responds to are two different things.” This statement alone proves that Mystery, despite his strange appeareance, knows exactly what he’s doing.

As Spacebunny wisely informed me early on in our relationship, you can’t “make” a woman happy. Like men, women either “are” happy or “are not” happy on their own; it’s basically a lifestyle choice which doesn’t necessarily have very much to do with either the circumstances or your actions. There are happy women living as impoverished single mothers in mobile homes and there are profoundly unhappy women married to devoted Fortune 500 CEOs living in multi-million dollar mansions. The only thing a man can really do is to be open to communication, do his best to fulfill his responsibilities and live the way that makes him happy. If you’re religious, then pray for her from time to time.

As for single women, don’t pay attention to a word they say about what they want. The vast majority are totally incapable of telling you the truth about this because they don’t know themselves what it is. This should be obvious because if they did, they wouldn’t keep making the same, stupid choices that cause them to complain all the time. I mean, look at the sort of ridiculous advice they offer as a substitute at Pandagon: “act like a vaguely normal and well-behaved version of yourself. Keep up with basic grooming.”

Right, that’s all a woman wants, someone who is clean, vaguely normal and well-behaved, that’s why drug-addicted musicians with dirty hair do so poorly with women. And once that doesn’t work, which it won’t, then what? Being long out of the game, I don’t have a lot of advice for those who want to meet people, but I can vaguely recall a few things:

(1) Never buy a drink for a woman. It puts you in the position of being a supplicant and an inferior. Far better to let them ask if you want to buy them a drink and respond with something like “No, but you can buy one for me if you like. I’ll get the next round.” If she’s at all interested, she will, if she won’t, she was just looking to use you anyhow. And if she’s obnoxious, about it, you have just potentially saved yourself time, money and grief.

(2) Don’t waste your time trying to convince women to be interested in you. You’re not a performing monkey. If you’ve introduced yourself and made eye contact, and she shows signs of being more interested in turning back to her friends than having a conversation with you, don’t hesitate to let her. Smile, murmur a social pleasantry and move on. There are plenty of girls on the girl tree.

(3) Don’t info-dump, let her ask the questions about you if she’s curious. With rare exceptions, people love talking about themselves so the more you encourage her to ramble on about herself, the more she’ll be interested in you. Plus, you get the benefit of finding out how crazy she is from the start.

(4) If you want to meet pretty girls, don’t go out with your male friends, go with your hottest female friend. You’ll meet more pretty women just sitting at the bar with a really beautiful example of the species for two hours than you will in a month of running around obsequiously buying drinks for every woman you find attractive.

(5) Stop worrying. There are more than three billion women on the planet and while there may not be a princess for every frog, there is a frog for every one. If you’re a 5 on the human attraction scale, well, that’s the breaks. Either find yourself a 5 or work at making yourself into a 6. Even so, you can get whatever kind of woman you want, but like everything, it’s a matter of being willing to put in the necessary effort. Even Brad Pitt and George Clooney had to work their handsome posteriors off for a number of years before they became the rich and famous icons of female desire that they are today.

Camille Paglia makes the same point I did in my essay in Ben Bella’s Narnia anthology:

Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

The verdict is in. There’s no getting around the decades of evidence. Secular art sucks. The fantasy and sci-fi genre is increasingly dreadful because it’s all about maintaining a mythical balance or self-actualization these days.

I’m on an award jury this year, I’m reading a lot of what is supposed to be the best stuff out there, and believe me, most of it is dreadful.