How big is the hole in the bottom?

Detroit’s Emergency City Manager claims to have found evidence of fraud in the city pension and insurance funds:

Orr ordered an investigation into employee-benefit programs yesterday, including the insurance and pension systems. He told the inspector general and auditor general offices, which both have subpoena power, to deliver their reports within 60 days. The documents should cover “next steps, and any corrective, prospective, legal, additional investigatory or other action designed to address any waste, abuse, fraud or corruption uncovered,” according to the order.

Wages, benefits and pensions took 41 percent of city revenue this fiscal year, according to a report from Orr. It showed that benefit and pension costs per employee had increased to $24,000 from $18,000 in 2000. Skipping payments to the funds and borrowing has kept the city afloat, according to the report. 

As Karl Denninger has pointed out, this is potentially much bigger than it sounds.  The suspicion is that due to the MERS-related fraud, a lot of the pension “investments” were never perfected, are already in default, and therefore a considerable amount of the money in the already woefully underfunded funds does not exist.  If fraud on a similar scale to that which took place in the housing market is discovered, it could render a number of state and municipal pension plans across the nation unable to continue to pay out benefits.

And the consequences of that would likely be interesting….

Diversity is the death of the republic

This isn’t a thought that is new to me; HongKongCharlie reminds us that the Founding Fathers knew it very well:

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common
national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the
exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that
love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely
connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in the
Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will
generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have
left behind; to the country of their nativity; and to its particular
customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government
congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be
led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that
they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential
to real republicanism?”
-Alexander Hamilton, From the New York Evening Post: an Examination of the President’s Message, Continued, No. VIII, 1802″

Those
who advocate diversity and immigration are not merely foolish, or
ignorant, they are as actively and effectively anti-American as the most
antipathetic individuals who are consciously attempting to destroy what
is left of traditional, constitutional, civilized, European America.

So,
do keep this in mind:  The rabbits and pinkshirts loudly proclaim that
my opinion is outrageous, offensive, and intrinsically unworthy of
debate… despite that opinion being, in the words of Alexander
Hamilton, “undoubtedly correct”.

46 million more Americans

That’s the CBO estimate for the Senate’s immigration bill:

The Senate’s pending immigration bill will pave the way for the
arrival of 46 million legal immigrants over the next 20 years, increase
the federal debt in the same time period and shrink Americans’ average
wage, according Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Session’s critical reading
of two new reports on the pending immigration reform bill provided by
the Congressional Budget Office. But Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, the most prominent GOP
advocate for the immigration reform bill, says the CBO reports are good
news for Americans.

Marco Rubio wants more Hispanic immigrants.  That’s almost as much of a surprise as Italy’s new Congolese Minister of the Interior, whose first action in office was to argue for the importance of making it easier for Africans to get Italian citizenship.  Isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that the absolute top priority of every immigrant who achieves any political power is to bring in more people just like them?

Anyhow, this should suffice to snuff out the last remnants of any grass roots Republican enthusiasm for Marco Rubio.  And I can’t help but notice the reference to that portentous year. 2033. By the time there are 357 million people living in the lower 48, I very much doubt they will still be a single political entity.

John C. Wright explains l’affaire sauvage

In his philosophical explication of the differences between the Conservative, Liberal, and Libertarian political theories, Standout Author John C. Wright explains why the conflict between me and the writers presently dominating SFWA was not only inevitable, but will remain unresolvable.

The reason why political discussions between partisans of these theories
are so often futile is that their goals are unrelated to each other,
and the fears of one seem highly theoretical, if not ridiculous, to the
other…. Libertarian views of Liberals is one of deep seated and scathing
contempt. Where Libertarians are fundamentally intellectual and
conservatives fundamentally men of passion and honor, Liberals are
entirely emotional, and do not have the metaphysical or philosophical
groundwork needed to erect an intellectual defense of their position to
Libertarians, or to mount an intellectual criticism of Libertarianism.

It’s intriguing to see how closely his observations serve well as a predictive model concerning the behavior of both myself and my critics.  I certainly tend to regard this particular set of critics with “deep seated and scathing contempt”.  And, as we have seen, the SFWA writers have not only failed to erect an intellectual defense of their position, or mount an intellectual criticism of mine, [REDACTED PENDING APPROVAL TO QUOTE FROM SFWA FORUM].  They definitely regard me as evil.

This speculation is admittedly harsh.

It would have been gentler had I been asked my opinion in the days
before I exchanged many, many arguments with liberals of all stripes.
The one thing they all have in common, and this includes Catholic
liberals as well as atheist liberals, male and female, young and old,
all of them, all of them, all I have ever met: their argument is
primarily emotional, and they interpret disagreement as a moral failure,
not just an intellectual one.

They do not think you are wrong, my dear conservative and
libertarians readers, they think you are evil. Not one I have met thinks
that there can be honest disagreement with their positions, or that the
matter is one where reasonable men can differ.

This is not due to the personality of the liberals I have met, but it
is due to their theory. I have had angry Catholic socialists denounce
me angrily as wicked for not believing his nonsense, but I have also had
gentle grandmotherly socialists do the same in mild tones, and sneering
atheist socialists utter the same denunciation in sneering tones
without even bother to discover what the argument is or the objections
are. The tone depends on the personality of the liberal, and they are as
different as the whole spectrum the human race affords.

But the the automatic imputation of vile motives and conspiracies by
one mass against another mass is not due to a character flaw in the
liberal psychology. Rather, the flaw is built into their theory. It is
what they have to say. They can say nothing else, since if they did,
they would no longer be liberals. The institutions of civilization are the enemy, since they and only they are the source of mass-oppression and inequality.

Wright’s observations are 100 percent in line with my own considerable experience of what he describes as the Liberal. And this explains why Jamsco’s assertion about the need for inoffensive dialogue is not only wrong, but futile.  Because he only thinks about what he sees as being obviously offensive, he doesn’t recognize that it is not the sharper points of the rhetoric that offend, but rather the way in which the use of that sharper rhetoric correctly communicates to the Liberal that the non-Liberal is immune to their primary emotion-based tactics.  He’s only looking at the surface, and in doing so, he’s failing to see the more substantial forces operating beneath it.

You cannot use Aristotelian dialectic with a Liberal.  You cannot reason with him because he is not reasonable.  You cannot engage in rational discourse with him because he is not rational. To paraphrase Aristotle, you can only rhetorically flay him alive while dialectically exposing the flaws in what passes for his arguments in order to persuade undecided third parties.  And the more cruelly you flay them, the louder they shriek, and the more third parties are eventually inspired to see the difference between your reason-based arguments and the emptiness of their emotion-based non-arguments.

It would surprise – no, it would horrify – the rabbits if they had any idea how more and more people are coming over to agree with my positions as a direct result of Liberal pointing-and-shrieking combined with their total inability to make a coherent case, let alone a compelling one.  Perhaps you recall how only last year various rabbits were trumpeting the significance of how popular Whatever was and asserting that I was jealous of their Chief Rabbit’s massive blog traffic?  Less than a year later, my blogs have 4553 percent more pageviews than the Chief Rabbit’s warren.

Now, Wright’s series of posts – read the whole thing from the start – are not about my conflict with a group of SFWA members, and yet they demonstrate that those who see that conflict as a petty writers squabble are entirely missing the point.  It is, rather, a micro-model of the great civilizational conflict that is already engulfing the entire West, whether most of those on either side realize it yet or not.

Prelude

Even the historically illiterate, stunted intellectuals of Red America are beginning to observe the signs of the eventual breakup.

Along with — and because of — dramatic social and demographic changes,
America is quickly dividing itself into two separate nations, regional
enclaves of rigid politics, as the idea of common national priorities
fades further into a distant past….  And the country’s seismic demographic and cultural shifts threaten to make our tribalism permanent.

There has been the rapid rise of minority populations and stagnation in the growth of the non-Hispanic white population in this country. Now, Hispanics represent a majority of all births in America, and last week The New York Times reported on census data that revealed that “deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century.”

In fact, according to an Associated Press report last week, which cited government reports: “For the first time, America’s racial and ethnic minorities now make up about half of the under-5 age group.”

But there were also some worrisome statistics in the report that could help to signal those children’s views on policy…. And, we are becoming less blindly religious and more blindly militaristic. (The former is a good thing; the latter, not so much.)

Blow is wrong about one thing: there is no “nation divided against itself”, because as I’ve previously noted, there are not merely two separate nations, there are four.  There are the Reds of progressive, secular America, there are the Whites
of traditional religious America, there are the Browns of third world
America, and there are the Blacks of feral America. They may broadly follow the racial demographics, but the lines are not hard; for example, Charles Blow is a black man who is clearly Red, rather than Black, just as David Brooks is Red, not White.

Given how people have expressed considerable doubt concerning my  negative outlook on the continued union of these four Americas, it should be interesting to see how they respond to a black, left-wing New York Times columnist who has, despite our very different perspectives, reached similar conclusions. Note, in particular, that damning admission: “because of dramatic… demographic changes”.

The fruits of diversity are bloodshed and war.  They always have been.  Populations of sufficiently differing time preferences simply cannot live together for long. And the only successful way to keep those fruits from ripening has is a powerful militaristic state willing and able to commit atrocities in order to keep the otherwise warring parties in line.  Consider, for example, the difference between segregation as it was practiced in the pre-1960s USA and the way it was practiced in the USSR and China.  Or the way it is presently practiced in Africa with the various tribes vying for power in the national government.

It won’t surprise me if those who oppose deportations now and are horrified by the WWII Japanese internment live long enought to one day find themselves supporting a Red American government that is engaged in internal deportations of Hispanics to its Aztlan Autonomous Oblast.

Setting the record straight

Two days ago, I referenced one of our previous game innovations in discussing the latest one, which naturally inspired the sort of individual who firmly believes their ideological opponents cannot possibly have ever accomplished anything of note to leap in with his ignorant version of events:

Vox: It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold. 

Obvious: It’s really too bad that the game POD had full MMX support and was released a full six months before Rebel Moon Rising.

First of all, if one was to go by the publicly available information from IGN and GameSpy – which is wrong, by the way – one would learn that RMR was released by GT Interactive on December 22, 1996, which is obviously before POD was released by UbiSoft on February 28, 1997. But the fact is that both games were actually released together for the first time on the same CD by Intel on January 8, 1997. However, the following YouTube video should make it clear that not only were both of us incorrect, the entire MMX-related discussion is irrelevant as I’d forgotten that Big Chilly and I actually introduced both 16-bit color and dynamic lighting in Rebel Moon, which was released as part of the original VL bus 3D Blaster package back in November 1995.

I don’t know what possesses these people with the desperate need to denigrate everything I do, but history tends to render their efforts pointless. I have little doubt that if in-game digital sales are successful and become standard in the industry, the anklebiters of tomorrow will do their best to deny that I had anything to do with it, let alone came up with the concept. Anyhow, this sort of thing suffices to indicate how the Left’s revisionist instincts penetrate even to the pettiest micro level.

I was wondering how I’d managed to forget that we had the advanced lighting model in our first game, and I realized that I tend to think of the dynamic lighting in terms of the laser effects.  The colored lighting is so much more effective when the lasers light up the corridors as they fly back and forth, that since the first one was lacking that particular application of it, I assumed that we’d been still using the same 8-bit palette that everyone else had been until then. 

One bit of trivia that might be interesting; we were also the very first to discover the reason for the huge gap between expectations for MMX and the disappointing results.  And by very first, I mean that I was the one who had to call Intel and give the guy managing the project the bad news.  We couldn’t figure out why the game was running at about one-quarter the Intel-estimated frame rates when Big Chilly decided to simplify things as much as possible and simply blit a black rectangle.

I still remember his eyes narrowing in suspicion as he stared at the results, pointed to them, and said, “now why does that number look familiar?”  It was because it was precisely the same as the speed limit of the PCI bus.  It quickly became clear that Intel had produced a very fast CPU capable of processing graphics at four times the rate that the communications bus on the graphics card could accomodate them.  This had a huge effect on everything, because it meant that we couldn’t use the higher resolutions for which we’d been creating the art, but had to back it all down to the same resolution we’d used previously with the Creative Labs card.

The game still looked pretty enough and got a decent review from CGW, but it wasn’t anywhere nearly as graphically beautiful as it should have been, even considering that it was a 2.5D game.

And that wasn’t our only contribution to the MMX project.  I was also responsible for killing what was intended as Intel’s original marketing slogan for it: “On the
‘Net/Off the ‘Net”.  But that is a story for another time.  And on a tangentially related note that no one but Big Chilly will grasp the connection, SWEET BILLY GATES but the insanity of certain console makers truly knows no bounds.

“The new Oddworld game New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One.
It’s not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn’t porting the game.
It’s not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it’s that
Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While
the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops,
Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace
their console.”

This Xbox One launch is reminding me more and more of the Sega Dreamcast. 

Mailvox: time-preferences and civilization

JC is is wondering at the intrinsically anti-scientific bent of the SFWA:

I’m a white, Christian, American male of slightly above average
intelligence – but far from a super intelligence.  I’ve been ejoying
your writings since the WND days.  Since you left them, and I was forced
to discover and follow your Vox Popoli blog – my mind has been quite
blown away by the content.  I eagerly digest (or attempt to follow) the
economic posts, and love the cultural posts.  The science fiction
generally doesn’t interest me, but this latest uproar re: SWFA makes me
sick.  I just wanted to drop a note of thanks and support.  Between you
and Ann Barnhardt, I truly feel blessed to be able to see the examples
you set in steadfastly standing for Truth.
Thank you.
Now for a question.  I may have missed it, but your “h8ers” seem to
imply you’ve conferred a superior/inferior distinction to the various
human sub-species.  I don’t recall seeing anything of the sort, I
thought you just noted that they are provably different.   I
would personally assume that different groups should have nothing
approaching “equality” for quite a number of characteristics, in general
from a statistical perspective.  An overall ranking of
“superior/inferior” doesn’t seem like it would make any sense at all
unless we are discussing specific characteristics.  For instance, a
Jimmy the Greek foul in discussing fast twitch muscle fiber and athletic
performance, or perhaps predisposition to certain hereditary medical
conditions.  Or demonstrated contributions to advanced science.  
There’s nothing in my mind that would necessarily judge one of
God’s children as better/worse from an overall intrinsic value sense
simply by noting a particular subspecies (or intermingling thereof, such
as with my mixed heritage children), but it’s absurd to say we can’t
talk about relative comparisons of discrete characteristics.  I’ve
wandered a bit here, but I assure you I’m no rabbit or troll.  I guess
my question was about the conclusions drawn from the variations in
subspecies:  you never made any claims that the homo sapiens sapiens are
just dirty pieces of shit with no worth, as your critics seem to be
claiming, right?  I don’t know how you put up with these clowns without
having their insanity rub off on you just a little bit.

I have repeatedly stated that it is absolutely meaningless to claim general superiority or inferiority for any of the various human subspecies, (or, if you prefer, genetically distinct population groups), because it completely depends upon the specific metric involved.  Is a Great Dane superior to a Siberian Husky?  Is a bluebird superior to an eagle?  It all depends upon what the basis for comparison is.

Now, the reason that the SFWA pinkshirts are upset is because if one chooses the metric of “civilized”, by which I mean “the ability to participate in, maintain, and build a complex, technologically advanced civilization”, one can both observe and explain which subspecies are more and less capable of it than others, and therefore it is possible to claim that Group X is superior to Group Y on that particular basis.  As it happens, that particular ability is largely predicated on time-preferences, as longer time-preferences are required in order to a) practice self-discipline, and, b) build wealth, which are two of the primary prerequisites for maintaining and building civilizations.

One can even go so far as to say that the civilizational process, which I observe appears to take around 1,000 years on average, is largely the result of artificially selecting for individuals with longer time-preferences.  If a society regularly gets rid of its short-preferenced, hot-tempered predators and its non-savers, it will eventually find that it has built up considerable wealth as well as a population capable of cooperating and living together in relative peace.  And with cooperation and wealth, a society has the wherewithal to begin advancing technologically so long as it has entrepreneurs and elects to foster them rather than crush them in the interest of established parties.

Having shorter time preferences doesn’t make anyone “dirty pieces of shit with no worth”, any more than being physically shorter does, it simply makes them human beings with the same intrinsic human value as everyone else who happen to be less able to participate in, maintain, or build an advanced civilization.  The pure savage lives entirely in the moment and does not control his impulses. The entirely civilized individual is self-disciplined and is always capable of putting off for tomorrow, or next year, options that are available today.  This may explain why Christianity tends to be a civilizing force, as it reinforces longer time preferences by extending them beyond one’s lifetime, and why atheism, despite the higher-than-average intelligence of atheists, tends to be a barbarising force. Intelligence, while not entirely irrelevant, is somewhat of a red herring in this discussion.

The idea that there are meaningfully different time-preferences between genetically distinct population groups is a testable scientific hypothesis, although aside from some very small-scale studies on children, “the Stanford marshmallow experiment”, I am not aware of any studies that have been done in this regard.  In order for it to be useful, I would recommend a study with randomly selected adults, (corrected for income and debt), who would be offered a choice between receiving $200 in cash immediately and a check for a randomly selected amount between $250 and $1,000 in a randomly determined period of time ranging from three months to one year.  A second study would then test the ranges of the time preferences of the various population groups based on the information from the first study, and a third would test children to see if the range of their time preferences were consistent with the adult ranges.

Perhaps the hypothesis that pure homo sapiens sapiens have shorter time preferences than the various homo sapiens-homo neanderthalensis blends would hold up, or perhaps not.  But that is the primary purpose of science, to formulate and test hypotheses.  It is, I think, more than a little ironic that so many self-professed “science fiction” writers are not only horrified by a scientific perspective, but are openly and avowedly anti-science whenever science threatens to upend their cherished ideological beliefs.

Anyhow, it is because the entire concept of a racial supremacist is intrinsically nonsensical that I occasionally describe myself as an “Esquimaux supremacist”.  Having grown up in Minnesota, and having lived through more than a few bitterly cold Minnesota winters, I have a particular appreciation for the obvious and undeniable superiority of that noble people of the north.

Gambling is going on in here?

Fox contributor Tobin Smith apparently failed to realize that he was supposed to make his profit on the pump from price movements, not directly:

Most investors can’t tell the difference between “sponsored investment research” and independent analysis, and that’s exactly what the “sponsors” — typically small companies paying for a marketing campaign that will inflate their stock activity and value — are counting on.

The difference gets even tougher to figure out when the sponsor hires someone who is known for giving independent commentary colored only by their own feelings and research. Think of it like a big honking commercial, with a celebrity endorser.

Last week, that bought-and-paid for stock endorsement was a 20-page mailer about Petrosonic Energy, supported by an e-mail campaign, featuring Tobin Smith, a money manager who has been a fixture on the television news shows for 15 years, and who is a regular on the Fox networks, describing himself on Twitter as a “guest anchor.” According to Fox, he is “a contributing market analyst for FOX News Channel and a regular panelist on ‘Bulls & Bears.’” (Fox, like MarketWatch, is owned by News Corp.)

While investors might have ordinarily treated the “special edition” of the new Next Big Thing Investor newsletter — Smith’s latest, just-started investment newsletter — like junk mail or spam, Smith’s name and his smiling, personable countenance had some investors doing a double-take, at least judging from the e-mails I received on the subject.

The people who contacted me considered buying the stock entirely based on Smith’s say-so, and the credibility he exudes in his Fox appearances. They didn’t appear to read the disclaimers of the campaign; had they bothered, they would have quickly found it was paid advertising for which Smith’s company pocketed $50,000.

The thing is, there is absolutely no difference between what Smith did and what Kudlow, Cramer, Bartiromo, and all the other financial news analysts do.  They’re all paid to try to sucker people into the stock market and they all benefit from seeing prices rise as the suckers create churn. I’ve never seen a study on this, and it has been a LONG time since I bothered watching what purports to pass for the financial stuff, but I would assume that there are probably 10 “buy” recommendations for every “sell” recommendation.

It’s not analysis, it’s cheerleading, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with economic realities or what the purported purpose of a stock market is.  The whole thing is a Fed-inflated casino, which is why “investors” are all breathlessly waiting today to see if Helicopter Ben is going to keep the party going another quarter.

Summa review

Frank Luke reviews Summa Elvetica:

One book that I recently gave a second read to was Theodore Beale’s Summa Elvetica. (Beale sometimes writes under the pen name Vox Day.) When I saw the title, I immediately thought of Aquinas‘ masterpiece Summa Theologia. When I read the blurb, I saw Beale had been going for that very connection. It’s a good connection, and the book makes good on the promised link without being heavy handed in the debate department….

I thoroughly enjoyed how Marcus’ journey from Amora to the Elven lands
paralleled his journey into becoming his own man and making his own
choices. Two other members of the envoy are fellow church men on
opposite sides of the debate. Marcus will be writing his own opinion for
the Sanctiff (though the Sanctiff will make the final decision on the
question of elves and souls).

In very much related news, I’m pleased to say that I’ve received several emails from people telling me that the new Summa Elvetica hardcovers have arrived and that it is a worthy companion to A Throne of Bones on the bookshelf.

NSA whistleblowers back Snowden

More importantly, they note that his approach was more successful than theirs:

USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three
former NSA employees who praise Edward Snowden’s leaks, corroborate some
of his claims, and warn about unlawful government acts….

In other words, they blew the whistle in the way Snowden’s critics suggest he should have done. Their
method didn’t get through to the members of Congress who are saying, in
the wake of the Snowden leak, that they had no idea what was going on.
But they are nonetheless owed thanks.
And among them, they’ve now said all of the following:

  • His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security.
  • What Snowden discovered is “material evidence of an institutional crime.”
  • As
    a system administrator, Snowden “could go on the network or go into any
    file or any system and
    change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he
    would
    be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed. So
    that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That’s why he
    said, I think, ‘I can even target the president or a judge.’ If he knew
    their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target
    list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be
    collected, yeah, that’s right. As a super-user, he could do that.”
  • “The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth.”
  • Congressional overseers “have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are
    totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling
    them what they are doing.”
  • Lawmakers “don’t really don’t understand what the NSA does and how it
    operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don’t understand.”
  • Asked
    what Edward Snowden should expect to happen to him, one of the men,
    William Binney, answered, “first tortured, then maybe even rendered and
    tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even
    executed.” Interesting that this is what a whistleblower thinks the U.S.
    government will do to a citizen. The abuse of Bradley Manning worked.
  • “There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know
    wrong is being done. There is none. It’s a toss of the coin, and the
    odds are you are going to be hammered.”

What a tremendous surprise to learn that the government isn’t telling the truth about Snowdon and his revelations!