Debt is cash

We’re not talking monetary theory anymore.  We’re talking actual government wages:

“”The Portuguese government is considering a plan to pay
public workers and pensioners one month of their salary in treasury
bills rather than cash after a high court ruled out wage cuts, a person
familiar with the situation said Sunday.



“This is one of the ideas being considered,” the person said.



By paying one month of salary in T-bills to public workers and
pensioners, the government would save an estimated €1.1 billion in
expenses, narrowing the budget gap significantly.”

Incidentally, this plan makes perfect sense: with every central bank
openly monetizing its debt, it has effectively made debt and cash
equivalent.

Things are rapidly getting very weird in the economic sense. Cyprus. Ireland. Portugal. And having driven away its high-income earners, France is showing signs of attempting to expand its tax reach beyond its borders. Paul Krugman is praising capital controls.

And, as Karl Denninger points out, it probably won’t be long before the federal government uses the insolvency of the state and local pension plans to make a play for seizing all those luscious, previously untaxed assets in millions of retirement plans.

Education is important

But degrees, particularly advanced degrees, are increasingly less so thanks to the magic of technology and the Law of Supply and Demand.  Dr. Helen points us to Slate:

I deeply regret going to graduate school, but not, Ron Rosenbaum, because my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious. (Granted, maybe it did: My dissertation involved subjecting the work of Franz Kafka to first-order logic.) No, I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.

You might think your circumstances will be different. So did I. There’s a little fable from Kafka, appropriately called “A Little Fable,” that speaks to why this was very stupid:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”

“But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it.

The mouse wasn’t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse, because “A Little Fable” lasts three sentences and is made up, while graduate school lasts at least six years and will ruin your life in a very real way.

Staying in school in order to avoid facing the economic environment isn’t merely cowardly, it is self-defeating. It shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be for people with 16+ years of “education” to figure out that the more there is of something, the less everyone else tends to value it.  And just because a decision made sense in your parents’ day, or your grandparents’ day, doesn’t mean that it still makes sense now.

The frightening thing is that far from learning from all the warnings, young Americans are going ever more heavily into student loan debt.

Educated White Woman: the VIP credit card

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to educated white women how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded phrase “female imperative” to which they react like vampires being slipped into a Hervé Léger bandage dress woven from silver thread. It’s not that the concept of “female imperative” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “female imperative” they point their fingers and shriek “misogynist”, start crying about how they were once near-raped in college, then threaten not to have sex with anyone in the near vicinity.

So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average educated white woman will get, without freaking out about it?

Ladies. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive department store, like Macy’s or Saks. Let’s call it The Real World. You have entered The Real World and are about to start shopping, but first you go have to decide what credit card you are going to use while you are shopping. Got it?

Okay: In the department store known as The Real World, Educated White Woman is the VIP credit card. It is an American Express Centurion card with an unlimited credit limit.

This means that almost all the employees in the store are more deferential to you than they would be to anyone else. They carry your bags for you. The prices are lower and you’re given discounts without even asking for them. You don’t have to stand in line at the register. You are simply given entry to some departments that others have to wait to get into, or are simply denied access. The store is easier to walk through, automatically, you don’t have to wait for a changing room, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

Now, once you’ve chosen the “Educated White Woman” card, you still have to decide how much you’re going to spend, and on what you’re going to spend it, and that will make a difference. If you only spend $250, and you spend it all on a big-screen TV as soon as you walk in the store, well, then you may be kind of screwed. If you spend $2,500 on earrings in the jewelry department, well, then you’re probably fine.

As your shopping trip progresses, your object is to buy stuff, figure out a way to carry it, and move on to the next department. If you spend all your time trying on swimsuits, or choose poorly and buy bulky things you can’t easily carry, then you probably won’t end up with much. But because you’re shopping with the “Educated White Woman” card, buying things and bypassing the lines at the register will still by default be easier for you, all other things being equal, than for another shopper using a less elite card.

Likewise, it’s certainly possible someone shopping with a lesser card is buying more, and more valuable, stuff than you are, because they know where everything is, or they are the perfect size 4, or they have an employee discount, or simply because they don’t spend half an hour dithering over every decision. It doesn’t change the fact you are still shopping with the VIP card.

You can end up buying nothing with the VIP card, but the VIP card still lets you buy more, and better, stuff than anyone else can possibly buy. The shopper who chose the “Straight White Male” card? That’s not even a proper credit card, that’s a Sam’s Club membership! If Straight White Male gets caught in the lingerie department trying on a pretty little thong, they’re not going to sell it to him, they’re going to call security.

And maybe at this point you say, hey, I’m not greedy, I don’t want a massive credit card bill at the end of the month and I don’t need any special treatment, I can make do with a regular VISA or Mastercard with a sensible limit.  Well, here’s the thing: In The Real World, you don’t ever have to pay off your balance! And you only get to shop there once. So why not make the most of it while you’re there? Your goal is to get as much of the best stuff as you can, not economize.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember when I said that you could choose what credit card you use in The Real World? Well, I lied. In fact, the store chooses what card you’re going to get when you walk in. You don’t get a choice; you just get the card given to you at the start of the game, and then you have to deal with it.

So that’s “Educated White Woman” for you in The Real World (and also, in the real world): The ultimate VIP treatment. All things being equal, and even when they are not, if the department store — or life — assigns you the “Educated White Woman” card, then sister, you’ve caught a break.

Of course, there is just one little problem with the “Educated White Woman” card.  It expires and you never know exactly when.  Just be sure that you’re done with your shopping before the employees start ignoring you, you have to stand in line at the registers, and no one is willing to carry your bags for you anymore.

Evolution raciss

I always find it amusing when people have fainting fits over my references to various human sub-species, when, as Steve Sailer demonstrates, that is precisely the conclusion reached by Mr. Charles Darwin himself.  Not only did Darwin never doubt that, to him, the question was whether Man was divided into various subspecies or entirely different and distinct species. Note that Darwin reached his conclusions without the benefit of the DNA evidence which has demonstrated that humans are genetically divided into different sub-species. 

We will first consider the arguments which may be advanced in favour of classing the races of man as distinct species, and then the arguments on the other side. If a naturalist, who had never before seen a Negro, Hottentot, Australian, or Mongolian, were to compare them, he would at once perceive that they differed in a multitude of characters, some of slight and some of considerable importance. On enquiry he would find that they were adapted to live under widely different climates, and that they differed somewhat in bodily constitution and mental disposition. If he were then told that hundreds of similar specimens could be brought from the same countries, he would assuredly declare that they were as good species as many to which he had been in the habit of affixing specific names. This conclusion would be greatly strengthened as soon as he had ascertained that these forms had all retained the same character for many centuries; and that negroes, apparently identical with existing negroes, had lived at least 4000 years ago.* He would also hear, on the authority of an excellent observer, Dr. Lund,*(2) that the human skulls found in the caves of Brazil entombed with many extinct mammals, belonged to the same type as that now prevailing throughout the American continent.

Our naturalist would then perhaps turn to geographical distribution, and he would probably declare that those forms must be distinct species, which differ not only in appearance, but are fitted for hot, as well as damp or dry countries, and for the arctic regions. He might appeal to the fact that no species in the group next to man- namely, the Quadrumana, can resist a low temperature, or any considerable change of climate; and that the species which come nearest to man have never been reared to maturity, even under the temperate climate of Europe. He would be deeply impressed with the fact, first noticed by Agassiz,* that the different races of man are distributed over the world in the same zoological provinces, as those inhabited by undoubtedly distinct species and genera of mammals. This is manifestly the case with the Australian, Mongolian, and Negro races of man; in a less well-marked manner with the Hottentots; but plainly with the Papuans and Malays, who are separated, as Mr. Wallace has shewn, by nearly the same line which divides the great Malayan and Australian zoological provinces. The aborigines of America range throughout the continent; and this at first appears opposed to the above rule, for most of the productions of the Southern and Northern halves differ widely: yet some few living forms, as the opossum, range from the one into the other, as did formerly some of the gigantic Edentata. The Esquimaux, like other arctic animals, extend round the whole polar regions. It should be observed that the amount of difference between the mammals of the several zoological provinces does not correspond with the degree of separation between the latter; so that it can hardly be considered as an anomaly that the Negro differs more, and the American much less from the other races of man, than do the mammals of the African and American continents from the mammals of the other provinces. Man, it may be added, does not appear to have aboriginally inhabited any oceanic island; and in this respect, he resembles the other members of his class. …

Liberals giving awards to each other

Justin Landon of Staffer’s Book Review appears to be about as impressed with the Hugo Awards as I am with the SFWA’s Nebula Awards:

The Hugos are utter twaddle.

Although the Hugos present the image of something more cosmopolitan
or representative than the standard convention award, it’s becoming
increasingly apparent every year that, despite being the most
recognizable award in science fiction and fantasy cultural awareness,
the Hugos are nothing more than an amalgamation of like minded WorldCon
members, or agendized voting blocs, bent on vociferous back patting. I
apply that statement broadly, although it is most obviously associated
with the down ballot. Before I get too far into that rabbit
hole, let me first place ‘best novel’ squarely in my sites where the
only explanation is that the average Hugo voter reads somewhere been
four and six novels a year.

Often when critics rail against the Hugo’s best novel category it’s
to attack lack of sophistication. The Clarke Award, British Science
Fiction Award, the Kitschies, Tiptree Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and
others spend some time examining science fiction and fantasy literature
through a critical lens. Anyone expecting that from the Hugo Award isn’t
just off the mark, they might as well be trying to stick ‘it’ in the
sarlacc.

No, the Hugo voter has a certain style it looks for in its
fiction. Hugo-style, if you will, is like Gangnam-style only without the
distracting Korean guy riding a horse, replaced with Charles Stross and
Connie Willis on a podium holding a. . . rocket ship. I admit
Gangnam-style doesn’t have nearly as much sex appeal. In other words,
Hugo nominated books tend to be recognizable. On the one hand because
they are mostly written by Stross, Willis, John Scalzi, China Miéville,
Robert Charles Wilson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ian MacDonald, and active
members of the Live Journal community, but also because they fit a
certain motif that’s difficult to pin down. I’ll fall back on the old
pornography argument, ‘I know it when I see it.”

I have to admit, I don’t pay any more attention to the Hugo Awards than I do the the Dove Awards, the Christie Awards, the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards, or the Tony Awards. The only reason I care about the Nebula Awards is because I am a Lifetime member of the organization that gives them out and I find it embarrassing that the SFWA so often honors mediocre novels at the expense of much more worthy ones.

The only award I’ve truly cared about in the last few years was Adrian Peterson’s MVP award for his heroic performance this past season; yes, it’s a quarterbacks’ league now but if the NFL MVP is only going to go to quarterbacks, then simply rename it the MVQ and be done with it.

And when I say I don’t care about awards, I mean it quite literally. I didn’t even know that Summa Elvetica had been nominated for an award until I saw it on Wikipedia a few years later, and when Marcher Lord was warned that A Throne of Bones would not be eligible for a certain award if I did not edit some of its more offensive bits, I cheerfully told them to go ahead and disqualify it.  I’m with Raymond Feist on this, who knows perfectly well that he’ll never win an award until he is declared an SFWA Grandmaster, probably after he is safely dead.  He is, quite simply, too successful to merit them.

Everyone has different goals. Rabbits need the group affirmation that these sorts of political awards offer them. Not-rabbits don’t. Psykosonik once beat out Prince for Best Dance Record at the Minnesota Music Awards for a song I wrote; I didn’t know we’d won until months later because not only did I not bother going, my bandmates who did didn’t even see fit to mention it because they knew I didn’t care. I didn’t even know I had been a three-time Billboard top 40 recording artist for about 16 years until I looked it up a few months ago when I was pointing out the dirty laundry of  the “New York Times bestselling” authors.

When you are fortunate enough to experience success, you learn to value certain aspects of it and to disvalue others.  My objective is to write a great epic fantasy series that is capable of creating the same feeling in its readers as Dune once created in me. That’s why I simply laugh when people claim I’m jealous of McRapey, or I’m imitating George Martin, or my feelings are wounded that A Throne of Bones wasn’t nominated for any awards.  Because in the game I’m playing, those things don’t even enter into it. They’re not relevant to my metric for success.

Perhaps I’ll succeed.  Perhaps I’ll fail. Most people would probably, and quite reasonably, bet on the latter. But regardless, talking about how people are performing in the shotput or the pole vault and who is winning those events means absolutely nothing to me over here in the blocks with Frank Herbert, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Richard Adams, and Neal Stephenson.

Immigrants are good for the economy

So much for that tremendously sophisticated theory:

In Stockton, Calif., which has just entered into Chapter 9 bankruptcy,
41 percent of the people do not speak English at home and 21 percent
cannot speak it very well, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The problem facing immigration advocates is that once they admit that the quality and quantity of the immigrant population has an effect on the economy, their entire rational for replacing the native population goes out the window.  They were able to successfully deceive the public in 1965 and 1986, but not any longer.  The effects of the foreign pigeons invading to roost and crap all over the US economy can no longer be denied.

How many more cities have to go bankrupt before it becomes obvious to everyone that immigration is not an intrinsic element of economic growth.  It is more than a little ironic that in the name of free trade, Americans have somehow managed to accept a system that involves the free movement of labor as well as restrictions on the movement of capital.

Productivity

It is said that men are always proud of the wrong things.  That may be, but I think everyone here will most certainly agree that working in “aw, he got the velcros” into the conversation, in correct context, makes the week productive, by definition.

Didn’t Kordell Stewart retire?

The rumor is that four homosexual NFL players are all going to come out and announce their shared sexual abnormality at the same time:

The one reason to worry about an NFL player coming out as gay would be the inevitable avalanche of horrible jokes, hateful responses, and insane scrutiny, all directed at one human being. Nobody deserves that, and it would be ugly. But as Ayanbadejo says, “If they could share the backlash, it would be more positive.”

In addition to muting the backlash toward any one player, four players coming out in four different cities — AT THE SAME DAMN TIME — would get all kinds of love and support, too, spreading the acceptance around the country, making this a more universal sign of progress in the NFL and the sports world, in general.

First of all, as Juvenal suffices to prove, it’s not progress, it’s decline. Second, I suspect it’s not going to go quite as well as the men in cheerleader skirts would like to imagine.  Not that anyone is likely say anything in public; Roger Goodell and the various teams have made it perfectly clear that this is one area where freedom of speech and expression are absolutely frowned upon and anything but unabashed approval will be punished.

But NFL players are now very good at mouthing all the right platitudes in front of the cameras and then expressing themselves on the field.  They will, quite rightly, resent having this sort of nonsense crammed down their throats while simultaneously being muzzled.

I think it would be amusing if four other players announced they are pedophiles and demanded the same sort of saintly treatment from the league and the media that the other pioneers will be receiving.  And it would be even more amusing to see the media whiplash that would take place if Tim Tebow happened to be one of the four players.

Speaking of category errors

It’s really remarkable how more than 80 years later, Paul Krugman and the Keynesians are STILL attacking Andrew Mellon despite the fact that his liquidationist policies weren’t implemented back in 1929 and they’re not being implemented now:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. … It will purge the rottenness out of the system.” Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.” 

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a
certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong
they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we….

So what should we be doing? By all means, let’s restore the kind of
effective financial regulation that, in the years before the Reagan
revolution, helped deter excessive leverage. But that’s about preventing
the next crisis. To deal with the crisis that’s already here, we need
monetary and fiscal stimulus, to induce those who aren’t too deeply
indebted to spend more while the debtors are cutting back. But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly
see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And
that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive
doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and
retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump. 
The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said,
been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality
play has a visceral appeal that’s hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit
of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it. 
But they shouldn’t. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars
are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is
what ails us now — and policy should be doing more, not less.

Notice that despite the complete failure of the concept due to the stagflation of the 1970s, Krugman, ever the True Keynesian, still believes that there is some kind of meaningful tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. There isn’t. Neither printing money nor increasing credit necessarily creates any jobs.

And how is it possible for liquidationist policies to be failing today when none of the insolvent banks have been liquidated?

Is reality misogynistic?

This was an interesting exchange over at Susan’s place.  Mike C asked her if  something I wrote merited being described in a certain manner:

Does this language from Vox Day also count as misogynistic? I am trying to figure out if this also falls into your categorization of misogynistic? 

“Because women are collectively more short-sighted and more
self-centered than men, giving them an equal voice in society is
tantamount to a slow-motion execution for any society. This is not
theoretical, it is observable, as the equalitarian societies of Europe
are already demographically in demise and in the process of losing their
democracies and their property rights.

I understand that many people believe women’s rights are important.
But are they more important than property rights? Are they more
important than democracy? What those who support women’s rights are
understandably reluctant to accept is that equalitarianism necessarily
requires the elimination of democracy, property rights, freedom of
movement, and even, in the end, capitalism and most of the tenets of
Western civilization. But like it or not, that is the choice that has
been made, and is being made, even today.

The Founding Fathers of the USA were no more mindless sexists than the Conscript Fathers of the Roman Senate. They
knew full well what would happen if sexual equality was ever granted.
It is not a coincidence, still less ironic, that those who built the
greatest and freest human societies have always vehemently opposed
women’s rights, while the totalitarians who most avidly sought to curtail human freedom it have tended to support them.”

To which Susan replied:  “Totally.”

I don’t think this is correct.  I don’t think it’s even possibly correct, in fact, I will assert that the notion is a simple category error. To claim that the observable, demonstrable, and provable
contradiction between women’s rights and the rights upon which Western
civilization were historically founded could even theoretically be described as misogynistic is tantamount to setting oneself
against logic, against history, and against reality itself.

As the Castrate said, it is so or it is not so.  If women’s rights contradict the rights of natural law, or the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, then they contradict them.  If I am correct, and they do, then it is a simple matter of fact and neither my feelings about women or Susan’s feelings about Martians have anything whatsoever to do with the matter. The idea is not misogynistic for the same reason it is not romantic or anti-semitic or happy or purple. The term simply cannot apply, not even hypothetically.

But no one need take my
word for this.  I plan to methodically prove it, conclusively, in a
series of forthcoming posts.  As I mentioned on her blog, I’d even welcome Susan’s contribution, if she would care to provide
me with what she would consider to be the definitive “women’s rights”.

I would also welcome a comprehensive list of “women’s rights” as they are distinguished from simple non-sexually based rights from anyone, male or female, who considers himself to be a feminist or even just a defender of “women’s rights”.  I can, of course, simply resort to Wikipedia, but I would prefer to utilize the list provided by a self-professed champion of them.