How long can this go on?

According to Zero Hedge, somewhere between 10 months and four years:

As we showed last week,
the rate at which NIM goes negative and the above feedback loops begins
would be at approximately 4.5% on December 31, 2013. The “breakeven”
rate unleashing the inflationary cycle would then decline by about 1%
each year assuming the Fed’s balance sheet continues rising at a pace of
$1 trillion per year.

So the good news for all those who have been wondering just how much
longer the Fed can continue doing more of the same while providing a
free lunch for all is that we now know there is a temporal bound: the
longer the Fed does nothing to change the status quo, the lower its
“rate buffer.”

Of course, there is a resolution: the Fed simply begins to sell its
assets, and in doing so, destroys the reserves created when said assets
were onboarded on the Fed’s balance sheet. But there lies the rub:
because the second the Fed enters open deleveraging mode, everyone will
sell everything they can to lock in the profits generated from the past
4+ years of Fed balance sheet expansion. Furthermore, at that moment,
the market will begin pricing in the unwind of some or all of the $15
trillion in central bank liquidity which is the only reason the S&P
is where it is today. The result would be a market crash so epic it
would make the market response to Lehman and AIG’s failure seem like a
walk in the park by comparison.

Which is where you come in dear retail investor, and the
whole myth of the “Great Rotation.” Because unless there is someone who
will start providing a bid into which the banks can offload their
securities in exchange for cold hard cash, as was explained earlier,
the entire stock market ramp of the past 4 years will have been for
nothing. It is also why day in and day out the media bombards everyone,
as it has in the beginning of every year for the past three, that the
time to enter the market is now, and there has never been a better time
(ignoring that the market is now more expensive on a forward multiple basis than it was at the last market peak in 2007). 

What concerns me is that the Federal Reserve and its figureheads appear to have given up on the repeated “green shoots” announcements and shifted into half-hearted “it’s not our fault” mode.  This makes me suspect that the implosion date will be closer to 10 months than four years.  I don’t think it will be hyperinflationary, as will soon be discussed in detail, in part due to the nature of the financial system, but also because it should be perfectly clear that the Federal Reserve is not going to sacrifice itself and the interests of its owners for the economy or for the federal government.

She’s doomed

Between all the media hype and the Nationwide at Daytona crash, it appears that Danica Patrick is a prime example of Hultgreen-Curie syndrome just waiting to happen:

It was guaranteed that Patrick’s arrival this year as the first female
to compete fulltime in NASCAR’s premier division would generate a
tremendous amount of attention. She already had developed a loyal fan
following based on her accomplishments in the Indianapolis 500 (two
top-five finishes) as well as her appearances in numerous television
commercials for primary sponsor GoDaddy.  Then she went out and won the
pole position for Sunday’s running of the Daytona 500, and the hype
machine shifted into overdrive.

Suddenly this has become more than just another auto race. It is a
full-blown event, coated with larger social implications. Patrick isn’t
being compared just to Janet Guthrie, the driver who motored past gender
barriers in the 1970s by qualifying for both the Daytona 500 and the
Indianapolis 500. She is evoking memories of Billie Jean King, who won
the famous “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match with Bobby Riggs in 1973,
striking a highly publicized blow for female equality.

Patrick has become a symbol of success for little girls, a high-speed, high-profile example of all that is possible in life.

Patrick seems nice enough and I don’t wish her a fiery death on the track or anything like that.  But I can’t say that I’ll be shocked if something goes very, very wrong at the Daytona 500.  And it should be kept in mind that as a leading symbol of equalitarianism, Danica Patrick has become a totem for the evil that is infesting Western civilization and eating away at its foundations.

Inflation: gasoline prices

Now, this should not be considered a response to Nate’s post on inflation, as it is not an integral part of the great inflation-deflation debate, but rather tangential to it.  It is simply an off-shoot of some research I was doing that is not going to be part of my core argument.  But I’m posting it nevertheless because it is interesting and should help put in context precisely where we happen to be at the moment with regards to recent price movements.  We could, of course, use CPI, but I don’t pay much attention to it since with all of its hedonic adjustments and so forth, I regard it to be as about as relevant to reality as the average science fiction novel.  And while I am very well aware of the various shortcomings of using a commodity price such as gasoline as an inflation metric, given the inevitable effects of supply and demand, it nevertheless can be readily observed that the price of gasoline is an even more “inflationary” one than than simply relying upon CPI.  Which is to say, using gasoline as a metric instead of CPI will tend to be a more favorable one to the inflationary case for those contemplating the inflation/deflation question.

To the best of my knowledge, the price of gasoline was $0.12 in 1913.  Another reference cites $0.25 in 1918, but I will go with the lower and older one as it is less favorable from the perspective of my deflationary position.  Utilizing the CPI, this provides an estimated equivalent price of $2.79, which is much lower than the current national average price of $3.74.

Now, given the massive amount of M2 money creation that has taken place since the financial crisis hit in Q3 2008, we would expect that at least an amount of that $3.62 increase in price per gallon has taken place since then.  But look at the 60-month history of gasoline prices, which actually fell dramatically in the first six months post-crisis, from $4.12 at the onset of the crisis to $1.61.

Prices have gradually worked their way up since then, but from an inflationary perspective, things have remained essentially flat over the last five years, which the observant reader will recall tends to be considerably more in line with the flat state of total credit market debt outstanding than with the continued expansion of M2.

Please note that I am not claiming that this proves anything yet, I am simply pointing it out to counteract the common assumption that price inflation is as rampant as it is presently perceived to be due to gasoline prices threatening to return to their previous all-time highs.

Mailvox: still relevant

While I tend to largely forget about past books in favor of a) the most recent one, and, b) those I’m currently writing, it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that people are still reading the older ones.  SA writes of his recent encounter with TIA:

Nietzsche’s famous response to his critics was, “Swallow your poison; for you need it badly.” There are realizations that begin by tasting a bit like poison, but end up being just the medicine we need. Vox Day’s book is like that — atheists will instinctively hate it at first, not just because of its content but also because of its ironic writing style. “Poison pen” it may sometimes be; but it’s exactly the sort of “poison” they really need. As anyone who can think philosophically, or even anyone with an ounce of common sense knows, atheism is inherently irrational, since it depends on claiming certainty about a matter it obviously could never know for certain.

Day calls the atheist bluff. Teeing off on some of the chief proponents of irrational atheism today — Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Onfray in particular — the author debunks their empty rhetoric with the simplest of weapons: facts. Particularly good is the author’s treatment of the old canard “religion causes wars,” for which he provides so much counter-evidence that the reader is left wondering why anyone ever thinks such a thing is true. He simply takes the atheists at their word, and tests their claims against the available evidence.

In a way, it’s unfortunate that Day resorts so often to the ironic tone, because opponents will be all too quick to jump on that stylistic feature and claim the author is a mere stylist without substance. That charge would be untrue, and a more calm tone might prevent that, showcasing the evidence rather than the rhetorical flourishes. However, flamboyancy and irony of tone have never stopped atheists from loving Nietzsche or uncritically embracing the random rhetoric of mere stylists like Harris or Dawkins, so their objections might be a trifle hypocritical.

On the good side, Day’s book is immensely readable, and at times is simply laugh-out-loud entertaining. You can dash through it in a night, and indeed, it’s hard to stop reading once you start. The central argument is not a scholarly approach so much as a popularly-accessible one; but that does not diminish the ultimate seriousness of the arguments advanced therein. Anyone who is already a theist, or anyone who is still seriously thinking about the atheism-theism debate can find in this book a helpful resource for casual debate. But the atheist “faithful” who have already closed their minds to the evidence may simply find it teeth-grindingly irritating.

It probably won’t escape anyone’s attention that the New Atheism is done, having mutated into helpless silence in the face of Islam on the one hand and A+ feminism on the other.  It’s remarkable to see that women can even ruin atheism; it’s a tactic that we theists should have utilized long ago.  After all, the sort of mind that is prone to atheism in the first place is going to be particular susceptible to cries of “sexism” and “racism”, and there are few groups more male and white than a gathering of atheists.

SA’s point that rhetorical flourishes can detract from the dialectic arguments is an accurate one, but the problem is that they are necessary for the majority who are not capable of following the dialectic arguments.  What TIA exposes, in crossing the rhetorical divide, is that there is very little but rhetoric in most of the New Atheist arguments, which is why a dispassionate dialectical critique would have been an error and left its atheist readers unmoved.  The venom and the spite with which so many atheist reviewers have responded to TIA over the years is proof of its effectiveness in that regard.

It’s also good to see SA single out what has probably been the primary accomplishment of TIA, which was the conclusive debunking of the “religion causes war” line.  We’ve seen less and less of that ever since TIA came out, and the historical evidence has even begun to creep into scientific journals such as Nature.  While I have no doubt that the Left will do everything it can to be sure I am never credited with having successfully demolished that line of attack against religion in general and Christianity in particular, (it’s amusing to see all the references to a $300 encyclopedia that it is perfectly clear no one has even seen, let alone read), I’m very pleased to see that mendacious, but rhetorically effective argument increasingly absent from the atheism-religion discourse.

And SA’s email is a useful reminder that as long as atheists attempt to rely upon the arguments it criticizes, TIA will remain relevant.

The Great Inflation-Deflation Debate

Nate forces my hand by kicking it off on his own blog:

It appears to me that there seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what the money supply is doing.  Is it growing?  is it shrinking?  Inflation?  Deflation?  Stagflation?   Obviously I am a hyper-inflationist…   Our buddy Vox is a deflationist.  So what gives?  Does it matter?

Well… if we’re going to talk about this we’re going to have to establish some kind of basic vocabulary.  For example… what is money?  I know… you’re thinking dollar bills and coins.  Yes and no.  Money is an exchange medium that is used to complete a transaction.  The critical characteristic of money is that it does not require any additional transactions to satisfy the terms of the exchange.  You got your money… and that’s good enough.  Lets look at gold for example.  Gold is money.  It always has been money.  You want some of my cattle… you give me a small amount of gold… and we’re done.  Modern cash is similar.  You give me cash.. I give you a cow or two… we’re done.  Cash is money.

What about debit cards?  I swipe your debit card… I give you cows…  we’re not done.  Your bank has to send money to my bank.  That’s an additional transaction.  Debit cards aren’t money.   Same for checks.  Checks aren’t money either.  They are IOUs for money.

Go to his place.  Read the whole thing.  If it doesn’t make sense, read it again.  Grok it in its fullness.  I will respond here within one week.

Umberto Eco on the death of the dream of Europe

I like and admire Umberto Eco for many reasons, but I firmly believe that the great humanist is absolutely on the wrong side of history with regards to the great post-WWII neo-fascist enterprise of the European Union.  And so, it is very satisfying indeed to read of the increasing despair of the bien-pensant intellectuals, and to hear the cri-de-coeur of an elite that is increasingly conscious of its failure concerning an endeavor where, for one brief shining moment around the turn of the millenium, it believed it had succeeded.

These are hard times for those who
believe in the European Union: from Cameron, who calls his compatriots
to decide if they still want it (or if they never had the will), from
Berlusconi who one day declares himself a Europeist but the next,
if he doesn’t make a visceral connection to the old Fascists, says
returning to the lira would be better, to the Lega Nord and its
hyperprovincialism. In summary, one can say that – at a distance
of more than fifty years – the bones of the founding fathers of
Europe United are turning in their graves.
Nevertheless everyone should know that
in the course of the Second World War 41 million Europeans died, (I
say only Europeans, not including the Americans and the Asians), massacred one after the other, and afterwards, saving the tragic
Balkan episode, Europe has known 68 years of peace.  If one
recounts to the young, (who maybe would appreciate it more if they spent a year working in another country on the continent with the Erasmus program, and perhaps at the end of this experience would find a twin spirit with those who speak another language than their own), that the French might today defend the Maginot
line to resist the Germans, that the Italians would want to expand
their borders to incorporate Greece, that Belgium could be invaded, that English
airplanes could bombard Milan, these youth would believe we were
inventing a science fiction novel. It is only the adults who
understand that instead of crossing borders without passports, their
fathers and their grandfathers vacationed with rifles in hand.
But is it really true that the idea of
Europe is unsuccessful in attracting the Europeans? Bernard-Henri
Lévy recently released a passionate manifesto in defense of a
European identity. “Europe or Chaos” begins with a disturbing
threat. “Europe is not in crisis, it is dying. Not Europe as in
the territory, naturally. But Europe, the Idea. The Europe that is
a dream and a project.” The manifesto was signed by António Lobo
Antunes, Vassilis Alexakis, Juan Luis Cebrián, Fernando Savater,
Peter Schneider, Hans Christoph Buch, Julia Kristeva, Claudio Magris,
Gÿorgy Konrád and Salman Rushdie (who is not European but has found
in Europe his primary refuge from the start of his persecution. I
also signed it with some other co-signers, a few days ago, when I was
at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris for a little debate. One of
the themes that quickly emerged, one that I found amply consequential, is
that there exists a consciousness of a European identity. It
occurred to me to cite the pages of Remembrance of Things Past by
Proust when, in Paris during the time of the bombardment by the
German Zeppelins, the intellectuals continue to speak and to write of
Goethe or of Schiller as an integrated part of their culture.
But this sense of a European
identity, certainly very strong among the elite
intellectuals, is it also among the common people? It occurred to me
to reflect on the fact that even today, in every European country, they
celebrate (in school and in their public festivals), real heroes, who
are all men who have valorously slain other Europeans, from the part of
that Arminius who exterminated the legions of Varo, to Joan of Arc,
the Cid, (because the Muslims against whom he fought were of the
European centuries), to various Italian and Hungarian heroes of the
Risogimento, who fell against the Austrian enemy. Is there no European hero of whom we can speak? Did none ever exist? What about Byron and Santorre di Santarosa, who advanced and fought for the cause of Greek liberty,
to say nothing of the not-insignificant numbers of little Schindlers,
who saved the lives of thousands of Jews without concern for what
nation they belonged to. What about the non-martial heroes, such as De
Gasperi, Monnet, Schuman, Adenuauer, Spinelli? And could not
searching into the recesses of history expose others, of whom we could speak
to the children, (and to the adults)? Is it truly possible that we cannot
find a European Asterix of whom we can speak about the Europe of
tomorrow?
The fall of the fraud-imposed European Union will be difficult and painful for many, just as the collapse of its force-imposed American counterpart will cause considerable chaos and suffering.  But in both cases, the pain will be a relatively small price to pay, because the alternative is the material imposition of Orwell’s metaphorical boot-on-the-human-face forever. 
The answer to his question is no.  There can never be a European Asterix.  Asterix is a hero to millions of Europeans because he represents the independent human spirit resisting the force of Empire.  And as such, the new Asterixes of the future will be those who courageously resisted the bureaucratic stormtroopers of the failing Union, not those who marched in their ranks.  The EU is in the imperial tradition of Augustus, Napoleon, and Hitler, and as such, it can never command the loyalty of an Asterix.
The intellectual elite always loves Empire.  They are its parasites, its remoras.  And how they hate that it is so often those men who stand against them and their will to rule that are loved and lionized by generation after generation of the common people.

On the radio

I was on Brian Greenberg’s Philadelphia radio show last night, where we talked all about McRapey, and how terribly persecuted I am, and how bravely and ingeniously I’ve handled being persecuted, and how my books aren’t derivative ripoffs AT ALL.  It was a very courageous performance by me and I feel much better about myself now that my feelings have been affirmed by a sympathetic media figure.

You’re going to want to hear it, because I also gave some important hints about my totally all-original next book!  That’s right, you can squee now!  Here’s a hint: my inspiration rhymes with Why Zack Does Improv and it’s a “reboot” of a certain science fiction classic, only instead of predicting the collapse of the Galactic Empire, Mary Spelltown proves mathematically that by switching over to a matriarchal system of rule by lesbian Empresses of color, the Empire will become even more vibrant and fabulous and fair, thanks to the invisible guidance of a secret dance club of mutant, mind-reading, mixed-race homosexuals that is founded by the brilliant, (and woman!) hard scientist.

And here is the best part.  They communicate by farting!  That’s right.  You may as well pencil in my 2014 Nebula Award for Best Tor Novel right now!

Reeducation for the insufficiently vibrant

Roissy notes that the government’s multicultural reeducation camps for insufficiently vibrant Americans are well underway:

He writes: “Like Communist reeducation camps, the captive (yes, captive, or they
lose their jobs) listeners in the audience are being humiliated by this
piece of shit into participating in de facto forced
confessionals of their imaginary sins, and indoctrination of their
“privilege” and “oppression”. You can hear their humiliating subjugation
in the way they nervously laugh at slander directed against them. This
is the laughter of the bullied beta male trying to go along to get
along, so as to avoid any beatings on the playground later.”

Rushmore isn’t enough

Al Sharpton on the pressing debate of the day:

Last month, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton conducted a spirited debate about whether Obama belongs on Mount Rushmore or instead deserves a separate monument to his greatness (just weeks before replacing frequent Obama critic Cenk Uygur as MSNBC host, Sharpton publicly vowed never to criticize Barack Obama under any circumstances: a vow he has faithfully maintained). Earlier that day on the same network, a solemn discussion was held, in response to complaints from MSNBC viewers, about whether it is permissible to ever allow Barack Obama’s name to pass through one’s lips without prefacing it with an honorific such as “President” or “the Honorable” or perhaps “His Excellency” (that really did happen).

I would absolutely love to see Obama added to Mount Rushmore.  The ears alone would be hysterical.  Given that the great destroyer of American liberty is already up there, it seems only fitting that the penultimate consequence of his actions should be memorialized in stone there as well.

However,  I don’t think Mount Rushmore is sufficient memorial for Barack Soetoro-Soebarkah-Obama.  I think he merits a “Chairman Mao” style statue of the sort that the Chinese carved for Martin Luther King.  The bigger, the better.  I want future generations to be able to see precisely how far the nation descended before its final collapse.  Ideally, it would be atop a square platform decorated by a carved frieze featuring 1) the Folsom Street Fair, 2) a squad of female Marines going into action, 3) an image of 9/11, and 4) Mexicans crossing the border.

Mailvox: which is worse, work or rape?

A drive-by commenter throws out a few questions:

women don’t have to stay home and breed simply because it intimidates
you that we’re in the workforce. What about the fact that women may
wish to work and be very capable of doing so. Are you saying women are
less intelligent than men? Is there any reason that a man couldn’t stay
home and provide childcare if that is best suited to a family? 

1) True.  Women don’t have to stay home and breed because it intimidates anyone that they are in the workforce, about two-thirds of them have to stay home and breed in order to prevent society from either collapsing into demographic and economic ruin or being transformed by the imported replacement workers into a third world society.  The birthrate has already fallen well below replacement level without the rate of female employment even drawing completely even with the male employment rate; one wonders how low it would go if all women were required to enter the workforce.

One can look to Londonistan if one requires an example of this process at work: “[F]or the first time, white Britons are now in a minority in the country’s largest city…. White Britons now make up 45 per cent of the population, compared with 58 per cent in 2001.  London’s population has been boosted by immigrants. Three million foreign-born people now live in the capital.  

2) The fact that women may wish to work and are very capable of working no more implies that they should always be encouraged to do so anymore than the fact that men may wish to rape and are very capable of raping means that they should always be encouraged to do so.  The ironic, but logically inescapable fact is that encouraging men to rape would be considerably less damaging to a society than encouraging women to enter the workforce en masse.  Widespread rape makes a society uncivilized.  Widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable.  History demonstrates that incivility can be survived and surmounted.  Unsustainability, on the other hand, cannot.

3) Are women less intelligent than men?  On average, no.  In terms of the highest standard deviations, yes.  However, I think it is readily apparent that both men and women are to blame for constructing an equalitarian society that, in terms of intelligence, doesn’t even rise to the ability of a dog to avoid defecating in its own bed and staying off the railroad tracks.

4) Yes, there are a number of reasons that a man cannot stay home and provide childcare.  The three most important are that a) most men don’t want to provide childcare, b) most women don’t want to work to support a man, and c) doing so significantly increases the probability that his wife will stop being attracted to him and his marriage will fail.  A woman simply OUTEARNING her husband increases the risk of divorce by 50 percent; this implies that it is untenable to expect women to be willing to completely support their families.  But certainly, if there are women who dream of marrying men who will stay home and play video games with the children while they work 60 hours per week to support the family, there is no reason they should be barred from doing so. 

I tend to doubt there are enough of these hard-working snowflakes to be of any statistical, let alone demographic, significance to society.