Yeah, that’ll work

Zerohedge notes the circular nature of the Italian bailout:

The EU was already embarrassed into releasing a press release that it could procure €150 billion in Eurozone contributions to the IMF rescue, now that the UK is out of the picture and the December 9 Eurosummit agreed upon total of €200 billion including non-Eurozone contributors (mostly the UK with €30.9 billion) has been “adjusted.” Now we find that the rabbit hole goes even deeper into Bazooko’s Circus because according to a just released update, of the remaining meager €150 billion in funding, Germany will be responsible for €41.5 bn, France at €31.4 billion, and Italy will need to provide €23.5 billion. To, you know, bailout Italy.

This could catch on! If you’re in debt, just bail yourself out! I’m beginning to think we should start administering drug tests to the mainstream economists and the European finance ministers. I mean, I understand the theoretical importance of animals spirits and the confidence game, but seriously, who is this supposed to fool?

The Tea Party – Occupy Wall Street alliance

That would be a worthwhile third party:

Open Letter from a Marine Tea Partier to All Occupiers
Posted on 12/12/2011

First of all, I’m surprised you’re reading this. Thanks to the corrupt media, many of you might be clueless to the fact we share quite a bit of commonground.

Let me clarify: By “Tea Party,” I am in no way referring to the hijacked movement we know and love today. By “Tea Party,” I don’t mean Iran warmongers, bailout lovers, the “extreme right,” and people who think what happens in your bedroom affects them in any way. No, what I mean is the Tea Party as it started in 2007 as opposition to Bush policies.

The media loves to paint a picture of OWS vs. TP, “right” vs. “left,” etc. It’s an old tactic called divide and conquer. If we fight amongst ourselves, no one looks at the true criminals at work in society….

The system we live under is a corporatist model rapidly deteriorating into a fascist police state. The reason I added “Marine” to the heading of this letter was to (hopefully) attract active duty servicemembers, veterans, and law enforcement. We took an oath to the Constitution in order to join. The oath clearly gives us not only the option, but the responsibility to disobey ALL illegal orders. The police attacking peaceful protesters in the streets are in direct violation of that oath. If you are attacking peaceful people you are already on the wrong side of history.

Remember, focus on commonground. Just don’t look to government to be our saviors. Our politicians (yes, including our President) are bought and paid for by corporations and the mega banks. In fact, Obama’s biggest campaign donor is Goldman Sachs. His Treasury Secretary worked at Goldman Sachs himself. Why do you think some Europeans call us the United States of Goldman Sachs?

Semper Fi and Semper Occupare. Because nothing would terrify the establishment more than a united Occupy Tea Party movement.

– Cpl. Stephen Mark Allen, USMC

WND column

The Eurocrisis comes to America

Something is very rotten indeed in the city-state of Brussels. Last night, I had dinner with a friend of mine who works for a large bank in Europe. We talked a bit about the increasingly ominous state of the European financial situation, and he mentioned something rather worrisome. This week, his bank was holding a series of internal meetings to inform various financial services managers of the bank’s plans to respond to a serious financial event. My friend explained that this indicated the various scenarios have already been gamed out, and the bank is rapidly moving to prepare itself in case any of the more problematic scenarios turn out to accurately reflect the real world situation.

Of course, these preparations don’t mean that anything is going to happen today, tomorrow or even next week. Boarded windows are not hurricane magnets.

Book Review – Embassytown

Embassytown by China Mieville
Del Rey (368 pages, $26.00, May 2011)

Embassytown is an excellent and astonishingly original science fiction novel. It is also a clever subversion of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, defending as it does a literally Satanic theme in its rationalization of the intentional corruption of innocence. As such, it could be considered to be a philosophical novel of the sort that Umberto Eco writes; this is the sole aspect of the book that is both weak and unoriginal. But the trivial nature of the philosophical aspect does not detract from the novel in the slightest, as very few readers indeed will be aware of either the subversion or the subtext despite the relatively clear suggestions provided by Mieville.

The story concerns a human colony of the future that is established on a very distant planet inhabited by a strange and sentient alien race that speaks a unique language that involves two simultaneous voices. In order to communicate with the aliens, it is necessary for humans to speak in specially trained, genetically identical pairs because the alien’s link between Language and mind is such that the aliens cannot understand the sounds even if they are reproduced accurately by machines or unrelated human pairs. These trained pairs, called Ambassadors, are the colony’s only means of communicating with the aliens, whose biotechnology is required for them to survive given their very limited support from the human empire to which they owe a rather tenuous allegiance.

Read the rest at The Black Gate.

VPFL Week 14

Final Regular Season Standings

Bailout Banksters 9-4-1 1000 854

Greenfield Grizzlies 9-5-0 1045 930

Moundsview Meerkats 9-5-0 1009 877

Green Reverends 7-6-1 923 935

RR Redbeards 7-6-1 920 927

Macau Marauders 6-7-1 895 998

MS Swamp Spartans 6-8-0 933 951

Bane Sidhe 6-8-0 923 991

Cranberry Rhyneauxs 5-9-0 973 1040

GroverBeach Quixotes 4-10-0 804 922
111 Bailout Banksters
84 Moundsview Meerkats

71 Greenfield Grizzlies
63 Bane Sidhe

90 RR Redbeards
84 MS Swamp Spartans

62 Green Reverends
60 GroverBeach Quixotes

87 Macau Marauders
85 Cranberry Rhyneauxs

Thanks to everyone for playing this year. The Banksters made a strong late season run with a three-game winning streak that claimed the regular season title, while Nate made an equally strong run that just fell short of the playoffs thanks to Green holding off the last-place Quixotes by only two points.

In the first round, the Banksters look to make it to the championship game with a 40-point performance from their Falcons giving them a Thursday-night lead over the Reverends. The other game features a classic old school showdown between the Meerkats and the Grizzlies.

The drug war against the economy

Fred Reed chronicles one effective way for G to GDP:

When I arrived in Mexico going on ten years ago, it was a mildly sleepy upper-Third World country, whatever that means—corrupt but not dangerous, not rich but hardly poor, barely middle-class overall and climbing, the mañana thing seldom noticeable, and women pouring into the professions. I parodied the American conception of Mexico as perilous hell-hole because it wasn’t. Not even close.

Then in 2006 Felipe Calderón became president, and declared war on the drug cartels. Mexicans I talk to think he did it under pressure from Washington, but I don’t know. Certainly Washington has done everything in its power to encourage it.

The war failed, as anyone with even a vague understanding of the world would have predicted. A war on drugs—foolish phrase—may be said to succeed if the price of drugs rises on the American street. It didn’t. It won’t.

Things happened that were touted as successes against the traficantes. A fair number of bosses of important cartels were killed or caught. Since Americans confuse leaders with movements and countries, this sounded like progress. Of course if, for example, you kill a leader of the “Taliban,” his second takes over within hours and all goes on as before. And if you kill the leader of a cartel, his underlings fight among themselves for the pieces, thousainds die, and law breaks down. Mexicans know this. The State Department apparently doesn’t.

Meanwhile, as always, drugs remain everywhere available in America.

At first the killing remained largely in the northern states, Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, and such, with patches south in Jalisco and, especially, Michoacan. The gringos who lived around Lake Chapala, an hour south of Guadalajara, were not much affected.

Then the mayhem arrived here at Lakeside. In recent months the gringo havens along the lake have seen firefights with automatic weapons and grenades. Bodies are frequently found. Very frequently. Until recently no gringos were killed. The narcos were fighting among themselves and against the police. Expats didn’t, and so far don’t, interest them.

A few days ago an American was killed in Ajijic, the epicenter of gringolandia. It was just an armed robbery gone bad. The narcos had nothing to do with it. Thing is, when the country falls into chaos because ofthe war against drugs, every other kind of crime follows.

The expats have begun moving out. Realtors report large numbers of houses going on the block. If this continues, and I see no reason why it won’t, restaurants will continue to close, maids and gardeners will lose their jobs, and the doctors and dentists that serve the expatriates will leave. Today a local Spanish website reports a fall of fifty percent in trade at eateries. If this continues, tourism, a crucial business in Mexico, will disappear. Already, we hear, the cruise ships have stopped going to Puerto Vallarta.

Prohibition never works very well and often the costs significantly exceed the benefits. And creating crime ex nihilo only serves to turn law-abiding citizens into criminals, it seldom significantly modifies their behavior. Just as you won’t stop reading the Bible or playing chess if such activities were made illegal, most people won’t stop drinking or doing drugs. Perhaps if pro-drug war Americans are unconcerned about the loss of Constitutional rights, the immorality, or the foreign instability created by the drug war, they will be more responsive to the way in which it is obviously serving as a negative fiscal multiplier now that the global economy is in contraction.

Alt Investors interview

Rahul interviewed Vox Day on December 14, 2011

Rahul: The first thing I wanted to get into is the argument of inflation vs deflation. I believe that we agree on many issues, but I know for sure we disagree on this topic. Why do you believe we’re going to face a deflationary depression.

VD: Because I believe the amount of credit created money, which is stored up in notional derivatives, and loans and that sort of thing, are going to decline faster than the central banks of the world are able to create money through the banks and push them out of the system.

Rahul: So what about the U.S. dollar then. We have Peter Schiff saying that the dollar is garbage. Since we artificially have low interest rates, a huge debt, and a trade account deficit, that will cause a run on the dollar.

VD: Because Peter Schiff has an amateurish understanding of the technical economic aspects of inflation as they relate to a debt-based currency. I was on his show; I like Peter and have a lot of respect for him. When it comes to the detailed aspects of economics, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s an investor and a good one. Everyone says look they’re printing money, and look at M2. They’re right, and M2 has increased. However, that’s only part of the equation. The unsophisticated way to look at the inflation/deflation question is to erroneously assume that money is paper. The central bank can print paper, and sophisticated people would say it’s all electronics (Fed would just flip a switch). What money really is, you can find this in Mises, is that money is the combo of paper money and bank credit. When you buy something, do you have to pay in paper?

Rahul: No.

VD: Off course not. How are you paying for it. You’re paying for it in credit. That’s an invented currency. It trades completely fungible. It’s completely fungible with paper currency and the electronic bank money. If you look at the data for the past 3.5 years, the total credit debt outstanding is flat at 53 trillion. M2 has increased a bit, but that’s 9 trillion. The amount of M2 has dwarfed by the outstanding bank credit. That amount, if it increased at its 50 year historical rate of 8.8%……known as Z1, we would have 72 trillion. We don’t. It’s still stuck at 53 trillion. That means it’s an active form of deflation. The only reason that this isn’t visible to everyone is that most of the deflation is hidden off the books in the financial institutions.

Rahul: Ok then. So what do you think about gold then? We have all these libertarians saying that gold will go to 10K /oz because we’re going to go back on some sort of gold standard. What’s your take on that?

VD: My take is that gold is much better as a wealth protector than it is than an investment. People think gold is good in inflation and bad in deflation. We had inflation throughout the 1980s at the same time that we had plunging gold prices. Now we’ve been seeing deflation…..even the inflationistas admit that there was deflation in 07-08. And yet gold prices went up. Gold, in some ways……for those who consider gold true money, then they should view it as anything that makes gold valuable is deflation. I think gold is a good safeguard of wealth even if you believe in inflation or deflation. Gold will still hold its value. The currency can disappear in either inflation, because it becomes worthless, or in deflation, where the financial system collapses because the debts can’t be paid off.

Rahul: Ok. Switching topics. Let’s look at Europe. Do you believe that the Euro countries will go back to their original currencies, like the Greeks going back the Drachma, or do you see a EuroTarp situation?

VD: Well I think they’re going to try a EuroTarp and it will fail. The Euro will break apart. I’ve been saying this for 10 years. I’m not surprised by the problems of the Euro. The only thing that surprises me that it’s 1.30 against the USD. 2.5 years ago, it was 1.15. It should be below .88 against the dollar.

Rahul: Why do you think it’s that high?

VD: I believe that the Fed is sending a lot money to Europe to prop up their currency.

Rahul: Allright. One last question. How will the U.S. get out of the depression? Krugman always talks about WWII getting us of the last depression. Will we have WWIII to bail us out or a Reagan style candidate to get us of this mess.

VD: Well, first of all, Krugman has no freaking clue what he’s talking about. He’s an absolute ignoramus on this matter. Before I got into economics, I was into military history. My grandfather fought in the south pacific. What got the U.S. out of the depression was that the rest of the industrialized world was blown to pieces. The US was the only country to have a functional industrial infrastructure. Therefore, we had 10 years to sell them consumer and capital goods to rebuild their infrastructure. It’s not even worth discussing. WWIII won’t get us out because WWII didn’t.

Rahul: So what will get us out of this mess?

VD: Collapse. What most likely going to happen is the financial system will collapse. The societal system will hopefully hold up. Currencies usually have a life of 70 years. It’s not the end of the world if the Euro dies. This isn’t the first attempt of a European monetary union. There have been at least five. This will collapse. The dollar will eventually collapse. This always happens. They will end up putting this back together.

Rahul: Will the SDR be the world’s reserve currency?

VD: It’s hard to say. I wouldn’t think so. What else is there? The central banks are allergic to a gold standard for the obvious reason that they can’t run their credit boom game very easily on a gold standard. They can do it, but they can’t do it to the same extent. Gold isn’t a magical cure all. We had a depression on a gold standard and we had problems with it. That doesn’t mean I’m against it. It’s much better and I’m for it. It isn’t a magical panacea that is going to usher us into unending prosperity. We still have to make stuff people want and sell it. That’s where wealth comes from. The whole idea that we can play games with money and that sort of thing, and somehow live off of that, is absurd. It’s a hangover from 40 years of a large credit boom. Since we’ve had a large credit boom, the bust will be magnified.

The Week in Alpha

We are reliably informed that women really do want to tear men down.

Susan Walsh warns young women that the Grim Beeper strikes much sooner at their reproductive capabilities than most of them believe.

It is noted that even Le Chateau asserts that the universality of Game renders its utility much broader than its primary usage as a pick-up artist’s tool.

The academic success of young women is not translating well to the work environment.

Is there a link between slender women who maintain their figures and negative personalities? And if so, why don’t men prefer butterballs?

Is Game a tool or a philosophy of life? It is explained why the latter notion is not only incorrect, but a basic category error.

Mailvox: heretic!

JimH apparently does not understand the basic concept of “fundamentalism”:

Sorry, I’m new here but it sounds like you wouldn’t agree with most Christian confessions of faith or Christian creeds. Nor could you likely hold office in any Christian denomination. How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian? You would quite possibly be labeled a heretic by many. I don’t know you well enough, but if you’re somewhat rolling your own religion and are as lacking in humility toward the Church as your blog suggests, there are cult-like overtones to your faith. I’d hardly call that fundamental Christianity.

I don’t agree with most of them. That is why I often describe them as a religion called “Churchianity” as opposed to Christianity. “How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian?” It is one and the same; most modern churches are more focused on the man-made edifice they have constructed on top of the Christian faith, be it political ideology, sexual revisionism, or doctrinal inventions.

fun·da·men·tal
adjective
1. serving as, or being an essential part of, a foundation or basis; basic; underlying: fundamental principles; the fundamental structure.

I have no religious regard whatsoever for the various extra-Biblical traditions of the various Christian churches, although I do respect them in the same manner I respect many of the non-religious traditions of Man. But I consider Churchian dogma such as the Trinity, the Rapture, infant baptism, transubstantiation, purgatory, female pastors, bans on alchohol and dancing, Papal infallibility, and Bishop Ussher’s historical chronology to be no more theologically legitimate or Biblically supported than I do the sale of indulgences, Dante’s geography of Hell, or Milton’s history of Lucifer’s Fall.

I have no doubt that some of the very churches that openly violate Scriptural teachings in their organizational structures would call me a heretic. What of it? If an ordained lesbian who subscribes to the Trinity and bides her time awaiting the Rapture by baptizing infants and attempting to revive Prohibition asserts I am a heretic, that merely tends to strengthen my suspicion that she does not worship the same god that I do. It is ironic, of course, that so many atheists like to strike the pose of potential burnee at the stake when history indicates that it was actually Christians who shared my skepticism concerning extra-Biblical dogma that were targeted by murderously inclined church authorities.

How and why should one show any humility towards organizations that teach demonstrable extra- and contra-Biblical falsehoods as the equivalent of Scripture? Consider, for example, that even those Christian scholars who subscribe to the Trinity concept “admit the trinity is not Biblical, did not exist in the Apostolic age, and was developed over a period of 295 years.”

It is even more ironic that what JimH “would hardly call fundamentalist Christianity” is far more genuinely fundamental Christianity than the concoction of Churchian creeds and structures that he considers acceptably orthodox. And adhering to the clear and undeniable teachings of a religious text that was written nearly 2,000 years before one was born is the exact opposite of “rolling one’s own religion”.

As for my failure to subscribe to what most people erroneously call the Nicene Creed, I merely point out that it isn’t even the Nicene Creed, but rather a substantially modified version of that creed produced by the First Council of Constantinople 56 years later. My religious beliefs actually happen to be more in accordance with the actual Nicene Creed than the beliefs of those who confess the subsequent Imperially-approved modification.

Three critics, three letters

Matthew David Surridge writes three intelligent responses to critics of the fantasy genre:

Dear Mr. Gopnik,

I read your recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dragon’s Egg,” with some interest. I haven’t read Christopher Paolini’s work; my interest is less in Young-Adult literature than in fantasy fiction. From that perspective I found your piece intriguing for what was left unsaid, or what you chose not to investigate. Specifically, I thought there were two major lacunae in the thinking underlying your approach to fantasy.

The first is apparent fairly early on, when you write that Ossian, The Silmarillion, and The Children of Húrin are boring. Later, you say: “And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda.” This may well be so, though I’d like to think the enigmatic poems of the Edda can intrigue most readers. At any rate, true as what you say may be, the reverse is true as well. If you’re a reader whose tastes were shaped by mythology, the realist novel is pretty weak sauce. Surely, though, there’s more to be said about either form.

I’d like to draw upon our shared heritage as Montrealers to illustrate what I’m saying. Imagine, one early April night as the NHL season nears its end and the baseball season gets underway, a hockey fan and baseball fan change sports for one game. The baseball fan watches a hockey game, the hockey fan a baseball game. Leaving aside issues of team loyalty, and assuming both games put the best elements of their sports on display, what are the fans going to see?

The baseball fan’s going to look at a hockey game and think it’s ridiculous. Where’s the stillness, the reflection, the carefully-unfolding rhythm of baseball? Hockey just keeps moving, at ludicrous speeds to boot. It’s crude, players blocking other players with their bodies, and there’s clearly no strategy; players race back and forth and back and forth along the ice surface, in frantic pursuit of a round black Mcguffin. It’s wearying. And the violence — what on earth is the need for that? Don’t these people realise how ridiculous this sport is?

The Children of HúrinThe hockey fan, meanwhile, finds the baseball game dull. The thing just goes on and on, and nothing happens, and nothing keeps happening at length. There’re no real battles in the game, outside of a few footraces; nobody physically struggles against anyone else. Not one body check. And no flow; a pitcher throws a ball, and then something happens or, most often, doesn’t. There’s no structure of one play constantly organically developing into another. No plot. (There’s also a ludicrous structural imbalance favouring big-market teams, but admittedly that’s really something separate from my metaphor.)

Neither hypothetical fan really understands the game they’re unfamiliar with. They can’t see the structures of the sport, and don’t appreciate the gamesmanship involved. More than that, neither fan appreciates the long traditions of the other’s game. Their tastes have been shaped by the sport they love to the point where the virtues of the other sport simply seem nonsensical, or at best an entertainment of a lower order.

Which is what I found lacking in your article. Your perception of Tolkien and of mythology as boring is, I feel, not a particularly useful critical judgement. All it really tells me is that you as a critic are not likely to be particularly sensitive to the techniques and processes of fantasy fiction. That you do not understand the work you’re talking about.

Which in turn leads me to the second problem I found in the way you approached fantasy: a lack of awareness of traditions within the genre. You didn’t seem to appreciate the diversity of forms within fantasy, nor did you seem to understand that fantasy represents a tradition (or group of traditions) that reaches back at least to William Morris — I’d argue well before him. I felt that weakened your piece in a number of ways.

It’s a very interesting post and I highly recommend you read it if you have any interest in the SF/F genre. I don’t agree with everything Surridge says, of course,* but the core of his theme is exactly right. I would find it hard to agree more with Surridge when he writes: [I]t’s possible to love a book and still disagree with it. This possibility, I think, increases with the greatness of the book. I don’t agree with Dante Alighieri that gays and non-Christians ought to be handed an eternal afterlife of punishment, but I think The Divine Comedy is a great book. And it’s one that I like, even love, beyond my appreciation of Dante’s poetic technique, and intricate structure, and brilliant fusion of reality and imagery and allegory. Because it is a great book, one’s affirmation or rejection of is able to go beyond the affirmation or rejection of the writer’s beliefs.”

Surridge has it exactly right here. I recently finished reading China Mieville’s Embassytown, which I will review sometime in the next few weeks, and while it is a quite literally Satanic novel, it is a very good novel and one that is well worth reading for precisely that reason alone. (And other reasons too, to be sure.) The key point is that the greatness of a literary work is not in any way determined by the degree to which it corresponds with the reader’s beliefs and opinions.

*I will state that it is a grotesque insult to the language to insist that the “transgendered” are not perverse, i.e. “disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired”, no matter how “hateful” or “insensitive” they or anyone else might happen to find the description. One thing I refuse to tolerate is the ideological corruption of language.