#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Seldom has a payrolls report been awaited with more bated breath than this morning. Here’s what is anticipated:
U.S. payrolls probably rose by 85,000, according to a Reuters survey, after a measly 18,000 gain in June. The unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 9.2 percent.
I have little doubt that Ben Bernanke was on the phone to the BLS last night, informing them that the number had damn well better be north of 100,000.
Holla has a few questions:
1. Is there a superior race? What groups represent it?
2. Is that race superior because of some sort of divine intervention or plan?
3. Does miscegenation “better” “lower” races?
4. Does Christianity allow for or encourage racialism?
5. Does God prefer whites to non-whites?
6. Why would God create races of people who were inferior to others? If you believe in some sort of evolution, is it a process guided by the/a devil, or did God purposefully create inferior races?
7. If groups of people are genetically pre-programmed to inferiority / violence, do you support genocide? I’ll use the legal definition of genocide here, but limit it to extermination, segregation, and limiting births in a specific population. Why or why not?
1. Superiority entirely depends upon the metric chosen. This question cannot be answered until you provide your favored metric. However, there are without question racial differences ergo the various races – and, for that matter, human sub-species – will presumably be superior to the others at some things and worse at other things.
2. Again, provide the metric by which “superiority” can be determined. “The quality or condition of being superior” requires a means of comparison by which that superiority can be ascertained.
3. I should think so. A half-African, half-Asian child will likely be more athletic than the average Asian and more intelligent than the average African. On the other hand, it will probably be less intelligent than the average Asian and less athletic than the average African. Hence Arthur C. Clarke’s dream of one mocha-colored, post-racial, bisexual humanity.
4. This is like asking if Christianity “permits” gravity. Christianity certainly acknowledges that the different races exist and expects Christians to surmount racial differences within the Church. But it doesn’t require or expect them to pretend such differences don’t exist outside them.
5. I see no reason to believe so. He does appear to be partial to Jews.
6. Perhaps for the same reason a game designer creates non-player characters that are not all as powerful as the protagonist. If there is to be variety, one individual must be superior to another in various ways, and therefore some groups will be superior in various ways.
7. No, I think containment is sufficient. The ancient German example and the modern Ottoman example indicate this to be the case. Violent people are usually content to fight amongst themselves if deprived of the ability to seek easier prey. Of course, the Mongol invasions would tend to argue that this strategy won’t always work. The violent breakups of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union demonstrate that even forced “unity” maintained for decades will collapse as soon as the force imposing it weakens.
Now, in light of this Federal lawsuit, I have three questions in return for Holla:
For at least two years, dozens of students at a Minnesota high school caricatured African-Americans in a homecoming week dress-up day by wearing low-slung pants, oversized sports jerseys and flashing gang signs, according to a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit filed last week claims officials at Red Wing High School knew of the activity and had a duty to stop it because it created a racially hostile environment. It follows a state investigation that found school officials did not fulfill their obligation “to provide an educational atmosphere free of illegal racial discrimination.”
“Acting ghetto, young white men seem to think that is the funniest thing in the world,” she said. “They don’t understand that kind of joke is the worst kind of stereotype.”
1. Did the school create a racially hostile environment by permitting whites to dress like blacks?
2. Should whites be permitted to sue for damages in Federal court when blacks caricature their culture by wearing suits and ties?
3. Is “acting white” also the worst kind of stereotype?
Apparently black-on-white racial violence isn’t the legacy of slavery:
Shaking hands in celebration, these two youths appear to have something to be happy about. But this sickening gesture is actually two murderers triumphantly celebrating their killing of a 16-year-old schoolboy. The footage was captured on CCTV of a London bus as killers Lamarr Gordon and Dale Green fled the scene of the stabbing of Nicholas Pearton in south London.
Today, a judge described the killers as a ‘pack of animals’ as he jailed Gordon, Green and five others for a total of 74 years. The youths were all found guilty of killing Nicholas, who they chased across a park before stabbing him outside a shop doorway in Sydenham.
It is educational to see the repentant “youfs” doing their best thug impressions in the mug shots. The primary lesson is one from the Old West: it is better to be judged by twelve than carried by six. The economic downturn is not going to help, so if you aren’t carrying yet, it’s time to get to a range and start. You may not be able to save your culture or your country, but you can still save yourself.
Jane Ziegelman inadvertently manages to present an effective case against immigration in the New York Times:
TENSIONS over immigration in Europe are flaring this summer, along with questions about what — whether language, dress or diet — makes a foreigner a citizen. Of course, these questions also have a long history in America.
One of the biggest battles over assimilation occurred a century ago in New York City, and the battleground was food. Politicians, public health experts and social reformers were alarmed by what they saw as immigrants’ penchant for highly seasoned cooking…. No immigrant food was more reviled than the garlicky, vinegary pickle. Pungent beyond all civilized standards, toxic to both the stomach and the psyche, the pickle was seen as morally suspect….
Of course, New Yorkers didn’t give up the pickle. By the mid-1920s, immigration quotas had restricted entry to newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe. Americans became less worried about the “alien hordes,” as they were known, and diet reform efforts subsided. Today, New Yorkers can proudly claim the pickle as a regional specialty. If this footnote from our culinary past can be read for a moral, it might be this: Our powers of assimilation are greater than we know. We can speak Spanish, eat sushi and still be American. The proof is in the pickle.
Ms Ziegelman obviously thinks that the fact Americans who once shunned the pickle as depraved ethnic food now happily eat them is an indication of immigrant assimilation and therefore evidence that immigration is desirable. In fact, it proves the exact opposite and underlines the very anti-mass immigration point I have repeatedly made here.
This is perhaps easier to see if we illustrate the fundamental flaw in her logic utilizing the reductio ad absurdum approach. Suppose that instead of pickles, we consider the traditional Indian custom of suttee, which involves burning a widow to death on the pyre of her deceased husband. This is not an American practice, indeed, it is abhorrent to Americans, particularly when it is involuntary.
But suppose 30 million Indian Hindus immigrated to America and brought their vibrant funeral tradition with them. And suppose that after a few decades of protesting suttee as a particularly vicious form of murder, Americans gradually became accustomed to the practice. After all, burning all those useless widows reduced Social Security costs, permitted a more orderly transfer of familial assets to the next generation, and freed up some desirable housing stock that was largely being wasted on elderly women. It might even help increase the money supply, as elderly, unemployed women tend to neither spend nor invest their money, but prefer to hoard it.
So, after 100 years, in which a sustained campaign led by third-generation Indian Americans took place, imagine the various legal impositions have been removed. Many, if not most non-Indian Americans are now cheerfully burning their widowed mothers and grandmothers on pyres; it has become a popular new American funeral tradition. Now let us revisit the question previously posed. Is an America where Americans burn widows to death, speak Spanish, and eat pickles and sushi not still America? To this, the sane and rational mind can only answer: “No, it is not, unless America refers to nothing more than a geographic location.”
When ethnic and cultural differences survive the immigration process and impose themselves on the broader American population, this is not assimilation, it is the exact opposite of assimilation. It is transformation. While some transformations are admittedly more significant than others, Ziegelman’s article is nevertheless a powerful reminder of why mass immigration should not be permitted by any healthy, self-respecting society and why it will destroy the traditional way of life to the extent that the customs and ideologies of those those permitted to immigrate depart from indigenous traditions.
Still, it’s only Greece… for now:
Worried about whether the banks will stay in business, Greeks have been taking their life savings out of accounts and sticking them in metal slits in basement vaults. The boxes are so popular that the bank has doubled the rent on them in the past year – and still every day between five and 10 customers request one. This bank ran out of spares months ago. The clerk leans over: “I’ve been working in a bank for 31 years, and I’ve never seen a panic like this.”
Official figures back him up. In May alone, almost €5bn (£4.4bn) was pulled out of Greek deposits, as part of what analysts describe as a “silent bank run”.
Considering the size of the Greek economy, that’s a sizable amount. Sarah Palin’s comments about the U.S.A. turning into Greece aside, I haven’t seen many signs of imminent U.S. bank runs, but then, it’s never a bad idea to keep an amount of ready cash and coin available. Especially of Ron Paul’s bill somehow manages to pass the House.
Rep. Ron Paul on Monday introduced legislation that would lower the federal government’s debt by canceling the roughly $1.6 trillion in debt held by the Federal Reserve.
And why not go ahead and cancel it? If the total amount of debt doesn’t matter because one person’s asset is another’s liability, then obviously canceling those debts can’t possibly matter any more than amassing them did. Since we are assured that the government’s growing debt to itself is not inflationary, then surely canceling that debt could not be deflationary.
NATE: Acceptable Man Behavior.
If your daddy, or grand-daddy dies, you get to cry. Crying at any other time for any other reason is unacceptable….
BANE: I’ll cry any damn time I want to. I am very sensitive. I will probably cry while I am whipping your invincible ass. I cry where appropriate in movies. And then I blow my nose in the hair of the girl in front of me, and cry while I whip her boyfriend’s un-understanding ass. Your post makes me sniffle a little. God gave yuh tear ducts for more than clearing gunsmoke from your bloodshot eyes. Dammit.
NATE: Great. This is what I have to look forward to. When the shit hits the fan… No doubt I’ll end up stuck in a foxhole with Bane… I’ll be cold… tired… and sittin’ there listenin’ to him cry.
***NOTE TO SELF***
Add suicide pill to bug-out-bag.
Derek Thompson of the Atlantic considered these four charts from Calculated Risk to the be scariest economic charts he’s seen all year. I can only conclude that he has not seen the following chart, which shows the “credit gap” between where the U.S. economy would be if credit growth had simply proceeded at its 50-year post-WWII average and where it actually stands after Q1-2011. The chart shows, in no uncertain terms, how completely unprecedented the situation is, and also demonstrates that the scale of the problem is much, much larger than is presently indicated by the various employment, production and consumption statistics.
Nor, I presume, has he seen the chart that accompanied it in last week’s column, which shows how the composition of that stagnant debt has been shifting since 2008.
This chart explains the reason behind the determination of both political parties to raise the debt ceiling, as federal debt HAS to continue to increase, and increase significantly, in order to make up for the ongoing contractions in the private debt sectors, which so far has amounted to $600 billion in the Household sector and $3 trillion in the Financial sector. The truly frightening thing is that it is perfectly possible for the Financial sector debt to contract much more severely; it grew from 0.85% of total debt in 1946 to 32.7% in 2008 and presently stands at 25.23%. Considering what $3 trillion in debt-deleveraging has done to date, imagine how much more economic pain would be involved in an additional $13.8 trillion contraction.
As Steve Keen has chronicled since 2005, the mainstream economists are still paying absolutely no attention to these apocalyptic signs because they consider debt to be “exogenous” to their system models. Paul Krugman’s words in his latest paper are straight out of Paul Samuelson’s 1948 textbook.
“Ignoring the foreign component, or looking at the world as a whole, the overall level of debt makes no difference to aggregate net worth — one person’s liability is another person’s asset.“
– (Paul Krugman and Gauti B. Eggertsson, 2010, pp. 2-3)
Of course, this gives us a clear warning with regards to how The Masters of the Universe are going to try to fix the problem. Big it up and centralize it. Since the U.S. inability to pay back its foreign debt is becoming increasingly obvious, the answer will be to “look at the world as a whole”, or convert a national economy into a global one in which the national debt no longer counts because “one person’s liability is another person’s asset”. As long as the macro accounting all balances, how could there possibly be any problem? And since the European Union has shown that the stresses of monetary union cannot survive without political union to enforce austerity programs and forced transnational redistributions, this means global governance will be a necessary, indeed integral, part of the mainstream economic program.
Because, after all, forcibly installing a one-world government makes so much more sense than simply replacing your inoperative and outdated economic model with one that actually works!
VDH on a murder that is not only a snapshot of a sick society, but serves as a cogent metaphor for Vibrant America:
A woman found slain at a Hanford car wash this week was killed randomly when a 17-year-old gang member happened to see her while taking a walk, Hanford police said Thursday. Denise McVay was washing her car — something she did several times a week — early Tuesday morning before work.
The teen was wandering the streets after leaving a party when he saw McVay at the Royal Car Wash on Garner Avenue at about 5 a.m. and decided to kill her, police said. The teen “simply wanted to kill somebody that night” and McVay, 49, was “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Capt. Parker Sever said. “It was a purely random act.”
The teen stabbed McVay several times and slit her throat.
The teen took McVay’s money and her car, Sever said, and drove to the home of a fellow gang member, Mauricio Ortiz, 18, of Hanford.
Consider the societal changes that have taken place in order for this incident to have taken place. McVay was likely unmarried, otherwise she wouldn’t have been washing her car, her husband probably would have done it for her. In pre-Vibrant America, there is a two-thirds chance she wouldn’t have been working at all, but would have been supported by her husband. In neither case would she have been at the car wash at 5 AM.
Prior to LBJ’s Great Society, the “teen” would likely have not been free to wander around at 5 AM, as he would have been sleeping or getting ready to go to his own job, as the various levels of government were far less likely to providing funds for unemployed youth to spend their days and nights in aimless partying.
And, of course, without the efforts of Senators Kennedy and Hart, and Rep. Celler, it is far less likely that either the murderous teen – who is almost certainly Hispanic – or his fellow gang member, Mr. Ortiz, would be in the country to commit the murders that Americans would not commit.
The picture of the future Vibrant America is becoming increasingly clear. It is shaping up to be a place where childless and unmarried white women will be expected to fend for their interests against the perceived interests of the growing third world underclasses. Somehow, I don’t think this was quite the gloriously liberated future that the feminists had in mind.
It is impressive how quickly the Republican Establishment – for whom you know I am said to be the Voice – managed to flip most of the Congressional class of 2010. Remember this when you’re urged to vote Republican in support of small government next fall. Remember this when the Tea Party stalwart tells you that he’s going to Washington to change how things are done there and represent the interests of those who elected him:
The House GOP freshmen were sent to Washington with a mandate from their constituents to rein in spending and put an end to the practice of the federal government borrowing far more than it takes in. But at the end of a furious spending battle that gripped Washington, most of the second coming of the Republican revolution voted for a bipartisan deal that increases the debt ceiling and cuts the deficit, raising the specter of disenchantment and possibly retribution from the activists who propelled them into office last fall.
Some of the tea-party driven supporters will undoubtedly conclude that their freshmen were bought out by the Republican establishment. All told, 59 freshmen voted for the debt bill – two-thirds of the rookie class – and 28 voted against it.
But the freshmen tell a different story of how they came to support the bill, one born out of listening sessions with leadership, an evolution in understanding the economic consequences of a default and opportunities to vote their priorities on the House floor. And, they say, their leadership was able to make them feel enough like valued members that when the time for tough votes came, they were ready to be team players in lending their support.
The Republican establishment has at least 30 years of experience in breaking the freshmen to heel. They did it en masse in 1994 and they’ve done it again now. This is why it is not merely stupid, but by Einstein’s metric, insane, to attempt to change anything by electing Republicans. The Tea Party has to break away and go third party if it is to have any chance at all at reducing government spending.
It probably won’t work that way either, given the changed demographics of the American electorate, but it should be obvious that it is mathematically impossible to effect any meaningful change over time if two-thirds of the “elected revolutionaries” can be successfully suborned within the first year of their taking office.
It’s the debt, not the debt ceiling. Moody’s announces a negative outlook for U.S. credit:
The U.S., rated Aaa since 1917, was placed on negative outlook, Moody’s said in a statement today as it confirmed the rating after President Barack Obama signed into law a plan to lift the nation’s borrowing limit and cut spending. A decision on the rating may be made within two years, or “considerably sooner,” according to Moody’s Steven Hess.
The debt-limit compromise “is a positive step toward reducing the future path of the deficit and the debt levels,” Hess, senior credit officer at Moody’s in New York, said in a telephone interview. “We do think more needs to be done to ensure a reduction in the debt to GDP ratio, for example, going forward.”
When I published RGD in 2009, I don’t remember anyone being concerned about debt levels except Credit Suisse and a few Austrian economists talking about Debt/GDP. It is a subject that few Neo-Keynesian or Monetarist economists are equipped to understand because it simply doesn’t factor into their models. Even those few prognosticators who are recognized for anticipating the 2008 crash, like Nouriel Roubini, didn’t start talking much about it, (except occasionally for the Japanese situation), until the middle of 2010. So, it’s interesting to see that it’s now being actively discussed in mainstream financial media outlets such as Bloomberg.
However, they’re still only looking at Federal debt to GDP rather than the more important figure of total debt to GDP. Keep in mind that it would be highly unusual for Moody’s to actually do any serious downgrading until it is already completely apparent in the credit markets. The ratings agencies are usually three days late and millions, if not billions, of dollars short.