#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
“[B]efore some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people one cannot instruct.”
– Rhetoric, Aristotle
With the benefit of an additional 2,333 years of human history, the only way this statement could be improved upon would be to replace the word “some” with “most”.
It’s always a good idea to verify that you’re not being subjected to a snow job. Or worse, subjecting yourself to one:
One of the most common errors in applied mathematical analysis is to fail to notice when a mathematical argument proves too much. This occurs when the same argument can be deployed more generally than in the particular case being considered, and in other cases where it can be deployed it leads to conclusions that are clearly absurd.[2] Though this can occur more generally — in nonmathematical reasoning — it is a particularly acute danger in applied mathematics, due to the fact that understanding mathematical arguments generally requires a high level of training and intellectual effort. It is very easy to get lost in equations and theorems and fail to see the forest for the trees.
An Example of Applied Mathematics Going Horribly WrongLet me give you an example of this phenomenon in action. The Australian government recently announced that it will attempt to enact legislation to impose a tax on industrial carbon-dioxide emissions, with some of the revenue being earmarked as compensation for affected consumers. At a pro-government political rally in Sydney, a young activist proudly displayed what he clearly thought to be a devastating economic argument in favor of this “carbon-pricing” scheme.
To those readers who have not studied neoclassical microeconomics, this is probably just a big bunch of gibberish. But to those who have, it should look quite familiar. The graph is a “utility analysis,” which purports to show that imposing a tax on polluting products (which increases their price) and simultaneously giving compensation back to consumers would make them better off than they were initially — in other words, it purports to show that the Australian government’s proposed scheme, or something like it, would make people better off.
This is a classic example of a mathematical analysis that proves too much. Notice, in the graph in the sign, that the two products are labeled “C” (for clean products) and “P” (for polluting products). Although they are labeled in this way, the fact that the horizontal axis represents the consumption of polluting products plays absolutely no part in the analysis. There is nothing in the graph representing the pollution that these products cause, and so the label is merely a name. The letter “P” is nothing more than an algebraic symbol, one that could just as easily stand for pies, pastries, printers, pizzas, polka lessons, picture frames, pole dancing, ponies, popcorn, pool tables, poppy-seed muffins, pornography, postcards, potatoes, potpourri, poultry, pumpkins, puppies, pudding, or any other good or service (including goods and services that don’t start with the letter “P”).
Thus, by the exact same mathematical argument, the graph implicitly purports to show that a government can make people better off by taxing any good and then compensating the consumers of that good. Though the government taxes the polluting products in the graph, the sign maker could just as easily have switched the labels on the axes so that the government taxes the clean products, and the result, according to the same analysis, would still be a consumer who is better off.
Actually, one of the problems that I occasionally encounter is that if I spend too long analyzing something, it eventually all starts to look completely nonsensical. I thought I had finished a draft of the third inflation video last night, then found myself going back and checking on a few details… and eventually got to the point where even a simple calculation like the difference between nominal and real GDP was beginning to look like an ancient series of glyphs scratched out by the Mad Arab. At one point, I had either proved that inflation cannot, in fact, exist, or that there has not been any economic growth since approximately 1566. Color me skeptical.
I don’t think it helped that I’d been reading a few chapters from the Aristotle’s Rhetoric earlier in the day. Which, I notice, makes it clear that the sign referenced in the article is an enthymeme attempting to pass itself off as a syllogism. However, as Mr. O’Neill adroitly demonstrates, it is only an apparent syllogism and therefore the enthymeme is a false one.
Anyhow, I am prescribed a solution: close the spreadsheets, put down the Aristotle, and find a nice, mindless novel to read. As it happens, I’d been meaning to get around to R. Scott Bakker’s books anyhow. So don’t expect much in the way of insight or brilliance this weekend.
In this week’s Voxic Shock podcast, I speak with the historian John Julius Norwich about the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, the great historians of history, and the outlook for the secular West meeting the challenge of Islamic expansion.
Operation Wetback II is long past overdue:
Many middle class people are leaving the state for Texas, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, where taxes and the cost of living are lower. In the past decade, 1.5 million more people left California for other states than came to California from another part of the United States, according to analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.
New births and international immigration make up the difference, but even immigration has slowed from sky-high rates in the 1990s, according to demographers, as people such as Maribel Mota, a recent arrival from Mexico, find themselves unemployed and behind on rent in the Golden State.
Mota, a 38-year-old who spoke to CNN through a translator, said she wants to go to Minnesota, where she hears there are more job opportunities and rent is lower. She’ll trade sun for snow, she said, if it means she can make ends meet.
No doubt those Californians won’t take long before setting about californicating their places of refuge. The problem is that if the legal immigrants are not sent back along with the illegal ones, it won’t be more than 20 years before the Aztlan independence movement becomes an issue. It’s pretty simple. Either the idiotic “melting pot” ideal is not only abandoned but aggressively rejected or the nation collapses amid civil war.
Turbo Timmy is looking to leave:
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has signaled to White House officials that he’s considering leaving the administration after President Barack Obama reaches an agreement with Congress to raise the national debt limit, according to three people familiar with the matter.
It’s telling that he thinks it is safe to assume that the Republicans, for all their brave talk about not raising the debt limit, are going to cave, wouldn’t you say?
The post-WWII period has not been as peaceful as is usually presumed:
We may think the world enjoyed periods of relative freedom from war between the Cold War and 9/11 but the new research by Professor Mark Harrison from at the University of Warwick’s the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, and Professor Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University, shows that the number of conflicts between pairs of states rose steadily from 6 per year on average between 1870 and 1913 to 17 per year in the period of the two World Wars, 31 per year in the Cold War, and 36 per year in the 1990s.
Professor Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick said: “The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913.”
One of the key drivers is the number of countries, which has risen dramatically – from 47 in 1870 to 187 in 2001.
As the historically aware observer increasingly gathers, the second-worst president in the history of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, has an awful lot for which to answer. It is largely his pre-neocon vision of world democratic revolution and declaration of U.S. support for tribal self-determination around the globe that is behind this increase in the amount of international conflict. I note that this study does not take the rising amount of intra-national violence into account, or the historical picture would likely look even worse.
All the clueless, self-styled “conservatives” who think they can simultaneously support small government and foreign wars need to have “$4 trillion” stamped on their small, sloping foreheads. No amount of militarily and historically illiterate blathering about how “we gots to kill dem ober deah so’s dey doan kills us heah” is going to change the fact that borrowing trillions of dollars in order to kill a few hapless goat humpers is demonstrably neither a sustainable nor an effective approach to war:
Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released Wednesday. The final bill will reach at least $3.7 trillion and could be as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.
In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaida leaders behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion. Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020.
The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due and many billions more in expenses that cannot be counted, according to the study.
I’ve heard some say that the “isolationism” of Ron Paul and others is dangerous and crazy. The fact is that if you do not subscribe to that “isolationism”, you are without question historically illiterate, militarily ignorant, and a complete, unmitigated financial moron. That $4 trillion spent on the unnecessary Bush-Obama wars could have been used to completely eliminate all of the state and local government debt in the country while reducing outstanding federal debt by 16 percent.
What profit it a nation to guard the borders of Germany and South Korea while leaving its own unmanned?
Do let’s hear more about how wonderful free trade is and what an intrinsic benefit it must be to everyone:
Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China. Wired reports the chips weren’t only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a “back-door” and could have been remotely shut down at any time. If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it’s friend or foe.
Apparently foreign chip makers are often better at making cheap microchips and U.S. defense contractors are loathe to pass up the better deal.
The important lesson here is that economics are not and cannot be the sole factor taken into consideration when one is contemplating the pros and cons of free trade. The fact that there is no blanket economic justification for free trade is an entirely separate matter.
Dr. Helen writes about the lack of media response to Thomas Ball’s suicide:
There are some pundits and commenters who have said that Ball does not deserve any compassion or that he should hardly be the poster boy for men’s rights because he may or may not have been jerked around by the family court. He did slap his then four-year-old daughter, giving her a cut on the lip, when she refused to obey him after three verbal warnings, etc. This isn’t great, but it doesn’t warrant jail time, arrest, or having one’s children taken away. If it does, there are so many women out there who qualify for the same treatment, I shudder to think about it.
But whether you think Ball is a good man, a bad man, or a crazy man doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Ball’s death — and the reaction to it — should serve as a wake-up call to how men and boys are being treated in a society that devalues their very existence. Males commit suicide at much higher rates than women and no one cares; they are treated unfairly by courts and no one bats an eye. They are abused by the women in their life and people say “tough shit.” So they ratchet up the game a little and start setting themselves on fire to get some attention to their cause and, once again, the media and society react with: “So what?”
Can we really stand by and do nothing about the treatment of men and boys in our society much longer? When I look at the picture of Mr. Ball in flames on the steps of that courthouse, I think the only answer is a resounding: “Hell, no!”
As I previously wrote, I think Ball’s chosen form of suicide was a relatively futile one and I suspect the media would have paid considerably more attention if he had instead set one or more of the many cogs in the family court system on fire. Like every other bureaucratic industry, the abuses of the family court system are not going to be ended by those who presently perpetrate them; there are too many parties with a vested interest in the continuation of the system. Since not only the system, but the law itself has been corrupted, the only possible solutions have to be external. The ideal outcome is the most likely one, which is that the family court system will collapse naturally with the rest of the bureaucratic system when extend-and-pretend finally runs out of new government debt to keep it going.
However, it doesn’t take an expert on the Tamil Tigers or the Sendero Luminoso to note that if a portion of the estimated 5,000 annual divorce-related male suicides ever become murder-suicides, this would likely trigger a sudden and urgent impetus towards revision of the mechanics of the current system.
Ball’s self-immolation illustrates the intrinsic problem with socially engineered injustice. While injustice is always wrong, it can at least be socially stable when directed against minorities or the unproductive. Targeted injustice against the productive majority whose labor is required for social survival is downright madness. Even if we set aside the interests of the unfortunate Mr. Ball, who benefits from his incindiary death? His ex-wife will receive no alimony. His children will receive no child support and will likely grow up with more than their fair share of social pathologies common among the fatherless. The state will receive no more taxes and the economy will no longer benefit from either his labor or his consumption.
And finally, as others have pointed out, if slapping a child somehow justifies burning at the stake, logic dictates that 21st century America will have to burn more women to death than the witch hunters of the 16th and 17th century ever did.
The electronic document released by the White House is confirmed to be a forgery:
Bitmap text versus antialiasing text: Notice the bitmap X checkbox in question compared to the antialiased X checkbox in question “e” – major inconsistency.
Additionally, the checkboxes are slightly different widths and positioned differently. (Pixels of checkboxes on the bottom right overlap line pixels below, almost as if the boxes were copied and pasted and manually positioned).
Some letter characters are identical, pixel for pixel, almost as if they were copied and pasted and then moved into position. For example, the lowercase “i” in the word Inside is identical to the first “i” in judicial. There are many similar identical instances as there are dissimilar typesetting examples of different fonts – both suggesting compilation of a document digitally.
Irregular typesetting spacing which is not consistent with proportional spacing used by computers or monospacing used by typewriters in 1961 – but is consistent with copy and pasting and moving letters around. Example: The word “Yes,” which has too much space between “Y” and “e” and not enough space between “e” and “s.”
“A normal document scanned and saved as a PDF file would not display these inconsistencies unless the document had been digitally altered,” she said. “A digitally altered document is by definition a manufactured document, or in everyday parlance – a forgery.”
“My guess is that the creator of this document was inexperienced when it comes to a multitude of concepts in using Adobe software,” Zebest said. “Whoever forged the Obama birth certificate might have known enough to be dangerous, but not enough to know how to cover up their tracks.”
I find it remarkable that the White House is releasing forged documents and the mainstream media still has absolutely no interest in the story despite the fact that the release of the document disproved nearly all of their previous defenses of Mr. Obama/Soetoro/Soebarkah’s presidential eligibility. No doubt they’ll all be taken completely by surprise when Obama declines the Democratic nomination for “health reasons” or “to spend more time with his family”.
We don’t have a lapdog media any more, but one that sees its primary role as acting as the federal government’s defense attorney.