Inherit the Science

Smarmy evolutionists and socially handicapped atheists almost invariably bring up the Scopes trial when confronting religious individuals or anyone skeptical about the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection. Of course, as is reliably the case, they know next to nothing about it, it is merely a social marker upon which they’ve learned to place importance in the course of their cultural indoctrination. Jonah Goldberg brings to our attention a few of the more interesting aspects of the science that the defenders of the secular faith still deem so vital to teach in public schools:

“The Races of Man. – At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest race type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America….

Improvement of Man. – If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.

Eugenics. – When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.”

The Remedy. – If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.
– George William Hunter, A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (New York, 1914): pp. 193-196, 253-254, 261-263.

So, the next time someone smirks and brings up Scopes, the monkey trial, or Inherit the Wind in an attempt to assume a posture of scientific superiority, don’t forget to ask them which aspect of elementary biology they deem the most important to teach to American schoolchildren, the mechanism of natural selection, the moral imperative of artificial selection, the criminalization of unfit breeding, the forcible placement of the inferior in asylums, or the supremacy of the white race.

The climate scam is dead

Tokyo says no to Kyoto:

The brief statement, made by Jun Arima, an official in the government’s economics trade and industry department, in an open session, was the strongest yet made against the protocol by one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

He said: “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances.”

The so-called science was always fictional and fraudulent and the economic implications were clearly insane, so it’s about time that the politics began to reflect those realities. As Europe enters what has started off as its coldest winter in 100 years and the global economy collapses into depression, it doesn’t matter how much or how frantically the true believers in global warming wave their hands and agree to concoct new scientific consensuses. The Chicago air exchange has been vaporized and the science-scammers’ gravy train is about to be buried under snow.

Remember this the next time the science fetishists tell you that a scientific consensus is something upon which you not only can, but must, rely.

2018 and 2022

Russia? That makes a degree of sense given the way in which Russian commodity wealth is making itself felt throughout the sports world. And Vladimir Putin is nothing if not a sports enthusiast. But Qatar? It’s not as if I was planning on attending the World Cup no matter where it is, but an Arab country seems like a rather unusual choice of venue given the present difficulties from Afghanistan to Iran.

An Irish Hitler?

Economist Barry Eichengreen reconsiders the European Union:

It pains me to say this. I’m probably the most pro-euro economist on my side of the Atlantic. Not because I think the euro area is the perfect monetary union, but because I have always thought that a Europe of scores of national currencies would be even less stable. I’m also a believer in the larger European project. But given this abject failure of European and German leadership, I am going to have to rethink my position.

The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year.

This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know.

I like Eichengreen’s work, but he is incorrect. The failure of the European Union is not a failure of French and German leadership, it is the structural failure of yet another European experiment in authoritarian, anti-democratic, centralized empire. Now, I tend to doubt that Ireland is going to develop into the 21st century version of National Socialist Germany for numerous reasons, chief among them the fact that it is an island without a navy. But given the harsh burden being imposed on the Irish people by their European and Irish governments for the foreseeable future, one can see where The Economic Consequences of the Peace might make for a timely read right about now.

A Congress of Suckers

In which Washington D.C. is shocked, shocked, to learn that greater part of the money that was so desperately needed to save the American banks that were deemed too big to fail actually went to their European counterparts:

Foreign banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the $3,300bn in emergency credit provided by the Federal Reserve during the crisis, according to new data on the extraordinary efforts of the US authorities to save the global financial system.

The revelation of the scale of overseas lenders’ borrowing underlines the global nature of the turmoil and the crucial role of the Fed as the lender of last resort for the world’s banking sector. However, news that banks such as Barclays of the UK, Switzerland’s UBS and Dexia of Belgium borrowed billions of dollars at favourable terms from US authorities may further anger critics already enraged about the Fed’s rescue of Wall Street….

Barclays was the biggest cumulative borrower from TAF. The UK bank, which bought the US operations of Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy in September 2008, borrowed a cumulative $232bn from the TAF through various subsidiaries.

It’s interesting to see that nearly four times more money went to the biggest European bank than to the biggest American bank. But as we’ve seen everywhere from Ireland and Iceland to the USA, this is always how the process of structural corruption plays out in a modern “representative democracy”. The legislature forces through a pig-in-a-poke by any means necessary, threatening everything from widespread cannibalism to tanks in the streets if the legislators don’t ignore the protests of the people and obediently “address the crisis”. Then, a few years after the fact, it is learned that the actual purpose of the law was entirely different than the one that was provided in order to push it through the legislature.

I don’t have much sympathy for the people, however. Because it doesn’t matter how many times this happens, they will fall for it just as readily the moment that another crisis is announced and another solution to avert it is presented.

Dissecting a defense of QE2

The Federal Reserve policy, that is, not the boat:

David Beckworth has offered a thoughtful, but I believe ultimately flawed, “conservative case” for the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing. While I wholeheartedly share Professor Beckworth’s desire to see the economy improve, and share his concerns that if it does not we may end up with expanded government spending, it is hard to see QE2 as providing the environment of certainty the private sector needs in order to expand.

Professor Beckworth should be commended for clearly spelling out his assumptions. Public debate would be far more fruitful if others did the same. Let’s start with his core assumption: Because the monetary base has been expanding and there’s been little inflation and little increase in consumption, households must be hoarding money. The logic in this case is sound; I disagree with the facts.

First, the good professor argues that spending is far below trend. That is true enough as it goes, but this trend includes a massive housing bubble, where imaginary wealth fueled spending, aided by massive borrowing from abroad. The objective of our economic policies should not be to get back to the top of the previous bubble. It was this desire to replace the lost wealth of the dot-com crash that contributed to the Fed’s juicing of the housing market. All that said, consumption today is higher than at any time during the recent bubble. The primary problem facing our economy is not a lack of demand.

Like Ben Bernanke, Beckworth believes we have had no inflation. Again like the Fed, he arrives at this conclusion by subtracting out of the inflation numbers all the things that real people spend their money on, such as food and energy.

Articles like this and Beckworth’s underline the importance of definitions. The money supply has been going up considerably. The CPI has been increasing, but not rapidly. Therefore, there is no inflation! (Notice that in practice, they never take production into account for the obvious reason that it is impossible to measure in any way that would be meaningful.) If we are to believe these expert economists, it doesn’t matter what is happening to actual prices or outstanding debt levels, not so long as we squint very carefully at only those metrics that we believe to define the situation.

And this is why I pay attention to indicators beyond those that I personally believe to be significant, because unlike the Keynesians, I am more interested in knowing what is actually taking place than I am in manipulating the publicbolstering animal spirits. If I am incorrect and we are headed for hyperinflation rather than debt-deflation, I would certainly like to know as soon as possible. The speed and complexity of economic events means that every economist is going to be proven wrong on a regular basis. Therefore, it behooves anyone with an interest in economics to refuse to be unduly wedded to any specific understanding or definition. This does should not be confused with some sort of conceptual relativism, it is merely a recognition of the inability of even the best economic models to reflect observable reality.

In any event, Calabria is correct. There is no rational defense of quantitative easing, regardless of the way in which one chooses to define inflation. QE2 is not an economic policy, it is the bank rape of the global economy. And by the way, there is an easier way to blow apart Beckworth’s case than Calabria does.

“Because the monetary base has been increasing so rapidly and there has been very little inflation, it must be the case that demand for the money must be increasing even more.”

Very well. Where is that “significant portion of the money supply” upon which the dread hoarders are supposedly sitting? Have bank deposits increased significantly? Beckworth also makes a classic Keynesian blunder in saying: “It fails to recognize that for every debtor there must be a creditor.” (Keynesians absolutely love this macro equivalence nonsense.) Of course, what happens when the debtor defaults….

The brothel or the burqah

The predicted consequences of post-Christian society are already presenting themselves in Britain:

What Alibhai-Brown exposes here is not merely a sexual double-standard, but also an ethnic or religious double-standard, where Muslim men have one standard for “our girls” and another standard for white girls, who are categorically presumed to be immoral.

If Alibhai-Brown has been willing to address the vicious attitudes among (some) British Muslim men that helped foster the environment in which the Derbyshire rape-gang flourished, wouldn’t it behoove someone to examine the problems among British whites that contributed to this horror?

The pimps in Bradford who talked to Alibhai-Brown about “cheap” white girls from “the estates” — British vernacular for government low-income housing, what we Americans would call “the projects” — weren’t just making up a stereotype out of thin air. In 2008, 45% of British births were to unmarried women and, in some low-income areas, the illegitimacy rate was as high as 68%. Such figures certainly indicate that a casual attitude toward pre-marital sex is commonplace in the U.K.

All of the airy secular notions about multicultural societies, sexual equality, universal suffrage, and premarital sex are finally running into the hard brick wall of historical reality. The various hypothetical coulds and shoulds are rapidly transforming into can’ts and don’ts. Now that Christian morality has been abandoned in favor of empty moral relevance, there isn’t any means of rationally arguing with the immigrant pimps who are cheefully turning out Albion’s sluttish daughters while guarding their own with all the primitive paternalism of a dragon guarding his treasure.

Now, set aside your instinctive emotional reactions for a moment and think about which of the two cultures a) truly values its daughters more, and b) is likely to demographically outperform the other. Is it the one that forcibly protects young women from their own behavior or the one that aborts them, deprives them of fathers, and generally abandons them to their momentary impulses? And is there any evidence that the positive aspects of the liberation of Western women, to use the rhetorical phrase, outweigh the negative aspects when viewed from a historical perspective?

As for one common argument to which those who admit the reality of the demographic problem often resort, the idea that the West’s scientific lead will somehow allow it to win any long-term intercultural struggle doesn’t hold water; intelligence agencies wouldn’t be assassinating Iranian scientists if sufficient military science didn’t translate across cultures and the same cultural forces that prevent Western fathers from controlling access to their daughters prevent Western universities from controlling access to their scientific technologies.

Let’s try this again

I think it’s better this time. I’m getting more familiar with Camtasia, which tends to help, and the volume is significantly louder. I also managed to utilize the full screen this time instead of inadvertantly leaving a black rectangle around the perimeter. I also introduced minor errors into two of the graphs; the CPI recalculated for the 0.6% annual error only shows a line including a recalculation for the last ten years and the labels for the dollar devaluation chart were cut off, but I’ve decided to leave it as is so that I can move on to the next one. I found a better font to use for the pop-up notes as well, or “call-outs” as Camtasia calls them.

As before, suggestions for improvement would be welcome. The next video will address why inflation has to include outstanding debt; after that I plan to do videos examining the two conventional definitions of inflation. If you’re interested in being notified when new videos are uploaded, you can subscribe to the Voxiversity Channel.

And the media is right on time

You may recall that in RGD, I wrote that the mainstream media would begin seriously throwing around references to the Great Depression before the end of 2010:

This is starting to throw off more echoes of the Great Depression, where you have a sequence of crises, each touched off by the ones that came before, like dominos falling into some diabolic design. Europe and America thought they’d seen the worst of things by the end of 1930, only to be knocked back down even harder by the contagion of the Creditanstalt crisis. In the US, the crisis ultimately triggered a string of bank failures worse than those sparked by the initial stock market crash, and the worst two years of the Great Depression were 1932-3.

I don’t want to lean too hard on this, as economic commentators (maybe including me) have started seeing Creditanstalt everywhere–in Dubai, in Greece, now in Ireland and maybe Spain. It’s entirely possible that we’ll eventually muddle through without a second major event. But it’s worth remembering that these things take a long time to unfold, and that we are often most vulnerable just when we think we have time for a breather.

The difference, of course, is that the Great Depression 2.0 is going to be much wider, and probably somewhat deeper, than its predecessor. The main reason is that the last time, only the USA attempted to fight it with major government intervention. This time, practically all the governments around the world are doing so. I’m a little off in terms of the timeline since the depression has not been publicly recognized yet, but I have no doubts that we are in it already.

The Fed defends the banksters

This is about as shameless as it gets:

The Truth in Lending Act from 1968 gives borrowers the “right of rescission,” the ability to undo a home refinancing or home equity loan within three years of the closing if the lender did not make proper disclosures — generally of the loan amount, interest rate and repayment terms. The law makes allowances for mere mistakes by the lender, but otherwise requires strict compliance, as well it should: disclosure is the main — often the only — consumer protection in the mortgage market….

The Fed proposal would change all that. Citing concern over banks’ compliance costs, it would require a borrower to pay off the remaining principal before the lender gives up its security interest. That would be clearly impossible for troubled borrowers. So the Fed’s proposal would benefit the creditor who violated the law rather than the borrower, paving the way for foreclosures that otherwise could be avoided.

In other words, the Fed wants to change the law to force a borrower to pay off his mortgage even if the mortgage bank doesn’t hold a legitimate interest in the house. This is sheer insanity. It should be clear from this that the Fed not only knows about the vast extent of the mortgage fraud, but is seeking to further victimize the victims of it. And it is no longer even pretending to be interested in the fate of the homeowning American public anymore.