VPFL Week 5

65 Bane Sidhe (4-1)
60 Greenfield Grizzlies (1-4)

75 Judean Rhyneauxs (3-2)
40 Moundsview Meerkats (1-4)

59 RR Redbeards (2-3)
64 Meigs Marauders (3-2)

93 Blackmouth Banksters (3-2)
31 Valders Quixotes (3-2)

44 Winston Reverends (3-2)
83 MS Swamp Spartans (2-3)

As always, this is your weekly NFL discussion thread. I’m still not that worried about the Vikings. I had expected them to be 2-2 at this point; they’ve been in every game and if it weren’t for a failed fourth-and-goal, they’d be exactly where they should be at this point in the season. The Bears are a mirage and it’s the Packers actually who look a lot worse than they were supposed to be this season.

Favre’s elbow, the offensive line, and the injuries in the secondary are concerns, of course, (yes, Nate, Farve’s injury is an issue but the arm isn’t “shot”), but as Favre and Moss get integrated with the offense, I expect them to go on a roll. And then everyone who is writing them off now will get more excited than the win streak justifies and start proclaiming them Super Bowl champs. I think they’ll take the NFC North and after that, who knows? Certainly no one appears to be staking a serious claim to NFC dominance yet.

A dialogue with Ilana (UPDATED)

In which we discuss the Great MBS/Foreclosure Fraud. Keep in mind that Ilana and I are not only WND colleagues, but like-minded libertarians as well, so please note that this isn’t the least bit personal on either side. I think Ilana’s objections are important and illustrative of the challenge in accepting the existence of an institutional fraud of this magnitude, hence this detailed response.

It must be obvious to readers of this site that I would strongly disagree with the case my colleague Vox Day makes against the strict rule of law and for grand-conspiracy….

Distilled, the argument for all-out sweetness and love for the foreclosed upon is that, because the banks are embroiled in the fractional reserve system, they should suffer the worst of fates.

That’s like saying that because the legal system is generally corrupt, murderers should go free; or because an owner who sells a parcel of land partakes in the property tax theft, the buyer should not have to pay him. Or because businesses often act like exuberant idiots during a phase of the business cycle—some as offenders; others as victims—their customers need not pay them. And on and on.

This is chaos theory; create chaos, and out of it, something good may come. And never mind that not all bankers are crooks; that not all of them understand the theoretical aspects of the system in which they are embroiled; and that not nearly enough bad things are said about the defaulters.

As to Vox’s point, it does not follow from “the mere fact of their focus on the borrowing parties rather than the banks,” that this “is proof that they are intentionally evading the real issue.”

Not in logic, at least.

Finally, the laws of economics are natural laws. Whoever is involved, it is categorically good that responsible buyers get to pick up foreclosed properties, and that the mortgage miasma is cleared and cleansed away.

To be honest, I completely missed her statement about my supposed opposition to “the strict rule of law”, otherwise I would have addressed that in my following email by pointing out that the “strict rule of law” completely forbade everything that the mortgage banks did in ignoring the land title system in favor of pushing 65 million mortgage transfers through MERS in only six years instead. But here was my actual response to her:

With all due respect, it is clear you don’t understand the issues at stake in the “foreclosure fraud” issue. You’re missing the relevant point because you’re only looking at the second wave of the frauds, rather than the first. The greater portion of the fraud occurred long before the very first defaulting homeowner was late on his first payment. There is absolutely no question – none – that the banks are
guilty of massive amounts of criminal and tax fraud prior to their subsequent commitment of the foreclosure-related frauds.

What happened was that the banks wanted to create mortgage-backed securities, but selling the securities legally required transferring the notes and titles as per the land title system. But that would have cost a lot in filing fees and all but eliminated their profits, so they simply ignored the law, created an electronic registry called MERS, and thereby ripped off large financial investors by selling worthless paper. The foreclosure-based fraud about which you have such doubts is merely the cover-up that resulted from the way in which a need to foreclose exposed the initial fraud.

I haven’t gotten permission from Ilana yet to post her email verbatim, but I will summarize it as follows, (and either replace the summary or correct it depending upon her preference.)

“We have a 3-stage process, not a 2-stage process. Bankers, most of whom really don’t know squat about Austrian theory, were compelled by law to grant rotten loans to the protected species of the politicians. They invented a product to do that.

Sounds quite creative; sounds like the unintended consequences of politics.

I began reading the column you recommended. It begins with a one-case study as its proof. This is statistically worse than insignificant. It graduates to assertion. Then adds another one-case study. You may be right, but the data in the column you provided does not prove your case.

Understand: I am not a partisan here; I’m not pro-banker. So far, I just don’t see good evidence for your case.”

This was my response:

I’m afraid you’re still a little too under the influence of the banking industry’s defense theory. You are repeating some of their talking points and focusing on some irrelevant side issues instead of the salient matters. What is irrelevant about the “one-case study” and the anecdotes being “statistically worse than insignificant” is that they are merely illustrative examples of an easily provable fact that applies to more than 60 million mortgages. It is quite clear that you do not know what the local land title laws are, (and being a Canadian by way of South Africa, I certainly wouldn’t expect you to; I’ve been in Europe for a decade and I have absolutely no idea what the local property laws are), so your attempt to use general principles to try theorizing around that gap in your knowledge is doomed to failure.

It’s not even possible for you to suggest that “the unintended consequences of politics” compelled the bankers to provide the loans to the favored classes because a) most of the relevant land title laws involved are older than the United States; they derive from the English common law, b) the MBS-selling preceded most of the laws that “compelled” them, and b) the number of loans that were fraudulently transferred far exceed the number of mortages sold that required any compelling. To quote Wikipedia: “What the case law is consistently holding is that MERS cannot do what it has purported to do (and has done in what appears to be over sixty (60) million mortgage transactions nationally).” The lawyers for MERS have even admitted this in court! “During the course of the hearing, the Court repeatedly raised the “MERS as nominee” issues to counsel for the Defendants, [MERS and OneWestBank] with said counsel finally admitting, upon repeated inquiry by the Court, that MERS cannot transfer promissory notes.”

So, this isn’t a case of bad politicians causing bad behavior by the banks. In fact, the bad politicians, the bad bureaucrats, and some of the bad state and federal courts have been repeatedly attempting to cover for the bad behavior by the banks. The banks are absolutely not on the side of freedom and capitalism here; they are deeply and actively involved in the corrupt politics themselves. Natural law also points to the guilt of the banks; they forgave the mortgage debt through their actions, then attempted to retroactively claim they had not forgiven it.

On a related, note, Jim Sinclair shares some interesting information.

I had dinner with my former partner, then lead director of and CEO of Bear Stearns. I could not contain myself so I asked him why he did so much business in OTC derivatives which were certain to bankrupt them. The answer I got was it was more than 50% of their profit. The right answer should have been it was more than 80% of their earnings.

UPDATE I: Ilana wrote back to note that she intends to further contemplate the matter. She added:

“You know very well that my problem with your argument, Vox, is that it teeters on grand conspiracy. One of your readers in the comments section picked this up quite well. The state and its cronies preside over the disintegration of civil society, but they do so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy.”

Perhaps it does teeter on grand conspiracy. But as I have pointed out in the past, calling something conspiracy doesn’t make it go away and the undeniable fact is that 65 million mortgages were transferred through MERS since 2004. Furthermore, it is highly probable that many of them, and perhaps even all 65 million, were transferred illegally according to laws that predate the Carter administration by decades, if not centuries. My skepticism is well known to readers and critics alike and it NEVER occurred to me that the mortgage fraud could possibly run this deep and this wide. I was sure that the reason the banks were mysteriously reluctant to foreclose upon properties in default was because doing so would expose their accounting irregularities with regards to the book value of the defaulting properties. It almost defies imagination that any bank would ever knowingly destroy the paper trail that is the only security for its interest in the loans it has made. And yet, we now know that many of them, including all the big, bailed-out banks, did.

Mailvox: fixing historical illiteracy

BN inquires on where to start:

I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to suggest a starting point for a person like myself who has become more and more interested in fixing my historical illiteracy problem. I’m looking for both advice on what to read in terms of a decent survey of world history and also what particular portions of human history are worth diving into and reading up on in finer-grained detail than the survey level. I’m not even sure where to start because it seems like drinking from a fire hose with all the possible resources out there. Any advice?

I would start by dividing up world history into sections and deciding where to go from there. Here is how I tend to think of them.

Ancients: Greeks, Romans, Egyptians.
Medieval: England, Crusades, France, Germany
Renaissance: England, Italy, Netherlands
Generals: Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon
Asian: China, Japan, Post-WWII
American: Colonial, 19th Century, Civil War, 20th Century

While one could argue in favor of the Khmer kings or the Mayan empire, if you are up on those six general topics, you will at least be much more historically literate than nearly anyone you will encounter in casual conversation. For a brief overview, I would start with something like The Columbia History of the World. Then pick whatever topic looks most interesting at the moment and select two books/series for each of the subsections that I listed above, one historical and one original.

For example, if you picked Ancients, an excellent start would be Plutarch’s Lives, which pairs the lives of famous Greeks with famouse Romans. Then, for an original document, I would suggest reading Caesar’s Commentaries on the Conquest of Gaul and the Civil Wars. More to come….

Mailvox: In which a solution is proposed

The prophetic tale of the Great Home Distribution:

“The house next door has stood empty for four months now, ever since our neighbors were foreclosed on and evicted. The bank isn’t even trying to sell it. Instead, a week or
two ago they sent over a crew to blow out the waterlines, fill ’em with antifreeze, and basically winterize the place, as you would do if you had a cabin in the deep north woods and were planning to close it up for the winter.

The kicker: the bank involved is one of those “evil” banks that’s currently in the news for possible mortgage fraud.

So here is my question for you: how soon do you think it will be before the fed.gov starts seizing such houses (since the title trails are hopelessly f*cked-up anyway), declaring them Affordable Housing, and redistributing them to the Deserving Poor?

After all, it’s worked so well in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. If you can seize the property of wealthy landowners and redistribute it to the peasants, you can count on the loyal support of the peasants in the next election — or riot.

Can’t you just see The Chosen One and his teleprompter up there on the podium? Thundering, “If we lose this election, the Republicans will take away your home!” (Because after all, once the gov’t has given it to you, it’s yours, right? Even if you didn’t work for it, don’t deserve it, and they had to steal it from someone else to give it to you?)

Interesting times, indeed. Figure the first couple such houses will go, with great fanfare, to the widows and families of Iraq and Afghan war casualties, or to a few wheelchair-bound disabled vets themselves. After all, who could object to giving extravagant gov largesse to widows, orphans, and cripples?

Then, once it becomes old news, the Great Redistribution begins…”

One nation, under fraud

An excellent article that not only sums up the relevant issues, but provides some stunning examples of how deep and pervasive the banking fraud is:

Tomorrow, a bank—not your bank, but any bank—could evict you from your home. Even if you didn’t know the bank was foreclosing. Even if your mortgage is paid off. Even if you never had a mortgage. Even if the bank doesn’t hold a single piece of paper that you signed. And major banks not only know this fact, but have spent millions of dollars to defend it in court. Why? The answer starts with a Jacksonville homeowner named Patrick Jeffs.

In 2007, Deutsche Bank sued Jeffs for his home, which is a necessary step in the process of foreclosing on a homeowner in the state of Florida. Curiously, despite the fact that he immediately hired a law firm to defend his property when he found out about the foreclosure, neither Jeffs nor his attorneys were at the trial. That’s because it had already happened. Deutsche won by default because Jeffs wasn’t able to travel backwards in time to attend, even though the trial featured a signed affidavit indicating that he had been served his court summons.

The only problem with the summons Jeffs supposedly received was that it had been conjured out of thin air.

In June of this year, a Florida court ruled that the document was fraudulent, as the person who was supposed to make sure Jeffs was served had mysteriously received a copy of the summons before the lawsuit had even been filed, and Jeffs never even saw the copy. The text of that ruling was posted on various financial news websites in September. The lawyers that Jeffs hired to defend his case say that fraud such as this is not uncommon. It’s a widespread problem, and it has cost countless families their homes.

“I think it’s safe to say that 95% of the foreclosure cases in Florida involve some form of fraud on the part of the bank,” David Goldman of Apple Law Firm, PLLC told The Daily Caller in a phone interview. “It’s probably closer to 99%. And the court system is helping them get away with it.”

…Banking officials happily told the Florida court system in 2009 that the documents had been shredded. At the time, lenders were trying to prevent some foreclosure rule changes, so they sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court. Among other things, the letter stated that it was standard practice to destroy mortgage papers once the mortgages were sold into MERS in order to avoid confusion. (“A” for effort on that front.) Something funny happens when tearing up a contract, and it might best be explained by a certain common phrase. That phrase is, “Tearing up a contract.” Unless very specific conditions are met, the contract becomes null. Void. Not worth the paper it is printed on.

It is now totally impossible and downright dishonest for anyone to attempt to somehow blame the ongoing collapse of the U.S. financial system on irresponsibly indebted homeowners or minor clerical errors on the part of low-level bank employees. Exposing the full extent of the fraud and placing the financial responsibilities where they belong will bring the housing system to a screeching halt, as indeed it must. But it is not a question of risking the breakdown of the system nor can the banks threaten to hold the system hostage because the system is already broken, having been fatally sabotaged by the mass mortgage transfer fraud (it’s far more than mere foreclosure fraud) of the mortgage banks.

Someone asked the other day if this explosive situation was really all about the short-sighted greed of bankers and if the bankers could really have been so incredibly stupid. To which the only answer is: yes, apparently. This is an object lesson in repeatedly looking the other way and NOT enforcing the rules; all that accomplishes is to teach the offending parties that they can up the ante on their offensive behavior.

Read the whole thing. It’s very informative and not a little eye-opening, even for confirmed cynics.

Captain Underoos is back!

Because the lesson that the Republican leadership has taken from the growth of the Tea Party and the implosion of the Obama administration is that what the party really needs is an Obamacare neo-Democrat with good hair and granny underpants who couldn’t beat the corpse of John McCain in 2008.

Mitt Romney’s political operation raised $1.7 million from July through September, again pacing the field of prospective 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls.

The former Massachusetts governor, who lost a bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and is widely believed to be preparing another run, has built a robust political operation including political action committees at the federal level and in five states with strategic significance in the pending battle for the Republican nomination: Iowa, New Hampshire, Alabama, South Carolina and Michigan.

Sweet Lincoln, but the Republican elite really are a determinedly self-destructive lot, aren’t they! Even moderate Democrats are howling for less government, so naturally the Republicans are trying to figure out how to put forward yet another Big Government RINO.

Mailvox: Game and the Christian man

AG asks for advice on dealing with the cold equations:

I’m a 22 years old Christian male. I’m by no means a natural alpha, but I’m a pretty bright guy and it is quite easy for me to make myself attractive to women. Social reticence becomes “aloofness”, not knowing what to say (and not saying anything) becomes “mysteriousness” — you get the idea. Maybe it’s not that simple, but from experience I know that attracting women is not tough for me. My dilemma is this: every Christian male I know seems to either be a reformed badboy (like you) or very beta. With the court system completed stacked against men, a failed marriage can completely destroy a guy. What’s a guy like me to do? Let out my inner badboy for the next 8 years and then beg God for mercy or just be the nice Christian beta and hope everything works out? Neither option seems appealing at all. You’re one of the few people I can think of that is a Christian and views women and modern America in a realistic way. I can’t figure out what to do and I would really love to hear your thoughts.

Paul is quite clear on sinning that grace might abound and it is no wiser to indulge in rampant sex for a few years with the idea that you’ll eventually set it aside than it is to decide to spend the next eight years in a coked-up state before getting clean. I remember one evening at the Digital Ghetto when the White Buffalo, Big Chilly, Horn, and Micron were all happily ensconced around Bongzilla. (I stayed very far away from the herb after an unpleasant experience with a PCP-laced joint at DV8.) Micron had cracked a joke about how they were all killing brain cells, but Horn protested that he had read a study reporting that it took ten years of regular marijuana usage to have a negative impact on one’s brain.

At which point, Big Chilly smiled – he had gone to high school with Horn – and said: “And how long have you been smoking?” At that point, he had three years left, but that was more than 15 years ago and he certainly hasn’t quit. So, the point is that you’re kidding yourself if you think you can simply dive into the corruption of the world and expect to come out clean on the other side according to your schedule.

But no one said you have to be the nice Christian beta either. Alpha isn’t the notches on the bedpost; they are merely the consequence of the attitude. If you are a leader, a woman will follow you anywhere, including to church. I have seen it happen. And a Christian man shouldn’t consider himself bound to act like a beta, let alone gamma, around women, in fact, he should be totally indifferent to the opinion of the scarlet women of the world, which is a fundamentally alpha quality.

I think you are confusing Churchianity for Christianity in equating betatude with faith. If you’re afraid to correct someone because it might hurt their feelings, if you can’t open your mouth without deprecating yourself, if you are more afraid to tell a woman not to gossip or stuff her face than tell an adulterer that his behavior is wrong, you are a Churchian using Christianity as an excuse for your inner gamma. You’ve already learned that you don’t have to be an arrogant bastard in order to get the girls’ hamsters spinning madly, trying to figure you out. Now you just need to take the next step and learn how to open your mouth without taking three steps back.

The reason Game works is that it is a pale, corrupted reflection of the truth. But what is its most central message? It sounds like one of Paul’s most important themes! For neither God nor Game have given you a spirit of fear. The Christian man should approach a woman to whom he is attracted with the same total lack of fear as the most hardened master of Game; if she’s not the one, then what do you care if she rejects you? The sooner she does, the better!

The limits of human attraction

In response to Retha’s attempt to protest that sin is not attactive to Christian women:

Are you trying to say you know me better than I know myself? Vox, when you make comments about women in general, you speak a lot of truth. But do not assume to know how any one particular women you never met will react or have reacted to something. I know from experience that this was not how I reacted to a serial fornicator who tried dating me.

Retha’s response reveals some interesting aspects of the differences between the male and female minds here. First, this is a spectacular example of female solipsism; she is attempting to rebut the concept that Christian women are not immune to female hypergamy by citing a single example of her own failure to be attracted by a sexually successful suitor. Second, it is an blatant theological error to claim that Christian women are not attracted to sin, indeed, the fact that the Bible bans women from positions of leadership within the Church and household make it rather clear that they are to considered more spiritually susceptible to sin, and therefore presumably more attracted to it, than men. Given that all men and women alike are fallen, it is absurd for her to claim that she, or any other Christian woman, is immune to the appeal of the world. As Billy Graham is once supposed to have said: “if you don’t think sin is fun, you’re not doing it right.”

With regards to the question of whether I know her better than she knows herself, I can only answer that because her response is a very conventionally female one, there is little reason to believe that she is a behavioral outlier beyond her creditable commitment to her faith. In other words, given a reasonable portion of the information that she possesses regarding any situation involving male-female interaction, I believe that not only me, but many men of sufficient knowledge of Game would be able to predict her future actions better than she can because they have no rationalization hamster nor hormonal cycle clouding their perceptions.

Women are not static creatures. They are extraordinarily dynamic, which is one of the things that makes them so fascinating and so unpredictable to those who do not recognize the primary motivational factors involved. As economists are gradually coming to accept, human behavior is seldom rational by any exterior metric. And the interior metrics of women tend to vacillate greatly, and more to the point, often without them consciously realizing they have changed. Some of these vacillations are predictable, which is why male predators are able to anticipate and take advantage of female dynamism with such reliable success.

The fact that Retha found one serial fornicator unattractive doesn’t indicate that it was his success with women alone that turned her off unless he was significantly higher status than her. Hence the “a little bit of beta” that is advised for alphas who are slumming. (In such cases, the woman’s rationalization hamster can’t spin its wheel fast enough to convince her that she’ll be able to hold his interest over time, so she rejects him first in proactive self-defense.) Given that Retha has, according to her, rejected literally every man that has ever expressed interest in her throughout the course of her life, it should not at all surprising that she rejected the serial fornicator too. Was the unattractiveness of sin the sole reason for that particular rejection? It’s doubtful, especially since he is neither the first nor the last male sinner she will encounter.

But Retha is not wrong in stating the completely obvious. There are always statistical outliers and when you play the probabilities, you will certainly lose from time to time. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Retha is one of the few women to whom the bad boys genuinely hold negative appeal and that she would be more sexually attracted to a meek and virginal omega than an arrogant and experienced alpha. I don’t buy it for a second, but it is at least possible. Thanks to the Internet, we know the limits of human attraction are disturbingly wide, perhaps even boundless. (You know that somewhere out there, there is a site for people who are deeply attracted to molluscs. With pictures.)

In summary, the answer is yes, unless you happen to be a statistical freak of some sort. One should always assume that a woman is going to behave like a normal woman unless one is in possession of reliable information indicating otherwise, just as one should always assume that a man is going to behave like a normal man. Now, we are not mere animals. We have the capacity to rationally control our behavior. But the very fact that we need to exert that control over our irrational instincts indicates that they a) exist, and b) influence our feelings, thoughts, and behavior in a potentially predictable manner.

Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

I suspect that some of you will be interested to hear that I picked up a copy of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris today. I’m planning to finish reading Cicero’s letters before I dive into it, but you can anticipate a review in about two weeks or so. I’ve also sent an email to his publicist requesting an interview; while Sam and I have exchanged email in the past, that’s on a different computer that is presently stowed away. But note that any interview I do will be a non-critical one; it will not be a debate. The point of a literary interview is to help the author accurately get the views expressed in his book out to the public, not to criticize them, and I’m not interested in limiting myself to interviewing authors with whom I more or less agree.

As you know, I refuse to pronounce judgment on a book, any book, without reading it, although I certainly don’t mind expressing my uninformed doubts should I have them prior to doing so. In this case, I have to applaud Sam for having the intellectual courage to seize the bull by the horns; unlike his fellow New Atheists (except Daniel Dennett), he has recognized the weak point of the lack of universal warrant and is attempting to do something about it. As to whether he has the intellectual firepower to successfully make his case, well, that may be another matter entirely. We shall presently see.

I couldn’t quite resist reading the first page or three… and all I’m going to say at the moment is that it is clear that unlike his fellow atheist Michael Shermer, Sam is unfamiliar with the core concepts of the Austrian School of Economics. Those who are familiar with how I operate and can put two and two together should be able to figure out why this seemingly unrelated field is relevant as well as where I’m going with this, in fact, I have even mentioned this specific issue in the past. I also found two major – at this point, I shall merely describe them as points of interest – in the first three pages.

As for that sound you hear, it is merely the blades being sharpened. Just in case they should turn out to be necessary, you understand.