The real religious threat

James Delingpole explains that it comes from the radical Gaians brainwashed by years of public school propaganda:

It’s time we woke up to the threat posed by this mass brainwashing of the younger generation. We worry, rightly, about those Muslim children who are being indoctrinated with the extreme Wahaabist version of their faith. Yet we seem astonishingly complacent that every day, in schools of every kind throughout the Western world, our children are being taught by well-meaning teachers to view their world and culture through exactly the same anti-capitalist, anti-human, anti-growth eyes as James Lee and the Unabomber.

The modern environmental movement is not kind, caring or gentle. It is a series of ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in our face.

If it weren’t for the fact that Western economies are collapsing anyhow, one could make a serious argument that the Gaians are a greater threat to humanity than the most expansionist imperialists of the Dar al-Harb. The lunacy of James Lee is a clear warning sign.

Another banking bailout

In AFGHANISTAN?

As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan’s biggest bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a major shareholder in beleaguered Kabul Bank called on Thursday for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.

“America should do something,” said Karzai in a telephone interview, suggesting that the U.S. Treasury Department guarantee the funds of Kabul Bank’s clients, who number about a million and have more than a billion dollars on deposits with the bank.

Kabul Bank handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers. It has scores of branches across Afghanistan and holds the accounts of key Afghan government agencies. The collapse of the bank would likely spread panic throughout the country’s fledgling financial sector and wipe out nine years of effort by the United States to establish a sound Afghan banking system, seen as essential to the establishment of a functioning economy.

Good luck selling that one to the American people. Even the most rabid neocons won’t want to touch it. It’s insanity squared.

VPFL draft

Your live online draft is set for Sat Sep 4 7:00pm CDT

We’re still missing Greenfield (White Buffalo), Alamo City (Clay) and Bane (Red). Get thee hence to Yahoo and register! Everyone else, make sure you’ve got your three keepers selected as your top three rankings. If you aren’t keeping three, then make sure that your third choice is NOT someone else’s keeper.

Hiding the decline

Karl Denninger is alerted to potential fraud in the housing price statistics:

I have a very disturbing email that came in this evening. It alleges out-and-out fraudulent reporting of home sales in one of the regional MLS systems. That is, prices paid that are in fact much lower than the “sold” prices reported in the MLS.

The person in question claims to have seen over 100 of these in his area. I have copies of two, and it appears, from the evidence that I have, that at least for those two the claim is accurate.

One in particular I was able to pull the auction data on. It “sold” under reserve, is listed as sold in the MLS at ~25% higher than the “sold” bid, and the premium is disclosed as 5%. This property also has a 90-day “anti-flip” provision on it, implying that the paper may be held by one of the GSEs. (It’s a nice-looking place, incidentally.)

Here’s the problem, obviously – Case-Schiller and other “home statistics” numbers related to price paid are all computed off these numbers provided by the local Realty boards (via NAR.) If the data in the MLS is bogus then so is the so-called “median sales price” and so are Case-Schiller’s numbers! These are not small discrepancies either – in both cases the “over-reporting” is by approximately 25%!

This would explain why housing prices have been mysteriously moving up while the number of home sales continues to plummet. It’s as if it’s not enough to cook the GDP, CPI-U, and U3 numbers, things are getting so bad that they have to create fictional statistics for practically everything in order to “hide the decline”.

Hey, it worked for the climate scientists. For a while.

Scientific hypocrisy

I always enjoy the way atheist science fetishists who believe firmly in the scientific method as the sole arbiter of Truth simultaneously insist that they don’t have to read a book in order to reach conclusions about it. So much for their supposed preference of observation to logic. Catkiller challenged an atheist named Maxpower to read The Irrational Atheist and this was the unsurprising ad hominem response:

I have not read the book (I prefer books like “The Science of Good and Evil” by Michael Shermer), but I did peruse the blog of the man who wrote The Irrational Atheist and read through some arguments he’s put forth. Since you’ve previously referred me to such nonsense as Jonah Goldberg, I should have expected some pretty poor arguments and old, tired fallacies that often turn up in theism-vs-atheism discussions, but I was particularly disappointed by the nutcase you’ve held up as your trump card this time. Here is what I have learned based on what I have read about and by Vox Day:

– He is a writer for World Net Daily, a fringe extremist website one step above Prison Planet or StormFront
– He appears to be a birther, an anti-feminist, and even opposes womens’ suffrage
– Oh, he also seems to be a white supremacist
– He has argued that Sam Harris is more immoral than Jeffrey Dahmer, which is a mind-boggling statement
– He appears to dispute the theory of evolution and the age of the earth
– He has stated that maybe “some” people don’t need God or the threat of punishment to be good, but he “certainly” does
– He has stated that, if commanded to do so by God, he would kill every 2-year-old on earth.

This last part makes Vox Day a particularly dangerous brand of psychopath, since people often commit horrific acts when they mistakenly believe to have been ordered to do so by God. Parents who withhold medicine from dying children or who violently kill “possessed” children are prime examples. No atheist would have a reason for doing such a breathtakingly cruel thing.

Well, this atheist certainly would have if given the opportunity. Consider his manifesto: “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human
infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed…. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!! The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation.”

Atheists usually claim religion is behind all the problems in the world, but since they also believe religion is human-created, they are eventually forced to end up advocating mass murder of one form or another. It would appear that Maxpower has forgotten the extraordinarily lethal behavior of a number of powerful, well-known atheists in dozens of countries during the 20th century. The late James Lee may be unusual, but he is unfortunately no unique aberration. The seed for mass slaughter is sown when atheists who share Lee’s faith in Malthus rather than the Apostle Paul and Darwin rather than the Gospels take positions of power.

By the way, the correct response to Maxpower’s question is that he hasn’t sufficiently understood what morality is to formulate a coherent question about it. The threat of punishment from a supernatural deity is not a source of morality, let alone “the only ultimate” one. Maxpower has done the metaphorical equivalent of confusing the possibility of a penalty flag for the NFL Competition Committee and the 32 NFL owners. The ultimate source of morality is God, whose authority over Creation rests upon the fact of His being its Creator. His game, His rules. The threat of punishment is merely an incentive to abide by those rules and should never be confused with either the rules or the Rulegiver.

Another Dawkins argument destroyed

In which a scientific experiment indicates that replacing fallible eyewitness testimony with “scientific evidence” such as DNA would be a really bad idea:

Interpreting alleles in a joined or partial sample is where the subjective opinion of an algebraist could play a part. To test this, New Scientist teamed up by Itiel Dror, a neuroscientist at University College London and head of Cognitive Consultants International, and Greg Hampikian of Boise State University in Idaho.

We took a mixed sample of DNA evidence from an actual crime scene- a coterie rape committed in Georgia, US- which helped to convict a fortify called Kerry Robinson, who is currently in prison. We presented it, and Robinson’s DNA contour, to 17 experienced analysts working in the same accredited government lab in the US, out of any contextual information that might bias their judgement.

In the spring case, two analysts from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that Robinson “could not have existence excluded” from the crime scene sample, based on his DNA profile. (A second man convicted of the same crime also testified that Robinson was an assailant, in return for a lesser jail term.) Each of our 17 analysts independently examined the profiles from the DNA ad~, the victim’s profile and those of two other suspects and was asked to connoisseur whether the suspects’ profiles could be “excluded”, “cannot be excluded” or whether the results were “indecisive”.

If DNA analysis were totally objective, then all 17 analysts should get to the same conclusion. However, we found that just one agreed through the original judgement that Robinson “cannot be excluded”. Four analysts related the evidence was inconclusive and 12 said he could be excluded.

What science fetishists consistently fail to understand is that scientists are the weakest link in the reliability of science. The scientific method is reliable only insofar as the humans who perform the observations and test the results are reliable. And there is no shortage of evidence, scientific and otherwise, to show that scientists are as intrinsically unreliable as every other collection of human beings.

American concubines

In which it is argued, contra my prediction of the brothel/burqah option, American women are rather far along in the process of abandoning marriage in favor of concubinage:

If one takes a close look at contemporary American society, it appears that concubinage is gradually reasserting itself in Western culture and law. This is an inevitable result of the idea that men have an obligation to financially support illegitimate children; an idea that was rejected by Christians because it fatally weakens the incentives for women without significant property to engage in monogamous marriage. In fact, Islam prohibits concubinage as well, and dictates that although a man may have up to four wives, each one will have the same status under the law. Abuses have always occurred, but the contrast between European and East Asian society (Chinese in particular) was stark up until modernization in Asia. Rich Chinese men often had a “first wife” and varying numbers of concubines, the Emperor would have hundreds of them, and lots of ordinary Chinese men had to make do sharing prostitutes or going entirely without a woman.

For young women, a life as a concubine is often preferable to being married to a poor man, and increasingly that option is open to them in the US. For the lucky few women – usually the exceptionally attractive and mercenary – a sexual relationship with a wealthy businessman, athlete or politician can guarantee decades of support if she manages to get pregnant. Rielle Hunter, John Edwards’ adulterous lover, is an example of a woman who pulled it off. Scores of women manage to hit the jackpot with young, unsophisticated athletes; thousands upon thousands of others we’ve never heard of take advantage of relatively wealthy men. In these cases, where child support will be enough to live on, the arrangement is concubinage in all but name. The only argument against equivalency is that sexual exclusivity is not guaranteed, as it usually was in ancient forms of concubinage, but given that sexual exclusivity is neither guaranteed nor enforced in marriage any longer and concubinage has always been held to be a lesser alternative to full marriage, it is fulfilling the exact same role the institution did in ancient times.

It’s an interesting historical correlation, but I don’t think the devolution into modern concubinage is so much an end state as a stage on the continued devolution into full female subjugation. The reality is that economics and demographics alike predict the unviability of any society with universal suffrage and concomitant legal favoritism towards women. Therefore, anything that naturally develops from that society is irrelevant, since the society is going to either collapse or be conquered and be replaced by a competing one.

Arson-free prophets

Mencius Moldbug explains why it is vital to read history’s losers:

This power, which the old States of Europe expended such rivers of treasure and blood to curb, at the beginning of the century, had transferred its immediate designs across the Atlantic, was consolidating itself anew in the Northern States of America, with a wealth, an organization, an audacity, an extent to which it never aspired in the lands of its birth, and was preparing to make the United States, after crushing all law there under its brute will, the fulcrum whence they should extend their lever to upheave every legitimate throne in the Old World.

Hither, by emigration, flowed the radicalism, discontent, crime, and poverty of Europe, until the people of the Northern States became, like the rabble of Imperial Rome, the colluvies gentium. The miseries and vices of their early homes had alike taught them to mistake license for liberty, and they were incapable of comprehending, much more of loving, the enlightened structure of English or Virginian freedom.

If the first great wave of immigrants were incapable of comprehending, much more of loving, the enlightened structure of English Virginian freedom, what reason is there for believing that this second great wave of third world rabble is capable of comprehending, much less loving, its surviving remnants? Even on the purely practical level, who genuinely believes that young men from El Salvador, Mexico, and Somalia are going to be able or willing to subsidize the lives of old white women 30 years from now?

Dr. Darwin Award

The most surprising thing about this is that the intrepid stalker was an actual doctor as opposed to a mental health specialist:

Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac had been missing since last week, a day after she went to the house of a man whom she had been dating, Bakersfield police Sgt. Mary DeGeare said…. Bakersfield firefighters spent five hours dismantling the chimney and flue from the outside of the home from Saturday to early Sunday to get to the body, DeGeare said. Detectives initially investigated the death as suspicious, but police said Monday that all the evidence indicates Kotarac voluntarily went to the roof, removed the chimney cap and slid down the flue feet first.

Apparently they don’t teach spatial relations at med school. The tragedy is that she didn’t even need to do herself in to win a Darwin award, her odds of NOT being an evolutionary dead end dropped considerably the day she applied to medical school.

Mailvox: reflections on RGD

Stilicho’s summary:

I received my copy of RGD on Friday and finished it last night. Excellent work. Funnily enough, just as I was starting to read the Saint Bernanke/green shoots scenario at the end, there was a power outage and I finished by flashlight. How apt. At any rate, I’m not sure I’ve grokked the full implications of your theories yet, but the first reading sure was an eye opener. There are a lot of thoughts I had while reading that are still bouncing around in my head that may take a while (and more reading) to fully digest, but I’ll share a couple with you:

1) The conventional Austrian theory that a switch from capital production to consumer production causes contractions doesn’t seem logical to me. Rather, it seems that such a switch would be a symptom rather than a cause. I don’t think you classified it as such, although you did express doubt that it was a casual factor. Why did the Austrian school think it was a casual factor?

2) I too was quite sympathetic to the WZI scenario until recently. I still think there may isolated incidents as certain industries or sectors experience mini bubbles induced by an excess of credit that is available and actually used in said industries/sectors. However, after reading your thoughts about the depth and breadth of secular debt issues, I don’t think that general inflation will be an issue for some time. If and when there is some recovery on the far side of TGD 2.0, do you think the WZI scenario is likely to occur given the monetary authorities adherence to neo-keynesian and monetarist theories?

3) I wonder how long we can keep limping along in what amounts to great recession mode until the bottom finally drops out? Isn’t that what Japan’s lost decade(s) amount too? A great recession scenario? But given the world-wide nature of the current crisis, you have convinced me that the bottom will drop eventually. How many bullets does Bernanke have left?

4) The neo-keynesians must have an absolute disdain for microeconomics. Either that, or it would be just too damned inconvenient to acknowledge verifiable microeconomic principles that might cast doubt on their macro theories. A bit of both perhaps?

1) I simply don’t know. My feeling is that because so much Austrian theory was not developed ex nihilo as so much Marxian and Keynesian theory was, but built rationally on the work of previous economic theorists, the conceptual model was somewhat influenced and therefore limited by the various pre-classical, classical, and neo-classical ideas that influenced them. What is strange about it to me is that Rothbard points out the exact limits of demand that I propose as a causal mechanism, but he only applies it to the market for labor. In any event, I agree, the shift from one form of production to another is a symptom rather than a cause. This probably makes me impure from the doctrinaire Austrian perspective, but hardly a heretic. The model works to describe and correctly predict regardless of which mechanism is favored. The advantage of my “limits of demand” mechanism is the way it explains how Austrian theory applies to financial services and other markets in which there is no distinction between capital and consumer goods.

2) No, I think the entire structure will collapse of its own weight first. Debt implodes faster than money can be printed. And I reject what appears to be the revised inflationist notion that a deflationary loss of confidence in a currency can be reasonably labled hyperinflation.

3) Not long. Not any. Most of the positive exit scenarios involve the Federal Reserve being either thrown aside by the US government or supplanted by the IMF.

4) Yes, they have ever since Keynes first voiced the idea that perhaps a macroeconomy behaved in a different manner than a microeconomy writ large.