Advancing on their backs

The reason many female executives are so desperate for respect they never receive is because so many of them know perfectly well they don’t merit it.

34% of executive women claim they know a female colleague who has had an affair with a boss. Furthermore, 15% of women at the director level or above admitted to having affairs themselves. And worse, 37% claim the action was rewarded: they said that women involved in affairs received a career boost as a result.

If 15% are prepared to admit it, the Rule of Three suggests that about half of all female executives are advancing their careers on their backs. Progress!

Happy Unicorn Day!

Carrie Lukas illustrates why conservatives should be slow to embrace the leadership of women who call themselves conservatives:

August 26 has been dubbed “Women’s Equality Day,” in celebration of the anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Passage of that amendment was the culmination of years of hard work and dedication on the part of America’s noble suffragettes, and it is indeed amazing to think of all of the progress women have made in our society in the ninety years following that breakthrough.

It is amazing… amazingly horrific. Let’s contemplate exactly what that progress has meant in material terms:

1. Millions of murdered babies, disproportionately female.
2. A significant reduction in marriage rates and a large increase in divorce rates thanks to pro-female divorce laws and the heavily female-biased family court system.
3. The doubling of the female work force suppressing wages and creating a vicious cycle where married women who don’t want to work are forced to do so because their husband’s real wages are lower than in 1973. To forestall the expected ignorance-based protests, I invite you to first consider what happens to the price of a commodity when the supply increases faster than the demand.
4. National insolvency.
5. A massive increase in sexually-transmitted disease.
6. A significant reduction of personal freedom for men and women alike.

It will be interesting to see if a nation that institutes female suffrage can remain sovereign and at least nominally free for even 100 years. The UK gave up its national sovereignty to the EU only 81 years after it instituted women’s suffrage. The US might make it, but it’s by no means a sure thing.

It’s important to remember that because the vast majority of the women identify themselves by the herd and by sex rather than as individuals, they will usually see themselves as women first and [fill in the ideological identification] second. Thus we have the absurdity of a self-styled “conservative” woman celebrating profoundly anti-conservative and avowedly progressive progress.

As I have stated several times before, there is no such thing as equality! It does not exist in material terms, legal terms, moral terms, scientific terms, or spiritual terms. There is no evidence for it because it simply does not exist. Women who traded societal wealth and material freedom for nonexistent “equality” have made a terrible bargain since they literally traded something for nothing. The foundation of the suffrage argument is the false assertion that voting is freedom. My counterargument rests on the verifiable assertion that voting does not equal freedom. That is the crux of the matter.

Doing the jobs Americans won’t do

Including, it would appear, border patrol:

Gunmen from a drug cartel appear to have massacred 72 migrants from Central and South America who were on their way to the U.S., a grisly event that marks the single biggest killing in Mexico’s war on organized crime.

For thousands of years, invaders have been repelled with lethal force. Now the US government expects the American people to believe that there is nothing that can be done to prevent literal millions from invading the southern border. This isn’t “immigration”, it is a plain and simple migration and if history has taught us anything, it is that a nation that refuses to defend itself from migration will cease to exist. Migrations almost always end in a great deal of violence and territorial partition, so there will almost certainly be more of this sort of thing in the future. Note that if the US had controlled immigration along the southern border and limited it to a small and digestible number, the murdered migrants would probably never have left their home countries and would be alive today. Their blood is metaphorically on the hands of the open borders crowd.

Yet mainstream media will shed copious tears over the dead migrants that they didn’t cry over all the Germans slain in the process of pursuing their dreams of a new life and new opportunities in France and Russia. The most interesting aspect of the story, however, is only tangentially related to migration. It is assumed that the massacre was committed by the Zetas, an unusually violent organization which was “initially formed by Mexican army forces who defected to the other side.”

Atheism does kill

So much for the No True Atheist arguments blaming all that 20th century atheist slaughter on communism. It is even peer-reviewed science:

Atheist doctors are almost twice as likely to take decisions that speed up death for very ill patients as those who are deeply religious, research has found…. The findings, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, showed that doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than any other group to have given continuous deep sedation until death, having made a decision that they knew could or would end life.

The more important question, of course, is how much more likely atheist doctors were to strangle their patients with their bare hands or to perform horrific scientific experiments upon them. I expect that percentage would be rather more than double. Unfortunately, it would appear the study didn’t cover that one.

What I find amusing is that the same atheists who deny there is any historically demonstrated atheist predilection for killing will read that piece and find themselves thinking “yeah, what’s wrong with that?” Although considering the bureaucratic nationalized morass that is the NHS, I suppose it’s possible that most of the doctors in Britain are communists these days.

The feet, they vote too

Intel CEO reminds Washington that capital is mobile. Especially human capital:

Otellini’s remarks during dinner at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum here amounted to a warning to the administration officials and assorted Capitol Hill aides in the audience: Unless government policies are altered, he predicted, “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”

The U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business, Otellini said, that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe–this is the bitter truth.”

I think he is dead on target here. My father was a pioneer in the computer graphics industry and he’s certainly not creating any new technologies or jobs in prison. I was one of the leaders in bringing graphics hardware to the computer game industry – no one believes this but you can look it up in the Computer Gaming World archives – and have invented a few things from a next-gen sound card to the world’s most advanced mouse and an AI system. I left the country more than a decade ago because I saw signs on the horizon of what Otellini is now pointing out. Furthermore, I run into Americans moving abroad to set up businesses on a regular basis, not every day, but a lot more often than I did 10 years ago. Between the high corporate taxes, the inflexible bureaucracy, the insane amount of regulations and paperwork required, and the global reach of the Internet, it simply doesn’t make much sense to start any business that isn’t a location-tied service one in the USA anymore.

As Schumpeter explained, no entrepeneurs means no economic growth, which means declining societal wealth and eventually grass hut city time. Unfortunately, most people are demanding even more government and they’re getting what they vote for while John Galt votes with his feet.

Unexpected!

Except, you know, for those who expected home sales to fall off a cliff as a result of the homebuyer’s credit pulling demand forward, exactly as Austrian theory has been explaining for decades:

New U.S. single-family home sales unexpectedly fell in July to set their slowest pace on record while prices were the lowest in more than 6-1/2 years. The Commerce Department said sales dropped 12.4 percent to a 276,000 unit annual rate, the lowest since the series started in 1963, from a downwardly revised 315,000 units in June. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast new home sales unchanged at a 330,000 unit pace last month.

Emphasis added, with a good deal of derision. Now note how they’re still talking about the possibility of a “double-dip” recession.

“”The odds of the dreaded double-dip are increasing. I’ve been one of the only people in the double-dip camp explicitly, but more and more of the people who have been playing in the game of what is the probability — 20 percent, 30 percent — are going to start saying maybe it is 50 percent.”

What a load of complete CYA nonsense. There will be no double-dip because there has been absolutely no recovery from which to dip again. The so-called recovery is a simple statistical trick utilizing government spending to paper over the continuing economic contraction. As the second stimulus runs out, the extent of the contraction will become more readily apparent to everyone. Extend, pretend, and hope for change has failed.

Refusing to learn

My contempt for anklebiters notwithstanding, I very much appreciate substantive criticism. This is why. When you refuse to pay attention to your critics, all you manage to do is increase the likelihood that you will look even more ridiculous in the future, as Paul Krugman demonstrates by continuing to cling to his ignorant idea of a nonexistent “hangover theory”:

[A]t least some members of the FOMC have bought into the hangover theory — the modern version of liquidationism in which mass unemployment is somehow necessary in the aftermath of a burst bubble:

Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Fed, argued that a large part of today’s unemployment problem is caused by issues the Fed can’t solve, such as the mismatch between the skills of jobless workers and the skills that employers wanted.

Here’s what Kocherlakota said in a speech after the meeting:

Whatever the source, though, it is hard to see how the Fed can do much to cure this problem. Monetary stimulus has provided conditions so that manufacturing plants want to hire new workers. But the Fed does not have a means to transform construction workers into manufacturing workers.

I tried, in that old piece on hangover theorists, to explain what’s wrong with this view in general.

Tried and completely failed, Mr. Nobel Prize winner. Krugman clearly has no idea how badly he was bitchslapped on that piece by me and numerous others. He knows nothing of Austrian economics, he has learned nothing in 12 years of its core concepts playing out right in front of his eyes, and he has absolutely no idea what is going on with the economy right now.

What’s worse is that Krugman clearly knows that his critics exist, as evidenced by his comments on his blog and the fact that he reads the comments that are posted there. Krugman isn’t just an ignorant economist, he has willfully and stubbornly chosen to remain that way.

The lemmings

Why do parents insist on doing this to their children? Why do they sentence those they supposedly love beyond everything else to thousands of hours of mindless indoctrination just because everyone else does?

We’re at his classroom. We’re supposed to leave right away. They told us that in Parents’ Orientation. They said hanging around only makes it worse. It couldn’t be any worse. Robby is fighting panic, asking questions, stalling to keep us there, tears running quietly down his cheeks.

“How many hours will it be?” he asks.

Thousands, I think. Thousands and thousands, in classrooms, away from us, until you’ve learned to accept it, and you don’t cry when we leave you, and your dolphin never talks any more.

To me, the saddest thing about sentencing little children to school is the speedy and unnecessary loss of their childhood joy and innocence. I spoke with one pediatrician who told me he can tell which children are homeschooled and which are not from nothing more than their demeanor when they get their medical checkups. And the sacrifice is made in the name of receiving an inferior education combined with learning social graces more appropriate to The Lord of the Flies.

Shameless spin

You may recall that on Saturday I warned of an UNEXPECTED collapse in home sales this week. Now consider the deceptive headline from NAR: July Existing-Home Sales Fall as Expected but Prices Rise.

Here’s the consensus forecast that preceded it: “the “consensus” forecast for existing home sales in July calls for a SAAR of 4.65-4.66 million which would be down just 9.3-9.5% from last July’s seasonally adjusted pace.”

And here’s the actual number in the report: Existing-home sales, which are completed transactions that include single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, dropped 27.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.83 million units in July from a downwardly revised 5.26 million in June, (it was originally reported as 5.37 million) and are 25.5 percent below the 5.14 million-unit level in July 2009.  Furthermore, it would be less misleading to say that they fell 28.7% from the previously reported figures rather than 27.2% from the newly revised ones.

The shameless spin doctors at NAR are attempting to claim that after a consensus forecast was overly optimistic by 825,000(!) existing home sales, a drop that is 216% larger than the one that was predicted, sales fell “as expected”.  I would encourage you to keep these shenanigans in mind as you read their economic forecasts going forward.  To put the magnitude of this collapse in perspective, here’s a chart from The Atlantic:

That will fool everyone

The Pentagon manages to pull out all “combat brigades” from Iraq by cleverly renaming them “Advise and Assist brigades”.

Soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division are deployed in Iraq as members of an Advise and Assist Brigade, the Army’s designation for brigades selected to conduct security force assistance. So while the “last full U.S. combat brigade” have left Iraq, just under 50,000 soldiers from specially trained heavy, infantry and Stryker brigades will stay, as well as two combat aviation brigades.

For some reason, the old joke about military intelligence springs to mind. They might as reasonably have renamed them “penguins” for all the good it’s going to do. And regardless of what they are called, the only relevant point is that there are still 50,000 American combat troops in Iraq.