The Home of the Bankrupt

The bankrupt banks are pretending to be solvent. So, it should come as no surprise that the Federal government has been following their lead.

[T]he IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”

The fiscal gap is the value today (the present value) of the difference between projected spending (including servicing official debt) and projected revenue in all future years.

To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.

Such a tax hike would leave the U.S. running a surplus equal to 5 percent of GDP this year, rather than a 9 percent deficit. So the IMF is really saying the U.S. needs to run a huge surplus now and for many years to come to pay for the spending that is scheduled.

The scary thing is that these calculations indicating national insolvency are based on numbers that are ludicrously optimistic. As I have been saying for more than two years now, it’s not a question of if the system collapses, it’s only a question of when.

Pro-science or pro-feminist

One can’t help but notice that the science fetishists who are constantly worrying about the “threat” that teaching Creationism or Intelligent Design poses to school children never seem to make a peep about what one British biologist describes as an actual threat to science in the schools:

In an interview with Horticulture Week, the man in charge of the herbariums at the Natural History Museum, said Britain faced a shortage of naturalists in the future just when the country will need experts to deal with the threat of climate change and biodiversity loss. He blamed the problem on a “lack of teachers who know about the natural world”.

“Even if the Government decided to put natural history on the primary curriculum, how would it do so with teachers who don’t have the basic skills? They are often terrified of the natural world – they scream at the sight of insects and tell the children ‘don’t touch’. The whole point is to engage them, but when people are frightened of handling soil, then we have a problem.”

This presents an interesting dividing line between the Darwinian cultists who are driven by their atheistic ideology, which takes a very pro-feminist position, and the science-driven evolutionists who are non-partisan on ideological matters. If teachers who are afraid of dirt and insects are having such a markedly negative effect on the teaching of natural science, then why haven’t we heard anything from the biology blowhards on the subject?

There has been a similar silence on Title IX science, which tends to indicate that political correctness is much more important to them than science.

Anklebiters Anonymous

In the interest of helping our resident trolls evolve into substantive commenters, as well as assisting non-Ilk readers recognize the usual suspects, I have decided to create a “best of” series which should serve as both amusement and edification. The honor of the first “Beezle” award goes to Cabal, whose epic defense of science he quite clearly doesn’t understand was eviscerated by the merciless duo of Bob Mando and DaveD. Please note that the ellipses are Cabal’s; his award-winning comment is quoted precisely and in full.

“Every single living organism that we know of is carbon-based and all of them require oxygen to live…without exception. And carbon is a by product of oxygen. the relationship between the 2 couldnt be clearer.”
– Cabal: 8/10/10 10:37 AM, Science gets it wrong… again

“Pure, unadulterated BS. there are numerous KNOWN organisms which will die in the presence of oxygen.

a – photosynthesis is possible without oxygen, even by carbon based life forms.
b – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria generated the free oxygen that exists in the atmosphere now as waste products.
c – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria ‘evolved’ from more primitive forms of bacteria which did not use oxygen at all in the photosynthesis process.

You are wrong about … well, pretty much everything, really. Carbon is a non-radioactive base element, number 6. Oxygen is also a non-radioactive base element, number 8. Neither of these elements can ever be a “product” of the other without the intervention of fusion or quantum manipulation. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a compound element which breaks down into one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms through simple chemical processes.”
– Bob K. Mando

“You have shown yourself to be profoundly ignorant of both biology (“Every single living organism….require oxygen to live…without exception.” Except the ones that don’t.) and basic chemistry (“And carbon is a by product of oxygen.”) You haven’t even grasped the most basic elements of the observable world, which you interact with everyday. Why, then, should we pay any attention at all to your ramblings on the more abstract aspects of life and the universe?”
– DaveD

Congratulations to all. The award is named for the banned commenter Beelzebub, whose ability to mangle facts and logic in the process of attempting to “correct” others is unparalleled.

UPDATE – Cabal amused the crowd by accepting his award, but not the chemistry lesson. Cabal: 8/12/10 9:57 AM: “I was not in error. Remove oxygen molecules from the universe and carbon based life becomes impossible.”

More sex, less age

It is science:

Put more sex in your life: It slows aging. A Scottish study found that thrice-weekly action stripped at least four years off participants’ faces, and getting busy even boosts immunity and reduces heart disease

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that who you are having sex with also matters. I don’t think thrice-weekly gay sex with a Haitian drug addict is going to slow aging, except perhaps in the sense that one actually isn’t getting any older.

You must zell!

When did it become a federal law that you must sell houses to black people?

In this tough real estate market, you would think that agents would be itching to sell their properties to anyone with money in hand. But a Chicago couple, their agent, and their broker are accused of some nasty discrimination that goes beyond being overly particular. Daniel and Adrienne Sabbia have been charged with refusing to sell a Bridgeport home to a Black couple because of their race, reports Chicago Breaking News.

Just in case you weren’t entirely sure that the civil rights movement killed the U.S. Constitution and the right of free association it contained, this prosecution should serve as sufficient evidence. In a free society, it’s not your business, my business, or the government’s business why someone chooses to sell or not sell anything to anyone. I’d like to see HUD go whole hog on this and declare that in the interest of expanding black homeownership, all purchase offers made by black individuals must be accepted at any price. Whether the home is listed for sale or not. Now that the principle of the free market in housing has been abandoned, there’s no reason not to set the parameters wherever the HUD bureaucrats happen to think best at the moment.

They’ll get what they deserve

Connecticut Republicans reject Peter Schiff in favor of Vince McMahon’s daughterwife.

In the Nutmeg State Linda McMahon (48%) handily beat former Congressman Rob Simmons (29%) and financier Peter Schiff (22%). In November she’ll face non-Vietnam Vet and AG Dick Blumenthal in a poltical steel cage match.

Most republican voters have clearly learned nothing, those commentators waxing enthusiastic about the tea party notwithstanding. This is much like choosing John McCain over Ron Paul, only we are now two years into the Great Depression 2.0. I am skeptical that a spendthrift entertainment mogul is going to do anything if she gets to Washington but borrow and spend.

The inflation test

Inflationistas have long insisted that the Fed can “print” all the money it wants. Deflationistas argue that it can’t. And now, we are beginning the process of finding out who is correct:

Fed Looks to Spur Growth by Buying Government Debt. Federal Reserve officials decided to reinvest principal payments on mortgage holdings into long-term Treasury securities, making their first attempt to bolster growth since March 2009 to keep the slowing U.S. economy from relapsing into recession.

The conventional inflationist argument is that the government can print as much paper as it wants. The problem with that is that in the US system, the government doesn’t print any paper, the Fed prints it and the government borrows from the Fed. So, the revised inflationist argument is that the purchase of Federal government debt is effectively the same thing as simply printing paper. I am dubious of this, as I am confident that the addition of these two intermediary steps with all the various complications they likely entail will derail the assumed equivalence. And then, of course, there is the question of whether the government can create debt as fast as it can print money even with the Fed promising that it will buy some of that debt. It is, after all, a mistake to assume that because the Fed has shown a willingness to buy a small portion of the newly-issued Federal debt, it will be willing to buy all of the newly-issued debt for an indefinite period of time. Which, you will note, is necessary if the equivalence is to hold.

I, for one, have seen absolutely no sign that the Federal Reserve is willing to put the interests of the national economy ahead of the health of its member banks, let alone itself. Have you? And remember, the $8 trillion in the M2 money supply is dwarfed by the $53 trillion in outstanding debt. The theoretical “printing” of the former will have to make up for the decline of the latter. Do the math.

She’s not alone

In fairness, her experience was worse than most. You know going in that you’re not going to get a real job with a degree in Women’s Studies or Sociology. But this woman was sold a totally worthless piece of paper for $70,000.

Carrianne Howard wanted to design video games. But her $12 an hour gig as an industry recruiter didn’t work out, so now she is stripping at a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Howard told Bloomberg. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”

I happen to know a reasonably significant percentage of the game designers in the industry. For example, yesterday I got a call from a very successful old school game designer in Australia about an idea we’ve been kicking around for about a year, and in the course of the conversation we discovered that he had signed a game to the same guy in England who had offered me a job around that time. In other words, we had nearly found ourselves working on the same project. It’s a fairly small world. And I have never met anyone who has a degree in game design. It’s one of the more shameless educational scams out there. If you want to get into game design, study programming, play a lot of games, and pursue an internship as a tester.

Still, most people never learn. The punchline is that she’s saving her money… for a business degree.

Homogamy and civilizational decline

Ross Douthat writes a pretty good column in the New York Times explaining how the anti-homogamy side has made a mistake relying upon irrelevant arguments. He also reiterates the one they should have been making from the start:

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage. It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes. Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.

Douthat also inadvertantly mentions the source of the problem, as the supplementation of those later ideas, especially the fictional “equality” of the sexes has been far more destructive to Western civilization than homogamy will if the judicial activists are successful in imposing their antidemocratic will upon the people. In fact, I tend to see homogamy and its assorted ills as being much more a late-stage symptom than a causal factor when it comes to societal collapse.

But that doesn’t change the easily observable fact that the forces pushing homogamy and open homosexuality are actively engaged in attempting to destroy one of the more successful civilizations in human history. As I showed in yesterday’s WND column, there is no genuine “progress” being made here, social or moral, this is simply a return to the pagan decadence of a society that was in decline 18 centuries ago. The observations of one of the first historians of women, Alfred Brittain, made at the turn of the 20th century about Roman women, was an insightful harbinger of the subsequent success of the suffrage movement.

“Julia represented the prevalent social conditions of her time. Licentiousness, like a cancer, was eating into the heart of Roman society; and this was to grow still worse. It must be admitted also that female degeneracy kept pace with the increase of woman’s influence in the political world. Livia and Agrippina the Elder were exceptions; but the rule was, and has been in all history, that the activity of women in State affairs was accompanied by an abundance of meretricious amatory intrigues. It is a remarkable fact that in the history of the Roman woman–and possibly this statement might be given a much wider application–there is no instance where any individual woman designedly helped to bring about the enactment of a law for the public weal. Female politics always had for their object the advancement of the female politician’s own personal interests or those of some male favorite.”

To be fair, there have been the occasional exceptions over the last 100 years, such as Margaret Thatcher, but then of course she was declared to be “not of the gender woman” by fellow members of her sex for her sin of deviating from the female political pattern.* What is ironic is that so many individuals who greatly cherish certain fruits of Western civilization, such as the science fetishists to give one example, completely fail to recognize that the societal decline they are lauding as “social progress” is much more likely to destroy the aspects of Western civilization that they enjoy, such as wealth, technology, science, free speech and relative political freedom, than it is to eliminate the moral and cultural aspects that they despise. To repeat my comment from yesterday, ignorant pagans rutting in filth and poverty are not capable of funding either the development of new technologies or the expansion of the scientific knowledge base. There are no science labs in grass huts.

*This was a direct quote from a female professor at my university.

Science gets it wrong… again

So much for “the biggest thing in the history of biological sciences” and “the scientific breakthrough of the century, perhaps of all time”.

“We Have Learned Nothing from the Genome”

SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far?

Venter: Close to zero to put it precisely. . . . [W]e have, in truth, learned nothing from the genome other than probabilities.

SPIEGEL: Did it at least provide us with some new knowledge?

Venter: It certainly has. Eleven years ago, we didn’t even know how many genes humans have. Many estimated that number at 100,000, and some went as high as 300,000. We made a lot of enemies when we claimed that there appeared to be considerably fewer — probably closer to the neighborhood of 40,000! And then we found out that there are only half as many. I was just in Stockholm for the 200th anniversary of the Karolinska Institute. The first presentation was about the many achievements the decoding of the genome has brought. Then I spoke and said that this century will be remembered for how little, and not how much, happened in this field.

One needn’t insist that the Human Genome Project was entirely useless – it wasn’t – to learn the very important lesson that asking scientists how government money should be spent is a terrible idea. Let’s face it, “a cure for cancer” is the scientific translation of that old politician’s standby: “for the children”. Science would appear to be our best bet for curing cancer prior to the Eschaton, but that doesn’t mean handing over blank checks to every flim-flam artist with a PhD and a white coat is a sensible investment that justifies the opportunity cost.

And, of course, like the Neo-Keynesians, the Darwinians will never admit that this expensive and cataclysmic failure of so many scientific predictions and expectations casts a degree of doubt upon the reliability of their pseudo-scientific model. The historical and scientific fact is that the world of genetics isn’t anywhere nearly as simple as their evolutionary model had led them to believe it was.