The incoherent Mount Vernon statement

Here’s a fun little game called Spot the Self-Professed Conservative Self-Contradiction:

A Constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.

* It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.
* It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.
* It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.
* It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.
* It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.

As the example of every war from De Bello Gallico to World War II should make eminently clear, America not only has no national interest in “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world”, but all attempts to do either are inherently contradictory to the principle of limited government based on the rule of law. There is not a single argument for “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” that will not directly and demonstrably violate the principle of limited government based on the rule of law.

Go ahead, feel free to try to make one. And, one notes, with no small amusement, that this incoherent Mount Vernon conservatism would require the USA to at least consider going to war with both the European Union and the People’s Republic of China as well as abandoning its military bases in Okinawa, Afghanistan, and Iraq. American freedom is in the American self-interest. Greek freedom or Chinese freedom may or may not be in the American self-interest, but obtaining the wherewithal required to forcibly impose freedom on the Greek or Chinese people, or anyone else around the world, is totally and utterly incompatible with both limited government and the rule of law. This is a matter of statistical and historical fact.

Needless to say, I won’t be signing it, my long affection for Mount Vernon notwithstanding. One of the more pleasant drives you can ever make is to take the top off the MG and drive from Oldtown Alexandria to Mount Vernon.

Bankocracy and the consequences of moral hazard

I strongly suspect that this widespread fury and total disrespect for the ruling bankocracy that passes for “law” is on its way to America. And it will probably be much sooner than anyone imagines:

The country is sliding into psychological despair within a cocoon of unrequited desires that have been inflamed and legitimized over the years. Anger is rampant. Yesterday on the bus a student gave his ticket to a lady, telling her that she should use his ticket because he was getting off. Someone called out that this was shameful “thievery” to which the youngster responded: “I am stealing 50 cents but the government and the banks have stolen 50 billion!” Many nodded in approval.

Prime Minister Papandreou was on television last night, white as a ghost. He was telling the Greek press that he was thankful that the IMF was “offering” their technical expertise (technognosia) to Greece. Yes money is not coming, but how sweet of the IMF to be sending its experts to dictate terms over the next few weeks. It seems that someone in Europe gave him the unexpected news that the party is over. This reality has not yet even remotely begun to set in here. The media are giving the message that “the Europeans can’t afford to let Greece go under….that Europe stands to lose too much….that Merkel and those stuffy Northerners will have to come to Greece’s aid.”

When the reality does start seeping in—hold on to your hats….

The unmitigated evil of TARP, the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie, and the banking bailouts really cannot be exaggerated. The total fiction of the necessity to guarantee bank profits, the total disregard for the rule of law involved in the sorcerous transmutation of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley from leaden insolvent investment banks into golden government-backed bank holding companies, and the utter contempt for the will of the American people has planted the seed for a number of extraordinarily negative consequences that will far outweigh the costs of a few big banks going out of business and a few thousand banksters losing their jobs.

I always wondered why the peasants didn’t recognize that the medieval aristocracy was shamelessly feeding off them without offering them anything substantial in return. That historical mystery is much easier to understand now, as people are losing their jobs, losing their homes, struggling to feed their children, and facing an increasingly bleak future while banksters are paying themselves literal billions for successfully defrauding the government, the politicians, the taxpayers through selling the myth of their societal necessity. This is not the result of the free market, this is not capitalism, and this is most certainly not human liberty, this is nothing more than bankocracy every bit as oligarchic, dishonest, and terminally short-sighted as the nominally socialist Soviet nomenklatura system.

And it will fail, as such systems always fail, because the final generations of the ruling aristocracy are so much more short-sighted and greedy than their fathers. They are too blinded by their misguided belief in their own importance to realize that the system will only work so long as the workers, the middle class, and the entrepeneurs receive a sufficient share of the wealth to play along with the game. Once the productive masses of society realize that the deck is stacked so heavily against them, they’ll not only quit playing, they will begin imitating their betters and turning to theft in the place of hard work and fraud in the place of frugality. Naturally, the praetorian authorities will crack down hard; witness how the bureaucratic leeches in the UK have blatantly – and suicidally – ignored UK law in order to attempt expanding their tax reach while simultaneously attempting to hide from the public how much they are paid.

But such efforts are always doomed to failure and the mere fact that governments are engaging in them is a strong indicator of a coming structural collapse. And the harder that they try to grip, the more people will slip out of their control by the mechanism of simply abandoning their roles as honest, productive members of society. After all, how can one possibly object to those who steal cents when the bankocracy is stealing billions?

Applefascismo

Cracked underlines the point I have been making for over decade now. It is Apple that are the techno-fascists; the famous 1984 ad was nothing but pure psychological projection:

When you buy Apple products, you don’t just buy computers or gadgets. Apple sells iPods and iPhones that play music purchased in their iTunes store. It’s all part of Jobs’s sales pitch to people who pride themselves on individuality. Even before there were ads featuring the kid from Die Hard 4 bickering with John Hodgeman in heaven, the message was been the same: PCs are for those people who follow the herd, but you choose Mac because you think differently….

[M]anufacturers of other cell phones and gadgets generally don’t care what customers do once they’ve paid for their products with good, honest credit card debt. But Apple goes beyond complaining. They will actively break your shit for disobeying their arbitrary rules. Yes, Apple has sent out updates specifically designed to disable phones that have been modified to work with carriers other than AT&T, or to run Microsoft Office. Seriously now, we’d be inventing new, fluorescent shades of berserk if, say, a PC manufacturer broke your computer for installing Linux.

Now, I have no objection to people using Apple products, even if I don’t deign to use them myself. And I understand the brilliance of Steve Jobs’s philosophy of limiting utility in order to reduce potential problems; every game designer knows that at least one-third of his time will be spent figuring out how to prevent idiots from purposefully ruining their own user experience. I was speaking with a technology reviewer a few days ago and I mentioned that if we created a function called ERASE HARD DRIVE, at least 10 percent of the users would assign it to a button and click it to see what happened. The reviewer laughed and commented that 100 percent of that clueless 10 percent would be furious upon discovering that the function had done precisely what it said it would do. And, of course, they would blame us for giving them the power to destroy their data so easily.

So, there is a solid rationale for simply not letting people do basic things like load their own software onto their own hardware at will. There is a sound logical reason for treating users like cretinous children and refusing to let them make their own decisions. And one can clearly make a great deal of money if that technofascistic attitude is combined with keen vision and great design talent. And yet, that doesn’t make it right.

The social cost of maleconomy

Don Peck writes an ominous article about the transformation of America in the Atlantic:

By the time the average out-of-wedlock child has reached the age of 5, his or her mother will have had two or three significant relationships with men other than the father, and the child will typically have at least one half sibling. This kind of churning is terrible for children—heightening the risks of mental-health problems, troubles at school, teenage delinquency, and so on—and we’re likely to see more and more of it, the longer this malaise stretches on.

“We could be headed in a direction where, among elites, marriage and family are conventional, but for substantial portions of society, life is more matriarchal,” says Wilcox. The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences. “Marriage plays an important role in civilizing men. They work harder, longer, more strategically. They spend less time in bars and more time in church, less with friends and more with kin. And they’re happier and healthier.”

Communities with large numbers of unmarried, jobless men take on an unsavory character over time. Edin’s research team spent part of last summer in Northeast and South Philadelphia, conducting in-depth interviews with residents. She says she was struck by what she saw: “These white working-class communities—once strong, vibrant, proud communities, often organized around big industries—they’re just in terrible straits. The social fabric of these places is just shredding. There’s little engagement in religious life, and the old civic organizations that people used to belong to are fading. Drugs have ravaged these communities, along with divorce, alcoholism, violence. I hang around these neighborhoods in South Philadelphia, and I think, ‘This is beginning to look like the black inner-city neighborhoods we’ve been studying for the past 20 years.’

Fortunately, all those millions of relatively impoverished immigrants from third-world cultures are likely to provide a wonderful antidote to this decline into matriarchal barbarism. Since immigration is good for the economy, imagine how bad unemployment might be if it weren’t for 12 million illegal immigrants doing the jobs that unemployed Americans can’t do.

The tide rolls out

The pace of credit contraction continued to increase according to the first February report.  Nearly $100 billion in bank loans were paid off, pulled, or defaulted in January.  At 1.42% of the total, this increases the estimated 2010 contraction from 10% to 15%, more than twice as much as the 2009 record.  This is a new chart going back to 1947, in order to better show the unprecedented nature of the ongoing loan shrinkage.  Keen observers may note that on this larger chart, 1975 does not show up as a negative credit year as it did in the previously displayed 1973-present graphs.  This is because the 1973+ numbers are weekly, while the 1947+ numbers are monthly.  This was enough to change what was a 0.9% contraction into 0.2% growth.  If you’re interested in understanding more about the significance of these credit statistics, The Vulture Lurks has a new review of RGD up:

The book is eminently readable, even for those lacking economics training. Vox was able to describe the economic mess in which we find ourselves, the steps that got us into that mess in the first place, and the likelihood that the steps currently being taken by our ruling class will exacerbate the situation, in terminology that wasn’t overwhelming. This book is understandable by ANYONE, regardless of economic background, prior study, or existing expertise. I consider this to be quite an accomplishment on Vox’s part.

Also, in what would appear to be the first review from Malaysia, GKE has a recommendation up on Amazon:  “I recommend this book for anyone interesting in a non-simplistic, but readable analysis of the current economic situation. I should also mention that I bought this book for Kindle and the price was perfect for a digital book.”

The hunt intensifies

First bounds on the Higggins boson

“The left shaded portion is the mass range excluded by LEP, and the central shaded region is the range excluded by the Tevatron. High masses are excluded by precision measurements of the weak mixing angle and the W mass, leaving only the range 115–150 GeV/c2 for future searches if the standard model is the correct theory.”

I find the Great Boson Hunt to be rather interesting, mostly because I am anticipating the prospect of all the amusement that will be provided by the competing explanations for why the standard model of particle physics is incorrect, what the most likely alternatives are, and whose fault it was.  It is quite funny to think of all the time and effort that has gone into the search for something that may still turn out to be no more real than the mythological pegasi. And yet, one has to respect the physicists, as unlike the evolutionary biologists, they have the intellectual integrity to test their assumptions and are even willing to abandon their theoretical models when their predictions fail rather than angrily defending them in the face of the observable evidence.

As we all know, if Haldane’s famous rabbits in the pre-Cambrian are ever found, it will take about two nanoseconds for the Darwinists to begin shrieking that what they had previously sworn up and down was a pre-Cambrian strata were actually Palaeogene rocks and this doesn’t disprove anything anyhow and maybe it’s not a real rabbit and why do you hate science you stupid Creationist bible-thumper…. Actually, come to think of it, it’s almost a pity that physicists don’t behave this way.

Atheists hate individual rights

It is much easier to understand Christianity once one comes to an acceptance of the existence of evil. In like manner, it is much easier to understand the link between Christianity and the concept of unalienable individual rights once one realizes that atheists who hate the former almost always hate the latter as well. As he does so well, PZ Myers once more provides the useful service of giving us a glimpse into the warped and irrational mind of the militant atheist:

It has been revealed that I’m a fan of Iain Banks. On my last long flight, I read his latest, Transition, which is a SF novel about people who can shift to alternate streams of reality, and who choose to meddle. One of the heroes of the story, Mrs Mulverhill, is explaining to another character about the various bizarre forms of government they find in alternate time-lines, and she defines one of the more freakishly weird.

“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”

That is perfectly in line with my own sentiments. Libertarianism isn’t so much a political and economic movement as it is a widespread pathology.

It is truly remarkable how an educated skepticism regarding the factual realities of the abuse of government power over millennia of recorded human history is somehow translated into “sociopathic self-regard” in the mind of the militant atheist. The godless Left, from Meslier and Marx to Kim Jong-Il and the Eurocrats, is obsessed with the notion of remaking Man in its own vision. There is never any possibility of principled, educated, and intelligent opposition to their fanciful visions of collectivist utopia, there is only pathology that ist verboten. The atheist left is always, without fail, totalitarian at heart. Consider these chilling words from Iain Banks’s interview with Socialist Review:

Is the Culture your vision of what humanity could, or should, be in the future?

“Yes! We’ll be lucky ever to achieve it. I think the only way a species like us could ever get to be like the Culture in the first place would be through genetic manipulation. Suppose there is some sort of mix of genes that predisposes us to racism, sexism and homophobia – I think we’d need to knock that out and we could become quite nice people…. for me it’s the ideal functioning utopia”

Banks is a very good science fiction writer with a Leninesque soul. In addition to being entertaining, his works show how the twin specters of eugenics and totalitarian dictatorship are always lurking in the shadowy hearts of the scientific godless. This is because fools who lack the beginning of knowledge will always seek to make themselves gods. It is not an accident that Christopher Hitchens still refuses to hear one word against Marx and dialectical materialism. It is not happenstance that the first atheist philosopher was honored by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. And it is not a coincidence that so many atheists happen to loathe both God and individual liberty.

And this comment from Banks says all you need to know about the total futility of atheist attempts to synthesize morality: “They are a very, very advanced society with quite good morals really. They occasionally resort to dirty tricks, but they can always prove it was the right thing to do because they use statistics.”

Statistics…. Aristotle wept.

A portrait of joy

After seeing that picture, not even the wintry, windswept soul of a life-long Vikings fan can find the necessary wherewithal to begrudge the New Orleans Saints their incredible Super Bowl victory.  Not unlike the unforgettable image of Kaka after winning the Champion’s League, this picture of Drew Brees with his son is a great reminder of the proper place that even the greatest temporal victories hold in the hearts of the champions.  How awesome it is for a man to be able to share a moment of triumph, however large or small, with his son.

Mailvox: correcting TIA

In which we are treated to a history lesson that corrects my description of the multiverse theory mentioned in TIA. In the chapter titled “Darwin’s Judas”, I wrote: “Those indisposed to accept the anthropic principle attempt to get around the massive improbability problem it presents by imagining that there are billions and billions of universes, for all things are possible through the scientist who postulates very large numbers. Only by postulating a potentially infinite number of universes can our wildly improbable universe become mathematically probable. Of course, there are no signs of any of these other universes, nor did science ever take the idea of parallel universes seriously until the alternative was accepting the apparent evidence for a universal designer. But not only is multiverse theory every bit as unfalsifiable and untestable as the God Hypothesis, it is demonstrably more improbable. If we accept Dawkins’s naked assertion that a universal designer is more complex than the one known universe, a designer is probably less complex than any two universes and infinitely less complex than an infinity of them.”

However, it appears I am entirely wrong about the multiverse concept being developed as a reaction to the anthropic principle. The gentleman writes:

One point that I think I should mention, though…. the “many worlds” interpretation of what’s going on was not invented by Darwinists in a desperate attempt to widen the playing field and give chance a chance–although they may well have seized upon it. The proposition actually predated the present debate by many years as the 1957 doctoral dissertation of Hugh Everett III at Princeton, who took the scientifically impeccable approach of accepting the mathematical formalism of quantum theory as meaning what it said. Collapsing wave functions and the assignment of statistical weights to the possible outcomes do not follow from anything inherent in the theory itself, but are consequences of the conventional imposed interpretation. Everett’s treatment effectively denies the existence of a separate classical realm, as distinct from a ghostlike superposition of potentialities, and asserts the existence of a universal wave function which never collapses, but decomposes naturally into a multitude of mutually unobserved but equally real worlds, each evolving in time, and in which the familiar statistical quantum laws will be found to apply.

I stand corrected. And, to be honest, also a little shocked that one of my favorite living authors, whose books rank highly in my personal top 100, actually happened to read one of my books. This is an excellent lesson in the importance of doing all of the tangentially relevant research; I researched the anthropic principle, but only bothered to read up on the various anti-theological attacks on it rather than investigating the multiverse theory itself.

WND column

Beware of Greeks Selling Bonds

The sum of these various factors is that the shadow of debt hanging over the global economy is more severe than it was in 1929. The threat is heightened by the fact that this time, 80 years later, it is not only the American authorities that are attempting to fight the contraction with aggressive fiscal and monetary policy, the European and Asian authorities are doing so as well. … This increasing inability to spend next week’s money today is exactly what is now beginning to be observed in the Treasury auctions around the world, as more and more national governments are finding it difficult to sell the debt that underlies their currencies.
– Vox Day, “The Return of the Great Depression”

While I have long predicted the collapse of the euro and eventually the European Union, I have to admit that Greece was not even on the periphery of my radar as a potential economic flashpoint. I examined the various economies of Europe in some detail while writing “The Return of the Great Depression,” and based on the incredible amounts of debt incurred by numerous countries during the real-estate boom of the last decade, it was clear there were a number of likely candidates for sovereign debt default.