Vox Popoli

The quiz on the Afterword will be posted tomorrow.

This is the result of the Fed and the FDIC continually playing double-or-nothing with the banking system:

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street’s most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

It shouldn’t be too terribly long before it all collapses. I think it’s inevitable at this point. My guess is that the monetary authorities will attempt to substitute a new currency and financial system that nevertheless leaves the same institutions in control. Given their inept performance over the last 20 years, I find it hard to believe they’ll be successful.

The big question, the only real question, is if the Fed can genuinely create money or not. The problem they face is that while they can print all the paper they want, they can’t get it into the system without someone borrowing it. The fractional-reserve system begins to break down as soon as people stop taking out loans, which appears to be the point we’ve finally reached.

So, the FDIC Quarterly reported a 20 percent decline in the Deposit Insurance Fund during second quarter, from $13 billion to $10.4 billion, which is considerably more than the $4 billion than the estimated losses indicated, much less the -$4.4 billion that I calculated based on the 1.94 balance reduction/estimated losses ratio that applied to the previous five quarters.

The answer is due to the Special Assessment which brought in an additional $8 billion or so from the insured banks, as otherwise the balance would have been reduced to $2.4 billion. The FDIC also announced another Special Assessment would be collected during the third quarter; since estimated losses in the third quarter have already surpassed those of the second quarter, $10.2 billion to $9 billion, it will have to be even bigger than the previous one.

The problem is that there is no explanation for why the FDIC has suddenly gotten so much better at estimating its losses. Whereas the ratio reliably averaged around 1.9x the previous five quarters, in the second quarter it miraculously improved to 1.2x. This seems… questionable at best, especially given the way that the situation is clearly worsening for the banks in general.

There are now about 102 banks in the state operating in the red, up from 76 in the first quarter and 74 a year ago, according to quarterly financial results the federal government released Thursday. Nationally, 28 percent of banks were unprofitable.

Less fit by the standards of natural selection, anyhow:

The following table shows the average number of children women have birthed by the number of male sexual partners they have had since the age of 18*. Like men, women who have had only one partner are the most fecund.

Whereas monogamous women who have only had one lifetime partner averages 2.29 children, the average US woman with nine partners averages 1.46 children. The big dropoff appears to be between six and seven partners, which I find somewhat interesting because I recall an old numerical definition of promiscuity from one of my school health textbooks as being six or more partners.

Religion would appear to account for most, but not all, of this effect, as regular church attendance is correlated with an increasae of about .7 kids/woman.

Email me if you’re on this list. The draft is Sunday, September 6th at 3:30 PM Central. I’ll assign teams and send you the end of year roster this afternoon; please send me your keepers (max 3) by Saturday evening.

Clay
Cynical
Mattos
Gadspeed
InklingStar
PeterAnthony
SoonMoon

Ian – if the WB isn’t playing this year.
Vox
Nate

RC wonders about the potential use of force to prevent abortion:

For years, I thought criminalizing abortion was consistent with libertarian principle. I can no longer see how. Libertarianism is not against all aggression. For an act of aggression to be criminal under a libertarian legal code, it would have to violate rights. Acts of aggression against cats and dogs wouldn’t be illegal under such a code. Why would unborn children have rights? Do you support the criminalization of abortion on theonomistic grounds? I don’t see how any degree of theonomy is consistent with libertarian principle. You seem like someone who would be familiar with these issues; maybe you’d discuss this on your blog.

The reason unborn children have human rights is that they are human. They exist, they are human, ergo they have the same right to life, liberty and property that their mothers and fathers do. As Ron Paul, a fine and upstanding libertarian, has pointed out, there are few acts of aggression more violent and unprovoked than those involved in murderously vivisecting an unborn child.

There is not a single pro-abortion argument that stands up to science and reason. Every single one is not only spurious, but easily demonstrated to be spurious. It is not necessary to bring religious arguments into the debate to conclusively settle the matter in favor of the pro-life position, in fact, the Bible-based arguments against abortion are, in my opinion, weaker than the rational and scientific arguments.

Criminalizing abortion is no more questionable from a libertarian position than criminalizing murder. It is an act of lethal, unprovoked aggression, often state-supported and sometimes state-dictated, of the sort that every libertarian, religious or secular, should vehemently oppose.

The Market Ticker explains the fraudulent nature of the market rally:

So let me see if I get this right. 2.126 billion shares traded in four stocks [Citigroup, Fannie, Freddie, and Bank of America -VD]… These four stocks represented thirty seven percent of all shares traded today. Today 3,162 different stocks traded on the NYSE. These four represent 0.13% of the total, yet they comprised 37% of the volume.

And to top it all off, two of those corporations are confirmed to be insolvent. But, on the plus side, at least we know where that money the Federal Reserve doesn’t want audited is going….

UPDATE – And here’s a contrarian indicator: Investors Intelligence, which tracks the market views of about 130 independent investment newsletter editors, said 19.8% of the letters now are bearish on stocks, down from 23.1% the previous week and the fewest since the 19.6% reading of October 2007.

Blackblade calculates it… from his own perspective.

To each his own… and yet I have to ask if he honestly only places 10 percent weighting on historical and documentary evidence in contemplating other matters. If so, I can’t imagine he spends much time reading books and newspapers. Actually, I have another question. What is meant by the “Belief” factor? I’d also consider substituting “Direct Personal Experience/Observation” for “Lack of any directly observed interaction”.

Richard Dawkins makes the mistake of claiming he’s going to prove evolution is a fact:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust…. Evolution is an inescapable fact, and we should celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty. Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of aeons past. Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.

Richard Dawkins has barely begun making his initial claims and already he’s talking about bishops and fudging his case. Evolution is an inescapable fact… that is inferred after the fact. As I said, the ex-scientist has lost his fastball; I suspect he’s made a huge blunder in writing this book because the primary defense of modern evolutionary theory relies upon the ability of its adherents to hide behind its mutable nature. One cannot take down the constantly morphing tautologies due to their dynamic nature, but one will at least theoretically be able to take down Richard Dawkins’s best case for evolution due to its static nature, which for the purposes of public discourse will arguably be even more effective.

I can’t be certain on the basis of this excerpt alone, but I suspect that Dawkins may have also made a very amusing mistake in selecting the metaphor of the detective. If Dawkins is actually operating under the popular notion of detectives making inferences to lead them the responsible culprit, the metaphor is going to blow up in his face. Anyone who knows much about the way the police actually catch criminals understands what I mean by that.

And yes, I’m desperately hoping that the magical replication fairies from The Selfish Gene make another appearance.

The Bahamas consider a legal oxymoron:

“I think the bill is a very good thing because I believe that a husband can rape his wife. No is no. I don’t care if you’re married or if you’re not married. No is no, and once you force yourself on someone, whoever it is, it is rape. I agree with the bill 100 percent,” she said.

First, there is no such thing as marital rape. Once consent is formally given in public ceremony, it cannot be revoked; the form in which marital consent is revoked is well-established. It is called divorce. This isn’t a religious issue, although many on both sides will attempt to view it that way, it’s a simple matter of when consent is revocable and the specific form that revocation must take. I invite those who believe that consent may always be granted and revoked at will to consent to join the U.S. Army, then attempt to withdraw their consent. That should serve to clarify the matter for them; one hopes they will enjoy their extended holiday in Afghanistan. The attempt to create a legal concept of “marital rape” is no less than an attempt to destroy the basic concept of marriage. If the husband or the wife has no more claim to the spouse’s body than anyone else, then the marital vows are meaningless and the marriage is a charade. Once consent is withdrawn, the marriage has ended.

If a woman wishes to preserve her right to sexually reject a man at will, she has a perfectly viable means of doing so. Don’t get married. It’s really not that hard. But, once married, neither husband nor wife has the right to reject the other’s marital claims. This does not mean that it is wise for anyone to abuse one’s marital rights, as doing so on a regular basis will tend to lead to the legally correct abrogation of those rights. One is always free to respect the other’s wishes and refrain from exercising one’s rights in the same way that most Americans fail to exercise their right to bear arms most of the time. But failing to exercise one’s rights is not the same as failing to possess them.

Men contemplating marriage would be wise to sound out their prospective brides on this issue. If a woman believes in the concept of marital rape, absolutely do not marry her! It would make no sense whatsoever to marry a woman who believes that being married to her grants her husband no more sexual privilege than the next unemployed musician who happens to catch her eye. And if a woman who believes in the existence of marital rape pushes you for marriage, just assure her that while you respect the institution, you believe it is much more important to defend her unqualified right to say no.

That the “marital rape” concept is not only legally oxymoronic, but deeply undesirable for both sexes, is exemplified by its implications for sex that by definition precludes consent. Let’s face it, any man or woman who believes in the criminalization of wake-me-up sex is not an individual with whom any decently hedonistic being would want to be saddled for a lifetime.