Vox Popoli

The Word of the Day for February 02, 2009 is:
cyberpunk • SY-ber-punk • noun

*1 : science fiction dealing with future urban societies dominated by computer technology

2 : an opportunistic computer hacker

Example Sentence: Cyberpunk — with its androids and cyborgs and human-electronic networks — almost turns reading into a computer game.

In science fiction circles, “cyberpunk” is a genre that often features countercultural antiheroes trapped in a dehumanizing high-tech future. Its roots extend back to the technical fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, but it was years before it matured. The word “cyberpunk” was coined by writer Bruce Bethke, who wrote a story with that title in 1980. He created the term by combining “cybernetics,” the science of replacing human functions with computerized ones, and “punk,” the raucous music and nihilistic sensibility that became a youth culture in the 1970s and ’80s. Not until the 1984 publication of William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, however, did “cyberpunk” really take off as a term or a genre.

Ah, fame….

The poli-demographic cycle at work in California:

How does one explain how California is broke, tens of billions of dollars in aggregate debt, despite having among the highest sales and income taxes in the nation?

We are naturally rich beyond belief—timber, oil, agriculture, a long sea-coast, wonderful weather, mountains, sea, and valleys—and inherited lucrative industries in tourism, computers and software, defense and great universities. Our grandparents left us a once wonderful freeway network, a tripartite higher education system, ports, airports, dams and canals.

So what went wrong, and why are tens of thousands of Californians leaving the state with bachelor degrees and above, while tens of thousands enter without high-school diplomas?

The answer, as VDH knows perfectly well, is simple. Ideology matters. Left-wing ideology is intrinsically parasitic, and once its depredations sufficiently weaken its host, both the parasite and the host are doomed. California is appears to be reaching that point, and the entire United States of America is not far behind it. Unfortunately for the residents of other states, many of the individuals who passively permitted this transformation – and in some cases actively encouraged it – have relocated and are now spreading their ideological filth in their new environs.

Recover is not right around the corner:

As George Bush did with the creation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Herbert Hoover oversaw the founding of an unaccountable organization making secret loans to banks and other failing institutions, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. As President Barack Obama has done with his “stimulus” program of massive federal spending, Hoover convinced Congress to increase federal spending 30 percent in 1931 alone. In relative terms, this failed spending package was larger than Obama’s incredible $775 billion “stimulus” plan, which would only amount to a 25 percent increase even if all of the spending were to take place in 2009.

But one of the more striking things [chronicled in America’s Great Depression] was the way in which the politicians and professional economists almost uniformly expected recovery to take place in 1931, and their panic when their expectations were dashed. Depression set in despite a resort to extreme measures that are all too familiar to the modern observer. Interest rates were cut to historic lows. Millions of dollars were loaned to the states to finance a vast series of public works and stave off unemployment. Taxes were increased at both the state and federal levels, and the Federal Reserve made use of every tool at its disposal to prop up failing banks.

On a related note, this WSJ article by two economists is timely and informative, if nothing new to the AGDers.

Here it is. And may the Force be with you. Regardless of how well or poorly you happen to do, I hope you’ve learned something substantive from this economic study.

I’d like to see the Cardinals win. I’m a fan of both Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald, and they’ve been underdogs since they were the second team in the Second City. Nevertheless, I just don’t see them beating a Steelers team that has a competent offense and a punishing defense. That’s been the model of success over the last decade or two, and the history of the Super Bowl is the history of high-powered offenses flaming out.

If you want to talk Super Bowl, this would be the place.

The Original Cyberpunk shuts the door to The Ranting Room with a familiar bang:

“So,” I said at last. “To what do I owe the honor of this visitation?”

Nixon seemed momentarily startled to notice me there, and then recovered quickly and offered up a small smile. “Farewell visit? After all, this is how The Ranting Room began: with you, channeling for me.” He smiled again, weakly this time, and shrugged. “Word gets around. So when I heard that you were retiring—”

“I am not retiring,” I protested. “I’m just reordering my priorities. There’s the new blog—”

“You’re retiring,” he said. “Or at least retiring as the creator and chief writer of The Ranting Room. You’re getting onto that big old helicopter, throwing one last great big ‘V’ to the crowd, and riding off into the sunset.

I considered The Ranting Room to be one of the Internet’s best resources for would-be writers. Here’s hoping that The Friday Challenge will turn out to be similarly useful. As for the Chinese Curse of the coming years revealed by the saturnine shade, all I can say is that I feel humbly grateful to be blessed with such a morbidly dark sense of humor.

Is not exactly a surprise, because non-profitable operations always burn through their VC money sooner or later. It’s almost always more effective to start an operation that is profitable from the start. Readers with long memories will recall that I never had any interest in what was obviously a ludicrous business proposition:

A few people have asked me about my opinion on what I think is now called Open Source Media, and wondered why I’m not involved or if I’m bitter about not being involved. My position can be summed up thusly:

1. Heard about it.
2. Didn’t sign up for it.
3. Don’t care about it.
4. Expect it to crash and burn.
– Vox Popoli, Nov 20, 2005

[W]e have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009. The PJM portal and the XPressBlogs will continue as is. Since our ad relationship continues for the time being, you should note that in order to be paid for the 1st quarter of 2009, you must leave the current Pajamas ads up until 12:01AM April 1. We will be sending you information in mid-March on removing the ads. As of April 1, 2009, you will be free to arrange syndication or re-sale deals.
– Protein Wisdom, Jan 31, 2009

And as far as I’m concerned, good riddance to them. Dennis the Peasant was right.

In the interest of watching the statisticians work their fictional magic, I thought it might be educational to track the economic contraction as it develops and see to what extent it shows up in the official figures. Notice that according to the current Advance report on the fourth quarter of 2008, the economy actually grew 1.3 percent this year. I’m guessing that they just might revise that down a bit in the next report or two.

It seems the incidence of the self-proclaimed rationalist drawing errant conclusions from demonstrably inaccurate data is not a new phenomenon:

Innumerable have been the explanations which men have offered for the apostasy of Julian. They have pointed to his Arian teachers, have suggested that Christianity was hateful to him as the religion of Constantius whom he regarded as his father’s murderer, while rationalists have paradoxically claimed that the Emperor’s reason refused to accept the miraculous origin and subtle theologies of the faith. It would be truer to say that Christianity was not miraculous enough – was too rational for the mystic and enthusiast. The religion which had as its central object of adoration the cult of a dead man was to him human, all too human: his vague longings after some vast imaginative conception of the universe felt themselves cabined and confined in the creeds of Christianity…. A Greek by education and literary sympathies, the Christian Bible was but a faint and distorted reflexion of the masterpieces which had comforted his solitary youth: a mystic who had felt the wonder of the expanse of the heavens, with a strain in his nature to which the ritual excesses of the Orient appealed with irresistible fascination, it was easy for him to adopt the speculations of Neoplatonism and to fall a victim to the thaumaturgies of Maximus. The causes of Julian’s apostasy lie deep-rooted in the apostate’s inmost being.
– The Cambridge Medieval History Series, Vol I, p. 78

Just as history’s most famous apostate did not become a pagan mystic because he was too rational for Christianity, the atheist does not become a secular humanist because he is too devoted to reason for religion. In both cases, the cause lies within the individual’s character rather than from any superior rational faculty. This should be obvious due to a) the oft-demonstrated logical errors of the leading atheists, (to say nothing of their collective belief in the AGW myth), and, b) the fact that atheist intellectuals tend to convert to atheism in their inexperienced youth, but irreligious intellectuals who convert to religion have tended to do so at the height of their intellectual powers.