Vox Popoli

There are two types of women, feminina collega and femina economica. The former is a man’s companion and her driving instinct is to put the interests of her family before her own, to make a priority of her twin roles as a wife and mother. The latter, on the other hand, makes a priority of her economic situation; if she happens to marry then she is a man’s parasite. The Virgin Queen brings to our attention a stellar example of the latter, one which illustrates the previously blogged link observed between falling house prices and declining divorce rates:

We saved and scrimped and searched for three years before sinking everything we had and more into a home for ourselves and our two children, a tiny co-op in a fringy New York City neighborhood. The process left us emotionally and financially tapped. Then, three days before we closed on the apartment, my husband lost his job….

It may well be that if this financial and subsequent emotional crisis hadn’t driven a wedge between us, something else would have eventually done the job. It’s certainly fair to say that we’re not the same people we were when we married a decade and a half ago, in our mid-20s. But even if our financial disasters weren’t the cause of our breakup, they sure were the catalyst.

Yet they’ve likewise made us think long and hard about the consequences of ending it. I have spent hours at my desk, ruefully contemplating my Quicken spreadsheet, calculating my monthly income and expenses, trying to make the numbers turn out better. Emotionally, I couldn’t afford to stay in this marriage any longer. Financially, I don’t know how I’ll be able to afford to leave it.

It is the bizarre logic of femina economica that I find particularly fascinating. She has the desire- the need -to leave her marriage because her husband is unable to maintain her in the style she believes is necessary to her emotional well-being, so she is destroying their marriage and sacrificing their children’s emotional stability in order to embrace the probability of penury in economically difficult times on the remote chance that she might be able to either a) discover a hitherto unknown capacity for earning income that she would somehow not be able to utilize as a married woman, or, b) meet a wealthier man and convince him to financially support her and her children despite the fact that she is fifteen years older than she was when she settled for attracting a less economically fit specimen.

In the real world, the grass is seldom greener. Try watering the lawn instead.

Just in case you were wondering if the government was actually more concerned about American citizens or its banker friends around the world:

In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night. The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC’s “This Week,” telling George Stephanopoulos, calling the coverage of foreign-based banks “a distinction without a difference to the American people.”

The financial community didn’t want to take its medicine back in 1999, so they put it off. Now they’re facing amputation, so they’re putting it off again. In the long run, they’re dead, of course, the problem is that each purchase of time to benefit the financial elite costs the American people dearly.

None of this is actually necessary. It’s only necessary in order to preserve the Federal Reserve’s failing monopoly over US money. Back when there were hundreds of competing bank currencies, a bank failure meant that those who held its currency suffered. Now that there’s a government-granted monopoly, a failure means that everyone will suffer. The fact that centralized money operates no better than centralized anything else should not surprise anyone capable of understanding the supply-demand curve.

UPDATE – Even the Washington Post recognizes that this preemptive bailout scheme is an insane idea likely to cause more problems than it solves:“With truly extraordinary speed, opinion has swung behind the radical idea that the government should commit hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to purchasing dud loans from banks that aren’t actually insolvent. As recently as a week ago, no public official had even mentioned this option. Now the Treasury, the Fed and congressional leaders are promising its enactment within days. The scheme has gone from invisibility to inevitability in the blink of an eye. This is extremely dangerous.”

UPDATE II – As you’d expect, Ron Paul is one of the few politicians who actually understands what’s going on and what should be done:

What’s your take on this huge financial bailout?

“It’s more of the same. More debt and more inflation and more pressure on the dollar. Ultimately, although the markets are responding very favorably at the moment, I think it is going to be devastating to the dollar and to our financial situation in this country.”

So instead of having taxpayers buy the bad debt, the market should take care of it by itself?

“Sure, prices need to go down. Bad debt needs to be eliminated. The taxpayer ought to be protected. Taxes ought to be lowered…We are following the same routine that we did in the Depression, and that is artificially try to keep prices up. People were starving in the Depression and the only thing they did was try to keep wages artificially high and keep food prices high. We are doing the same thing now—we are trying to keep housing prices high. Low prices for houses mean poor people could buy a house. This is the most important part of a free market economy and that is free market pricing. Without free market pricing, the market can’t work. And this is in a way a major effort to price fix.”

They can fight economic gravity as hard as they want. But in the end, the plane is eventually going to run out of fuel and the landing will be a lot harder as a result. I don’t have much sympathy for a country who rejected the chance to have Ron Paul at the helm and favored the likes of McCain and Obama.

86 Burns Redbeards (2-0-0)
65 Black Mouth Curs (0-2-0)

78 Alamo City Spartans (2-0-0)
70 Silver Spooners (0-1-1)

73 Valders Valkyries (2-0-0)
55 Judean Peoples Front (1-1-0)

82 Masonville Marauders (1-1-0)
80 Winston Reverends (0-2-0)

67 Mounds View Meerkats (1-1-0)
37 Greenfield Grizzlies (0-1-1)

Nate asked me what I think about the apparent end of the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment. Well, I think it’s long overdue, I wanted the Vikings to pursue Drew Brees back when San Diego decided to go with Rivers, and that the Vikings should now aggressively pursue signing either Jeff Garcia or Daunte Culpepper. Both quarterbacks, despite their limitations, are much likelier to be effective than Jackson or Gus Frerotte can be, and Garcia probably even knows a fair amount of Childress’s offense due to his time in Philadelphia. That being said, I’ll take Frerotte over Jackson without hesitating.

Jackson’s inability to develop into a serviceable quarterback, combined with the meltdowns of Vince Young and Michael Vick, demonstrate what anyone with a serious interest in the NFL knew all along; the supposed “reinvention” of the quarterback position was nothing more than a politically correct, media-driven attempt to support black quarterbacks. There’s no reason why a black quarterback can’t be as successful as a white one, as Culpepper, McNair, and McNabb have all shown. But those three quarterbacks were successful because they used their athletic ability as a last resort, not something they turned to the second they saw their first receiving option was covered. I suspect the NCAA move to spread offenses bears at least part of the blame for the amazing level of QB incompetence in the NFL.

NFL quarterbacking primarily concerns the art of the read, and the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment appears to show the limits of what one can be accomplished in three seasons with a committed coach, a strong arm, and a serious effort on the part of the quarterback. I quite like T-Jack as a player with physical talent who has really given it his best shot, and with his work ethic he’ll probably make for a reasonable backup. But he simply can’t see the field, read the defense, and find the open receiver in the very small amount of time provided by NFL defenses.

In other news, I’m kind of pleased about the Hochuli incident and not just because I don’t much like this San Diego team. NFL refs should be more inclined to swallow their whistles, as given the fact that perfection isn’t possible, they should referee the games in the full awareness that the game is not about them.

I’ll be shocked if the Vikings do well against the Panthers, as much as I like and admire the courage of Antoine Winfield, who has made two of the best solo tackles I have ever seen in the NFL, I hope they’re not going to let him go solo on Steve Smith. About the only hope for the Purple would appear to be possible overconfidence on Carolina’s part.

They totally know what they’re doing. They’re scientists, you see. And they’re ENTIRELY SURE they’re not going to melt the planet or anything while they’re smashing atoms:

The world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has been badly damaged and will be out of commission for at least two months, scientists in Switzerland have admitted. CERN says that problems with its particle collider, which cost £3.6 billion, are worse than previously thought and that preparations for experiments will now have to be postponed….

They had planned to crash atoms inside the vast detectors of the LHC by sending two beams in opposite directions. James Gillies, spokesman for CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research – said this will now have to be put on hold indefinitely as experts try to solve the problem, which has been caused by a leak of helium in its 17 mile tunnel. In what is technically known as a “quench”, up to a tonne of supercooled helium escaped because of a faulty electrical connection between two magnets in the massive machine.

I’d feel much safer if it were Italian scientists messing around with trying to miniature black holes, to be honest.

Drudge on the Dow:

DOW UP 40 POINTS IN PAST MONTH… UP 18% PAST 5 YEARS… UP 44% PAST 10 YEARS…

In other words, stock market investors have made, on average, 3.2 percent per annum over the last five years and 4.4 percent over the last ten. That’s presumably before inflation and also ignores the fact that one-third of the stocks that made up the Dow of 1998 are no longer part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Those who think that the stock market is always the safest investment should note that simply depositing one’s money in a Euro-denominated bank account since 2003 would have returned 8.5 percent per annum in currency appreciation plus interest without any of the inherent stock-related risk.

In case you’re interested, these are the companies that were part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1998 that are no longer so: Chevron Corporation, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Union Carbide, Sears Roebuck, AT&T Corporation, Eastman Kodak, International Paper Company, Altria Group (Phillip Morris) and Honeywell International. These declining companies were replaced by healthier, more growth-friendly corporations like the American International Group, which the keen-eyed reader may note has been occasionally in the news of late….

You may now feel free to flap your arms and fly about the country:

The Securities and Exchange Commission took the dramatic step early Friday of temporarily banning the routine practice of betting against company stocks. The move, announced on the agency’s Web site, may well be unprecedented and a reflection of regulators’ concern about the widening scope of the financial crisis as entreaties come from all quarters to stem a swarm of short-selling.

This is a dead horse that deserves beating and beating well. The markets are not free in the USA. They never have been. More regulation of what are already very over-regulated markets is not going to ward off the inevitable economic bust that always follows economic booms. Since a) the Austrians were correct, and b) the USA has recently enjoyed the longest and most artificially prolonged financial boom in history, it shouldn’t be too terribly hard to realize what we have seen thus far is merely the camel’s nose in the tent.

I’m just curious if this ban is temporary in the “road work ahead – lane closed” sense or in the “extraordinary expenditures – income tax” sense.

It usually comes down to economics in the end:

Homeowners may despair as turmoil in the property market slashes value off their houses, but new research shows they could have the weak economic climate to thank for helping them hang on to their spouse. Data from the Office of National Statistics suggests that an unforseen consequence of falling house prices is a lower rate of divorce among married homeowners over the past 10 years…. Divorce accounts for around 6pc of all house sales in the prime property market, rising to 13pc among houses valued at more than £1m and 18pc among houses valued at more than £2m.

This doesn’t surprise me. There don’t seem to be too many women walking away from functional marriages simply because they’re “not happy” when there is little prospect for easy post-marital financial security. As societal wealth is annihilated – or more precisely, as the veil is stripped from the illusion of societal wealth – we can expect to see a return towards more conservative social mechanisms since there were economically rational reasons they came to be developed in the first place.

So, add increased marriage rates and lower divorce rates to the probable consequences of the fiat bubbles bursting. While there are certainly numerous systemic obstacles inhibiting marriage, such as the family courts, market forces always overwhelm law and social policy in the end.

I have no doubts that Obama is a fraud. He’s pretty obviously the sort of presentable black individual that every white liberal wants to fall all over themselves helping, who happens to be a con man that expects and is always prepared to take full advantage of that help. There’s one at every private school. I’d never questioned if Obama had written his own books or not, but it seems I probably should have:

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write “Dreams From My Father,” he had written very close to nothing. As an undergraduate, Obama had written what he justifiably calls some “very bad poetry.” He published nothing under his own name in The Harvard Law Review, where he served as an editor and as president. And after leaving Harvard, he published nothing in its review or in any law journal.

Then, in 1995, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time magazine has called – with a straight face – “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

The public is asked to believe Obama wrote this on his own. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. In writing a book on intellectual fraud, “Hoodwinked,” I developed an eye for literary humbug, and “Dreams” serves up an eyeful….

I have attempted to contact Dystel without success, but it is highly unlikely she re-wrote the book. Whoever did almost assuredly shared many of Obama’s sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text. I had never even thought of Bill Ayers as a likely ghostwriter until I ordered his memoir, “Fugitive Days,” and began to read it. He writes very well and very much like “Obama.” Unlike “Dreams,” however, where the high style is intermittent, “Fugitive Days” is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. That voice is surely Ayers’

It would simply be too hilarious if it turns out that Ayers rewrote Obama’s book in order to complete the contract that Obama couldn’t. No doubt some professional textual analysis is in order here.

In related news, archeologists today discovered a stone tablet containing the Lex Concido Rex, which apparently codified the imperial laws banning species extinction proclaimed by one Dens Ingens, a dinosaur emperor from the Gwaag Dynasty:

Stock market speculators will not be allowed to profit from the falling share prices of banks and insurance companies, financial regulators have announced…. The City regulator introduced a ban on the “short-selling” of banking and other financial shares on the London stock market. Short-selling is essentially a form of betting; a technique used by hedge funds and speculators to profit from falling share prices.

And once more history repeats itself. If prices are going down, why, it must be the speculators! Why not just have done with it and pass a law forbidding stock prices to decline that also gives everyone ten billion dollars? It would be nearly as effective.

An IQ guy attempts to work it out:

[T]hese are the facts concerning Obama’s LSAT score while attending Law School at Harvard University. We do not know his actual LSAT score; however, after much research, we found that the average LSAT score for all Harvard students is 171. The percentile rank for an LSAT score of 171 at Harvard is 98.8%.

MENSA will accept LSAT scores as a means of qualifying for MENSA membership. (MENSA also accepts up to 200 various IQ tests and other tests of cognitive function as well.) The LSAT score required for MENSA membership is equal to a percentile of 95% or higher. Thus, basing Obama’s estimated LSAT score of 171 ranks him in the top 98.8% (percent/percentile) range which is clearly above the lowest acceptable LSAT percentage rank of 95%, which clearly affirms that Obama has a qualifying intelligence quotient that would allow him acceptance into MENSA.

Since MENSA accepts various IQ Tests as well as other cognitive tests to qualify for MENSA membership it is safe to estimate that Obama’s IQ Score could range anywhere from a low IQ score of 130 based on the Stanford Binet IQ Test, Revision 5, to a high IQ score of 148 based on the Cattell IQ Test.

What the IQ guy failed to account for is the fact that Harvard University practices affirmative action. PBS Frontline reports: “The gap in SAT scores persists even at the highest levels of achievement. A study of the 1989 applicants to five highly-selective universities found that white candidates’ average combined SAT score was 186 points higher than the corresponding SAT average for African American applicants.”

Furthermore, the New York Times reports that “At the best schools, by contrast, efforts to diversify the student body translate into a 400-point bonus for minority students on the SAT tests.”

That 98.8 ranking, according to the average Harvard LSAT, translates to an estimated 138 IQ, which is equivalent to a combined pre-1996 SAT score of 1310. That’s pretty good, if not spectacular. However, note that this very same 98.8th percentile is only 1290 when taken directly from the pre-1996 SAT. [There is a dichotomy between the reported 98.8 percentile IQ equivalence on the LSAT and the 98.8 percentile on the pre-1996 SAT. Since Mensa accepts the 95th percentile on the LSAT as evidence that one is in 98th percentile in intelligence, it’s clear that the SAT-IQ conversion, based as it is on a broader population sample, is the more accurate and 1290 is the correct figure] Due to affirmative action, however, one must reduce that score by at least 186 points. (400 seems extreme; I suspect the NYT article is talking about the new SAT, which isn’t valid for the purposes of this comparison.) Thus, giving Obama the benefit of the doubt drops his score to 1104, which is equivalent to an IQ of 116. That’s not bad, but it is significantly less intelligent than Hillary’s 140 IQ, as well as being lower than George W. Bush’s 125 IQ (1206 SAT).

Before one points to the fact that Obama ranked highly in his class, it’s important to keep in mind that Bill Bradley was a Princeton Rhodes Scholar despite his 485 Verbal SAT and mediocre 103 IQ. Academic success, like every other kind of success, is just as much about hard work and determination as it is about intellectual firepower, but Barack Obama’s supporters obviously shouldn’t be attempting to make their case for him on the basis of what is, based on the available information, probably an IQ of between 115 and 120, only one standard deviation above the norm. Of course, this estimate is based on averages which don’t necessarily apply to a single individual; Obama could lay the matter to rest by simply permitting his scores to be released to the public.

If his intelligence is so incredibly important, as some of his more visibly insane supporters insist, then surely the senator should inform us precisely how intelligent he is. Because he demonstrates his ignorance and a less-than-impressive intelligence nearly every time he opens his mouth despite his handlers’ attempts to retroactively fix his statements: “The fact that we have reached a point where the Federal Reserve felt it had to take this unprecedented step with the American Insurance Group is the final verdict on the failed economic philosophy of the last eight years.”

First, AIG didn’t fail because of the economic philosophy of the last eight years. Alan Greenspan goosed the markets by expanding the money supply while Clinton was president and Ben Bernanke has further loosened monetary policy since. Second, that “unprecedented step” was taken with the American International Group.

UPDATE – Upset Obama admirers should note two things. First, a 116 IQ still indicates an intelligence that is well above average. It’s hardly an insult. Second, I am not a Republican, much less a McCain supporter, and have never even voted for a Republican for president.

UPDATE II – Obama graduated from my mother’s alma mater, where everyone takes the various college prep tests. He was not a National Merit Scholar, a National Merit Semifinalist or an Outstanding Participant. This indicates a ceiling on his SAT percentile at 96.9, which indicates a maximum possible SAT score of 1230 and maximum IQ of 129.