Tag: mailvox

I usually just delete and ignore my daily hate mail, but this was right up there with the classic Navy SEAL copypasta.

Dear Pale Nigger with a Tiny Head

After encountering you and being within the confines of your sniveling shithole called “vox popoli” I have attempted to give my own honest and humble opinions and recommendations to anyone willing to listen. In hindsight I cannot imagine why I even paid attention to a lowly fool who believes wholeheartedly in the lie of jebus chris. Being the ultimate seeker of history beyond anyone I have ever seen I judge such books as ‘Ecclesiastes’ ‘Luke’ ‘Deuteronomy’ ‘Genesis’ ‘Exodus’ and other filth to be paltry, petty gibberish totally unfit for future generations to read. Unlike yourself, I am a reader of ALL known ancient languages and scripts. There are but few who could beat me in this field and most of them are dead. I have read the ‘bible’ from beginning to end and in all its earliest iterations. I know ALL of its flaws and the crude excuses of translations in its intricate fallacies. I am also aware of the seemingly endless archeological evidence and alternative historical records that ultimately crush the [ill]legitimacy of the Tanakh/Old testament and its synthesised bastard spawn the greco-roman ‘new’ testament. In the area of ‘gawd’s word’ I am superior in knowledge to anything you ‘know’.

Being as high as I am, and you as low as a mite, your censure of my deductions and articulations is quite the appalling breach of natural law. In the purely truthful sense of law it is only fitting that ‘eye for an eye’ to be meted on those equal and in this particular scenario you are not an equal on any level. The logical conclusion of this is to have you banned from employment and your entire well-being seized for the benefit of your betters as well as any belonging you claim to possess. You can retaliate but in the end it shall mean nothing. The tiny-brained mulatto wogs that dwell in that shitpit known as Italy are absolutely incapable of halting your punishment and any call to stop my righteousness shall only end in their demise. Any police found aiding your escape shall be executed as the repugnant criminals that they are.

I have noticed for a while that you have consistently deleted my infinitely righteous messages of truth on your site. As this crime is utterly irredeemable, I am forced to conclude that you have joined the ranks of the various cockroaches who have denigrated and insulted me for no better reason than to hide your own weak, pathetic, life-unworthy-of-life selves. As such, you shall be executed without dignity and any and every wog cop you call upon to hide yourself with shall also be judged guilty of the crime of preventing justice and tortured to death for this transgression.

You have been condemned and there is no redemption. No cry of mercy, no display of repentance to me or my Lord shall be accepted. Your existence shall be nothing but pain, misery and eventually suicide. May the disgusting thing you call “faith in christ” be expunged from your very being and your assets of “castalia house” be seized for the benefit of your betters.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this gentleman has asymmetrical features, objectively bad skin, and does not go out on a lot of dates. Can you even imagine how he would respond to getting shot down by a woman? I used to wonder why girls are so cruel to gammas, but now I understand.

Of course, it’s so over the top that one tends to suspect it is one of the Dread Ilk trolling.

A reader has a scoop about DC’s Supergirl television show:

Inside info from the set of Supergirl.  It was already converged.  I didn’t think they could converge it any more.  But they found a way. In the upcoming season, the heroes and the “good guys” won’t have any assault weapons.  They are de-gunning them.  No projectile weapons.  No SWAT gear or tactical vests. They even have a special anti-bumpstock bit of business planned. 

This new approach on the part of DC is certainly going to have some interesting implications for The Punisher, to say the least, if Marvel follows suit.

ML is not exactly surprised by David Hogg’s rejection of Laura Ingraham’s apology:

David Hogg is predictably still calling for boycotts of Ingraham’s advertisers, calling her apology inadequate. It’s a shame she didn’t read your book.

At this point I can safely state, without any sense of exaggeration or modesty, that if you have anything to do with the media or politics and you do not read SJWAL, you will fully merit the treatment that you’re going to get from SJWs sooner or later. Conservative commentators continue to demonstrate that they never learn anything from the various defenestrations that preceded their own, as they insist on demonstrating every single time one of them comes in for targeted public criticism.

Laura Ingraham rightly made fun of David “Totally Not a Crisis Actor” Hogg because he’s been getting rejected from various universities, then promptly backed down and apologized when the media’s little darling affected to have gotten his feelings hurt. As you can imagine, her apology completely resolved the situation, because SJWs always refrain from taking advantage of an apologetic conservative rolling over and showing his yellow belly.

Advertisers – including TripAdvisor, Nestle, Wayfair and Hulu – are dumping Laura Ingraham after she slammed Parkland survivor

TripAdvisor will pull its advertisements from right-wing television host Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program.

In a tweet, Ingraham mocked a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting in February that left 17 students and adults dead. The survivor-turned-activist, David Hogg, responded on Twitter by calling on his followers to contact Ingraham’s top advertisers. Ingraham later tweeted her apologies “for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland.”

Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —incl. @DavidHogg111.  On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland. For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how “poised” he was given the tragedy. As always, he’s welcome to return to the show anytime for a productive discussion. 

What a brave opinion leader! The complete spinelessness and stupidity demonstrated by the hapless Ingraham aside, this episode demonstrates how fragile the Right is when it relies upon the Left’s infrastructure. Even a not-very-bright high school student can effectively take down a major conservative media figure with nothing more than a well-targeted tweet.

But there is a more important point here than the obvious question of “what part of ‘never apologize’ did you fail to understand?” If you live by advertising from converged corporations, then you can safely expect them to cut you off the moment someone complains that you are violating the current Narrative.

Ingraham’s cringing self-implosion demonstrates why it is so terminally short-sighted for conservatives to insist on continually maximizing their short-term interests in exposure over their long-term interests in a solid non-converged infrastructure. This is why I wouldn’t accept a television show on Fox News or CNN even if one was offered to me on a silver platter, as while such a show would be of significant benefit in the short term, it would vastly increase my fragility, whereas continuing to build up Infogalactic, Voxiversity, and other platforms will likely prove more beneficial to me and many others in the long run.

I have no sympathy for the talking heads who are shut down by their advertisers or the self-published authors who are shut down by Amazon. These are known risks and they cannot come as a surprise to anyone who has been conscious for the last four years. While you’re not necessarily part of the problem if you’re not helping build alternative platforms, you also are not part of the solution, and can’t expect much in the way of support or sympathy if you find yourself being deplatformed in the future.

MP explains why Smoot-Hawley is deemed to have been so important in the 1930s, and why tariffs cannot be a similar concern today even if we accept Jude Wanniski’s original case for its connection to the Great Depression:

I was reading some of your earlier threads and I noticed you had questions as to how the Smoot-Hawley Tariff came to be associated with causing the Great Depression.

The idea was first proposed by Jude Wanniski in his book “The Way the World Works.” Specifically, it is in Chapter 7, “The Stock Market and the Wedge.”

 I recently read the first 10 chapters of Jude’s book and I can say it is excellent overall and well worth reading, but the conclusions are vastly different from the normal interpretations of Smoot-Hawley. Basically, Jude was tracking the reportage of the Smoot-Hawley legislation as it was winding its way through Congress. Every time the legislation experienced a setback, the stock market would rally. Every time it experienced a success, the stock market would decline. When Hoover finally signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff into law, the market took a massive dive. Thus, you have the evidence of the Smoot-Hawley tariff causing the Great Depression.

This is good as far as it goes, but it begs the question as to why the market was so concerned about the tariff to begin with. Was the market really worried about reciprocal tariffs or a decline in economic activity? It turns out that the evidence in Jude’s chapter points to a different reason:

The stock market was tracking the tariff legislation because it was worried about a bond market dislocation. This is my analysis piecing together the evidence presented in chapter 7 of Jude’s book.

 Basically, before WWI, America was the world’s biggest debtor nation, importing capital from all over the world to build and invest in the United States. During and after WWI, America became the world’s biggest creditor. Out of the national income of $30 billion, Woodrow Wilson lent $11 billion to England and France to fight WWI. After the war, America lent an additional $14.7 billion for private and public investment, a lending boom that continued to grow throughout the roaring 20’s. This means that during probably the biggest boomtime in US history up to the period, where the economy grew to $100 billion before the crash, the United States was accumulating a massive bond portfolio where a sizeable percentage of assets were concentrated in foreign bonds.

 Because the US was on a gold standard where $20 bought an ounce of gold, the only way for foreign entities to pay for their dollar-denominated debts was to sell to the United States, exchange goods for cash, and then meet the terms of their bond agreements. To guarantee that they could sell goods, gain cash and pay debts, European firms were dumping product in the United States.

The dumping was at first concentrated in the agricultural sector and it was wreaking havoc on farmers. Because farmers accounted for 25{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} of the population, they managed to push the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922, a tariff of not only 34.8{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b}, but with a Tariff Commission whose duty was to equalize production costs as a condition for any tariff removal. Yet, throughout the 1920’s, not only did the dumping continue, it moved upmarket. Wisconsin Senators, by the late 1920’s, were complaining about Belgian cement undercutting Wisconsin cement companies.

Jude’s book provides great insight into what was going on in the 1920’s American economy. Warren Harding ran on a campaign of “returning to normalcy” by repealing the high income taxes of the war years. This caused the US economy to boom. By 1925, the top marginal tax rate was reduced to 25{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} and the US economy was roaring along.

Unfortunately, the malfeasance of the Wilson administration led the United States to lend enormous amounts of money to the rest of the world, a practice that continued among private sector banks throughout the 1920’s. JP Morgan would lend money to Belgian cement makers that would then export government-subsidized cement to the US, sell it, and then service the bonds, which reflected in higher stock prices for JP Morgan and Belgian cement companies, but would wreak havoc on local businesses that then lobbied for tariff protection.  This process was repeated across hundreds of different industries.

The stock market was not worried that the drop in international trade would tank the US economy. International trade was small as a percentage of the US economy, roughly 4{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} total. But, that 4{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} of international trade was servicing the accumulated lending that amounted to anywhere from 30-50{0e0118f8ae392893e7132af0e0c1b6af259b6ae2f64a392a36423d79bfd12d2b} of the value of the entire US economy. The tariff meant that firms would not be able to service the money lent to them by Americans and, thus, lead to massive bond defaults.

What happens to the value of company stock if the company defaults on its bonds? The stock goes to zero.

That is what the market was paying attention to and why it was reacting the way it did to the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

We can see why today tariffs will not have the same effect that they did in 1929: the US is not the world’s biggest creditor. Our debtor status means that we are not vulnerable to a bond-market dislocation. Other nations are. We can safely go back to raising tariffs and building the United States.

Of course, this also explains why creditor nations such as Germany and South Korea are so inordinately terrified of what are, in reality, very small and modest tariffs. It’s not just their massive export sectors that are potentially at risk, but the huge financial Ponzi schemes that have been constructed on top of them. The various camels we call economies are overloaded with debt and there are an awful lot of things that look like straws these days.

I cannot verify any of this. I am merely passing it along from one of my sources.

The President signed the bill because the military needed to be funded. They’re going to have some big jobs this year: war with Iran, rounding up most of the Obama administration to stand trial in front of military tribunals, and keeping domestic order when the roundup happens. The midterms are going to be utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. That means the roundup will happen before then and the DNC will be struggling with things other than running for office.

My understanding is that the war with Iran will not be direct, but will be more of a massive support operation for the Gulf Cooperation Council. Which means that it is essentially the Israeli-Sunni alliance against the Shi’ites.

I don’t like hearing that, not one little bit, but another Gulf war would be immensely preferable to the war with Russia that the neocons have recently been pushing. Of course, given the Russo-Iranian alliance, it could easily expand into that.

Anyhow, as always, we will see what we will see.

Peter Thiel raised some questions about trade, capital flows, and tariffs at a recent talk at the Economic Club of New York. Specifically, why does capital flow in the opposite direction now than it did in 1900, when slow growing economies like the UK invested in fast growing economies like Russia and Argentina? 

There is something really odd going on in the trade relations… The way you’d expect things to be working in a healthily globalizing world is that capital would flow from the slow growing to the fast growing economies, from the developed to the developing world.  This was the way trade patterns looked in 1900, which was a relatively open, free trade world, where the UK had a current account surplus of 4{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} of GDP and the capital got exported to invest in Russian railroads or Argentina, or all sorts of other countries that had higher growth rates and promised a higher return on capital.  That’s the way globalization is supposed to look.

Today, it’s quite the opposite, where capital is flowing uphill from China to the US and is the other side of these enormous current account and trade deficits that the United States has. And so, we are exporting $100 billion a year to China, importing $450 billion a year from China. And China, an economy that’s growing at, say, 6.5{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year is investing in an economy that is maybe growing at 3{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year, when the flows should be the other way around.

And so I think that tells you that something is incredibly off. It pushes you to have to ask questions, why it is off?  Why does nobody in China want to buy anything from the US? Why are our goods so undesirable? Or, are there policies that skew things too much towards consumption in the US and more to investment in other places, and should we be rethinking that? Or, are there intellectual property things that are not being enforced? There are a lot of very granular questions that we need to be asking.

Even if free trade is good in theory, and that’s what you want to get to, I think the way you get there is, perhaps, by not being too dogmatic and too doctrinaire.  And if you have people negotiate trade treaties who are doctrinaire about free trade, I always get the sense they won’t do that much work because if you negotiate a good trade treaty, that’s a good thing, and if you negotiate a bad trade treaty that still a good thing because we know that all trade is always good for everybody, in all times, in all places. And so we have to always be careful that free trade orthodoxy not become just a euphemism for the sloppiness or the laziness of the people negotiating these treaties.

Capital chases profit. There is more profit to be made in the US financial sector, which eats up about one-third of all profit in the USA, than there is in the non-financial sectors of other, faster-growing economies. That’s my initial thought, anyhow.

Zaklog the Great poses a trivial objection:

So, Vox, what would you say to someone who hasn’t studied economics enough to seriously parse through these arguments, but has observed that, almost without exception, the government is a terrible way to get things done? There seem to be very few things the government is capable of doing effectively, and therefore, the idea that managing the economy is one of those very few seems doubtful.

1. Tariffs are no more “managing the economy” than any other form of taxes are. Falsely equate the two demonstrates that you are engaging in dishonest rhetoric rather than honest dialectic. 
2. Getting what done? Governments have historically done a better job of defending borders than any other form of organization, and are certainly a damned sight better at it than international corporations, which, by the way, are government-created entities. Tariffs are a form of border defense, in more ways than one.
3. Tariffs are considerably less intrusive, and cause less economic disruption, than any of their three primary alternatives, income taxes, consumption taxes, and wealth taxes. If you believe that government is a terrible way to get things done, why would you rather have it interfere on a holistic and daily basis with the economic activity of every single domestic citizen rather than on a far less frequent basis with the cross-border shipments of a limited number of foreign corporations?
4. Tariffs don’t require effectiveness, and domestic governments have proven to be far more susceptible to control by the will of the people than international corporations.
5. Even if one assumes government corruption and inefficiency, it is still preferable to convey legal advantage to manufacturing companies that employ large numbers of people in a tariff system than to financial companies that do not in a free trade system. (Courtesy of Jack Amok.)

Has it ever occurred to feminists that perhaps there is a very good reason for the glass ceiling?

You have probably heard about the collapse of a pedestrian bridge at FIU in Miami today.  I was researching who the builder is, I stumbled across an article from yesterday celebrating the bridge’s construction.

 Key quote from the female engineer/project executive, Leonor Flores (speaking about teaching her daughter that women can go into STEM):

“It’s very important for me as a woman and an engineer to be able to promote that to my daughter, because I think women have a different perspective. We’re able to put in an artistic touch and we’re able to build, too.”

Yeah, about that…

FIU pedestrian bridge collapses days after installation; police say multiple deaths, cars trapped.

If you think about it, what is this but an example of Merkel’s Germany or May’s Britain writ small? Or, to put it in even more brutal terms, Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett-Packard….

Written by economist Steve Keen, one of the few professional economists to have correctly anticipated the global financial crisis of 2008, eCONcomics is a series of three satires explaining why the science of economics has gone so terribly wrong. In these savagely erudite satires, Keen highlights the lameness of the excuses offered by economists for their failure to predict anything from the financial crisis to the recent stock market highs. From “secular stagnation” to the “non-accelerating inflation rate of employment” and the “full employment real interest rate”, Keen expertly mocks both the myths and the incompetence of his professional colleagues.

After reading eCONcomics, you will understand why no economist ever seems to be able to explain what is going on today, or tell you what will happen tomorrow.

Steve Keen is Professor of Economics at Kingston University in London, and an Honorary Professor at University College London.

I wasn’t planning to announce this until next week, as it’s still not in stock on Amazon, and there are some pricing/discount issues that we have to resolve, but since I know some of you are checking out the Castalia Books Direct store and it’s as cheap to ship five comics as one, I figured I’d go ahead and make the print edition of Steve Keen’s economics comic book available to those who are interested today: eCONcomics: Taking the CON out of Economics.

Which, I will warn you, even in comic book form is challenging. On the other hand, it is indubitably a unique collector’s item from one of the great minds of economics. Imagine owning a first edition of Albert Einstein’s first comic book….

Anyhow, this is a larger 10×7 32-page book that we did not originally plan on selling anywhere but through Amazon and the chain stores – the comic stores are hardly going to carry a highly esoteric educational one-off – so we set a low retail price and a low discount. The problem is that this means the $4.99 price on the Castalia Direct store is actually higher than the $3.99 retail price. We will resolve that somehow, but whether it involves raising the retail price and the discount or something else, I simply don’t know. So, if you very understandably would prefer to wait for the retail price, it should be on Amazon by the end of the next week. While it is being published by Castalia, for the time being I put it in the Arkhaven collection on the store for simplicity’s sake. You can even pick up a copy of Steve’s Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? while you’re there.

Also, a reader who is a former comic book store guy had an idea for how we could produce limited collector’s editions to benefit the early supporters. He suggested that we do something to signify the first X number of copies printed, such as a gold Arkhaven logo or whatever, as this would potentially increase their value to collectors down the road. While I’m not interested in playing the variant covers game, or charging people more for mirrored reflective holographic covers, something like this that doesn’t cost the reader any more and simply rewards those who were the first to support our new comics strikes me as a win-win situation.

So, is this of any interest to the collectors in our midst, and if it is, what should X be? Our goal is to eventually hit average issue sales of at least 50,000, so keep in mind that we probably want to establish a limited edition base that we will not change in the future. Also keep in mind that it costs us both time and money to make this change on every single comic, not much, but enough that we don’t want to do it for 50 or 100 comics. My thought is that something in the range between 500 and 5,000 would be about right, but I will defer to the wisdom of the enthusiasts.

And finally, how would you like us to signify these collector’s editions? The aforementioned gold logo, distinctive yet tasteful? A giant garish COLLECTOR’S EDITION stamp? Share your thoughts.

Keep in mind, all of this is after many repeated warnings, bannings, and finally, spammings.

Hi,  I was a chatter on your blog,  Mature-Craig, citizen Pepe

I want to apologize for not staying away as you asked

There was a couple topics you brought up that gave me a chance to get some things off my chest publicly that I needed to get off my chest.

I am going to stay away from now on.

I sincerely wish you all the best
– Craig Joseph, 4/3/2017 5:56 PM

OK sir I will leave and not come back.  My wife doesnt liike me spending too much time on this anyway.

I wanted to apologize to you one more time.  I wanted to apologize to both you are and your wife as well for my gamma behavior ten years ago.  I want both you and your wife to know I think very highly of both of you.  I think back at some of the things I was saying 2004-05 and I am disgusted with myself.     Best to you and your family.

Its not a good spot for me.
– Craig Joseph, 2/25/2018 4:41 PM

American Christianity has generally had a deeper love for the Old Testament than European Christianity. And the vast majority of religious American Christians see the Jews as the root of the tree of Christ.

fair enough I guess

The fact that America is Judeo-Christian and not merely Christian is a reflection of those facts.

kind of an antagonistic thing to say,

its also fact that America has a lot of Anglo Saxon Christians, its a fact that America is also Anglo-Christian, Italo-Christian, Afrikana-Christian, Latino-Christian, Oriento-Christian etc

The roots of the Jewish people are more closely tied to Jesus Christ than those other groups that is true, but I say its a fact that America is Anglo-Christian, there are many many Anglo Christians in this country
– Craig Joseph aka The Pepe report 3/1/2018 10:40 AM

it wont happen again,
– Craig Joseph 3/1/2018 5:04 PM

Seriously, what is the problem? Look, it’s really NOT THAT HARD to not visit a blog, let alone not comment on it. For example, John Scalzi asked me to stop commenting on his blog back in 2008. I haven’t commented on it since and I’ve barely even visited it except to occasionally copy a post that someone else has pointed out to me for subsequent quoting here.

If you’re told not to comment here, then don’t do so. You are not welcome. You are trespassing. You may even by illegally cyberstalking, depending upon the law in your jurisdiction. You’re not going to change anyone’s minds, you’re not going to get me back somehow, and you’re not going to prove anything except for the fact that you have less self-control than the average crack-addicted teenage prostitute.