Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: a humble request

PC has found the Common Sense dialogue to be of no little interest and has a few questions:

Love the blog and hope that you can answer a few questions for me. Your correspondence with Common Sense Atheism made me reconsider many of my thoughts on Christianity and God. Like him, I felt in command of the fundamentals of Christian theology when all I know are Bible stories and sermons from my youth. And it bothers me that I have neglected a large field of intellectual inquiry. However, many of the Christians I meet and evangelical literature I come across are just as inane as the childish arguments for atheism that are too common on the internet. I am glad to have found in you an intelligent advocate who can discuss these topics without nonsense.

How do I begin to erase this deficit? What are some books that I can read this summer to learn the doctrine of Christianity? Where can I find intelligent arguments for the existence of God? Are local priests and ministers generally good discussion partners?

I’m a mathematician, so I like my theory raw. Don’t be afraid to lay the good stuff on me.

On a different note, I am interested in your conversion to Christianity, how a self-proclaimed internet superintelligence discovered and accepted belief. Also, you mention occasionally that one of your reasons for faith is because you saw evil in the world. Could you elaborate on this? What do you mean by evil? What are some examples?

First, always remember that most people are inane. Most people are idiots no matter what they do or do not believe. If you find an honest and intelligent interlocutor in any area, then cherish him regardless of how similar or divergent your views happen to be. Synchronicity of perspective is not an intrinsic hallmark of intelligence.

Second, I must freely admit that I am overdue in writing my response to Luke’s last post. I’m not the least bit apologetic about my tardiness, mind you, as we just went gold on a year-long software project yesterday and I’m still in the process of gradually reanimating from development zombie mode. As will soon become clear, Luke and I are so far apart in philosophical areas that have absolutely nothing to do with religion that our differences of opinion with regards to Christianity almost pale in comparison. But it should take the discourse in an interesting and perhaps unexpected direction.

Third, I think it is absolutely refreshing whenever someone steps back to reconsider what they actually do and do not know, contra their previous assumptions. As much as I might brutally tear into Luke, or anyone else, for mistaking their half-remembered fragments of childhood knowledge for a comprehensive grasp of a subject, it’s actually an entirely normal failure to revisit the past. I remember being astounded when SB dryly asked me why I thought the crust was the healthiest part of the bread… the real reason was that someone had once told me that as a young child and I had never once bothered to actually stop and think about the matter. And the observable fact is that most people never stop and think about anything they have been told by their parents, their teachers, and their professors. So, it should come as no surprise at all that most atheists raised in a Christian tradition should belatedly discover that they really don’t know that much about the simple theological facts of the faith they are rejecting… in the unlikely event they ever stop long enough to seriously consider the matter.

This is why I tend to take an atheist who abandons a religious faith after the age of 30 much more seriously than the normal teenage deconvert. Think about this for a second: How many of your decisions made in your teen years do you still think were particularly wise or intelligent today? And every childhood deconvert I have ever questioned has simply had Daddy issues of one sort or another. You can usually identify the latter sort by their emotional reactions to religion.

As for learning about the Christian faith and theology, the two best books with which to begin are Letters From a Skeptic by Greg Boyd and Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I would follow that with Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton, and Cynic, Sage, or Son of God, also by Boyd. Then re-read the four Gospels. As for priests and ministers, well, I wouldn’t expect too much out of them other than a reasonably accurate summation of the theology. Remember, they are called to be shepherds of the flock, not providers of intellectual discourse to the highly intelligent. This isn’t to say that no priest or minister is capable of it, but it’s really somewhat of a category error to seek it from them.

Regarding evil, I simply mean behavior that is described as evil or wickedness in the Bible as well as the influences, autonomous or otherwise, that encourage that behavior. I see it in the world and I see it in myself. I have seen it in the transparent lies of an almost-innocent child, in the irrational fury of a hysterical woman, in the maddened glee of a violent man, and throughout the blood-soaked pages of history. I have seen it in the rich and the poor, in the brilliant and the dim, and in the beautiful and the ugly. Once, like many an arrogant non-believer before me, I thought I could construct my own valid moral code and live by it. And, like everyone but the nihilists, I failed. Not spectacularly, but worse, ludicrously and unneccessarily.

As for evil, you know what it is. It is everything from the first lie you tell your parents and that senseless momentary impulse to smash your fist into an unsuspecting person’s face as they walk by to the Ten Persecutions of Imperial Rome and the Killing Fields. I have no doubt that you have heard the little whispers in the back of your mind from time to time just like everyone else. There are two parts to evil, the temptation and the submission. When the submission finally comes, when the resistance finally fails, it feels absolutely liberating at first and it is only after a period of repeated acts of submission that one gradually discovers apparent how enslaving evil truly is. Hence the apparent theological dichotomy of finding freedom through bending the knee before the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think that unless one understands that evil is in some senses desirable to every man and woman, one cannot even begin to make sense of the Christian faith. Unfortunately, many if not most Christians take the admonition to hate evil and twist it into an erroneous dogma that insists evil is not and cannot be enjoyable. And yet, no matter how terrible the act, it always feels either good or necessary at the moment of action. This is just one of the many ways in which I find the Christian perspective to be more observably accurate than the current scientific ones.

I do not speak about my personal experience with anyone. This is for several reasons, but primarily because I understand that personal experiences are not an objective basis for rational argument. In addition, I know that atheists reject personal experience as a basis for belief even in the case of their own experiences, or at least they claim to do so. So, there is clearly no point in it. The atheist who queries, even sincerely and in good faith, about someone else’s experience is attempting to put himself in the position of prosecutor and judge and I have no interest in playing star witness and public defender.

I tend to doubt this response answered all of your questions, but at least it should suffice to give you a starting point on your investigation. And before you begin reading anything, I highly recommend contemplating the significance of John 20:24-31. I think many atheists who are conditioned to believe in the idea of a blind Christian faith and its supposed arrogance, would do well to become familiar with what is indubitably the genuine Christian attitude towards doubts and doubters.

Mailvox: In which we point and laugh

Keller demonstrates to all and sundry that he doesn’t have to worry about demonstrating his insecurity by joining Mensa:

There is nothing, nothing, more insecure than belonging to Mensa. I don’t think Molotov Mitchell or his wife are very smart…. Yes, there is nothing insecure about wasting money to have a meaningless membership in a “smarty” club. Ha, I mean what a lame, pathetic, girly thing. It’s like paying money to belong to a “Big Penis Club.” God forbid we verify your intelligence or penis size, we just have to see the membership card and you’ve won the argument!

It is eminently clear that Keller isn’t smart enough to figure out how Mensa works. If Mensa were, in fact, a “Big Penis Club”, it would most certainly require the third-party verification of your penis size. Hence the requirement to take an intelligence test in order to qualify for membership in Mensa. In fact, according to a 2003 survey of 5,000 men, Mensa is roughly the IQ equivalent of having an 8.15-inch penis.

Now, as to whether one considers Mr. Mitchell or his wife to be very smart or not, that completely depends upon one’s perspective. The Mensa requirement is not terribly high; there are approximately 120 million individuals on the planet capable of qualifying. However, if someone is a Mensa member, then he possesses incontrovertible evidence that he is more intelligent than 5.88 billion of the people on the planet. And that’s assuming that the individual barely squeaked past the Mensa bar, it’s entirely possible that he is oen of the few Mensans who are as far beyond the Mensa requirements as the requirements themselves are beyond the average 100 IQ individual.

As for insecurities, I can honestly say that I have never met an insecure Mensan. Of course, I’ve never been to a meeting or anything, and as is probably abundantly clear to most of the regulars by now, my membership is little more than one of the many tools in the AWCA arsenal. But since the subject of personal insecurity was raised, I would be remiss if I failed to note that getting one’s panties in a bunch over someone else’s membership card is hardly a reliable indicator of a confident and self-contained personality. A reaction to Mensa membership always tends to remind me of those poor independents who spent four years walking around a Greek-dominated campus complaining about fraternities and wearing a GDI sweatshirt.

Mailvox: prayer request

Regular reader LP sends this one out to the Ilk:

My mom was hit by 2 cars Tuesday evening. She is not ok, we are not sure about the extent of her injuries. She broke around 6 to 9 ribs, to top it all off, today is her 60th b-day. Her car was totaled as were the other cars. The two cars sandwiched my mother’s car. She may have cardio thoracic surgery, not sure on that, but her hip and pelvis are fractured. She was sent to Allegheny ICU in Pittsburgh. Dad and I have been there and so far she is looking so-so. Keep her in your prayers. Do pray for the other 2 to 3 people in the wreck as well as they were sent to UPMC ICU that night.

Here is hoping she will make a full recovery.

A failure to communicate

I believe that’s what we have here:

I believe that when you say that Catholics are not Christian you are wrong.

I am not in the business of deciding who is and who is not a Christian. What I was referring to when I wrote “although many Catholics are Christians, many are not by any reasonable Bible-based definition of the latter term” is Catholics who themselves abjure Christianity. There are no shortage of confirmed Catholics who reject the label “Christian” but nevertheless describe themselves as Catholics. Indeed, in Italy, they probably make up the majority of Catholics. While they are cultural Catholics, one cannot reasonably describe them as Christians because they themselves will tell you they are not.

But speaking of Catholics, it is good to see that the Vatican is finally beginning to lay the greater part of the blame for their priestly sexual abuse scandal where it properly belongs, on homosexual priests who should never have been admitted to the priesthood in the first place. The Catholic hierarchy is still responsible, of course, as it was their decision to accept those priests and their failure to deal appropriately with the predictable consequences of that decision when they eventually surfaced.

The Holy See’s second-highest prelate after the Pope has blamed homosexuals for the paedophile crisis. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, said that the child rape scandal that is threatening the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide is linked to homosexuality and not celibacy among priests.

I can’t help but find it funny that the example cited by the Times in an obvious attempt to surreptitiously rebut Bertone’s statement refers to a “paedophile” priest having sex with a young girl from the time she was 16 until she was 20. By this standard, pretty much every single college man in the country is a pedophile. The man was clearly not fit for the priesthood and should have been stripped of his office long ago, but on the basis of the example cited, he was just as clearly not a pedophile.

Mailvox: Catkiller’s crusade

I have no idea what Catkiller is going on about here, but if you are one of those freaks who keep sending me things like “I bet 100,000 people like cheetohs better than Dalia Grybauskaitė” on Facebook, this may appeal to you:

Go to http://www.amaze.fm/ and fill out the short form to become a fan. You’ll have to confirm your free account on your email. Then go to our list of songs under “Mindclear”. You can do this by searching or just click on the “charts” link. Our songs are “This Song”, “Nock”, “Killing Your Dream” and “The First Star”. Rate them out of five stars and make a comment if you like. The important thing is the rating. We’re already in the top ten with two songs at the time I’m writing this. If we’re at #1 at the end of the week, Hugh Hewitt will play us on the radio. Maegan will be thrilled. Just one vote is huge, so your vote might be the one that puts us over the top.

Employment application advice

Karl Denninger points out how it is possible to take advantage of the legal maze that surrounds the modern corporate employment:

So here’s the deal folks: While I can’t ask you about your health status nor if you have dependents, nothing prohibits you from putting that information on your resume if it is to your advantage – and it is, if you are in excellent health and have no dependents.

Will this matter?

In this economy you better believe it. This has been true forever, but it has become even more true with the passage of Obama’s “Health Care” law. So if you’re unemployed and have these cost-impacting facts in your favor, make damn sure you list them.

An employer cannot ask about this, nor can you realistically discuss this in an interview, but absolutely nothing prohibits you from listing this as a “personal attribute” on your resume. If nothing else, in a tie-breaking circumstance it will get you the interview you need to have a shot at the job.

Never forget that no matter what bizarre obstacles are placed in your way by the bureaucrats of the world, you can usually figure out a way of bypassing them. But this usually requires first taking the time to understand the nature of the obstacle and what it was originally designed to prevent.

On a related note, CS, who is in the military and has an engineering degree, wishes to poll the hivemind.

I decided that the prudent course of action would be to learn some marketable skill and start working on independent income sources before separating from the military (which I can’t do as yet because of contractual obligations). My ambition is to be self employed and make a good income that depends on the quality of product I create (versus, for instance, the current situation: a salary that depends upon the number of hours I physically exist in a particular space per week).

The trouble is that I need a skill I considered writing, which I enjoy, but there doesn’t seem to be good money in it. Investment sounds attractive, but far too risky. These are things that I would like to do in addition to a primary occupation. Upon reflection, I remembered that I had a ball in my high school and college “intro to computer programming” classes years ago. I realized that expertise in programming could have many advantages:

1) It results in products of genuine value.
2) In our inreasingly computerized world, good programs and programmers should remain in demand.
3) The product is information, possibly meaning greater versatility in creation, marketting, and distribution above physical products. In theory, this could allow the smart programmer to have a very high degree of control over his own time and effort.
4) If it’s at all like my high school and college experiences, it’s challenging and rewarding.
5) One knowledgeable about computers is at a distinct advantage in the modern world.

6) I’m guessing it ingraines a habit of thinking things through thoroughly and logically. Whch brings me to my request. I would very much appreciate answers to these questions:

1) Is it worth it to try? (please note that I don’t want to be a dabbler; if this i to be a source of income, then I want to be an expert)
2) What practical advice can you offer on gaining expertise as quickly as possible? For instance, what books and programs should I have? What type of computer do I need? Should I take a college course? Are there any people or organizations I ought to contact? Remember that I am at present almost completely ignorant about computers, so I have to start at the most basic level.
3) What are the best ways to make money as a programmer? I’m especially interested in those that would allow me to be self-employed.
4) What blogs, websites, publications, and other sources should I be familiar with?
5) What are the pitfalls to be avoided?

Have at them. Note that he’s smart enough to avoid wasting his time with writing and investment, although I’m not sure about assumptions 2 and 5. It seems to me that trades such as plumbing and electricity are probably a safer bet in the present circumstances, but I don’t know much about the present demand for those services.

Mailvox: take another look

HR asks an unexpected question:

I am reading your book and find it fascinating. I really appreciate your laying out the several possible scenarios and the arguments pro and con as well as identifying their supporters. The chart on your blog of “Debt Outstanding 2004-2009” I find quite convincing for your position on the key question of inflation vs deflation. However I also find that the Fed Statistics (see page 9 of this link) seem to show quite different trends and support the opposite conclusion. What is the source for your chart?

I’m glad HR finds it worthwhile reading. My source for the sector debt is the Federal Reserve flow of funds account. Notice how the red line for Federal debt on the chart ends a little below the $8,000 billion line. If you look a little more carefully at the linked PDF, you’ll see that this corresponds rather neatly with the $7,805 billion reported in 2009-Q4 for the Federal Government. The reason for this is that the Federal Reserve flow of funds account is, in fact, the very Z1 report that HR cited.

In other words, you have to look at the bottom of the page, not the top, since those are the 1978 numbers. It’s a bit easier to see this in the online version, in which the years run from left to right.

Mailvox: a waste of time and effort

The Baseball Savant questions my time allocations:

Leaving aside the fact that we pretty much disagree about everything when it comes to Christianity, the one thing I have a problem with in reading your blog the last couple of years is your fight in atheism/religion. Admittedly I haven’t read “TIA”, but I think for this discussion I get the gist that you basically used the same logic that the unholy trinity provided to disprove atheism or at least show that it’s more unlikely than religious thought/belief. I might be oversimplifying it, but I think you get my point. My problem though is that you spend an enormous amount of time on this very topic. That I don’t understand. I would think even as an open theist we would have similar views on eternal perspective and the problem that I have is that your writing of TIA, although interesting, doesn’t further that cause too much.

I can certainly see the rationale behind it if you believe that you are the first domino to fall in that equation in that

ATHEIST –> READ TIA —-> DOUBT ATHEISM —–> DISREGARD ATHEISM —-> BELIEVE IN RELIGION —-> COME TO CHRIST

But the last part is very dicey. There are a million religions in the world, and it seems your argument is only that atheism is illogical. I agree with it. I guess I’m just wondering the end? Not that everything has to be done with eternal perspective in mind, but this is something that I think definitely coincides with that sort of thing because you are delving into religious matters. Does open theism teach that God is pleased if something comes to religion even if that religion is still pagan in nature and hell is the final destination for the person who converts to that religion from atheism?

If it’s all for intellectual masturbation then I get it, but you seem too bright to waste time on an endeavor such as this with no real cost/benefit analysis in the end.

Obviously you write for you. You’ve always said as much, but the time aspect is odd for me. What do you think?

First, I don’t spend anywhere nearly as much time on the subject as most people think. Because I read very fast and think a bit more quickly than the norm, it doesn’t take me very long to notice the flaws in an argument and use them to pick it apart. The only thing that occasionally takes an amount of time is doing the research to prove what I already have concluded to the satisfaction of others. Second, as always, I highly recommend reading the relevant material before commenting on it.

Because the Baseball Savant hasn’t read TIA, he isn’t aware that my ambitions for the book have always been modest. I not only think the last link in his chain is very dicey, I think the one preceding it is too. TIA is not a work of Christian apologetics nor is it even a theological work, the one speculative chapter notwithstanding, as it is nothing more than a work dedicated to destroying a collection of spurious, illogical, and demonstrably false arguments by a small group of well-known intellectual charlatans. Convincing the reader to disregard a specific form of atheism is the most that the book was ever even potentially going to achieve, and it’s quite clear that it has been very successful in that regard. The feeble and insubstantial protestations with which the Against the New Atheism slideshow has been met is testimony to the way in which even the most militant atheists have largely abandoned certain arguments they once believed to be powerfully effective.

Removing a bar to belief isn’t always going to lead to belief. I would even say that it usually isn’t. But, having seen so many well-meaning Christians struggle so ineffectively against unoriginal and outdated arguments that were fundamentally flawed, I thought it was worth the small effort it took to dismantle them in such a comprehensive manner that practically anyone who has read the book can now do the same with ease. I expect that I will continue to tear apart their future arguments since it costs me nothing and I find it more entertaining than sitting down and watching 151 hours of television per month like the average American. Needless to say, I will be providing a detailed critique of Sam Harris’s all-too-characteristically incoherent argument in favor of utilizing science to answer moral questions at some point in the future.

The truth is that I spend far more time on what could be characterized as even less important matters. I am currently designing five games, none of which are of any importance to the human race and only two of which will be potentially profitable to me. I am spending a great deal of time and money on a superior input device which will allow people to do useful, useless and even harmful things on a computer up to 50% faster. I am writing a sequel to a novel that probably didn’t sell more than 500 copies. I play board games and computer games, alone and with others. And I just finished reading a novel by Balzac that wasn’t particularly interesting and has taught me nothing useful.

The ironic thing about this email is the way it shows how people, even those who haven’t read the book, are still far more interested in discussing The Irrational Atheist than they are in discussing either of the two books I have published since. And this is despite the fact that we’re now in the midst of the very economic contraction that I describe in The Return of the Great Depression!

Time passes whether we spend it wisely or not. I have numerous regrets for opportunities and time I have wasted in the past, but writing TIA and discussing the related issues is not one of them.

Mailvox: Obama vs science education

Scott Hatfield of Monkey Trials writes about the standards of science education:

I invite you to read the state science standards for high school biology in California. You’ll find those on pages 51-56 of this PDF file. It’s true that evolution is in there, but there is absolutely no requirement to teach ‘scientific history.’ I admit that I give one lecture on Mendel and his experiments when I teach genetics, and one lecture on Darwin’s voyage of the Beagle and how that (and the thought of others, like Malthus) influenced his thought.

Other than that, the other 178-days of instruction are pretty much the concepts and facts that you can see on the standards, which are in fact voluminous. I can’t speak for PZ and Dawkins, but I assure you that I care very much about the fact that there is less time for experiments and far too much time spent prepping for the standardized tests which, under NCLB, are used by the states and the fed to rate schools.

By the way, if your looking for a way to improve science ed, then please join me in rejecting the OBAMA administration proposal to tie teacher evaluations more closely to testing. A rare offer for you and I to unite in a criticism of the present administration!

Again, check out what we actually have to teach. There’s a lot to cram in 180 days, and to do it, we typically are sacrificing labs, especially the highly-instructive but time-consuming ones that take weeks to complete.

I have no problem whatsoever condemning the Obama administration proposal. Teacher evaluations and education standards are not Constitutional concerns of the U.S. federal government and Obama has no business attempting to dictate such things. Now, I’m certainly not against the use of standards in evaluating teachers; one reason for the drive towards objective standards is that the political power of the teachers unions is completely out of hand in some states. Given that testing can be an over-blunt club, I’m curious to know how Scott would prefer to see teachers evaluated. And while I don’t understand how opposing a proposal for a change can improve the current situation, I am happy to oppose it nonetheless.

Obviously, a science teacher whose black, inner-city, public school students score an average 80th percentile is probably a much better teacher than one whose Chinese, suburban, private school students average 85th percentile. And it’s also clear that straightforward teaching to the test will tend to restrict a teacher’s ability to focus on whatever aspects of his subject he thinks is important. But I’m sure Scott also realizes that for every good science teacher who wants to push his students and expose them to actually learning how to utilize the scientific method, there are several who would spend the entire school day haranguing their students on anything from Marxism and patriarchal oppression to Genesis and Scientology if given the opportunity.

I don’t have an answer myself. But I’m curious to know what Scott’s recommendation would be. As for “science history”, that’s often what is taught in lieu of science. Whether one considers the cult of Adam Smith or the cult of Charles Darwin, even a moment of reflection should suffice to determine that the Great Men of Science theme is actually a historical theme, not a scientific one. An astronomer has absolutely no need to know if it was Pythagoras or Copernicus who thought the Sun orbited the Earth in order to calculate the orbit of an extrasolar planet just as a biologist has absolutely no need to know if it was Darwin or Paley who articulated evolution by natural selection when he is figuring out the utility of junk DNA.

Don’t get me wrong, I think scientific history is tremendously interesting and knowledge of economic history is actually quite valuable in understanding how and why the present orthodoxy went so badly awry. The more unsettled a science is, the more important the historical knowledge will be. Reading Joseph Schumpeter’s mammoth History of Economic Thought played a major role in my critical revisitation of Ricardian free trade, then Friedmanite monetarism. But repeating anecdotes about finches and shoemakers should never be confused with actually calculating debt/GDP ratios or collecting butterflies.

For the record, I no more object to teaching evolution than I do to teaching Keynesian macroeconomics or any other extant idea. In other words, I insist on them being taught and being taught accurately. It is only when you have fully and correctly understood a concept that you can truly grasp the intrinsic and/or potential flaws in it. For example, I found this requirement to be more than a little amusing: “8. Evolution is the result of genetic changes that occur in constantly changing environments. As a basis for understanding this concept: a. Students know how natural selection determines the differential survival of groups of organisms.” I should, of course, be very interested to know how they know that, given that even Richard Dawkins has now admitted that the science is still unsettled on whether Darwin was fundamentally wrong about the very core of his so-called “dangerous idea”. The logic is at least superficially sound, but is the science? After all, that is precisely what still remains to be determined.

But to be clear, it must be understood that while I am an outright Keynesian Denier, a Marxian Denier, and a Friedmanite Denier, I am but a mere Darwinian Skeptic.

Mailvox: Deflation vs inflation

JB inquires regarding the matter:

Congratulations, it looks like you’re right about deflation vs. inflation. I thought based on the historical example of other systems going belly up that inflation was always the final scenario. But your grand graphs of credit implosion are everything a rubbernecker could wish for in twisted limbs and crashed clunkers.

I’m still not clear on what’s going on, and I’d like to run a few questions by you. Credit contraction is ~ to GDP contraction, yes? So if deflation is keeping pace with reduction of goods and services, then prices should remain constant, right? Consumer goods are a subset of that. Are you predicting deflation from the consumer’s perspective, and if so, why? What I’m getting at is that even though the credit bubble’s magnitude dwarfs all other considerations, its implosion doesn’t logically necessitate consumer deflation, as far as I can understand. I guess your main reason there won’t be inflation, besides the impossible magnitude of the credit bubble, is that the Fed is private and won’t order the whirlybirds aloft. Why do you think a legal technicality like that is going to stop the Fed’s big brother, the US Federal Government? Given the trend, shouldn’t we be more surprised if any banks at all manage to remain private?

First of all, let me say that the question is far from settled. I understand the inflationary case and it is a perfectly reasonable one, albeit based on general principles that I do not believe apply in the specific case of the peculiar U.S. monetary system. I’m going to address the matter in more detail in a column and explain why I expect the debt-money supply to decrease to a certain, specific level at a minimum. However, the easiest way to achieve a basic understanding of the issue is to look at this chart which incorporates the latest Federal Reserve flow of funds account of total debt outstanding.

The red line amounts to the case for inflation. This is the Federal spending that the inflationistas assume can grow indefinitely and has, in fact, increased by $2 trillion since the third quarter of 2008. However, even this 35% increase in 18 months has not been sufficient to counterbalance the ongoing credit contraction in the household, financial, and state & local government sectors. Moreover, that Federal spending increase is now coming to an end even as the contraction in the financial sector doubles its speed and state & local spending hits the insolvency wall.

In answer to your questions, GDP contraction is not equal to debt contraction even though debt is a primary factor in sustaining GDP growth. Because GDP is disproportionately weighted towards government spending and because the G component of GDP is dependent solely upon the growth in government debt rather than overall debt, GDP can increase even in the face of overall debt contraction. But it cannot do so for long, as the chart above indicates. As far as the banks go, because they are insolvent by every meaningful accounting measure, they have already been quasi-nationalized because although their profits remain private, their losses are charged to the public.