Tag: trainwreck

Holocaust a surprising boon for Jews

Without the Holocaust, would the Jews ever have gotten their own internationally recognized state in Palestine? Would they be able to so easily trump every criticism of a Jew, be it legitimate or illegitimate, by simply crying anti-semitism? Sure, the Tribe would probably still run Hollywood even if there had never been a Holocaust since they created it, but would Ben Shalom be Chairman of the Federal Reserve and would Jews be so heavily represented in the U.S. Senate, the Congress, and the U.S. media without it? Clearly, Jews should be as deeply grateful to Mister Hitler for helpfully slaughtering a few million of their fellows as China’s girls are for a mere 43 million of them being sacrificed to the greater good of their sex:

[G]ifted young women are increasingly common in China’s cities and make up the most educated generation of women in Chinese history. Never have so many been in college or graduate school, and never has their ratio to male students been more balanced. To thank for this, experts say, is three decades of steady Chinese economic growth, heavy government spending on education and a third, surprising, factor: the one-child policy….

Still, 43 million girls have “disappeared” in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year. Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF’s representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls “but they have to be born first.”

No doubt we will soon read about how the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis has brought about a renaissance of Tutsi intellectual life in Rwanda and be informed that it was a combination of the sack of Rome, the Black Death and the Mongol invasion of Europe that accounts for that continent’s historical significance. No doubt the AGW/CC crowd will want to ride this pale horse too.

Wängsty is still at it

In which R. Scott Bakker demonstrates that there is more fantasy in his philosophy than there is philosophy in his fantasy.

By way of clarification, no one asked him about the ‘absolute’ of anything. I’m not sure I understand, otherwise (and would welcome clarification). Is he saying he doesn’t believe in the question? Or is he saying the truth or falsity doesn’t matter, so long as people do what he wants them to do? Or is he actually biting the bullet, saying, ‘I really don’t know whether my claims are right or wrong, but I don’t care one way or another, so long as people seem to believe me.”

Or is he simply avoiding the question once again.

It appears I have to write very slowly or Bakker will be again unable to follow what everyone else has understood. I initially ignored the question because I thought it was rhetorical. After he started suggesting I was avoiding it, I gave the only answer I considered to be meaningful. But what I am saying, and what I have believed from the start, is that it is a stupid and irrelevant question. There is no such thing as “certainty” and Bakker’s entire certainty/uncertainty framework is a false one. Not only are there no “Grand Prize Winners” in the sense that he means it, I don’t know a single person who genuinely believes they are a Grand Prize Winner either. The basic philosophical framework he has presented is as fictitious as his novels.

Here is my return question for him. (1) What are ten historical examples of “certainty” causing more material harm than uncertainty?

Now, if I were a follower of Theo, I would like to know what the hell he’s talking about. Why should they take someone who doesn’t care about the accuracy of his views of faith seriously? Or, if he does take the accuracy (as opposed to the consequences) of his claims seriously, why should they trust the claims of someone who doesn’t take the likelihood they are wrong seriously.

They take me seriously because I have a strong track record of being much more accurate than the average commentator or media expert over nearly a decade of writing columns. When your predictions help people make 475% on their investments during a bear market, help them avoid going underwater on their homes by correctly nailing housing prices within $300 one year in advance, and correctly anticipate a global financial crisis several months in advance, it tends to give you a certain amount of credibility. I am always aware that there is a possibility I am wrong. Anyone with an IQ over 80 is. But Bakker can’t seem to grasp the concept of probability. Everyone is wrong sometimes. Pataki anyone? The Lizard Queen? But the verifiable fact of the matter is that I am wrong far less often than most despite the predictive risks I take, and when I am wrong I am still usually in the general vicinity.

For example, I predicted that Obama would not be the 2012 Democratic nominee over one year ago. I said he would be encouraged not to run by the Democratic Party elders. At the time, everyone thought that was absolutely insane and the prediction was much mocked by many among the Dread Ilk. While I still may be turn out to be wrong, no one is laughing at it anymore, least of all Obama’s advisors, now that the Washington Post is reporting the very activity that I predicted last year.

One of the things that seems to make democracy such an effective form of governance, for instance, is its capacity for reform, for adapting to new social realities. It’s ugly, it’s prone to error, but the institution is designed to eventually get it right.

Bakker must be a historical illiterate. Cicero knew better than this more than 2,000 years ago. The American Founding Fathers knew better more than 200 years ago. Democracy is not “designed to eventually get it right”, it is designed to eventually collapse into dictatorship. Also, of all the “democracies” in the world, Switzerland is the only one that is even remotely democratic in the proper sense of the term. Bakker clearly doesn’t understand that modern pseudo-democracies are structured in such a way as to prevent meaningful reform and periodically release political pressure while ensuring the continued rule of the political elite.

From De Re Publica:

“I have reasoned thus on the three forms of government, not looking on them in their disorganized and confused conditions, but in their proper and regular administration. These three particular forms, however, contained in themselves from the first, the faults and defects I have mentioned, but they have still more dangerous vices, for there is not one of these three forms of government, which has not a precipitous and slippery passage down to some proximate abuse. For after that king, whom I have called most admirable, or if you please most endurable—after the amiable Cyrus, we behold the barbarous Phalaris, that model of tyranny, to which the monarchical authority is easily abused by a facile and natural inclination. Alongside of the wise aristocracy of Marseilles, we might exhibit the oligarchical faction of the thirty despots, which once existed at Athens. And among the same Athenians, we can shew you, that when unlimited power was cast into the hands of the people, it inflamed the fury of the multitude, and aggravated that universal licence which ruined their state.”

The reason science has so outstripped its competitors boils down to creative flexibility in the face of supercomplexity. Multiple researchers with multiple hypotheses, embedded in a system that selects for accuracy. You never ‘go all in’ – rather, you hedge your bets, always realizing the complexity of things is such that you could very well lose. And you listen closely to those making contrary bets around you, realizing that they are at least as likely to be holding the winning hand as you.

This section is simply ridiculous from start to finish. Bakker obviously knows little about how science and scientists actually operate. Scientistry is a corrupt and politicized institution that makes increasingly little use of scientody. He needs to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as he clearly isn’t familiar with the problem of scientific paradigms, nor does he realize that the only reason science has been so astonishingly successful in the West is because it has ridden on the back of free enterprise and technological development. The Soviet Union devoted a higher percentage of its GDP to science than the West did and was still driving 1950s automobiles forty years later.

It may be true that we are all possessed of three-pound brains. It is also empirically and historically demonstrable that some individuals put those three pounds to more systematic and effective use than others.

And I have a second question for Bakker. (2) On what basis does he assume that I am any more certain, or any less skeptical, than he is?

BONUS ANSWERS: Eric asked: If human action on earth is of importance, and that action is shaped by belief (both facts asserted in his answer) then that belief and the correctness thereof must “matter.”

When did I say that human action on Earth is of any importance? I implied precisely the opposite in citing Mises. Human action only matters, it only CAN matter, in the subjective sense, so the belief and the correctness of the belief can only matter to the acting man, except in that there happen to be any material consequences of those actions to others.

How do we KNOW if we are Acting Correctly?

By ascertaining if the consequences of the action accord harmoniously with the results predicted. Or, if you prefer, by their fruits you shall know them.

Worse than I thought

Karl Denninger notes that the big banks are presently trading at less than half book value:

The very acts that led to the crash of 2008 are back in play, and they’re doing the same thing to market volatility. Banks are still hiding derivative exposure, claiming that they need these “customized” products for customers (and refusing to exchange-trade all of them.) Banks are still holding assets on their balance sheets at what the market judges to be a fantasy value – not only is their stock price half of book value or less in many cases, but we know there’s nobody with actual money who believes the claimed valuations on the balance sheet are real, as if they did they’d buy up all the stock and get the assets at half price – an instant 100% (or more) capital gain.

Who wouldn’t do that, if they believed the banks? Every one of these institutions with deeply-underwater balance sheets – Bank of America and Citibank in particular – would be bought out tomorrow. The fact is that nobody believes these marks are real. Nobody. It would only take one “somebody” with money who would pounce on such an opportunity – if it was real. And there are lots of people with money.

I repeat: There is not one entity with funds that believes these banks are honestly reporting asset values. NOT ONE.

And here I was telling that nice Canadian anchorwoman just last week that based on the FDIC seizure reports, I estimated around $3 trillion of $7.6 trillion in reported big bank assets were completely nonexistent. Mea culpa. It would appear I was too optimistic by at least $800 billion.

Ah well, that’s close enough for biology, anyway.

Payrolls

Seldom has a payrolls report been awaited with more bated breath than this morning. Here’s what is anticipated:

U.S. payrolls probably rose by 85,000, according to a Reuters survey, after a measly 18,000 gain in June. The unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 9.2 percent.

I have little doubt that Ben Bernanke was on the phone to the BLS last night, informing them that the number had damn well better be north of 100,000.

Mailvox: A poem by Little Dick

Every now and then, people ask me why I bother engaging with evangelical atheists. I trust this email, quoted verbatim and in its entirety, should suffice to answer that question. It would appear that Little Dick Harris is attempting to convert the world to atheism with poetry. His magnum opus is entitled “Woo”.

Woo

The Christian’s Jehovah, the Almighty God,
is a capricious and cantankerous sod;
he’s a jealous, vain, and incompetent fraud,
with the morals of a sadistic tribal war lord.

For homophobia, misogyny, and genocide too,
that old Bible Bogey is the god for you.
He’s his own father, and his son, and a ghost too,
but there’s even more ridiculous woo.

Christians claim their god, in his Empyrean lair,
is omniscient, omnipotent, beneficent and fair;
but, with the problem of theodicy,
that dogma is Christian idiocy.

The Jew’s Yahweh, a wrathful old jerk,
set Jews strict rules on when to work,
how to dress, and what to sup or sip,
and giving baby boys the snip.

Myths of Bronze Age, goat-herding nomads,
metaphorically have them, by the gonads.
The Moslem’s Allah, a fierce great djinn,
demands under ‘Islam’, literally, ‘Submission’.

Apostasy is treated just like a crime;
they’ll threaten to kill you, to keep you in line,
and if you dare draw Mohammad in a comic cartoon,
there’ll be riots and killings from here to Khartoum.

Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist,
Zoroastrian, Baha’i, Mormon, and Scientologist,
Confucianist, Shintoist, and Taoist too,
Spiritualist, Wiccan, and the New Ager into woo.

Yea, verily, those of each and every religion,
are mired in the miasma of superstition.
So, why should yours be the one true faith,
in the magic of a phantasmagorical wraith?

Belief, without evidence, is just plain crazy,
ignorant, stupid, or thoughtlessly lazy.
Life derives no purpose, at a theistic god’s direction;
evolution really happens, due to Natural Selection.

I have sent you this poem in the hope that you will read it and realize that some people find your religious beliefs to be unwarranted and absurd. When I was a small boy, still in short pants, I understood that there was no supporting evidence for religious beliefs, and therefore, such beliefs had no basis in fact. Later, I realized that religion was a tool for controlling people. Religion should be a private matter, because when it gains political power, as with any ideology, it becomes a tool for oppression. Please consider the benefits of rational thought over superstition and wishful thinking.

Oh, I read it twice, as a matter of fact. The first time in disbelief, the second time in awe. My first coherent thought was that the poem doesn’t scan well, commits six rhyming infelicities, reveals the usual ignorance of actual Christian theology, repeats numerous talking points that have been repeatedly shown to be false, and consists of crude doggerel that is never going to be mistaken for Dante or Yeats. My second thought was that we have a real candidate for the 2012 Richard Dawkins Award on our hands! Science can inspire art after all!

My third thought, of course, was that the poet is not one who would recognize a “rational thought” if he spent the next ten years having Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes read to him before bedtime. And then, only then, I began to laugh….

One of the many amusing things about this email is the way that Little Dick openly admits his lack of faith is quite literally childish. “When I was a small boy, still in short pants, I understood that there was no supporting evidence for religious beliefs, and therefore, such beliefs had no basis in fact.” I don’t know about you, but I tend to find this assertion to be just a little less than credible. What are the chances that, “as a small boy still in short pants”, Little Dick Harris had been able to peruse all of the available evidence that tended to support religious beliefs, whether one uses the term “evidence” properly or not?

Of course, his poem is a colorful piece of evidence demonstrating, that like every other evangelical atheist, Little Dick is still an emotional and intellectual child throwing a non-stop temper tantrum because the adults simply will not pretend to believe in his imaginary world.

UPDATE – But wait, there’s more! A follow-up email has arrived:

Vox, you ask, “What are the chances that, “as a small boy still in short pants”, Little Dick Harris had been able to peruse all of the available evidence that tended to support religious beliefs, whether one uses the term “evidence” properly or not?”

Zero, of course. What a stupid question. It isn’t necessary to read all of it, or, as I’ve subsequently discovered, any of it. Other than, that is, to find out that it’s empty, eristic hermeneutics, & sciolistic casuistry.

Little Dick noticed that the sort of miracles documented by Bede, clearly, were no longer taking place. Occasional claims for somewhat more mundane miracles, usually involving apparitions or healing, were obviously without good supporting evidence. As Hume demanded, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, & it was always lacking. By the age of twelve, it was plain to me that everything that I was aware of that happened in the world, & the universe, was potentially explicable in terms of natural processes.

Half a century later, I’ve never once doubted that, except for the realization that we may never be able to explain everything. Supernatural explanations add nothing of real value to our understanding. All that they can do is satisfy the wishful thinking of credulous individuals.

There you have it, from the mouth of the Poet Laureate of Rational Atheism. You don’t need to examine ANY evidence at all in order to reach a rational conclusion that satisfies the self-styled materialist. And thus the Worm Ourobos devours his own tail and we finally reach the glorious conclusion of rational materialist epistemology.

So doomed it isn’t funny

And you thought Greece, Spain, and Ireland were in desperate straits… consider poor Seattle:

“I think to make it the most competitive for our team, Tarvaris needs to be our starter right now. Tarvaris brings so much continuity to us.”
— Seattle coach Pete Carroll, after naming Tarvaris Jackson the team’s starting quarterback on Saturday.

Ye cats!

Black Democrat plays race card

And in other news, grass is still green, water is still wet, and Republicans are still going to cave under the media pressure:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) on Friday strongly suggested that members of Congress are making it difficult for President Obama to raise the debt ceiling because of his race.

That’s right, Sheila. They raciss! Everything is raciss! The sun rose this morning and it was raciss! The White Man don’t like it when it’s DARK outside. He raciss!

Here is a suggestion for Rep. Lee. In the event you do not wish people to believe you are genetically inclined to sub par intelligence, it might be useful to avoid publicly demonstrating a complete inability to identify the relationship between cause and effect.

Check under the math

It’s always a good idea to verify that you’re not being subjected to a snow job. Or worse, subjecting yourself to one:

One of the most common errors in applied mathematical analysis is to fail to notice when a mathematical argument proves too much. This occurs when the same argument can be deployed more generally than in the particular case being considered, and in other cases where it can be deployed it leads to conclusions that are clearly absurd.[2] Though this can occur more generally — in nonmathematical reasoning — it is a particularly acute danger in applied mathematics, due to the fact that understanding mathematical arguments generally requires a high level of training and intellectual effort. It is very easy to get lost in equations and theorems and fail to see the forest for the trees.
An Example of Applied Mathematics Going Horribly Wrong

Let me give you an example of this phenomenon in action. The Australian government recently announced that it will attempt to enact legislation to impose a tax on industrial carbon-dioxide emissions, with some of the revenue being earmarked as compensation for affected consumers. At a pro-government political rally in Sydney, a young activist proudly displayed what he clearly thought to be a devastating economic argument in favor of this “carbon-pricing” scheme.

To those readers who have not studied neoclassical microeconomics, this is probably just a big bunch of gibberish. But to those who have, it should look quite familiar. The graph is a “utility analysis,” which purports to show that imposing a tax on polluting products (which increases their price) and simultaneously giving compensation back to consumers would make them better off than they were initially — in other words, it purports to show that the Australian government’s proposed scheme, or something like it, would make people better off.

This is a classic example of a mathematical analysis that proves too much. Notice, in the graph in the sign, that the two products are labeled “C” (for clean products) and “P” (for polluting products). Although they are labeled in this way, the fact that the horizontal axis represents the consumption of polluting products plays absolutely no part in the analysis. There is nothing in the graph representing the pollution that these products cause, and so the label is merely a name. The letter “P” is nothing more than an algebraic symbol, one that could just as easily stand for pies, pastries, printers, pizzas, polka lessons, picture frames, pole dancing, ponies, popcorn, pool tables, poppy-seed muffins, pornography, postcards, potatoes, potpourri, poultry, pumpkins, puppies, pudding, or any other good or service (including goods and services that don’t start with the letter “P”).

Thus, by the exact same mathematical argument, the graph implicitly purports to show that a government can make people better off by taxing any good and then compensating the consumers of that good. Though the government taxes the polluting products in the graph, the sign maker could just as easily have switched the labels on the axes so that the government taxes the clean products, and the result, according to the same analysis, would still be a consumer who is better off.

Actually, one of the problems that I occasionally encounter is that if I spend too long analyzing something, it eventually all starts to look completely nonsensical. I thought I had finished a draft of the third inflation video last night, then found myself going back and checking on a few details… and eventually got to the point where even a simple calculation like the difference between nominal and real GDP was beginning to look like an ancient series of glyphs scratched out by the Mad Arab. At one point, I had either proved that inflation cannot, in fact, exist, or that there has not been any economic growth since approximately 1566. Color me skeptical.

I don’t think it helped that I’d been reading a few chapters from the Aristotle’s Rhetoric earlier in the day. Which, I notice, makes it clear that the sign referenced in the article is an enthymeme attempting to pass itself off as a syllogism. However, as Mr. O’Neill adroitly demonstrates, it is only an apparent syllogism and therefore the enthymeme is a false one.

Anyhow, I am prescribed a solution: close the spreadsheets, put down the Aristotle, and find a nice, mindless novel to read. As it happens, I’d been meaning to get around to R. Scott Bakker’s books anyhow. So don’t expect much in the way of insight or brilliance this weekend.

The Costs of War

All the clueless, self-styled “conservatives” who think they can simultaneously support small government and foreign wars need to have “$4 trillion” stamped on their small, sloping foreheads. No amount of militarily and historically illiterate blathering about how “we gots to kill dem ober deah so’s dey doan kills us heah” is going to change the fact that borrowing trillions of dollars in order to kill a few hapless goat humpers is demonstrably neither a sustainable nor an effective approach to war:

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released Wednesday. The final bill will reach at least $3.7 trillion and could be as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaida leaders behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion. Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020.

The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due and many billions more in expenses that cannot be counted, according to the study.

I’ve heard some say that the “isolationism” of Ron Paul and others is dangerous and crazy. The fact is that if you do not subscribe to that “isolationism”, you are without question historically illiterate, militarily ignorant, and a complete, unmitigated financial moron. That $4 trillion spent on the unnecessary Bush-Obama wars could have been used to completely eliminate all of the state and local government debt in the country while reducing outstanding federal debt by 16 percent.

What profit it a nation to guard the borders of Germany and South Korea while leaving its own unmanned?