Take a look around

What we have here in this prediction of evangelical collapse is a very typically American failure to look beyond the cultural borders while attempting to contemplate global trends:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the "Protestant" 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

If the full extent of your cultural awareness is limited to Europe and the United States, as is the case with the New Atheist and most American Christians alike, this perspective makes an amount of sense as long as you ignore the demographic trends. But once you take into account the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa and Asia, the thesis falls apart.

From NPR, of all places: In The land Of Mao, A Rising Tide Of Christianity

Official Chinese surveys now show that nearly one in three Chinese describe themselves as religious, an astonishing figure for an officially atheist country, where religion was banned until three decades ago. The last 30 years of economic reform have seen an explosion of religious belief. China's government officially recognizes five religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Daoism. The biggest boom of all has been in Christianity, which the government has struggled to control....

Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million.

I have no doubt that the increasingly "liberal" evangelical church will follow the lead of the old mainline denominations and decline into numerical irrelevance. Once cut off from the nurturing root of the Word of God, Christian churches always die. There are a number of signs, but easily the most reliable one is the establishment of female pastors.

Because the US government has been fairly successful in bringing the American church to heel through its establishment of federal licenses, it is interesting to note that while China is attempting to utilize the same tactic, the Chinese Christians are familiar enough with the costs of centralization to resist the state's attempt to control them.

America is following Europe into a secular post-Christian period. But can be seen in Europe, secular post-Christianity is not sustainable and rapidly leads towards rampant paganism. And, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history, paganism is easily trumped by Christianity. Unfortunately, History's cycles are rinsed with blood.

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It took them long enough

From the Onion:

At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

With audible murmurs of "This is no way to live," "What the hell am I doing here—I hate it here," and "Fuck this place. Fuck this horrible place," all 8.4 million citizens in each of the five boroughs packed up their belongings and told reporters they would rather blow their brains out with a shotgun than spend another waking moment in this festering cesspool of filth and scum and sadness.

The fact that one of the chief accomplishments of science and technology is to permit people to live in their own filth like factory chickens without dying like flies should tell you all that you need to know about city life. And spare me the blather about the wonderful museums and so forth. No one actually goes there.

Consider: the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the top ranked museum in the country. It has all of 4.9 million visitors per year. If we assume that absolutely none of those visitors were tourists who don't live in New York City, that means that the average New Yorker visits the museum 0.58 times per year.

Don't get me wrong, being a libertarian I fully support the right of moronic urbanophiles to live in ludicrously over-priced and over-regulated squalor. I simply don't find it sophisticated, enviable, or even fathomable.

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National Review still supports fake conservatism

And here you would have thought that all those futile years of George W. Bush, Arlen Specter, and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have cured the onetime conservative magazine of its dedication to power and political pragmatism.

Forty Jim DeMints or 60 Lindsey Grahams? Forty Christine O’Donnell’s or 60 Mike Castles?

These are questions conservatives have to think about when they see polls like the latest Rasmussen, which has Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican thoroughly unloved by tea partiers, leading Democratic nominee Chris Coons 48-37 while conservative Republican Christine O’Donnell trails Coons by the same eleven-point margin, 47-36....

So, again: would conservatives in Delaware rather win, or send a message?

For actual conservatives, the only rational answer is 40 DeMints. Daniel Foster has asked a misleading question. The correct one is, would conservatives rather elect a false conservative majority that will vote against conservative principles while ensuring that a Democratic majority succeeds it when the inevitable reaction comes, or continue building towards a genuine and committed conservative majority?

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You can take the boy out of the madrassah

But you can't entirely take the madrassah out of the politician that the boy becomes. Obama whines about his "some powerful interests" and their opinion of him:

“Some powerful interests that have been setting the agenda in Washington for a long time, and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

To me, the most interesting aspect of this is that the first negative thing that sprang to mind when Obama wanted to express how people were badmouthing him, he thought of "a dog". That is not a normal American expression. One works like a dog, one is as loyal as a dog, one is dog-tired, whereas the negative forms tend to utilize the term "bitch" instead. Using dog in this perjorative sense is much more common in the Arab world.

It seems to me that this is, in addition to demonstrating Obama's inability to withstand legitimate criticism, an example of his Indonesian Muslim upbringing showing itself in a moment of stress. This doesn't mean he is a crypto-Muslim, but it is rather yet another indication of his essentially foreign perspective. In support of this interpretation, I would note that while I have seen many distinctly negative terms applied to Obama since he first launched his presidential candidacy, I have never read nor heard of him being referred to as "a dog".

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VDH piles on

He addresses Krugman's WWII stimulus argument from the historian's perspective:

I’m not an economist, but as an historian, I consider this an abject misreading of the postwar period, at least through the early 1950s. The war years were characterized by frenetic hyperactivity: Americans worked long hours, women were brought into the work force, new towns and manufacturing centers sprang up, and people gave up necessities — all on the assurance that this furious pace and consumer scarcity would be short-lived.

As WWII ended and the clean-up began, there was an enormous amount of pent-up global demand for goods. Given the wreckage in Europe, Japan, and Russia and the underdevelopment of India, Asia, and South America, we were about the only ones with the industrial and commercial wherewithal to supply the world rebound — often receiving cheap oil, gas, minerals, and interest in exchange, which supplemented our own vast supplies of comparatively cheap and easily recoverable resources. Nor should we forget the psychological element: Americans, after winning two wars, were enormously confident about their newfound international stature and influence.

At home, four years of consumer deprivation during the war and the weak demography of the 1930s had combined to create huge demand, all while society was increasingly leaving the farm for good and becoming suburbanized. The result was that in the late 1940s and 1950s, the birth rate soared and consumers enthusiastically made first-time purchases of washers, dryers, fridges, cars, etc. Thus, the American economy grew by leaps and bounds.

Today’s situation is not comparable: We are in hock to foreign creditors for trillions and have not been a net creditor since the 1980s. A China, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, or India is as or more likely to supply recovering demand for food, steel, or electronics.

Krugman should be careful what he wishes for. England, the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, and Italy all engaged in massive WII spending; England did so to a much greater extent than the USA ever did. And how did it work out for their postwar economies? The Broken Window fallacy only isn't a fallacy when you win a war while incidentally breaking all the windows and killing all the glaziers in the neighboring towns. And the history of warfare declares that this doesn't happen very often even when you are fortunate enough to win.

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Seven Years Off

The first problem with Paul Krugman's hypothesis is that 2010 is not 1938, it is 1931. This should be obvious because at no point in the last two years has anyone except me, Robert Prechter, Mike Shedlock, Karl Denninger and a few other economic heretics admitted that we have been in a depression for months now.

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938....

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.

But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.

The second problem here is that Krugman is making a standard post hoc ergo propter hoc mistake. While the US did engage in a massive burst of unrestrained federal spending, it was not the spending that produced the postwar prosperity except in that it paid for the munitions and manpower that was used to destroy every industrialized economy that was not already destroyed by the Germans or the Japanese.

And the third problem, of course, is that the Keynesian notion that government spending is economic growth, let alone is capable of creating growth that is a multiple of the spending, is both logically and empirically false. Remember, no one even began to recognize that the Great Depression was a great depression until the end of 1931.

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That didn't take long

"Post-occupation" Iraq gets down to business:

Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq's ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting. The attack also made plain the kind of lapses in security that have left Iraqis wary of the U.S. drawdown and distrustful of the ability of Iraqi forces now taking up ultimate responsibility for protecting the country.

Sunday's hour-long assault was the second in as many weeks on the facility, the headquarters for the Iraqi Army's 11th Division, pointing to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.

If "heavily-armed militants" are already attacking a divisional Army HQ, I think it is reasonable conclude that there is a long and nasty period of civil war ahead. The problem with "the Surge" was never that American forces didn't have the ability to impose a temporary reduction in the internecine violence, but that it was merely a short-term measure that would stop working when the necessary forces were withdrawn.

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Don't marry debt

Marriage is already a financially risky move under the present legal regime. But marrying a heavily indebted woman would be financially insane, especially in the current economy:

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days. Ms. Eastman said she had told him early on in their relationship that she had over $100,000 of debt. But, she said, even she didn’t know what the true balance was; like a car buyer who focuses on only the monthly payment, she wrote 12 checks a year for about $1,100 each, the minimum possible. She didn’t focus on the bottom line, she said, because it was so profoundly depressing.

But as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. “He accused me of lying,” said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. “But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn’t really want to know the full amount.”

It sounds like the gentleman escaped just in the nick of time. In addition to the $170k in debt, Miss Eastman sounds exactly like the sort of woman who would not only rationalize lying to a man, but being unfaithful as well. In any case, how you manage your personal finances is a good indicator of how you will manage both a household and a marriage as well. The short-term oriented woman who can't foresee the obvious consequences of credit is the same sort of woman who can't foresee the obvious consequences of encouraging the harmless attentions of her male acquaintances and co-workers.

The truly dangerous thing about debt, where women are concerned, is that can lock them out of a career as a wife and mother. Unless you marry someone wealthy enough to pay off your debts without thinking about it, having children and staying home to take care of them simply isn't an option. So, you'll have sacrificed not only your own future but your children's as well in order to spend five years studying 14th century Basque poetry and having sex with ten or twelve college guys whose names you'll struggle to remember ten years hence.

The harsh reality is that a few years on the pole with a coke habit would still leave the average woman with a better long term prospect of happiness than the popular combination of student loans and a soft liberal arts degree from a reputable private university.

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RAW on the New Atheists

This excerpt from Prometheus Rising is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the Dawkinsian rational materialist, in light of how it was written by a non-theistic scientific mystic 27 years ago:

Rationalist robots, like the other robots, may be totally mechanized or may have some slight flexibility, or "freedom" built into their circuitry. The totally robotized make up the vast horde of the Fundamentalist wing of the Materialist church and the other True Believers in the scientific paradigm of 1968, 1958, 1948 or whenever their nervous systems stopped taking new imprints.

These are the people who are perpetually frightened and dismayed by the large portion of human behavior mediated through Circuit II mammalian politics. They think that because this territorial-emotional ("patriotic") behavior is not Rational, it should not exist. They accept Darwin as dogma, but are nervous about "Darwinism" (because it accepts mammalian politics as an Evolutionary Strategy that has worked thus far) and are repulsed by the data of ethology, genetics, and sociobiology. They don't like the rest of the human race much, because it is not guided by their favorite circuit, and they are uneasily aware that the rest of the human race does not like them much....

The totally robotized Rationalist, the one whose nervous system has stopped growing entirely, can be recognized by two signs: He or she is constantly trying to prove that much of the daily experience of the rest of humanity is "delusion", "hallucination", "group hallucination", "mass hallucination", "mere coincidence", or "sloppy research". And he or she never thinks that any of his or her own experience would fit into any of those categories.

Substitute "religious" for "patriotic" and "religions" for "politics" and he could have written that today.

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VPFL Draft

It's at 5:30, not 7 PM. Just a reminder.

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Changing odds

It wasn't all that long ago when I wrote of my assumption that the Republicans were going to take the House and might take the Senate as well, thus leading to Obama's eventual implosion in the 2012 Democratic primary. More than a few critics said that I was crazy. Of course, once it happens, everyone will believe that it was practically inevitable.

Typically cautious Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, is rocking the political world with a new "Crystal Ball" prediction: The GOP will win the House, making Ohio's John Boehner speaker, might get a 50-50 split in the Senate, and will pick up some eight new governors.

The winds at Republican backs are more favorable than they were in 1994. If the idiot Republican establishment can merely avoid falling over their own feet and embrace the anti-government mood instead of attempting to tamp it down, they'll clean up. But never underestimate Republican self-destruction.

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It's just about that time

Football Outsiders offers a refresher course in NFL statisticology:

You run when you win, not win when you run.

The first article ever written for Football Outsiders was devoted to debunking the myth of "establishing the run." There is no correlation whatsoever between giving your running backs a lot of carries early in the game and winning the game. Just running the ball is not going to help a team score; it has to run successfully.

There are two reasons why nearly every beat writer and television analyst still repeats the tired oldschool mantra that "establishing the run" is the secret to winning football games. The first problem is confusing cause and effect. There are exceptions, usually when the opponent is strong in every area except run defense, like last year's New Orleans Saints. However, in general, winning teams have a lot of carries because their running backs are running out the clock at the end of wins, not because they are running wild early in games.

The second problem is history. Most of the current crop of NFL analysts came of age or actually played the game during the 1970s. They believe that the run-heavy game of that decade is how football is meant to be, and today's pass-first game is an aberration. As we addressed in an essay in Pro Football Prospectus 2007 about the history of NFL stats, it was actually the game of the 1970s that was the aberration. The seventies were far more slanted towards the run than any era since the arrival of Paul Brown, Otto Graham, and the Cleveland Browns in 1946. Optimal strategies from 1974 are not optimal strategies for today's game.

And yes, I am very, very nervous about going into the 2010 NFL season with The Tavaris Jackson Experiment as the confirmed backup QB to a man who is on the verge of entering George Blanda territory. Come to think of it, I'd be more comfortable if it was George Blanda backing up Favre and he's 83 years old.

VPFL UPDATE: It shouldn't be necessary to worry about the exclusions in the VPFL draft tonight. Yahoo has added the ability to specify keepers and I have done so for everyone. Blackmouth is not keeping anyone, the Meerkats have only one keeper, and Winston is keeping two. The other seven teams are all keeping three.

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Applying science to string theory

What a novel idea!

String theory was originally developed to describe the fundamental particles and forces that make up our universe. The new research, led by a team from Imperial College London, describes the unexpected discovery that string theory also seems to predict the behaviour of entangled quantum particles. As this prediction can be tested in the laboratory, researchers can now test string theory.

Of course it seems probable that if the prediction is incorrect, the string theoreticians will follow the example of the Darwinists and insist that string theory is still totally scientific and totally accurate even though every attempt to utilize it to make predictions keep showing it to be reliably incorrect. When even Richard Dawkins feels the need to start using qualifiers in his would-be magnum opus in defense of the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection, henceforth TEpNS, only the most fanatic Darwinist could fail to recognize that there is a very real possibility that the theory's future lies with space aether, phrenology, and phlogistons.

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Double bubble trouble

A number of people have asked me what "the education bubble" means. While it's not actually a true investment bubble since purchasing a college education is not a bona fide investment, the ever-rising cost of a college degree does have frothy and bubblicious aspects that can be seen very clearly in this chart from TaxProfBlog that compares CPI inflation vs the increase in US home prices vs the increase in college tuition.

In combination with the huge increase in students attending college, the value of a college degree is presently around one-third of what it was in 1990. I had previously estimated it was 28% of the value... but in either case, this assumes you are one of the 50% of college attendess who manages to successfully complete a college program and receive a degree within five years.

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The real religious threat

James Delingpole explains that it comes from the radical Gaians brainwashed by years of public school propaganda:

It’s time we woke up to the threat posed by this mass brainwashing of the younger generation. We worry, rightly, about those Muslim children who are being indoctrinated with the extreme Wahaabist version of their faith. Yet we seem astonishingly complacent that every day, in schools of every kind throughout the Western world, our children are being taught by well-meaning teachers to view their world and culture through exactly the same anti-capitalist, anti-human, anti-growth eyes as James Lee and the Unabomber.

The modern environmental movement is not kind, caring or gentle. It is a series of ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in our face.

If it weren't for the fact that Western economies are collapsing anyhow, one could make a serious argument that the Gaians are a greater threat to humanity than the most expansionist imperialists of the Dar al-Harb. The lunacy of James Lee is a clear warning sign.

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