Yes, they really are unstable

As well as being liberal fascists... quotes from the Democratic Underground:

I just ordered a TV-B-Gone, for FOX News quarantine enforcement.... It's a simple device, which looks sort of like a car's keyless entry remote, with a single button that causes it to emit the infrared "Power off" codes for every brand and model of TV it knows about, which is to say about 95%+ of TVs in existence.

Yeah, it's time to get aggressive when it comes to people playing FOX News in businesses, doctor's offices and other public places.

Reading the comments there makes one wonder if it might not be well past time to put Prozac in the the water supplies of certain Democratic states. Democrats have control of the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the ABCNNBCBS cabal, and the New York Times, but the mere sight of Fox News in a public place is enough to send them around the bend.

And speaking of insane liberal fascists:

"I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."
-Barack Obama

That's in the Constitution, right?

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The innocence of the academic

VDH offers an allegorical explanation for why Obama's Chamberlainesque chatterbox approach is likely to cause more international problems than Bush's bomb-and-occupy method:

One small example of my late coming of age. A rather brutal neighbor (now dead and not to be mentioned by name (de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est)), an immigrant from an impoverished country, a self-made man, veteran of infamous fights and various bullying, shared a communal ditch. We talked and exchanged pleasantries–at first–at the standpipe gate. He lamented how rude my late grandfather had been to him, and even had made unfounded accusations that he was less than honest (he was also sort of playing the race card, remarking about the prejudicial nature of California agrarian culture).

I was shocked to hear that, and assured him that there would be no such incitements on my part on the new age of the Davis farm. No more ‘me first’, no more disdain for newcomers and upstarts. And then after about 3 months of sizing me up (at 26, I confess looking back I was not 1/8th the man my grandfather was at 86) he began stealing water in insidious ways: taking an extra day on his turn, cutting in a day early on mine, siphoning off water at night, destroying my pressure settings, watering his vineyards on days that were on my allotment. Stealing no less! And in 1980!

Here’s how I rushed into action. First, I gave a great Obama speech on communal sharing and why the ditch would not work if everyone did what he did. Farmers simply would perish if they did not come together, and see their common shared interests. He nodded and smiled-and stole more the next week.

I don't know why, but over the years I have seen how it is extremely hard for normal people to understand how blatantly some individuals can lie to your face. I suspect that only those who have had the benefit of long-term proximity to one of these shameless and habitual liars can understand how completely meaningless words can be in the mouths of some individuals. I'm not afraid to rely upon vverbal assurances, but once it's become clear that there is a reliable gap between what an individual says and what he does, I simply apply that gap to future pronouncements. But, in the rare case of the sociopaths, whose statements bear no recognizable similarity to their actions, I pay no attention whatsoever to their words.

As for the international policy implications, I believe the best strategy for dealing with Afghanistan would have been John Derbyshire's shock-and-exit idea. The biggest problem with the Bush approach was that it revealed the practical limits of America's ability to project force, which has probably encouraged the country's enemies every bit as much as Obama's feckless chattercentric strategy will.

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On the passing of Kung Fu

An anonymous emailer shares his thoughts:

Only in Hollywood could accidentally strangling yourself while choking the chicken be considered *not* a stupid and embarrassing way to die, but rather an occasion requiring heartfelt expressions of admiration for the deceased and condolence to the family.

Well, I suppose there's some consolation to be found in the thought that he died doing what he loved. Although, as Spacebunny said, is autoerotic asphyxiation really the best one can do in BANGKOK, of all places?

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The useless "stress test"

As the chart from Calculated Risk shows, Roubini was correct again and unemployment is already worse than the "more adverse" conditions that were supposed to represent the government's worst case scenarios.

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Marriage as investment

It's interesting to see the various ways that women make use of their physical assets to scam men out of their financial assets. In Western divorce culture, alimony is the vehicle of choice. In Chinese male surplus culture, it's pre-marital bride prices that serve the purpose:

With no eligible women in his village, Zhou Pin, 27 years old, thought he was lucky to find a pretty bride whom he met and married within a week, following the custom in rural China. Ten days later, Cai Niucuo vanished, leaving behind her clothes and identity papers. She did not, however, leave behind her bride price: 38,000 yuan, or about $5,500, which Mr. Zhou and his family had scrimped and borrowed to put together.

When Mr. Zhou reported his missing spouse to authorities, he found his situation wasn't unique. In the first two months of this year, Hanzhong town saw a record number of scams designed to extract high bride prices in a region with an oversupply of bachelors.

Obviously, not all women view marriage as a cash cow. But enough women do, in enough disparate cultures, that it should serve as a warning to men to choose their wives on a far more careful basis than they usually do.

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European tremors

Stratfor reports on Latvia's failed bond auction:

On June 3, the Latvian government failed to auction any of its 50 million lati ($100.7 million) of bonds, managing to sell only about 2.75 million lati ($5.5 million) worth of 30-day bonds the following day, which is raising fears that European emerging markets will have to struggle to raise capital for their rising debt.... The Latvian economy is, to put it bluntly, in shambles. Gross domestic product (GDP) is forecast to decline by over 13 percent in 2009.

The conventional wisdom has it that Europe is belatedly being hit by the financial turmoil that struck the States last fall and that the USA has seen the worst. I suspect that what we're seeing is more akin to water sloshing back and forth in an increasingly turbulent manner, in which case the relative calm in American markets is only temporary. And by "over 13 percent", Stratfor actually means 18 percent.

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The frauds of science II

Martin Blume protests too much in his review of Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific Worldby Eugenie Samuel Reich:

Reich does an excellent job of dealing with the facts of the Schön case, but less well with their interpretation. She tends to describe issues in black-and-white terms and uses strident language unnecessarily. An acerbic tone creeps into judgements of the individuals involved, such as one editor being "opinionated", and this distracts from her central points. More important is Reich's conclusion that the self-correction process of science failed in this case and should not be trusted: "It seems like little more than blind faith to insist that all activity carried out in the name of science will always be self-correcting." Yet Reich doesn't say where this assumption comes from. No scientist who has thought about how science works would "insist" on this; nor can it "always" be true.

Blume's criticism of Reich's failure to defend her assertion is downright humorous, considering that no scientist ever offers any actual scientific evidence for this supposedly self-correcting nature. In fact, the only evidence I've ever seen on the matter indicates that 14 percent of scientists admit their colleagues falsify data and 72 percent admit that their colleagues engage in other questionable practices. And it's hilarious to see how Blume damns pretty much every science blogger and science fetishist who has ever addressed the issue of science's self-correcting nature; most of them exhibit a belief in it far blinder than any religious faith. The pedantic quibble over an obvious rhetorical flourish is almost embarrassing as the point Reich has made, and which Blume is trying desperately to evade, is that there is little, if any, evidence that science is any more self-correcting than any other human endeavor; I daresay it's far less self-correcting than computer programming or race car driving, just to give two examples.

Blume would have done better to put Schön's fraud into proper statistical perspective rather than attempting to claim it as a case of the system working. No number of arrests can prove the city is crime-free. After attempting to minimize the force of Reich's criticism through declaring that no scientist believes science is always self-correcting, he then does a 180 and attempts to defend the current self-correction process. He's surely correct that the probability of detecting data fabrication can be increased, but I am deeply skeptical that an exhortation to remain vigilant and encourage alertness will have any effect at all. And his iconoclastic suggestion that important results should be replicated will surely confuse the innocent who genuinely believes that repetition is an integral part of the scientific process.

Blume's defense of scientific integrity is little more than fluff, and leads me to conclude that Reich will likely be provided the opportunity to write more books of this sort.

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Womenomics

Spacebunny sends a link to an article about a new book on women and the workplace. She notes: "And women wonder why they get paid less....."

The authors] call for women to say no to 60-plus-hour work weeks and overly demanding jobs that yank them away from their families. Instead, they urge working women to use their clout in the workplace to demand fewer hours at the office, turn down non-family-friendly assignments, and take control of their time by working from home more, checking e-mail less and avoiding meetings whenever possible.

It may surprise you to know that I'm generally in favor of both men and women doing as the Womenomics authors recommend, so long as they do so in the full knowledge that they will receive lower pay and fewer promotions than those who are willing to put in more time and work harder. Women should by all means avoid jobs that tear them away from their families; the smart employer will actively look to find a way to accommodate such women, who tend to be smart, efficient, dependable, and very hard-working within the time limits that their family responsibilities permit. And everyone would be better off with fewer meetings; one of our business partners has a meeting-heavy culture and it's astonishing how long it takes them to do anything.

The problem with this book, I suspect, is that the usual female fascism will likely rear its incoherent but lushly-maned head and demand that everyone do less work so as not to make working women look bad by comparison, thereby transforming what could be a reasonable call for workers to examine their individual priorities into yet another justification for government intervention into the workplace.

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Gordon Brown must go

I can't say with complete certainty that Gordon Brown is the worst Prime Minister ever to be inflicted upon the English people, but he's without question one of the worst. Of course, if the British Labour Party wasn't such a bunch of feckless, economically-incompetent, euro-subservient ninnies, they wouldn't be the British Labour Party:

Honestly, my granny could run a better coup than this lot. How hard can it be? What does it take to get rid of Gordon Brown? You'd think a well-judged shove would do it. Or a lone tank outside the radio station. Or a ranging shot from the destroyer offshore. Or just one gentle puff from someone close – and he's gone. Yet after another day of political comedy, the Prime Minister is still locked away in Downing Street, refusing to budge. Westminster thinks he's finished, but he's still there, like a gangster shouting: "Come and get me, coppers!" He has no intention of making things easy by walking away.

Send Labour - and perhaps more importantly, the Conservative Party - a message by voting UKIP today. And for the love of Her Majesty the Queen, find her a less obnoxious Prime Minister to serve time until the next parliamentary elections, the calling of which should be the new Prime Minister's first action. It is rather amusing, though, to see the speed with which Tony Blair's Nu Labour managed to transform itself back into a media-friendly version of Old Labour, complete with its patented capacity for economic self-demolition. Unfortunately, David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher and the Tories are too europhilic to be a genuine alternative. Regardless, as even the Labour-loving Guardian has concluded, Gordon Brown must go.

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Darwinian Tales

They're kind of like fairy tales for scientists, except they are usually less coherent than the Brothers Grimm variety:

Although many scholars have tried to identify a useful function for human hairlessness, they have failed. Indeed Alfred Wallace, the biologist who jointly described evolution with Darwin, concluded that our hairlessness proved the existence of God. Only a supernatural being, unconcerned with natural selection, could have designed it.

But Darwin showed that hairlessness was proof of a different type of evolution, not by natural selection but by sexual selection. Under natural selection, individuals survive if they are adapted to their environments: a brown bear, being conspicuous, would not last long in the Arctic, so it evolves into a polar bear. Sexual selection is not concerned with the environment but with sex: individuals breed only if they find a mate, so animals have to attract one. Consider the peacock.

OK so already we're in trouble. The guy is going to use the example of a peacock's plumage to prove why we lost our hair. (!!) If that were the end of the story, I might say some wise aleck remark like, "If the guy were trying to explain why women had such lush manes, compared to the meager covering of the males, then it might make sense to bring up the peacock." But I can't go that route, because the "scientific Darwinian" story gets even more convoluted.

Of course, this is an amateur Darwinian Tale. We Scientific Selectionists prefer to explain Evolutionary Stable Strategies, such as why passive men pursue ill-tempered women, also known as the STD-PW Dilemma:

Heritable psychological variation is the “raw material” of human evolution by natural selection, and understanding the mechanisms that generate such variation has become a fundamental challenge for contemporary evolutionary biology. A male human faces an inescapable reproductive dilemma, in that he seeks to spread his genes as widely as possible, an evolutionary pressure which is countered by the fact that an overly aggressive man risks a higher probability of being injured or diseased, thus resulting in a hindered ability to mate. However, a wholly passive man faces the high probability of falling under the influence of his mate and being prevented from going out to find other potential mates, thereby limiting his gene-spreading.

The STD-PW dilemma has, through Natural Selection, resulted in the evolutionary stable strategy of passive men selecting for bitchy women, with whom they mate and spread their genes before prolonged exposure to the bitch results in the application of one of two variant strategies. Either the male cannot stand the female's bitching anymore and flees of his own volition, (the proto-passive strategy) or the female becomes so disgusted with the excess passivity of the male that she either kicks him out of the house or initiates a relationship-ending affair (the passive strategy).

Either strategy results in freeing the passive man to pursue subsequent mates and further spread his genes without any need for the aggression that would force him to risk reproductive-hindering injury and/or disease.

It is science!

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The next bubble

Leveraged lawsuits. I like the sound of that one. Vampire money squared!

Richard W. Fields says he has come up with a win-win financial strategy for the downturn. He is investing in lawsuits. Not in trip-and-fall cases, mind you, but in disputes that are far larger, more costly and potentially more lucrative, often pitting major corporations against each other. Mr. Fields is chief executive of Juridica Capital Management. which runs a fund that invests in one side of a lawsuit in exchange for a share of any winnings.... Juris typically invests $500,000 to $3 million in a case, Mr. Desser said. He would not identify the company’s backers, but said that “on the portfolio as a whole, our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year.” He added, “We’re certainly beating the market.”

You know there are already guys at Citi and Goldman Sachs who are busy figuring out how to assess the risk factors and price the securitization of lawsuit investment products.

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UKIP in the UK

"Polls ahead of tomorrow's elections suggest that Labour could be facing the worst drubbing in its history. By some counts the party is even trailing the UK Independence Party in voting intentions for the European Parliament."
- The Daily Telegraph

That's my recommendation for any British readers voting in tomorrow's European parliamentary elections. The two most important issues for Britain right now are a) leaving the European Union, and b) ending immigration. Everything else is irrelevant in comparison with those two issues, which threaten the sovereignty and survival of the nation. With the exception of Daniel Hannan, the Tories are pretty much useless, while Labour is unspeakable and the Liberal Democrats are little more than Labour lite.

If there is no UKIP candidate standing, vote BNP. Despite their left-wing economic policies, they're on the right side of the two most important issues at the moment. Don't be put off by the hysterical media rhetoric or fooled into supporting Cameron's Conservatives, they're nearly as Europhilic as Nu Labour and they're not going to allow a referendum on the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty either. The Tories don't want to change the direction set by Blair and Brown; they offer nothing more than the illusion of change. Fortunately for British voters, the parliamentary system precludes the ridiculous "a vote for a third-party is a vote for the Democrats" argument that so many mathematically challenged Republicans find convincing.

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Doubleplus Doomed

And you thought it was bad enough when you thought Obama, or at least one of his pet Keynesian economists, was running GM:

“There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.”

But now, according to those who joined him in the middle of his crash course about the automakers’ downward spiral, he has emerged as one of the most influential voices in what may become President Obama’s biggest experiment yet in federal economic intervention. While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit, it is Mr. Deese who is often narrowing their options.

A month ago, when the administration was divided over whether to support Fiat’s bid to take over much of Chrysler, it was Mr. Deese who spoke out strongly against simply letting the company go into liquidation, according to several people who were present for the debate.

Now this is fabulous! We actually have a wannabe lawyer with a poli-sci degree from Middlebury and no absolutely experience in the real world handed directly responsibility for making important economic policy decisions. I'm going to go out on a real limb here and predict that this automotive experiment isn't going to end well.

Better yet, he was the top economic staffer for Hillary Clinton's campaign. Remember, that was the campaign that didn't know how the nomination rules worked. What are the odds he knows the first thing about malinvestment or realizes that he's following the Japanese zombie model? One in one quintillion against or one in one megabazillion? I'd have more confidence in Paul Krugman. Actually, come to think of it, I'd have more confidence in the decomposed corpse of John Maynard Keynes.

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Liberal Fascism: the paperback

This is just a reminder that Voxiversity III will be kicking off with the first quiz on June 13th. The paperback is now available, so if you don't already have the hardcover, pick up a copy and start reading the introduction, "Everything You Know About Fascism is Wrong". Even if you've already read the book, as many here have, you may want to consider re-reading it next week since you have to know your stuff fairly well if you're going to score highly on the weekly quizzes.

It is not enough for the gorilla to read Nietzsche. The gorilla must grok Nietzsche.

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He still believes

My new publisher was kind enough to supply me with a number of books I needed for reference while working on the current project, so I now possess more Paul Krugman books in multiple editions than I would have imagined one year ago. Having read the 1999 edition of The Return of Depression Economics as well as a few of his self-serving attempts to pretend that he saw the housing and financial crises coming - sorry, Paul, but spotting the housing boom in 2005, one year before it ended, is not exactly impressive - I was curious to see how he would deal with two rather glaring statements that had appeared in that original edition in the 2008 re-release, titled The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.

"On the whole, I have an easy conscience about the problems of the advanced countries. What I mean by that statement is that the solution for these problems do not seem to involve any especially painful tradeoffs.... the things advanced countries need to do to counter depression economics any compromise of the commitment to free markets." (1999, p. 162)

"The world economy is not in depression; it probably will not be in depression anytime soon." (1999, p. 154)

I haven't found any reference to the former quote yet, in fact, the section of the title essay to which it belongs, "Protecting the Rich", appears to have been excised entirely. Apparently Krugman isn't eager to remind everyone how he declared that keeping interest rates low and maintaining inflation around two percent would be sufficient for the USA to avoid a Japanese-style liquidity trap. Surprisingly, however, he repeats the second quote twice in the space of two pages in the new edition.

"We're not in a depression now, and despite everything, I don't think we're headed into one (although I'm not as sure of that as I'd like to be)." (2009, p. 180)

"The world economy is not in depression; it probably won't fall into depression, despite the magnitude of the current crisis (although I wish I was completely sure about that)." (2009, p. 181)

It should be interesting to see how those statements continue to evolve in future books and/or revised editions. Unsurprisingly, his proposed solution involves increasing the size of the next fiscal stimulus equivalent to 4 percent of US GDP. But since this is only $560 billion, his published proposal is smaller than the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama has proposed as part of the 2010 budget.

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The case against homeschooling

In which a teacher offers copious evidence for my calculation that the average teacher's IQ is below the societal norm:

Here are my top ten reasons why homeschooling parents are doing the wrong thing:

10. “You were totally home schooled” is an insult college kids use when mocking the geeky kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was home schooled or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of being homeschooled....

8. Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.

If you truly don't grasp that the public school system is an idiot factory, staffed by predatory, propaganda-infusing idiots, you probably aren't capable of reaching the logical conclusion about your own place on the intellectual totem pole. Which is fine, I see absolutely no need to spell it out for you and wish you all the joy of the summer re-runs.

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At the Black Gate

I'm a day behind, unfortunately. Nevertheless, booklovers might be interested in my belated post there today, as I wrote about an online tool that I've found to be useful for locating hard-to-find books.

I am firmly of the opinion that a family library is one of the most important contributions one can make to one's own education as well as the education of one's family throughout the years. My autodidacticism was far less influenced by the books I was encouraged to read by my father as a teenager than it was by the relatively few, but high-quality sets of children's books acquired by my mother. Those books were responsible for my acquaintance with everything from Plato and Demosthenes to Roland and Oliver, Coleridge, the Kalevala, and the Chronicle of the Cid. I particularly remember the oversized hardbacks in a series that included Robin Hood, The Virginian, and my favorite, The Tales of Paul Bunyan.

I was the beneficiary of an expensive private education from the seventh-grade through university. And yet, I can testify that the return on my parent's investment was far, far greater on those thirty or forty books to which I was exposed in my childhood than it was on the much larger one they made in my formal, credentialed education.

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WND column

Out of Ammo

Last week, Barack Obama declared that the U.S. was out of money. Today, General Motors is expected to file for bankruptcy, which is an ominous sign in a land where the financial health of the automotive giant has long been considered a proxy for the financial health of the nation. And California looks increasingly likely to go bankrupt in the near future. And yet, in a nation without money, Bloomberg has reported that the Federal Reserve has loaned out 7.8 trillion dollars without telling anyone where it has gone.

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