Freudian fraud finally finished

Amazing. The fact that psychiatry is a completely bogus pseudoscience concocted by the lunatic ravings of an Austrian pervert couldn't kill off credentialed talk therapy for more than 100 years, but simply making insurance companies pay for such "therapy" appears to have it on the edge of extinction in less than a decade.

Alone with his psychiatrist, the patient confided that his newborn had serious health problems, his distraught wife was screaming at him and he had started drinking again. With his life and second marriage falling apart, the man said he needed help. But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient.

Is there any chance we can force insurance companies to pay for Neo-Keynesian economics while we're at it? But in light of how we were contemplating earlier those white-collar jobs that can be automated, it occurs to me that psychiatry is clearly an occupation that can be easily replaced with software programs that are much cheaper than psychologists or even social workers. How hard can it be to make a synthetic speech program that asks "so how does that make you feel", "I'm sensing you harbor some ambivalence about your mother", and "I'm just going to prescribe you Xanax and we'll see how that works for you."

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The demon that lurks

This is about as flawless a portrait of a Gamma Male that anyone could possibly paint. It includes a description of the demon that lurks inside the twisted, affection-starved heart of every Gamma, a demon that can only be exorcised by the powerful ritual of a pretty woman's unsolicited smile.

UPDATE: In related news, I have invited JY to fill one of the Delta roles at Alpha Game. He is young, Christian, and engaged, which should help put to rest the notion that Game is only for Pick-Up Artists. His first post, Stumbling toward Alpha, is now up.

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Krugman is correct!

Will wonders never cease! Of course, I note that what he gets right is an observation on education and technology that has absolutely nothing to do with economics. It would appear his track record of uniform failure on that subject remains spotless:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers. And legal research isn’t an isolated example. As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

It is actually not a question. Everyone is wrong to the extent that they believe education has anything to do with macroeconomic success, and this is easily observable even if one omits the technology factor. In Tunisia, for example, 57 percent of those entering the labor market have college degrees. The comparable figure in the United States is 30 percent. But the Tunisian unemployment rate among those college graduates is 45 percent, three times higher than the national rate. That's why so many of them who participated in the recent revolt a) spoke English, and b) had the time to participate.

What those who make a fetish of education simply fail to understand is that knowledge - particularly knowledge of the sort that is sufficiently codified to be included in a college textbook - is not intrinsically valuable to anyone. It makes no difference to me if you happen to know the date of Agincourt, the periodic table of the elements, or the correct way to utilize Pascal parameters. Your knowledge of those things isn't going to produce any value to me, since profit is only created through human action.

The fallacious idea underlying the link between education and economic growth is that expanding an individual's knowledge base will enable him to engage in more economically productive action. But this completely depends upon a) what that knowledge is, b) the ability and willingness of workers to translate knowledge into action, and c) the utility of those actions in producing goods and services that customers want or need. In most cases, the education that is being provided fails on all three points.

Producing more lawyers, social workers, and Womyn's Studies majors is not going to generate any productive economic activity, indeed, it is guaranteed to generate activity that will increase economic contraction by inhibiting the free flow of goods and services. Combine that with the development of technologies that will significantly reduce the need for human service providers such as lawyers, paralegals, engineers, and teachers, and there is a perfect storm of mass white-collar unemployment on the horizon, not only in the United States, but all around the world.

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WND column

The Tripoli Trap

It is not hard to understand why the idea of military intervention in support of the Libyan rebels battling against the Gadhafi regime is tempting to some Americans. Responsible for both the Lockerbie bombing and the Berlin disco bombings that killed both American soldiers and civilians, there is little that is not reprehensible about Muammar Gadhafi. Nor has there ever been even a pretense of democratic legitimacy about the government of The Brother Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which came to power in a conventional third-world "colonel's coup" in 1969.

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Fantasy, Romance, and the Omega author

What is the essential difference between Fantasy and Romance? The lines appear to be increasingly blurred these days. While the RWA didn't include the teen romance of the Twilight series on its list of bestselling romance novels, the current list includes books from the Ghostwalkers and Immortals After Dark series and one can hardly walk through a grocery store, let alone a bookstore, without encountering an interspecies love triangle between a woman, a vampire, and a werewolf. For some reason, it would appear that two vampires, or alternatively, two werewolves, seldom share common tastes in human women. So there is magic and the supernatural in Romance and there is no dearth of love and sex in Fantasy. So what is the difference?

Aside from the covers, arguably the most reliable method to distinguish between the two is this: In Romance, men typically pursue women. Sometimes they even ravish them. In Fantasy, on the other hand, men are almost invariably surprised by female interest in them.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

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The piggies squeal

Britain's banksters are upset that their central banker isn't running interference for them ala Mr. Bernanke:

Bankers, businessmen and economists joined together to dismiss the bulk of the Bank of England Governor's comments, with some even questioning whether he should remain in his post.

One senior banking source, at one of the UK's top five banks, went so far as to brand Mr King "an embittered old man with no appreciation of reality".

The anger follows an interview the Governor gave to The Daily Telegraph yesterday, in which Mr King said that the finance industry needs urgent reform and that there is a risk of a second banking crisis.

I know I'm surprised that the banks don't see a second financial crisis coming. Why should they, when they didn't see the first one until it arrived either? Meanwhile, in other news, one of Britain's biggest banks just announced that it is moving to Hong Kong. What a smart decision was made by the British government in twice offering HSBC, which collected $3.5 billion from the U.S. Treasury's bailout of AIG, in twice offering to bailout HSBC in the last three years. It's probably fortunate for the U.K. that HSBC didn't accept either offer.

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The downside of status

In their rush to declare themselves alphas, before whom men cower and women tremble with anticipation, what is often forgotten by perfectly normal deltas and gammas is that socio-sexual status very often comes at a price.

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We are not alone

An announcement of extraterrestrial life:

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.

That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.... Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies -- comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched -- because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

If a great many scientists say extraterrestrial is impossible despite the fact that they can't possibly know with any degree of certainty, we can safely conclude that it will be discovered relatively soon, assuming it hasn't been already. But I'm less interested in yet another exercise in the foolishness of scientists throwing away their credibility in unscientific opining than I am in this question: would the proven existence of extraterrestrial life tend to support the Christian view of Creation or undermine it? Or would it depend upon the form in which that extraterrestrial life takes?

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Game blogging

Although the econ blog concept didn't end up working out quite as well as I'd envisioned, I think Twitter is actually a better vehicle for that. However, I have noticed there is a good deal of continuing interest in Game theory, in fact, more than I can reasonably bring myself to devote to it on this blog. Since I'm presently working on a Game-related project, I think the time has come to set up a separate blog devoted entirely to the subject. My idea is to have seven bloggers, of which I will be one, each presenting the perspective of the one of the categories I have described in the socio-sexual hierarchy: Alpha, Sigma, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Omega... plus one ♀. I'm open to bloggers who already have blogs, there are two or three few people I'd very much like to participate, but in general I'm more interested in those who aren't already blogging regularly.

If you're interested, please mention it here, then email me a sample post along with your age, marital status, religious faith, and which perspective you think you could accurately represent. I would prefer a mix of married and single, religious and irreligious, older and younger. Note that I'm not interested in exercises in self-justification, such as explaining why you're really a "stealth alpha" even though your last date was with a transsexual streetwalker in Las Vegas five years ago nor do I want Tucker Max fiction cribbed from old editions of Penthouse Forum. Roissy already has the "I am Alpha, hear me roar" aspect of the subject well-covered, so what I'd like this new blog to bring to the table is both the painful stories of the past and the accounts of transformation, both successful and unsuccessful, from the present.

I'm still going to discuss the subject here as I have been doing, but I will also post there several times per week. Please don't volunteer unless you can reasonably commit to posting three times per week since a good blog should average around three posts per day. I don't know if anyone will be interested in blogging, or for that matter, reading such a blog, but I figured it doesn't hurt to throw the idea out there to you all.

In tangentially related news, it's time to clean up the blogroll. So many are now defunct that my plan is to nuke them all and only keep those bloggers who tell me they are still active. Let me know if you want to stay on the blogroll or be added to it in the comments here with a) the blog name and b) the URL.

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It's because you collectively suck

Teachers are in shock at the contempt in which they are held:

The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.

“You feel punched in the stomach,” said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees’ two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor’s plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights.... Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

Perhaps the reason for this scorn might have something to do with little facts such as these:

About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000. The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, the proportion was 23 percent.

I would argue that most public school teachers don't even deserve minimum wage, for the obvious reason that they can't do their jobs. Fire them all, tear down the system, and replace it with a technological spin on homeschooling for those parents who can't homeschool. I guarantee the results would not merely be superior, but vastly superior.

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A long-awaited dance

I can't pretend that I'm anywhere nearly as excited as a lot of epic fantasy fans are, but I will probably re-read the series in order to refresh my memory before reading the next book in the series:

Great news for fans of epic fantasy today: The great George R. R. Martin has announced on his web page that the long, long-awaited 5th book in his SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series is almost done. No kidding this time. A DANCE WITH DRAGONS will be hitting stories on July 12, 2011. Although previous dates have been set and then cancelled, Martin says this one is “for real.”

I generally enjoy the Fire and Ice series, but I thought the last book, divided into two, bordered on the tedious and didn't advance the story much. Like pitchers, writers tend to lose their fastball abruptly, and often without any warning. I suspect Martin's inability to finish the book in a reasonable time frame after turning in a relatively mediocre, (in comparison with the standard he'd previously set, you understand) prior novel doesn't bode well for A Dance with Dragons, but I will be pleased to be proved wrong in July.

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Mailvox: the replay link

Cocomoe sends a link for the benefit of those who couldn't listen live yesterday:

The Vox Schiff interview can be relistened and relistened to here for free Mar 3 hour 1: (Vox starts at minute 27). I thought Vox did real well and even better the 2nd time you listen and get Schiff to be more background.

Actually, I don't feel as if I even began making a case, for as I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I had no idea that there was going to be a debate about inflation. I was told that we'd be discussing inflation and deflation in the context of Bernanke's recent testimony to Congress. So, what you're hearing is my attempt to be polite and avoid simply telling the host "congratulations, you've figured out the basics of supply, demand, and the quantity theory of inflation, which has only been around since Ssu-Ma Chien in the second century BC." There is literally nothing that Schiff is saying that any economics student didn't learn in Econ 101 except the bit about the Federal Reserve Notes. That doesn't mean he's necessarily wrong about high rates of inflation coming, only that repeating what the Wall Street Journal has been saying since April 2008 isn't telling anyone anything new nor does it explain in any way the various anomalies that I have noted in the money supply and the credit markets. Just saying "housing is an asset", which isn't even true in the case of housing, is not a meaningful response, let alone a substantive rebuttal. For all that there are multiple definitions of inflation, all of them include the concept of a general increase in prices and there can be no price inflation if wages and housing prices are falling even though prices are rising in other sectors.

"The only Chinese with notable views in the more strictly economic realm was the distinguished second century B.C. historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145c. 90 BC).... Ch'ien was one of the world's first monetary theorists. He pointed out that increased quantity and a debased quality of coinage by government depreciates the value of money and makes prices rise. And he saw too that government inherently tended to engage in this sort of inflation and debasement."
- Murray Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, pp 26-27.

By the way, here are the specifics on the incidences of default versus hyperinflation in Europe since 1800 that I mentioned in the interview. There have been 73 sovereign defaults compared to 20 total years of hyperinflation in Austria (2 years, 1,733%), Germany (2 years, 2.22E+10%), Greece (4 years, 3.02E+10%), Hungary (2 years, 9.63+26%), Poland (2 years, 51,699.4%), Russia (8 years, 13,534.7%). Similar ratios are seen in Latin America and Africa. However, high rates of annual inflation are quite common historically and the USA is actually quite unusual in having had only one year since 1800, 1864 to be precise, where inflation exceeded 20 percent. One thing inflationistas might find interesting is the fact that hyperinflation is NOT necessarily dictated by the increase in the quantity of money, because in at least two cases, those of Germany and Hungary, the amount of inflation exceeded the increase in the money supply.

UPDATE - WND has a nice, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek article on RGD hitting #1 in its category on Amazon. Of course, the headline is a little unfortunate, as I would hope demand for it hasn't actually peaked at this point.

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The unacceptable inevitable

What happens when the unstoppable political force meets the inevitable political issue?:

In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was "unacceptable'' to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security "unacceptable."

Doesn't matter. Here's the numbers. Show me what we're going to do about it.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare comprise 56.7% of the federal budget ($2.1 trillion.) Defense comprises another 18.7% (about $700 billion.) And interest, today, is a paltry 4.6% (primarily due to ZIRP). Interest expense will double even if we don't add one more dollar of debt to the Federal side.

Not might double, will double.

And will do quite a bit more than that when interest rates return to historic norms. Color me skeptical that the Tea Party is going to be any more successful in holding the Republican Party's feet to the fire when two-thirds of them won't even look at the elephant in the room. Playing ostrich and declaring the inevitable to be unacceptable just isn't going to accomplish anything.

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The winners write it

The economic history, that is. I'm not a bankster, so it must be the tiger's blood. Regardless, RGD is the #1 ebook in Economic History.

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A patient explanation

Roissy attempts to explain Game, very slowly, to the uninitiated mainstream:

First, everyone needs to stop throwing around the word douchebag so lazily and haphazardly. Douchebags aren’t hopeless with women. Just the opposite. Douchebags are pricks and assholes — usually gauche and lower class — who inexplicably do well with women. (Well, inexplicable to anyone who isn’t a reader of the Chateau. We here know the reason why chicks dig jerks.) Think of hotchickswithdouchebags.com, or some of the cast of Jersey Shore.

Most douchebags are naturals with women, probably because they aren’t smart enough to question their unwavering self-confidence. In fact, the best naturals with women mostly occupy the left hand side of the bell curve. The truly dangerous skirt chasers are the naturals with smarts. There aren’t many of them, but they do exist. They are unstoppable forces of nature, owing partly to their concomitant suite of dark triad traits.

I found this part to not only be succinct, but exceedingly amusing, as it happened to come on right on the heels of Spacebunny informing me that I am "a very bad man". Note, however, that Roissy specifically denies the idea that Game is tool with just one application, which should be completely obvious given this description of its essence.

That women’s behavior can be so analyzed means that women’s actions can be predicted, and subsequently that men with this knowledge can tailor their behavior to get the most out of their interactions with women. Knowledge is a powerful thing, and knowing what’s up does, in fact, shift the balance of sexual power in men’s direction by removing the inscrutability and whimsy that has been the prerogative of women since time immemorial. Game means that it is no longer simply a matter of dumb luck when men get sex and love.

Game is no more limited to use by pick-up artists in night clubs than a screwdriver is limited to use by murderers in stabbing someone to death. Unless you seriously wish to deny that a) female behavior falls into patterns and is predictable to some degree, or b) knowledge of those patterns can be useful to men in a variety of applications, logic dictates that Game will be of use to nearly every man on the planet.

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Be prepared

Since it doesn't do to wing it before discussing economics with someone who has a reasonably sophisticated grasp on the subject, I thought I had better acquaint myself with the latest statistical updates before attempting to talk about them in public. What is interesting to note in all of this recent inflation hysteria is that the rate of increase of the CPI-U measure of price changes and the M2 money supply measure are both presently below their 50-year average.  Below is a chart showing the change in CPI-U and M2 on a monthly basis since January 2008.

The average annual growth over this period is 1.44% for CPI-U and 6.16% for M2.  That sounds like a lot, but to put it in perspective, the average annual growth over the 51 years from January 1960 to January 2011 is 4.13% for CPI-U and 6.86% for M2.  It's far below the record three-year periods of 1978-1980 in which CPI-U averaged 11.6% growth per year, or when M2 growth averaged 12.2% growth in 1977-1979.  And while it is absolutely correct to doubt the veracity of these government-published figures - anyone who goes through the M2 statistics won't miss the discrepancy between various H6 reports for the exact same month - but since these statistics are being used to support the inflationary case, the fact that they are not increasing at an unusually rapid rate must be taken into account.

It hasn't escaped my attention that gold, oil, and commodity prices are all increasing.  Neither have I failed to note that other prices are continuing to fall.  The collapse of housing prices, down 31.4% from their 2006 Case-Schiller peak and falling at an annual average rate of 7.9% over the three years covered in the chart above, are much more indicative of a deflationary environment rather than an inflationary one.  How do we balance these contradictory indications?  I expect that is a question that Mr. Schiff will probably want to discuss.

Now, in the video entitled Four Keynesian Inflations, I explain why attempting to measure inflation in terms of CPI and GDP makes absolutely no sense, despite the fact that this is how the financial media always describes it.  But, even if we accept the idea that inflation is the rate of dollar price changes (CPI) in excess of the rate of economic growth measured in dollars (GDP), it should be obvious from the chart entitled Inflation 1960-2010, which subtracts Real GDP from CPI-U, that inflation is neither at a historically high level nor is it even increasing at the moment.  I think the chart demonstrates even more clearly that the Samuelsonian metrics involved are almost completely worthless as they clearly do not measure what they purport to measure, but since they presently frame the context of the mainstream economic analysis, it is necessary to take them into account.

Since we're apparently also going to be discussing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, it may be helpful to read his most recent report to the Congress if you want to follow along.

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Attn: inflationistas

Name of Guest: Vox Day
Date: Thursday, March 3, 2011
Interview Start Time: 10:35 AM ET
Interview End Time: 11:00 AM ET
Program Name: The Peter Schiff Show
Host: Peter Schiff
Topic: Ben Bernanke and the debate over inflation.

Just in case you're interested. You can listen live here.

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Greatness encapsulated

The epic wit and wisdom of Charlie Sheen:

"I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning. I win here and I win there."

"I'm gonna say this. It's a polygamy story. All my guy friends are gonna like throw tomatoes at me. It's like an organic union of the hearts. Together, it's like, it's on."

"I'm different. I have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart. I got tiger blood, man. Dying's for fools, dying's for amateurs."

"I'm tired of pretending I'm not special. I'm tired of pretending I'm not a total bitchin' rock star from Mars."

"I have a disease? Bullshitt. I cured it... with my mind."

"I have defeated this earthworm with my words – imagine what I would have done with my fire-breathing fists."

"My fangs are dripping tiger blood."

I have to say, I am totally with him on the tedium of false modesty. And forget Two-and-a-half Men. In these latter days of Survivor: Dancing with the Teen Mom Idol Chef, how in the name of all that is pure win does Charlie Sheen not have a reality show?

It's a crime, it's a tragedy. Not a single tiger's blood pearl that drops from those cocaine-encrusted lips should be lost to posterity.

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Eventual Irish default

Ireland is caught in the debt trap:

Ireland's new leader Enda Kenny faces a daunting task as he tries to change the terms of his country's €67bn (£57bn) EU-IMF package, either by cutting the penal rate of interest or changing the remit of the rescue fund to help Ireland claw its way out of a debt trap. The three parties in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition have issued a paper ruling out use of the bail-out machinery to purchase the bonds of eurozone states in trouble, or engineer a "soft" debt-restructuring by lending to these countries so that they can buy back their own debt cheaply from the market.

They're going to default sooner or later. They have to. It's not as if they can even convincingly play Extend-and-Pretend, given that what they're pretending is a mathematical impossibility in the short term. At least in the case of the United States, the pretense is still potentially credible in the short term.

It is irrelevant if Merkel and the Euzi bankers manage to cow the new Irish government into backing down again. Ireland will not be able to pay the debt however it is framed and decorated. Better Kenny and company follow the example of Iceland and tell the bankers that they'll have to pay their own debts with their own money... and if they don't have it, then their creditors will have to book the loss.

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Claws of the lion kitty

In which RS Bakker affects the pose of a philosopher, to comic effect:

I find myself wondering about the people who read through Theo’s blog entries, nodding their head and thinking, “Yes–Yes!“

What, if anything distinguishes us from these guys? Are we every bit as chauvinistic as they are, only in different ways? For a long time now, this has been my impression of many you find in the humanities: self-serving dogmatism concealed behind a facade of pseudo-critical homilies. Only sophisticated where Theo is crude, adroit where Theo is clumsy.

In teaching practical reasoning I’ve always been troubled by two specific fallacies: the arguments ad hominem and ad populum. If it is the case that we cannot help but unconsciously game ambiguities to secure status and prestige (which is to say, confabulate rationalizations), and if it’s also the case that the our cognitive incapacity and the complexity of the world are such that anything may be rationalized, then the who of the argument becomes all-important, doesn’t it?

Chauvinistic. Clumsy. Unsophisticated. Overdeveloped rationalization module. A dearth of humor. False sense of intelligence. Thinks - presumably falsely - has hit the cognitive jackpot. Buying own bullshit.

What a delightfully descriptive portrait! How fortunate it is that Bakker is "troubled" by the fallacious ad hominem argument... at least when teaching practical reasoning. He would appear to be considerably more comfortable with it when wielding it in a passive-aggressive manner he can barely bring himself to attempt disguising. Like most mid-witted academics, he has no idea what to do when forced to deal with arguments presented by a member of the cognitive elite that are over his head, so he is forced to resort to the usual character assassination in order to explain why this incomprehensible personage is inferior to his noble, self-questioning self instead of trying to address the arguments.

I don't find myself thinking at all about the people who read through Bakker's posts and agree with them. They're morally confused individuals who suffer from either insufficient intelligence or a surfeit of modern secularist dogma which renders them unable accept the conclusions that logic forces them to confront. So, like overmatched mid-wits usually do, they attempt to move the goalposts, desperately attempt to avoid admitting that they've been shown to be incorrect, and launch bitchy little passive-aggressive assaults in an attempt to maintain their self-image as rational and intelligent individuals.

The thing that I find so tremendously amusing about the half-educated and moderately intelligent is that they so seldom recognize the obvious limits to their knowledge and capacity for reason. They primarily concern themselves with the superficial aspects of the intellectual life rather than its substance; their conversation is replete with references to their credentials, the name-dropping of authors they haven't really read, and ideas they only dimly recall. It was entirely typical example of this type when James claimed to have "read everything Nietzsche has written that I could get my hands on including two biographies" but nevertheless didn't recognize the term "Preachers of Death" even though I had quoted the entire passage related to it and credited the quote to "Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, IX". They don't recognize or understand their own intellectual heritage because they don't actually know much about it. So, it should be no surprise to learn that Bakker's assumption of the superiority of his own sophistication and moral courage is neither a new nor original action:

But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.

Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.

What is the great dragon which the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God? "Thou-shalt," is the great dragon called. But the spirit of the lion saith, "I will."

"Thou-shalt," lieth in its path, sparkling with gold—a scale-covered beast; and on every scale glittereth golden, "Thou shalt!"

The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales, and thus speaketh the mightiest of all dragons: "All the values of things—glitter on me.

All values have already been created, and all created values—do I represent. Verily, there shall be no 'I will' any more. Thus speaketh the dragon.

My brethren, wherefore is there need of the lion in the spirit? Why sufficeth not the beast of burden, which renounceth and is reverent?

To create new values—that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating—that can the might of the lion do.

To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion.

To assume the right to new values—that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Verily, unto such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey.

As its holiest, it once loved "Thou-shalt": now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this capture.

Now, I obviously disagree with those who think themselves lions and pronounce themselves superior on the basis of their rejection of the values of "the great dragon". (The Biblically astute reader will note the satanic inversion of the metaphorical images there.) Still more do I oppose those who have undergone the third metamorphosis and think to construct their own value systems capable of serving as a standard by which previous moral values can be judged. But I can only be amused by the claws of the lion kitties, who scratch harmlessly away as they attempt to build their value system on that shaky foundation which declares "doubt as the highest virtue", especially when they do it in obvious ignorance of the well-worn path they are treading.

Bakker and his readers simply do not understand what morals and moral standards are, which is why they are not equipped to even begin the discussion from which Bakker has retreated. The irony is that Bakker was extolling the virtues of 8-bit greyscale by favorably comparing it with the crudity of the three primary colors, before turning to contemplate the unsophistication of those who he believes can only perceive those three simple colors. And in doing so, he has revealed how he completely fails to grasp that those three primary colors are all that is necessary to produce the 16.7 million colors that he cannot see.

I don't expect Bakker and his kind to agree with me. I don't even expect them to understand me. Let's face it, if they couldn't grasp the moral/color analogy, "lion kitty" is going to be about as intelligible as "hno4^d39fu". But we can hope that perhaps one day Bakker will intellectually mature and learn that the step that follows self-questioning is answering those questions. Some people appear certain because they have never asked themselves any questions about their underlying assumptions and beliefs. Others do because they have asked all of the pertinent questions and decided upon what reason, research, and experience indicate are the best possible answers. It is apparent that Bakker can't tell the difference... which is unsurprising considering that he cannot tell the difference between libertarian morality and conservative legality either.

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We're #2524

It would appear Death By 1000 Papercuts's Alexa-based metric has Vox Popoli listed as the 24th most popular libertarian site on the Internet. Perhaps this will suffice to convince people that I am really not a social conservative, given that my staunch support for legal drugs, prostitution, and nuclear weapons, (to say nothing of my opposition to military imperialism, financial interventionism, government-sanctioned marriage, and the pledge of allegiance), doesn't appear to have done the trick.

Now, I'm not into chest-thumping over hits and lists and awards. Except, of course, the one award given by Bane, which I will cherish always. (Note to those who bought into the whole Bane is Dead charade... just look at the Middle East. Now you know what he's been up to.) First, there are too many horrible sites that are highly ranked and too many very good sites that virtually no one reads to take the numbers game very seriously. Second, let's be honest, I am a little too arrogant to be inclined to put much credence in a metric that depends upon what most people like, most people being idiots and all.

But I do find it a little mystifying when those with readerships that are but a fraction of the Dread Ilk - let alone the WND readership - attempt to dismiss what I'm writing because they think no one reads it. How, precisely, does that compute?

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Killer vaccines

The Supreme Court renders vaccine makers unaccountable:

The Supreme Court today gave vaccine manufacturers greater protection from lawsuits by parents who say vaccinations harmed their children, ruling that Congress had blocked those types of claims against drug makers. In a 6-2 decision, the justices said Congress had effectively shut the courthouse door to these lawsuits in 1986, when it created a special vaccine court designed to compensate victims of vaccine injuries.

Contrary to the common assumption, I am not uniformly anti-vaccine. I think some vaccines make sense and represent a reasonable risk. On the other hand, I simply do not understand those people, especially left-wing scientists, who insist that all vaccines are intrinsically good. The following questions spring to mind:

1. Why does profiting from vaccines rather than anything else magically make a corporation intrinsically good rather than presumably greedy and evil?

2. How can one justify vaccines for non-lethal and non-communicable diseases on the basis of historically lethal and highly communicable diseases?

3. If vaccines are not capable of causing serious harm to children, why is it necessary to set up a system to compensate children who have been harmed and immunize vaccine makers from financial responsibility for those their products have injured?

4. How can anyone rationally claim that science uniformly supports vaccine use when no empirical studies that actually utilize the scientific method of experimentation and observation are utilized in testing vaccine safety?

5. Why do pro-vaccine advocates attack those who don't vaccinate their children according to the vaccine schedule when doctors specifically tell parents not to vaccinate their children according to the schedule if an older sibling has had a negative reaction to a vaccine?

6. Why do pro-vaccine advocates assume that vaccines which are proven to be safe for adults are also safe for infants and toddlers who weigh a fraction of what an adult weighs?

Now, based on the principle of "follow the money", I am confident that the current vaccine schedule is significantly more dangerous than most anti-vaccine people believe. If they were anywhere nearly as safe as advertised, it wouldn't be necessary to provide special protection to the manufacturers. That doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to get vaccinized for tetanus and polio, but why on Earth would it make sense to take any risk, however slight, in order to avoid getting a cold or the chicken pox?

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The null spiral

Wall Street isn't even pretending to be connected to the actual economy anymore:

Fresh from Wall Street's alchemy labs: Credit derivatives tied to General Motors Co. debt. The rub is, no such debt exists. Banks and hedge funds are trading credit-default swaps, which make payments to holders of General Motors bonds in the event of a default. But GM canceled $40 billion of debt in bankruptcy and has pledged to cut its remaining $4.6 billion bank loan to the bone this year.

In other words, Wall Street investing doesn't even rise to the level of gambling anymore. It's as if the bookies of Las Vegas decided to start taking bets on imaginary football teams instead of NFL teams during the upcoming lockout.

"Hey, I know you bet the farm on the Minneapolis Norsemen to cover the spread against the Wisconsin Puckers, but wouldn't you know it, the Puckers won, 111-85... oh, wait, football. That is to say, 27-10."

This can't help but bring to mind the obvious question of what percentage of GDP happens to be imaginary.

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