In which the squirrel meets the train

Sam Harris is debating William Lane Craig tonight at 7 PM EST. Since Harris's arguments are so inept and factually incorrect that I could beat him in a debate while simultaneously playing ASL and Ms Pac-man, I tend to doubt Craig will have much trouble with him. It should be interesting to see if Craig elects to make his own positive arguments and challenge Harris to refute them or if he takes a cue from TIA and shreds the arguments that Harris puts forth.

Since the title of the debate makes it sound as if Harris is attempting to talk his book, The Moral Landscape, I suspect even many atheists will be underwhelmed by his futile attempt to use science as a basis for deriving ought from is. Anyhow, I'm not staying up to watch it, so if anyone feels so inclined, please go ahead and provide color commentary or summarize it here.

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Sooner or later

It doesn't matter when the "transition" takes place. As happened with the Soviet withdrawal, once American combat forces are withdrawn, whenever they are withdrawn, the puppet regime forcibly installed by it will fall:

On Wednesday, Pres. Barack Obama held a video conference with Afghan president Hamid Karzai and welcomed the Afghan leader’s announcement of the first seven areas to transition to Afghan forces this July. The White House hopes that a smooth transition will help them to begin drawing down American forces this summer and end the foreign combat mission in the country by 2014.

Alas, this is wishful thinking. The troop withdrawal begins at a time when security in Afghanistan is worse than it has been in nine years. The Taliban are resurgent and have stepped up attacks as part of their spring offensive. On March 29, insurgents captured a district in eastern Nuristan Province, an area U.S. troops are turning over to the Afghan authorities. “The white flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is flying over the Want district center, while some policemen of the puppet administration flee toward the provincial capital after slight resistance,” boasted Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid.

Even more worrying, al-Qaeda is making a comeback in areas recently vacated by the coalition forces.

It's not only those who don't know history, but those who refuse to acknowledge its lessons, who are doomed to repeat it.

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Why liberals are so inept at debate

A woman explains why liberals can't defend their opinions on Salon:

When you live, say, on a coast or in a very blue state, you grow accustomed to being surrounded by people who believe like you do. You get to thinking that the only people who would dare contradict you are ignoramuses. Meanwhile, I began directing all my anger toward the Republican Party at Janet. On the day that Congress voted to defund Planned Parenthood, I found myself furious at Janet, just Janet, as the face of all that was bad in the world....

I don't speak for Janet, but I think there's something deeper at play. Janet's willingness to associate with so many liberal friends -- though I know she seeks refuge in chat rooms and magazines that share her beliefs -- makes her a better and more interesting person. She has her beliefs challenged constantly. She is more well-read and educated in her politics than most of the liberals I know. Too many liberals I know are lazy, they have a belief system that consists of making fun of Glenn Beck and watching "The Daily Show."

It is a massive disadvantage to have no understanding of the other side's reasoning - such as it is - or ideology. Because it is, for the most part, avowedly anti-intellectual, the Left regularly puts itself at a complete disadvantage by refusing to pay attention to anything but its own dogma. I have seen this again and again in both the journalistic and the academic world, which heavily relies on credentialism rather than knowledge.

It is not an accident that TIA unmasked the limited range of knowledge possessed by biology and philosophy PhDs and RGD exposed the strict limits of the mainstream economics PhDs. I have long known that the petty intellectual emperors wear no clothes outside their own little disciplines, as autodidacts, dilettantes, and renaissance men seldom go in for academics these days. The Dread Ilk will recall how a look at the curriculum for a biology major showed that the graduate would not possess a conventional broad-spectrum liberal arts education, which is why calling an academic on his assertions outside of his area of expertise will reliably expose him as an intellectual bluffer.

What is true of the liberal credentialentsia is doubly true of your average run of the mill liberal. Whereas the liberal academic only possesses a narrow range of knowledge, the average liberal possesses virtually none at all. His education consists of having been told about things, so he thinks in terms of reference points rather than actual facts. And, because he willfully cringes away from any perspective that might challenge his opinions - or more accurately - expose his ignorance - his intellectual development is halted at the level of an elementary school child parroting back the assertions of his teacher.

But conservatives should not be too proud. They are guilty of a similar, albeit lesser sin, as they tend to avoid studying the intellectual roots of their own ideology as well as those of competing ideologies. One reason I respect conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck even when I disagree with their advocated policies is that they make a point of encouraging conservatives to read more deeply in the conservative tradition. When Hayek as at the top of the economic bestseller lists, this is strong testimony concerning the intellectual development among conservatives. Needless to say, one never sees liberal media figures encouraging liberals to read Dewey, Sanger, or any of the historical progressives whose influence still dominates modern American liberalism.

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Grinding downward

I knew that housing prices had declined since their 2006 apex, but I hadn't realized just how far they had fallen. The highwater mark of NAR's median existing home price was $227,100, which is $71,000 more than last month's $156,100. That amounts to a 31.3% decline in home prices, which is 37.4% when corrected for CPI-U inflation. The chart below puts it in perspective.



It may be worth keeping this ongoing price collapse in mind before concluding that rising metal, commodity, and stock market prices prove the inflationary case, especially since the effects of that price collapse still remain unaccounted for.

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So... where is the punchline?

In which the nadir of Gamma pseudo-spirituality is explored: the Conscious Men "devote ourselves to the worship of the divine feminine we discover the divinity of the masculine":



Now, I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the leaders is named "Gay". Not one of this pathetic collection of gammas, omegas, and not-so-latent lambdas would be capable of dominating a woman if you paid them to do it. But it is a very good example of classic Gammathink, endowing the female sex with all sorts of nebulous wonders such as "an intuitive connection to the Earth" on the basis of nothing but pure pedestalization fantasies. The truth is that socio-sexual losers like these Conscious Men honor nothing but the possession of a vagina, the depths of which they are neither worthy nor likely to plumb.

If you ever had a hard time understanding Game, just watch this with the understanding that this is the complete antithesis. If you want to live the rest of your life without ever attracting a woman or having sex with one, I would highly recommend becoming a Conscious Man.

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RGD interview with Sean Hannity

Sean was joined by author and columnist Vox Day in the show's final hour to talk about his book, "The Return to the Great Depression." You would think a book that tackles such a complicated issue as global economics would be a tough read, but it's actually quite the contrary. Vox Day - one of the few economics writers to predict the current worldwide financial crisis - explains why it is likely to continue.

The entire 15-minute segment has been made available at hannity.com.

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2037

I thought Paul Ryan's comments were interesting, in that we finally have a politician who is, unlike all the mainstream economists, actually looking at debt levels instead of GDP and the money supply.

“We’re on a debt crisis path. We are on a path where the government goes from 20 percent of GDP, to 40 percent then 60 percent of GDP. We’re on a path where our debt goes from about 68 percent of GDP to 800 percent of GDP over the three-generation window,” Ryan said.

“I asked CBO to run the model going out and they told me that their computer simulation crashes in 2037 because CBO can’t conceive of any way in which the economy can continue past the year 2037 because of debt burdens,” said Ryan.

I also found the CBO simulation crash of 2037 to be fascinating, given that I have predicted 2033 to be the date by which the United States will have either disintegrated or lost its national sovereignty. What Ryan, like Sean Hannity yesterday, leaves out is that government debt is only part of the equation and a relatively small part at that. The combined Federal/State & Local debt has increased from 16% of the total to 22.5% since 2005. If private debt continues to decline, from 31.5% to 27% for financials and 28% to 24.3% for households, then government debt will have to increase in order to prevent the economy from shrinking.

This is why I said that there is no easy way out of it. The Ryan plan isn't awful, but it isn't sufficient either.

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Solipsism as national security

Kathleen Parker offers further evidence in support of the dire need to end women's suffrage:

Women, and by extension children, suffer what too many have come to accept as “collateral damage” in theaters of war. We hate it, of course, but what can one do? It isn’t in our strategic interest to save the women and children of the world. Or, as an anonymous senior White House official recently told The Post:

“Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities. There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, no stranger to the importance of advancing women’s rights, promptly repudiated the comment. Even so, the anonymous spokesman’s opinion, though inartfully expressed, is hardly isolated.

But what if this is a false premise? What if saving women from cultures that treat them as chattel was in our strategic and not just moral interest? What if helping women become equal members of a society was the most reliable route to our own security?

The problem, of course, is that it is not. Parker might as reasonably have asked what if buying women rainbow-striped unicorns was in our strategic interest or if buying vibrators for Libyan women was the most reliable route to American national security. I would very much like to know who actually pays this woman for her opinion, as I'm quite confident that one could find a Labrador puppy whose columns would be a) more intelligent, b) more interesting, and c) less expensive than the gynocentric drivel Parker has on offer.

Granted, every column would concern how it is a vital national interest to feed Labradors more raw meat, or alternatively, how it is a national disgrace that Labradors are only fed 60 percent of the amount of raw meat given to Rottweilers, but how is that substantially different from what most female op/ed writers produce anyhow?

Does this moronic female seriously wish to argue that women and children suffer more than men do in times of war? They may suffer more of the collateral damage, but only because the whole purpose of the intentional damage is to kill the enemy men. How many women and children died at Salamanca or Gettysburg? The last time I read something this stupidly myopic, it was an old joke about the New York Times: "Asteroid to end all life on Earth, women, blacks to suffer most."

But even worse than the total ignorance of military history is the idea that equality, at home or abroad, is in the American national interest. America has been lethally weakened by the equalitarian dogma; there would be no need for the 30 million immigrants that are presently dismantling the social fabric if 30 million American children murdered by their mothers had lived. "Saving" women by enforcing Western equalitarian dogma is not only not in our strategic interest, it quite clearly isn't in our moral interest either.

Women may not be pet rocks, but Kathleen Parker is clearly less intelligent than a box of them.

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They aren't smart enough

I'm down with Steyn on his condemnation of the would-be speech police:

When I wrote over the weekend about the trial of Australia’s most prominent columnist for expressing his opinions, I did not expect it to be quite so immediately relevant to the United States. But perhaps what’s most disturbing about Lindsey Graham’s dismal defense of his inclinations to censorship is the lack of even the slightest attempt to underpin his position with any kind of principle. He all but literally wraps himself in the flag, and, once you pry him out of the folds of Old Glory, what you’re left with is a member of the governing class far too comfortable with the idea that he and his colleagues should determine the bounds of public discourse.

I’m sick of that. I’m sick of it in Canada, sick of it in Britain, in Australia, in Europe, and I’m now sick of it in America – in part because, as Senator Graham has demonstrated in his fatuous defense, guys like him aren’t smart enough to set the rules for what the rest of us are allowed to think.

The irony, of course, is that Sen. Graham (R-SC), is talking about throwing out the First Amendment in order to defend non-Americans who wish to establish Sharia in the United States from criticism by Americans. That should be more than enough to deny him the Republican nomination in his next electoral campaign. It is time to restore the Constitutional rights of free speech and free association to Americans. I propose establishing the following principles:

a) Any private employer can hire or fire any employee for any reason.
b) No public employer may deny employment or fire any employee for any expressed opinion about anything.

If you are a private employer, then it is your business and only your business if you want to employ nothing but black lesbian Marxists or Holocaust-denying Scottish neo-Nazis. But if you are a public employer, then you have absolutely no right to favor one socio-political perspective over another. Free association and free speech. It doesn't get anymore fundamentally American than that.

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On the radio

It appears I'll be on Sean Hannity's radio show at around 5 PM today, in case you're interested. The discussion is supposed to be about RGD, but as we have seen, you never actually know until you're on air.

UPDATE: Some of you asked what effect this interview had on RGD's Amazon rating. It definitely gave it a boost, although the Kindle edition was already ranked fairly high due to its low price relative to most economics books. It would also appear that Hannity listeners prefer real books to ebooks:

Kindle rank: 551 from 3,980
#1 in Economic History, #6 in Economics
Hardcover rank: 861 from 122,000
#11 in Popular Economics, #14 in Economics

It's interesting that the Kindle store categories do not exactly match the book categories. For example, there is no Economic History category for hardcovers. Another observation worth noting is that #551 in Kindle falls between #178 and #302 in Books. This tends to confirm that Amazon is selling more ebooks than actual books. So, the Kindle version of RGD is likely in Amazon's top 250 overall.

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Why Game interests me

The Responsible Puppet puts forth eleven reasons:

Top Eleven Possible Reasons Why Vox Day Likes Talking About Game

1. Maybe after the rigor and math and Statistics and consistency and evidence required with his posts about the economy, debt, football and atheism – it’s nice to kick back* and not worry about that stuff.

2. It’s fun to be a role model. Every Game post makes him a hero for every guy who’s ever been hurt or turned down by a woman . . or made to look like an idiot by one.

3. Let’s face it. It’s a great way to stick it to the Woman, if that’s your thing.

4. Game comes in with a built-in instant defense. Does someone disagree with you? Call them a white knight, a snowflake or a Gamma***. Argument over!

5. Everyone wants to think they’ve chosen wisely when they got married. Perhaps Game helps him believe he’s got pretty much the only decent lady** out there. Or as he describes it, “A diamond among lumps of coal”.

I think he omitted a few obvious possibilities.

12. Vox and Spacebunny have embraced polygamy and he is working on obtaining his second and third wives.

13. Vox and Spacebunny have an open marriage and Vox is simply polishing his moves.

14. Vox hates Gammas and this is his way of torturing them.

15. Vox hates women and this is his way of torturing them.

16. Spacebunny doesn't exist and Vox is a hapless Gamma attempting to learn enough Game to actually get a date.

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In which we are diminished

One of the old school Ilk has moved on to the next level. Longtime readers will recall Alex, the sharp-witted mother, outspoken Christian, and strong homeschooling advocate who seldom hesitated to share her opinions here. She wasn't around as much the last two years, as she was increasingly occupied with battling the cancer that ultimately got the better of her last week. She was a fighter by nature, and it came as no surprise to learn that she lived longer than the doctors had anticipated. She and Spacebunny set up the original homeschooling group here together, so if you're involved in the current one, spare a thought or two for her today.

She was fiercely proud of her son Jake, who by all accounts has grown into a fine young man worthy of his mother. She suffered no fools, gladly or otherwise, and I always admired her spirit. May she rest in peace and in the glory of her Heavenly Father.

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Reason without knowledge

It's always informative to watch an atheist attempt to stumble his way to a conclusion that justifies his incoherent beliefs about religion and humanity, most of which are formed in near-complete ignorance of the former.

So Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who organized a Koran burning on March 20, wanted “to stir the pot.” Mission accomplished. Perhaps he’d care to explain himself to the family of Joakim Dungel, a 33-year-old Swede slaughtered at the U.N. mission in Mazar-i-Sharif by Afghans whipped into frenzy through Jones’s folly.

On reflection, no, there’s nothing Jones can explain to Dungel’s family, or the other U.N. staffers murdered. Jones is not in the explanation business. He’s a zealot. How else to describe a Christian who interprets his faith not as grounded in love and compassion but as a mission to incite hatred toward Islam?

There’s no discussion with a bigot like this: You can’t be argued out of something you haven’t been argued into in the first place.

There are so many things wrong with Roger Cohen's column that it's hard to know where to start. So, let's begin with the aphorism, one that is popular among atheists, and like most popular atheist aphorisms, is easily shown to be both factually and logically incorrect. Cohen presents a modified form of the usual saying, which is that one cannot be reasoned out of a position one has not reasoned oneself into. But this is clearly false. Most of us possess opinions that are based on assertions that were made to us as children by parents, teachers, and other children, in fact, that is how we obtain most of our opinions.

Therefore, when one changes one's long-held opinion based on a consideration of the relevant facts and logic, either internal or external, one is usually reasoning one's way/being reasoned out of something one has not reasoned oneself into. As a child, I thought the crust was the healthiest part of the bread because my mother told me that when I was very young and I had never once stopped to think about the matter. Years later, when Spacebunny asked me to consider it, I quickly reasoned myself out of the instilled belief.

Now, why would the Rev. Jones have any need to explain himself to the family of Joakim Dungel? He didn't put Dungel in harm's way in Afghanistan. The government of the United States, the government of Sweden, and the United Nations bureaucracy all bear some responsibility for Dungel's presence in the war zone that is Afghanistan, as did Dungel himself. Those who attacked the UN workers were not forced to attack them, they made a conscious choice to do so. And Korans are incinerated literally every day around the world, so the decision of Afghani Muslims to react with violence to a symbolic gesture is actually nothing more than scientific evidence in support of Jones's hypothesis regarding Islam. If Rev. Jones is to be held "responsible" for burning a Koran, then the likes of P.Z. Myers must be held equally responsible for desecrating a Communion wafer.

It is ironic that Cohen, whose name indicates Jewish heritage despite his professed status as a non-believer, should attempt to utilize the term "zealot" as being somehow incompatible with genuine religious principles. To be zealous in one's Christian faith is an excellent thing, as to whether that is true of Jones or not, neither I nor Cohen can possibly say with any degree of accuracy. Where Cohen goes wrong, as do so many ignorant non-believers, is to state that Christianity is grounded in love and compassion or that it has no place for hatred.

It all depends what the object is. Christians are told to love their neighbors and enemies alike, but also to hate evil and to shun the wicked. Compassion and forgiveness for the repentant is required, but wickedness is not to be tolerated. Jones did no harm to any individual man, woman, or child, he simply attacked what every Christian believes to be false.

Cohen goes on to write that believing Islam and the Koran serve violence, death, and terrorism is as dumb as equating Christianity with Psalm 137 that says the “little ones” of the enemy should be dashed against stones. But it is Cohen's comparison that is almost epically stupid, as Psalms predates Christianity and isn't even part of the Mosaic Law anyhow, whereas the Koran is the core of Islam. And it is a historical fact that Islam accounts for 50 percent of all the religious wars in history, which should come as no surprise given that it has always been a religion of the sword which has grown through military conquest rather than personal transformation. It takes an atheist to conclude that the core tenets of Christianity should be represented by pre-Christian poems from a different religious tradition.

Cohen claims that religion has much to answer for, in Gainesville and Mazar and Omagh. But atheism has even more for which to answer, in Pyongyang, Beijing, Colombo, Yangon, Hanoi, and Brussels. In any event, Terry Jones does not represent the worst that religion can do, in fact, he is one of the brave few calling attention to the worst that religion actually does, considering the bloody centuries of rule by the mighty caliphates of the past that the modern jihad is actively seeking to restore. Unlike Bush, Obama, Gen. Petraeus, and media figures like Cohen, Jones clearly recognizes for what the so-called Religion of Peace is and what it is not.

In conclusion, I note that like most non-believers, Cohen does not realize that it is not hatred and murder that are the antithesis of mercy and forgiveness, but rather self-assurance and pride.

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180 seconds

That's all you've got:

The average female spends 180 seconds sizing up a man's looks and fashion sense as well as appraising his scent, accent and eloquence, the Daily Mail reports. Women are also quick to judge how a man interacts with her friends and whether or not he is appropriately successful or ambitious. The study found women are reluctant to change their minds about a man and are likely to believe 'they are always right' in their judgements.

If you've only got three minutes before you are judged, you had better be sure to make the most of the time allotted. And in Alpha Mail, PC asks how to educate his young daughters in a Game-informed manner.

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Two birds, one stone

Frankly, I don't see much downside to the equation that many in the media are suggesting. If each religious book burned results in 20 dead United Nations bureaucrats, where exactly is the net loss to American interests? And I'm not sure which is more amusing, the Democrats who are attempting to claim that it is a totally legal book burning that has a direct causal relationship to lethal Islamic riots a world away while the bombing of a Muslim country cannot possibly be to blame, or the Republicans who are loathe to actually come out directly against a man's right to burn his own book while trying to make sure that everyone understands they think the book-burning is "ill-judged" and "unhelpful".

Unhelpful to what? Maintaining a pair of long, expensive, unconstitutional, and strategically stupid military occupations? Continuing mass migration from third world hellholes? And as for General Petraeus, his comments make it clear that he is a politically correct coward and a certain war loser.

Following Sunday's meeting with Gen. Petraeus and the ambassadors, Mr. Karzai requested in a new statement that "the U.S. government, Senate and Congress clearly condemn [Rev. Jones'] dire action and avoid such incidents in the future." Mr. Karzai issued this demand even though President Barack Obama has already described the Quran burning as "an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry"—adding that "to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity."

I'd have more confidence in the U.S. military effort if Rev. Jones was leading it. Any statement that falls short of the following by any American leader is an indication that the speaker is completely unfit for office.

"Rev. Jones, like any American, is free to dispose of his own property in any manner that happens to please him. This is not a matter of any concern whatsoever to the United States government."

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WND column

Defending the Debt Ceiling

Over the 30 years that I have been observing American politics, one thing is perfectly clear. When Republicans stand firm on their purported principles, they win elections. And when Republicans abandon their principles in the name of moderation, or centrism, or pragmatism, or appealing to independents, they lose elections. This is because Americans respond more positively to political leadership than they do to followership. Chasing the polls is a short-sighted game for fools and renders elected office pointless since there is no rationale for holding office if one intends to accomplish nothing while holding it.

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A Song vs The First Law

Like many George R.R. Martin fans, I have re-read A Game of Thrones in order to refresh my memory prior to the advent of the HBO television series. I actually wound up re-reading all four books, as you do, which should come in handy with the scheduled release of A Dance with Dragons later this summer. But since I'd so recently read four of Joe Abercrombie's books, which have occasionally been compared with Martin's series due to their similarly dark and violent nature, I thought it might be interesting to compare the similarities and differences between the two epic fantasy series.

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Be careful what you wish

The Libyan rebels get a little more air support than they'd bargained for:

A NATO-led air strike killed 13 Libyan rebels, a rebel spokesman said on Saturday, but their leaders called for continued raids on Muammar Gaddafi's forces despite the "regrettable incident." NATO has conducted 363 sorties since taking over command of the Libya operations on March 31, and about 150 were intended as strike missions but NATO has not confirmed hitting any targets.

One wonders how many non-combatants have been killed by these so-called surgical strikes. I tend to suspect that the Libyans who are neither regime nor rebel supporters are probably less inclined to be as forgiving of such collateral damage as the rebel forces are.

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The secular inquisition

In which Enlightenment secularism is once more proven to be a false dawn:

I never thought I'd have an opportunity to see a real-life heresy trial in 21st-century Australia, but that's exactly what's been going on this week in Melbourne's Federal Court. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has been dragged before a judge and accused of thought crimes against the high church of political correctness. He's being prosecuted and persecuted for the lese-majesty of challenging the cult of victimhood that dominates racial discourse in Australia.

The plaintiffs in this case claim to be aggrieved by several Bolt newspaper columns that cast doubt upon the authenticity of their Aboriginality.... These Aboriginal leaders seek not only an apology, but also a court order that would prevent Bolt from ever expressing similar views again.

It is remarkable to repeatedly see demonstrated how little value the modern secularists place on the Christian humanistic values to which they claim to more committed than the theists who first established them.

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The boots are on the ground

Justin Raimondo notes an admission by Mr. Obama and explains why the USA is now invading its third Moslem nation in ten years:

Like all US wars since the Revolution, this one is about the internal politics of the US, rather than a real external threat to our security. The Clintonian wing of the Democratic party is determined to regain power, and Hillary’s push for war is the spearhead of the Restoration. The Clintonites are determined to outflank the Republican party in the foreign policy field, and eliminate the Democrats’ alleged "national security deficit" once and for all, albeit while swathed in a penumbra of moral righteousness.

The Republicans, who have presided over the most aggressive expansion of the American empire since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, are in no position to criticize this new crusade in the Middle East. They do so with the albatross of Iraq weighing heavily around their necks. Politically, it’s win-win for the Democrats, as they gear up to save what remains of their hold on power.

It is certainly amusing to see how Republicans and conservatives are contorting themselves into political pretzels, trying to explain why Iraq and Afghanistan were necessary defenses of American national security while Libya is not, while simultaneously attempting to claim that they are the champions of fiscal restraint and small government. The Pauls, Ron and Rand, are among the few sane Republicans these days, which no doubt is why they are considered "unelectable" and "crazy" by the conservative media.

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Explaining Econ 101 to Krugman

The Nobel prizewinner finds himself in over his head:

There is, if you think about it, an immediate logical problem here: Republicans are saying that job destruction leads to lower wages, which leads to job creation. But won’t this job creation lead to higher wages, which leads to job destruction, which leads to ...? I need some aspirin. Beyond that, why would lower wages promote higher employment?

Seriously? Krugman is seriously asking why lower prices promote higher demand? Unbelievable. Apparently the devotees of the Keynesian Cross have forgotten how to draw a basic SD curve. Because lower prices promote higher demand, ergo lower wages promote higher employment.

As for Mellonism, it was never put into practice... which brought about Great Depression I.

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F----- by the Fed

The truth about the Fed's "salvation" of the financial systemforeign banks and corporations finally comes out:

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.

Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch from the Fed’s “discount window” lending program, according to Fed documents released yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion.

The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record.

Bernanke, Paulson, and the various officials and the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury deserve prosecution for theft, at the very minimum. It was always obvious that they were milking the American taxpayer for someone's benefit, but it can't even be pretended that it was in the U.S. national interest anymore. The Federal Reserve isn't a central bank, it is quite simply the greatest financial rapist in the history of mankind.

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Marriage and the state

Conservatives once welcomed the state getting involved with marriage, despite the fact that it had very little previous involvement with the institution. The result? Instead of strengthening marriage, in less than 150 years, we will have seen marriage devolve from a religious sacrament between a man and a woman to a state contract of indefinite term that can be created by anyone between anyone:

The ACLU of Nevada is challenging Nevada law on who may perform marriages. Currently, the law allows clergy, judges, “commissioners of civil marriages,” and the deputy commissioner to perform marriages. This, it seems is not enough to satisfy the five individuals (shouldn’t that be an even number?) suing Clark County and the state. They would prefer the state allowed any person, regardless of religious affiliation, to be given the authority to solemnize a marriage. More exactly, they believe they have a constitutional right to this policy.

It is long past time for religious individuals to begin pushing for the separation of marriage and state-marriage. I haven't thought about this long enough to have a solution in mind, but the need is clearly there. And it should be an object lesson to conservatives: Trust not in the State!

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