It was already a sham

The mainstream media errantly assumes that Hillary Clinton's girlfriend's silence about her sham-husband's internet hijinks means that she is upset:

This raises the question one must ask of many a Good Wife -- did Huma simply look the other way, unwilling to know what was going on in Anthony's underpants? It was clear yesterday from her staunch refusal to play along with the sham that is her marriage that Huma, unlike her husband, is in no mood to lie about the state of her union.

Some women accept their husbands' quirky habits. Mine likes to watch football. Weiner gets his jollies sexting with women, including one to whom he wrote he had a "ridiculous bulge in my shorts now. wanna see?" But being publicly outed as a woman scorned, whether it be online, in the flesh or on the phone, is too much to take. See ya, lover.

Washington has become the new Hollywood, beards and all.

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Employment and depression

One thing that most people probably don't realize is that in the pre-Samuelsonian era, depressions were generally viewed in terms of the supply and demand for labor rather than a via a money metric of consumption. One of the more remarkable things for a young economics student reading Keynes's General Theory today is discovering how it reads more like an Austrian logic-based text than a modern macroeconomics statistical digest. Today, the employment level doesn't even factor into the modern determination of whether the economy is growing or not. Hence the new economic oxymoron of "a jobless recovery".

But by the older perspective, it is obvious that the USA is still in the same depression that it was in 2008. Consider the following labor report:

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months - a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

Moreover, another little known fact is that the unemployment numbers provided for the Great Depression on an ex post facto basis by post-WWII economists were overstated because the BLS economist responsible, one Stanley Lebergott, counted many government workers as being unemployed. Michael Darby corrected for this and came up with the following numbers:

Year L D
1929 3.2% 3.2%
1930 8.7% 8.7%
1931 15.9% 15.3%
1932 23.6% 22.9%
1933 24.9% 20.6%
1934 21.7% 16.0%
1935 20.1% 14.2%
1936 16.9% 9.9%
1937 14.3% 9.1%
1938 19.0% 12.5%
1939 17.2% 11.3%
1940 14.6% 9.5%

Note that by this corrected measure, even the woefully misleading U3 unemployment measure is presently at the same level as 1937, and worse than 1930. At 15.8, the more relevant U6 measure is worse than 1931 and every year except 1932 and 1933, the absolute nadir of the Great Depression. It may be worth noting that adding the current 20.3 million government workers to the ranks of the unemployed, as per Lebergott, would increase the current U3 rate to 22.3 percent and the U6 rate to 29 percent, which exceeds even Lebergott's calculation for 1933.

Given the slide in housing prices, the unemployment rates, and the length of joblessness, two things should be readily apparent. First, the economic contraction has not ended. Second, the GDP figures notwithstanding, it is a larger scale event than the Great Depression.

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Readership and other trivialities

Being an armchair economist, I often find it interesting to look beyond the obvious numbers given the way they are so often misleading. For example, a few years ago, I used to be the third most-read WND columnist behind Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. Ann was head-and-torso beyond everyone else, and while I occasionally gave Pat a run for his money, his readership was usually ahead of mine by a decent margin. It's been a while since I last looked into the matter, and since I no longer have direct access to their servers - I prefer to email my columns in so I didn't bother to ask for it after one of the occasional structural reconfigurations - I began by looking at the Facebook Likes that are now attached to each column.

Unsurprisingly, by this metric, Ann Coulter is still the queen of WND. Here are the Likes for her last four columns compared to a few other selected writers, in order of average Likes.

232.0: Ann Coulter (253, 75, 243, 357)
75.5: Chuck Norris (39, 169, 60, 34)
41.5: Vox Day (60, 40, 40, 26)
35.0: Thomas Sowell (34, 36, 52, 18)
22.0: Ilana Mercer (15, 11, 56, 6)
13.5: John Stossel (19, 5, 19, 11)
10.0: Chrissy Satterfield (29, 11, 0, 0)
9.8: Pat Buchanan (18, 9, 1, 11)

From this, one would quite reasonably conclude that Ann's columns are much more read than anyone else's, something on the order of five times more than mine. Chuck's average is high, but it's bumped up significantly by one outlier of a column entitled "The Self-Destructing Republican Party", which went over extremely well with Republicans terrified that their leadership is going to blow their opportunity to knock off Obama. In looking at the actual readers of those same columns for Buchanan, Coulter, and Day - which I requested and cannot directly divulge, but suffice it to say they are in excess of my blog numbers - my WND readership is now 60.7 percent of Miss Coulter's, which is up more than 10 percentage points from several years ago if I recall correctly.

What I found both interesting and slightly depressing is the fact that Chatterfield's columns are now more liked, on average, than Pat Buchanan's. This tends to suggest that WND readers have become more partisan and less partial to intellectual weight as their numbers have grown. While Mr. Buchanan's readership numbers have not actually declined over time, they have declined in a relative manner as my WND readership is now 122.9 percent larger than his. Of course, it must be kept in mind that although his columns were available elsewhere before, it is entirely possible that many of his biggest fans do not read him at WND, but prefer to read him at The American Conservative instead.

It's also worth noting that the difference in the size of the Like gap and the readership gap between Coulter and myself tends to indicate that while many WND readers are willing to read my column, they don't like them all that much. Which makes an amount of sense, given that WND's conservative Republican readership are likely to hold opinions that are more in line with hers than with my radical libertarian iconoclasm.

Regardless, because I am unwilling to cede primacy of position to Miss Coulter, however much she merits it, (or however little she values it), I intend to resort to cheatingnew tactics. Now, I like to think that I am unusually good at interviews because I am apparently one of the very few interviewers who makes a habit of a) reading the book or the relevant information beforehand and b) letting the interviewee talk as much as he likes in answer to my questions. However, I have done very few interviews in the last year because it is a tedious and lengthy task to transcribe them.

The solution being entirely obvious, I'm pleased to say there will soon be a second weekly Vox Day contribution appearing on WorldNetDaily. The initial subjects will include economist Ian Fletcher, Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker, and the eminent historian John Julius Norwich, among others. I am also in the process of putting together a Joel Rosenberg retrospective which will feature several notable science fiction and fantasy authors.

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Warning: naked congressman ahead!

Weinergate expands:

BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com have reported throughout the morning about the emergence of new details in the Weinergate saga, after a young woman came forward with new information that tends to undermine severely the theory that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was the victim of a “prank” or a “hack.”

Weiner's wife Huma could not be reached for comment, as she was fully occupied with her duties servicingserving Secretary of State Clinton.

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The amorphous Official Story

This belated announcement demonstrates why you should never, ever, pay much credence to official government statements about major events:

Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said Monday.

The nuclear group's new evaluation, released Monday, goes further than previous statements in describing the extent of the damage caused by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. The announcement will not change plans for how to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the agency said.

THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. DO NOT PANIC! THERE IS NO MELTDOWN. ALL THE REACTORS ARE STABLE... okay, well, there was maybe a meltdown. Um, three, actually, if you insist on being precise.

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A fallacious free trade argument

Mark Perry omits a key factor in attempting to defend international free trade:

Bottom Line: To argue against free trade among countries, one would also have to object to free trade among American states, counties, cities and individuals, see my edits below of Fletcher's article that hopefully make this point.

That simply is not the case. In fact, Perry misses a vital point, which is that in order to argue FOR free trade among countries, one has to accept a similar free flow of labor between countries as presently exists between American states, counties, and cities. And how sizeable is that free flow?

In 2009, 4.7 million Americans moved from one state to another. Keep in mind that the entire American employed labor force is only 140 million. If we conservatively divide the number of domestic migrants by the average household size of 2.6, we're looking at 1.8 million workers, 1.3 percent of all American workers, who moved intrastate.

This suggests that if the world were to adopt international free trade, more than a million Americans would need to move to China, Mexico, Japan, Germany, and Canada in order to find employment on an annual basis. It would be necessary to know the amount of intrastate trade vesus international trade to provide a precise estimate of how many Americans would need to emigrate every year, (53% of them to China), under a free trade regime, but I find it unlikely that many Americans are likely to prove supportive of a trade system that would require them to move to places like India and Bangladesh as freely as it now forces residents of Detroit and Minneapolis to move to Scottsdale and Naples.

Being an American expatriate myself, I know much better than most that it is possible to change one's international residence. And due to my extensive, long-term international experience, I can say that I find this particular aspect of the free trade argument to be naive to the point of absurdity. Most American expats to even first-world European countries don't last two years due to the significant language and cultural differences. The concept is a complete non-starter and therefore the equivalence is false.

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WND column

This is No Double Dip

One reason I prefer economics to finance is that timing has never been my strongpoint. I thought the tech bubble was going to pop in 1998. I wrote a column in 2002 that commented on the expansion of the housing bubble and noted that this was likely to have a negative effect on the global financial system, but never imagined that the bubble could go on as long as it did or that real-estate prices would rise to such elevated levels. So, given this track record of prematurity, it should be no surprise that it has taken longer for the economic consensus to recognize that the global economy is caught up in a very large economic contraction than I anticipated.

But it is coming, nevertheless. Consider the following two headlines from last week:

"'WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF A GREAT, GREAT DEPRESSION'"
– Drudge Report, June 1, 2011

"U.S. house price fall 'beats Great Depression slide'"
– The Independent, June 1, 2011

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The lady postures too much

Naomi Wolf explains that she likes herself better and is actually more attractive now that she's in her late 40s and no one wants to have sex with her. Unsurprisingly, now that she's gotten older, she has concluded that age, like beauty, is also a myth:

Recently, I was at a party, and a man who, like myself, was in his late 40s, arrived with a woman 20 years younger. It took only a few moments of conversation before the rest of the group realized that the two had very little in common. And yet I did not feel the frisson of envy among the men present, nor did I see a bristle of jealousy from any of the stylish, accomplished women in their 40s. In fact, the mood of both genders was tender, almost pitying. The man may have imagined that he was showing off the youth of his date the way he might show off a new Maserati; but parading her around like an acquisition seemed only to make his friends feel sorry for him....

There are many other delightful surprises about being at this stage on the journey. I don’t miss the brutal sexual harassment that young women receive from men — and I love the far gentler flirtation or civil compliments from cab drivers and park chess players my own age or older. On the street, young women are told: Give me some. Older women hear: I love your eyes.

It is certainly amusing to see a woman whose entire literary career was based on her attractive-by-New-York-writer standards try to rationalize away the fact that she is past her sell-by date. It's also remarkable that she managed to write about the changes in women's attitudes and bodies over the last two decades without once seeing fit to mention the enfattening of America; Naomi has clearly packed on more than a few pounds herself.

Any time you see a woman describe "magnetic and dynamic women my own age" you know perfectly well she is referring to childless women fast approaching menopause who are filled with boundless hate for the young women their male peers are dating. Wolf's attempt at a bemused zen-like pose is about as convincing as unemployed female college graduates babbling about how "strong and independent" they are as they move home to spend a year deciding what graduate schools Daddy is going to pay for.

The punchline which reveals the entire point of the article is this pathetic attempt at a neg: "[I]n my own circles, at least, it is considered more macho for a man to have an accomplished woman his own age on his arm. His ego, it is understood, can take it."

Right, because men pursue beautiful young women in order to be macho. It's not sex and beauty that interests them, but female approval. This woman clearly doesn't know the first thing about men. One of these days, someone is going to have to inform women that their endless shaming tactics only work on other women and gamma males they don't want to have sex with in the first place.

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Film the police

Florida police demonstrate their stalwart respect for the law they are supposedly enforcing:

Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer. Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling “you want to be fucking paparazzi?”

Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer's back pocket as he was laying down on the ground. And finally, they took him to a mobile command center where they snapped his photo and demanded the phone again, then took him to police headquarters where they conducted a recorded interview with him before releasing him.

But what they didn’t know was that Narces Benoit had removed the SIM card and hid it in his mouth, which means the video survived.

People are going to have to get proactive with the police and force them to get used to the idea that all of their actions, legal and illegal, are going to be recorded. What everyone should start doing as a matter of course is pulling out their phone or camera and film, or even just pretend to film, every police officer they encounter no matter what he is doing. It is absurd that public employees should think they can assert that their official duties, which take place in public and are funded by the public, merit any sort of privacy.

And any policeman who seizes and destroys private property in the manner described should be charged with a misdemeanor for a first offense, a felony for a second.

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The unreliable history of vaccines

One of the most effective arguments for vaccines is that they have significantly reduced the death rate from the various diseases against which they are supposed to protect. And while there is little question that things have improved, there is unfortunately real cause to doubt that they have improved anywhere nearly as dramatically as nearly everyone on both sides of the issue assumes:

The National Vaccine establishment, supported by Government grants, issued periodical Reports, which were printed by order of the House of Commons, and in successive years we find the following statements:

In 1812, and again in 1818, it is stated that "previous to the discovery of vaccination the average number of deaths by small-pox within the (London) Bills of Mortality was 2,000 annually; whereas in the last year only 751 persons have died of the disease, although the increase of population within the last ten years has been 133,139."

The number 2,000 is about the average smallpox deaths of the whole eignteenth century, but those of the last two decades before the publication of Jenner’s Inquiry, were 1,751 and 1,786, showing a decided fall. This, however, may pass. But when we come to the Report for 1826 we find the following: "But when we reflect that before the introduction of vaccination the average number of deaths from small-pox within the Bills of Mortality was annually about 4,000, no stronger argument can reasonably be demanded in favour of the value of this important discovery."

This monstrous figure was repeated in 1834, apparently quite forgetting the correct figure for the whole century given in 1818, and also the fact that the small-pox deaths recorded in the London Bills of Mortality in any year of the century never reached 4,000. But worse is to come; for in 1836 we have the following statement: "The annual loss of life by small-pox in the Metropolis, and within the Bills of Mortality only, before vaccination was established, exceeded 5,000, whereas in the course of last year only 300 died of the distemper." And in the Report for 1838 this gross error is repeated; while in the next year (1839) the conclusion is drawn "that 4,000 lives are saved every year in London since vaccination so largely superseded variolation (3)."

The Board of the National Vaccine Establishment consisted of the President and four Censors of the Royal College of Physicians, and the Master and two senior Wardens of the College of Surgeons. We cannot possibly suppose that they knew or believed that they were publishing untruths and grossly deceiving the public. We must, therefore, fall back upon the supposition that they were careless to such an extent as not to find out that they were authorizing successive statements of the same quantity as inconsistent with each other as 2,000 and 5000.

The next example is given by Dr. Lettsom, who, in his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee in 1802, calculated the small-pox deaths of Great Britain and Ireland before vaccination at 36,000 annually; by taking 3,000 as the annual mortality in London and multiplying by twelve, because the population was estimated to be twelve times as large. He first takes a number which is much too high, and then assumes that the mortality in the town, village, and country populations was the same as in overcrowded, filthy London! Smallpox was always present in London, while Sir Gilbert Blane tells us that in many parts of the country it was quite unknown for periods of twenty, thirty, or forty years. In 1782 Mr. Connah, a surgeon at Seaford, in Sussex, only knew of one small-pox death in eleven years among a population of 700. Cross, the historian of the Norwich epidemic in 1819, states that previous to 1805 small-pox was little known in this city of 40,000 inhabitants, and was for a time almost extinct; and yet this gross error of computing the small-pox mortality of the whole country from that of London (and computing it from wrong data) was not only accepted at the time, but has been repeated again and again down to the present day as an ascertained fact!

In a speech in Parliament in defence of .vaccination., Sir Lyon Playfair gave 4,000 per million as the average London death-rate by small-pox before vaccination—a number nearly double that of the last twenty years of the century, which alone affords a fair comparison. But far more amazing is the statement by the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter, in a letter to the Spectator of April, 1881, that "a hundred years ago the small-pox mortality of London alone, with its then population of under a million, was often greater in a six months’ epidemic than that of the twenty millions of England & Wales now is in any whole Year." The facts, well known to every enquirer, are: that the very highest small-pox mortality in the last century in a year was 3,992 in 1772, while in 1871 it was 7,912 in. London, or more than double; and in the same year, in England and Wales, it was 23,000. This amazing and almost incredible misstatement was pointed out and acknowledged privately, but never withdrawn publicly!

The late Mr. Ernest Hart, a medical man., editor of the British Medical Journal, and a great authority on sanitation, in his work entitled The Truth about Vaccination, surpasses even Dr. Carpenter in the monstrosity of his errors. At page 35 of the first edition (1880), he states that in. the forty years 1728—57 and 1771—80, the average annual small-pox mortality of London was about 18,000 per million living. The actual average mortality, from the tables given in the Second Report of the Royal Commission, page 290, was a little over 2,000, the worst periods having been chosen; and taking the lowest estimates of the population at the time, the mortality per million would have been under 3,000. This great authority, therefore, has multiplied the real number by six! In a later edition this statement is omitted, but in the first edition it was no mere misprint, for it was triumphantly dwelt upon over a whole page and compared with modern rates of mortality.

Now, a very good argument in favor of the smallpox vaccine is that the disease has largely been eradicated, even in nations where the hygiene and sanitation does not rise to the level of nineteenth century London. But it does no one any good, and the pro-vaccine cause no service, to resort to citing fictional numbers in order to claim that public health has dramatically improved as a result of certain vaccines.

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An economic conundrum

Given the following factors:

1. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the statistical measure for the size of the national economy.
2. The formula for calculating GDP is C+I+G+(x-m).
3. In the most recent BEA report, current dollar GDP was 15,010 billion. Exports (x) were 2,020 billion and imports (m) were 2,591 billion.
4. In Q1-11, international trade reduced the size of the US economy by $571 billion. Without any international trade at all, GDP in Q1-11 would have been 15,581 billion, representing a healthy rate of 4.8 percent annual growth from the 14,871 billion of the previous quarter instead of the 0.9 percent reported.

This is the challenge: justify the continuation of international free trade utilizing reason, logic, and conventional macroeconomic theory in light of these figures. This means no resorting to Austrian-based skepticism concerning the validity of economic statistics or ideological objections to government intervention. For the purposes of this exercise, we are assuming that the Samuelsonian metrics are valid, relevant, and a legitimate foundation for national policy.

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The dream prison

To be honest, I can think of worse fates:

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells. Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

Brutal workouts during the day followed by playing games all night... throw in some alcohol and three hours at a downtown night club on the weekends and that pretty much describes my twenties.

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R.I.P. Joel Rosenberg

Some bad news this morning. Joel Rosenberg, the SF/F author, Second Amendment advocate, and a friend of mine, died of a heart attack last night. He was 57. The OC has more information at the Friday Challenge.

If you haven't read his books before, I highly recommend beginning with Not for Glory. It contains one of my favorite short stories, about the dangerous relationship between the treacherous general Shimon Bar-El and his nephew Tetsuo.

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Statistical shenanigans: U3

You may recall that my prediction that the U3 unemployment would exceed 11 percent in 2010 was "incorrect". The BLS reported U3 at only 9.8 percent even though fewer people were working due to a concomitant increase in the number of people who had mysteriously decided to exit the labor force in the midst of the "recovery" That's why I revised my 2011 prediction as follows: "U-3 unemployment will climb above 10 percent. The real unemployment rate will be much higher, but it will be masked by a decline in the Labor Force Participation rate below 64 percent. The employment-population ratio will fall below 58 percent for the first time since 1984.

Needless to say, I didn't find it quite as inexplicable as some economists have to see that the current employment trend is defying "the rules of a normal economic recovery.":

The labor force — those who have a job or are looking for one — is getting smaller, even though the economy is growing and steadily adding jobs. That trend defies the rules of a normal economic recovery.... The percentage of adults in the labor force is a figure that economists call the participation rate. It is 64.2 percent, the smallest since 1984. And that's become a mystery to economists. Normally after a recession, an improving economy lures job seekers back into the labor market. This time, many are staying on the sidelines.

Their decision not to seek work means the drop in unemployment from 9.8 percent in November to 9 percent in April isn't as good as it looks. If the 529,000 missing workers had been out scavenging for a job without success, the unemployment rate would have been 9.3 percent in April, not the reported rate of 9 percent. And if the participation rate were as high as it was when the recession began, 66 percent, in December 2007, the unemployment rate could have been as high as 11.5 percent.

Translation: the real U3 unemployment rate has been over 11 percent since 2010, as I originally predicted. However, the BLS has concealed this very high rate of unemployment by the simple tactic of reducing the size of the labor force despite the growing population of the country. This is only one of the many reasons that Mises was correct to condemn the use of statistical empiricism in economics; the statistics are neither reliable nor represent a consistent metric.

There is no mystery and it is not true that "nobody is sure why it's happening." The reason it is happening is completely obvious: there is no economic recovery. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is playing games, just like the Federal Reserve and most of the other Federal agencies, to conceal the observable fact that the Great Depression 2.0 has been underway for 30 months already. And their ability to hide it is gradually crumbling.

UPDATE: BLS report today: U3=9.1%, LFP=64.2%, E/PR=58.4%.

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This is how you do it, Republicans

I've never heard of Ray Junior before, but this is most definitely the correct way to treat a reptilian politician who is attempting to falsely pass himself off as a fiscally conservative republican:

Junior: The question is simple: You’re a Senator today. The Ryan plan comes across your desk. Are you voting yes or no?

Haridopolos: Again, Ray Junior, I’m not getting into that today because it’s not the vote that I’m dealing with

Junior: But you’re on my show. This is the question I’m asking. We’re trying to figure out whether we want to vote for you to become a U.S. Senator. Are you voting for the Ryan plan or not? This is not about what you want to talk about. This is what I want to talk about. I want to know: Do you vote for this bill or not?

Haridopolos: What I’d like to talk about is simple – what did I do in the state Legislature…

Junior: I’m not interested in what you want to talk about, Mike. I’m mention what the voters want to talk about. The voters want to talk about the budget. And I’m interested in what I want to talk about — my show. Tell me: You voting for the Ryan plan, yes or no?

Haridopolos: Again, I don’t have all the information to make that decision yet.

Junior: How could you possibly not have all that information, you’re running for Senate?

Haridopolos: Ray, I thought you wanted to talk about what we had accomplished, not about a hypothetical.

Junior: Your guy that asked for you to be on the show said “Hey, I’d like to get him on the show.’ I said ‘fine. Let’s bring him on the show.’ So I’m asking you that question. The only reason people avoid questions like this, Mike, is because they don’t want to be tied in — when they don’t want to actually have people see how they would do things. There’s no reason to avoid this question. How could you possibly be running for U.S. Senate and not know what’s in the Ryan bill?

Haridopolos: I know what’s in the Ryan bill, but again, what you’re asking me is a fair question. What I’m telling you is…

Junior: Ok, I’d like a fair answer…

Haridopolos:…A lot of people are talking about hypotheticals — if they run, if they win. Let’s talk about what I actually accomplished

Junior: Laughter… no, no, no. You’re not doing that, Mike. Every single thing a person talks about when they’re on the campaign trail is a hypothetical. A hundred percent of it. There’s nothing that’s not hypothetical. The only way we know whether it’s going to be true or not is when they get into office is if they follow through on the things they said they would do. That’s why I’m asking you: Would you vote yes or no on Ryan?

Haridopolos: Exactly what I’m bringing up. My point as well. I made a promise to balance the budget, not raise taxes, not raise fees..

Junior: Ok, does the Ryan plan do that? Does the Ryan plan do that?

Haridopolos: Look, the Ryan plan is what’s in Washington

Junior: Ok, get him off my phone. I don’t want anything to do with this guy. Get rid of him.

What a pity that the big boys are all more interested in exchanging back rubs and foot massages with the likes of Newt Gingrich and Captain Underoos than they are in pinning down Republican would-be leaders on the big issues and holding them accountable. If you can't answer a simple and straightforward yes or no question concerning your position on one of the central issues of the day, you should get the hell out of politics.

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Don't worry, you're not too pretty for science

A female scientist desperately wants you to know that someone told her she was pretty, the bastard, and now she can't wait to tell you about ithow angry that makes her!

I'm ticked off and venting via dashed-off blog rant.... I know Mr. Salesguy was trying to be nice and probably thought he was flattering me, but fer chrissakes, that is NOT the way to go about it. Women in science already frequently feel like "The Other," that we're "too XX" to be good at what we do, that our possession of breasts surely must mean that we're too much of a fragile flower to be able to handle the "man's work" involved in science and academia, and that we need to go above and beyond what our male colleagues do just to feel the same level of acceptance and appreciation. I'm sure Mr. Salesguy has never thought about the plight of women in science before tonight (and I doubt that my conversation really made him think about it for more than a few fleeting seconds), but it really dragged down what had otherwise been a very nice few days of unadulterated sciencey goodness.

This is a beautiful example of what is one of my favorite female faux outrage poses. Certain women, usually those of average appearance, love to pretend to be furious because someone complimented them, which they believe gives them an excuse to talk to everyone they can get their hands on about the fact that someone thinks they are pretty or whatever. You'll notice you never see any genuinely gorgeous girl getting her thong in a twist over someone happening to recognize the obvious; she knows she's hot and it's no big deal.

And the idea that one can be somehow damaged by one's looks defying the expectations of one's occupation is a ridiculous attempt to justify the "look at me, look at me" behavior. At my second book signing, which was a large Barnes & Noble event at which there were some 10 or 12 other much bigger-name SF/F authors, including Gordon R. Dickson, there must have been at least 10 people who told me I didn't look like a SF writer. I didn't take any offense, of course, or agonize about how this made it terribly difficult to be taken seriously as a writer. It was not exactly hard to ascertain what they meant by the comment given that in addition to being the youngest one there by a decade or more, I was also the only weightlifter in the bunch. SF/F writers are often fascinating conversationalists and I quite enjoy spending time with them, but as a general rule they tend not to make for the most physically imposing specimens of humanity.

So, Ms Dr Smith needn't worry. As an expert observer of the opposite sex, I don't think she's too pretty for science. I don't think she's pretty at all. I'm confident she can rest assured that most men who aren't of low sexual market value, like the scientists and atheists by whom she is customarily surrounded, will not take any notice of her unless she happens to perform some spectacular feats of science. Which is probably unlikely, since she's such a transparently superficial twit that she'll find it hard to pull her narcissistic nose out of her navel long enough to observe anything scientific.

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The danger of biting at ankles

You tend to get kicked in the teeth a lot:

Ok, so we go the whole day and no-one points out that free fall most certainly is acceleration. 9.8 m/s/s, to be exact.

The statement was not "freefall is not acceleration", but that "acceleration is not freefall". Does an orbital rocket blasting off accelerate? Does an automobile? And are either of these machines in freefall while they are accelerating as per their normal operation?

Some commenters appear to have an amount of trouble understanding the concept of sets and subsets. The subset is not, and cannot be, the set of which it is merely a part. (Cue Markku bringing up the null set.) I tend to doubt anyone would have felt the need to attempt offering a correction had I stated, for some inexplicable reason, "Numbers are not nine". I desperately hope, anyhow, that even the most cluelessly contrarian anklebiter would have been able to resist the urge to reactively insist that "Nine is a number!"

Yes, it most certainly is. But three is a number and it is not nine. Ten is also not nine. There are, in fact, a vast collection of numbers that do not happen to be nine, just as there are many rates of change of velocity over time that do not involve the motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. The two terms overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

So, a helpful word of advice to the pedantically inclined. If you make a habit of actively seeking to criticize others or just have a tendency to react to assertions in an instinctively contrarian manner, I suggest learning to first ask questions rather than immediately attempting to offer corrections even when you are reasonably sure that you have understood what the other person said. Always get confirmation first. Because when you are dealing with anyone who is reasonably intelligent or even just precise in their thinking, there is a very good chance that your posturing - and let's face it, that's what it is - is going to cause you to make an ass of yourself by trying to correct something that is not, in fact, incorrect.

I understand that my towering intellectual arrogance is infuriating to some readers. Even those who often agree with me are sometimes sorely tempted to attempt to "bring me down" when they perceive an opportunity. But not every red flag waved in your face merits a blind and heedless charge. If you've read this blog for any time at all, you should be aware that there are few things in which I find more personal amusement than publicly skewering a superficial and reactively contrarian would-be critic.

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The cancerous eyes of the state

Murray Rothbard expands his logical case against empiricism in economics, specifically, explaining how the systematic gathering of statistics tends to lead inevitably to bureaucracy and increased government intervention in the economy:

[S]tatistics are desperately needed for any sort of government planning of the economic system. In a free-market economy, the individual business firm has little or no need of statistics. It need only know its prices and costs. Costs are largely discovered internally within the firm and are not the general data of the economy which we usually refer to as "statistics."

The "automatic" market, then, requires virtually no gathering of statistics; government intervention, on the other hand, whether piecemeal or fully socialist, could do literally nothing without extensive ingathering of masses of statistics. Statistics are the bureaucrat's only form of economic knowledge, replacing the intuitive, "qualitative" knowledge of the entrepreneur, guided only by the quantitative profit-and-loss test. Accordingly, the drive for government intervention, and the drive for more statistics, have gone hand-in-hand....

Suffice it then to say that a leading cause of the proliferation of governmental statistics is the need for statistical data in government economic planning. But the relationship works also in reverse: the growth of statistics, often developed originally for its own sake, ends by multiplying the avenues of government intervention and planning. In short, statistics do not have to be developed originally for politicoeconomic ends; their own autonomous development, directly or indirectly, opens up new fields for interventionists to exploit.

Each new statistical technique, whether it be flow of funds, interindustry economics, or activity analysis, soon acquires its own subdivision and application in government.

In the RGD chapter entitled "No One Knows Anything", I demonstrated how wildly inaccurate, mutable, and untrustworthy the economic statistics on which so much government policy is predicated are. But the problem is that regardless of how inaccurate or even irrelevant they are, they will be used to justify government action in various areas of the economy and inspire public malinvestment while simultaneously exacerbating private malinvestment. If statistics are the eyes of the state, the central flaw with them that they will always be short-sighted, astigmatic, subject to optical illusions, and prone to aggressive intraocular lymphomas.

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On podcasting

I get a lot of requests to do more podcasts on a regular basis, and while I'm amenable with regards to the necessary talking, interviewing, and so forth, I've finally concluded that I'm simply not at all interested in doing the necessary editing and studio tinkering. So, if there is anyone who is interested in that side of it, let me know. I don't have any grand ideas about going full media, but given how most of the world seems to be astonished that the global economy is headed back tostill experiencing economic contraction, I figure that there may be a need for more of the sort of thing I started with the Voxonomics podcasts.

Basically, I'd like to be able to record an MP3, upload it to a server, and have a reasonably edited podcast magically appear within a day or two. If that's not possible because no one is interested, it's completely fine, but I thought I should at least throw this out there for any audiophiles with some time on their hands.

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Tipping Point USA

Scott Adams suspects there may be one in the near future:

Yesterday I went to Walmart and demanded that they give me a cartload of merchandise for free. This demand was not well-received, so I didn’t get to the second part of my plan which would have involved criticizing the job performance of the people who were giving me free stuff.

Okay, I didn’t really go to Walmart and demand free stuff. You probably knew that because it sounded ridiculous on face value. We all understand that no entity can survive for long if it gives away its resources while asking nothing in return. And this leads me to my point: In the United States, 51% of adults pay zero federal income tax, and yet they have the right to vote. That’s the very definition of a system that can’t last.

I’m not sure where the tipping point is. So far, the power of the non-tax-paying majority has been blunted by the influence of political parties and the misdirection of the media. If the majority ever figures out that they can legally confiscate the wealth of the minority, tax rates will double overnight. My best guess is that the United States will go into a death spiral at about the point that 55% of adults pay no federal income taxes.

It's not quite a legitimate analysis, in that many of those who don't pay any income tax do pay payroll taxes. But the general point is correct. No quasi-democratic system, even a very limited representative one, can reasonably hope to survive as long as those who benefit from it are permitted to vote themselves benefits.

It's too soon to tell, on the basis of a single Congressional election, if the mere threat of partially pruning the entitlement programs is enough for a sufficient number of swing voters to turn against the Republicans in general and the Ryan Plan in particular, not that either will actually solve the dire financial and economic situation in which the nation has mired itself. But if Americans simply will not support the eviscerating of Social Security, AFDC, Medicaid and Medicare despite the fact that they cannot afford to pay for them, it will prove the point that Adams is making.

But he is incorrect about one thing. The USA is already in a death spiral. It simply hasn't struck the ground yet.

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You don't say

The headline on Drudge made me laugh.

"'WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF A GREAT, GREAT DEPRESSION'"

Really now? I am... so very surprised!

"Interest rates are amazingly low and that, thanks to Ben Bernanke, is driving everything," Yastrow said. "We’re on the verge of a great, great depression. The [Federal Reserve] knows it. We have many, many homeowners that are totally underwater here and cannot get out from under. The technology frontier is limited right now. We definitely have an innovation slowdown and the economy’s gonna suffer."

This was all entirely predictable. It was, in fact, predicted. My timing was a little off, as usual. I thought the media would start realizing the reality of the situation towards the end of 2010, not the middle of 2011. But the situation remains precisely the same one I described in the Introduction to The Return of the Great Depression and I see no reason to change a word of it.

"Due to the sizeable bear market rally that began in March 2009, many, if not most, economic observers are presently convinced that the global economic difficulties of last autumn are largely behind us now, courtesy of the aggressive, expansionary actions of the monetary and political authorities.

They are wrong. It is not over. It has only begun.

I believe that what we have witnessed to date is merely the first act in what will eventually be recognized as another Great Depression."

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Acceleration is not freefall

I tend to find it somewhat mystifying when an anklebiter yet again attempts to pronounce the irrelevance of Vox Popoli for the Nth time since the very first one did so sometime back in October 2003. I never thought to create a general interest blog, in fact, it took a six-month false start before I even managed to start doing daily posts. Now, posting here is just a part of my routine that requires about as much mental effort as going to the gym or making lunch, the difference being that I am considerably less likely to sprain something while posting here.

(Speaking of which, I was pleased that I was able to jack my dumbbell military press up to 5x30kg yesterday. I was rather less pleased to discover that my neck now objects to being turned to the right. Ah, the bittersweet joys of age.)

Anyhow, in response to one of the anklebiter's claims that the blog was in decline, I mentioned that its readership, like that of WND's, has continued to increase over time. But what surprised me when I went back to look at the actual numbers was that the rate of readership growth has also been increasing.

May 2008: 136,577 monthly visits
May 2009: 151,610 +11.0%
May 2010: 185,275 +22.2%
May 2011: 245,493 +32.5%

In fact, last month set new records for both visits and page views (365,271) despite the fact that there were no new books released, no incoming traffic from any of the big blogs, and nothing of exceptional interest happening around the world. At this rate, there will be 350k monthly readers by this time next year, which is about 320k more than I'd ever imagined there would be.

Anyhow, I appreciate the way so many of you take the time to stop by on a regular basis and see what's going on, I'm glad you continue to find the posts here to be of interest, and I appreciate the way in which your questions and substantive criticism help to clarify my thinking.

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Mailvox: a profound change of thinking

MK writes to tell how she has found the dreadful miasma of misogyny that engulfs this blog to not only have adjusted her thought processes but also aided her marriage:

It occurred to me yesterday what a profound change in thinking I have had as a result of reading your blog and one of the books you referenced (Married Man's Sex Life). In my youth in the 70's, I was happy to soak up the happy horse-sh#$ that popular culture sold about roles of men and women. My marriage of [two decades] has been a difficult struggle owing in part to my desire to see my husband as a badly designed female.

For his part, in my assessment, my husband still struggles with the reality that I am not a man - that is, that I lack career ambition, aren't that good at finishing what I start (except household duties), and would prefer he initiate sex. It might be harder for him to give up the desire for me to share the providing than for him to give up on primary child-care duties (when that was needed) and housework. The upshot: it is a relief to accept I am not the woman Madison Ave. promoted who wants and can bring home the bacon, serve it up in a pan, and also provide hooker style sex services to my man. That never was me and I always felt inadequate.

I hate to say, I think my husband does view me as inadequate (he works with many woman/mothers who earn big bucks alongside him, not to mention his mother was a dynamo working wife/mother out of monetary necessity). The blog has helped me, however, to accept that I am who I am and more importantly, he is who he is as a he. I have a newfound respect for that. Little by little, I am changing my behavior and attitude and while my husband may always feel he got ripped off because I really wasn't the career woman he thought I was (I had a job when we met, was good at it, liked it, and parlayed it into working from home so I could take full-time care of and homeschool our children, not because I needed to work for my identity or the money; rather, I did it because I knew my husband wanted me to make money).

I am a Christian of [more than a decade], and this has been an area that the church we were involved with was no good at leading (male/female roles). I have a friend who has been a Christian all her life, but struggled in her marriage. She did not marry a devoted Christian and longs for leadership, but from our conversations, it is clear, she's at least 50% of the problem. I have shared insights with her from the blog and it is changing her too. Thank you and please keep doing what you're doing.

I'm glad she's found the blog to be helpful. I think it's interesting to see how MK's email shows the flipside of the female employment issue. Whereas many men don't want their wives to work so that the women can focus on their careers as wives and mothers, those who do marry working women often expect them to continue working so the men do not have to shoulder the responsibility as the sole income provider. This is dangerous ground, because it is a potential deal-breaker should the woman decide she wants to unilaterally change the arrangement ex post facto.

While women tend to feel they always have the right to change their mind, consider it from the male perspective. What wife would appreciate it if her husband told her that he wasn't happy with his job and had decided to stay home and master Guitar Hero instead? Would she be delighted that he was pursuing his dream or would she be upset that he had, in a single stroke, suddenly put pressure on her to figure out how to increase her salary by at least 50 percent or accept the necessary reduction in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed? Even though MK's decision was beneficial for both her marriage and her children in the long term, it's perfectly understandable that her husband would feel as if he had been played with a bait-and-switch, because it would appear that he was, at least to some extent. There are no shortage of men who have discovered that housework isn't as unpleasant, stressful, or time-consuming as office serfdom and they are more than happy to divide the responsibilities as they have been told that women want them to do. Naturally, they will resist a sudden demand that they to return to a more traditional role for which they are completely unprepared, and indeed, might even consider to be evil and sexist.

It's also noteworthy that she has found the church to be useless with regards to offering support for traditional male and female roles. Churchianity is relentlessly feminized and feminist, which is only one of the many reasons to reject it as a pale, bureaucratic, heretical imitation of Christianity.

But I am pleased to hear that MK and her friend have derived a modicum of personal utility from this blog, and I'm sure Athol could use the encouragement as well.

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